Microsoft NTFS for Mac Screenshot
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How to both WRITE to and read from PC [NTFS] Drives on macOS

A file system is the component that allows an OS (operating system) read from and write to files on your devices storage. Every OS has its own file system, some of which are more compatible across platforms than others. For example, Mac computers used exclusively HFS+, while the current versions of Windows uses NTFS (New Technology File System). When you connect a storage device formatted in NTFS to a Mac, it is recognized and read alright, but you can’t modify it by any CRUD operation i.e. Create, Read, Update, Delete any files on it  – unless you have some 3rd party add-ons installed and configured, and you can learn about them in this article to ultimately enable Mac to write onto NTFS drives.

Although the inability to write to NTFS on the Mac might become quite an issue for Mac newbies, be them first-time computer users or switchers from PC, the solution which is was invented as early 2000s, has evolved over the years as macOS (X) has been updated. The Mac operating system formerly called OS X – last year renamed macOS – can always read & write to PC disks and hard drive volumes formatted in FAT32 – a format which is not quite used any more due to its limitations of 4 GB maximum file size and 2 TB for maximum storage volume, whereas NTFS, free of these limitations, is readable not just by Macs since day 1, but by almost all non Windows-PC systems as well. However NTFS is not writable by default outside Windows due to a restriction brought on by Microsoft. As mentioned, there already are a few 3rd party solutions and workarounds to remove this restriction.

With the release of macOS High Sierra which introduced Apple’s new file system called APFS to be used by newer SSD-based Macs replacing the legacy HFS+, bringing on the ability to write to NTFS formatted volumes has become a little more complicated. Since my article titled Ability to write to NTFS volumes on the Mac published back in 2008 has become fairly obsolete so that the suggested workaround(s) in it are now very difficult if not impossible to apply, in this new, 2018 article, I’ll be explaining some of the best solutions for the need to write to PC volumes a.k.a. NTFS drives as an assertive old-timer. I’ve been using Apple computers since 1985 and have been doing computing cross-platform computing since 1993, and have been using Bootcamp since the year it came out and cross-platform working is at the heart of most of my digital activity.

Read on to find out about free and paid solutions to be able to write to NTFS disks and other storage devices mounted on the Mac.[Read more]

iWork
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iWork in iCloud – Free Web-based Productivity Suite from Apple

iWork from Apple

Although we do not hear the name “iWork” pronounced anywhere any more, it was the name for the trilogy of the full-blown productivity suite from Apple featuring word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications alternative to Microsoft Office. The “hard-client” version of these applications – namely “Pages“, the word processing app, “Numbers” the spreadsheet app, and “Keynote“, the presentation app – are usually available for free exclusively to Apple customers who purchased at least one of Apple hardware product such as a Mac computer or an iOS-based smart device such as an iPhone or iPad or at what I would call a reasonable price to be purchased separately by old-timers and early-adopters like myself.

iWorkHowever, Apple has also made web versions of these applications back in 2011. As of 2012, the software set was free to any purchaser of a new Apple product – a perpetual license is automatically granted to the associated Apple ID of such a customer so that they can download them for any of their Apple devices from Apple’s App Store.

Very few people know that the web application version of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are actually free for everyone who just signs up to obtain a free Apple ID and get access to iCloud.com (which is also for free) via this Apple ID even if they didn’t (and won’t) purchase anything from Apple. And because the iCloud versions of these applications simply run inside a web browser, you do not necessarily need a Mac or an Apple smart device to use them.

PagesAs mentioned above, the alternative “Office” productivity suite consists of “Pages” the word processor which is pretty much compatible back and forth with the files created with Microsoft Word, “Numbers” the spreadsheet Numbers iconsolution with artistic style so that aside from creating and working with traditional spreadsheets, you can also create ones which look like product brochures with stylish tables and formatting with an impressive (but not extreme) compatibility with Excel, and the last but not least is the “Keynote” application which is a presentation application that works the “Apple way”. These three applications can import and export most MS Office files (except those loaded with VBScript macros), and they are even capable of producing PDF outputs. With Pages, it is even possible to export your document as an ePub file – great news for self-publishing book authors!

Apple Keynote iconTo use these applications, all you need is a browser and an “Apple ID”. Very few users know that on any computer, be it a Mac, Windows PC or Linux/UNIX machine – especially one freshly set up with any applications not yet installed except a default web browser coming along out-of-the-box, one can just log in to www.icloud.com and start working on .doc(x), .xls(x) and .ppt(x) files (or create them from scratch), share them by e-mail (with no e-mail client set up on that very computer) and even export them as PDFs – all just using a compatible browser.

Pages on iCloud screenshot

Exporting a newsletter from Pages word processor running in a web browser connected to iCloud.com

At the time of this writing when Safari 10.1 is a month old since its release, iWork page on Apple’s web site acknowledged that iWork for iCloud works with Safari 6.0.3 or later, Chrome 27.0.1 or later, and Internet Explorer 10.0.9 or later. Although a recent version of Firefox should do fine as well, Apple does not seem to officially support Firefox, neither guarantees iCloud will work fine on it.

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How to Convert .daa Disk Images to .iso

.DAA to .ISO ConverterIf you ever run into a disk image in .daa format, and you need to access its contents on Mac OS X, DAA Converter for Mac OS X is what you need.

DAA Converter for Mac OS X is a free utility for converting DAA & GBI disk images to ISO format so they can be accessed on your Mac.

DAA Converter is a native GUI application which wraps the command-line tool, DAA2ISO / GBI 2 ISO, by Luigi Auriemma.
It runs on Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or later. I have tested it on Mac OS X Leopard which works just fine on 10.5, too.

Just drag the icon of any .daa or .gib disk image onto the application’s icon, and the conversion process will instantly take place – an .iso version of the disk image will be instantly created on the same directory as the source image file.

You can download DAA Converter for Mac OS X (141 downloads)  here or visit the downloads page.

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How to easily open UIF disk images on the Mac and convert to .iso format

UIF2ISO MacPopular among Windows PC users .Uif is an alternative disk image format to others like .iso.img and .bin-.cue couples.

You can open and convert UIF disk images on Mac OS X using one of the following disk image utilities:

  1. Uif2iso which is a cross-platform command-line tool developed by Luigi Auriemma.
  2. Uif2iso4mac a GUI application by Torsten Curdt . Uif2iso4mac is built upon  Luigi Auriemma’s uif2iso command line utility with a Mac graphic user interface adding basic functionalities of a real Mac app like drag-and-drop and a menu bar i.e. choosing an image using the File > Open menu.

[Read more]

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Download Google Chrome for Mac (Beta) here

Although a beta version of the new, popular, long-awaited web browser Google Chrome for the Mac has already been released, the download page file has been removed from Google’s own search results.

Google Chrome for Mac Download Page at Google
Luckily I had downloaded a beta version and already using it. You can download it here for your own hands-on experience on Google Chrome on your Mac.

Download Google Chrome for Mac (offline installer) (636 downloads) for Mac OS X (supposedly for Intel only)

Google Chrome is made possible by the Chromium open source project and some other open source software.

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Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard