Your eyes are not deceiving you. This post is in a new category that I believe I will post about a lot in the near future. I recently received my new Macbook Pro and I'm really enjoying the experience thus far. I think the whole "it just works" notion is a little misleading, as a Windowz user for over 15 years now (wow...) I have learned how to deal with problems (that occur quit often) by going to task manager and other little tricks I've picked up along the years. On a Mac when something doesn't work, or an application is "stuck" I still have no idea what to do... I mean I could go to the terminal and try to figure out which process to kill but that seems like a lot of work to me.
Anyway, this post is actually dedicated to Chmox the free chm reader for OS X. A buddy at work suggested I take a look at O'Reilly's Ajax Design Patterns by Michael Mahemoff (ISBN 0-596-10180-5) and he casually gave me his USB key to download... in return, I casually downloaded the chm file to Mac only to find out that I don't have the right software to open it... Chmox to the rescue. 2 second after pushing "download" on sourceforge and I've already begun reading.
In other Mac related news, my favorite shortcuts are:
Quicktime just not cutting it? Feel like you have to download a gazillion codecs? You don't. I'd like to introduce VideoLAN's FREE open source VLC media player (download it here). Turns out this bad ass media player does it all, just download, unpack, and you're ready to enjoy video and audio in a sweet wrapper.
Some key product points:
Being an open source application has its benefits, Google's "Summer of Code 2008" picked up some projects and have many capable engineers working on new stuff.
The VideoLAN project was assigned 14 slots by Google. 10 of those went to VLC related projects and 4 to x264 projects. Official results are available on Google's website.
VideoLAN's main site http://www.videolan.org/ is a good source for more information such as product feeds and other interesting projects.
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