Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of moving your business to the Mac. We’ll examine different software and tools that can make it easier or harder, and gain insight and input from you, the reader.

One of the biggest differences between Macs and PCs, especially in relationship to business, is the operating system. PCs use the world-wide familiar Windows Operating system, while Macs use a new and innovative, Leopard OS X. Many other posts on this site talk extensively about Leopard OS X, but in relationship to you and your business, how different are the operating systems?  Apple has delivered more than a thousand new features in Leopard OS X over the last seven years and is working to improve performance and there is talk about launching an operating system known as OS X Snow Leopard.

There are important questions to ask when considering moving your business to a Mac. What do you use your computer for in your business? Internet surfing, email, purchasing, record keeping, account information, payroll ? Are the employees in your company computer literate enough to make the transition with you? How much training will it take? What software is available and how much will it cost? Would a move to a Mac pay off in the long run? We will explore these questions and others in the next few weeks.

Part of our research and discussion will involve you, the reader. Gaining insight and input from you will be pivotal to our exploration. Have you attempted to move your business over? What did you experience? What were some of the more difficult issues and how did Mac make the transition easier? Your input is needed and valued.

Check out a guided tour and learn more about the basic operating system of the Macs at Apple and in the upcoming days and weeks we will launch an investigating into the realistic idea of taking your business to the macs!

The Gray Blog – “Apple Goes After Clone Maker Psystar”

Personally, I like the idea of Mac clones.  Although I wasn’t a big fan of the clones in the late 80′s, now that we’re on Intel processors, the hardware options become a lot more interesting.  This could end up being a huge boost for the Apple OS and it’s market penetration if they open up licensing at some point.  I’m certainly not saying I don’t like Apple hardware, it rocks.  But I always cringe a bit at the cost of their more robust systems.  Course “cringe a bit” doesn’t prevent me from actually ponying up the bucks to buy a high end system.

For those of you who have been running into the annoying warning that the last beta release of Remote Desktop Connection for Mac has expired, Microsoft decided to bless us with an updated release yesterday.  You can download it here.  The new release promises to last until the first official release.  The site was down at times yesterday but seems to have been available throughout the day today.

RDC

Apple has made Screen Sharing suprisingly powerful in Leopard. As a previous user of Apple Remote Desktop, I have to wonder why I may need it anymore. The Leopard Screen Sharing includes most of the features I need, and as we have discovered can be extended to be a very close to full featured replacement for Apple Remote Desktop. These tips will give you bonjour browsing of network computers, and scaling, color, observe/control, curtain and snapshot options. This will not however replace or include functionality which is more valuable to enterprise users such as reports, remote installation, or dragging files to and from the remote computer and controlling computer.

Enable Bonjour in Screen Sharing

This tip is fairly straight forward and simple. This will require you to launch screen sharing seperately as stated above in order to use this functionality. Open a terminal instance, and simply type:
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug 1

Launch Screen Sharing and you should now see a drop down list of all Bonjour computers on your network.

Add Toolbar Options to Screen Sharing

To enable toolbar options including control/observe, scaling, curtain, and color options in Screen Sharing you will also need to run once command in terminal.

This the new toolbar you will see after running this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ‘NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar’ -dict-add ‘TB Item Identifiers’ ‘(Scale,Control,Share,Curtain,Capture,FullScreen,GetClipboard,SendClipboard,Quality)’

Enjoy!

A Japanese developer, Taiyo, has released two Quick Look plugins which add some very handy functionality to Quick Look, the ability to look at the contents within a folder and a zip file. Both plugins present the data in a very attractive list view. Why Apple did not include the ability which both of these plugins add is beyond me. Thank you Taiyo! Get the Quick Look Folder Plugin or the Quick Look Zip Plugin. To install these, unzip the files, and copy to your /Library/QuickLook/ folder. These should work as soon as the files are present in the Quick Look directory.

Changing The Dock

After a brief 10 minute process, my Dock now appears like this:

The process is straight forward and quick, to modify the look of your dock you will need to:

• Navigate to Macintosh HD -> /System/Library/Core Services/
• Right Click on Dock and Click Show Package Contents
• Navigate to Contents/Resources
• Backup the files scurve-s.png, scurve-m.png, scurve-l.png, scurve-xl.png and frontline.png
• Modify these files to your liking and replace them. For our team, we had to delete the files completely and then add them back into the directory. There seems to be some issues with authentication and copying files into this protected directory. We could not just do a copy/replace.
• Optionally, If you do not feel graphically inclined, Leoparddocks.com has many pre-made dock modifications available for download.
• Open Terminal and type “killall Dock” note: You must spell Dock with the capital “D” to correctly kill the process
• Your nice, new Dock should now be present

Changing the Dock Indicator

To change the Dock status indicator follow the steps listed above and swap out the files indicator_small.png, indicator_medium.png, indicator_large.png, indicator_small_simple.png, and indicator_medium_simple.png. Be sure to make a backup of these files as well!

We hope these hints serve you well, changing our Dock was a breeze. It will only be a matter of time before an application exists to automate this process. Have you modified your Dock? We would love to hear about your experience and any further tips. Leave a comment below!

(Via Engadget.)

(Via Jackilyn.com.)