AuburnCom Weblog

Apple Mail has been my favourite Mail program for several years, it’s usability is higher than Gmail or Outlook, it’s fast, good looking and easy to compose in. But today I want to point out the great Stationery feature that Apple has added to the most recent version of Mail. Apple’s Mail or Mail.App is now at Version 3.1 and now handles RSS feeds as well as ToDo lists, for me, stationery is the most exciting feature. From Apple Mail’s compose window, you’ll see a small button labeled “Show Stationery”, click this and a small pane drops down from immediately below the toolbar.  From here you, you have a choice of six categories to choose your staionery from, “Favorites”, “Birthday”, “Announcements”, “Photos”, “Stationery” and “Sentiments”.  Each category contains a bunch of great looking templates that function like the templates in Keynote, iMovie, Pages, and most other Mac Cocoa Applications. That means, quite simply, you can drag images and text from anywhere on your screen (including webpages) right into the template. So whether you have a photo of Baker Beach in your iPhoto library, or, you find it on flickr, just drag it into your message to display it alongside your message.     This stationery feature makes your emails very vibrant and interesting, plus, they display really well in most other email clients , especially gmail! Have Fun! Remember, Friendly, Smart, Certified Apple Expertise is at hand, call 415-871-9683 and speak to Brendan                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

A company by the name of Newsgator make a bunch of solutions in relation to RSS, They make everything you need to create, publish and read Really Simple Syndication feeds from the biggest sites, like cnet.comand nyt.com.If you have Leopard, then Apple’s Mail program does a great job of aggregating feeds so you might be all set, if, however, you use more than one computer or cell phone for reading your RSS newsfeeds, then, you’ll need something which synchronizes across them and has a good interface. Enter NetNewsWire, currently a new Beta for Leopard is available here: http://nnwbeta.com, NetNewsWire is a very effective RSS reader designed for OS X, it synchronizes transparently across the internet, to ensure that your other Macs, and iPhones, and iPod Touch’s will all be aware and up to date on what stories you’ve read, flagged, marked etc. Give it a try!Screenshots below:   

Another good question from a valued client:

Dear Brendan,
for a long time now I have had no alarm clock, mostly because there is
scant room for one next to my bed. So I have been relying on Elsa to wake
me and she’s pretty consistent. She assaults me regularly between 530 and
six o’clock in the morning. She has no respect for weekends.

But I was wondering now that I have a handy dandy spanking new shiny iMac
if it might have its own alarm clock. If it did, that would be fortunate
for it would force me to get out of bed to turn it off! Of course I’ve
been known to go back to bed anyway in such events.

Here’s the Answer:
Indeed, I’ve often wished for a good alarm clock on the Macintosh, I’ve had good results with this free application called Alarm Clock Pro, it’s available from http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/audio/alarmclockpro.htm, and is free except for donation requests.

If for any reason your Mac is going to sleep or turning off at night, you may configure it to wake up by itself(about five minutes before the alarm is due, perhaps)by going into the energy saver system preferences (to do this, type “energy saver” into spotlight).

One can tell the computer to wake up at a certain time every day, once this is done, the computer will be on and the Alarm Clock Pro can do it’s work, hope this is helpful!

In the spirit of our usual high quality recommendations, comes another great recommendation for a piece of software that runs transparently in the background on your Mac.   

It’s a great Password Manager that will start remembering all your passwords and form information after a quick two minute setup, as if that wasn’t enough, it’ll generate ultra strong passwords with a single click if you need them for future accounts, want more? okay, it’ll easily create new fake personalities and profiles for using on sites that you are wary of, not sure if this video sharing site is the real deal or not, then let 1  Password generate your alter ego’s information for it’s registration form. 

So, enough said, it’s a great Password Vault and Manager with great back end security and plugs into all three of your favorite Mac browsers, Safari, Firefox and Camino, so, if in two months you switch to(or back to) Safari from Firefox (which has it’s own password manager) you’ll still have all your bank passwords and user profiles, indeed, in two years if you switch to camino, all your profiles will come with you.

Oh, did I mention that it syncs all these passwords to your iPhone… just not enough room on the page for how great 1 Password is… 

1Password is available from http://1passwd.com/  for $29.99 with 100% money back guarantee, or, you can get a free copy for a limited time through a Macworld promotion from http://agilewebsolutions.com/promo/macgems.

Either way, enjoy it, you’ll love having your computer enter your passwords for you, and of course, it’s fully controllable with super master passwords for safety!

P.S There’s a version for your Palm Treo too! 

Brendan

I was given a card to get free tracks off itunes, with a download code.I’ve asked people to download them for me but they say it can’t betransferred to another computer or MP3 player.Can you confirm this? there’s no way for me to get those? (unless Iinstall itunes on one of my computer and listen to those tracks onlythere, which sounds ridiculouis…)thx!

Approximately 10% of the entire iTunes music store is now DRM free, which means that it will play on ANY computer or Device that you like, these songs are labeled iTunes Plus, and display a small plus sign (+) next to them, almost every song on the EMI record label, as well as many many songs from independent labels are in this format. But, the other labels, Sony, Warner, and Universal are not allowing their music to be sold in this DRM free format that allows you to choose your own player, be it iRiver, Creative, Palm, Blackberry or any of the 100’s of music players out there.
I believe quite a few of the cards with free tracks on them are indeed these “Free” tracks, one reason they do this is to make happy kittens, and the other is so kitties can become aware of this DRM issue and make trouble for the silly record companies that don’t allow DRM free sales. 
So, go ahead and claim your free songs, if, for some reason they are restricted to play only in iTunes and won’t play in your Linux/Windows wonderland (free from silly fruit symbols) then simply burn a cd from iTunes, that will liberate your songs to the old fashioned CD format and remove that pesky DRM, you can then rip to any operating system, be it Unix, BeOS, Ubuntu, Windows 95 or Microsoft Ultimate Limited Super Exclusive Signature Vista Premium Edition

The Macintosh line of computers, has, for many years implemented quick, simple and powerful networking technologies years ahead of other computer makers.This post is about the dual gigabit ethernet ports that have been standard on the Power Mac G5 and the recent Mac Pro computers.  Apple led the field in 2000 by shipping its PowerBook and PowerMac computers with Gigabit Ethernet.

 Initially, gigabit Ethernet was deployed in high-capacity backbone network links (for instance, on a high-capacity campus network). In 2000, Apple’s Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 were the first mass produced personal computers featuring the 1000BASE-T connection.^[1] It quickly became a built-in feature in many other computers.

But Apple innovated again when they shipped the Power Mac G5 in June 2003 with Dual Gigabit Ethernet Ports, praise reigned on the Power Mac for this:

 The Power Mac G5 supports up to 16GB of 533-MHz DDR2 SDRAM and now includes two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Multiple Gigabit Ethernet ports are well suited for users who plan to utilize their Power Mac in an Xsan environment — that’s Apple’s storage-area network technology for high-performance computing. 

But, what can these dual ports do for us in our day to day computing? Well, simply put, your Power Mac can connect to your Router through both of these ports simultaneously and instantly double your network bandwidth.Many operating systems including Unix, Linux and Windows XP require intelligent configuring on the part of the user or the “System Administrator”, on the Mac, however, It Just Works.This trick will work for you even on your laptop, where a windows laptop would become confused with a WiFi connection as well as a Wired Gigabit connection, the MacBook will happily use both network connections simultaneously to get the most efficiency from your home router. Remember, the greatest home routers are the Apple Airport line of routers available from the Apple Store, Amazon or AuburnCom, your San Francisco Mac Evangelist!  

Fantastic News!

From Ars Technica:

The global data plan will be $59.99 per month for iPhone users, which will be added on top of your domestic iPhone plan. So if you already have an iPhone plan for $59.99 per month in the US, it’ll be another $59.99 on top of that to use this plan internationally. That’s a total of $119.98 per month (or for that particular month that you want to use it internationally).

Try using Command+H to hide your Mac OS X windows, it’s faster, skips effects and saves space in the dock…

MacBreak Weekly, hosted by Leo Laporte and part of the TWIT network, has been getting better and better recently, The Macalope has made a few appearances and this week in episode 64, John Siracusa, writer of this wonderfully intricate review of Leopard on Ars Technica
, is a guest and provides fantastic details of how and why Mac OS X Leopard is such an important step.

Listen to it over on http://www.twit.tv/mbw64

An Apple certified evangelist is awaiting your phone call to help you get the most out of your Mac. Certified by Apple in OS X support, I provide consultations on Panther, Jaguar, Tiger and the amazing New Leopard operating system. Would you like it to do more for you? automate your calendar events, simplify your music collection, handle the party music for your elaborate home audio system.

or lets talk about video, I evangelise the Apple TV, apple’s great product that brings your entire iTunes library to your living room, your bedroom, in fact any rooms in fact you’d like to listen to the large music library that you’ve spent so much time building, wouldn’t it be great to play all that music from the comfort of your living room couch? Call for a example of it’s usefulness.

Mac Hardware, software and Networking is all under our microscope, Apple has certified us as experts and we are so happy to bring this expertise to you.

AuburnCom is a registered San Francisco company with clients from Marin county, Sausalito, Yerba Buena island, the city of San Francisco and as far south as Daly City, we make house calls to the East Bay, and ship replacement and upgrade superdrives to faraway states including Texas and Massachusettes.

Call us on 415-871-9683, email brendan@auburncom.com or visit http://www.auburncom.com to find out more about us or how we can make things better and easier for you.