Opera 9? Non!

Well, reluctantly, because it is an attractive piece of software. But at heart that's the only real charm of the thing.

Unless you're not living in cyberspace, you'd be aware that Opera 9, the "third" browser - the other two being IE and first Netscape, now Firefox - (kind of like the Fifth Beatle) was released a few days ago.

Since Opera has been free for some time now and since I like to experiment with free software, I downloaded it, gave it a spin and then deleted it. I'm back to where I started on the Mac: Safari.

What's to like about Opera 9?
- Slick, attractive interface But beauty gets you only so far.

- Tabbed browsing Yawn! Been there since Maxthon on IE-Windows, Safari, Firefox, et al. Even IE 7 does it now.

- Thumbnails of your open tabs Okay, but clunky interface: you hover your mouse over the tab to see the thumbnail. No point to that.

- Navigate tabs with the keyboard Good for quick jumps between your tabs, but Opera uses the digit keys 1 and 2 to jump to the previous and next tabs and those keys aren't located close enough to the trackpad to be convenient. I prefer my current add-in to Safari which lets me use ,. (comma, period) - much closer to my fingers. Opera also uses Option-Tab to cycle between tabs, but that's too close to Windows' Alt-Tab and OS X's Command-Tab for comfort - confusing.

- Widgets Well, might get the Windows crowd panting, but we've got Dashboard and we don't honestly need any more of those widget thingies. And even those other guys have had Konfabulator - now Yahoo! Widgets - for some years.

- URL shortcuts/aliases Potentially useful if you're fast on the keyboard (like me): You can define say, 'ymac' to stans for the Why Mac Blog URL http://whymac.blogspot.com, type 'ymac' in the address bar, hit Return and get to your chosen site quickly. It can be faster than Bookmarks if you've got a lot of those to navigate through. Maxthon had this about 5 years ago, but I've got the same thing in Safari with an add-in. So no, doesn't get me excited.

- Mouse gestures Potentially very sexy. Maxthon had these about 5 years ago too. Essentially you click and drag your mouse in a defined direction or "gesture" to do something like open a link in a new tab or reload the page. Can be very useful. But a complete bitch to do on a trackpad with a single button (like on my MacBook Pro). So, reluctantly, no.

What's to, well, dislike about Opera 9?
- Occasional weird page rendering GMail is a case in point. The font looked all squished up and the checkboxes were h-u-g-e.

- Weird color rendering Well, this may be because it's just too strict. For instance, I had tagged the blue text on my blog pages using the font color="blue" tag, which may be lazy, but all other browsers didn't mind. Opera however showed that text in burnt red. I had to recode the tag to use #0000CC instead. And "red" showed up as black.

- Crossword applets This was the clincher. Okay, I know it's probably a bit of an esoteric downer, but it was the reason I deleted Opera. I like tackling crosswords and my favourite is the Times cryptic crossword. It's available via subscription from timesonline.co.uk and you can choose to print it out or solve it interactively in your browser using a java applet. The applet has worked fine for me in Maxthon and Safari. I tried it in Opera. The applet loaded and then froze. I couldn't move through the crossword grid at all. I tried it a couple of times but to no avail.

Bye-bye, Opera.

Pretty Damn Funky

Yup, PDF. Support for the PDF file format in Mac OS X is awesome. Coming from the Windows world, that's the only word I can use. I'll say it again: awesome!

In my job I have to do a lot of pdf creation: sending files off to perfect strangers who may or may not have my version of Word or Excel and, more importantly, whom I don't wish to grant the right to futz around with the content of my files. PDF is the way to go.

Now, in Windows, I had downloaded a plugin for MS Office that allowed me to save my Word or Excel files to PDF. That was a darn sight cheaper than springing for the full version of Adobe Acrobat. And, of course, I had downloaded Acrobat Reader to allow me to read the darn things. And the latter kept pestering me to upgrade every time I opened it.

I had resigned myself to hunting about for a similar download for Mac OS X until I got around to reading the fine print.

Mac OS X supports reading and writing PDF files out of the box.

Reading files is achieved via Preview, so if you double-click on a PDF file in Finder, it launches Preview and you can wade in on your PDF.

Even cooler is the ability to create PDF files directly from your Word or Excel (or any other) documents. Choose the Print option and instead of printing the document, click the "Save as PDF" option, give it a name and file destination, and your PDF is ready to roll.

But the coolest of all, is that you can use the same technique to save entire web pages. That beats any Save As HTML or Save As Web Archive trick. When you want to save a web page that you're reading, hit Command-P and choose the Save as PDF option again. It's the best way to send someone a web page. Using a site's built-in "Email this page" link often sends only a link to the page, not the page itself. And some sites require the reader to register and log-in. And others might have browser-specific quirks. Yet others have pages that expire after a few days or depend on complicated ASP variables in the URL to display the right page. Sending the page as a PDF eliminates all these hassles for the recipient and is easy as pie for the sender.

It's also a handy way to save any web receipts that you get if you purchase online and the site solemnly advises you to "Print this page for your records."

Pretty Damn Funky!

Widget wows! Google Blogger

My first widget plug: well, the logical one is the widget I use to write this blog.

F12 gets me the Dashboard and there's my widget waiting for me, logged in to my blogger account. It's not a fancy interface but I can specify the title and use Command-B and Command-I to bold and italicise stuff.

And of course, I can pop in any html tags I feel like.

I can save my entry as a draft or publish it directly.

The best part though: since it's a widget, I can have multiple copies open, one for each of my blogs. That is mucho nifty!

Get it here: Google Blogger widget

Steel Vault

This is my first software plug on this blog. There will be others, I promise, and there's no real reason why this should be the first, other than the fact that I just used it.

Do you have trouble remembering the various passwords and identities and pins you have in both the physical and cyber worlds? Do you even know how many you have?

I just put together a bunch of mine and I discovered I have no less than 56! Fifty-bloody-six! That's like a respectable Test score (cricket, not SAT).

My RAM needs help in remembering so many pieces of critical information - I ain't getting any younger.

There are loads of password managers out there. I used to use something called e-wallet in my Windows days.

For the Mac, I've adopted Steel.

Clean interface, attractive icons, flexible categorization options.
And at $9, it's a steal.(Steel, steal, get it? Get it?)

What I miss from e-wallet: I can't add more than 6 user-defined fields. Not a deal-breaker, though: 6 is plenty most of the time.

Get it here: Steel

Monitor-ed

As I blogged earlier, I have a 15" Samsung LCD monitor for WPC and my original plan was to share that with Mini via a KVM. The obstreporousness of the KVM in refusing to recognise my wireless keyboard has put paid to that.

I am about to reconcile myself to unplugging and re-plugging the monitor from one to the other. But it's too painful a solution for a lazy sod like me. Just then as I'm poking about disconsolately behind Mini I realize that she's sitting right next to my TV - she needs to be there to connect easily to my amplifier. And I know that computers can be plugged into TVs, so this might be worth exploring.

My TV is also a Samsung, but more than that, it's an LCD TV. I had been particular to choose an LCD one rather than a plasma one when I went looking for a flat screen TV because the industry buzz was that LCD was the wave of the future. So I had settled on a somewhat smaller LCD that cost me about what a larger plasma would have. I had figured the trade-off would be worth it.

My hunch is about to pay off in spades!

I rootle about behind my TV and discover a socket that looks awfully like a computer monitor one. I frantically burrow through my drawer of manuals and locate the TV manual and with trembling hands I flip through the pages. Yes! It can be used as a computer monitor! And it uses DVI which is what Mini uses too! Oh, frabjous day!

There is little else to tell. In a few seconds Mini is connected to my 42" LCD TV, the wireless keyboard is on my lap and the mouse is at my side as I sit on the bed 10 feet away and surf iTunes in glorious technicolor and large-enough-to-read-from-ten-feeet-away font size and blast the music of my choice.

When Front Row is introduced a few months later, I scoff at it and flick the dust from the irreproachable Logitech keyboard at my wrists and laugh out loud from lazy eyelids. I've been on Front Row from Day One. (Why Front Row, anyway? I always thought the Back Row was the place to be at the movies.)

Wonderful Wireless

My home LAN is like so:
* a Windows PC (whom you've met as WPC) running Windows XP, into which is plugged a DSL modem thoughtfully provided by my ISP who is also my telephone provider.
* a Belkin 2.4Ghz 802.11b wireless hub, which is plugged via Ethernet cable into WPC
* a second WPC in my kids' bedroom which is also plugged via Ethernet cable into Belkin

If I've got all these Ethernet cables all over the place, you may well ask why I have a wireless hub. The answer is the Sony Vaio notebook on which I live. That is the only gizmo that uses the wireless part of my network.

Because I live in an apartment constructed largely of concrete and brick the wireless signal doesn't travel very well from room to room and Ethernet is the only reliable way of connecting the rooms. So when we furnished the house we laid in Ethernet cabling in all the rooms and that's still the backbone of my home LAN.

However, since I spend most of my time at home in my bedroom on my comfortable sofa chair with my laptop on my lap (hence the name, duh!) in the same room as my wireless hub, wireless works well for me.

To err is human, but to be cautious is wise. I use WEP encryption on my wireless hub and MAC address recognition. If you haven't a clue what that means, take heart, I used to be like you.

Essentially, that means every computer that wants to connect to my LAN either needs to be physically plugged into the hub via an Ethernet cord, or authenticated via WEP and MAC. Okay, that's not much better. I know, I know.

How's this: every computer that wants to connect to my LAN via wireless needs to have a password to connect to the network and needs to be registered as a good guy. WEP takes care of the password bit and MAC takes care of the good-guy registration bit. WEP ensures that whatever data passes through the air is encrypted and MAC is a unique identification number that tells my hub that this computer is authorized to connect to the LAN.

So before I can introduce Mini to my LAN, I need to ensure that she fits in well. I toy with the idea of running an Ethernet cable from Mini to the hub. It's only about 3 feet away but it means one more ugly cable. Mini is supposed to have built-in wireless networking. Let's see if she means it.

System Preferences seems the logical place to go, so I pop it open. (I've explored the OS X interface enough by now to figure out where to find SP.) Network under "Internet & Network" seems an appropriate option. The dialog box (is that what they call them in OS X?) has a Show Me option and I find AirPort under that. I've already spent enough time on the Apple site to understand that this not a reference to Heathrow, so I choose that.

Hey, the first thing that shows up is "AirPort id" and that looks like a MAC address. This is cool. In Windows I used to click Start, Run, type in "cmd" to get into a command line interface, type in "ipconfig /all" and then wade through a largely incomprehensible list of data to get the MAC address. (And, of course, I needed to know all about ipconfig from my DOS days.)

In OS X, three mouse clicks and I'm there.

Joining my home network is just as easy (once I remember how to get the WEP password from my router interface). AirPort sniffs out my home network plus a couple of others that seem to be running in an apartment above or below. I choose mine, type in my password (and I love the option to display the password while typing since for some strange reason my router favors a password expressed in hex).

I'm connected and on the Internet in less time than it takes for a cup of coffee to brew. This is so much easier than setting up wireless LAN access was on my Sony Vaio.

I'm falling in love with Mini, but there's still the small problem of sharing a monitor with WPC and without a KVM. How?

Wireless Wackiness

The story so far: I plug in my new Mini, attach a wireless Windows keyboard and mouse, play around, shut Mini down, unplug the k & m, and...

I plug the wireless receiver for the k & m back into my Windows PC and boot it up.

WPC doesn't recognise the keyboard! It has spent only about the last 2 years living peacefully with the keyboard but now WPC is in a sulk and refuses to acknowledge the keyboard's presence! This is insane.

Over the next 45 minutes I go from incredulous to incandescent. I change the batteries in the keyboard. I click the connect buttons on the wireless receiver and the keyboard about a gazillion times. I reboot WPC about as often. I fiddle with the USB port and the plug. Nada. Zilch. WPC is about as ready to accept the straying keyboard as Anna K is to accept me as the love of her life. There is even one completely bizarre message from Windows that advises me that I do not appear to have a keyboard plugged in, so I should press any key to continue!!! Franz Kafka and the Indian bureaucracy appear to have taken up residence on my mother board. I take out my cupboard keys and try pressing those. Hey, it might work on the voodoo principle.

Finally, in complete disgust I unearth an oldfashioned wired keyboard, plug it in and WPC is satsified.

This does not bode well for my plans to use a KVM to share the keyboard, mouse and display between Mini and WPC. And the lack of well boding is duly fulfilled. The KVM does not like my wireless k & m and refuses to acknowledge them. And the whole point of having a wireless k & m and a Mini that I plan to use as a music center is that I should be able to use them from my armchair near my bed and not be wired down to my computer desk.

Bugger the KVM. In any event, I do much of my work on my notebook and only use WPC as a network server and gateway to the internet, so I can live with a wired keyboard for him and a wireless for Mini.

Time to introduce Mini to my home LAN.

Setting up Mini

My Mac Mini is delivered to my office in a cute little box. I scurry home and open the cute little box to uncover an even cuter littler box within.

After wiping off the drool that has dripped onto its quasi-translucent top, I place it reverently on a little shelf equidistant from my amplifier and my Windows PC behemoth. I should plug in the KVM switch so I can use both machines but I can't wait to see the Mini in action, so I shut down my PC, unplug the D, K and M and prepare to plug them into Mini. (That sounds vaguely rude, but I mean no harm.)

My keyboard and mouse are wireless and they both use a single little black receiver that needs to be plugged into a USB port. Mini has two of those, so I still have one left over for iPods and the like. So far so good.

I notice a little black dot on the front of Mini, under the Superdrive slot, and there's a fleeting thought that it's a shame that this otherwise pristine surface is marred. But it's plug in time and I can't be bothered with black dots.

I plug in the power brick and the wireless receiver. The monitor plug requires an adapter and my heart skips a beat, but before I can panic too much I remember the adapter that was cleverly packed with the Mini. To snap it on and plug in the monitor is the work of a second, but I stop to marvel at the sleek design of the display adapter with built-in wheels on the side to tighten the screws that hold it securely to the socket. No screwdriver needed. God is in the details.

All is plugged in. I flick the power switch on the wall. And gently depress the power button at the back of Mini - the first power button I've encountered that has such an agreeable feel to it - smooth and gently bulbous.

There is a discreet twang as Mini boots up for the first time. The clean white boot screen comes up on the monitor and the first feeling is that there's something weird going on. I've become too used to seeing the BIOS loading message, the black screen, then the blue Windows boot screen. This clean white with a grey once-bitten apple and a gently turning wheel below is strangely comforting yet disconcerting.

And that strange blemish that I'd noticed on the front of Mini is actually the power light! Cool! It's a dazzling pinhole of white brilliance. I'm beginning to go for this white motif.

I am informed that Mini hasn't been properly introduced to the keyboard and I'm asked to press the two keys on either side of the space bar (at least that's what I remember - it's approximately right). Mini hums to herself briefly then tells me that Mr. Keyboard works for her as does Mr. Mouse. Super, Mini's up and ready to roll!!

I resist the temptation to dive into exploring Mini. Instead, I decide to get the KVM switch in place and hook up Mini to WPC (that's Windows PC to you). I shut down Mini, unplug the wireless receiver from Mini, plug back into WPC and power up WPC.

And thereby hangs a tale...

My Mac Mini

I purchased my first Mac computer - a Mac Mini - in September 2005 as something of a birthday present to myself. It's a standard issue G4, 1.42 Ghz, 512 Mb RAM, 80 GB HDD machine with a Superdrive. Running Mac OS X Tiger, natch.

I have a fairly decent collection of music - 820 albums, 438 artists and over 12400 songs, at last count - and I was looking for a solution that would save me shelf space, allow me access to my entire collection, and... well, you know, so on.

[iTunes or Windows Media Player? Watch this blog: I've got some things I'd like iTunes to borrow from WMP. Yup.]

Why did I choose the Mac Mini - three primary reasons:
form factor - the Windows PC in my bedroom is a bloody ugly tower that I try to hide under the desk. My desk is usually cluttered with junk. I don't have much else shelf space to spare. A 6" X 6" X 4" brick seemed just right.
price - in India, about the price of an assembled PC, albeit BYODKM as Apple so charmingly terms it: Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard and Mouse. Ok, I can do that.
BYODKM - actually, this is a stroke of marketing genius, IMHO. It deserves a para to itself.

My thought process when confronted with BYODKM went something like this. I've got a decent Samsung LCD 15" display, a pretty sexy Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. With a KVM (that's Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch that will only set me back a few hundred rupees I could share these between the two computers. That means I don't have to completely forsake my hard-earned Windows skills and learn a whole new way of doing things. I don't have to junk the MS Office that I occasionally need to use on my home PC. My printer setup stays the same. My DSL internet connection stays on my Windows PC so I don't need to hassle with the ignorance of the ISP in setting up my DSL modem for the Mac. The keyboard layout will remain the familar Windows one, and though that might cause me a few hiccups, it'll still be easier than figuring out what the hell a "Command" key is. I get the best of both worlds. And it doesn't cost me an arm and a leg. And I can plug the Mac Mini into my home network and my amplifier and download music from iTunes (like I need more than 820 albums) and blast it at will. And I get to play with this Mac OS X animal and see what the fuss is all about. And I can always retreat to the shelter of Windows if it gets too stuffy.

And it's my birthday.

No brainer.

(BTW, why is it BYODKM but KVM? Why not KDM or BYOKVM? Mysteries of the Universe.)

My Apple tree

Where I came from
In a word: Windows.

I've used Windows through all its avatars from 3.1 to XP. 

I'm not a techie, though I could be considered something of a power user - my definition of a power user being someone who enjoys technology, is lazy enough to want it to do more for him and is industrious enough to take the trouble to make it do more for him. Or her.

Where I am
In another word: Apple

It sometimes amazes me how much of my life has almost surreptitiously been taken over by Jobs and the gang.

The journey
I was always interested in the Apple story, but living in India the only Apples that were easily available and affordable were the ones that grew on trees, usually in Kashmir.

With liberalization, came apples from other parts of the world including New Zealand. In their wake came the silicon-based ones that inspired this blog.

I started, as I suspect many recent Mac converts have, by lusting after the iPod. The iPod was the first Apple product that, to me, was affordable, useful and, of course, sexy. (The Macs were sexy, sure, but were about as available or affordable to me as Anna Kournikova.)

I duly purchased an iPod - an el cheapo Shuffle for my daughter and it was much loved. The drift to the Mac planet had begun.

Then came the tipping point - the Mac Mini. I've always been a sucker for minis - cars, skirts, whatever - and the Mac Mini was not only sexy, it was available and affordable. Anna come home. The tree has taken root.

Why Blog

Here's Yet Another Mac Blog on the Virtues of Apples (but I resisted the temptation to name it YAMBVA, so that has to count for something).

Why YAMBVA?

After being a Windows user for 20 years, from before there even were any windows - yes, DOS day afternoons, remember them? - I flirted with the Mac camp for a few months and finally made the commitment a little over a month back.

Since then, I've found much to love about my Mac and little to dislike, but yes, some nostalgia for some Windows stuff too. I've also found much on the Web for and against both sides, usually vituperative and unbalanced, but sometimes sensible and enlightening. Since I am by nature a reasonable man (so are they all, all reasonable men), I hope to give something back to all the anonymous and not-so-anonymous bloggers and webbers who have helped my conversion to Macism.

I shall blog the tips and tricks I've found, the great software I've discovered, the things I'd like to see and some general ramblings.

If these help you, great! If they don't, go climb an apple tree.