thriftmac

Marathon lives

2009-11-08T20:24:41Z

The first-person shooter Marathon first came out in 1994, back in the dark days of the Mac when there were precious few games being developed for our beloved, but beleaguered, operating system.

Bungie — the game’s creators — was treated almost like a hero for having faith in the Mac. People snapped up the Marathon trilogy and made it a minor hit.

I was reminded of Marathon when one of the members of thriftmac headquarters came home raving about Halo. This game was at one time presumed to be a sequel to Marathon, but instead Bungie disappointed us by going to work for Microsoft and the Xbox.

It all seems like ancient history, but Marathon lives on thanks to the tireless efforts of fans — and thanks to Bungie for making the code open source. A special program called Aleph One has been created that allows the game to run on OS X with smoother graphics and a larger screen resolution. Aside from this, completely new textures have been created to make the games look even better. Major conversion scenarios have come along, and some are still being updated with artistic restorations.

Marathon was probably one of the best games ever made for the Mac. If you haven’t tried it, you should. If you haven’t played it lately, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what’s new. Start here.

Has iStat Menus met its match? [1]

2009-11-04T18:41:25Z

iStat Menus has a lot going for it. It keeps track of what your system is doing with nifty little graphics in the menu bar: CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage and activity, network bandwidth, and temperature sensors. Configuration is neatly tucked away in a preference pane, and as a bonus you get highly configurable date and time for the menu bar. Best of all, it’s freeware.

Could anything be better?

We recently discovered a program called atMonitor, which covers pretty much everything iStat Menus does, then goes a lot further. The same system activities are monitored in the menu bar, plus a few others can be added. If you don’t like a cluttered menu bar, you can opt for a floating window, which nicely displays system activities in graphs that update horizontally. Icons for the three most active apps are shown on top.

But that’s not all. A “top” window lists all the process in order of activity — not just the apps you’re familiar with but also background stuff with arcane names such as fontd and pboard. When you click on one of the names, information is displayed in large area above — including a description from iusethis. A tool bar allows you to renice, signal, pause or kill the process.

So is atMonitor better than iStat Menus?

In some ways, yes. There are a lot more options and features, some of which I haven’t touched on here — priorities, triggers and logging among them. You can even download themes or change the colours. On the other hand, atMonitor is not quite as polished as iStat Menus, and you do need to have it running in the dock like any other program. In fact, this may be atMonitor’s greatest drawback — iStat Menus is more discreet. For example, while iStat Menus may not have a floating window, you can get a similar effect by clicking on its menu bar graphs to see more detail.

The verdict

Since both programs are free, why not use both? Keep iStat Menus running for your everyday needs. It’s unobtrusive, attractive and covers the basics. Fire up atMonitor when you really want to puzzle out those processes with your undivided attention.

atMonitor [3]

2009-11-02T17:04:50Z

Display system activity in real-time. In addition to CPU, GPU, VRAM, FPS, disk and network info, atMonitor allows interaction with processes, setting up triggers, logging, purging RAM and more. Three views: menu bar, floating window and top window. Four different themes.

Google Chrome first impressions [3]

2009-10-26T16:21:14Z

When Google came out with a “developer release” of Chrome for the Mac, I couldn’t resist having a look. I’m all too aware that it’s not even beta — it ate the first version of this post — but the download should still give some idea of where we’re headed.

The first thing I noticed is that it’s snappy, as if it were trying just a little bit harder to render the websites I visited. Of course, this always seems to be the case with a new browser or new version of a browser. It’s good to see, though, that Google is determined to give Apple a run for its money when it comes to speedy browsing.

I’ve grown accustomed to using Safari’s bookmarks sidebar over the years, so it was one of the things I immediately missed in Chrome. It quickly imported all of Safari’s settings, but you’re forced to drill down from a menu to find the bookmark you want.

I know all the cool kids are typing in the URL field these days, but what if you can’t remember the name of a site or just want to browse what you’ve bookmarked? Here’s hoping the final version does bookmarks in a way similar to — or better than? — Safari. At least we can hope it will be better than Firefox’s poor implementation.

Chrome definitely comes out ahead of Safari with tabs. Apple tried putting them on the top, but did it in such an awkward way that they were forced to backtrack. Chrome’s tabs are done in a manner that leaves plenty of room for you to grab the top of the window, and there’s no confusion over a single tab acting differently from multiple tabs. And all this is done without sacrificing any of the viewport’s vertical height. Good work.

Overall, the look of the interface is one that Mac users will find acceptable, if a bit “toyish.” Already, it looks better than Firefox, which has struggled to fit in with the Mac experience. Strangely, Google felt compelled to offer various themes for Chrome. You can easily choose and install them from a gallery. I tried about 20, and couldn’t find anything that improved on the default. They look fine by themselves, but once applied they’re awful.

In the end, the developer preview isn’t much to go on at this point. But if this is a sign of things to come, Mac users should soon find themselves with another serious option for day-to-day web browsing. Looking forward to it.

Backuplist

2009-10-24T20:55:23Z

Wrapper application for the powerful Unix rsync tool processes your choice of files to be backed up as copies to your hard drive or to an external storage device. It offers many important options for advanced users.