Full credit for this tip goes to the team at maclife.com who published it in their August issue.  If you don’t subscribe, you want to think about it.

To enable xray view in Quicklook open a Terminal window and enter the following command;

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders -boolean YES

Now when you Quicklook a folder you’ll representations of the icons of what is in the folder.  It’s a little thing and definitely geeky but kinda cool.  If you get tired of it, turn it off using the same command, just replacing YES with NO

Recommended

When I bought my current Mac Pro, it came with nVidia’s GT8800 that I ordered as a factory upgrade from whatever was stock at the time.  The upgrade was inexpensive and got me a better GPU and more memory.  The card also supported Dual Link DVI to two displays and I have to say that I got over two years of excellent service from it.

But as I embark ever more deeply into video editing, I discovered that likely through my own ineptitude and lack of proper training, I was able to strain the capability of the GT8800 so I started researching alternatives.  There was the ATI Radeon HD 4870  on the Apple Store that had a faster GPU but no more video memory, there was the nVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for nearly $2,300 (argh, choke) and the EVGA GeForce GTX 285.  I was not aware of the GTX 285 or of EVGA for that matter so I went over to my local Canada Computers and talked to John and Samuel.  Canada Computers is a retail chain that deals in all manner of kit but this store at least, attracts some seriously hardcore gamers and gamers as we know tend to beat on video cards pretty hard.  Both Samuel and John admitted to no familiarity with the Mac Pro platform but did share that they had enjoyed a lot of customer success with EVGA cards and with the Windows release of the GTX 285.  They did tell me that the GTX 285 had been superseded by the GTX 295 on the Windows platform and also advised that there was a hack out in the internet on making one work in a Mac Pro.  As I depend on the Mac Pro for work every day, i chose not to go that route and had them order me the Mac version of the GTX 285.  With no disrespect to Apple or Apple resellers, I saved at least 10% off the price of the card by getting it from these folks.

Installation was straight forward once I disconnected the web of cables from the Mac Pro and pulled its mass out from under the desk and into the kitchen where I could work on it without crippling myself.  I did learn some tips that might be useful for anyone else.

1. When EVGA says read the instructions first, do it.  If you are not running a current build of Snow Leopard, be absolutely sure you follow the instructions about installing the display drivers BEFORE you take things apart to install the card.  I found that on my machine, running 10.6.3 at time of install, the drivers had already been provided in an Apple update.  If you find this too, well you’ve burned a whole minute, but if you didn’t have the drivers installed and tried to power up the Mac with the new card and no drivers you’d be seeing a black screen and the only fix would be to pull the new card, put in the old card, load the drivers…You get the point.

2.  The PCI-e slots on the Mac Pro have little card locking clips that you engage when removing a card.  Using a flashlight helps you see them and helps you cut down on the cursing when you cannot figure out why the stock card will not come free of the slot.

3. The GT8800 has only one power cable.  The GTX285 has two.  Disconnect the one from the GT8800 before you try to remove the card as you’re going to need it in a minute.  The GTX285 comes with two new power cables, so you could use both new ones of course.  I did.

4.  The motherboard location of the two power ports you will be using is best accessed if you have 14″ long rubber fingers that are impervious to cuts and scrapes.  If you are not Mr. Fantastic, take the time to do the motherboard connections before you install the new video card.  If you don’t, you will just have to pull it out to get the cables connected, and if that happens, remember point #1.

5.  Did I mention that making those connections can be challenging?  I found that a pair of bent nose hemostats worked fine.  Connecting the upper slot first makes things easier as well.

6.  Once the cables are connected and latched onto the motherboard (check that the latching mechanisms on the power connectors have engaged), place the card into the slot.  Slot 1 is best because like most other high end video cards, the GTX 285 is a double-wide.

7.  Replace the card slot locking bar, put all the other pieces back together, connect your cables and fire it up.

At boot time and in normal operations, frankly you won’t see much of a difference.  If you use iStat and watch temps very closely, you might find the system runs a bit cooler.  Or not.  The new card really comes into it’s own when you are doing some intense editing in Final Cut Studio or Premiere Pro or Logic Studio.  Screen draws are faster in Aperture, and Photoshop seems snappier.  I’m not a gamer but I did speak to a guy who uses Steam on the Mac and he says this card is better than what I had for gaming.

In summary, if you need more video horsepower, can handle the expense, and are willing to read the instructions you will like the EVGA GeForce GTX285 Mac Edition.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Five days in and I have to say that the upgrade to 10.6.4 has been pretty darn seamless. I upgraded the MBP 17, the MBAir, K’s MBP 13, D’s MB 13, the Mac Pro octal and the little Dell Hackintosh. Every one when completely smoothly using software update except for the Dell which uses the combo updater and the good graces of Meklort’s tools.

I love the new reader function in Safari and the extension capability having installed the adblock and instapaper extensions. I was also glad to see that ClickToFlash also works in the new release. The extensions will prove more manageable than the old plugin model I can see already.

There were changes in Mail that broke most of the add-ons initially but Letterbox has been updated as has Dockstar since the first update.

iCal was also updated but in fairness I haven’t looked at it as I love the amazing BusyCal and use it by default.

All of the utilities I autolaunch work just fine (Launchbar, Textxpander, Hyperspaces amongst others). This is usually where an OS X update causes me the most grief, but not his time. In the past I have seen the dreaded bsod on update but this one was flawless. One tip I strongly recommend is to disconnect all your external devices during an OS X update. Apple notes this in their docs but not everyone is zealously reading them.

I don’t think the new release is any faster in my workflows but given the security fixes and the updates to Apple utilities it’s worth your time to do. Of course, be sure that you have a recoverable backup before making any major system changes.

Despite not having access via Technet to any of the Microsoft Mac apps (hey MS please change this!) I have been able to conduct some testing with the betas of the new office suite coming this holiday season.

Where Office 2008 was a combination upgrade (file formats, tools) and downgrade (no vba support), the coming release looks much more viable particularly if you are using a Mac as your system of choice in business.

The big change is the replacement of the much maligned Entourage with Outlook. While I don’t need to connect to Exchange for business and don’t use Outlook, my research shows this offering as significantly better than Entourage and for those who are accustomed to working with Outlook, I think you’re really going to like this change. Look and feel is similar to Outlook 2010 for Windows, and they’ve done a great job on that one. If I had to use Windows and worked in an Exchange shop, I’d be ok.

I started my testing with beta 2 and just installed beta 4 at time of this writing. The new build is more stable as one would expect and the implementation of the ribbon interface is far less disconcerting than I expected it to be. Particularly in PowerPoint when I revert to the Office 2008 version for production work, I find myself missing the ribbon interface! It’s that good. I just wish there was a ppt player for the iPad as the Keynote iPad app needs a lot of compatibility work.

Excel works nicely although I had to change the default display zoom on the Mac Pro so I could read the content. The Vba macro support works for the most part although I’ve had complex Corp Finance created macros make the boom boom.

Word is just excellent, with great performance and ease of use. I typically use the very strong Neooffice for work since we do everything in the open document format, but when I need to share something in the MS formats I pull into Word to do a quick format verify. I also like the track changes functionality when working with teammates on RFPs. It’s very simple and clean. I ran into some formatting challenges with documents coming from Office 2003 for Windows, particularly in tables and bullets but when I cleaned them up, I was able to confirm that they went back to Windows as doc files without any problems. This is critical because of the significant growth of Macs in the enterprise and the need for seamless interoperability. Microsoft looks to have some really good work here.

I’ll look forward to future betas and the final FCS release as what I see so far is a winner.

It’s now been about six weeks since the receipt of the new MacBook Pro core i7 machine. As I usually do, I went with a 17″ model again, and again chose the non glare screen option. While this means no glossy black bezel, it also means no annoying reflections off the super bright screen. I chose the 500gb drive and upgraded the RAM to 8gb. In selecting the Core i7 version I got the faster CPU and top end graphics capability.

First Impressions

This is my first unibody machine although I had bought a 13″ MBP for my wife. It feels lighter and more compact than the old MBP although technically they are about the same. The new screen graphics are really fast and the colours are amazing. I notice it most when working on HDR photos. I’m not a gamer but I do some video work and find that the machine is definitely faster rendering and even the redraws seem faster. This week I will be stress testing the machine building some content with the latest Camtasia:Mac that will include some HD video. The drive is quick enough and while the SSDs are faster the price differential is not justifiable to me.

Ongoing Use

Like the old unit I still have kernel panic issues with the eSata card that uses the Siig chipset sometimes on insertion and sometimes on removal. I am using their new drivers with my card that came from Griffin. Annoying but not a show stopper. eSata is so much faster for backups and Time Machine.

I use the machine for presentations several times a week and the mini display port adapter works great and is easier to connect than the old DVI adapter but I have more issues where it wants to mirror the screen even though I always select dual screen mode when connected. I just ran the 10.6.4 update so maybe this will improve. I also have a Targus bluetooth remote but it has become very unreliable for use with the new machine. I’ll need to see if others are experiencing this issue.

When traveling I use the machine to extend the hotel room internet connection to my iPad and iPhone and although the procedure seems to have changed since I last tried this, it works wonderfully. The new black keyboard is much easier to see in low light than the old aluminum topped one and I think I may type marginally faster on it. It’s the same keyboard as on my first gen MacBook Air and has a good feel, with decent resistance and return.

I kept the predecessor in production for just over two years and while there were few things wrong with it, other than the case starting to separate at the seams, I’m very happy to have upgraded and believe that the expense was worthwhile.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

While when buying Blu Ray movies I always look for packages containing digital downloads, they don’t always exist and this makes things tougher to get my purchased content onto my iPad and AppleTV.  Blu Ray rip tools have been on the PC for a while and I’ve had opportunity to test out three different ones for the Mac.  MakeMKV also rated highly but the current price was more than I was willing to pay for a tool I will use very rarely.  Rarely because I will only rip movies I have paid for and I don’t buy a lot of movies as I use renting as my crap screen.  Unfortunately, the crap screen needs a lot of cleaning.

So when I decided to buy software after evaluating, I bought MacBluray Ripper Pro.  It sells for $19.95 USD through the Avangate secure web store.

As you can see from the screen grab, the interface is simple.  Insert disc in drive.  Once recognized set in Preferences where you want the rip stored and click RIP.  Eject when done.  The little app is very fast and so far (six rips – told you I don’t buy a lot of movies) has performed flawlessly.   Transferring to iTunes has been more problematic as I wanted to use my Turbo 264 HD but it depends on the paid version of Flip4Mac and as I use Windows media pretty much never, this ticked me off, so I went back to the old faithful Handbrake.

Hasn’t let me down yet, although it would be cool if it used the coprocessor in the Turbo 264 HD stick.

Like they say, there’s always a catch.  You need a Blu Ray drive and Apple doesn’t offer this as an option.  I bought a LaCIE external Blu Ray recorder about a year ago so I could dump my video and audio working files onto 50GB rewritable disks.  I leave a disk mounted pretty much all the time and it’s worked out pretty well.  The LaCIE drive is overpriced and I have shied away from their products after losing several of their external drives well before MTBF, but this one has, knock wood, been reliable.

You’ll also need drivers for the drives and to make the media available.  As I have been a Roxio Toast Titanium customer for a long while, I bought V10 with the added Blu Ray support and the drive works great with media appearing on the desktop nice and quick.

MacBluray Ripper Pro comes from blumac software – more info at http://www.macblurayripperpro.com/ It’s a good product and worth the $20 if making digital copies of movies you’ve bought is important to you.  I have to admit, I’m not nuts about their use case to timeshift rented movies as this opens the door for potential theft, but to each their own.  Don’t steal movies or music.  Please.

RECOMMENDED

I recently discovered to my chagrin that Apple Mail on my MacBook Air would no longer start. This was part of a much larger set of problems that this machine was starting to demonstrate including slowdowns, application lockups and other issues.

In doing some research on how to fix this problem, I discovered a series of threads I wanted to share with you. Many Mail issues can be resolved through rebuilding the index for Mail. Here’s how.

1. Open ~/Library/Mail where the ~ represents your user home folder
2. Drag the file called Envelope Index to your desktop
3. Make sure this file no longer shows in the Mail folder
4. Relaunch Mail
5. Accept the prompt to import messages
6. Review any messages telling you that your machine is out of sync with MobileMe and make the decision that best suits your data.
7. You’re done

If this doesn’t work for you completely, you’ve got a bigger problem, but it does solve a number of issues.

Every now and again I run across a little tool that is just killer. Thanks to the nice folks at the Mac Attack I learned about Secondbar by Andreas Hegenberg.

I have had dual monitors on my Mac Pro since the upgrade from the old PowerMac and I am very used to the side by side displays. On the left is a Dell 24″ and on the right is an Apple 23″ Cinema Display. But when you deal with this much screen real estate, mousing over to one monitor to get to the menu bar while hardly traumatic is very mouse intensive. Hence Secondbar.

Secondbar is a very simple tool that creates a menubar at the top of the second display. That’s it. No rockets to Mars or quantum mechanics, just a second menu bar. I love focused answers to problems. Since any Mac Pro or Macintosh laptop can be connected to a second display via cable, and since you don’t have to mirror the displays, this is just incredibly useful.

Download Secondbar at http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=79 The author and version number says that this is early code but you get used to it pretty quick and it’s such a timesaver that you cannot complain about free and working. Very cool.

Day one with the new printer is done and overall I’m very pleased. While I bought the printer from my local Apple reseller, TRG in Aurora, it was delivered direct from Xerox by Purolator. The driver got the box to the front hall and I took it from there. The printer weighs about 60 pounds so once it was on the stand it was simply connecting power and Ethernet. Then I loaded the wax ink blocks into the proper trays (impossible to mess this up) and fired it up. I then put the install CD in the Mac Pro and launched the installer. It discovered the printer on the network without issue and installed the drivers and configured the connection. The test print failed from the installer software but one launched from the print queue directly worked perfectly. I then ran Apple’s Software Update and it fed me new drivers automatically.

The printer is nearly silent unless printing and consumes little power at idle. It generates a bit of heat because it keeps the wax liquid, but no worse than a colour laser. Print quality is incredible, better than any colour laser I’ve seen using toner and nearly as tight as a photographic inkjet printer. Paper handling so far has been trouble free.

What is amazing is how fast this thing is. I have been using an older Minolta QMS Magicolor 2210 for a few years and while it’s been a good unit it’s starting to go through parts. I was becoming frustrated with it because graphics rich PDFs or Keynote presentations were taking a long time to print. I ran a 20 page analyst report, double sided, through the Xerox and had beautiful rich output in under a minute. The colours are bright and snappy, the tables are sharp and the charts just pop.

The unit uses wax blocks with excellent longevity in four colours, black, cyan, magenta and yellow. You buy block kits like toner. The colour kits include 3 blocks and the black kit comes with six blocks. Each kit is about $140 from Xerox (cheaper from Amazon) and delivers several thousand pages. Xerox posts all in prices per page of from 2.9 cents for a business letter to 25 cents for a full blown graphics page. Their models include all the consumables not just the ink, so a fairly accurate overall costing in my opinion. Prints last well but could fade in sunlight according to my research.

The only issue I ran into with the unit had to do with the Windows 7 driver install. I tried the install both from the CD and from Xerox’s Web site. It took a really long time to discover the printer and when it installed the management console something caused the printer to freeze. Since this happened more than once and only when I tried to get the Windows 7 drivers working, I think that the problem is related to the driver. I’ll try again without installing the console since it seems of little use anyway. It’s not a big deal for me because we’re finally all Mac here at the castle, except for the test machines needed for Windows and Linux.

This is only the first day so stay tuned for further updates, but so far I’m very pleased.

Apple has made Aperture 3 available an by all data it’s an upgrade worth buying. However, I and many other people have had the upgrade result in Aperture constantly crashing on launch with a dump of messages that are not very helpful. One poster noted that he spent over an hour with Apple’s usually superb technical support yet never had the issue resolved. i discovered a potential solution that worked for me in the forums at DPReview, the superb digital photographic site.

Here’s how to fix the problem and what you’ll need.
Your Aperture 3 serial number (full version) OR
Your Aperture 3 upgrade serial number and your Aperture 2 full serial number

1. Aperture should be installed but is crashing on launch. If not, this tip isn’t the one you need. Don’t trash Aperture
2. Open the Library folder at the root of the hard disk (not the library in your user folder). Then open the Application Support folder followed by the ProApps folder. In this folder you will find .id files that correspond to whichever Apple Pro Apps you have installed. Move the aperture and proapps .id files to your desktop, ensuring that they are gone from the ProApps folder.
3. Launch Aperture. Even if you’ve entered your information before you’ll need to do so again.
4. Enter your Aperture 3 serial number. If your install is an upgrade, you’ll be prompted for your full version serial number. This is where you enter your Aperture 2 serial number.
5. Register your software if you have not already had this happen (unlikely).
6. Launch Aperture and let it upgrade your Aperture library. Be patient, this takes a while for large libraries.
7. Accept or not to use the places feature (your choice).
8. Exit Aperture and relaunch it to be sure all is solid.
9. If you have other ProApps installed, now would be a good time to launch them to ensure that they still launch properly.
10. Run Software Update. At the time of this writing, there was already a slideshow patch posted. I expect that there will be more based upon the volume of issues reported with the 3.0 release.

Of course if you have no issues with your install or now that things are fixed, dig in, it’s a solid upgrade and an excellent product overall.