Jeremy’s Little Corner Of The Web…

I was browsing MacSurfer and came across yet another switcher! He's having some problems with his shiny new G5, and I thought I'd answer a couple of questions/problems:

The post is located here.

"The middle mouse button doesn’t open links in new tabs in Firefox, it does in Safari though. Still deciding which to use as my default. It would be Firefox I reckon if the middle click worked."

I'm not sure why Firefox does that. There is an extension you can get that will allow you to set modifiers to open a new tab. I think it's either Tabbrowser preferences or Tabbrowser extensions. More Extensions for Firefox are also available here.

I would suggest that you try out Camino, which is based on the Mozilla codebase, but with a Cocoa interface. It's very, very fast, and make use of many features of MacOS X, such as the Keychain. My only gripe with it is no popup- or ad-blocking.

The beta of OmniWeb 5, which is based on the WebKit (same as Safari), is also a great browser. It features a different form of tabbed browsing, site preferences, popup- and ad-blocking, among many other features! You can get it from here.

When looking for new software, the best place to look is MacUpdate.

"Haven’t figured out a way to have something to click on on the desktop to connect to the Internet, but I haven’t yet sorted out the router, no bloody cables. So I have to go into the network options and connect from there. There must be an easier way! Oh, and I keep getting a reminder that I am on the Internet, would I like to stay connected …. yes I would and I don’t want to see this again!"

I've never felt the need to do that. How are you connecting to the Internet? I'm assuming dialup, since you're getting those reminders. The way to remedy that is to go into the Internet Connect application. There *should* be an option somewhere in there to disable the reminders or prompts. There's also an option to show the modem status in the menu bar. With that enabled, you can click on the 'phone' icon in the menu bar and get it to connect from there. I can probably post some screenshots later…

"Still need an avi->mpg converter and something to burn DVD/VCD with. Not sure if there is something built in. Also an image editor."

I've never needed to use an AVI->MPEG converter, but search on MacUpdate and you might find something.

For burning DVDs, DiscBlaze might be of use, as well as Roxio Toast Titanium.

For image editing, the best program I know of is Graphic Converter, but you may also want to try a Mac version (which still requires X11) of the GIMP.

"The keyboard is lovely. The mouse (my old mouse) isn’t as smooth as on windows."

I would open the Mouse & Keyboard Preference Pane in System Preferences (or something like that) and increase the speed of the mouse tracking. That will probably fix it.

"You can’t delete a file by pressing the delete button, or maybe you can, but I can’t."

No, you can't. The way to do it is to hold the Command (Apple) key and then hit delete.

"It doesn’t detect my camera when I plug it in. But I haven’t read anything about it at all."

What sort of camera is it? I would fire up iPhoto (or whatever other photo app you are using) and see if it's registered there.

"Now, where is the command line…..?"

/Applications/Utilities/Terminal

If you're interested in the command-line, can I also suggest you check out Fink? It's a distribution of many, many Linux/UNIX apps for MacOS X, with integrated dependency checking, resolution, and so on… I maintain some packages for the distribution, but I haven't been active (at all) recently.

One other app I can recommend (that I can't live without now) is LaunchBar. Install it, try it, and you'll be amazed! I use this over the Finder in most cases, because it's so quick…

If you want a program to control iTunes, I'd like to plug my friend's app, M-Beat.

Hope this helps!