Mac Fangirl

With a few easy tweaks you can have your shell looking exactly like you want it and even have a number of shells with different colored windows and text in different tabs. In one tab, you can have your basic black text on a white background. In another tab, pink text on a blue background, and so on, as you customize them to whatever suits you.

First, a shell is your entry point into the UNIX system underlying your Mac OS. There is no GUI. It’s simply a text-based command line. The terminal.app is simly a window that contains the command line interface, and it is this window which we seek to change to our liking.

Alas, behold the awesome power of the blinking cursor. It awaits your command. But today, we’re not interested in explicitly typed commands. We’re instead going to use the terminal.app settings to change some colors. That’s it.

By the way, if you muck up anything, fear not. You can easily restore your changes to default settings.

Terminal.app is found in Applications - - > Utilities - - > Terminal.

Once you select Preferences from the drop-down menu, you get a box that contains some default color combinations for background and text.

Click on Terminal and then select Preferences.

Here is where you want to decide what color combinations you want. For one project you may want to have black text on a white background, and for a different project you may want yellow text on a green background.

Begin by clicking the + (plus sign) at the lower left to add a new default window and then type in the name you want to give your new terminal window. You can add as many new windows as you like and customize each window according to your preferences or work space needs.

Then highlight the Text setting on top of the right panel to choose your text color under the text section. Then with the Window setting highlighted you can choose your Background color. Now, look at your terminal window to view the changes and then tweak the color as needed. Do the same for any new terminals you added.

You can make any of your newly added terminal windows the default by selecting your preferred custom window or any of the windows provided and clicking the default button underneath. Now, when you do a Command-T to open a new tab, the new tab contains your new default color settings.

You can restore to default settings.

Now that you’ve got your Terminal Window color scheme(s) in place, you’re ready to tackle the UNIX command line. In a later posting we’ll examine the sudo command and the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). You will need to have administrator privileges to use the sudo command.

Just don’t let all this power go to your head.

iPhone owners and those who want an iPhone are stuck with one carrier: AT&T.

Turns out there are myriad reasons why AT&T has drawn the ire of consumers, not just recently, but for decades. Let’s start with AT&T’s negative impact on the newest iPhone model.

Read Four Reasons Why iPhone Owners Hate AT&T.

Because AT&T has not yet made improvements to its network, it will become a weakness for the new iPhone 3G S. In other words, the feature-rich iPhone whose monicker includes “S” for Speed, will not be able to utilize the faster HSDPA network that can obtain speeds as fast as 7.2 Mbps because AT&T is behind the infrastructure curve on this one. AT&T is not due to begin working on this network technology until later this year and may take as long as 2011 to complete it.

Here you have a device that’s capable of operating on a network at the 7.2 Mbps speed, but the carrier just isn’t up to speed.

And because AT&T is “finalizing internal system upgrades” the long-awaited features, MMS and tethering (using your iPhone as a modem) won’t be available until perhaps later this year. At&T is reportedly reconfiguring its data plan to include the tethering capability, for anywhere between $60 and $70 per month. And this doesn’t include Text Messages. Charming, isn’t it.

Now, let’s turn to the App Store. AT&T has it’s tentacles in some of the apps’ features also. Skype and SlingPlayer for iPhone are limited to working over Wi-Fi because AT&T’s 3G network can’t handle the strain.

This post would be remiss if it didn’t include some mention of, or at least a link to, some of AT&T’s most egregious acts in the recent past, such as warrantless spying on ordinary Americans.

Here’s what Free Press is trying to do about it.

Tell Washington, Free My Phone!

New “smart” phones have set the stage for the future of a mobile Internet. But companies like AT&T and Verizon are getting in the way by shackling open and innovative devices to closed networks. The FCC and Congress must step in to protect consumers and foster innovation. We demand:

The freedom to choose any phone on any network.

The freedom to choose among many carriers in a competitive, low-cost marketplace.

The freedom to access any Web content, applications or services we want through our phones.

If the message “no devices registered” appears on your MobileMe map when you attempt to “Find my iPhone”, even after you’ve enabled Push in your email settings for your MobileMe email account, then make sure you have a backup on your computer hard drive of your Mail, Contacts, Calendars and then delete your mail account on your iPhone and then re-add it. Have your user name and password handy for this.

Do a MobileMe sync from your computer and that should restore your mail, contacts and calendar info.

That should solve the problem in the Find My iPhone also.

My current version of Mac OS X is 10.5.7. One of the nicest features I use on my Mac is the Dock. Back in the old days of Windows XP I created a folder on my desktop called Apps and then proceeded to turn it into a toolbar that I could place on the left side of my screen. Then I would fill it with shortcuts of all the programs and utilities that I used most frequently. It was useful enough, but it lacked any functionality that the Mac OS X dock has, like the little glowing dot underneath the app to let me know that it is open, or the bouncing icon to let me know it’s active. Plus, it just wasn’t nearly as pretty as the Mac dock.

My XP apps bar lacked the customizable features that the Dock has. No genie effect. No animation. No hidden option. I like, too, that the Dock automatically re-sizes when I either remove or add apps to it.

When Leopard first came on the scene, I’m not sure what all the commotion was about the Dock. Guess, some preferred the old 2-D version or disliked the transparency. To me that’s part of the beauty of the Mac OS X desktop. It looks like someone actually took the time to design the GUI to make an aesthetic statement so the end result would be a meeting of art and functionality. Recall that Windows has been the ultimate Mac copycat.

There are nearly 50 apps on my Dock right now, not including the Documents Folder and the Trash bin. I’ll take the Mac OS X Dock over Windows Task Bar ANY day.

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How will the improvements in Mac OS 10.6 affect your day to day computing. Two words: speed and performance.

The new OS will install 45% faster and use less hard drive space.

Grand Central Dispatch will more efficiently distribute tasks across multiple cores and processors to optimize power and performance. The multi-core processor support will improve multi-threading through GCD.

Safari, Mail, Finder, Quicktime, Spotlight, will load faster, and perform better due to being optimized for 64-bit chips.

The 64-bit kernel technology will support up to 16TB of RAM (theoretically, according to Apple’s website).

The general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU), once exclusive to games, video editing, and 3D rendering, will now be used in both non-graphical and graphical apps thanks to OpenCL. This essentially gets the most bang from computers with a combination of multi-core CPUs and GPUs.

Let’s look at what Apple said about this.

Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for use in high-performance computing applications like genomics, video encoding, signal processing, and simulations of physical and financial models.

Mac OS X is superior to any Windows OS because Mac is based on UNIX.

The foundation of Mac OS X is Darwin, the open-source UNIX technology that gives Mac OS X its power, stability, robustness, and elegance, and yes, even some measure of complexity to make it both challenging and rewarding.

No need to get stuck in “DLL Hell” or registry mishaps or hanging shutdowns that beset Windows OS’s. In UNIX you have an OS that has been continually improved upon for some 40 years and that has become a model for what every OS should aspire to be.

Check out Darwin at the Apple Developer Connection site

http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/Darwin/

Learning UNIX and all that you can do under the hood of the OS is worth the endeavor. Consider the speed and control that this OS gives you.

Now with the release of Snow Leopard in September you can look forward to such enhancements as 64-bit support, Grand Central Dispatch that allows developers and users alike to exploit the full potential of multicore systems. Make sure to watch the WWDC keynote address and prepare to be very very impressed.

The upcoming Snow Leopard coupled with the new iPhone 3G s makes The Jetsons look like The Flintstones.