The recent (June ‘07) article over on TorrentFreak about uTorrent for Mac doesn’t seem hopeful or at least soon coming. They do have another article explaining ways to run uTorrent on your Mac via Crossover Office (beta) or Parallels.

As I migrated away from Windows I bought a copy of Parallels thinking I’d run them side by side so I could use some of those Windows-only apps like XnView and my old copy of Fontlab Using Windows apps so seldomly, I don’t like the idea of installing (and making me buy) a whole copy of Windows onto my Macbook Pro for an occasional use.

Enter uTorrent.

I had been using Azureus for my torrenting needs until Comcast started blocking resetting my upload transfers. I read that uTorrent was so much better but alas, Windows only. Well, after trying the ie4osx kit, I ended up not using the IE part so much as the intel native Darwine kit and it’s accompanying WinHelper.app. I gave it a try, downloaded the uTorrent installer, ran it through WineHelper.app and seconds later, a successful install. The real test was would it launch and better yet, access the internets? It does.

Required Parts for uTorrent on the Mac:

1] Install X11 from your Mac OSX install CD or DVD. This is necessary for running any Windows apps without using Parallels.

2] Download and install Darwine for your Mac’s CPU architecture
Mount the DMG and drag the “Darwine” folder to your “Applications” folder. Run the various wine* apps in the “Sample Applications” folder inside the “Darwine” folder. These will help better configure the environment.

Links to both Intel and PowerPC builds of Darwine:

Darwine for Intel Macs
Darwine for PPC Macs

3] Download the install package for uTorrent.
Run the install.exe and let uTorrent install to the “Program Files” directory (a hidden “.wine” folder within your home folder).
uTorrent

4] Launch WineHelper.app from the “Darwine” folder then go to File > Open, Program Files > utorrent > utorrent.exe
This will launch X11, a log window and a terminal window. You can safely close both the log and terminal windows without hurting the uTorrent process.

5] Open a torrent from uTorrent’s File menu, point it to where you want to save the file and you’re off!

Note: You can’t hide uTorrent like a normal Mac app, you can hide X11 but not the uTorrent window itself. However, you can minimize it like a normal Windows app, except it will minimize down to the bottom left of your screen, sort of hovering near the top edge of the dock. Clicking the reduced title bar will present you with a pop-up menu of options like “Restore”, “Close” “Maximize” and a few uTorrent specific options.

Note2: If the option “Minimize uTorrent to tray” it checked, uTorrent will disappear to a tiny rectangular window and icon at the top left of your screen, directly under the menu bar. This icon can be right-clicked to access all of uTorrent’s system tray icon options.

Hopefully, the uTorrent for Mac project will continue but this works (for me) in the meantime.

After having comments set to “always moderate” for a while, I’ve gotten tired of deleting the spam comments bots dump on my blog so I turned on Askimet once I realized it wasn’t on and installed the reCaptcha plugin for Wordpress.

On every other site, captchas are a pain for me. I usually type the image letters in a few times since it usually tells me I’m wrong even though it looks right to me. Most of the time I push through just to post that comment. Sometimes I just leave the site in frustration.

ReCaptcha seems to be a little nicer to use. It’s based on words (or parts of words) scanned out of books and visually altered a bit to defeat spam bots while maintaining readability for us lowly humans. The letters or words you type in are used to digitize public domain books so your typing isn’t done in vain. Also available is an audio clip you can play that speaks some numbers aloud instead of typing the letters. It can be refreshed without having to reload the entire page, which is nice if you’ve written a long or link-heavy post and don’t want it to get lost.

I may try a couple other plugins if the spam comments don’t slow down. What’s working on your site and how difficult is your method to implement?

[update] I am still getting spam comments and didn’t understand why, so I wrote a gibberish comment and tried submitting it without typing in the captcha. It was accepted and I was confused. I went to the reCaptcha site to find out why and it seems the plugin works by marking a comment as spam when the captcha isn’t correctly typed in. So the comment is still accepted but when it’s marked as spam, Askimet immediately dumps it into the Spam Comments box and neither you nor your reader ever sees the spam. Pretty slick! I’d say reCaptcha is a good alternative for those looking at anti-spam solutions who dislike the “normal” captcha software.

I recently discovered that InDesign CS3 has extended a feature present in the CS2 version. In the previous version of ID, you would place a PDF and choose the pages you wanted to place. When placed, a link to the file was created and it was treated just like any other image (meaning you couldn’t edit the PDF contents within InDesign). This feature has been expanded upon greatly with the latest incarnation of ID by allowing the placing of other InDesign files (.indd). This works better than the PDF placement because now, with the addition of importing multiple images at once, you can place multiple pages without going to the File>Place (or Cmd+D) over and over.

This feature would be useful anytime a larger project is divided into smaller parts and separated into multiple ID files. I recently have been working at a promotional products company who creates a yearly catalog. The catalog is divided into multiple sections (folders of files) and each section is split into even more InDesign files. Each section is then printed and bound separately. To expedite printing, you could create one master ID file for each section with the entire section laid out in one file. What’s great about this feature is that when any placed ID file is modified, the master layout with the placed pages will automatically update the linked file, just like an image. When viewing the Links panel, all pages and images are listed. You can choose “Edit Original” on any pages or image linked to a placed page. It’s pretty slick when you start using it.

A word of caution, since ID must load all the pages you want to place into memory, the initial Place command can seem slow (this could have been unique to my machine or the company’s network so your milage may vary). Once the loaded cursor appears though, you can drop, drop drop until all chosen pages are placed in the new document. Also like images, the pages come in at 100% so no scaling or box creation is necessary.

If you found this tip useful, post a comment telling other readers how you implemented it and whether or not it increased or decreased the production process.

Sure, I’ve gotten annoyed by the eyesore of Leopard’s new Stacks feature. Looks like a jumbled mess and since the icons change based on the contents, it’s hard to tell the Stacks apart if you have multiple Stacks without constant icons. I briefly read over the modified date hack to keep a constant icon and it seems like a hassle. I wanted something quick and easy to implement so I figured out a better way. Here’s an easy tip for creating a static icon (or custom icon) at the front of the Stack.
Myself, I have four Stacks in the Dock: /Applications, Utilities, Documents and Downloads (pic 1).

When clicking on the Stack, I think the trick becomes pretty clear, as seen here
(pic 2).

This trick is simply achieved by creating a folder within the folder you intend to use as a Stack and change its name to a space character. After that, just do a Cmd+I (Get Info) on the icon you’d like to use, select the icon, copy it (cmd+c) then Get Info again on the new folder and paste the icon onto the existing folder icon. Voila! new constant icon (pic 3).

The only drawback here is you can’t sort the Stack by anything except “Name” because it will obviously sort to whatever matches that criteria. I prefer sorting by name anyway so this works out great for me and I hope it works for you too.

Update: Link to contract PDF has been fixed!
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Contracts are an integral part of any freelancer’s toolkit. Below, I’ve posted a good beginner contract in non-editable PDF form which will serve as the base for my own. Startup graphic designers, web designers and programmers should all have one before dealing with their first client, many don’t know where to begin when writing one. The PDF I’ve posted should give you a good jump-off point to draft your own, inserting your own logo and information then have it reviewed by a local laywer, for touching up any legal details specific to your city or state.

Freelance Starter Contract

Post inspired by the recent article on Web Worker Daily titled
“Web Worker 101: 7 Business Basics”.
The tips are wise but there isn’t a link or suggestion on where to find a good, beginner contract or template so I have provided one here covering proposals, estimates, production, invoices, basic copyright, scheduling, payment and more.