MacMost: Archives

A recent tradition at Apple stores has been to hold modest sales on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Tomorrow may prove to be slightly more than that, with some Apple Stores opening as early as midnight, and several products having decent sale prices.
To check to see when your local Apple Store will be opening, go to Apple’s retail section and look up your store. A special list of holiday hours should appear on that store’s page.
Reports of sale prices include as much as $101 dollars off MacBook Pros and the Air, and also up to $61 off iPads.

A school in New York is looking to get one iPad to share between six classes of students with autism. Many of the students can benefit from computers, but cannot use a mouse. The teacher already has apps in mind that could be used on this iPad Join MacMost in supporting this project.

“You’ve heard of turducken? Well this is a MacPadTV. I’m streaming a video
from my Mac to my iPad and then on to the Apple TV with AirPlay.”

One feature of Siri is the ability to dictate text instead of typing on your iPhone. Siri recognizes words and needs no special training. You can also type punctation and special symbols and commands.

There's a lot you can do with the calendar creation feature in iPhoto 11. You can use your own photos and iCal calendars to order a printer calendar from Apple, or print it yourself. You can also export the pages from a calendar to a PDF or even create an image from it.

You can use Siri like a personal assistant by creating notes simply by speaking. You can create new notes, or even add to existing ones. Siri can also search your notes. In the Reminders app you can create different lists, and then use Siri to add items to that list.

Apple took iTunes Match live this week. The new service allows iTunes users to store their entire music collection on Apple servers and then access it from any desktop or iOS device. The service only uploads songs not available in the iTunes store, simply giving you access to the iTunes store versions of others. The result is all of your music appears to be “in the cloud” and accessible anywhere. It is only available in the U.S. for now, and costs $25 per year. You can find out more about iTunes match in this episode.

An elementary school in Bakersfield, California wants to get an iPad to help students learn how to read. The teacher already has several apps in mind that will help, they just need to get the iPad. Join MacMost in supporting this project.

“Hmmm. The iPhone Cards app. That’s way better than my idea of sending a handwritten card by mail that is scanned in and emailed to someone.”

The new iTunes Match service from Apple allows you to keep your entire music collection in the cloud. You can access all of your songs from any Mac or iOS devices you own. Find out what it does and how it works.

If your internal drive is getting full and you want to move your iTunes music to an external drive, you can do so by using functions built right into iTunes. Keep your iTunes Library on your internal drive, but move your music to an external drive. That way you move the bulk of your files to your external drive, but keep all of the primary functionality of your iTunes Library on your internal one.

On the iPhone 4S you can use Siri for a variety of time-based functions. You can create simple alarms in your Clock app with Siri and even change alarms. You can also start, pause and stop timers. You can also create more complex reminders that then sync across your devices with iCloud. Reminders can be location-based as well as time-based.

Apple updated its flagship New York store on 5th avenue with a new glass cube. The new structure uses only 15 panes of glass. The store is often seen on television worldwide during major product launches.
Every year Greenpeace ranks technology companies based on products and their manufacturing processes. Years ago Apple was as the back of the pack, but has made major strides forward. It now ranks fourth behind HP, Dell and Nokia. You can check out the full report.

“I’ll have my Siri contact your Siri and set up the meeting.”

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.