Bambi’s Mac Mail: Google Maps, Sugar App, Switchers.

First off, Google Maps. It doesn’t work with Safari, but is fine in Firefox (Mozilla, Netscape, not OmniWeb). Of course, Google Maps is still in beta, so there’s hope, right? Click Here for the site (if you’re not using Safari).

Tera’s Application of the Week was the AddressBook plugin which linked addresses to the Google Maps (in Firefox, for now). AddressBook already has a link to MapQuest. Control-click (or, right click) on an AddressBook address.

Some Mac users live in small towns. They may even have electricity and running water. Mac user “foo” brought us up to speed on his/her situation:

“This is a cool feature, but as cool features sometimes are, it is also pretty useless. I dont know about the rest of you, but *my* address book contains 3 types of entries: friends, family, and co-workers. I know where these people live—I dont need a map.”

I had the pleasure last week of introducing SugarSuite to Mac users. Sugar is an OpenSource customer relationship management application that runs on PHP and MySQL.

It’s very powerful, flexible, and web-based. It’ll also run on Mac OS X if you download and install PHP and MySQL and turn on the Apache web server. All, including Sugar, are free.

Some Mac users had trouble with the Unix file permissions, but finally got the hang of it. Reader “eduo’s” comments summed it up:

“Great article! Sadly some of the comments show some of the idiosyncracies of Unix can’t be avoided. Some comments have touched on this and although I believe more info should be given (I think using “directory” should be kept, as it lets people understand this is not a task to be done 100% on the Finder), I also believe it’s not the task of this article to do so.

Maybe doing a small feature with basic terminal commands (how to change directories, know where you are, permissions, etc.) would be a good idea to reference from these kinds of articles.

Otherwise the negative comments stemmed from lack of knowledge (which isn’t a sin, just probably not the focus of these articles; to every time mention about permissions and config files) might discourage the writes. 

Also, I applaud the decision of recommending Marc’s packages. The man has done a LOT to close the gap between the powerful unix underpinnings of OSX (mainly apache and PHP) and the new users. “

Click Here for the link to the SugarSuite article.

How many Macs have you owned? How many iPods? Tera seems to have topped the list, though many Mac users seemed surprised when they stopped to count.

As an example, read the comment from user “srayconstantine:”

“I considered the question of how many Macs I have purchased carefully and was stunned to realize that my PowerBook G4 is my 15th Mac purchase. 

Starting with my IIcx in 1989, I also purchased a Mac SE, Mac Classic, two Centris 660s, a PowerBook 620c, a rev B iMac, a PowerMac 9600, an original iBook, 4 snow iBooks (for my wife and 3 of my daughters), a Quicksilver and my PowerBook G4.

Oh, and for Christmas, my 4 daughters and my son all got iPods. I never owned a PC.”

Aren’t hand me downs neat? Oh,  ray said, “I never owned a PC.” A true Mac purist.

Over 1,000 responded to Tera’s poll on iPods and Macs. To see the results, Click Here.