Mac Compatibility Tip

Do you have file sharing set up on your Macs?  Or, maybe an AirDisk? (USB hard drive connected to your Airport Base Station.)

If you’re using other platforms on the same network (linux or windows, for instance) you may have trouble seeing those shares from your non-Mac machines.  The reason for this is they way Apple sets OS X to share those items.  Using Rendezvous (formerly known as “Bonjour”, also known as mDNS) Apple places “.local” on the end of their hostnames.  Apple’s rationale for this is that those things utilizing Rendezvous (shares, printers, scanners etc) are local to you - on the same small network.

Unfortunately, this clashes with just about everyone else.  Windows machines in an Active Directory will see those shares just fine (they also use .local for addressing) but otherwise (Windows machines in a workgroup or Linux machines in general) won’t see this.

There is, however, an easy fix.  You need to tell your non-Macs to look for .local addresses.  You’ll need to add a search prefix (a.k.a. search domain) to your network settings.  Go into your network settings and look for this field.  What you want to add in there is “local” (without the quotes).

That should do it!

Spaces Tips

If you don’t use Spaces, YOU SHOULD!  If you do use spaces, here are some tricks:  

1. Move to another space by pressing Control-<space #>.  So, if I wanted to move to Space #3, I’d press Control-3, for instance.
2. Instead of opening up Spaces just to drag one window to another space, drag the window as you normally would, but this time push the mouse against the edge of the screen (while you’re dragging the window) and watch as you slide (with the window you’re dragging) to the adjacent space.  This one only works left-right or up-down… no diagonal dragging (oh well).
3. If you already know the number of the space that you’d like a particular window to move to, click and hold the window as if you’re going to move it around, then press the shortcut like you would in tip #1 above.  Your window will slide to that space and then you can position it on that space without letting go of the mouse.

Cool!