While Pages, Word and even TextEdit are good for word processing, programmers and Web developers need to edit plain text files all the time. The granddaddy of all text editing programs is BBEdit. It’s expensive, but for serious coders it is the environment they live in every day. It has tons of features and customizes itself according to what type of text file you are editing: html, php, c, css, xml, and so on.
In iPhoto 09 you can select Faces, and then one of the faces you have already identified. You can then press Confirm Name to confirm that face in other photos. The trick is to do this over and over again, repeating until iPhoto runs out of pictures to confirm. Each time you do it, iPhoto will get smarter about identifying that face, which is why it will find new photos for you to confirm.
The genre of puzzle games where you build something to solve levels seems to be a mainstay of iPhone gaming. At the pinnacle of this genre is Fantastic Contraption, a game where you build mechanical devices to reach a goal. It is sure to bring out the engineer in all of us.
Not much in the world of Apple news this week. There are some rumors floating around. First. there is talk of an update to the Mac Pro line, featuring new Intel processors at the end of March. Second, there is speculation that Apple may split the iPhone into two lines later this year, with a $99 low-end phone with only Edge network and no GPS, and a higher-resolution screen iPhone 3G for $200 or $300.
More phishing emails have been going out claiming that your MobileMe account is set to auto-renew but your credit card info is wrong. If you roll over the links in this email, you can see that they don’t go to Apple. Learn more about protecting yourself from phishing in episode 54 of MacMost Now.
If you use Screen Sharing or something else that requires that you can rely on a local machine’s IP address, you can tell your Airport basestation to assign a static IP address to a certain computer based on its MAC address. Run the Airport Utility program and look under Internet, then DHCP settings. There is a section called DHCP Reservations. You can tell your basestation to always give a specific local IP address to a specific device.
With more and more paperwork happening without the paper, your control over those PDF files becomes more important. What’s frustrating is that you can’t edit, write on or draw on PDF files like you can with paper, even using some professional PDF programs. PDFpen from SmileOnMyMac allows you to do almost anything with a PDF file, and then save it back out as a PDF file. So you can mark up or simply sign a PDF document. Very handy.
One of the most useful features of Leopard is the ability to connect from one Mac to another via Screen Sharing (VNC). You can do the same thing from your iPhone with the Mocha VNC app. While navigating a large screen on the small iPhone one restricts this to simply accomplishing a single task or two, it can be invaluable for someone who is frequently away from their computer. You can also try the free Mocha VNC Lite.
A company called Net Applications has determined that about 10% of all Web traffic is from Mac users. This could be considered a more accurate measure of computer marketshare as it rules our machines used for more mundane business tasks and focuses on those used actively. This is the highest mark so far by Macs on the Web.
In other news, Adobe has let it slip that they are working on some form of Flash for the iPhone. No real word yet on what that will be, and whether it will be for use inside the iPhone’s Safari Web browser or some sort of stand-alone viewer.
Those waiting for a new 17-inch MacBook Pro will have to wait until at least the middle of this month. Originally, the machines were to ship at the end of January.
You may know that you can select a file or folder and press Command+I to get information about it. But did you know that if you press Command+Option+I you get the same information, but in a floating palette window called the inspector? This window will stay above all other Finder windows and the information displayed will change as you select different items in the Finder.
Your computer is the perfect place to store information. But what about when that information is so important that you want to guarantee that no one can get at it? Data Guardian gives you a secure database fore information, protected by strong encryption. So now you can store your credit card numbers, passwords and other bits of important data on your Mac without worry.
Here’s a great twist on a word game. Instead of just re-arranging letters, you have to re-arrange letters and pictures to form words. Stitch’em Words keeps you thinking in many levels and is pretty clever.
