Calling the Mac experts

[Lemur]

There's a distinct lack of feedback when you click things. Unless a programme immediately launches or similar it's hard to tell if you clicked correctly, missed, or whatever.

I take it you've hidden the dock, then. When you launch an app its icon shows up in the dock with a little white dot next to it. Un-hide the dock and you'll see what I mean. This is an easy way to see what apps are open.

[Fragony]

apple + space is really all you need. Type in the program and it finds it, if you forgot who Solon is just type 'Solon'

"Athenian statesman and lawgiver. One of the Seven Sages, he revised the code of laws established by Draco. His division of the citizens into four classes based on wealth rather than birth was the basis for Athenian democracy."

my favorite feature.

[frogbeastegg]

I take it you've hidden the dock, then. When you launch an app its icon shows up in the dock with a little white dot next to it. Un-hide the dock and you'll see what I mean. This is an easy way to see what apps are open.

No, it's still there. I emptied it out and shrunk it down a bit and am happy to leave it be. If a programme has launched then it's not much help, e.g. swapping windows.

It's just ... awkward. Sometimes I'll click on something and nothing will happen, leaving me wondering if I missed the icon's catch area. So I try again after a bit and the program comes up and I'm not sure if that's because I got it right the second time or because it took a while. Or I'll click a button or link inside a programme and nothing will happen leaving me wondering again. Sometimes I know it takes a few seconds; sometimes I know I missed. The rest of the time I have no idea.

apple + space is really all you need. Type in the program and it finds it, if you forgot who Solon is just type 'Solon'

Now that is neat! It knows Pericles and Augustus too. Doesn't seem to know any medieval kings, pity.

[Fragony]

You would be amazed how much actually is there, if I don't know anything macbook first, then wiki. It's a fantastic feature, if you know the document/program/song/whatever you are looking for you can open it in the blink of an eye.

[Fragony]

wth?

[Banquo's Ghost]

The battery should be new in a refurb, but you should nonetheless make sure you calibrate it. It's usually best to do this once a month as suggested, though for my MacBook Pro - which is on the mains more often than not - I don't bother more than once a quarter.

You can check your battery condition in System Profiler (click the little Apple logo at the far left of the menu bar, then choose About This Mac and then More Info - also go here to ensure your system is up to date with Software Update). A very useful widget (small applications that live in your Dashboard) is iStat, which will help monitor your battery easily. It's free (one can make a donation).

There's a collection of guides on the Apple site, that may be of use.

If your dock icons for applications don't seem to respond to your click, try going to System Preferences, Dock and select Animate Opening Applications. The dock icons will now bounce while they're opening. Note that in Sys Pref and many other OSX apps, there is no need to click "Apply" or "OK" as the change takes effect immediately you select it.

Spaces is a delight. You can assign applications to open in their own space - so you might have Safari in Space 1, Scrivener in 2, Excel in 3 and so on. You swap between them with Apple key + arrow keys. Much easier to flip between research sources. Add this to Exposé (which reduces all open windows on a desktop space to fit the screen, where you can select the one you want to go to) and working with multiple sources open becomes really easy. Of course, this may not be your modus operandi.

With Scrivener, don't overlook the full screen writing mode. Everything goes away but your words. It's very productive, and your research is only a click away.

[frogbeastegg]

The battery has stabilised itself at between 5 and 6 hours usage now.

With Scrivener, don't overlook the full screen writing mode. Everything goes away but your words. It's very productive, and your research is only a click away.

I stayed up past 1AM going through the tutorial and playing with features as they were introduced. I started it around 9PM; I couldn't tear myself away from my new box of toys.

I've been chopping my mammoth Eleanor manuscript up into rough chapters, colour coding them and adding a brief synopsis. There's over half the manuscript left to attack and already it's feeling far more wieldy. I was sweating when I told Scrivener to do a word count on the entire thing - it sat there with a little colour wheel spinning for nearly a minute. I feared I'd killed it, until it spat out a result. I've got enough words to make a 1239 page mass market paperback. Scary.

[pevergreen]

Do I sense an Eleanor: Apprentice and an Eleanor: Master? (Sorry, I have the Riftwar on my mind)

[caravel]

For what it's worth, Caravel, a buddy of mine who is a Linux/BSD admin for a media group phoned me up with excitement after trying his first OS X notebook. "You have no idea what it's like to have a Unix laptop that just works," he said. So clearly in the notebook space there is room for the hardware/software integration that OS X offers.

IN support of which, go to any Unix convention and count the OS X notebooks. There will be many.

Yes a lot of UNIX people are like that - very different to the Linux geeks - and I'm a Linux geek at heart. The way I look at it though, here in the UK a Mac costs twice as much as an equivalent spec PC. For me it's just not worth it, but for others it probably is. In all honesty I don't like Apple due to how they operate - I like them less than MS so I'm probably quite biased.

[Lemur]

I stayed up past 1AM going through the tutorial and playing with features as they were introduced. I started it around 9PM; I couldn't tear myself away from my new box of toys.

Okay, fine, I give in. After hearing you and Banquo rave on and on about Scrivener, I downloaded the free trial and started working the tutorials.

Goodness.

I think this may replace no fewer than four applications I've been using. This really is good stuff. If I weren't so stodgy and stuck in my ways I would have tried it before.

Sure, it's not gonna work for the customized templates used by some of my corporate clients, but that's fine, I can still crank OpenOffice when I need to. But this is a mighty fine box of tools. I think I'm in love.

Somebody needs to port this app to Windows. Quickly. It's too fine to be restricted to Mac users.

[Banquo's Ghost]

Somebody needs to port this app to Windows. Quickly. It's too fine to be restricted to Mac users.

Unlikely, as they are tiny team based in Cornwall, UK.

Will There Be a Windows Version of Scrivener?
This is one of the most frequent questions we receive. The answer, I am sorry to say, is, "No - certainly not in the foreseeable future." The reason for this is not that we are Mac snobs, but simply that Literature & Latte - as explained above - is a very small company, and we happen to prefer and use (and program for) the Mac platform. The Mac operating system (OS X) is, internally, very different from Windows, to such an extent that porting Scrivener to Windows would pretty much require programming it from scratch (not to mention me having to learn how to program for Windows). Programs that do run on both Windows and OS X tend to fall into two camps: those that have whole teams working on them who are thus able to create two entirely separate versions optimised for each platform (examples are Word, PhotoShop and suchlike); and those that are created using intermediary software such as REALBasic (the latter tend to stick out as not really looking or feeling "native" to either platform). Scrivener was created using the standard Mac OS X programming frameworks (known as "Cocoa"), so it is native to the Mac. Because of this and the fact that I do not have whole teams of programmers to port it to a different platform, a Windows version of Scrivener is very unlikely. Sorry. That said, if you happen to be a talented Windows programmer as well as a writer and you like Scrivener, feel free to drop me a line - I can't offer anyone a job, though!

Glad to see you are being seduced too!

[frogbeastegg]

Do I sense an Eleanor: Apprentice and an Eleanor: Master? (Sorry, I have the Riftwar on my mind)

The story arc splits neatly into three segments, and I've had joking names for each for years. Part 1 is 'Nell and Fulk's Spytastic Adventures'. Part 2 is 'Uh oh ...' and part 3 is 'Wherein there is killing and stuff, also cleaning up'. Imagine walking into a bookshop and asking for a copy of one of those!

Okay, fine, I give in. After hearing you and Banquo rave on and on about Scrivener, I downloaded the free trial and started working the tutorials.

Glad that you've got some return for helping me

Somebody needs to port this app to Windows. Quickly. It's too fine to be restricted to Mac users.

If it had been possible on Windows then I'd have been thinking of the option Caravel mentions here: a normal laptop with vista nuked off of it and a decent OS installed. Whether I'd have taken that route or not is a different question; spending time cleaning junk off and setting the machine up in a usable fashion would have been more effort than I'm currently willing to spend. Getting this desktop back up and running took me a lot of time, for which I had other, more uses.

Have you seen page four? It's nice but it lacks some of the things I liked in scrivener's product blurb, and those tools were more useful to me than the ones page four has but scrivener does not.

[Fragony]

Can anybody tell me how I can look up my account name? It's on receipt/email?? I got OSX with ze mac

[frogbeastegg]

How do you run the equivolent of a deep virus and spyware scan on a mac? Some has stolen my credit card details and I want to be sure that didn't happen because of something malicious on my macbook. I did use it for a single card transaction on a site I normally use, so the details have been on there.

[Lemur]

ClamXav is supposed to be pretty good, but I seriously doubt you've got malware on your laptop. Not saying it's impossible, but it's the least probable avenue of infection.

[frogbeastegg]

Thanks.

I seriously doubt that it's any fault of mine full stop; it's infinitely more likely I'm the victim of a random number generator or an employee stealing details. Peace of mind's all I'm really looking for.

[Fragony]

NO I DON'T WANT SAFARI TO SEND A FORM AFTER POSTING JUST BACK WOULD BE AWESOME.

Safari suckiness is driving me nuts, how do I fix this annoying as can be.

[Lemur]

Why are you using Safari anyway? Firefox works like a charm, and I like to use the same browser on every platform. It comforts me like a yellow baby blankie.

[Fragony]

I like how you can quiekly browse between your favorite sites, but this form thing is bewildering.

[Banquo's Ghost]

Fragony, can you be more specific about the "form thingie"? I use Safari a lot, and can't imagine what you might mean.

As Lemur says, Firefox on Mac is excellent and much better featured in many ways. The top ten sites feature on Safari isn't worth the hassle you seem to be experiencing - though it might be easily fixed.

EDIT: If you look in Preferences (tool bar Safari menu) and the Security tab, do you have a checkbox ticked at the bottom that says: Ask before sending a non-secure form from a secure website? If it's checked, maybe this is the problem. Try unchecking and testing.

[Husar]

NO I DON'T WANT SAFARI TO SEND A FORM AFTER POSTING JUST BACK WOULD BE AWESOME.

The way I understand it you post something on the forum and when you press back it asks whether you want to send some data again?
That's probably because you go back to the page where it sends you post/the text in it to the server.
In that case I'd suggest to either:
a) click on the forum name at the top of a page to go back
or
b) do it like I do and open every thread in a new tab, I find this has a few other advantages as well, after posting just close the tab and go to/open the next one

Not that I use Safari on the Pc but it's roughly the same for any browser, FireFox should ask you the same question about resending data, had it myself before.

[frogbeastegg]

Froggy's mac musings number 1: why can I accidentally put the cursor into drag and highlight mode all the time just by scrolling up or down a page, yet can seldom activate the mode when I want to use it?

[Lemur]

Ars Technica weighs in with their 10.6 review. Worth a read.

[Lemur]

Unlikely, as they are tiny team based in Cornwall, UK.

Unlikely, but not impossible. Behold, Scrivener for Windows beta 3. I'll be locking my bedroom and holding all calls while I cuddle up with this sexy piece of software.