The Unofficial Mac

The Best Ever App on the iPhone

Alpay — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:11:46 +0000

I once wrote a post on how the mail.app on my iPhone was crashing and how I have fixed it. Looking back now I just can’t understand how that post still gets the most traffic to this blog. Well while I was thinking about this post, it occured to me that no one ever mentions which one is the best app on the iPhone platform. We all agree that apps are the best thing happened to the iPhone and there are people coming up with a new class of phones called the app phones. iPhone is definitely the best of them all. So which app is the best app? I would very much appreciate your comments but if any of you is concerned with what I think I would choose the app that is not available in the app store. No you don’t need to jailbreak your phone, because most probably you are already using it. Yes I am talking about Mobile Safari, the best and probably the app most used on iPhone. It is what makes this phone so wonderfully different from all those phones before it. It renders pages beautifully and the smart zoom is probably the best feature on any mobile phone. If you are not with me on this just see how much are you using it, and compare with other browsers preceding Mobile Safari. If you have other candidates, please compare it with its alternatives in the comments. Mobile Safari is what makes the iPhone a revolutionary internet device as Steve Jobs himself said.

What is my Google OpenID URL?

Alpay — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:20:54 +0000

If you are looking on a page that is OpenID enabled and would like to login using your Google OpenID (yes, your Google ID’s are OpenID’s now) you should enter the following URL without changing anything:

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

If you are already logged into to Google Services like Gmail then you should be able to login to any OpenID enabled site in theory.

Good luck,

Windows Live Messenger 2010 pictures

Alpay — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:37:32 +0000

Today I have seen screenshots from the new version of Windows Live Messenger, 2010 through a tweet by Paul Thurott. I have to say I haven’t been using any official Windows Live Messenger clients for a while but this thing gets larger and uglier with every new version. I am not sure I will be willing to sacrifice my entire screen to an IM. On MacOSX I am using Adium which is a perfect, unobtrusive piece of software that lets me reduce the size of my contact list to the minimum, only showing the names and status icons of my friends. My chat window is tabbed so even if I chat with 10 friends it just takes one small part of my screen.

I just can’t understand what is going on in Windows. Actually I have been trying to write something on them and this post will definitely not be it. But Microsoft, that huge company is creating products as if this is still 1998 and people are willing to take whatever they present.

With everyone using Facebook which offers integrated IM, twitter, Gmail and multiple protocol clients like Adium, Digsby and Trillian, I don’t know besides those mindless millions (and yes there are millions of them) who is using this kind of software.

Google Chrome for Mac Beta

Alpay — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:40:11 +0000

Yesterday I have received an e-mail from Google about the beta release of Google Chrome for Mac. The absence of Google Chrome on Mac OS X has been bugging me since the release of it on the Windows platform. Being a browser whore I switch my default browser from Safari to Firefox to Opera and back quite frequently. I have even tried Camino and Omniweb shortly. For Chrome I once downloaded a nightly developer build but wasn’t very much happy with it.
Now that it is officially released to the public I just opened up my Mac and downloaded the beta. It just installed quickly, imported my Safari bookmarks and was ready to go. Since then I have been using it for all my browsing, which is mostly products from the big G including Gmail, Google Tasks, Google Reader, Last.fm and my custom wordpress installations. Chrome on Mac seems much faster than any other browser I have ever used and feels mature. However we don’t have the newly release extensions, I don’t have Gears (because I am Snow Leopard) and can’t use offline Gmail, and Google Calendar and Wordpress Turbo. It is also interesting to see that there is no Bookmark Manager thus I can neither delete nor rename a folder I created in my “Other Bookmarks” folder.
With all these missing parts, I am sure Google Chrome will catch its Windows sibling quite quickly and we will enjoy the speed of Webkit and the available extensions to mimic what we do on Firefox quite soon.
I am really happy to be able to use Google Chrome in a non-virtualized environment that belongs to me and expecting further updates as soon as possible.

The Gears, HTML5 dilemma

Alpay — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:50:08 +0000

As you may already now, Google has decided to pull the plug off Gears. Gears powers offline Gmail, offline Google Calendar and much less used Wordpress Turbo. The rationale behind this decision is the fact that Google is pushing out HTML5 and this standard offers pretty much everything and then some more of what Gears does. Google says that Gears has been an interim solution for the problem of offline web-apps and now that many others including mainstream browsers are supporting it there won’t be any necessity for Gears. OK, if that is the case I am happy, but what about now? Gears does not work on Snow Leopard, and Gmail, Google Calendar and Wordpress Turbo does not seem to support HTML5. Or is it that the browsers I am using Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome for Mac Beta do not support HTML5. I am still waiting here Google…

Ommwriter – distraction free writing

Alpay — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:08:54 +0000

OK, so here I am. Just downloaded the ommwriter I have read about on the internets. It is a new take on the distraction free writing arena where full-screen bare-bone editors are what sells (or are free most of the time). I have been checking these stuff since I am basically a person of distractions. My mind just can’t stay on one subject and just jumps around pulling my eyes, my hands and my body around.
This, by the way, is much better than writeroom, where you are writing in a dark background. Ommwriter provides an ambient background music, a nice snowy background and tingling sounds for keypresses. I really liked it good work…

A new blog post

Alpay — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:18 +0000

What else can you do when you have setup your blog again, configured analytics and keep checking how many people arriving to your blog every day? Well, you got to create some time and write a new blog post. Becoming a full-time Ph.D student after recognizing in horror that I am wasting my time to an undeniable and scary deadline, I always thought that I would be able to spare time for everything I liked to do. This includes some web projects I have dreamed becoming very rich from, my personal blogs, and even games. After over 60 days of scrambling around I have found that the more time one has, the less you can do with it because now that it is free I don’t seem to value give a damn about what I have been doing. Removing all those distractions and low-priority items, now I have a single game on my PSP, only my blogs to update and my thesis work. Well-done and keep it up baby!

External Access to phpmyadmin on WAMP

Alpay — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:13:26 +0000

I am banging my head to whatever I can find as I try to create a demo for my Ph.D thesis including Eclipse, web-services, tomcat, mysql, apache and etc. Today I found out here that to give external access to the default phpmyadmin installation in WAMP one has to click on WAMP system tray icon>Apache>Alias Directories>http://localhost/phpmyadmin>Edit Alias and change the line reading “Allow from localhost” to “Allow from all”.

May help someone someday.

Mouse problems with VmWare Fusion

Alpay — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:13:02 +0000

If you are, like me, having problems with your mouse clicks on your
Windows virtual machines running under VmWare Fusion and luckily
haven’t installed Vmware Fusion 2.0.6 update or the new 3.0 then go
ahead and update because those versions promise to fix your problems.
Wow, that was a long sentence…

Posted via email from alpayerturkmen’s posterous

Mossberg on Windows 7

Alpay — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:47:17 +0000

Today I have read a piece by Walt Mossberg on Windows 7. In the article Mossberg argues that Windows 7 is not as bad as its successor Windows Vista, but almost as good as Mac OS X 10.6 aka Snow Leopard. I am not sure about this.

I have left the Windows world when everybody was using Windows XP and Vista was in the beginning of its measly life. I have been using solely Mac OS X since then, Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard. So, wrt my experience, I can compare recent 3 Mac OS X versions to XP and to some extent Vista (from my colleagues’, friends’ and family experience). Windows 7 has been living in a VM, mostly used to copy files between two NTFS partitions.

Mossberg argues that Windows 7 fixes problems with Vista and that is really good for Microsoft. Unfortunately, it is not enough for me. In my opinion the key features he lists for the new OS can be grouped like: those that every modern OS must have (fluid networking), those that fix problems with Vista (speed, compatibility, nagging), those that seem mostly useless because there is no great hardware to support it (touch) and those that are minor GUI improvements (desktop and file organization, the new taskbar). There is not one thing I see in that list that will make me say that: “ah, OK, that is a must have. let me try it”. Like integrated security measures, fancy network functionality (like automated file sharing, mesh-networking etc.), a complete and revolutionary GUI. Neither is the OS faster, more secure or has more eye-candy than what Apple offers at the moment. If you don’t need Windows, than I believe there is no reason to switch back.

So, I don’t agree with what Mossberg says. Better is not enough for Microsoft. They need to do the best.