Hello, my name is Mariusz Cieśla and my job is to make the web a better place.

Tag Archive for 'mac'

Mac tip: Make Safari open links in new tabs

Published on March 21, 2009 in Apple, Apps and Daily; 2 Comments

I’ll be honest – since Safari 4 beta came out, I totally forgot about Firefox even though I’ve been known Firefox evangelist for a long time. Why I left it then? Simple thing – Safari is much faster and now it has the features I require from my browser of choice (del.icio.us integration and working, friendly and effective web inspector, which wasn’t so good in Safari3/Webkit).

There was just one thing that I found absolutely annoying about Safari – every ‘incoming’ link I clicked in my Adium, Twitterrific or whatever else, was opened in a new window, which led to very cluttered desktop in a while. Firefox used to open new links in new tab, which was much more efficient in my opinion. As a guy who always has to hack something in his operating system, I learnt that on Mac you can do everything, but it requires one of those two – either you have to buy a $5 app that will do it for you cause it is in the API, just not in the OS *or* you have to type some weird command in the Mac Terminal to make it work. I was right. Luckily, Garcya has a fix that doesn’t require to buy a five-dollar-app, just requires you to use Terminal. Ready? Here we go!

First, quit your Safari. And by quit, I mean Command+Q, not the red button in the top-left corner. Done? Great. Now open your Terminal (if you never used before, it’s in your Spotlight, or in Applications » Utilities). When you’re in your terminal, paste in following command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Hit enter, run Safari and voila – you can now enjoy a screen-efficient incoming links handling in Safari.

Dear Apple, get us a real customer support

Published on October 22, 2008 in Apple, Daily and Personal; 9 Comments

So, I decided to buy myself a new Macbook. For a while I planned the old MB Pro, but since the new laptop should be a good replacement for my home PC, I decided to wait for new ones because they were supposed to have nVidia’s 9xxx chips. So they arrived. I have money, I know which one I want (13.3″ 2.4G version with 4 gigs of RAM) but… yeah… I live in Poland.

What’s wrong with it? Apparently, a big chunk of our beautiful continent of Europe is eligible to buy their Macs in some Apple Store. Still, for some reason in my country where I know lots of people having Macs or interested in getting one, Apple support is a disaster. We have our beautiful “authorized reseller”, we can buy our Macs in something called iSpots or in stores that have been given “blessing” of the reseller (Cortland, RCS2 etc.). When after Polish premiere of new Macbook I called iSpot to know if I can get one, they said “No”. So I asked why. They said they don’t have them and they don’t know when they will. Hello? I think they started already and should be available, right? Apparently not. Not mentioning the fact that even with available Macbook, getting a custom one (with for example more RAM on board) can be up to month of waiting.

Pricing at the reseller? Well, this list shows that price of a 17-inch Macbook Pro in Poland is the highest in the world. We even beat Norway and Sweden, which have one of the highest wages in the Europe. That’s not really nice, especially considering the fact that I earn around 10% of a typical Norwegian wage (I worked a bit with a Norwegian company, so I have quite a good comparison).

And what about customer support for the users that already managed to wait in a month-long line and got their brand new Mac? If something goes wrong, of course, you can turn it in to the service. No problem. If your SuperDrive is down, you’ll pay half of new Mac Mini price for it. If it’s just a minor issue, most probably they will send it to the Germany, where it will be fixed. This can be up to six weeks of waiting, from what I’ve heard so far. If that’s customer support, I’d rather be not supported at all and do everything by myself (including sending my computer to Germany).

So, again. Dear Apple, could you get us some proper customer here, on the east side of the iron curtain? I heard that the curtain is lifted now and we are a part of EU too.