Shai Perednik.com » MSI

Quicken Essentials on a Macbook Nano

Shai Perednik — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:23:41 +0000

UPDATE: See below for the fix.

I just purchased the new Quicken Essentials for mac to run on my MSI Wind Macbook Nano only to find out that the icon is marked with an strikeout.

When you double click the icon your told
“You cannot use this version of the application Quicken Essentials.app with this version of Mac OS X.

The Quicken Essentials requirements say Leopard or Snow Leopard. So is it possible Intuit has actually hard coded “Atom=False” to prevent Atom users from running the app?

FIX

I’ve found the issue and the fix.

The minimum requirements are 10.5.8 and I’m running to 10.5.7. So here’s the fix:

[list=1]

[*]Right click Quicken Essentials.app

[*]Click “Show Package Contents”

[*]Open the “Contents” folder

[*]Open the info.plist

[*]Look for “Minimum system version”

[*]It will have a value of “10.5.8″. Change that to “10.5.7″.

[/list]

That’s it. The icon still has the slash across it, but it opens and works fine on my 10.5.7 Macbook Wind. You could probably change it to 1o.5.6 or whatever, but I havn’t tested that.

I’ve found the issue and the fix.The minimum requirements are 10.5.8 and I’m running to 10.5.7. So here’s the fix:

Right click Quicken Essentials.app
Click “Show Package Contents”
Open the “Contents” folder
Open the info.plist
Look for “Minimum system version”
It will have a value of “10.5.8″. Change that to “10.5.7″.

That’s it. The icon still has the slash across it, but it opens and works fine on my 10.5.7 Macbook Wind. You could probably change it to 1o.5.6 or whatever, but I havn’t tested that.

Quicken Essentials on a Macbook Nano originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on March 9, 2010.

Mockflow: web-based, real-time, collaborative wireframing

System — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:00:17 +0000

Automatically pulled from Google Starred

Filed under: Design, Developer, Web services, Web

A key part of interface design is an exercise known as “wireframing.” In this design phase, elements of an interface are blocked out roughly to show relative placement, interaction, and functionality. It is a rapid way to talk through functional requirements of a project and get buy-in from stakeholders without having to waste a lot of time on visual design that won’t remain in a finished product.

Mockflow is a flash-based, online, collaborative wireframing tool for Web and Software designers. It contains a fairly complete set of wireframe elements and icons for use in your wireframe with flexible customizability of all the elements. The killer app of the tool is it’s ability to collaborate in real-time with other team members online. Very, very useful for distributed teams.

I tend to use Adobe Fireworks for all my wireframing (and everything else) but a coworker pointed me toward this tool and it captured my attention. I find flash-based tools distasteful, they always feel slow to me, but this one was simple enough, with enough features to make it compelling to use. Definitely the right tool for the right situation.

The basic version is free, but ad supported and you are limited to two collaborators. Upgrading (introductory price of $49 / year) grants you unlimited collaborators and projects, is ad-free, and gives you 500 MB of storage. Definitely worth a look for distributed Web teams.

Mockflow: web-based, real-time, collaborative wireframing originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mockflow: web-based, real-time, collaborative wireframing originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on October 21, 2009.

Found Footage: The do-it-yourself wedding photo booth

System — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:20:05 +0000

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online

Filed under: Odds and ends, MacBook, Found Footage

What do you get when you mix a MacBook, a US$99 printer, some Ikea shower curtains, and lot of wedding guests?

In the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, Cline looked into renting a wedding photo booth that would take pictures of guests, save a digital copy, and then print out a strip of photos for the guests to take home as a keepsake. The cost for the rental was prohibitively expensive — about US$2,000 a day.

David quickly decided that by combining his Mac, a special Automator workflow that he created, an Epson PictureMate Dash printer, an old wardrobe frame, and colorful shower curtains from Ikea, he could inexpensively re-create the functionality of the expensive rental.

His Automator script prompted wedding guests for their names, took 3 photos, arranged the photos in a vertical strip, displayed the photos on the screen for the guests to view, printed out the photo strip, and then saved the individual photos and photo strips in digital form onto the Mac. After the wedding, the photos were uploaded to an online photo album.

From the looks of the happy wedding guests, the Do-It-Yourself Photo Booth was a success. I’d venture to say that David Cline is ranking high in the standings for the “Brother of the Year Award.”

TUAW Found Footage: The do-it-yourself wedding photo booth originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Found Footage: The do-it-yourself wedding photo booth originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on August 18, 2009.

WhatsOpen tells you why volumes won’t eject from your Mac

System — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:20:11 +0000

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Apple, Freeware

Anyone who regularly plugs and unplugs external drives from their computer has at some point been frustrated by the operating system’s refusal to eject a volume. Lately I’ve begun using more external drives, and this phenomenon is occurring more and more frequently. Apple has acknowledged this issue, and will be addressing it in the forthcoming Snow Leopard release of OS X, but that doesn’t help us right now.

Fortunately, WhatsOpen does help us right now. The next time you run into the “disk is in use and could not be ejected” error message, fire up WhatsOpen to see what file is open from the volume you are trying to eject. It should be immediately obvious in most cases.

If you’re not interested in hunting down the offending application, and you’re not worried about potentially losing data if you haven’t saved your work, there’s a Force Eject button that will simply stop any process that has a file open on the drive, and eject the drive.

Hopefully in future all operating systems will build in a graceful way to handle ejecting external drives, but until then utilities like WhatsOpen are necessary in your tool belt.

[via Macworld]

WhatsOpen tells you why volumes won’t eject from your Mac originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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WhatsOpen tells you why volumes won’t eject from your Mac originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on July 23, 2009.

It Must Be Nice to Be Verizon

System — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:00:11 +0000

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online

It must be nice to be Verizon right now. Free from the intense scrutiny AT&T receives by having the hottest and “smartest” smartphone, it can appear to rise above it all. It can have TV ads to claim the best network on the planet, and it’s done. It can have legions of people claiming they’d drop AT&T in a heartbeat, or snap up an iPhone tomorrow, if only it could be on its network.

Even setting aside that the iPhone on Verizon would not likely be the iPhone we recognize, this is ridiculous.

Before we get into it, let me first say that if you live where there’s little or no AT&T coverage, then obviously Verizon or another carrier is what you need. But every carrier has holes in its coverage. Every. One. This article isn’t about that.

No, what this article is about are those places (and there are many) where either carrier is an option. In that case, there are general perceptions where Verizon seems to either have people fooled, or it’s no different than AT&T but it isn’t noticed.

It must be nice to sell phones with less usability than the iPhone so your customers don’t hammer your network, and then sit back and let people assume you could handle the load under which AT&T is straining.
It must be nice to utilize the same pricing and subsidy strategies as AT&T, but get to remain above the fray while AT&T takes the heat for what the whole industry is doing.
It must be nice to charge for carrier cash cows like SMS and tethering, but have everybody only complain about AT&T doing it.
It must be nice to brag about having visual voice mail on some phones, while quietly hiding that it’s an extra $3 a month.
It must be nice to not allow convenient syncing of data, media, bookmarks, etc., via the excellent iTunes environment, instead using clumsier tools if anything is allowed at all, and have your customers just take it in stride.
It must be nice to disable hardware features on many phones, such as Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi, with little complaint from the masses.
It must be nice to avoid GSM, still using CDMA-based technology that the rest of the world (and AT&T) has abandoned. Its rollout to a 4G network could come with headaches as a result.
It must be nice to brag about 3G speeds, and have no one point out that your CDMA 3G technology (EV-DO) can handle voice or data, but not both simultaneously. Browsing the web when a call comes in? You can have the call or the web, not both. Oops.

If Verizon received even half the scrutiny AT&T does, it’d be buried with criticism. If AT&T is getting a lot of bad press, Verizon would be ripped to shreds. But since it doesn’t offer a phone that’s particularly compelling, one that taxes its network, one that people actually want to use, few have bothered to look beyond the geek with the glasses it puts on TV. It must be nice.

Finally, this in not intended as a defense of AT&T, and in no way excuses it from legitimate complaints. I’ve certainly grown tired of all that company’s talk, but no action. However, the idea that Verizon would somehow be free from all these complaints — even assuming it allowed the iPhone as is — is not supported by its own actions. As a U.S. carrier it has far more in common with AT&T than people seem to realize.

I was a Verizon customer for years prior to switching for an iPhone over two years ago. The “Verizon envy” many AT&T customers possess is akin to the grass always being greener on the other side. Problem is, most of you would find out it’s crabgrass.

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It Must Be Nice to Be Verizon originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on July 20, 2009.

Installing Microsoft Silverlight v3 on OSX

Shai Perednik — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:51:29 +0000

For some reason the Microsoft Silverlight installer thinks hackintoshes are powerPCs. There’s a simple workaround for this:

Download the Silverlight plugin for Mac OSX.
Mount the .dmg file
Drag the Silverlight.3.0.pkg file to your desktop
Unmount the .dmg – not required now
Right click on “Silverlight3.0.pkg” and choose the “Show Package Contents” menu item.
Double click on the “Contents” folder.
Double click on the “Resources” folder.
Drag and drop the file “InstallationCheck” to the trash.
Close out the folder you’re working in.
Finally double click on the “Silverlight3.0.pkg” package, and it should install fine now.

VIA Msi Wind Forums • View topic – Installing Microsoft Silverlight v2 on OSX (Advent 4211).

Installing Microsoft Silverlight v3 on OSX originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on July 14, 2009.

Chinese company introduces Atom-powered Macbook Air clone

System — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:00:09 +0000

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online

When MSI introduced its MSI X-slim line of Intel Atom and CULV powered computers, a lot of people commented on how these relatively inexpensive 13.3 inch laptops looked an awful lot like the much pricier Macbook Air. Now a Chinese company is showing a mini-laptop that bears an even more striking resemblance to the Macbook Air.

The GB X1200 has a 12.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display, and yes, I know that makes it a bit smaller than the Macbook Air. But it’s also super thin, and has a hidden door for the USB ports and other connectors that won’t easily fit on the side of the computer. It also has a nice wide touchpad with a single large button below it.

On the inside, there’s no confusing the GB X1200 with the Macbook Air. This compuuter has a 1.6GHz intel Atom Nz70 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive. It sports 2 USB ports, a 1.3MP webcam, and Windows XP. It looks like this is an OEM product, which means that we could see it rebranded and sold under a different name at some point.

via NetbookNews.de and shanzheiben

Post from: Liliputing

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Chinese company introduces Atom-powered Macbook Air clone originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on July 6, 2009.

PC Pitstop users rate netbook satisfaction: MSI Wind U100 on top

System — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:20:02 +0000

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online

PC Pitstop offers online diagnostic tools for finding problems with your PC and tuning it up. In other words, they come in contact with a lot of PC users. This week the company published the results of a survey asking netbook user about their satisfaction with their little laptops. The results? Overall, it looks like a lot people are pretty happy with their netbooks. The top 9 machines had user ratings of 3 or more stars out of 4.

The MSI Wind U100, Asus Eee PC 1000HE, Samsung NC10, Asus Eee PC 1000H, and Acer Aspire One snagged the top 5 spots. And fewer than 17% of the people owning each of those netbooks complain that their systems are slow. Less than 6% complained about their computers freezing.

Of course, an Intel Atom based computer is going to be slower than a lot of laptops out there. But the point is that these netbooks are fast enough for most of the tasks users expect them to run, and customer satisfaction seems to be pretty high.

via Technologizer

Post from: Liliputing

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PC Pitstop users rate netbook satisfaction: MSI Wind U100 on top originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on July 3, 2009.

Mozilla-based email client Postbox finally gets add-ons

System — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:00:05 +0000

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online

Filed under: E-mail, Productivity, Beta

Postbox is a powerful email client based on Mozilla’s Thunderbird, and, like Thunderbird, it now supports extensions. The selection of add-ons is limited right now, but it includes some useful ones: ReminderFox handles reminders and to-do items. Minimize to Tray is just what it sounds like, allowing Windows users to put Postbox in the system tray. Nostalgy adds keyboard shortcuts, and MozBackup backs up your messages and settings. This is a good start, but it’ll interesting to see what other useful extensions pop up now that the door is open.

The latest build of Postbox also adds a long list of other useful features. If you’re switching from Mail.app, you can now easily migrate your settings to Postbox. Postbox will now also pull photos for your contacts from OS X’s address book or from Twitter. Several performance upgrades and fixes of annoying issues from earlier versions are also in place now, so it looks like a good time to consider giving Postbox a try.

Mozilla-based email client Postbox finally gets add-ons originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mozilla-based email client Postbox finally gets add-ons originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on July 1, 2009.

Upgraded Wind MacBookNano to 10.5.7 100%

Shai Perednik — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:50:57 +0000

Today I took the plunge and updated my MSI Wind runnnig 10.5.6 to 10.5.7. Normally I would have waited longer before applying a major update. However with recent reports of 5hr battery life on the 6cell u100 I decided to update.

Following this post everything went through fine. I had to remove ffScroll and SmartScroll, reaply the Trackpad driver included in the driverpack and not I’m back @ 100%. No hickups.

Interesting thing is after the update my TimeMachine update was 3.2GB and is still backing up.

Below is the post i followed via the MSI Wind Forums

MSi WindOSX86 10.5.7 Upgrade pack for both 10.5.4 and 10.5.6Quote:

DISCLAIMER: While I feel extremely confident that I tested the crap out of these installer packages I can not test every situation or configuration. This means you should BACKUP IMPORTANT DATA so that you are prepared to reinstall OS X.

Download Link: (Current version 1.5)
MSi WindOSX86 Upgrade Pack v1.5

The above driver pack only has the 10.5.7 Update pack to allow you to install the 10.5.7 Combo update and the 10.5.7 Update pack and after your restart you will still have full access to your Trackpad and Keyboard. It doesn’t matter if you are running 10.5.4 or 10.5.6, just follow the instructions and you can easily upgrade to 10.5.7.

New notice in this installer

Here’s what’s included in the PDF guide:
Guide to install 10.5.7 Combo update on MSiWindOSX86 build

Prerequisite:

Downloads:
The Driver pack with instructions
The Apple 10.5.7 Combo update (Apple web site)

Ready to install:
Download and then install the Apple 10.5.7 Combo update.
DO NOT RESTART!!
Now run the appropriate installer. This will install the missing PS2 kext’s so that when you restart you will have your keyboard and trackpad.
It is now okay to reboot; click whichever “Restart” button you like, it doesn’t matter.
Just to clear up any misconceptions, here’s a screen shot of my system while I was performing the update:

Almost done:
As you may or may not know, with almost any combo or “point” update, your system will restart, begin to boot up but then restart a second time. This is completely normal and to be expected.

Once you are back on your 1024×600 desktop with a working keyboard and trackpad, you may notice you do not have any sound control in the menubar. Perfectly fine and will be fixed on the next reboot. You should notice on the this shutdown that it shows the familiar “Preparing Boot Caches” dialog box. That too is expected and just what the doctor ordered to fix the sound.

Final boot:
You’re done!

21-May-2009: Revised the download to one driver pack. Updated the ApplePS2Controller.kext so that it will display the Trackpad settings in the Mouse/Keyboard prefpane.
10.5.6 Updates:
21-May-2009: revised installer and UNSELECTED the Trackpad option, added new notice regarding Trackpad and dual booting.
20-May-2009: revised the installer and UNSELECTED the Networking option so now you HAVE to select the Networking option (I can’t believe this has caused so many problems!)
14-May-2009: revised networking file, fixed framebuffer file, added battery kext

Upgraded Wind MacBookNano to 10.5.7 100% originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on May 15, 2009.