With a few glaring exceptions, these days most companies have moved away from treating Mac users like inconvenient step children. (Can you hear me Intuit? Your Quickbooks & Quicken support for Mac is horrid!)

And since Mac users make up a disproportionate number of the technology early adapters I’m surprised that Google Chrome’s Mac version is so far behind Chrome for Windows.

Even now when you go to the Google Chrome for Mac web page they say it is still in development. But if you’ll give Google your email address they’ll shout at you when it’s released. I did that. Months ago.

This past week I finally got tired enough of waiting to check it out for myself that I went to the Chrome for Mac developer download page and got a copy for myself to take it for a spin.

Here’s the thing: It’s a fantastic browser.

Strengths of Google Chrome

Speed. The first thing I noticed is how incredibly fast Google Chrome is. I mean it’s crazy fast. With everything. When you launch it, it barely bounces in the dock twice before it opens. Most web pages load way faster than with Firefox or Safari. And it shuts down quickly too!

When you’re on the web all day long like I am, saving a couple seconds on every single page load adds up to a big increase in productivity by the end of the day.

Accurate rendering. I ran Chrome through the Acid3 Test & it passes. Unlike Firefox. That means you see what you’re supposed to on the web with Chrome.

Easy to Set Up. When I first installed Chrome on my Mac it gave me a choice to import my bookmarks and settings from either Firefox or Safari (or neither). It brought all my bookmarks and saved passwords over seamlessly. They’re are a bunch of Themes you can choose from to customize the look of your browser. I chose one that looks like brushed metal. Seemed chrome-like to me.

Weaknesses

Still in “development.” Since Chrome for Mac is still in development you shouldn’t be surprised if you find some bugs now and then. I’ve only seen a couple problems since I started using it. For example one time a text box on a form wouldn’t let me enter anything. But I am writing this post using Chrome.

No bookmark management yet. I have way too many bookmarks in my browsers so I organized them into folders. With Chrome for Mac all bookmark folders are at the bottom of the rest of the bookmarks under “other bookmarks.” So to get to a bookmark in a folder I have to scroll down the bottom of my list, go across to a fly out list of folders, then up to the appropriate folder, and finally across to the bookmark I want.

I’m looking forward to the manage bookmarks feature being turned on so I can rearrange them for an easier workflow.

No 1Password Integration. Yet. This is a big one for me, and the primary reason why Chrome won’t be my default browser on my Macs anytime soon. 1Password is a fantastic tool for managing website login credentials for your Mac. It syncs your logins across browsers and even syncs between my desktop & my laptop.

1Password was one of the first programs I bought when I made the switch to Macs, and with the number of websites I got to every day between social media sites & client sites it is a huge productivity saver for me. Until Chrome for Mac actually comes out of development I don’t expect the good folks at 1Password will invest too much time integrating with it.

Bottom Line

At the end of the day Google Chrome for Mac is an excellent browser. It’s even tempting to make it my default browser. Google seems bent on raising the bar for web browsers and the winners will be all of us consumers who will have better tools to access the web.

But for now I’ll stick to Firefox, even though it is slower. With all the extensions I’m using on Firefox (especially 1Password) it is still a more versatile tool over all for my work needs.

1Password securely saves your passwords on Macs

I have an insane number of website accounts and profiles to keep track of. It goes with the territory of one who makes his living in the virtual world. Between my own profiles on dozens of social media sites, various email accounts, the blogs I own, banking and online bill paying sites, web hosting accounts, and the client work I do – it can truly get nuts sometimes.

The problem is twofold. First I need to keep the passwords someplace that’s organized where I can find them all. Quickly. The old paper and pencil password log I kept back in the day wouldn’t be able to keep up.

Then there’s the security issue. Paper and pencil is a bad idea. Even worse is keeping a spread sheet or text document on your computer with all your passwords in it!

Secure AND Easy

Fortunately 1Password keeps track of my passwords for me while keeping them secure at the same time. It was one of the very first purchases I made when I got the first Mac here at SuccessCREEations and at just under $35 for a single license is arguably some of the best money I spent getting started.

I’ve been using 1Password for about a year now and the program is easy to use, secure, and saves me countless hours hunting for my passwords.

1Password Makes Browsing More Secure

With all the social media sites that folks can join the the temptation can be strong to just use a standard password on all these different accounts. That’s a very bad idea.

And with 1Password it’s unnecessary too.

Because the program securely remembers all your passwords for you, there is no longer any need for passwords that are easy to remember. Now you can use truly random character strings for your passwords and still have them available in all your browsers.

Even better

Coming up with a random sequence to much bother for you? No worries.

1Password can generate truly random strings for you within parameters you can set. All you have to do is click your mouse and get remarkably strong unique passwords for every account you have.

That makes it much less likely that someone will hack your online information. Even if one site were to be compromised the damage is isolated to that account because all your others have randomly different passwords.

And they are even working on a web based version that will give access to this great service for Windows users too. Very nice.

Check out this video. If you are on a Mac and have too many passwords to manage, 1Password is worth a look.

No, we’re not talking about the big guy on the right here spraying gobs of bullets on the silver screen, as entertaining as that is.

A screenshot is simply a way to capture what you are looking at right now on your computer screen so you can use it later, or share it with someone else.

An Example

Say for example you took a silly little online brain test to see if you were more right brained or more left brained in your thinking.

And then suppose your results were strange enough that you wanted to share them with some folks.

Apparently I’m ever so slightly more right brained than left brained. At least according to that test.

Now my question is this. How did I use more than 100% of my brain that day?

Weird.

And it’s one of those things that is much easier to explain when folks can look at the screen shot.

All I did was capture the screen shot, open the image in Photoshop, and add the circle and text. Then I resized the whole thing uploaded it and now everyone can see that I use more of my brain than I have.

On a Windows computer capturing a screenshot is pretty straight forward. The keyboard has a Print Screen button.

But what about on a Mac?

It can still be done fairly easily with a little know how.

Built-in Mac Screenshot Commands

The know how on a Mac as usual involves keyboard short cuts. Here are a few that are built into Macs and what they do.

• Command+Shift+3 Capture entire screen and save as a file
• Command+Control+Shift+3 Capture entire screen and copy to the clipboard
• Command+Shift+4 Capture dragged area and save as a file
• Command+Control+Shift+4 Capture dragged area and copy to the clipboard
• Command+Shift+4 then Space bar Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and save as a file
• Command+Control+Shift+4 then Space bar Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and copy to the clipboard

Macs let you capture all sorts of stuff from your screen and either save them as file or copy them to the clipboard.

Another Handy Screenshot Tool

But say you want to capture more than what appears on the screen at one time, like say a tall web page. What then?

One way to do it would be to capture the window using “Command+Shift+4 then the Space Bar” above. Then scroll down to the next section and repeat as required to get it all.

But then you have to combine all those images into one tall image using Photoshop or some other graphics program.

Fortunately there is an easier way.

Just go and download Paparazzi!

With this free application you can just enter in the URL of the site you want to get a screenshot of and it will convert that web page into one picture for you.

It can be very handy, especially for web design folks.

For example, what web browser is the best one? That’s a question that can spark some heated debate depending on what circles you ask it. Wanna have fun at a tech-geek gathering? Ask it to a group of Mac users and then sit back and watch the fireworks.

It’s sorta like pulling the pin from a hand grenade, and tossing it into the middle of the room to see what will happen.

Anyway this whole thing started because FireFox was beginning to give me problems. Over time it seemed to be hanging up longer and more often. With my current severe scheduling challenges, sitting waiting while a web browser checks out for sometimes several minutes at a crack was getting frustrating to say the least.

I’ve been a FireFox fan for quite a while so when it started giving me fits I felt a little like I was starting over. Everyone’s got their own opinion. Every browser seems to claim they are the fastest. What follows is far from scientific. I’m not a full blown tech-head. So take it for whatever it’s worth.

FireFox

Like I said I’ve long been a FireFox fan. It is extremely customizable. There are probably thousands of extensions to add all kinds of useful tools at your fingertips. Many are great for social networking sites and the like. Some of my personal favorites include StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and LinkedIn.

There are also a couple other FireFox extensions I find useful. One is SearchStauts to get a quick snapshot of the specs on a site.

Another Mac only product that I’m wondering how I got along without is 1Password for managing all the logins and passwords for all the different sites I go to. This one works across most of the browsers, which was a huge time saver for me.

I wouldn’t have even considered looking at other browsers because of the beauty of having all my favorite tools in one spot until I started having problems with it hanging up. Poking around some forums it seems that FireFox behaves perfectly well for some folks using Macs and is problematic for others. I couldn’t find any common denominator that might be the source of the problems.

Safari

The next logical for a Mac has to be Apple’s own browser Safari. They’ve got Safari 3 in public beta and they claim to be the fastest thing out there. I did notice a difference when I downloaded it to replace the version that came with my Mac Mini this summer.

Once I got over the emotional pain of not having my StumbleUpon bar and my Del.icio.us buttons handy I found that I rather like it over all. Safari does a great job displaying text. (The tech-heads call it rendering text. Whatever. The letters are noticeably clearer than with FireFox.)

Another thing that Safari does is that it allows you to re-size text fields. This is hugely handy when entering information in web pages like I’m doing right now as I type this post. I can just grab the bottom right corner of the text entry field with my mouse and drag it to most any size I want. Very useful.

One down side to using Safari is that it doesn’t play nice with Gmail, which I use extensively. Gmail utilizes Ajax for several features, Google Talk integration, and some of the message menu buttons, for example. My understanding is that since Ajax is a mashup of several different kinds of code, some of which aren’t web standardized, Safari won’t handle it as intended. Safari does best with standard compliant sites.

It’s inconvenient. One would hope that Google and Apple would come to some sort of understanding on this one. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

Camino

Mozilla, the same people who produce FireFox also have Camino. Camino was designed from the ground up to integrate well with Mac OSX.

One thing it does that FireFox doesn’t is tie directly into the Mac Keychain, which stores passwords and the like. That makes managing passwords a little easier. Well, if you don’t have 1Password, that is.

Other than that I really couldn’t see the point of Camino. I thought it would be a decent substitute for FireFox if FF was having problems. But without the number of available plugins, Camino seems very much like a second tier browser to me.

Opera

Then there’s Opera. There are folks out there who are passionately in favor of this one. I’d never paid it any attention until a friend of mine convinced me I had to try it. Here’s what their website says about the browser:

The award-winning Opera Web browser The coolest, fastest, and most secure free Web browser available. Try it now to see just how great your Internet experience can be.

Seems to me like so much blah, blah, blah. But hey, I was willing to give it a try.

First things I noticed. Opera does things differently. They don’t have a bookmark bar like the other three above. Instead they have what they call a “Speed Dial” page. When you open a new tab the browser shows a page with thumbnails of your speed dial linked pages.

It gives you a whopping 9 places to put your commonly used sites. I currently have 34 sites linked in the bookmark bars of the other browsers. A limit of 9 doesn’t do it for me.

Opera is the only browser that doesn’t play well with 1Password. With all the passwords I’ve got to keep track of, that’s a show stopper for me. Then there’s the speed issue.

Browser Speed Comparison

In the midst of my browser challenges I was also having a compounding connectivity issue. We use AT&T (formerly BellSouth) DSL so I called their tech support and they claimed it was my Linksys router’s fault.

I didn’t believe them so I got my dad on the phone. He’s a programmer from all the way back to the punch card days. When I run into a stumper I call, “Daaaaddy!” He gets me straightened out.

We spent a couple hours on the phone going through my modem and router settings and what-da-ya know? The AT&T boys were right. Sorta.

In the process of checking things out, he showed me a site that tests connectivity speed – the Speakeasy Speedtest. And looking at that test got me thinking about upgrading my DSL speed, which I ended up doing through AT&T.

I thought perhaps I could run each of the browser through that test and see if there really is a difference in speed. Here’s what I expected going into my totally unscientific and probably mostly bogus little test: Safari 3 feels the fastest of the 4 by quite a bit. FireFox and Camino are about the same and about the middle of the pack. Opera feels incredibly slow to me.

But is any of that perception real? Let’s check.

Since I’m here in Savannah, I clicked on Atlanta in each of the browsers. And because I’m interested in speeds in my normal usage conditions I have iTunes running in the background, A Twitter client and an IM client running. Oh,and iMail’s running too. I’ve got a bunch of tabs open in Safari, but with the others there is only the one window open with no other tabs.

Here’s what I found:

Camino: Download: 6330; Upload: 429

FireFox: Download: 6332; Upload: 424

Opera: Download: 6324; Upload: 427

Safari: Download 6324; Upload: 425

(All numbers are kbps)

Yep. They all receive data at about the same speed. Go figure. Now I know that says absolutely nothing about how fast the different browsers render web pages. But it was a fun little test for me just the same.

What I decided

I still love all the features I can get in FireFox and it isn’t seizing up nearly as much with the faster DSL connection. But it still does bog down sometimes for no apparent reason.

Safari still seems faster. And since most of the sites I’m going to are text based the fact that text is clearer in Safari has helped make that my primary browser for now.

So what I end up doing it bouncing back and forth between these two. I use Safari for most stuff. But when I want to Stumble something, or to use a feature that I don’t have on Safari, I’ll open that site in FireFox.

Not an optimum solution, but it seems to be the best compromise so far.

I overheard Gorgeous telling a friend that she doesn’t hear grumpy noises eminating from my office anymore. I take that as a good sign things are going well.

Before I got the Mac I was at the point where I was loosing about 20 minutes out of every hour on my machine waiting for things to process or rebooting. That doesn’t happen anymore.

One Hitch

Well, there was one morning this past week. For some reason my mouse laser stopped registering clicks. It would track around the screen fine, but wouldn’t click on anything.

The scroll function wasn’t working either.

I fought with it a bit to see if I could get it reset easily. I was hoping to figure out if it was something screwy I did or not. Smart money is on operator error.

Finally I just did a hard shut down of the computer, turned off the wireless mouse and keyboard, and powered everything back up.

Things have been purring along nicely ever since. One hitch in two weeks is so much better than the several times a day that I was dealing with that

MS Office Work Around

I don’t yet have much need for MS Office with what I do here on this machine. But occasionally clients will send me a Word document from time to time.

I’ve found a serviceable work around with Google Docs. It is right there alongside my Gmail account and can import and export Word documents just fine. It isn’t perfect. But it does work for those occasional documents you need to get out.

Eventually I’ll probably get MS Office for Mac, although I hear Open Office is pretty good too. Maybe I’ll try that first.

A Mac Resource

Was pointed to a great resource for news on things Mac by a friend. If you are interested in that sort of thing, check out Think Secret. It’s chock full of insider info.

Before I check out this morning, let me leave you with a little PC vs. Mac humor.

Enjoy!

Dang that Mac is Small!

The very first thing Gorgeous and I couldn’t help but notice is that the stinking thing is small. I mean really small. We’re talking about a highly concentrated processing-power-to-volume ratio.

I’ve got hardcover books on my shelf that are bigger than this thing. Gorgeous asked if that little box could really do everything the HP tower that I was using did.

“No Honey. It does a whole lot more.”

I call it the Return of the True Desktop. Right now the Mini is parked on the corner of my desk behind my phone. It’s in a spot that previously held general clutter.

The Mini is much better looking than the clutter was.

The Big Part

I opted for the big screen. 23 inches of wide screen HC goodness. I can have my browser window open in the middle and various chats, my calander, email, and misc. other stuff all open on either side, watching while I’m working.

Way cool.

One down side is that I haven’t yet mastered dragging things across that big old screen. I keep running out of mouse pad.

I’m used to working with a track ball on the other machine. Might have to go that route if I can’t get a grip there.

But the picture! Oh yeah!

I put one of my Band of Brothers DVD’s in and Wow! Amazing picture quality.

Glad I got the big screen.

Out of the Box

One thing that surprised me was that the Mac had to update a whole bunch of software when it fired up the first time. I’ve got DSL but some of the files it downloaded to update things were huge. It took about 45 minutes for the all the downloads to come through. Then another 15 minutes-ish to install everything and re-boot the computer.

Not a problem. Just unexpected.

They aren’t kidding about things just working. Right now I have 11 different programs running. 8 different windows open.

Everything is clipping along without so much as a pause.

And there wasn’t all that mess with gobs of other programs to “try” that I had no interest in. No overwhelming attempts to up-sell me a bunch of junk I don’t need.

That was a refreshing change.

Biggest Challenge So Far

So far the biggest challenge I’ve had is getting the Mac and XP machines to play nice where the printer is concerned.

I had it almost worked out with the printer on the Mac.

But I couldn’t get the XP’s to print multiple copies. And that’s a big issue from Gorgeous’ perspective. There are times when she’s got to print bunches of things. Having to do it one at a time is a pain.

So at the moment I put the printer back onto our XP tower. But now the Mac doesn’t seem to want to print to it. I haven’t had time to work on it much. But the Mac sees the printer, says it’s printing to it.

The only problem is nothing comes out of the printer.

I’ll figure it out eventually. When I have a moment to mess with it. But the two systems don’t seem to want to play nice on that one for now.

Here’s a little Mac vs. PC fun for your Friday. Enjoy!