Kimb Jones

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You can’t use your Skype headset with Continuity/Handoff in OSX Yosemite

April 11, 2015 by Kimb Jones

I recently started using my Mac to take calls linked to my iPhone (one benefit of being in the same ecosystem) and soon learned of a real pain in the arse problem – you can’t simply use a USB headset to route the audio, nope, you HAVE to use the default OSX Sound settings meaning the audio always comes from your speakers.

This is annoying because both Skype and Hangouts easily allow you to alter their settings to do this so you assume that FaceTime would do the same right?

Anyway, don’t waste your time looking because as Peter Shilling describes on his blog you have to use the OSX ‘Show volume in menu bar’ option as a way to switch things around when making a call:

Top right corner of your Mac you have a tool bar. Start by ensuring that you’ve got the setting Show volume in the menu bar selected (see above screen shot).

When you receive a call via your iPhone hold down the option key on your keyboard and click the speaker icon in your tool bar and there is the answer (for the moment). You can quickly change the output settings while you take the call.

Cheers: Peter Shilling

Not ideal but works until the next OSX update.

 

Filed Under: Personal, Technology

New MacBook Pro!

November 17, 2013 by Kimb Jones

I’ve been rocking a white plastic 2009 model MacBook for a few years, it was my first ever Mac but the poor thing has slowly degraded into being a useless device after upgrading to the latest OSX and has never been really great for doing graphic work on.

New MacBook

A couple of weeks ago I bagged a semi-new MacBook Pro which was pre-loved by my good mate Tony who did an awesome job upgrading it from it’s basic form to a beast that sports 8GB RAM and a 128GB SSD drive alongside the stock 320GB HDD (CD drive has been removed).

The upgrade has totally changed my working model. Before I used Mac for coding/dev and my workstation PC for graphic work. Now I can do everything on one portable machine leaner and faster than before.

I’ll still keep my workstation PC (a beastly Windows machine with an SSD/6GB RAM/1TB HHD) for home media storage, backups and testing but not much else. I’m sad to move away from being totally platform agnostic but as I have no desire to upgrade to Windows 8 I’d have probably ended up using my PC less and less anyway.

And now, the important part:

Essential Apps

  • Path Finder – because OSX’s default Finder sucks
  • Skype – obviously
  • Dropbox – obviously
  • SkyDrive – a new addition, I use this for design resources/assets rather than clog up my Dropbox
  • CrashPlan – backs up my Mac to my PC server, this is then uploaded to the cloud
  • VLC – runs any video
  • CCleaner – because I still like the felling of ‘uninstalling’ apps (doesn’t actually work in OSX Mavericks yet!)
  • FileZilla – because FTP still exists
  • Photoshop & Illustrator – obviously
  • CodeKit, PrePros, Compass.app – for LESS/Sass/Comppass-ing in the GUI
  • DesktopServer – Simplest way to spin up test WordPress sites in minutes
  • Sublime Text – best text editor around (I also have Coda2 floating around)
  • SourceTree – for GUI Git-ing, makes complex branches a lot more easy on the eye
  • Spotify – for cloud music-ing

The rest of my apps for writing/email/productivity are all in the browser (mainly Google powered). I run these in Chrome and run Firefox for general browsing. I swap between Chrome/Firefox for dev.

Filed Under: Design, Development, Personal, Technology

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CEO and co-founder of the Make Do WordPress agency.

I also run the WordPress Sheffield meetup.

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