Adium has been my main Instant Messaging client ever since I switched to a Mac. I used to be a fan of Yahoo Messenger because of its simple interface and features. All that changed when they kept adding unnecessary features to once a clean app making it one of the more bloated IM app around. Adium is an open-sourced multi protocol Instant Messaging client. Out of the box, it supports Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN, Jabber-protocol, ICQ and many others via plugins. One of the best things about Adium is that the interface is clean with all your chats  appearing in a single tabbed window. You can choose to reorder the tabs or drag them out to a separate window. Unread messages will be indicated by a different colored icon on the tab, making it easy to identify the chats and reducing window clutter on your desktop.

As I’ve mentioned, Adium supports multiple protocols and allows seamless messaging to users on different networks effortlessly. However, there are limitations for some of these protocols. For example, Adium does not support Yahoo’s Imvironment feature, so you don’t get to doodle with your buddy and custom emoticon on the MSN network is not supported yet. Adium is highly extensible with its growing database of plugins for different protocols and also features a large collection of dock icons, status icons and contact list style for you to customize the look and feel of it.

Another great feature that Adium has is the customizable Event Notification. You can configure Adium to respond to certain event notification by triggering specific actions. For example, I could set a user’s online status to prompt a sticky notification and play a specific sound to notify myself or set an automated reply when I am away. If you’re using Windows, a great alternative to Adium would be Pidgin, try it today.

Adium
Adium Xtras
Pidgin

I’ve never been a big fan of backups until I found Time Machine. You could probably tell by my previous write up on Time Machine here. Backups should never be a tedious chore requiring lots of patience and time and yet they are your last resort when your machine starts to act up on you. My current routine involves plugging in my Time Machine drive every 1-2 days at work or at home as well as having Mozy backup running in the background.

Mozy is an online backup/storage service which currently offers 2Gb of backup storage for free when you sign up. The thing I like best about Mozy is that it quietly runs in the background and performs the backups seamlessly. To start using Mozy, you just need to configure your initial backup sets. I choose to backup only critical files like my contacts, emails and other files that I work on a daily basis. Mozy comes with a default set of backup sets for stuff like emails and contacts or you could fine tune your backup by selecting specific files and folders for backup. Backup frequency can be configured to be fixed on schedule or whenever your machine is left idling. Mozy allows you to restore your backups using its own interface, via web or have a DVD of the backup burnt and sent to you at an additional charge.

Clients for both Windows XP and MacOS X are available for download once you have signed up for their service. You can install Mozy on more than one machine, Windows or Mac, but they will all share the maximum 2Gb for your account unless you are registering several accounts with them. Mozy’s worth a try, doesn’t hurt to have a backup backup
Check out more details their site below.

Mozy

One of the first thing that I installed on my Mac was Quicksilver from Blacktree. I’ve heard so much about QuickSilver that I’ve actually downloaded it to my PC before my Mac even arrived. Once loaded, I can see what the fuss is all about. QuickSilver is essentially a launcher application. Its core strength is its ability to memorize and adapt to your frequently used applications and documents and lets you effortlessly launch by simply invoking it and typing a few keywords.

Once activated, QS presents you with a simple dialog. As you type a few letters of the application or document that you wish to run, it will automatically seek the closest match to what you are looking for and displays an icon of it. By default, the action that is associated with it is to Execute the application or Opening the document, but once you hit Tab, you can begin typing Action that you wish to perform. QS manages this by indexing all your applications and documents for faster response.

In the example above, I entered “Hatsu” and it automatically highlighted the file Hatsune Miku.jpg for me. As I hit the Tab button and begin typing the letters “Co”, QS defaults the action to Copy To. Finally, I complete it by typing “Pic” and it displays my Pictures folder. Once I hit Enter, it will copy the image to the Pictures folder. QS is highly extensible and there are many more advanced plugins that you can download to add more actions and features to it. QuickSilver is without a doubt very intuitive once you have mastered the basic idea. It combines the flexibility of Command Line Interfaces coupled with the usability of GUIs in a very unique package.

For more details and download, visit their site at Blacktree.com QuickSilver

I just got myself a new mouse to replace my crappy no-brand optical mouse which I have been using with my Mac. I was having a hard time choosing one till I finally settled with the Logitech MX518. I’m currently using a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 on my desktop and it doesn’t come any close to the MX518. With an adjustable resolution of up to 1800dpi and 8 configurable buttons including 2 DPI switching buttons, the MX518 is truly an impressive mouse. Given the feature set and the price, the MX518 seems like a reasonable purchase considering there’s a lot of good reviews on this model even though its been around for a while (still one of the top rated ones compared to the laser alternatives).

Sadly, there is no love for the MX518 on my Mac. The package came with drivers for Windows Vista and XP only and even Logitech’s official site does not offer proper drivers for it, so I was only able to use the standard 3 buttons and scroll wheel on my Mac out of the box. So folks, be sure to look for that smiley Mac face before buying a peripheral for your Mac next time.

Fortunately though, there are third party drivers that allows you to detect and configure these buttons. One of these is a shareware called USB Overdrive which lets you assign functions to the additional buttons. However, I couldn’t assign anything to the DPI  switching buttons on the mouse itself so I’m only able to use 6 of its buttons, but the 2 DPI switching buttons are still pretty handy for me since I could switch the responsiveness when I’m doing graphics or when I’m gaming. To get the full experience, the drivers that works in Windows lets you customize the mouse even further, but I’ve yet to try that out. Overall I still find the MX518 to be a great mouse since it fits my hand really well and it is very responsive when you set the DPI to its highest settings.

Logitech – MX518 Gaming-Grade Optical Mouse
USB Overdrive

Its Firefox 3 Download Day today ! Well technically its 1am our 18th June apparently. Do your part and help support the world’s safest, fastest and bestest (I swear this should be a word) web browser on the planet ! The Firefox team is attempting to set the world record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours starting today 17 June 2008. So head out to www.spreadfirefox.com now and spread the word around. Be sure to grab the best version of Firefox yet once its out tomorrow !

The MacOS X is based on the Unix file system which is hierarchical in nature with system folders that are not meant to be fiddled with. So instead of presenting you with the entire file structure, the Finder simply starts with your local home folder that contains all your personal storage like Documents, Downloads and Pictures. Just as in any Unix environment, the moment you log into a terminal, you are always presented with your home folder. All your personal files are stored in the home folder and you seldom need to navigate to other parts of the file system. I kinda like this approach as it helps reduce the clutter and I can concentrate more at the task at hand.

The Finder 

The Finder allows you to create shortcuts to your commonly accessed folder in the toolbar which is the left panel you see above by dragging and dropping folders. Since it allows you to easily define your own personal “Places” you do not actually need to have a complete hierarchical file structure. The Finder has 4 modes of the display, the top most screenshot you see is the default icon view, followed by the list view above, the column view below and lastly the cover flow view.

The column view is handy for navigating deep into folders. As you explore the folders from the left, the folder pane expands to the right until you finally click on a file which shows up as a preview dialog on the last pane. For media files, you can just click to view or listen to it. It even displays embedded album covers if it has one.

The Coverflow view which was was first introduced in iTunes is pretty nifty as well. iTunes originally used this view to let the users browse through their album cover collection. In the Finder however, the Coverflow view displays a preview of the file instead. For images and most text documents, it will display the actual preview but for audio and video file, you would still need to click on the QuickLook button to preview it. It would be cool if the preview could be done directly from the CoverFlow pane itself.

Smart Folders 

One of the more interesting feature introduced in Leopard are the Smart Folders. Smart Folders are basically folders that has predefined search fields that searches for files that meets your criteria. To create one, you simply start with a blank Smart Folder template. As you enter the keywords for your searches, Finder immediately populates the window with any files that matches your keyword, you can also limit the scope of searches to only your home folder, or the entire Mac or within other Smart Folders. The search can also look into the contents of the files or just by the filename.

Once you have entered the keyword, you may tweak the fields by selecting the files to be matched to be limited to images, documents or other formats. You can add and remove additional criteria at this point until you feel the search results meets your requirement.

Once you are satisfied, you may save the Smart Folder and it will be added to your Saved Searches and added to the toolbar. Looking at the detail of the newly created Smart Folder, you will notice that the folder is actually a form of a search query. There is no limit to how you can use the Smart Folder. This is quite possibly one of the most useful feature that I’ve used on Leopard so far.

And there you have it, a quick walkthrough of Finder’s basic interface and features. Stay tune as I uncover more gems built into Leopard.

I wasn’t expecting to write my next post on Time Machine this early but a little *mishap* over the weekend prompted me to start writing about it. Time Machine is one of the new features in Leopard that allows you to backup your Mac simply by plugging in an external harddrive and letting it run in the background.

You see, I bring my Mac to work and occasionally I copy some of my work-in-progress back home to review. What I would usually do is mount my network drive onto the Mac and copy entire folders to the harddrive. It didn’t occur to me however is that when you copy entire folders in Leopard, files that are already in the existing folder gets removed. So yeap, you guessed it, I had overwritten an entire folder which had some important files that I was working on.

Immediately I thought to myself, “Can we really turn back time with Time Machine ?” Luckily though I have been running Time Machine backups since the second day I received the Mac. I originally intended to keep a longer log of backups to write a post on the Time Machine feature.

I hooked up my backups to the Mac and entered the Time Machine.

As you enter Time Machine, the first thing that catches your attention is the smooth transition into the Time Machine mode which replaces your desktop with a time line view of your currently opened application, in this case Finder (Mac’s equivalent to Windows Explorer) against the backdrop of floating space. Yeap, the outer space with spiraling galaxies in the distant (corny yes? I know).

I knew I lost the file somewhere in my Documents folder, but I can’t quite recall the exact filename. So I typed in part of the filename in the search bar (file names have been changed to protect the innocent ). Hmm.. no results now for obvious reasons. What do you do next ? You go back in time.

Along the right side of the screen are two directional arrows that allows you to move between the time of your backups. I clicked on the Back arrow and what Time Machine would do is trace back the history when a file with a similar name existed.

Voila… sure enough it found the file. So I highlighted the file, and clicked on the Restore button and Time Machine brings it back to the present time. And that is all to it. Easy and fuss free. For years I have tried various backup solutions for Windows but none could match Time Machine’s simplicity and ease of use especially during the backup process. In the end I never actually kept a good backup copy of my PC’s content and over the years I did have my share of unrecoverable mishaps like above. With backups this easy to use, who wouldn’t be compelled to start backing up their Macs on a regular basis.

More information about how Time Machine works:

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review 

X.5 Time Machine