Why Can't Growl Actually Work?

So there's this great application for the Mac called Growl.  In my opinion this is a must have for all mac users.  It adds great functionality to nearly all applications either through built-in support or through outside plugins and applications.  Growl itself mimics the built in feature of outlook to pop a notification (on the right I believe) when an email is received through Microsoft Exchange email.  The difference is that this service works for EVERYTHING you can think of.

Pretty much every application out there has a plugin of some sort to function with growl.  For fb it can tell you when someone writes on your wall or sends you a message or whatever, for gmail it tells you when you receive an email.  With iChat or Adium, when someone IM's you and when someone signs online.  There's a plugin for iTunes to display a popup with the song info when you're playing a new song.

Essentially Growl is really handy for notifications.  However, unfortunately, it isn't perfect.  Growl freezes constantly for me (sometimes every hour, and when this happens it hogs my computer's CPU).  This is a major problem.

While I do love Growl, I wish it worked better so that I could actually rely on it successfully.

Caffeine: Your Mac Needs Some Too

So pretty much all of us watch TV and movies on our computer or make presentations in front of large groups using a projector.  It's happened to all of us: your computer goes to sleep at precisely the wrong moment and screws everything up.

That's why you use caffeine.  It's a small application that essentially consists of a cup of coffee on the menu bar.  You click it, and your computer won't go to sleep.  Click it again and you turn it off.

The application even has a couple cool ways to customize how your computer goes to sleep so that it's perfect.

With caffeine, you'll never have your computer go to sleep at the wrong time.

What's Your Mac Missing?

So after a bunch of people have asked me what apps they should get for their (usually new) macs and such, I decided I should probably start actually recording this information rather than just tell everyone verbally.  That way I don't have to keep telling everyone the same information and I can avoid forgetting awesome apps.

Therefore I'm gonna be starting a new line of posts with the label "Mac Must Have" signifying it's an awesome app you should probably set up for your application.  I'll also comment Mac related informational posts with this tag when relevant (such as a post on how to get your google voice number ringing on your mac).

So here's the important aspect:
Click here to see all posts on this topic.

Coming up: Caffeine.

I Found a Bug in Snow Leopard: Mac Keyboard and a KVM

So I upgraded early last week to Snow Leopard at work to complete testing of VMware Fusion 2.0.5 on Snow Leopard at work. If you use both, it works great (see the blog post), and I have been using Snow Leopard since.

I noticed really quickly an interesting bug between Snow Leopard and my KVM at work. For those of you who don't already know, a KVM is a device that allows you to share a monitor and keyboard & mouse between multiple computers (the one I have serves up to four) so that you don't need to have 4 monitors and 4 keyboard and 4 mice on your desk. It's pretty cool and useful.

Anyways, in order to simplify things, you always connect your mouse and keyboard to this device. OSX does a great job of detecting the keyboard to figure out which key layout it is. In Leopard, this setup worked fine, and the keyboard was connected perfectly. When I connected it the same setup to Snow Leopard, my keyboard was detected as an older keyboard. This doesn't seem like it would be a huge problem, but before Apple created the new thin keyboard, the function keys were in different spots. The volume control and eject button were over the number pad; Dashboard and Expose were setup around the F8 key, though without any images. There were no play or pause buttons then either.

When I connect my keyboard directly to my Mac Pro, it is detected correctly. However, when I connect it to the KVM, it detects it incorrectly. Initially I thought the computer detected my keyboard as the old one since the dashboard and expose buttons were over the F8ish function keys, but I later realized that the volume control was not over the number pad as it had been in the past. In fact, I have been completely unable to find the volume control anywhere on the keyboard.

I'm assuming this is a bug in Snow Leopard with the connection to the KVM since this did not happen at all on Leopard. Obviously I am not sure exactly what is causing the problem, but it's really annoying and I'm hoping it is fixed sooner rather than later.