Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know your iPhone could do: make floor plans by just using the camera and some taps. With MagicPlan you stand in the middle of a room and use your iPhone’s camera to create a floor plan by simply indicating the locations of corners and doors. The result inside perfectly accurate, but pretty close. You can add rooms and do your entire house or office.
“We have more than 200 different iPhone cases to choose from.”
“I don’t know if I like any of these. Are there more in the back?”
Most Dock icons are just plain icons. But try running Activity Monitor, and app found in your Applications/Utilities folder. The Dock icon can show you graphs and charts relating to the activity on your Mac. Control+click on the icon and choose an option under Dock Icon to change what information is pictured. You must keep Activity Monitor running for the icon to update, but you can hide it.
With the Oscars coming up this weekend, it might be fun to pretend you are part of Hollywood with the simple but fun interactive adventure Stardom: Hollywood. You start at the bottom, unemployed and behind on your rent. Then you make choices and complete quests to facilitate your rise to stardom.
A few minor software updates this week addressed small but annoying bugs that have been causing problems for some users. iOS 6 was updated to 6.1.2 to address a problem when iOS devices were used to get email from Exchange servers. iTunes was updated to fix problems with syncing and store purchases. But it also seems to make it easier to sort search results, a problem many were complaining about with the initial release of iTunes 11.
Apple also released another update to Java to prevent another type of potential malware attack. This update gained more attention as this type of attack was allegedly used to infiltrate computers of Apple employees. MacMost recommends turning Java off in your web browser unless you absolutely need it.
In other news, the Mac Pro is no longer available for sale in Europe. This is due to the now-aging model not meeting regulatory standards. Many believe that Apple is simply removing the old model because a new Mac Pro is on the horizon.
Microsoft is pushing Mac users toward its new Office 365 subscription service by raising the price on stand-alone copies of Office for Mac 2011. These are now $140 or $220, depending on whether you want to include Outlook. A subscription to Office 365 costs $100 per year and allows you to use the software on up to five computers.
“Our IT department is against letting us get Macs.”
“Why? Because they don’t know how to fix them?”
“No, because they won’t need to.”
You can get TinkerTool at http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html.
Say you have an email address example@icloud.com. You can append a tag to that with a + symbol. For instance, you could use example+something@icloud.com. You can use this when signing up for email newsletters or web sites. Mail sent to this tagged address will come into your regular inbox, but the “to” field will show the full address including the + tag. You can use this to filter your messages in Mail.
Apple has quietly updated the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, and also dropped its price. The low-end MacBook Pro with a 13-inch Retina display and 128GB of storage is now $1,499, $200 less than before. The 256GB model is $300 cheaper at $1,699. These now come with a slightly faster 2.6GHz processor. The 15-inch models also received a processor boost to a 2.4GHz or 2.7GHz quad-core processor. The high-end model now also ships with 16GB of memory. The MacBook Air is also less expensive now, with a price tag of $1,399 for the high-end 13-inch 256GB model.
Apple is busy with legal matters as usual, but this time in disputes with its own shareholders. At issue is Apple’s large cash holdings. At least two groups of shareholders are arguing that Apple should find a way to return some of that money to the shareholders. Apple currently issues a $2.65/share dividend each quarter, including one this week.
You can download the Recovery Disk Assistant at http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433.
The concept here is very simple and very useful. Color Assist uses the camera to show you the RGB color value of anything. For designers and graphic artists, this is really cool. If you see a nice color or set of colors in a book, poster, or a real-world object like a tree or cup of tea, you can capture and save that color value to use later.
