Platform Peace

Another good VMware Fusion 2 vs Parallels Desktop 4 comparison. Via Web Worker Daily.

The “Edit in TextMate” feature (part of the TextMate TextMate bundle) lets you call upon TextMate to edit text fields in other applications. However, following the instructions in the TextMate bundle was not working. It turns out this is due to a change in how Leopard handles Input Managers. Here are the steps you need to take to enable the “Edit in TextMate” feature in Leopard.

As a longtime Outlook user, I miss the the three vertical pane approach to email: folder Navigation on the left, message list in the center, and the preview pane on the right. So, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there are at least a couple of options to make this possible in Leopard’s Mail.app.

jkOnTheRun posted about Letterbox which I ran for a while. The only thing that bothered me was that the default columns Mail.app shows in the message list required that, in order to see everything, the center pane be a little wider than I typically like. Then I noticed that a commenter on that post recommeded WideMail which has the added benefit of breaking down the message metadata into two lines in one single column of the message list (similar to Outlook). WideMail also seems to have a bit more flexibility in its configuration options.

For now, I am running WideMail and am really liking it. I haven’t had any issues so far. The only concern I have is that the developer’s blog has not been updated since March of 2008 so I wonder if development has stopped. Letterbox also seemed stable for the brief period in which I ran it so I think it is a good option as well.

Nice comparison of the newly released Parallels Desktop 4 and VMware Fusion 2. via theAppleBlog.

Evernote 1.1.6 for Mac is available via a software update and brings some much needed capabilities for note editing. The following formatting options are now (finally) available in the Evernote note editor:

• Unordered and Ordered lists
• Ability to add hyperlinks
• Tables
• Horizontal rules (hr)

The lack of the above was really frustrating in previous versions of Evernote. There are several other updates in this release. See the full release notes on MacUpdate here.

I was editing a bunch of files on my server via FTP and was a bit annoyed by multiple TextMate windows for every file that I needed to edit. After a quick search, I found this great post that describes how to configure a TextMate project for files opened via Transmit.

Use Tabs in Textmate for Files Opened Via Transmit by Stuart Colville

I haven’t actually tried Boot Camp for a few reasons:

1. I like the idea of running Windows and OSX side-by-side* AND
2. I don’t have enough hard drive space (I run all my VMs off an external drive) AND
3. I haven’t rebuilt my Mac in a long time to free up enough space

• Yes, I am aware VMWare Fusion has the ability to run a VM from the Boot Camp partition and if I ever get around to freeing lots of space from my MacBook or adding a larger capacity hard drive, I might try this option.

With that in mind, I wanted to capture this post of Boot Camp tips from TheAppleBlog for future reference.

Boot Camp: Taking the Sting Out of Your Sin

So, after about a year of using a Mac as my primary computer, I decided to share the list of applications I consider essential on OSX. This is not a comprehensive list of every application I have installed; it only includes the ones it would be really tough to deal without. What are your essential applications?

Essential Mac Applications

Nice example and video about using the VMware Fusion 2.0 Keyboard Mapping feature. VMWare Fusion 2.0 is a huge improvement over 1.0 - highly recommended.

I use the Homebrew theme in Leopard but found that the default blue color was very difficult to read against the dark background. I found this which lets you customize the Terminal colors on a per-profile basis. Very useful.