Video Conferencing with Messenger

Video conferencing with Windows Live Messenger was always a great way to keep in touch with family spread far and wide. It was a bit of a pain hooking up the webcam though, so it didn't really happen as often as it should.

So my new Macbook has a built-in webcam. Handy! Time to get back to using video.

Except everyone I know uses Windows Live Messenger.

I had Adium installed - a great little IM (Instant Messaging) program that you can use to type notes to people with Live Messenger (among others). But no video.

So I tried Yahoo Messenger. Yep, it has video. Yep, you can message people using Live Messenger. But you can't video conference with people using Live messenger. Sigh.

Microsoft even make a version of Messenger for the Mac. But would you guess? No video!

It was actually while writing this post that i found aMSN - a Live messenger clone that actually supports video! So instead of signing off this post with despair, I have a glimmer of hope. About to download it and try it out now...

New MacBook

Well, the bug bit.

Having to share the iMac became too much. My new MacBook arrived today!

It's a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM, with OSX Leopard (10.5).

And of course, it has the cool little Apple logo that lights up on the lid when it's on, too!

One of the things I miss the most is the old right-click - but I'm pleased to say that's been taken care of on this new machine.

Go to System Preferences and choose Keyboard & Mouse. You'll see this:

The bit that says "Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click" basically lets you tap the trackpad with 2 fingers for a right-click. Easy!

And the 2 finger scrolling is pretty cool too. That saves trying to line the mouse up on the scrollbars.

Now, back to playing,,,!

Printing from Open Office

Had some trouble printing from Open Office Writer (an open-source word processor). Didn't seem to matter what setting I changed, it didn't fit on the page properly.

I even contacted Canon who emailed me some steps to follow. It was around then that I figured out it was printing fine from other applications, just not from Open Office!

Fortunately, Open Office lets you "Save as a PDF" - so that's my temporary solution... Save the document as a PDF, and then print that.

Hopefully the next update will fix that little bug.

The end of the line

I was playing around in Aptana (a code editor) and was desperately trying to get the cursor to the end of the line. In Windows, pressing then End key does that (and Ctrl + End takes you to the end of the document).

Not in OSX though. 

I tried Command + End, Control + End, Option, Shift, and just about everything else I could think of. 

The trick?

Command + Right Arrow!

And obviously (once you know that) Command +  Left Arrow takes you to the start of the line.

I found a screensaver!

Just a quick follow up post to yesterday's gripe about not being able to find any software for OSX Jaguar (10.2) - I found a screensaver!

It simply displays this big retro-style digital clock on the screen.

Yeah, I know, it's not much. But at least it works on Jaguar!

I'll post if I find anything more interesting...

Software for older versions of OSX

I have a couple of Macs in my life these days: A shiny new 24" iMac, and an old G3 iMac like the photo here.

The new one is running OS 10.4 - so no dramas there. But this old one is on 10.2. Not that old - but I can't seem to find any software for it! Everything I find (either free or commercial) wants a newer flavour of OSX.

So with the exception of Firefox (which I'm using at the moment) I'm stuck with whatever came on the OSX Jaguar CDs.

That strikes me as a bit weird. Surely there must be a place to go for older OSX software. Anyone know of such a place?

No right answers for IE8

There has been quite a lot said recently about Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). Should it default to "standards mode"? Or default to "IE7 mode"?

But Joel on Software has put things into perspective: Neither side is right, and neither side is wrong. Because there is really no right answer here.

It's a long read, but worthwhile if you've been following the debate. It also add some understanding as why Vista is so plagued. (And yes, I'm one of those who has gone back to Windows XP)

Before reading Joel's article I didn't really have an opinion on what IE8 should default to. At least now I can say that maybe having no opinion is the right one!

If things stay as they are, we may all have a lot of work to do - going back and fixing old sites. Grrr.

The saving grace in my case might be the use of very specific stylesheets for Internet Explorer. We have used a conditional comment to call a stylesheet for IE6, another one for IE7, so IE8 shouldn't read either of these - and just worry about the main stylesheet designed for Firefox etc.

I hope. I'll have to check...