PC vs Mac ;-)

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

How to use Adium on every Mac OS X Space

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Thomas Maurer

Since Mac OS X Leopard I use Spaces a lot. In the System Preferences, Expose & Spaces you can configure Spaces. You can also configure Applications to use everytime the same Space. So for example my iCal always opens on Space 3, Tweetie always on Space 1 and so on. This is nothing new but it is pretty usefull to arrange your workspace like that.

I also use Adium a lot so, often I copy past something form Safari, Evernote, Mail or another program to the Adium Message Window. But with Spaces I always had to drag the Adium Message Window to the Space of the Application or the other way round. But there is a pretty cool setting in Spaces. You can set an Application be on “Every Space”. So I set Adium to “Every Space” and I don’t have to move the Adium Message Window or a Application.

I know this is nothing new, but I just didn’t know about this function.

Convert Word Documents to PDF with Automator

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Thomas Maurer

I got a lot of Microsoft Word Documents form one of our professors at KTSI. But Evernote only supports text recognition inside PDFs. So I converted all Word Documents to PDF with the Mac OS X Automator.

How to convert Word Documents to PDF:

Open Automator under Mac OS X
Add a “Get Specified Finder Items” object
Select the Word Documents
Add another “Convert Format of Word Documents” object
Set the Format to ” Portable Document Format (PDF)”
Now click run and the Automator will convert all your Word Documents and you can find them in the same folder as the Word Documents

Apple Xcode 4 beta preview 2

Posted on July 23, 2010 by Thomas Maurer

Apple today released Xcode 4 beta preview 2. I friend of my found very interesting default Credits if your creating a new project.

Thanks to @omnibyte

How to lock a Mac Screen

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Thomas Maurer

I work often with my notebook at school or by customers, so I need something to quickly lock my screen for security reasons. There is an easy way to lock the screen of Mac OS X and also save battery life.

First check the checkbox for “Require password after sleep or screen saver begins”

Now I create a new active Screen Corner with “Put Display to Sleep”

No I can just move my cursor in the bottom left corner and my screen gets black. After I move my mouse or press a key I need to login again. But all programs run in the background.

VMware Fusion: wouldn’t it be great…

Posted on April 30, 2009 by Thomas Maurer

As a Windows System Administrator who works on Macs, Virtualization is a really esencial thing. I love to work with VMware Fusion and his Unity Mode, and I of course some other great features Fusion provides. So I had some thoughts about the next version of VMware Fusion.

Wouldn’t it be great if…

there would be an iPhone App to start and shut down VM’s and maybe some other small things like watching the performance… (really interessting feature if you use VMware Fusion for Server Virtualization)

Something like an Advanced View for some administrator features…

One of the Advanced things could be a monitoring for the performace of the virtual maschines

SNMP and SMTP features for monitoring maybe also something for the iPhone App and the Push notificationservice of Apple.

better performace, especially if you run more than one VM at the same time and of course the overall performace of Fusion.

visual effects, I really loved the turn around effect in Fusion 1 or was it paralles 3?

V2P and P2V, creat a Bootcamp Partition out of a VM and back with some simple clicks

Support for Microsoft VHD Files, maybe not best performance but working…

Templates, creat templates for diffrend Operating Systems, so you can setup a new VM really fast

Screen-Capture Tool for creating documentations

OpenGL Support

A powersafe mode for VM’s on a notebook

Mounting virtual disks in OS X

cloning VM’s (not just copy past)

up to 8 processors per VM (Mac Pro’s and Xserve)

creating virtual networks, closed from the real networks, for test environments

Change Settings on a running virtual machine, and take these settings after reboot

OpenCL, CUDA, ATI Stream Support (Snow Leopard)

OpenCL, CUDA, ATI Stream could be great for Import VM’s

Don’t get me wrong, I really love the easy and simple view of VMware Fusion, but I would love to see more advanced features.