Mac OSX Power Tools
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| Mac OSX Power Tools Dan Frakes 607 Pages Sybex Publishing $39.99 US/$63.95 CAN click on image to buy |
And then there's this book......
Power Tools is literally like going to Lowe's on a Saturday afternoon. Only you don't have to leave the house. This book offers a wide variety of information on how to drastically improve the overall performance of your Macintosh (provided you're on OSX.2 and nothing earlier that is.) and also tells you about programs you've probably never heard of to improve your Mac or actually take it to throwback mode with freeware/shareware products to make it look and act like the old OS. (Yes, there are people who want that and in some cases, like Windowshade X, we all want to.)
Within a week of reading this book, I already started tinkering with my own Mac. Did you realize you could take that striped panel that appears on startup with the Mac OSX logo and remove it with your own logo or some whacked out photo? Well you can! Thanks to reading the book, I learned of an app called Virage that allows you to change the Boot Panel (that's what it is called) and swapped out the Mac OSX logo for my company logo. (Now if I could just make the type above the loading bar white instead of black.) Then I was at one of my clients who was complaining about the fact that they couldn't get their legacy printers to work in OSX. Guess what? I showed them a product called Gimp-Print that takes care of that. And where did I learn that?[an error occurred while processing this directive]
This book is a cornucopia of insight and info on taking your Mac apart (without physically taking it apart) and make tons of improvements to really make your Mac fly on the new OS. Features on File Sharing, Printing, the Terminal app, the Dock and even Unix is covered. (Although if you really want to learn Unix, this isn't the book for you.)
The book itself is well-organized offering a variety of tip tables you won't find in any other book. As many of you know, certain features of the OS are only available to certain users of the system. So practically every feature of OSX is showcased to show you which features are available to just administrators or everyone using the computer. This way you can see which files you really want to protect and how to do it.
I'm really pleased that a book like this has come out. It isn't another Mac Bible nor is it a Mac Fix It book. This is a book for the compu-handyman (read: UberGeek) who really wants to dive into the OS to excavate everything beneath the surface. More Power!
Adam Bell is the Design Director, CEO, Videographer and sometimes janitor with dzign@datatv.com (http://datatv.com/) amazingly not getting plastered in the French Quarter of New Orleans, LA.
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