If you’re looking for a great, geeky present for yourself or one of your Mac loving friends, MacHeist has a bundle of 10 Mac programs for the low, low price of $49. This price includes TextMate, one of the nicest text editors for OS X—a piece of software that normally costs 39 Euros by itself. Even better, 25% of the purchase price is donated to one of eight charities of your choice. Overall it’s a win-win, so head over and check it out.

When I changed hosts for my blog, it also meant that I could no longer just SMB the files around. I had to find an actual SFTP/SCP-client for my Macbook. A quick Google search turned up Cyberduck and Fugu. I arbitrarily chose Fugu. (Turns out this was the right decision. Dustin convinced me to try Cyberduck; version 2.6.1 crashed three times in a row while I was trying to type in the hostname. But I digress…)

Fugu is pretty slick, but it would only open files for editing using one of the preset editors, none of which I had. I decided to see if I could change the list of available editors to include TextEdit, since I was only editing basic CSS.

Turns out you can. Here’s how.

1. Right click on the Fugu application and choose “Show Package Contents”

2. Navigate to Contents, Resources, ODBEditors.plist

3. Open the ODBEditors.plist file in TextEdit. Scroll to the bottom of the file and either create a new entry or modify one of the existing entries. I modified the emacs entry, since I don’t plan on ever using it. This is what it should look like:

4. Save the file and you’re good. Load up Fugu, click Fugu, Preferences. In the preference pane, click the Files icon. In the External Text Editor, choose the name of the editor you just created. In my case, TextEdit.

Viola! You can now command-J to edit files with your chosen editor from Fugu.

If you’re into tech then you’ve probably already heard about Internet Explorer’s glaring security hole. The flaw allows code to run on your machine just by visiting a malicious page. Ad companies are using the flaw to install spyware and adware on your machine. This is a very Bad Thing. Normally I would just ignore this advisory and wait until Microsoft decided to fix the problem. Well, that didn’t work this time. After some strangeness when I visited a perfectly normal site, I decided it was time to find a new browser, at least for a while. Since I’d been hearing good things about Firefox, I thought I’d give it a try. I went to mozilla.org and downloaded version 0.9RC. Keep in mind this is beta software, and although it is a release candidate, it could still have bugs.

The Good

Installation is a snap. Really. The best thing about the installation is that it grabs everything from IE. When I fired it up for the first time it had all my bookmarks, history, cookies, options, and even all of my “auto complete” things (where it remembers stuff you’ve typed into the form before and will drop down possible matches to what you are typing now). It was awesome. The idea of not having all of those on a new browser is one of the things that has kept me from switching in the past.

Firefox supports tabbed browsing. I actually was not a fan of tabbed browsing until I started using it in Safari. Now I use it all the time. Tabbed browsing in Firefox takes some getting used to, mostly because I’m so used to IE where everything is in a new window, that I don’t remember to just close the tab. However, then a nice little box pops up to ask if I really meant to close the whole window (you can turn it off, but I don’t recommend it unless you are used to tabbed browsing on Windows already).

Popup blocking is built in. So far it has caught every popup, which is pretty good since the Google toolbar has recently been letting some through.

Finally, there is a built in Search bar, which by default searches Google, although you can change it to whatever engine you prefer. You can also add eBay, Amazon, dictionary.com and a lot more.

The Bad

I really haven’t had too many problems with Firefox. The main issue is that plugins for previous versions don’t work with 0.9RC. In fact, I haven’t found a single plugin that works, I’m not sure if it’s because they haven’t been updated or because plugins were for some reason disabled.

Internet Explorer only stuff doesn’t work with Firefox. Makes sense. However, I’m typing this in IE because FreeTextBox (kind of like super Notepad for the web) is IE only. Also the Google toolbar is IE only, which wouldn’t be a big deal if plugins were working, but I really miss being able to click “Autofill” and all the form fields are magically filled in, no typing required.

The Ugly

Themes don’t work in 0.9RC. Or, like plugins, they haven’t been updated yet. The default theme is ok, but there are much nicer looking themes available for 0.8. In fact, I went back to 0.8 for the themes, but then all of the other cool features of 0.9RC didn’t work anymore so I switched again. I’m sure once the actual 0.9 release is made, themes and plugins will work.

If you’re interested in downloading Firefox, go to mozilla.org or directly to the official Firefox page.

Edit: If you’re having trouble getting themes and extensions to work, you may be having the same problem I had.

Last night while I was in bed waiting for sleep to oh-so-slowly sneak up on me, I had a brilliant idea how to fix Firefox. Why I was thinking about Firefox and its broken extensions and themes, I’ll never know. However, the point is that I was thinking about it and I vaguely remembered a check box somewhere that said “Allow web sites to install software.” Being the paranoid person that I am, I unchecked it as soon as I installed Firefox and didn’t give it another thought. Until last night. Today, I rechecked the box and voilà! themes and extensions work. So, if you are having the same problem, look for that check box in Options under Advanced.

There are still some bugs with Themes and Extensions, especially those that have not been updated for 0.9, but at least they install now.

For those of you who use iTunes, version 4.5 is now available. It has several new features and now you can download a free single from an “emerging artist” every week. It seems like this update is made up of a bunch of small things that ellict a “that’s kinda cool” response, instead of a few “WOW” features. For example it’s kinda cool that you can watch movie trailers straight from iTunes (and of course buy the soundtracks and audiobooks). It’s also kinda cool that you can watch music videos. I’m not really a music video fan but I watched a couple and it was sorta nice, but not something I would really miss if it wasn’t available.

One new feature that is pretty useful is the improved printing options. Now you can print a list of your songs, or a list of all the albums you have. You can also print cd covers with actual album art (or a mosiac of all the covers for a mixed cd). I don’t really ever burn discs, but if I did, I think this is a really cool feature. I’m thinking about making a mix cd just to test it out. :)

All of the audiophiles out there will probably be happy with the new Apple Lossless Encoder, which promises full CD quality audio in about half the size an uncompressed audio file would require. This would also probably be a good option to back up CDs onto your computer without a loss in quality.

If you go to the iTunes site you can read about all of the other features I didn’t cover like: Radio Charts, iMix, Wish List, and now your library has links back to the music store as well.

Ok, I gave in. If you want to see some of the songs I listen to you can view my very own iMix list (you need iTunes).