August 4, 2008 at 12:17 pm
· Filed under Uncategorized
The key points of the software he reviews here, are features that the mail application, that comes built into your Mac already does in wonderful ways. Xobni, is an add on for that application “Outlook” that is default on Windows XP and severely frustrating for many users, and so if one used Outlook, one may use Xobni. Interestingly, most clients of mine have long ago moved to Gmail(if they’re Windows Users or Apple Mail) since both of these provide really fast indexing, sorting, calendar and meeting integration and more.
Mail, the humble program down in the Dock, that looks like a samp has super powers.
It stores unlimited archives of Mail back to years and years ago.
It Indexes emails by Date, Subject, sender, Content and more.
It has data detectors that let you create events from dates mentioned in emails.
It detects addresses in emails and lets you Map them with a single click.
It associates the sender with your Address Book entry for them so you can see their picture, Birthday, Spouse and any Notes you need.
It allows you to create Notes or To-Do items from lines, words or any content inside an email, these To-Do’s go straight into iCal to give you reminders.
This is just the highlights of Mail that I find useful, for more on Mail, there’s Apple’s Page:
and a wonderful Blog:
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August 4, 2008 at 11:58 am
· Filed under Uncategorized
I have a question for you, this weekend I’m purchasing a Mac Notebook and with it comes a free 8 gig iTouch. I have been doing a little research and am a little confused. Does the iTouch have calendar capabilities and is it able to sync with the notebook? I’ve read blogs with people saying it does and others saying it doesn’t. Looking for a little clarification.
The iPod touch is damn cool and does almost everything the iPhone does, bar taking photos and making calls, iCal absolutely syncs with the mac, just like the iphone does, and if you use “mobileme” then it syncs through the air, which is nice.
Notebook never synced (sank?) but thanks to the app store, there are a slew of alternatives for notes, like evernote, or jott, and they sync with the internet or “cloud” and your mac can then sync with the cloud too.
I had thought the mac comes with a 16gb iPod touch, isn’t the rebate good for $299???
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August 3, 2008 at 11:23 am
· Filed under Apple, Mac OS X
Does your screensaver kick in while you’re watching a video on hulu.com? Or your screen go asleep while you’re watching twitlive.tv or the AuburnCom office camera?
Get Caffeine, a tiny Mac only program that puts an icon in your menu bar, before you click play on the big lebowski, tap this and it’ll keep your Mac awake for you, no visits to the system pref pane for you!
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July 27, 2008 at 11:39 am
· Filed under Apple, iPhone
Have you tried the NetNewsWire application for the iPhone?
It’s awesome.
Subscribe to your favorite sites using RSS through an online (free) version at Newsgator.com, use the (Recently) Free Mac Desktop version of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire on the iPhone will synchronize your subscription list and pull all those stories from all those sites (my iPhone is currently displaying 2367 stories unread!) to your iPhone for local reading, you can switch off all your wireless functions, put the iPhone in Airplane Mode and go into a nuclear bunker, the playa, or an airplane, and all those stories are there in full glory waiting to be read.
If you’re new to RSS here are some great RSS feeds to begin with:
The Macalope RSS Feed
Dilbert Comic Strip RSS Feed
“iPhone” ads on Craigslist RSS Feed
Why did I feature these feeds? One very big reason, all three offer ‘Full’ Syndication, the posts that come through the RSS feed are the entire subject, uncut! Other Rss feeds like the Nytimes, BBC and even our own SFgate offer only short clips of stories in the RSS feed, avoid those, stick with good full feeds and embrace papers and journals that offer such RSS feeds, my favorite paper and electronic journal: Wired
Try out NetNewsWire Today
!
P.S. When you start getting too many feeds to handle on your iPhone, go to the newsgator website. Settings->Edit Locations->NetNewsWire iPhone/iPod-Touch — you can edit the feeds you get there! (thanks to davidbro)
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July 22, 2008 at 10:42 am
· Filed under Apple, iPhone
Thanks to a tweet by jaxmac, a mac Sysadmin from Florida, I’ve been trying out the new free wordpress application for the iPhone and iPod touch.
You can post to multiple different wordpress blogs, write posts while offline! And it’s pretty simple to use, even easier than the actual wordpress web browser interface, and leaves just one question, when will we get a foldable portable bluetooth keyboard for the iPhone, which is rapidly becoming the one device to rule them all!
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July 20, 2008 at 12:12 pm
· Filed under Getting a Mac, Leopard, Mac OS X
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July 17, 2008 at 11:55 am
· Filed under Apple, Ergonomics
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July 16, 2008 at 9:49 am
· Filed under Apple, Getting a Mac, Leopard, Mac OS X
A brief question from a valued client:
Chris has mentioned you set him up at home where he can use virtualdesktop to log into work? Can you send me the instructions for this or alink to the download? Ideally I can do this with our imac so I do notneed to bring my lap top home.
You’ll need VPN access to your work network, once you have that you need to make that connection, if it’s a simple VPN connection, then the built in VPN functions of the Mac can get you connected, if it’s more complex or secured, you’ll need “VPN Tracker”($119), available from: http://www.equinux.com/us/products/vpntracker/Once you can get connected to the office, you open and execute “Remote Desktop Connection”($Free) from Microsoft, available here: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspxThe VPN settings for your company should be easy to get from your Tech Department, putting those into the Mac or VPN Tracker may be difficult, but after that, setting up “Remote Desktop Connection” is pretty straightforward.Don’t hesitate to ask more about this, I build VPN solutions often for clients, for both large and small companies,
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July 9, 2008 at 4:54 pm
· Filed under Apple
Thanks to John Gruber for pointing out this article on Tom’s Hardware.As a client of mine pointed out just before I bought my Air, the early SSD drives are not mind bendingly better at saving power than the good seagate spinning disk hard drives. They DO however have a much much much lower failure rate.Average hard drives fail between 1 and three years into usage, Hitachi’s sometimes in the first week, that’s why we supply and install only Seagate hard drives that come with industry leading Five year warranties, meaning that as long as your time machine backups are being kept, your hard drive will be replaced free up till 2013 (when hard drives will be a distant memory ;)
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July 7, 2008 at 12:41 pm
· Filed under Apple, Mac OS X, MobileMe
Oh, Yeah!Adam C. Engst reports for tidbits that
“Precipitate Shines Mac Spotlight into Google’s Cloud”Stuart Morgan of Google has released a free Mac OS X preference pane called Precipitate that enables Spotlight and Google Desktop to search documents stored in your Google Docs account, along with your Google Bookmarks.
Try it out here: http://code.google.com/p/precipitate/
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