Want to extend a working session on a Macbook Pro battery from, say, 2 hours to 3.5 hours? Then read this post. If you are looking merely how to extend your Macbook battery life to make it last longer in terms of months or years, there are loads of other resources on the web. Still, applying the methods explained in this post will result in less battery drain, which in turn will also extend overall battery life of your Macbook Pro. In this post I’m explaining primarily methods to squeeze most juice out of your Macbook battery in a working session, and only indirectly – how to extend Macbook battery life.

I searched for a bit more advanced and less known methods to optimize Macbook (Pro) battery session beyond the usual ones (turn down screen brightness, turn off Airport and Bluetooth etc.) . I found a couple of promising ones, implemented them and I am happy with the results, to the extent that I may not need to buy a new Macbook Pro battery just yet. It’s now 39 months old with 506 loadcycles, and still has 75% capacity, which is almost spectacular for its age. Fully charged and optimized it now blasts out a bit more than 2.5 hours of working time – before the optimization I could hope for max 1.5 hours of fun. 66% percent increase in battery session time is certainly worth a look at, regardless of what condition your battery is in. So here is how to max out your Macbook battery. » Read more: Maximize battery cycle time and extend Macbook battery life

Do you use Omnigraffle to create website wireframes/prototypes and other kind of work on your Mac? Have you reached the level of complexity in your wireframes where Omnigraffle just started to run slow? Here is a little tip on how to get this great tool to run a lot faster: launch it with QuartzGL enabled.

If you’re not sure what QuartzGL is, it is very roughly a feature in Leopard (and “Quartz Extreme 2D” in Tiger) which uses GPU to draw OSX user interface – and is not enabled by default. The main reason is that enabling this feature on a OS-level results in various drawing inaccuracies and other instabilities. However, running this feature on an application basis can be beneficial.

This trick might well become obsolete with the introduction of Snow Leopard (and a properly modified Omnigraffle probably), but until 10.6 finally comes around, it will help. I’ve been using this trick for quite a while for running various applications on a Powerbook G4 and now on a MacBook Pro, and speed boost benefits of QuartzGL are by far most noticeable with Omnigraffle.

Enabling QuartzGL in Terminal

There are quite a few how-to’s out there on how to enable QuartzGL. One way is to turn on QuartzGL in Mac OSX terminal, but a logout/restart is required in order for the new settings to work.

To enable QuartzGL in Terminal, type:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver QuartzGLEnabled -boolean YES

and log out and log back in or restart the machine.

To disable QuartzGL in Terminal:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver QuartzGLEnabled -boolean NO

Enabling QuartzGL with Quartz Debug

Enabling QuartzGL via Terminal and then restarting will enable QuartzGL system-wide. But if you want to enable QuartzGL on a per-app basis, a much more convenient way to make Quartz GL work is to use a program called Quartz Debug (use version 3.0 since the procedure explained below does not work – the way it is explained – with version 4.0), which you can find in Apple’s Xcode Developer Tools package – it’s a hefty download and you can get it from the Apple Developer Connection site (
http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/mac/index.action), a registration is required and it’s free.

Update for Snow Leopard users or users of newer versions of XCode: the procedure does not work with Quartz Debug 4.0 or at least you cannot quit Quartz Debug 4.0 and keep your settings saved – you will have to keep Quartz Debug 4.0 open all the time, since this version doesn’t save the settings on force quitting the app. An earlier version, Quartz Debug 3.0 from an older version of XCode, does just that. If you don’t want to bother looking for the right version of XCode, just enable QuartzGL via Terminal as explained above.

If you install the whole Xcode, you can find Quartz Debug in “Developer > Applications > Performance Tools” folder. You don’t need the entire Xcode installation in order to use Quartz Debug- it’s just a program that you can move to your Applications folder and delete the whole rest of the Developer folder. Initially, you could try to extract just the Quartz Debug program from the XCode package perhaps using Pacifist or similar program, or see if you can download a standalone version of Quartz Debug (preferrably 3.0) from another source on the internet. The location of Quartz Debug in Finder:

Next page: Page 2 – Applying QuartzGL for a specific application»

It’s been a while since my last post and in the mean time I came across lots of great software. Yet nothing is quite like this one. If I’d been full of praise for Synergy and its properties of controlling multiple desktops (of different machines) at the same time (and place), this newly discovered package takes multitasking another step further. How to add a third screen to an already existing dual-monitor setup? “Buying” a triple-head video card is of course one way to do it, but in theory, it should also be doable by assigning a portion of (real) desktop to be accessible via VNC or a similar remote desktop client. For it to be actually useful, one could find a way to artificially extend (i.e. double the size of) an existing desktop, then view this extended chunk in a VNC client on a completely different machine – whose monitor preferably sits next to your dual-head setup.

And that is EXACTLY what folks at JINX from Germany did. Their ScreenRecycler is an absolutely fantastic piece of software – its drivers allow for a virtual extension of your desktop – in fact creating a whole new desktop that acts as a regular one. After installing the driver, rebooting and launching ScreenRecycler app, the new display shows up in Tiger’s Display Preferences. You can select its size/resolution and positioning against existing desktops:

My setup is a 12-inch G4 Powerbook (64 Mb VRAM) with 1024×768 primary desktop, external 1400×1050 desktop, and a Windows XP machine with 1152×864 monitor and RealVNC (recommended) installed. After starting Screenrecycler (as sort of a VNC server), launch Real VNC client in WinXP, type in Mac’s IP address on a local network…

…and Mac’s third desktop shows up on PC’s own monitor:

Totally awesome. Jinx is definitely getting my dollars for this brilliant piece.

Ever felt like two keyboards and two mice on a desktop, controlling two different machines, are two too many? With Synergy, you can control all computers around you with a single keyboard and mouse. All you need to do is set the controlling computer up as a Synergy server and the rest as Synergy clients, regardless of whether these clients are Macs or PCs. And you will instantly get a feeling as if you’re working on a two, three, n-monitor setup. Set the server-clients in a desired order – according to how your monitors are positioned – just like in Display Setup:

Run both server and client and you’re done. No more keyboard switching. Enjoy!

Oh yes….download Synergy at Sourceforge.