Switchers' Blog

Cool New Feature in OS X 10.4.8

John Gruber reports a new cool in feature in OS X 10.4.8: you can now zoom your screen using Control + scroll wheel.

The settings are defined in Mouse Preferences. Make sure you try the “Smooth images” option — the screen looks great:

Securing Your Mac

As a longtime Windows user I'm accustomed to malware. When I switched to Mac OS X I found a different world that seemed immune from security threats. I really wanted to believe the prevailing mantra that "things are different here", but I don't buy into that theory.

While I am a big believer that Mac OS X is more secure than its more popular counterpart, the small size of the Macintosh market has virtually guaranteed that criminals would ignore it. The "return on investment" to the criminals just wasn't worth their time and effort.

This is changing, however. With the recent "cool" factor of Mac and the ever increasing Apple market share, criminals will start to take notice.

I recently wrote a Squidoo Lens to bring Mac Security into focus. The Mac Security Lens will be where I link to various articles on the web and tie together the information available on the web and our other sites.

Great Deals on MacZOT!

MacZOT! is a very interesting web site that runs exclusive deals on many great shareware products. It’s lots of fun to check in each day to see what’s new. There is even a MacZOT! dashboard widget to keep you up-to-date.

Today’s special is the 1Passwd Password Manager. As is customary on MacZOT!, every product has a steep discount and 1Passwd is not exception. For a limited time save 33%!

Skype 2.0.0.2

David and I just tested a new release of Skype 2.0.0.2.

It is still marked as beta but it fixes our major problem with the previous versions, namely, very slow file transfer. We use Skype to exchange screenshots all the time.

SnapNDrag + Skype = poor man’s screen sharing.

Also, the video function seems to be working better.

1Passwd 1.5 Prerelease Now Available

We are nearing the official release of 1Passwd version 1.5! It has been a long haul but we have just released a Prerelease version of 1.5 to the website. (if you want to try prereleases, subscribe to the newsletter)

Please note that prereleases are not for the faint-of-heart, so please don’t upgrade to the new version if you don’t enjoy being on the ‘bleeding edge’. With that being said, we have tested this version completely and it brings several key new features, such as:

Exporting iPhoto Images to Flickr

I’m a really big fan of Flickr and have been using it ever since Abby was born.

The biggest pain with Flickr is using its web-based interface. Now don’t get me wrong, their UI is very nice, it’s just that iPhoto is local, fast, and convenient.

FlickrExport solves this problem by providing Flickr integration into iPhoto. Once installed, from within iPhoto you can simply highlight the image(s) you want to upload to Flickr and press CMD – Shift – E. This brings up the export screen: