MacMost: Archives

A classroom for students with learning disabilities in Seattle, Washington is looking to get an iPod touch. This teacher wants to use apps to make learning fun for enthusiastic children who have extra challenges to overcome. Join MacMost in supporting this project.

There are many options for formatting cells in iWork Numbers. You can choose the number of decimal places, or use fractions. You can format as currency or choose a different base system. You can choose from a variety of date and time formats. You can also create steppers, sliders and pop-up menus to make it easy to change values to cells. Conditional formatting allows you to have cells that change color and style with certain values or ranges.

When you sync photos from your computer to your iPhone you will get an album named Photo Library in your Photos app. This isn't an album, but a complete list of all of the synced photos on your iPhone. It will include those in albums and events you have synced, but the photos are really only on your iPhone once. The Photo Library is just a way to view of list of all of these photos instead of viewing them by album or event.

Learn how to use keyframes to animate video in Final Cut Pro X. You can scale and reposition video clips between keyframes to create a variety of special effects. The example used is video shrinking to the center and then moving to a corner. You can also use keyframe animation to rotate, distort, color adjust or fade a clip.

A school in Pooler, Georgia is looking to use an Apple TV 2 to project its iPads and other things to the screen in the classroom. I think the Apple TV 2 has great potential in the classroom and I’m excited to see a teacher trying to use it there. Join MacMost in supporting this project.

This week Apple updated its iOS GarageBand app making it compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch for the first time. The music creation software is similar to the existing Mac version but with a set of instruments that can be played using the touch screen of iOS devices.
Apple admitted this week that there is a problem with the iPhone 4S related to battery life. The good news is that it is a software problem and an update will be issued to fix it soon.
With its product line most likely fixed in place for the holiday shopping season, Apple is continuing to fine-tune its retail stores. In-store pickup of online orders expanded this week from California to New York, and there are reports that more stores will be supporting this in the upcoming days and weeks.

“Ms. Roth? Instead of doing my class project with Eddie, can I team up with my friend Siri instead?”

A common question people have is “What does this icon mean in the iPhone Weather app?” The iPhone Weather app gets its information from Yahoo Weather. The forecast should be the same as if you want to Yahoo and looked up the weather for your area. But the iPhone Weather app doesn’t include descriptions of the graphic icons that appear next to each day.
Some are obvious. A bright yellow sun means “sunny.” But others are less obvious. So you would think that there would be a guide somewhere to these icons.
Not only is there not a guide, but it seems the icons used in the iPhone app are not used anywhere else. Yahoo has many different sets of weather icons for use on their sites and by third-party developers. But none exactly match the ones used on the iPhone.
However, the following set comes very close. Close enough that you should be able to find a match if you are unsure what an icon means. Note that some icons are used for multiple weather conditions. For instance, Tropical Storm and Hurricane use the same icon as Thunderstorms.

You can control a Keynote presentation on a Mac with your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad using the Keynote Remote app. But this requires that both the Mac and iOS device be on the same wi-fi network. In cases where you don't have a wi-fi network, such as a presentation hall or classroom, you can establish your own local network using your Mac, and connect to it with your iOS device. This allows you to control the Keynote presentation directly from your device to the Mac.

In your Mac's Applications folder you've got a Calculator app that you probably haven't given a second look. This is much more than a simple utility. You can use it in scientific and programmer mode, convert units, time and currency, work in octal and hexadecimal, produce a tape of your calculations, and even get it to talk to you.

Learn how to add keyboard shortcuts to your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Keyboard shortcuts can make it much easier to type using the on-screen keyboard. You can substitute short groups of letters for longer phrases, like 'em' for your email address or 'icu' for 'I'll call you later.'

Apple issued a quiet update this week of its MacBook Pro line of laptops. The new models have the same design and basic features as the previous line, but have minor updates to processor speed and hard drive space. For instance, the low-end MacBook Pro now comes with a 2.4GHz i5 processor and a 500GB drive. It previously had a 2.3GHz processor and a 320GB drive for the same price.
The Apple Stores are experimenting with in-store pickup. Three stores in the San Francisco area are now offering the ability to order and pay for products online, and then stop by the stores to pick up the products. It appears that Apple will soon be offering this in more stores in the U.S.

A classroom in Kent, Washington needs an iPod touch so the students can use educational games and listen to books. Join MacMost in supporting this project.

“Only an A- on your report card? I know you said you’d get a B+, but my expectations were an A+. I’m going to have to downgrade you.”

Keeping your Address Book contacts in a good state is even more important now because of integration with iCloud, iOS 5 and social networks. There are several fields in Address Book that are more than just bare information. Learn the special properties of the birthday, nickname, phonetics and URL fields.

While Siri has brought speech commands to the iPhone 4S, Mac users have long had the ability to speak commands to your computers. Learn how to enable Speakable Items on your Mac, find out which commands work and how. You can also add custom commands and have your Mac speak to you.

iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad has a great set of accessibility features that can be useful for just about anyone. You can zoom in on the screen, change the font size for some apps, have your iPhone speak text on web pages and in documents, use multi-touch gestures with just one finger, and even set custom vibration sequences.

The launch of the iPhone 4S mirrored previous iPhone launches with long lines, sell-outs and broken sales records at AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. A reported 4 million units were sold over the weekend. The downside was slow and problematic activation for the new phones, with some people having to wait hours before they could use them.
In Apple’s quarterly report it showed new highs for Mac sales with almost 5 million Macs being sold in the last quarter. This is despite the sale of more than 11 million iPads, some of which may have been purchased instead of a new Mac.
Wall Street wasn’t impressed with Apple’s numbers. Even though they passed Apple’s own estimates, they missed the estimates of Wall Street analysts. This was mostly because of lower iPhone sales due to the fact that a new iPhone model wasn’t released until after the end of the quarter.

A classroom in West Chatham Elementary School in Pooler, GA needs two Mac minis. The students will use them to make podcasts, web sites and ebooks. Join MacMost in supporting this project.

“Our new Mac mini doesn’t have an optical drive. I can’t make the fun sing-along CDs for our road trips anymore!”
“Oh too bad.”