I recently downloaded and installed Safari 4 on my MacBook Pro and my initial reaction to the software is awesome! Today, I enabled the Develop part of the program and started playing with it while working on a web project. After troubleshooting a few css issues on a website using the development tools on Safari, I must say I am very impressed!
I especially like the resources view that allows me to look at what elements of my sites are taking the longest to load. Prior to using Safari 4, I was a frequent user of the Firebug toolbar for Firefox. Safari 4, in my opinion is much better for usability and is more aesthetically pleasing.
This impression may change in the future, but so far I am very pleased with the flexibility, the ease of use, and the design of the Develop functions of Safari 4!
Applications, General, Technology, Websites
Firebug, Safari 4
I recently worked on a computer that the user had lost the Show Desktop icon from the quick launch menu in Windows Vista. After trying to fix it in the OS I turned to Google and found a great article about how to fix the problem from Microsoft. It involves opening notepad and pasting some code and saving the file as desktop.scf
The code to be pasted:
[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop
You can find the article at: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=190355
General, Problems, Technology
Desktop Icon, Issues, QuickLaunch, Vista, Windows, XP
While listening to this week’s TWIT (This Week in Tech) Chris Pirillo mentioned that he used Plaxo to sync his Outlook hosted exchange with iCal, Address book and Gmail. I had been looking for an all in one application like this for quite some time but I had only found pay services that didn’t have as much capability.
After about an hour of testing and setup,I have determined that Plaxo is perfect! It provides a ton of features for synchronization and it has a free version that takes care of all my needs! I installed it on my MacBook Pro and on my tablet and everything is now syncing perfectly! Before plaxo, I had to always go to Outlook to look up a contact or an event which took forever!!! Now all I have to do is either go to GMail, iCal or Address Book to look up up information. It is a much needed product that I am so happy to have found! Check it out at http://www.plaxo.com
Thank you Chris for mentioning this killer application!
Things that are now in sync:
Outlook Contacts & Calendar
Motorola Q Smartphone connected via hosted exchange
GMail Contacts
GMail Calendar
iCal
Address Book
And I’m sure the list will grow in the future
General
When Google enabled IMAP on all accounts I was finally given enough reason to move my primary email over to Google’s App’s service. I had always wanted to switch to Google App’s for my email except the problem was that I couldn’t sync my email with IMAP and I need this important feature to make everything work. My setup includes using Mail
on OSX and using the built in mail application on Windows Mobile so POP would not have cut it in my situation. So, as soon as I got word that IMAP was being enabled for Gmail I immediately created a Google App’s account for Beardmoreweb.com. Migration was very easy, all I did was saved my messages from my old server running IMAP to my local computer and then reset my mail clients to the new Google App’s settings. (This documentation can be found on the GMail help site) After making the changes to my mail client, I simply had to login to my Google App’s Gmail account and turn on IMAP. Once this was enabled, everything worked great!
My email sync’s with the server faster than ever before and Gmail’s web interface is light years ahead of Squirrelmail which used to take at least two minutes to load all my emails.
Probably the best feature is that I get almost 5 gig’s of storage per account! This is a huge increase from what I was dealing with on my old email server.
The hardest part of this was training my family how to use the Gmail web interface. It took them a little bit of time to understand the conversation oriented layout because they had been used to Squirrelmail, they are still adjusting.
From a management standpoint, Google’s interface is great giving easy access to creation/modification of users and services. I have no complaints at all, my only wish is that I could have done this long ago! 
All in all, the transition took about 3 hours to change my mx records, to dump my email from my old mail server to the new Gmail account, to setup my two mail clients and lastly, to train the rest of my family to use it. It was a very worthwhile move for me and I highly recommend Google App’s to anyone needing a great IMAP email server with a huge amount of storage all for the price of free!
To switch to Google App’s go to www.google.com/a
General
Since I am a student at the University of Minnesota I am constantly using my laptop on campus. The SSID for the University of Minnesota is" U of M Wireless" and I have it set in my wireless settings to automatically join this network. Just the other evening, when I was in my apartment and I turned my MacBook Pro on, I saw that it was trying to connect to an adhoc network also named U of M wireless. This scares me because someone could think that they are on a legit U of M wireless network but really be connecting to a rogue device. One would think that Leopard would be able to differentiate between connecting to a regular AP and an adhoc device. I am pretty sure that I saw that Tiger could do this differentiation and I am wondering why Leopard isn’t doing this.
If anyone else has had this same issue, leave a comment.
General