The switch to Mac sent me scattering to find replacements to all my favorite utilities. One of most often used is a screen capture too (on a PC my goto is Faststone Capture). On the Mac I tried several, the built in tools, Skitch, Voila, and others. Some were better than others but none of them fit the bill until I found Little Snapper (I like to say it with a John Wayne accent, you might consider doing the same).

Little Snapper is awesome. It’s easy to use, beautiful (as a man am I allowed to say that?), and powerful. It’s editing tools are really nice. It lacks the page tear jaggies, but that’s probably a good thing (I’m so 3000 and 8 page jaggies are so 2000 and late.) Here’s a capture with some sample effects.

Notice the shading, blur, text and arrow. One thing I like about the arrows are the subtle curves… nice touch…

Little Snapper also provides a ton of upload capabilities… FTP, SFTP, Flikr, and Ember (oh… you gotta check out Ember… cool…)

See it in action with this getting started video. I haven’t purchased it yet ($35) so if you know of something better let me know… fast!

Wow, my 1st application is finally available in the iTunes Store.  It’s a simple little app really… My goal with it was to get my feet wet with Objective-C and iPhone development. 

The application is a sound board especially designed for the corporate environment (please no comparisons to the iFart app…)  I’ve also always wanted to develop this app.  You now know what goes through my mind during meetings and conference calls… seriously… just ask those I work with…

The app is called Office Antics (look for sister apps ‘Classroom Antics’, ‘Car Antics’, ‘Kids Antics’ and many more soon.) Below is a screenshot.

Each image and accompanying sound has been carefully chosen for the office environment. Here’s a short description on how each sound can be used:

• Loser: Did the boss man just deliver some bad news… pick up morale by reflecting the mood with this sad trombone effect.
• Crickets: You know that awkward silence that comes up in every meeting or teleconference… now you have something to fill it with.
• Cat Fight: One of your teammates getting a little aggressive? Let them know it…
• Joke: We know… your supervisor’s jokes aren’t funny. Add a little rim shot after the next one to show your sarcasm… err… support.
• Whip: Doing more with less… who isn’t? Let management know when employment has turned to slavery.
• Applause: Did you co-worker just nail their presentation? Show your support. Works real well on a conference call.
• Monkey: Is the corner office paying peanuts… well tell them what that buys….
• Taps: Is your office mate’s project going down in flames… honor its death with a military salute.
• Charge: Did your manager just inspire you to take the hill? Yeah probably not… well this sound effect will just have to be used for the chair races down the hallway.
• Scream: 4PM and all is quite in the cube farm… let the other animals hear the screaming that’s going on in your head.
• Snoring: Is your director droning on and on about the latest policy… let him know he’s lost your attention.
• Donkey: We’ll just let you use your imagination for this one…
• Laughter: Another great effect for your boss’ jokes
• Drum Roll: Manager got big news? Help her build the anticipation…
• Cow: Stuck in the elevator with 10 other folks? Let the herd know there might be a few too many hooves on board.
• Chicken: Did Bill just back down from taking a stand? Let him know you support his decision!

All this for the amazingly low cost of 99 cents!  SO… how can you help?  I’m glad you asked!  Help a brother out by downloading it and if you feel so lead giving it a great rating.  It’s the best use of a dollar you’ll find!  Don’t have an iPhone?  Rush out and get one… it’s the best use of $300.  Chances are you know someone how does own one… pass this post on to all of them.  I’ll be eternally indebted to you.

OK so here’s what you’ve been waiting for…. the direct link to the app!!!

Thanks in advance for your support!

Here’s a pretty cool looking subversion client for Macs.  I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks pretty cool!

Well I guess I’ll be getting that book on Objective-C : )  I haven’t watched the video of the keynote yet, but I watched the live updates on the MacRumorsLive web site.  Overall looks like some good stuff.  The iPhone prices ($199 for 8 gig and $299 for 16 gig) look good.  Not a lot of details on the data plan pricing, but the rumor looks to be + $10 for 3G.  I’ll have to think about it some more before clicking buy (I tend to over analyze purchases).  Looks like we all have until July 11th to decide.

The new applications for the iPhone 2.0 look really cool. 

Some of the news on next version of OS X called Snow Leopard look pretty cool.  Native support for Exchange 2007 in iCal and Mail sounds interesting.  I’m not sure what that means though and why it’s specific to Exchange 2007… interesting…

Overall lots of good stuff.  Still not sure what the bridge metaphor was… OS X and iPhone maybe??? 

The Advanced Technology & Architecture Department at Cornell recently posted up an interesting video on integrating Macs with Active Directory extensions.  This was something we discussed during our meeting with Apple. It’s cool to see a walk through. If you’re interested in this kind of integration it’s definitely worth you time to watch it.  You can skip in about 7 mins to the start of the integration presentation.

The server tools he mentions downloading are here.

The scripts for AD extension I think are here, but I’m not sure yet as I don’t have a Mac home this weekend.  If anyone has a link to them please share : )

Day 4… things are getting better, but I’m somewhat looking forward to getting my old laptop back.  Again, I’m loving the Mac OS and user experience, but am feeling a little limited by not having easy access to my SQL tools and Visual Studio.  I think it would be better if I had a more powerful MacBook Pro with more memory.  I’d then probably load my virtual machine at start-up so it would only be a mouse-click away.

Looking back I think I’d also install VMWare Fusion.  I’m thinking it would be nice to have a consistent VM that I could run on a workstation, server or Mac.

We had our call today with an engineer from Apple.  While it was only 45mins long we got a ton of information out of it.  I’ve learned so much about Macs in the last 2-3 weeks, but today’s call made me realize how much more we have yet to discover.  One are we need to do much more research on is remote management of Macs.  We can either extend Active Directory with new attributes for managing Macs or install a OS X server.  If anyone has ideas on the pros and cons let me know.  The Apple engineer was pretty honest that both would work well.  Another issue for us was the lack of support for DFS.  We heard that that would be available in 10.6, which will be fine for us.  Also coming soon is better support for password expiring when connected to Active Directory.

I’m thinking that even when I go back to my laptop I will keep the MacBook Pro on my desk and powered on.  I want to continue the momentum of learning as they certainly won’t be leaving our environment any time soon.  In fact it sounds like we’re going to be getting more and more of them as the Children’s Ministry is forming their multi-media strategy around ProPresenter.

On a side note using the Mac sure has mess up my Photoshop skills.  I can’t get any keyboard short-cut right after using a Mac for a few days.  Why couldn’t they (computer industry as a whole) standardized at least cut and paste….???

I’m barreling through much of the three books I purchased (see post below).  They have been a tremdious resource.  While I might not make it through all of them this week (a few night projects popped up with week).  I’ll definitely continue till I’m done.

Overall I’m feeling very comfortable on the Mac platform. To keep with my video analogies (I’ve received a lot of positive feedback no feedback on them) here’s how I felt today…

Today was a bit smoother. I started by replacing the Apple keyboard I was using with my old Dell. No style points for sure, but it was much easier to type with.

I spent quite a bit of time figuring out Entourage. I fixed my occasional security issue by using the normal authentication instead of the Kerberos. Also fixed an issue with sending attachments be defaulting the encoding to Windows (MIME / Base64) and got my signature configured. I was bummed to find out that Entourage does not allow you to using personal folders (pst files). I was hoping to attach my current files I use to sort my emails by project. This is a major disappointment. Overall Entourage has been a major disappointment. I think it will be fine for must of our staff, but anyone serious about email won’t like it. I’d also like to talk to the Microsoft designer who has an affinity for using purple in the interface…. odd…

OS X 10.5.3 came out today so I installed that. My laptop is still slow to login so I’ll have to take Austin’s advice and disable Bonjour. Hopefully it will fix some of the issues we have with attaching to network printers. I did have a scare after installing it. Once it rebooted it kept typing 0s all by itself. WHAT? Took me a few minutes but I found the problem… the old bluetooth keyboard was on the other side of my office had a box sitting on it… who would have thought….

I did have a change to play with SQL Grinder. Definitely not a keeper. It’s good for executing queries and viewing schema, but that’s about it. I found MacSQL3 which is better, but still leaves a lot to be desired when you’re used to SQL Server Manager.

As the week progresses I’m learning more and more. I think this was a valuable exercise. I love the core OS (speed / reliability) and the navigation of system. Very powerful and easy to use. I’m disappointed though in the number and quality of 3rd party applications (not really a surprise). It’s especially hard when you develop on the Microsoft platform (duh). A lot of people have been asking if I’m going to go longer than a week. I’m not sure the answer. It’s probably a no, but I will miss the navigation and overall quality of the OS. When I do go back I think it will be to XP. I don’t think I could take using Vista after OS X.

Guess today I feel a bit like this plane.

Starting to pull up… but barely (did you see how close that was… man…)

Thought I’d keep a running issue list of things I find… well… issue with, and more importantly the fix or work around to solve it.

Issue 1: Slow login when using mobile account away from the network

Sometimes (but not always) when I startup from home on the laptop it’s very slow to login. I assume this is because it’s trying to find out AD server? It doesn’t always happen though… sometimes it’s as fast as at work…??

If you know the resolution to any of the issue above help a brother out and post the fix, link or thought in the comments. Thanks in advance!
Issue 2: Entourage Issues

I occasionally get the error below when sending e-mails in Entourage.  When I resend them from the Drafts folder 9 times out of 10 it works.

Interesting tidbit…

Entourage uses the same WebDAV access to talk to the server that OWA uses.  Outlook uses the MAPI protocol.

Nice… glad to see they went all out when the developed Entourage…

So Mac week is off and running. First a trip to the bookstore to get some education. I left with the following books that I hope to get through this week.

“Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger” (Dave Taylor)

I’m hoping this book will help me apply my Unix knowledge to help automate administrating OS X.

“Apple Training Series: Mac OS X Support Essentials (2nd Edition) (Apple Training)” (Kevin M. White)

This book looks like a good resource for overall system support and touches on the benefits of having an Apple server in your environment.

While each of these books have some overlap, I’m amazed how little it is. Each looks at OS X from a unique perspective. Hopefully, I’ll be able to chew through most of these books this week (mostly at night as I don’t have time during the day).