MacMost: Making the most of your Mac, iPod, Apple TV and iPhone.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    “Hi, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.
    Today, let’s take a look at some great free iPhone Apps. Among the thousands of applications at the iPhone Apps store, there are some that are completely free. Now, a lot of these are junk but some are actually pretty good. So, let’s take a look at some of the free iPhone Apps I’ve been using recently.
    Let’s start by taking a look at Google Earth. Google Earth is just like you would see it on the map. It presents the entire earth via satellite photos and allows you to jump around, do searches, and even use the GPS in your device to find out where you currently are. You can go ahead and pinch and squeeze to expand, contract, review, and even rotate it around. So, it’s pretty neat. I’ll let you decide whether it’s a toy or a useful tool.
    Next up is iTalk from Griffin. Now, there are a variety of free and pay audio recording iPhone Apps out there. This one is ad supported–you can see an ad at the bottom. The thing about iTalk is that it has a lot of features. It lets you select quality, start a recording, then you can pause a recording and pick it up later on. So, it’s easy to record short memos or maybe an entire university lecture. When you’re done, I like the fact that you can go back in and edit notes and information about the recording. Then you can transfer it to your Mac using a piece of software that you download for you Mac as well.
    Now, here’s one to keep an eye on. It’s called Fring and what it allows you to do is to chat over a lot of instant messaging networks so that you can avoid the SMS over AT&T if you like. You can also make calls over voice over IP networks like Skype. So, I’ve entered in my Skype account information here and I have the ability through a paid Skype account to make calls out on Skype so I can actually dial a number and use Skype rather than AT&T to make a call. Now, I can only do this over a WiFi network. So, I can do it at home or at the office but that’s going to save me a lot of minutes every month. The quality is so-so and the software is really buggy so it’s not something that’s going to replace your regular phone just yet, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
    Here’s one called Translator. Now, Translator does exactly what you may think. It allows you to go ahead and select a starting language, a target language, and then go ahead type some text, and translate. It’s pretty useful for translating things you may be reading but not that great for helping you speak foreign language because it does not give you a pronunciation guide. But still, it’s free.
    Now here is one that no iPhone web developer should be without. It is called simply Fonts. What it does is it gives you a complete list of all the fonts that are available on the iPhone and it includes the ability to actually see how they look on the iPhone. So, this is very useful for designing your CSS for iPhone webpages.
    Wikipanion is another self explanatory application. It basically allows you to look up things on Wikipedia. Now, it does this fast enough in a nice enough way to make me prefer it over using the wikipedia.org website through Safari on the iPhone.
    Now, no internet user should be without a FaceBook account and no FaceBook user with an iPhone should be without the FaceBook iPhone App. It basically allows you to access almost your entire FaceBook account and even some different applications. It’s very useful and great for updating your status and checking your friends’ status updates. There is also a Linked-In application if you use that network instead.
    Of course, a great way to find free or pay iPhone Apps is to go to the MacMost.com/iphoneapps directory. There you can go ahead and search for things that are new, things that have been updated, or you can search by price so you can see the free stuff first. Give it a try.
    Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig for MacMost Now.

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    Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today let’s take a look at some web browser alternatives.
    So if you’ve got a Mac you’ve got Safari and chances are that’s what you use, that’s the main Mac browser. Second to that is Firefox which a lot of people use and we’ve talked about before. But there’s actually a whole bunch of alternative browsers. Let’s go and take a look at a handful of them.
    So the first one we should probably mention is WebKit, what WebKit is the open source browser behind Safari. So it’s actually really just Safari, but there are new releases of it every single night. That’s right you can go and download it at nightly.webkit.org and it’s a good alternative if you really want the cutting edge version of Safari. A lot of people also report that WebKit is faster than the currently released version of Safari so if speed is important to you, you might want to get this free browser.
    Another open source and free browser is Camino and this is also one that I find to be incredibly fast. You can download it at caminobrowser.org
    And most alternative web browsers are based on a certain development kit that you can see browser to browser, but not Opera. Opera is based on its own set of source code so it’s a little bit different than everything else, it’s also pretty fast. You can go and download it at opera.com
    So OmniWeb is a little bit different than all the other browsers in that it actually costs something. It costs $15, of course there is a free trial as well. You get it at omnigroup.com now what you get for this, there are a lot of advanced features. Like, for instance, the ability to have work spaces. That’s a complete set of windows, tabs, preferences, everything that you can customize for a different browsing experience and save for later.
    Now perhaps the most unusual web browser in our group is one called Flock, you can get it at flock.com. It’s also our free web browser based on Firefox, but it has a ton of extra features you can see right away. In a sidebar it presents things like all your social networks so for instance here I’ve got Twitter in the left sidebar. I can update my status and I can also check on everybody else’s status who I’m following you can do the same thing with Facebook or sites like YouTube so there’s a ton of different little top bars and sidebars for tracking different things in your social meeting networks. You can even have a homepage established that combines all sorts of different things like RSS feeds kind of like My Yahoo! or iGoogle, but done inside your web browser.
    So basically all of these web browsers are kind of similar, the differences are very subtle. As they’ve been adding features over the years they’ve been getting closer and closer to each other and there’s really not much incentive to switch from Safari or Firefox to one of these. Firefox, though, has the big advantage of all the add-ins so if there’s some feature you really need chances are somebody’s created an add-on for it. Flock has an advantage if you’re a really big user of social media if you’re checking your Facebook account or Twitter account every five minuets then you probably want to check out Flock. And also you probably want to check out Camino if you really want something just super fast and simple. Another one to check out in that class is one called iCab, as well.
    The rest of them have features that may or may not appeal to you, they all are either free or have a free trial so if you really are interested in getting a different browser I encourage you all to look at them. I’ll put all the links in the show notes at MacMost.com and download them all and compare them for yourselves. If you find anything interesting be sure to leave a comment to this episode at MacMost.com. Till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

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    Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today I want to show you how to Print Photo Books using iPhoto at apple.com.
    So I’m going to risk sounding like an infomercial here ’cause I really love this. Using iPhoto you can go ahead and order through apple.com books that have your photos in them. You get wire-bound, soft-cover, or hard-cover books. All different sizes. They range in prices from $10.00 for a small soft-cover book to $30.00 and more for a large hard-cover book. You basically go into iPhoto, choose the photos you want, and then you can lay them out, and you can add additional pages as well so you can make these things pretty much as big as you want. You can fit multiple photos on a single page, and do all sorts of creative things with them. Let’s go and take a closer look.
    Alright, so here we are in iPhoto. Now, you can choose the photos that you want to make into a book, and you can go ahead and click the book icon at the bottom and then get to choose the type of book. You can choose hard-cover, soft-cover, or wire-bound at different sizes. So we can choose a medium soft-cover, for instance. We can pick from one of many different themes to start with, and get started. Then you get your photos at the top and view your book at the bottom. You can flip through the pages, back and forth, and then go ahead and drag and drop photos into areas and also enter text. You can go ahead and enter large blocks of texts on some pages, and other pages you can go ahead and just have photos, if you like. Um, you can go ahead and adjust the themes, and you can adjust the layouts of single pages, for instance, to change it. You can add additional pages if you don’t want to go with the standard number of pages in a book. And you can even use autoflow, which will just flow in all your photos into a book to be really quick about it. And go through, and play with your book and adjust it as much as you want. You can also, of course, even adjust individual pictures, changing the scale and the contrast of the photo here, even applying special effects to it. So there’s tons of stuff that you can do, with the photos. It makes you go wow with your design. You can change the settings of the book, for instance, change the fonts, sizes, that type of thing. In addition to pressing the buy book button, for ordering information, you can also go ahead and print out your book. Now, this is one of the coolest features. If you have a great printer, for instance, you could, of course, go ahead and print your book at use “your own printer.” A few of us have a printer with this kind of quality, but you can also save it to PDF, which means you can create a digital copy of your book for archiving purposes so now you can get one or more copies printed out, and of course, save it in iPhoto, but you can also have this online version. You could even upload it or email it to friends.
    Now, I’ve come full circle on how much I like this product. At first, I didn’t think it was a good deal. It seemed to be a little bit expensive, might as well keep the photos as digital copies, or go to a cheaper service and get them printed out as regular photos. Well, when I saw how many photos you can fit on a page, particularly when the photos should be grouped together and also how many different options there were and how nice these books were, and how much nicer they were than actually printing individual photos out and making your own photo albums, well, I came around. Now I love them and I like to print them up as presents for people, from special events, I also like to make them for my own library for special events that I’ve taken photos from. It really adds a lot more value to my digital photo taking.
    I know this sounds like an infomercial, but I really do like it.
    Now, you can go to apple website, and take a look at all the different options and prices for these iPhoto printing books. There’s a lot of different information here and a lot of really good examples of what you can do. It even has examples of all the different themes.
    So if you like taking digital photos, and you like photo albums, then you may like this. So check it out. Till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.