Archive for December, 2008
Obamafy Yourself with this nice Photo Booth Plugin
This Plugin is only for Leopard using Photo Booth Users, but it creates really cool pictures in the style of the Obama posters:
You can fetch the Plugin from the developers website: http://www.dubster.com/obamafy/
Alex loves his Mac
Boy oh Boy, I can’t get enough of this guy.
If I’d been keeping track of my own journey into the Mac Universe, it would have been like this, he’s a former expert PC user, who’s jumped into the Mac and embraces all the great things that come with a Mac.
If you haven’t fallen in love with the Mac yet, or want to be reminded of the joy you had when you first got your Mac, check this out:
MacBook Unboxing
AlexOsh1234 over on Youtube unboxes his new MacBook in this cute and easygoing video from the wondrous youtube.
Alex admits to being a brand new Mac User, and he seems pretty impressed and excited by his new Mac.
New Mac Recommendation
Regarding the new computer that you’ve the opportunity to buy, the entire Mac Lineup is very attractive at the moment, the Laptop line got a refresh from top to bottom just two months ago, so any Mac Laptop from the entry level MacBook (http://tinyurl.com/6m97t6) to the higher end MacBook Pros(Apple MacBook Pro) are good investments (in the sense that they’re brand new technology).
If you favor portability, I highly recommend the laptop that I use, the MacBook Air, it too got a refresh which make it very desirable now, when I purchased mine, they only had 80 Gigabyte hard drives, they’ve been bumped to 120 Gigabyte hard drives, and, even have an option for a 128 Gigabyte Solid state hard drive(MacBook Air Computer).
The Air is a very portable computer and with a solid state hard drive has extraordinary speed and reliability advantages over traditional hard drives, I chose traditional at my time of purchase, but that was almost a year ago when the cost of a solid state drive was $1000 over traditional (now it’s $500) and the size was 64 Gigabytes (now it’s 128 Gigabytes!)
So, to summarize, whichever MacBook you choose, you’ll be making a good decision, I’ll be happy to help get you up and running with it and your other computers at your convenience.
FOCUS
Inspired by the news than Lenovo is unveiling an 11lb Dual screen “Laptop” (a strong lap needed, thats the weight of a large bag of Potatoes), I’d like to share with you some of the benefits that Apple’s focus makes available to us.
In the current economic and energy conscious environment, the “bigger screen than yours” concept of buying laptops has flown out the window, so many people have flat screen tv’s today that they know they can plug in their laptop and enjoy a large computer desktop when in their home/office/studio. In addition, people are teleworking more and more, and becoming used to checking email on the bus, in a cafe wherever. With these two factors, consumers are realizing that longer battery life and lighter weight are more valuable than large laptop screen size.
Amazon Best Selling Laptops Show MacBooks and NetBooks Dominating.
Apple has reacted as well as anybody can in the face of this by unveiling the ultimate lightweight laptop that compromises in very few ways, the MacBook Air and recently, the killer combination of 24inch display with 13″ MacBooks.
By picking up a 13″MacBook with a 24″ Cinema Display, you’re acquiring the power to be very portable in your day to day activities, and then, arriving at your workdesk, to seize the screen real estate only dreamed of up till recently by even Professionals. This combination of laptop and spectacular screen is a simple, powerful solution for every user.
Take big pictures on your camera while in the field, preview and filter them while on the train back to your studio, then, at your desk connect to the 24″ display and examine the minute details of the pictures.
Or, If you work with numbers, use your laptop screen for sending and receiving tons of emails, invoices receipts etc, then, when at your desk, connect your Cinema display and look at multiple spreadsheets, graphs and stocks on the wealth of space, even utilising your MacBooks 13 inch screen for your calculator and Email.
Simply a wonderful combination.
Apple Releases 10.5.6 Update
Apple has released it’s latest update to Leopard in order to further stabilize and secure your Mac.
Please take your time in running this update, make a full backup of your files, read the details of the update, download the update and run the update when you have time to leave your Mac to do it’s update.
Here’s Apple’s official release notes:
What’s new in this update?
Address Book
- Improves reliability of Address Book syncing with iPhone and other devices and applications.
AirPort
- Improves the reliability of AirPort connections, including improvements when roaming in large wireless networks with an Intel-based Mac.
Client management
- Improves reliability of synchronizing files on a portable home directory.
- Fixes an issue in Mac OS X 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 in which managed users may not see printers that use the Generic PPD.
- Client computers that use UUID-based ByHost preferences now respect managed Screen Saver settings.
iChat
- Addresses an issue that could cause an encryption alert to appear in the chat window.
- Setting your iChat status to “invisible” via AppleScript no longer logs you out of iChat.
- Resolves an issue in which pasting text from a Microsoft Office document could insert an image rather than text.
Graphics
- Includes general improvements to gaming performance.
- Includes graphics improvements for iChat, Cover Flow, Aperture, and iTunes.
- Includes fixes for possible graphics distortion issues with certain ATI graphics cards.
- Includes overall performance and reliability fixes.
- Improves Connection Doctor accuracy.
- Fixes an issue that could cause messages identified as junk to remain in the inbox.
- Fixes an issue that could cause Mail to append a character to the file extension of an attachment.
- Addresses an issue that could prevent Mail from quitting.
- Improves reliability when printing PDF attachments.
MobileMe
- Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac automatically sync within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at me.com.
Networking
- Improves Apple File Service performance, especially when using a home directory hosted on an AFP server.Important: If you are using Mac OS X 10.5.6 (client) to connect to a Mac OS X Server 10.4-based server, it is strongly recommended that you update the server to Mac OS X Server version 10.4.11.
- Improves the performance and reliability of TCP connections.
- Improves reliability and performance for AT&T 3G cards.
- Updates the ssh Terminal command for compatibility with more ssh servers.
Printing
- Improves printing for the Adobe CS3 application suite.
- Improves printing for USB-based Brother and Canon printers.
Parental Controls
- Addresses an issue in which a parentally-controlled account could be unable to access the iTunes Store.
- Includes general fixes for time limits.
- Resolves an issue that prevented adding allowed websites from Safari via drag and drop.
Time Machine
- Fixes issues that could cause Time Machine to state the backup volume could not be found.
- Improves Time Machine reliability with Time Capsule.
Safari
- Improves compatibility with web proxy servers.
General
- Includes Mac OS X security improvements. See this website for more information.
- Addresses inaccuracies with Calculator when the Mac OS X language is set to German or Swiss German.
- Improves the performance and reliability of Chess.
- Improves DVD Player performance and reliability.
- Performance improvements for iCal are included.
- Fixes an issue when running the New iCal Events Automator action as an applet.
- Adds a Trackpad System Preference pane for portable Macs.
- Improves compatibility with smart cards such as the U.S. Department of Defense Common Access Card.
- Updates time zone data and Daylight Saving Time rules for several countries.
Calaborator
This is Killer!
really Simple, clean integration of iCal with Google’s now CalDAV enabled Calendar service. Add or remove events in iCal and they go to Google Calendar, very very nice.