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MacMost Now 152: How To Report a Bug To Apple

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig shows you how to report a bug to Apple. If you’ve ever been frustrated by an Apple application that isn’t working right or crashes, this is the way to tell Apple about the problem and help them fix it.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today let’s take a look at how you can report a bug to Apple.
    So a bug can be anything from a crash of an application to something that’s just not working as you expected. Now when you find something like this and especially if it really bugs you, you probably want to report it. Well, reporting to Apple can be done in many different ways. Let’s take a look at three of them.
    Now, the most official way to file a bug report is to go to Apple’s official site, bugreport.apple.com. Now in order to file a bug report here, you have to be a member of the Apple Developer Community. So you have to sign up for an ADC membership. Doing so is free for the most basic membership, which then allows you to file a report like this. You can then go back and track your report as well.
    Now another thing you can do is you can go to the discussions area at Apple.com. Just go to discussions.apple.com. Now here you’ll find different forums for all sorts of different applications and aspects of Apple hardware and software. So go to the one that applies to the bug you want to report. The first thing you’re going to want to do is search to see if there’s already a thread on this particular issue. If there is, you can contribute to the thread. Give more details about what you found or continue the call for Apple to fix the problem or change the feature. If there isn’t a current thread you can go and add one yourself. Now it’s best actually to get as much useful information as you can and indicate that you want to help and help find a solution for the problem. That will get you the best response. Then go and check in on the discussion as often as you can so you can update people who ask you questions, or maybe even Apple engineers that post responses to that thread.
    Now one of the most common places for users to find bugs is in Safari. See, Safari has got to be able to browse the entire internet, which is millions by millions of different web pages, all built by different people. So, it’s pretty common that Safari or any browser doesn’t render a page correctly. When you want to report that Safari isn’t doing something right, you don’t have to go to any of those different web addresses. All you need to do is, inside Safari, choose the Safari menu and choose ‘Report Bugs to Apple.’ This will bring up a short little form with the page address that you’re currently on already filled in, and you just describe what is wrong with the page and why it should be fixed. You can also add some more options like the basic type of problem, and you can even send a screen shot of exactly what you’re seeing on the current page or the source of the page. So it’s a great, quick way to report bugs in Safari to Apple.
    As a software developer, I know how important it is to get good bug reports. But all too often, bug reports are just too simple. For instance, someone reports that there’s just simply a crash, or something goes wrong. You want to describe exactly what’s going on, and whenever possible, produce steps that will reproduce the bug every time. Tell the developer everything about your system that you can as well so that they know exactly what’s happening. Some piece of information you think isn’t that important could actually be the key for the developer to find the bug and fix it.
    Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Posted in MacMost Now, Video Podcast, frontpage | 1 Comment »

MacMost Now 151: Free iPhone Apps

Monday, October 27th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig looks at seven free iPhone applications: Google Earth, iTalk, Fring, Fonts, Translator, Wikipandion and FaceBook. You can find iPhone Apps using the MacMost iPhone App directory at http://macmost.com/iphoneapps/ .

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.

Show notes:
    You can search for iPhone Apps and sort them by price to find the free ones at the MacMost iPhone Apps Directory. You can find the ones talked about in the show there too:
    Google Earth: Explore our planet using satellite views and Web data.
    iTalk: Record audio.
    Fring: Instant messaging and calls over Skype using Wifi.
    Fonts: See which fonts are installed on your iPhone and how they look. Useful for iPhone Web site developers.
    Free Translator: Translate text from one language to another.
    Wikipanion: Look up items on Wikipedia.
    Facebook: Check FaceBook and make status updates.

Posted in MacMost Now, Video Podcast, frontpage | No Comments »

MacMost Now 150: Mac Web Browser Alternatives

Friday, October 24th, 2008 by rosenz

   http://macmost.com/ Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at some alternatives to using Safari or Firefox on Mac. They include Camino, Flock, Opera, Web Kit Nightly Builds and OmniWeb.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    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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MacMost Now 149: Printing Photo Books With iPhoto

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig shows you how to create an print books of your photos using iPhoto. You can order them from Apple, or print them yourself, or save them as PDF files.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    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.

Posted in MacMost Now, Video Podcast, frontpage | 1 Comment »

In Defense of Non-Firewire MacBooks

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 by rosenz

   Everyone is in agreement that the new MacBooks look great. But almost everyone is also in agreement that the biggest problem with the new MacBooks is the removal of a Firewire port. The MacBook Pros have one, but not the new MacBooks.
    The primary use of this Firewire port was to import digital video from a camcorder. They can also be used to connect external hard drives and some other devices. But hard drives are usually USB2 nowadays, which are comparable in transfer speed to Firewire. So the main problem with not having Firewire on the new MacBooks is in connecting camcorders.
    But Steve Jobs defended this move, saying that many new camcorders use USB2 anyway. This is surprisingly true. I haven’t bought a new camcorder in about 2 years, and then Firewire was the standard. But looking around now, I see that USB2 has indeed moved into this area. There are still Firewire connectors on some camcorders, but USB2 does seem to have taken over.
    In addition, the home video camcorder market has changed. Nowadays, any decent digital camera has a video mode that captures at least 640×480 video at 30 frames per second. The quality isn’t pro-level, or even Web video level in many cases, but it is definitely family reunion video level. And these videos are transferred to your computer via USB2, or using a card reader. Also, with the popularity of small, cheap video cameras like the Flip, many people are forgetting about consumer-level camcorders all together in favor of this cool little devices.
    So the only problem I see is the situation where someone who has a Firewire-only camcorder buys a new MacBook to replace an old one. Now they find they can no longer connect the two. Their upgrade has turned into a downgrade. And with no expansion slot on a MacBook, and no way to adapt USB2 to Firewire, they really are stuck. There is just no way to use Firewire on their new MacBook.
    So existing MacBook users that use their MacBooks with a Firewire camcorder need to either get a new camcorder or upgrade to a MacBook Pro, not a MacBook.
    Looking at it from Apple’s point of view, I do see this taking care of one problem: how to differentiate the MacBooks from the MacBook Pros. In the past, the case has been different, as well as the video chips. Now that they are the same, we’ve got Firewire, expansion slot, and larger screen, to name the major differences.
    So the good news is it will be easier to choose between MacBooks and MacBook Pros. The bad news is that if you really want Firewire, you’re going to have to pay a lot more for it. But with a difference in price of $700, you can afford to replace that old camcorder with a new one anyway.

Posted in Blog Posts, frontpage | 4 Comments »

MacMost Now 148: Merging Folders

Monday, October 20th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at three methods of merging files inside of folders. You can use Apple’s FileMerge that comes with XCode, the ‘ditto’ command in Terminal or a variety of downloadable programs including File Synchronization.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi. This is Gary with macmost.com. Today let’s look at different methods for merging folders full of files in Mac OS 10. If there’s one way that Windows has Mac OS 10 beat, it’s in folder merging. This is when you take a folder and drag and drop it onto another folder. In Windows, it’ll merge the two folders. It’ll save the newest copy of files with the same name, and it will put new files into the merged folder, but it won’t delete any old ones. In Mac OS 10, you’re simply replacing one folder’s contents with the other’s, meaning you’re deleting any files that weren’t in the second folder — not a merge at all. But there are many different ways to do merges of folders in Mac OS 10. Let’s take a look at three such ways. Let’s take a look at the test case. I’ve got two folders here, Test1 and Test2. In Test1 I have four files, Test File 1, 2, 3 and 5. In Test2 I’ve got four files also, Test File 1, 2, 4 and 5. So there is a file that is missing from here and vice versa, numbers 3 and 4. In addition, Test1/File2 was modified yesterday at 9:00, but in here, Test File 2 was actually modified today. So it’s been updated. So this Test File 2 is newer than this Test File 2. Now let’s try to merge these together successfully.
    There is an official piece of Apple software that will do this. It’s called FileMerge. But the catch is that it doesn’t come with Mac OS 10. Instead in comes with XCode, which is the developer environment. In order to get the XCode, you have to join the Apple developer community, which is free, and then you have to go over to this part of the Apple site and download XCode, which is a whole gig. Once you’ve got it, though, you’ve got a bunch of useful utilities, including FileMerge.
    With FileMerge, you get two areas you can compare, left and right. You select what you want for the left comparison, and then you select what you want for the right comparison. Then hit “”compare.”" What you’ll get is a comparison of everything in those folders. So you get here that Test File 2 is different, 3 is on the left, and 4 is on the right. You can narrow down your results if you have a long list, for instance excluding anything that’s identical. Then you select all the files if you want to do a merge. You select what kind of merge, Combine Files, Use left as predominant, right as predominant, etc. Once you’ve selected the type of merge that you want to do, you select it. It’ll ask you what you want to do — use the existing directory or create a new one. Let’s create a new directory at the Test level. We’ll call it Test3, and we’ll save. The important thing was that I selected all the files on the left. If I had only selected some, it would only have merged those. It’s important to remember to do that extra step. Now we look in the Test directory and see that there is, indeed, Test 3, and we see that all the different files are there, including the updated version of Test File 2. And we see the rest, merged together in that one directory. So using FileMerge is pretty difficult if you’re not used to programming. There are a lot of different options, and it doesn’t always work completely as you’d expect, so it takes some time getting used to. It’s not a very automated solution, either.
    Now let’s look at how we can use the terminal to merge two folders together. We’re going to use a command called “”ditto.”" This will merge two folders together, and it’s pretty easy to use. The first thing you want to do is navigate in terminal to the current directory. Test1 and Test2 are in a directory called “”Test.”" An easy way to get there without figuring out exactly where that is, is to select it, and copy. Then we go over to the terminal, and we type “”cd”" for change directory, and then we paste the full path in there. Now we are in that test directory. If we do “”ls”" for list, we look and see, there’s Test1 and Test2. Now we’re ready to go. What ditto will do is merge two or more directories together, and put them in a third, if you like. For instance, let’s do Test1 and Test2, and put them in Test3. And instantly we see that, not only did the command complete in the terminal window, but it created that folder. If we look at Test3, we can see all five files in there. Now let’s go and take a look. Of course, 3 and 4 are one from each of the directories, and 2 is actually updated today. And you could see that that’s the current file, if we looked into it, rather than the old file. Now if we delete Test3 and reverse the ditto command, we’ll see something different as a result. Test2 Test1 Test3. We get the five files just as before, but if we look at File 2, we see that it’s the old one. So what ditto is doing is saying, grab the first folder, and then grab the second folder, and this is the one that supersedes the first one. When we do the opposite, Test1 supersedes the second one, so we end up with the old file. This isn’t as useful as determining which ones are exactly the newest, but at least you do have this sort of control over it. You can also merge two folders into one, by simply only having two directories there. For instance, “”ditto Test1 Test2″” will merge the contents and the results will be in Test2. You can also merge a whole bunch of them, and the last one will always be the folder that everything ends up in. If it exists, then the contents of that are also merged. If it doesn’t exist, it creates it and puts the merge in that folder.
    Now there are a bunch of shareware programs out there that allow you to synchronize and merge folders. They have various prices and they have various features. For just simply merging some together, though, one of the simplest seems to be one called File Synchronization. You can download it here. What File Synchronization does is, it allows you to add a pair of folders, and you can do that by dragging and dropping. We can add Test1 and Test2 like that. And then you can determine what you want to do. You can add all sorts of different options, what to do with orphan files, you can set up automatic synchronization between the two of them, and you can set lots of different preferences. Click the synchronize button, and it will synchronize the two folders. This isn’t simply merging two folders into one. This is actually synchronizing both. So if I go back to Test1 and Test2, I find they both have all the files in there now. In addition to that, I find that Test File 2 is now the most recent one in both folders. So it’s a true file folder synchronization program, not just a merge. It’s worth taking a look at, and it costs about $15. There are a lot of other ones there, that cost anywhere between that and upwards of $30 or even more, that do even more advanced file synchronization.
    So there’s a look at three different ways that you can merge folders together on Mac. They all fall far short of the Windows way of doing it, which is just so simple and elegant that it becomes way more useful. Hopefully, in future versions of Mac OS 10, we’ll get the option to either supersedes do it the old way, by replacing a folder, or doing a merge similar to that used in Windows. Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Show notes: The link to download XCode is http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/. You can read all about the Terminal ditto command at this official help page: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/ditto.1.html. You can get File Synchronization here: http://nemesys2.dyndns.org:8080/.

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MacMost Now 147: Spotlight on Spotlight

Thursday, October 16th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at Spotlight, the search functionality built into Leopard. By using the quick keyboard shortcut and the Spotlight menu, you can quickly run applications, search for specific files and even look up dictionary definitions and do complex mathematical calculations.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary with macmost. Today, let’s put the Spotlight on Spotlight.
    So Spotlight gets a really bad rap. It’s an extremely useful tool in Leopard. In Tiger it wasn’t so great and then a long time ago its predecessor, Sherlock, was pretty bad. So let’s take a look at Spotlight in Leopard and see how it can make so many tasks that you perform all the time much easier.
    There are basically three ways to bring up Spotlight in the finder. The first is just hitting command F and then you get a Spotlight search window. You can also get here by using any finder window and typing in the little search box on the upper right, that converts the finder window to a Spotlight window and you can search for files here. For instance, search for test and it will give me results that either have test in the name or there’s somehow the word test in the contents of the file.
    But this isn’t the most useful way to use Spotlight I find. Let’s go and look at a completely different way. The third way to access Spotlight which is this little magnifying glass here at the top of the screen. You and you can go ahead and type in the word test and then you get all sorts of results. Or, a better way to do it is hit the keyboard combination command space, and this will bring it up just like you clicked on it. So you don’t have to bring your cursor all the way over to the right side of the screen and then you could start typing. So you type the word test and then you get your results.
    Now Spotlight gives you a lot more than just files results. Some of the most useful things Spotlight does is it gives you a dictionary definition right here. You can go ahead and click on that and it will bring up the dictionary application but of course you’ve also got a summary of that, right there in the Spotlight window. All you have to do is roll over it. You can also go ahead and navigate in this Spotlight window using arrow keys; so you can go ahead between any of one of these. So if you find a file that you want you can actually press return to open that file and its default application or you can have command return and it will open up the window with that file highlighted. When searching for something in Spotlight here’s something really cool you can do. You can go ahead and specify, you only want to look at the name of the file by typing name, colon and then your search term. Now you’re only going to get files that have that term in the name.
    Now you can also add in something additional to that. Go back to searching for test and we only want to go ahead and look at a particular kind of file. We can type kind and then colon and then one of many different keywords, like text, it will only give us text files. Or if we want to find mail documents, we can look in mail and it will only give us results in mail sent or received. There’s a whole list of them and I’m going to include a list of these keywords and some other information in the post for this video for this at macmost.com.
    Now, you can also use the date functionality. Matter of fact you can even use the keyword today so you can find documents that have the word test associated with them that were created or modified today. You can even use created and you can type in date, like that, and it will only show files that were created today that have something to do with the word test.
    One of the other things that you can do is use Boolean searching, in other words words like and, or, not. So for instance I can go ahead and look for test and microphone and I come up with a document called another test that I created today that has both those words in it. I have to capitalize and and you can also use or or not to search for things.
    So here’s a really good example of how to use Spotlight to do something easier than it would using the finder regularly. Say you want to go ahead and look at a font that you’ve got on your machine. Usually you have to go and find that font application go in there and find that specific font. But you don’t have to do that if you Spotlight. So you just do command space to bring up this menu and you type in the name of the font and you’re going to go ahead and get lots of hits including the font. So you just scroll down here to the font that you want, you see there’s a lot of different ones that match Ariel, and if I hit return it will actually know enough to launch font book and bring up Ariel right there. So a much quicker way to get into fonts. And you can do this with lots of other applications as well.
    Okay. Here’s my current favorite use for Spotlight. It’s launching an application. Say I want to launch an application and it’s not in the doc and I’m not sure I’m I just need to type the name. I hit command space, bring up the Spotlight field and I type in the name of the app. Since the app name matches perfectly it is the top hit otherwise I could scroll up and down with the arrow key to get the exact thing I want to open, hit return and there I go. It launches the application. This is a lot faster than finding the app in the finder.
    Here’s another cool use. You can use Spotlight as a calculator. So instead of launching the calculator desktop app I can just type something in there and I actually get a little calculator result. 1 + 1 = 2. But I can do very complex things, like 5 x 5 + 6 and it will calculate that. I can even go ahead and use functions, like the square root of 9 or more complex things like the cosign of .5.

   You can also make Spotlight more useful to you by tagging your files. So here’s how you do that. Here’s my documents folder and I select a file called another test. I do command guide to get information on that file and I get my basic information window which tells me things like the file size and all that. At the top something called Spotlight comments. I can go ahead and type anything I want in there like a tag. So I can create something called my tag and just leave it in there. So I close that now and now when I search in Spotlight for my tag it finds the file so I can add different tags to different files. For instance, if certain files are associated with a project I can add those tags in the comments. I can add more tags if a file’s associated with more than one project and it can make it very easy for me to find these files using Spotlight later on. Of course, you can also adjust Spotlight slightly to your needs. Underneath all of the results in a Spotlight search is a Spotlight preferences which you can also access through your regular system of preferences if you like and it brings up the preferences windows. So you can do things like select which types of files you want represented. For instance you can be sick of seeing lots of music files when you don’t want those you regularly search. You can uncheck that. You can also change the keyboard shortcut from command space to something else. And you can set some privacy restrictions up so if there’s a certain folder you don’t’ want Spotlight returning searches for you can specify that as well.
    So that’s a really quick look at how incredibly useful Spotlight is in Leopard. And the key to making it very really useful is use the keyboard for everything. All the stuff I’ve showed you here can pretty much can be done with the keyboard. Command space, you type in something, you up and down with the arrow keys, you hit return, you do command return, you can do all these things with the keyboard. So if you’re really good at using keyboard shortcuts, Spotlight is definitely for you. I’m going to post a list of some of the common little keywords and modifications that you can use in Spotlight to this post at macmost.com So if you’re not watching this at macmost.com you may want to go there and look for Episode 147 of macmost.com.
    Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig.

As a companion to this video, here is a Spotlight quick reference list:
    Default keyboard command to bring up Spotlight search field: Command+Space.
    Using the “kind:” modifier, you can specify the kind of files to show. Some common ones are: app, contact, folder, email, event, todo, image, movie, audio, music, pdf, pref, bookmark, font.
    You can also use the “date:”, “created:” and “modified:” modifiers with dates like 10/16/08. The “date:” modifier works with “date:today” as well.
    You can use “name:” to specify that you only want items with those words in the name.
    You can use quotes to exact phrasing, like “my file”.
    You can use AND, OR or NOT in searches, but they must be captialized.
    When you get a list of times, you can use the arrow keys to move down the list. Then use Return to open the file or application. Use Command+Return to open a Finder window with that file selected instead.
    Here are some of the math functions you can use when using Spotlight as a calculator: sqrt, pow, ceil, floor, rint, exp, log, sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan.

Posted in MacMost Now, Video Podcast, frontpage | 8 Comments »

MacMost Now 146: New Line of MacBooks

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at today’s announcements of new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, MacBook Air and new Cinema Display.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary of MacMost Now. Let’s take a look at today’s announcements and the entire new line of MacBooks.
    Today at Apple headquarters Steve Jobs and his team made a whole set of announcements including new MacBook Pros, new MacBooks, new MacBook Air and a new display. Let’s take a look.
    So basically there are four new features to the MacBook line. The first is an entire new manufacturing process. Apple says they’re going to be making their MacBooks, MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros out of a single piece of aluminum which they carve out and so create a stronger and lighter MacBook. In addition, there’s also a new graphic chip set. Something new from Invidea in two different flavors is going to be in all of these laptops and it’s going to be up to five times faster than the integrated Intel chip set that had been in there previously although probably only slightly faster than some of the Invidea chip sets that have been in previous versions of the MacBook.
    In addition to that, we’ve also got a new trackpad. So this new trackpad is going to be made out of glass and it’s going to support multi-touch; up to four fingers can be used for different gestures and even simulating multiple buttons. In addition to that the entire thing’s actually going to be a button itself. You can press it down and that acts as the single button that we’re used to finding above or below current trackpads.
    In addition to that we’ve also got a new thing called a mini display port. So instead of having DVI ports on some Macs and a miniport on some others we’re going to have this mini display port which will support just about any kind of video display up to 30 inches, depending upon the internal video memory that you have in your machine.
    So for the MacBook Pros we’re going to have two different flavors. One is a $2000 machine that’s going to feature a 2.4 GHz processor, 250-gig hard drive and also comes with two gigs of ram. In addition, there’ll be a $2499 version of the machine which will have a 2.53 gig processor, a bigger hard drive at 320 gigs and 4 gigs of ram. These machines are going to come with a nice, glass, glossy screen as well and they’re going to come in just under an inch thick. In addition, you’re going to have an option for a solid-state drive and also for a 2.8 GHz in the Pros.
    So the new MacBooks are also going to come in two flavors. There’s going to be a $1299 version that comes with a 2.0 GHz processor and a 160 gig hard drive also a more expensive $1599 version that comes with a 2.4 GHz processor and a 250 gig hard drive. Now these new MacBooks are made of aluminum just like the MacBook Pros so there’ll be less of a visual difference between the MacBooks and the MacBook Pros. Another difference between the MacBooks Pros and the MacBooks will have a fire wire port on the side which also could be used as fire wire 400 with an adaptor. Won’t be any such thing on the MacBook. It was also announced that the MacBook Airs are going to be updated. They’re going to include the new mini display, the new trackpad and also the new Invidea graphics chip set.
    The announcement today actually will leave two older MacBooks around. The white plastic MacBook will be on sale for $999 and also the 17 inch MacBook Pros will still be available in their old configurations, although in a question and answer session after the press conference today Jobs said that those will be updated soon.
    A somewhat separate announcement is for a new cinema display. This is going to be a 24-inch cinema display which will display 1920 by 1200 pixels and it will feature speakers, isight and a microphone and it’s actually being touted on the website by right now as the perfect additional display if you have a MacBook.
    So that just about wraps it up. A lot of these things are shipping right now or tomorrow. Some, like the display and the MacBook Airs, won’t be shipping until November so check Apple.com for release dates.
    Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Posted in MacMost Now, Video Podcast, frontpage | 1 Comment »

Apple Special Notebook Announcement Live

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 by rosenz

Summary: Jobs announced new MacBook Pros, a new 24-inch display, and new MacBooks. He also announced an update for the MacBook Air. The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros feature a new style of construction where the the aluminum body is carved from a single block. They include new Nvidia graphics chips for better video performance, and a new mini display port. There is also a new glass trackpad that supports multi-touch for gestures and the entire trackpad is a the button.

   Here was the play-by-play:
    10:05 Steve Jobs comes on stage and introduces Tim Cook, the Apple COO.
    10:08 Cook talking about the success of Mac taking more market share over the last few years.
    10:10 Cook says Mac actually has 31% market share when you measure in revenue.
    10:12 Jobs introduces Jonathan Ive, Apple VP and lead designer to talk about MacBook design.
    10:15 Ive talking about building notebooks by taking a single piece of aluminum and carving parts out of it.
    10:17 Start with a 2.5 pound piece of aluminum and end up with a single .25 pound piece.
    10:20 Jobs now talking about the Nvidia 9400M chipset, which will provide video and a GPU, 5 times faster than the current MacBook integrated video.
    10:22 New MacBooks will feature a multi-touch glass trackpad, where the entire trackpad is the button.
    10:23 New trackpad will include multi-touch gestures and multiple button support through software.
    10:24 New MacBook Pro: Glass LED-backlit screen, connectors on one side only, mini display connector, new trackpad, new graphics chips, new rigid aluminum body built with new technique.
    10:25 Also: Backlit keyboard, iSight and mic, magnetic latch, motion sensor.
    10:26 New mini port connector will be on all new Macs?
    10:29 NVIDIA GeForce 9400M or the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M.
    10:31 Will include Firewire 800, two USB, mini display port, audio in and out, ExpressCard 34, and a battery indicator. No Firewire 400 (But you can use an adapter). Have slot-loading superdrive.
    10:33 Option for Solid State Drive. Can access the drive and battery through lid at bottom.
    10:34 .95 inches thick.
    10:35 Bluetooth 2.1, 802.11n.
    10:36 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 3MB L2 Cache, 2GB Memory, 250GB hard drive and SuperDrive for $1999.
    10:36 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 6MB L2 Cache, 4GB Memory, larger hard drive and SuperDrive for $2499. Also better video chips.
    10:38 Shipping today!
    10:39 Upgrading MacBook Air: Nvidia 9400M, 120GB drive, mini display port (November)
    10:40 New 24-inch display with 1920×1200, iSight, mic, stereo speakers, 3-port USB, $899 (November)
    10:41 New MacBooks: Nvidia 9400M, mini display port, glass screen, multi-touch trackpad, new construction technique like the MacBook Pro, better battery life.
    10:44 2.0 GHz processor model with 160GB drive for $1299 and 2.4 GHz for with 250GB drive for $1599.
    10:45 Old white plastic MacBook still on sale for $999. MacBooks on sale today, in stores tomorrow.
    10:46 Video shown about new MacBook and manufacturing process.
    10:52 Jobs jokes about health, shows current blood pressure on screen (110/70).
    10:53 Q&A session.
    10:54 Display Port used instead of HDMI because HDMI can’t drive 30-inch monitor.
    10:56 Blu-ray left out because it is too hard to license it.
    10:58 17-inch MacBook Pro will also be refreshed, but later.
    11:00 Only glass screens, no more matte ones in the future.
    11:02 Jobs says touch screens don’t make sense yet.
    11:03 No Mac “netBook” yet as market is too new.

Posted in Blog Posts, frontpage | No Comments »

MacMost Now 145: Microsoft Sync Connects iPod and Car

Monday, October 13th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig talks to Dan Gray from MPGomatic.com about the Microsoft Sync system put into many Ford cars. It allows you to connect your iPod or iPhone to your car through the dock and play your music through the car as well as control it with your dash, steering wheel or voice commands.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today let’s take a look at how to connect you iPod or iPhone to a car using the Microsoft Sync System. So I’m always interested in how people connect their iPods and iPhones to their car. I have to do mine through an old fashioned headphone jack but there is some more advance systems out there like the Microsoft Sync System, which allows you to attach your iPhone or iPod through a USB port to your car and then you can get data on the screen in your car and also control it through your steering wheel. So my friend Dan Gray runs a site http://mpgomatic.com. Now its kind of like car reviews for geeks. He talks about gas mileage and technology in cars, so Dan knows all about this sort of stuff. So Dan, whats the deal, why does Microsoft supply the way for iPods to connect to cars, why Microsoft? you think it would be Apple or some other company?”
    Dan - “It sounds kind of odd that Microsoft would be the link pen that would make Ford successful by allowing iPods and other mp3 players to hook to their cars, but Microsoft sees a pretty good market there and it is a good one. Basically the Microsoft sync system allows you to plug an iPod or other mp3 player into the dash through a USB connection. So it blows away any of the simple jacks, you know and an audio input jack is one thing your gonna get your music off your iPod into your system but your still gonna have to control it through the iPod. So Ford rolled this out slowly in 2008-2009 it’s in most models, it’s in the Escape, the Escape Hybrid, the Mustang, the Flex, the Fusion, the Focus, it’s in Lincolns, its in Mercury’s, it’s in just about every Ford right now”
    Gary- “So when you plug your iPhone or iPod or whatever into the car you’ll actually see like the display of like what song is playing, or what songs are available”
    Dan- “Depending on whether you have a nav system or not, you’ll see the name, you’ll always see the name of the song or the playlist or the album, if you have the nav system you’ll see everything, I mean it will get just like the front of the iPod, you’ll have full control over your playlist through that screen but, the great part is you have control through the steering wheel, so you don’t need to take your hands off the wheel and you can do things strictly by voice commands which is wickedly cool. once you learn how to speak sync-esque”
    Gary- “Give me an example of a voice command”
    Dan- “Play, The Clash, and boom it will start playing the Clash, if you say Neil Young it will play Neil Young”
    Gary- “So if you have the Clash on you iPod, it’ll find it, figue it out and start playing it” Dan- “Yea it’ll look through artists, it’ll look through albums, it’ll look through playlists”
    Gary- “So does this work with an iPhone and iPod Touch also?”
    Dan- “Now I haven’t tested it with anything other than an iPod, but if you look at Syncmyride.com there’s a long list of the players that it works with” Gary- “Awesome, does it also work with non-iPod devices like other mp3 players?”
    Dan- “Zen’s and Zunes and Creative thingamigiggers, yea it works with most of them, with the higher end ones its gonna provide that USB input but with the low end stuff its just gonna be through the audio jack and youre not gonna have that high end control”
    Gary- “Ok thats great! well thanks for filling us in Dan!”
    Dan- “Its my pleasure, I’ll bring more of them in as I go, theres more advance iPod integration in the VW’s and the BMW’s and the Mini’s and other manufacturers are working to include this stuff pretty quickly, the input jacks are one thing, but once you can take real of your audio player from the dash or from the steering wheel, it changes the game, thanks for having me on Gary- “Thanks for all the great info Dan! You can find Dan’s insight at http://mpgomatic.com, until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig MacMost Now.

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