Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Mac OS X for Geeks
Faisal Jawdat, of Forwarding Address, has knocked up a guide for power users and Unix switchers called Mac OS X for Geeks. Don’t let that title put you off - it is useful reading for anyone using OS X, not just the Geeks.
The number one tip, as far as I’m concerned, is the following:
If you’re at the shell the “open” command will open a pathname as if it had been opened from the Finder. “open foo” will open the file foo with the appropriate helper. “open .” will open a Finder window for the current directory. “open foo.app” will open the “foo” application. This is particularly useful when poking around areas of the file system which are otherwise hidden from the Finder. In addition, the -a flag causes the Finder to search for and open an application, e.g. “open -a Terminal.app” (opens the first Terminal.app found, regardless of its location) or “open -a BBEdit.app ./foo.txt” (opens foo.txt from the current directory in the first BBEdit found).
Also, since Leon mentioned the other day that he was having trouble playing films downloaded with Bittorrent:
Video is kind of a mess. You’ve got QuickTime. You can get DivX. If you’re dealing with lots of Windows files you’ll also want to get VLC, MPlayer and Windows Media Player. None of these will play everything, but all of them together will play most everything.
I’m not really sure why video in OS X could be considered any more of a mess than it is on any other platform. RealOne, Windows Media Player, & the Quicktime Player handle their own formats just fine as far as I can tell, and VLC has thus far loaded everything I’ve thrown at it with admirable aplomb—weird VCD codecs, DivX and all that nonsense (including BitTorrent files of allsorts—without even requiring any additional downloads or plugin nonsense. Handy! Plus VLC has that cute little orange road cone icon. ;)
Posted by brian w at 5pm on 20.07.03
VLC is great, as is MPlayer (both play everything in my experience, but I tend to use MPlayer as it has a slightly better UI)
That said, I still think video on OS X (or 9.x for that matter) can be considered a mess. Pretty much every video file you might download via filesharing apps won’t play on a Mac out of the box, and while great tools are out there, they’re pretty obscure, and far from being as user-friendly as, say, any of the iApps.
Maybe I have high expectations, but I want everything to work just like that, and for everyone, not just folk like me (us?) who seek out and download every new app in sight!
Posted by Jack Mottram at 7pm on 20.07.03
foo?
sorry, that has puzzled my addled brain.
Posted by Donna at 9pm on 20.07.03
>> foo?
It’s a geek thing :)
Posted by Matt at 1am on 21.07.03
Yes it has been said before that I am just a wannabe geeklady
pffft!
Posted by Donna at 10am on 21.07.03
Since it’s a geek thing, Slashdot has a discussion of the origin of ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ as used geekily. Here is a definition/etymology, and here’s another.
It’s just a metasyntactic variable, baby! Or in non-language geek terms, a word used in examples to stand for whatever is under discussion…
Posted by Jack Mottram at 1pm on 21.07.03
Thank you, Sir Geek!
I’ve now lost all interest
Posted by Donna at 7pm on 21.07.03
Hee. That would be a good tagline for Slashdot, I think.
Posted by Jack Mottram at 10am on 22.07.03