Macbook Pro 2.26 Ghz 13 Inch: Brief Review

Thought I'd do a quick post on my impressions of the June 2009 release of the Macbook Pro 13" entry level configuration. I sold my 2.4 Ghz late 2008 Macbook Unibody in order to finance this purchase. I had updated the stock drive on the previous machine to a 500 GB Seagate. So the update was painless. I just moved the drive over and swapped out the RAM for the 4 GBS I had.

The 2009 Macbook Pro I find feels more solid without that flimsy battery hatch on the 2008 machine. The display is also light years ahead in terms of viewing angles, color and the general look of images, text and webpages. The battery is obviously superior. I found it charged much faster after running it down for the first calibration. Obviously the addition of the extra ports, like SD and Firewire are an added bonus.

How to speed up Apple's Magic Mouse: MouseZoom

I love the new Magic Mouse. Some people say that the clicking is a bit stiff, and so it is. But I can live with it. I like the way it feels. Coming from a PC, I like a fast mouse. But even with the Magic Mouse cranked to full speed I find it a bit slow for my liking. Enter MouseZoom. It hasn't been updated in a while, but it works great under Snow Leopard. It gives you the ability to get some more speed from the Magic Mouse. Sweet. Download the utility here.

A brief review of Safari 4 Beta: Possibly the world's best browser?

I'm a recent convert to OS X. I've been a Firefox guy. Gotta love all those plugins! Although you can get Firefox 3.x looking pretty cool on OS X with the GrApple Delicious theme, it isn't integrated with services, which is a pain. Anyhow, I thought I'd give Safari and Camino a whirl. I checked out Camino and it's great too, but I find it a bit limited for my needs in its current iteration, and a bit slow (even 2.x beta). So, I started playing around with Safari 4 beta.

IBM Model M Keyboard & OS X

I just got a new Macbook Aluminum unibody. I'm loving this machine so much. But when I'm at home, I like to plug into a 24 inch screen and I love to type on the IBM Model M keyboard, probably the best keyboard ever built. I have 3 of them. Anyhow, I did some googling around to try to find a solution to remapping the Mac Command key to the right control key on the M. Most of the key remapper programs out there do not appear to support OS X 10.5.x or Leopard. Anyhow, I found a little program called PCKeyboardHack that did the trick. It allowed me to map the right control key to the Mac Command key. Obviously you could go into the preferences -> keyboard & mouse and under "modifier keys" you could map the cap locks key to command for all keyboards. Personally, I use that key. So, that wasn't a solution for me. Anyhow, download PCKeyboardHack here if you think it might be useful to you. Update: PCKeyBoardHack works with all current versions of OS X including Lion.