Posts with tag tuaw

Filed under: Fun, Games, Macintosh, Apple, Freeware, Time-Wasters

Tetris is built into your Mac - Time Waster

by Jason Clarke Oct 7th 2008

If you're a Mac user, did you know that Tetris comes with your Mac? Have a look through your Applications folder - you won't find it there. Thanks to Cory over at TUAW, I now know that Tetris is an Easter Egg that can be found in the Terminal application.

Here are the steps to get the game going:

Open Terminal, which you can find in the Utilities sub-folder in your Applications folder
In the Terminal window, type "emacs", then press Enter
Wait for the Emacs screen to load (you'll see a bunch of welcome information for GNU Emacs)
Press the Escape key, then type "x" then type "tetrix" (no space between "x" and "tetris") and press Enter

If you've followed the instructions exactly, you should now be looking at a working game of Tetris. Controlling the blocks is done with your arrow keys.

Yes, this game of tetris isn't the best implementation you will find. It's very narrow, making it quite frustrating to play. But hey - it's free Tetris, and it's built in to your Mac!

Tags: Mac, Terminal, Tetris, time-waster, TUAW

Filed under: Business, Windows, Macintosh, Office, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

Converting .docx documents to .doc

by Jason Clarke Sep 24th 2008

Thanks Microsoft. No seriously, thanks. As far as I can tell, the new .docx default document format in MS Word 2007 and 2008 (for Mac) does nothing to make my life easier, but has certainly made it more of a pain. Although my office predominantly uses Office 2003, our users are starting to receive documents saved in the newer .docx format, and are unable to open or edit them. Since I happen to be running Office 2007 and 2008 on my machine (it's a Mac with VMWare Fusion for running Windows), I get to play the role of "mister file converter".

Well, no longer.

Thanks to our pals over at TUAW, I can now redirect my office mates to Zamzar's free online file converter. We've written about Zamzar before, but this is the first I had heard that it supports Office file formats.

Tags: doc, document-conversion, docx, docx-to-doc, excel, tuaw, word, zamzar

Filed under: Fun, Internet, E-mail, Productivity, AOL, Beta

AOL Desktop for Mac resurfaces after five years

by Lisa Hoover Sep 28th 2007

When we heard that AOL (this blog's parent company) was coming out with a new version of Desktop for Mac, we were pretty excited to see what they'd been up to since the last release five years ago. Now that we've had a chance to play with it, we like it but think it's still got a ways to go before there's a compelling reason to leave behind whatever browser / IM / email combo you're using now.

Though this new version of Desktop for Mac is still in beta, it seems stable. We tested Desktop on a new generation iMac and a MacBook Pro and it ran just fine on both. System requirements include a PowerPC G4 or greater, OS X 10.4 or higher, and at least 256 MB RAM. Surprisingly, Desktop only needs 60 MB of hard drive space (Firefox alone needs 52 MB).

Tags: aol, aol-for-mac, beta, browser, desktop, email, login, mac, screenshots, the-unofficial-apple-weblog, toolbar, tuaw

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity

Access a second operating system on your Mac with VMware's Fusion

by Lisa Hoover Jul 1st 2007

If you love your Mac but still need or want to run Windows, Linux, or Solaris, then VMware's Fusion is worth a look. Though it's still in beta and not expected to launch until later this summer, this virtualization tool gives you access to all the apps in a second operating system without requiring a reboot to access them.

We downloaded it to a MacBook Intel Core 2 Duo and then installed Windows XP without a hitch. Fusion will find and run the existing Windows OS that ships with Boot Camp, so a separate Windows installation isn't necessary in that case. According to the VMware website, Fusion also works with Vista. Once your OS of choice is installed, let the fun begin.

Gallery: VMware Fusion

Tags: fusion, linux, mac, tuaw, unity, virtualization, vmware, windows

Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Web services, Shareware, Social Software

Spyder - Offline MySpace client for Mac OS X

by Chris Brentano Jan 21st 2007

If you are a reader of our sister (or brother) site TUAW, you may have seen this covered a little while back. Spyder is a handy offline MySpace client for Mac OS X by Michael K. Link that you may find useful if you are a hardcore MySpace user. Its clean interface, which seems to be inspired by a little bit iTunes 7, a little bit Delicious Library, allows you to manage your social network with relative ease. A demo/free version is available which handles about 70% of all functions available on the MySpace web site (you can't send friend requests, for example) but if you pay for a license all features are enabled.

It's definitely a clever application - since there's no published MySpace API (as far as I know), what I presume it's doing is making the HTTP requests and crawling the document to pull the necessary data (screen scraping). The $34.95 price tag may turn all but the most serious MySpace users away (or folks who can't handle dealing with some of the more, ahem, 'customized' profiles). At the moment only MySpace is supported by Spyder, but the developer has promised Facebook and Flickr support in the future.

Tags: michael k. link, myspace, spyder, tuaw

Filed under: Macintosh, Apple

Macworld 2007 Stevenote Live Blog at TUAW

by Jordan Running Jan 9th 2007

If you a) are an Apple fan (or are just Mac-curious) and b) enjoy refreshing your browser, you should do what I'm doing and head over to our sister blog TUAW, where they're liveblogging Steve Jobs' keynote right now. Speculation as to whether any Earth-shattering plans will be revealed today is rampant as ever--iPhone? iTV? iBex? Tune in to find out. If your reloading finger gets tired and you're a Firefox user, I recommend the ReloadEvery add-on. And when the Stevenote is through, check out TUAW's hot new photo galleries.

Update: Also check out Engadget's Stevenote coverage.

Tags: apple, keynote, liveblog, liveblogging, mac, macworld, steve jobs, SteveJobs, stevenote, tuaw

Filed under: OS Updates, News, Windows, Macintosh, Apple, Microsoft

Pirillo says Vista will help Apple

by Ryan Carter Oct 15th 2006

Chris Pirillo has an interesting take on the whole Vista versus Leopard debate and why Vista will only hurt Microsoft and help Apple. He says Vista will help Apple double its market-share. Is he wrong? I generally agree with what he says in this article, because frankly I think he's right. I am not sure if I am a Vista fan, I like the user interface and eye-candy, but the way it functions just doesn't cut it for me. Apple clearly has the advantage now with boot-camp and parallels running both OSs over a Windows-only PC. For the first time in history, I am considering buying an Apple machine, because it will run both operating systems and it will do everything I need it to and more. Sure, Apple is a bit more expensive, but maybe it is worth it. I feel cheated, in a way gypped by Microsoft and their inability to get their products out on time, with everything in tact, and stable. What do you think? I never thought this day would come, where I would see the value in Apple over Windows. Times change. What if the world turns to Apple, as Chris alludes to here? Microsoft may yet have a grip on corporate environments, but more and more consumers are heading for the comfort of an Apple tree with a plush Leopard, instead of being scorched on high mountain Vista, baking in the sun. Is Microsoft in for trouble, or not?

Tags: Apple, Leopard, Microsoft, OS X, OsX, Pirillo, tuaw, Vista, Windows

Filed under: Utilities, Video, Macintosh, Podcasting, Commercial, Shareware

Mac screen recorder reviews

by Jay Savage Aug 23rd 2006

DLS reader and FreeMacBlog webmaster Brian has put up a nice summary of the the available screen recording options for the Mac (at least the affordable ones). The list is a good rundown that features some old favorites as well as some new players. His pick of the litter is iShowU. Actually, it seems, surprisingly, to be the only real contender. None of the other options offer audio and video recording for Intel and PPC macs. The venerable Snapz Pro X demo wouldn't even launch on his MacBook.

Tags: iShowU, Mac, screen capture, screen recording, Snapz, Snapz Pro X, tuaw

Filed under: Fun, Macintosh, Freeware

Grow a pet on your dashboard

by Jordan Running May 26th 2006

I always hem and haw over featuring individual widgets, but this one I couldn't resist: Chi Pet is a Dashboard widget for OS X that simulates, ah.. having a Chia Pet. I'm not quite sure what kind of animal it's supposed to be-maybe a turtle?-but it's definitely cute. Like a real Chia Pet, Chi Pet starts out orange and naked and, if you keep it watered (by clicking on the droplet icon every two days or so), will grow an attractive green coat. Unlike a real Chia Pet, however, if you fail to water it, it will actually roll over and die. Aww.

[Via TUAW]

Tags: chiapet, chipet, dashboard, freeware, fun, osx, tuaw, widget

Filed under: Internet, Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, Shareware

WebnoteHappy - ultimate bookmark manager for OS X?

by Victor Agreda, Jr. May 17th 2006

Folks I've tried 'em all, del.icio.us, Furl, even my .Mac's ability to sync Safari bookmarks online... And what I've wound up with is a mishmash of bookmarks all over creation, some with tags, some without. I don't know if WebnoteHappy is the ultimate answer, as it doesn't necessarily push the list to the web (more on this in a minute), but it does have a lot to offer. For instance, I switch around to different browsers for different things. I use Firefox to blog, Safari to research, Opera to just surf junk, Camino for blogging sometimes, Flock for research sometimes, etc. WebnoteHappy keeps all of my bookmarks in one central location, and with bookmarklets or a hotkey, I'm able to send a URL to the app. It's kinda like syncronizing your bookmarks within one machine as those bookmarks are then accessible system-wide. The organization tools are great too, working much like iTunes. There's good tagging support, and the ability to talk to NetNewsWire, still my most used RSS reader. Now as for publishing online (for use on other machines), I can either try to move my bookmarks back into Safari (there's a merge feature) and sync with .Mac, or export my bookmarks file (the app provides a couple of ways to do this) and send it upstream...

Tags: camino, firefox, opera, safari, tuaw

Filed under: Fun, Text, Windows, Macintosh, Office, Apple, Commercial

AppleWorks for Windows - Freaky Friday Find

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Apr 14th 2006

I remember Claris. What a great little tool, ClarisWorks. Then Apple snarfed the company back up, and it became AppleWorks. And let's face it, aside from an ugly port to OS X, AppleWorks has remained the "free with your iBook" crappy Office knockoff it's been for years. But I had no idea they still offered AppleWorks for Windows. What a world. And why bother? OpenOffice is fantastic in Windows. On the Mac it has a few, shall we say, issues to resolve... But that's where we find it. I'd love to see the sales chart for the Windows version of AW though. By now it must look like a chart of the adoption rate for Windows ME. I mean, the iBook on the page isn't even a G4! Besides, iWork is a lot more fun to use, even without a spreadsheet or database tool. This stinker debuted in 2002, and four years later needs to just go away now... And this coming from a guy with a Pentium II in his garage running an Ubuntu LiveCD.

Tags: appleworks, claris, clarisworks, freaky friday find, FreakyFridayFind, iwork, openoffice, osx, tuaw

Filed under: Design, OS Updates, Utilities, Productivity, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Commercial, Shareware, Freeware, Open Source, How-Tos

Tips for Boot Campers

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Apr 12th 2006

So you've put Windows XP on your Mac. What now? As someone who has to constantly switch between the two, I have a few tips. There are problems inherent in dual-booting, as opposed to running a virtual machine inside another OS (virtualization has its own issues of course). The big one for me is the issue of data storage. While I need to use USB memory sticks at work to move data from my iBook to a PC for printing, if it's a simple data sharing issue at home, this is easily remedied. I've been trying out FolderShare from Microsoft, and it works great. The OS X client is quirky, coated in brushed metal, but works like a dream. Right now it's in beta, and thus free, but expect this to change. Another alternative is a .Mac account and the XP utility for mounting your .Mac "drive." The nice thing about this is you can treat it just like a hard drive, but with all the latency issues you'd expect with a WebDAV data store... Still, there are plenty of online storage options out there.

If you want your XP to look more like a Mac, the contest winner appears to be FlyakiteOSX. Making it work like a Mac is a bit different. You know, Home is My Documents and so on, and each platform is totally different under the hood, yada yada. More important is to just understand the difference between the two and deal with it. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of data points out there for switching from a Mac to a PC. Statistically that's just not a big pool to draw from... There's a mostly useless CNet article from 2002. And there's a much better piece from Rolf Howarth in 2004. Rolf made the switch to XP and documented the affair. Skip through the hardware issues to the software bits though. Again, it's a little out of date (XP handles wireless pretty well nowadays, in my experience)... Oh and Jeremy Zawodny switched to a PC laptop last year and appears to enjoy it. Anyway, there are lots of differences. Mostly it's a change of geography, with the need for some extra security thrown in. Instead of the menu bar up top, it's the tray down below.

If you're feeling homesick for something like Quicksilver, we've had this discussion a lot on Download Squad, plus other modifications. Choose your poison. If you want to enable Microsoft's version of Fast User Switching, you can. Downloading the Google Pack is helpful, as you get a Spotlight-esque search tool and a task switcher. Gnosis has a ton of XP resource links for you to peruse as well, which range from troubleshooting to massaging more performance out of the OS. One idea to feel at home in either OS is to use nothing but cross-platform, open source apps. It's an idea anyway.

Hey, it could be worse. Try switching from UNIX to Windows.

Tags: apple, boot camp, BootCamp, osx, rolf howarth, RolfHowarth, switch, tuaw, xp

Filed under: Web services, Google

Simply Google

by Jordan Running Apr 11th 2006

TUAW's David Chartier dropped us a line to point us to Simply Google, a sort of meta-homepage for Google's many, many services. In addition to the requisite Google search box, it also has search boxes for Images, Groups, Books, Blogs, and so on and so on, plus links to other Google sites like Analytics, Personalized Home, and Gmail, plus all of Google's blogs (and their feeds). Simply Google also has links for Google's various apps and its April Fools sites and, for, good measure, search boxes for Yahoo!, MSN, and a few others. No, this isn't the first meta-Google site, but for a site with a couple dozen search boxes, Simply Google does a nice job of keeping down the clutter.

Tags: David Chartier, google, homepage, meta, simply google, simplygoogle, tuaw

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Browser Tips

Tweak the Firefox leak - Today's Browser Tip

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Apr 10th 2006

I tried this on my Mac and PC and it seems to provide just a little relief. If you recall, Firefox tends to eat memory during browsing, especially if you use a lot of tabs. For each tab, each page will cache several pages back and forward. This is nice if you want speed, but bad if you have several tabs open at once, all active in different Windows. While some said this was a memory leak, Mozilla came out to say it was, in fact, a feature. Well this made it to digg, and now the people have had their say: this may fix your Firefox memory leak. Then again, it might not. It's not a real fix, just a config change. What it does is flush the RAM of stored pages, and move everything to the HD, where large chunks should stay. The author said this saves hundreds of MB at a time. Once you minimize FF, the pages are moved to the HD from RAM. You can then restore FF and see the savings. As you can see from the comments, the mileage you get out of this one varies. The good thing is, it's easily reversible and isn't really hacking Firefox, just twiddling the controls a bit... For more enhancements, there's always the Firefox 1.5 tweak guide.

Tags: config, digg, firefox, tuaw

Filed under: Audio, OS Updates, Windows, Apple, Microsoft

Monaco - Microsoft's version of GarageBand?

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Apr 10th 2006

You mean Microsoft isn't going to quit making iLife-style apps just because Macs can boot into Windows? Well, I doubt Windows Movie Maker is going anywhere. And Max, Vista's photo application, is set to be a major selling point to the consumers out there. So I can only think Monaco, or Vista's answer to GarageBand, will also be at least a bullet point on the back of the box (which box remains a question). There's a heated discussion on this topic over at ArsTecnica's M-Dollar. One comment to note: Microsoft set out to dominate the office, which they did. Apple set out to dominate the creative studio, which they did. Now we see each traveling to the other corner of the ring (Apple's got rack-mountable servers, a true server OS, and iWork for what its worth), what will be the result? I can't wait to see the Monaco interface. I have been intrigued with Max, and it'll be interesting to see what Vista technologies are leveraged by Monaco in a similar fashion. So far not enough details have emerged about Monaco to make a call... Let the Studio battle begin!

Tags: arstechnica, creative, garageband, ilife, monaco, studio, tuaw, vista

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn U After spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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