PCTips Box

Nowadays everyone needs to have a little eye-candy on their desktop and, although most of the people that use the Mac Terminal can easily be considered as being a little bit on the geek side and will always prefer functionality over good looks, I’m pretty sure that none of them will refuse having a really nice looking and always ready Terminal at their disposal, just a key shortcut away.

And, by saying it will be just a key shortcut away, I don’t mean that you’ll be able to launch a Terminal windows each time you’ll push the magic button combination. No! The Terminal will just slide down over your Mac’s desktop and will hide again under the menubar when you will not need to use it anymore. Just like the Quake-like console I mentioned in the title.

SIMBL and Visor

How can this be achieved, you ask? Well, it couldn’t be any simpler! All you will have to do is to install SIMBL, download a plug-in and place it in the right location on your Mac’s hard-drive. (more…)

Although many people have their favorite web apps setup as their homepage on their browsers, there are times when running a web app inside its own window - in a separate process - could come handy. Think about having your browser clogged up with way above 30-40 tabs open and crashing at random times.

Then, you will just have to open it again and fire up the web interface you were working with at the time of the crash. A desktop web app will automatically eliminate the need of restarting your work flow all over again just because a buggy web browser decided that he had enough.

That’s only a quick example why one would need a web app to run on its desktop. To be able to do it, you will have to use an application developed by Mozilla and named Prism. It enables the end user to easily integrate any type of web application into a friendly desktop environment. (more…)

No one ever bought a car or a computer because it could go slower. If your hard-disk drive seems to take forever to go about its business, or if it’s having trouble keeping up with your CD-R burning software, chances are it’s time for a tune-up and defragmentation.

Step 1: Close any open applications. Disable antivirus utilities, screen savers and other background programs. Make sure you’ve quit all programs in Windows by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete once (don’t press it twice or you’ll restart the computer).

Step 2: Windows will show you a list of applications running. Highlight each application (one at a time) and click on End Task to close each one. (more…)

Apple is riding a success wave fueled by the market performance of the Mac computers. And while the Cupertino-based hardware company was pushing in excess of 2.15 million Macs per month back in the third quarter of 2007, ahead of the advent of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, its proprietary operating system also grows its own market share in the background. Statistics delivered by Net Applications reveal that at the end of 2007, Mac OS X accounted for over 7% of the operating system market, just behind Vista which passed the 10% mark in December
of the past year.

But with the added Mac OS X audience also come inherent caveats. With an install base of in excess of 70 million users worldwide, Mac OS X is increasingly coming in the focus of attackers. The DNSChanger Trojan horse aimed at Apple’s operating system is an illustrative example of such a scenario. And as Mac OS X will increase its footprint on the operating system market, the threat landscape will react, responding with new threats tailored to the platform. (more…)

The iPhone, that extremely popular gadget built by the Cupertino company Apple, is one of the latest devices threatened by some malicious packages, as Orla Cox of Symantec today warned. What’s interesting is that this threat, if we can name it so, is not as dangerous as it may sound, because the only thing it does is to harm some of the applications deployed on the affected iPhone. The malicious file comes as a firmware update and is named “iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep”. Its creators described the package “an important system update; install this before updating to the new 1.1.3 firmware”, according to the Symantec official. (more…)

Unfortunately you must be proactive to protect yourself from today’s bad guys. Here is my down and dirty list for PC users.

1. Install a good anti-virus program and make sure that it is updated regularly. While most of today’s programs update automatically, you should check occasionally to make sure they are working properly.

2. Don’t open email attachments even if they are from someone you know. Open only if you are expecting them, you know the person sending them, and you know what the attachments contain. (more…)

Apple’s move to Intel architecture opened up a whole new world of possibilities, and it was not long before software, such as Parallels, VMWare and Boot Camp, came and made lots of those possibilities reality. Now, with Leopard released, new information about how the Mac OS reacts to Windows executable has come to light.

The abundance of speculation has been spurred by two independent reports. The first, a thread on the Wine mailing labeled ‘Interesting Behavior of OS X’, has Steven Edward’s describing that Leopard has an undocumented loader for Portable Executables, which are used in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. (more…)

iPhone is virtually slaughtering Windows Mobile powered devices in terms of market performance. In yet another aspect of the multifaceted Microsoft vs. Apple face-off, the Cupertino-based hardware company has left the Redmond giant in the dust. On the U.S. Market, the iPhone has been nothing short of a smashing success just a few weeks short of the first six months since it was introduced. Earlier in 2007, Apple chose to sacrifice Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on the altar of the iPhone. Apple talked at that time of necessary tradeoffs, and it looks like their gambit payed off. The iPhone is swallowing market shares at a rapid pace and is consistently growing its audience. (more…)

If you are an iTune user, the following add on list will come handy for both Mac and Windows users.

Lets first check the programs, which should be there on a Mac computer:

Synergy: Synergy is an iTunes utility designed for expanding the graphical display of the standard iTunes feature set. The update adds the ability to display album covers of song titles being played.

Fetch Art for iTunes: Fetch Art allows to automatically download album art from music in iTunes. It uses album art from Amazon.com, and the ID3 tags in the MP3 files to determine the appropriate CD cover to download. (more…)

Gmail’s huge success owes itself in large part to the wide range of applications, browser add-ons, styles, scripts and bookmarklets that work with it. From the get-go Google’s stayed out of developers’ way and turned a blind eye to unofficial Gmail add-ons, even ones that may very well violate its terms of service. Smart move: Google’s high tolerance for third-party apps have only helped Gmail win the hearts of power users and tweakers everywhere. (more…)