MacMost: Archives

Before you buy a professional word processor consider using TextEdit, a program that comes with your Mac and can handle most non-professional word processing needs. You can format and style text, add images, lists and tables, and even open Word docs.

An Uninterruptible Power Supply is a great accessory for your Mac. It provides surge protection, protection against momentary power outages and gives you a chance to save your work if a longer power outage occurs.

You can use Find to search within a Web page in Safari or any browser. This simple technique can make it much easier to locate information.

Apple seems to be scrambling to get content for the iPad ready to go for launch day. At the same time, publishers have been preparing books and other content. Several publishers should have books available on day one, or soon thereafter. But some, like Random House, are holding out according to reports that have those publishers worried that book prices may follow iPhone app prices into the bargain basement range.
Publications like the Wall Street Journal may be preparing subscription services. Reports are that the WSJ will be available on the iPad for $18/month.
Wired magazine has been reportedly testing an iPad version and also selling ads to fill it. Some magazines may be selling per-issue at full price on the iPad, while others will sell at a discounted level. Some will have advertising and some won’t — at least to start.
It will be interesting to see which publications do well on the device, and which fail to gain an audience. It will also be interesting to see how they do against iPad and online-only publications that do no need to also support a print version. An digital-only publication theoretically costs the same to produce whether there are a thousand subscribers or a million.
On the video side, CBS has been reportedly testing our a Flash-less version of its Web site that should work on the iPad. The video would use HTML5 for playback, rather than the Flash plug-in.
And on the App side, there are reports of developers getting their games and other apps ready for iPad launch day. Some developers have had access to iPads for testing.
In Mac news, Adobe seems poised to release its Creative Suite 5, which would include new versions of software such as Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and Acrobat. The date has been set for April 12. But lest you think this news doesn’t somehow involve the iPhone, the new version of Flash is supposed to allow Flash developers to make native apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This would be different than Flash on the Web. The apps would simply appear as normal apps. Many apps are already developed in alternative environments from the standard Apple Xcode environment. Adobe even lists some Flash-created apps on its Web site and blogs.
Apple lost one of its board members this last week when Jerome B. York died of a brain aneurysm. York had been on Apple’s board since 1997. During his career, York also served as CFO of Chrysler and CFO of IBM.

Learn about the Snow Leopard firewall. You can turn it on in your system preferences and it will block unwanted access to your Mac from inside your network or while you are on a public network.

You can use Preview in Snow Leopard to merge documents and pages within documents. It works a little differently than it did in Leopard because you can have multiple documents in the sidebar which can confuse things.

There are many ways to export your video from iMovie. Using the Sharing menu, you can go directly to iTunes, iDVD, YouTube and more. But using the Export Movie and Export using QuickTime options give you greater control.

Last Friday Apple began taking pre-orders for iPads. You can pre-order for delivery or reserve an iPad for pick-up at your local Apple Store. The initial models will be available on April 3rd, and will be WiFi models only. A 3G model, able to connect to AT&T and other wireless networks, won’t be available until about a month later.
Reports varied on sales. Some estimates but the first day’s sales at just under 100,000 orders. But Apple hasn’t released any official numbers yet. The reports are only estimates from financial analysts.
In addition to Apple’s e-book reader app that is expected to ship with the iPad, it looks like we will have a choice of other e-book reader apps as well. Barnes and Noble has announced that they will have a reader app for the iPad. And it is expected that Amazon will have a Kindle app — they already have one for the iPhone while will most likely work on the iPad.
The Kindle desktop application finally made it to the Mac this week with Amazon’s release of a public beta test of “Kindle for Mac.” You can download it at http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/mac/.
Research company NPD Group reported that Mac sales were up significantly in the first two months of this year as compared to last year. New iMac and MacBook Pro models in late 2009 are the most likely cause, as well as a recovering economy.
Apple released a minor update to Safari, version 4.0.5, this week, available through Software Update. The new version features many performance and stability improvements.

Defragmentation was a common technique among Mac-using professionals in the 1990s. But with Mac OS X and today's hardware, do you still need to run defragmentation software?

If you have a large iTunes library, you may want to consider moving it to an external drive. You can also have some of your media on an external drive without having to move the library. Take a look at three methods of handing an iTunes library on an external drive.

You can run Windows on your Mac using either Boot Camp, a virtualization solution like Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox, or a Win32 API solution like Wine to run individual applications. See the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Last Friday Apple overhauled the Mac Developer program for the first time in years. Gone is the tiered system, replaced with a single $99 price. But also gone is the hardware discount. Thought some developers point out that with a $99 program replacing a $500 one, the savings are close to the hardware discount anyway.
Unlike the iPhone Developer Program, the Mac Developer Program isn’t required to develop Mac software. Apple does not control the distribution of Mac software like it does for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. So membership in the Mac Developer Program is voluntary, with support being the primary benefit.
Game developer Valve announced that it is bringing the bulk of its game library to the Mac in April. Games include Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half Life game series. In addition, new games were being developed for simultaneous deployment on PCs and Macs. This follows EA’s lead from a few years back when it started deploying games on the Mac at the same time as for Windows.
Apple removed more apps from the App Store this week, this time targeting Wi-Fi “stumblers” — apps that look for and display the names of nearby Wi-Fi signals. The reason for the purge this time is simply that many of these apps use part of the iPhone OS that is restricted by the iPhone Developer agreement. These are referred to as “private APIs” and can cause the app to stop working correctly when that part of the iPhone’s OS is updated, which is why Apple prohibits their use. Some Wi-Fi finder apps that did not use this functionality remain in the App Store.

The free Mac OS X extension Growl allows some of your applications to send you screen and audible notifications when events occur, like incoming email or completed downloads. You can even pass these notifications on to your iPhone. Check it out to see if it is something you can use.

When you print documents from your Mac just to read them away from your desk, you can choose Layout in the print dialog to save paper. You can put 2, 4 or more pages onto one sheet of paper this way. It is handy for long documents and multi-page receipts.

You can easily export vCards from the Mac OS X Address Book and send them in email messages. The recipient can then easily add all of your contact information to their Address Book or other contact management software.

Another week, another Apple news story controversy. Apple audited its manufacturing suppliers and made the report public this week. You can read it here. It is important to note that Apple did this on its own, and other companies that use the same or similar suppliers don’t even do this kind of audit.
They found two main problems: underage workers, and employees working more than 60 hours per week or 6 days per week. The underage worker problem was just 11 workers that were 15 instead of 16 when hired, although they were now either of age or no longer employed.
But some press covered the story like Apple was trying to hide something instead of brining it to light themselves. Other news sources then jumped to Apple’s defense, praising the company for going beyond simple compliance with the law.
Next week is the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and it looks like developer Valve will be announcing a major push into the Mac gaming work. They produce games like Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead.
Rumors this week center around Apple establishing a cloud storage service for music and video. The idea would be that people could buy music and video from iTunes, and not have to store them on their local hard drives. So you could purchase movie after movie from Apple and just access the files over the Internet instead of locally.

You can use the Safari Bookmarks Bar to store you more often accessed bookmarks. But you can also use folders there to store larger numbers of bookmarks and groups of related bookmarks.

The Trash in Mac OS X is a failsafe device to prevent you from accidentally deleting items. But many people use it as a holding place for files that they aren't sure about. Learn how to use the Trash properly so you keep files around that you may need, and delete only the ones you are sure you want to get rid of forever.

If you add birthdays to your contacts in Address Book, it will create a special Birthdays calendar in iCal. You can use this to keep track of your friends' birthdays, although functionality is very limited.

Package files are somewhere between folders and disk images. The most notable one is your iPhoto Library, which is a collection of files protected inside a package file that you can still open and view. Installers are another common type of package file.