I like my MacBook Air (my hands are soaking in it right now), but the speakers suck. I have never been able to get much volume out of them. Until now.
One of the winners of the MacWorld awards this year was Boom, a “volume booster” for your Mac. Works like a charm! It easily doubles the volume of the speakers, making it practical to use the Air to watch, say, The Daily Show, without having to don earphones. Well worth the $5 to crank your Mac up to 11.
I used to be a PC guy, but have completely gone Mac (MacBook Air, Mac Mini, iPhone, iPad, Jobs Distortion Field Glasses, etc.). But Mac went Emery before Emery went Mac! Proof below:
From http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/Libc/Libc-594.9.1/gen/magazine_malloc.c:
/*
Multithread enhancements for “tiny” allocations introduced February 2008.
These are in the spirit of “Hoard”. See:
Berger, E.D.; McKinley, K.S.; Blumofe, R.D.; Wilson, P.R. (2000).
“Hoard: a scalable memory allocator for multithreaded applications”.
ACM SIGPLAN Notices 35 (11): 117-128. Berger2000.Retrieved on 2008-02-22.
*/
My student Charlie Curtsinger pointed out a better alternative to Cinch: BetterTouchTool. The name is not as nice, but unlike Cinch, BetterTouchTool lets you snap windows to corners. By default, these occupy 1/4th of the screen, but the proportions are adjustable. I have only been using it for ten minutes, but it works great – and Charlie says he has been using it for a while without any issues.
Since making the move to Mac, I have discovered and installed some programs that I’ve found quite useful. Here’s one I use every day.
Cinch is a window manager that emulates a feature from Windows 7, which has some nice UI innovations (!). With Cinch installed, you can drag a window to the top of the screen, and it zooms it to fill the screen. The nicest part (which I don’t think Windows does) is that if you drag a window to one side of the screen, it fills exactly that half. Tremendously useful on laptops. Seven bucks, totally worth it.
Emery Blogger 