The XBox 360 controller is really one of the best gamepad ever made for any console out there. The best part is it works on computers as well, where past efforts by various companies to produce a good gamepad has always fell short. You can’t fully realize the XBox 360 controller’s potential just yet on the PC though, as full support won’t arrive until Windows Vista. The current PC drivers can’t take advantage of all the buttons, and has trouble dealing with several of the input axis (getting analog stick & the paddle trigger to work, for example, is an exercise of frustration).
Of course, Microsoft isn’t offering a driver for the Mac. However, just as SteerMouse provides an excellent third party solution for enhancing your mouse on the Mac, there are third party driver for getting the XBox 360 controller to work on your Mac as well. Spotty game support is more of an issue, but I’d imagine most of us will just be playing emulator games with that controller anyway.
Take a look at the Mac driver for the XBox 360 controller here.
There was one very, very annoying issue that I’ve found with MacOS X. When you tab through fields, it will by default, always skip over drop-down selection menus. Since so many websites uses this as say, the credit card expiration date field, it is extremely annoying as we get close to the Christmas season.
Just doing a bit of digging though, I came across the solution. Turns out this is a behavior that wasn’t just browser specific, but applied across the entire OS. All you have to do is change the option of how your keyboard behaves. Tony Spencer has a blog post on how it’s done:
“Un-skip” those dropdown boxes now!
As a follow up to my post about Word 2007 file format incompatibilities, there are some very clever people that found out how you can extract the text out of these new file formats. Go to MacOSXHints to read more:
Extract text out of Word 2007
As I’ve mentioned in the “Yes, I’m a ’switcher‘” post, I’m a very recent convert to the Mac. Although I can’t quite identify myself as a pure convert, since I’ve had plenty of experience with Mac since childhood, throughout college & professionally. I just haven’t owned a Mac at home for the past decade and a half.
There are a lot of fear in switching to a new platform. Although going from Windows to Mac really isn’t that hard, a bit of a learning curve is involved in acclimation to the slight differences in their UI. Honestly, Windows has always emulated Mac, and then Mac emulated some parts of Window, it’s really not that hard to get accustomed. What is a bigger problem though, is getting replacement software for what you’re used to in Windows.
Here’s the good news, there is a plethora of budget to free Mac software that can probably cover everything you do in Windows, and in many cases, do it even better.
Mail, Address & Calendar
Most people has seen plenty of iTunes, heard about iMovie and iDVD in the barrage of Apple TV ads. I’m surprised at how many people who don’t know about the other very useful, and powerful software that Mac comes with.
Mail (sometimes called Mail.app to not confuse it with… well, mail) is the default email program shipped with Mac. It does look extremely simple and straight forward at first, but it does have a good amount of hidden…
News.com has the scoop here:
New Office file format could cause headaches
This makes me wonder, if OpenOffice (or its Mac cousin, NeoOffice) would have an easier time at opening the new file formats & types than the Mac or Windows’s previous version of Office. I’ve been using NeoOffice exclusively since switching over to the Mac. I’ve never personally required any of the advanced capabilities of Microsoft Office anyway.
As much as Microsoft champion the idea of backward compatibility (after all, that’s why it took so long to get us from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP, right?), it’s surprising to me that they would devise a format that causes so much backward compatibility issues.
The very first time I fell in love with a computer, was my brother’s Macintosh. This was way before Microsoft even had Windows 1.0 up and running. It opened my eyes to what the computing experience should be like versus what it was. The concept of a GUI, the usage of this odd little device called “mouse”, the chime as the Mac booted up was all so intuitive to me; so much so, that my brother was concerned with me breaking the computer for the first time. It wasn’t so much that I would spill drinks on it, but I knew how to use the Mac enough to really cause some damage to it, where I would never be able to even navigate my own way through DOS without his guidance.
Even then, I still faded away from Mac in the 90’s. The mid-90’s was a dark period for Apple. Steve Jobs was gone, and Apple stopped innovating on new technology, instead focused heavily on marketing and diluting their own product line by introducing a seemingly endless number of models that catered to no particular segments (well, they were supposed to, just never did a very good job at it). The only memorable about Apple during those periods were the endless informercials I would see on Sundays about their line of Performa, Quadra, Classic… so on & so forth.
After many happy years with Windows (and I do stress, that I was in fact, happy with Windows), I finally made…
