Administering an Apple lab for the most part is pretty simple. Modern Apple computers tend to work without a lot of hassle and using tools such as Apple’s Remote Desktop and System Image Utility combined with a Netboot server has typically been enough to deal with network imaging and administration.

Yet recently Augustine Christian Academy purchased 15 new silver iMacs for their computer lab and decided to refashion the older iMacs into faculty desktops for the elementary teachers. Since the total number of Apple computers in the school has been regularly increasing, administration has become more complex. While System Image Utility could have still worked for imaging tasks, it was very slow, bulky, and did not allow for easy deployment of various types of machine images. I needed to find something better.

During my search I looked at many different tools including InstaDMG, JAMF Casper Suite, and DeployStudio.

InstaDMG was quite nice. It is free, extremely simple and fun to use. Unfortunately, I found it did not yet support Snow Leopard very well nor did it create a netboot image for easy deployment. JAMF Casper Suite looked quite nice but it was frankly too expensive for a small private school.

DeployStudio on the other hand was fast, agile, and free. It created a netboot image that can perform a number of tasks including imaging, installing packages, and deploying images. New machines can be added to various lists, by MAC address, and instructed to perform various functions by default on netboot.

Thus I was able to create a base image of Snow Leopard and various package sets to differentiate between faculty computers and student computers. When a faculty computer netboots it is instructed to reformat itself into the most up to date faculty image. When a student computer netboots it reformats into a student image.

Even more if a faculty member, for example, brings their laptop in and needs administration software installed, they can simply netboot and install the admin software packages without reformatting and all by using a simply gui.

As you can see DeployStudio is extremely flexible and easy to configure. Combined with Apple Remote Desktop, my life as an admin has become easy.

While there is very little helpful documentation for DeployStudio, or for that matter InstaDMG, DeployStudio is very easy to setup and figure out. If you need the ability to deploy software to many computers in your organization quickly and efficiently, I highly recommend trying out DeployStudio.

www.deploystudio.com

Periodically I want to clean my mac’s system cache, repair permissions, run the maintenance cron jobs, and toggle hidden files in Finder. In the past I would always use Titanium Software’s Onyx to accomplish this feat easily and all in one program.

Yet a few days ago I stumbled upon Dare to be Creative’s MainMenu. While I think that this software has a horribly unspecific name, MainMenu consolidates many of the features contained in Onyx into a simple, beautiful, and elegant menu bar UI. In fact all of MainMenu’s features are only 2 clicks away.

While MainMenu does lack in the depth of Onyx, it contains all of the features I would want to use on a day to day basis. Thus while I still love and will continue to use Onyx, MainMenu is a wonderfully polished and ellegant replacement for much of its functionality.

Check it out at santasw.com!

I realize that this blog post will not be for everyone. Not everybody has tons of windows open at any given time, nor needs a quick way to manage windows. Yet if you do any kind of development (or research related writing) on a mac, Irradiated Software’s SizeUp may be exactly what you were looking for.

SizeUp let’s you quickly resize windows using keyboard shortcuts. You can instantly size a window to take up 1/2 or 1/4 of the screen and place it in any corner with a simple hot-key. (You may also make a window full screen, or centered at a specified dimension). This is extremely useful if you need to drag files between several finder windows, monitor several terminals, or even just write a document side by side with a website. For more information about SizeUp’s features check out the product page and the screencast.

One thing, completely unrelated to the functionality of this product is the product licensing fees. For me, this kind of functionality is quite useful but I would never pay the developer’s suggested price tag of $9.99. A program to manipulate my windows via the keyboard is just not worth $10 to me (call me cheap). Yet I would be willing to pay a developer a few dollars for this kind of functionality. Irradiated Software understands this and has put in place “Name Your Price” licensing. Basically the developer sets a “suggested” price and a minimum price (to cover his costs) and then lets you pay the value you feel you will get out of the product. This pricing model, in my oppinion, really makes SizeUp a good value.

Even more, if the $2.99 minimum price is still too much for you, there is also a slimmed down version of SizeUp named TwoUp—which is freeware.

In conclusion, if you do much development or writing check out Irradiated Software’s SizeUp. It’s a simple program yet a big time saver!

One thing that has come up frequently in recent conversations is TextMate. While not as configurable as vim or emacs, TextMate has quickly become my favorite all time text editor on any platform. It is extremely powerful yet still easy to use and to customize.

Unfortunately it is a bit lacking out of the box and really needs some configuring. There are also many plugins and bundles out there but finding good ones requires a lot of utilization of Google.

Thus to make getting started with TM easier I have compiled a short list of the various bundles, plugins, and themes that I use in my setup.

Theme

• Twilight (built-in)

Bundles (Extra)

• subtleGradient — Thomas Aylott’s Awesome text processing bundle (be sure to checkout the Balance Jr functions) svn
• ACK “Fin in Project” Bundle here
• YUI Compressor Bundle here
• Ruby Saas Bundle here
• Markdown Bundle svn
• JavaScript jQuery Bundle svn

Plugins

• Dialog 2 — TextMate 2 dialog plugins svn
• ReMate — Used to disable the automatic project tree refresh when TextMate regains focus here
• ProjectPlus — Ciarán Walsh’s awesome project drawer plugin. Makes working with projects much nicer. here

For a few months the thought of switching to VMware Fusion for my windows virtualization needs has been on my mind. In fact the only reason I had not switched was due to not wanting to spend another $80 on a piece of software which I don’t use all that often.

But today I was sent a marketing email via Parallels announcing the Parallels Desktop for mac 4.0 update. The update looked pretty good, maybe even bringing Parallels desktop back up to a competitive plane with VMware Fusion, but at the bottom line they wanted $40 to get all the new bells and whistles.

Now I already spent $80 originally on this app at version 2.0. Then only 2 months afterwards, due to some very specific needs, I spent another $40 to upgrade to version 3. This time around I just can not justify giving Parallels more money. Don’t get my wrong, I am not trying to be cheap. But why is it that Parallels, who writes less stable software than VMware, is not willing to upgrade their clients for free while VMware is? I just can’t justify regularly spending money to upgrade an inferior product, when a stronger product exists that will not require update fees.

This was nonetheless the last straw for me. I am now looking forward to more stable virtualization, free upgrades (hopefully), and better linux virtualization. Wish me luck - I’m currently importing one of my old Parallels vms into Fusion. :)