AuburnCom Weblog

Wonderful article on Computerworld, that highlights a bunch of features in Leopard that are awesome.Apple.com is pointing to this article too, it’s that good! 

iChat is an instant messenger created by Macintosh and based on AIM.  One of the options that iChat presents to the user is the ability to add buddies.  A user can do this by:1. Open iChat up.2. Select Buddies on the top toolbar and click Add Buddy.3. Enter in their screen name as well as what type it is (AIM or .Mac).4. Click Add and they will be entered as a buddy.

The Mac user base has grown exponentially in recent years, more folks are switching from Windows than ever before, after all, when a PC consultant can run multiple instances of Windows Vista, XP, Red Hat Server and more under the extremely stable Parallels, VmWare Fusion or the (Free) Opensource VirtualBox on their MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or $1099 MacBook, why not get a Mac?One of the most missed features that Windows converts ask me is about the delete key, on a PC, the delete key deletes to the right (or forwards, if you’re writing in a western language), this ‘forward delete’ key is certainly present on the full size keyboards that Apple ships with Mac Pro and iMac computers but noticeably absent from both the new wireless Apple Keyboard and also Apple’s fine line of Notebook computers, fear not, because holding the ‘Fn’('Function’) key on your notebook or wireless keyboard while tapping the delete key causes it to behave like a ‘Forward Delete’. For more tips and tricks, subscribe to the RSS feed from this page by adding “http://auburncom.com/wp/feed/” to your FeedReader of choice or check back here often.You can also send your Mac OS X questions or pet peeves too brendan@auburncom.com 

Whenever you next find yourself penning an email in Mail, a script in Textedit, or a message in iChat, try tapping the “Escape” key halfway through the word you’re typing, you’ll see a drop down list of words that OS X has fetched from the Oxford American Dictionary, selecting one of these and tapping the “Return” key will save you a few seconds and also ensure your spelling is correct.

This technique will even expand your vocabulary and may win you your next game of Scrabble.

Using the new Podcast Producer feature in Mac OS X Leopard is one of the most impressive publishing platforms I’ve seen in a long time.Using Podcast Producer, an organization can record brief or long podcasts in Audio, Video, Screencast form and have the Leopard server take care of all rendering, storage, processing and publication. Thats not all, Podcast Producer will automagically fill in neccessary fields, add overlay effects as well as prepend and appending movies (Think “A Brad Bird Production”, of a “Pixar Podcast” with motion graphics and swooosh sound effects etc) to your podcasts, this cuts podcast production time not in half but into a tenth, absolutely essential for any organization with PR in their minds, and who doesn’t?Check it out here: Learn moreAnd Order it here: Apple OS X Server Leopard at Amazon

Just got an email from a great client of mine, Peter, makes impressive video documentaries and Film at his company, 313 Video, here in san Francisco.  Peter was using up disk space like gangbusters with all his video captures, especially now with HD video, so I recommended the 750GB Seagate FreeAgent that I’ve been evangelising since it first came on the market, It’s sleek black aluminum and completely fanless, with three interfaces, USB2, eSATA and the king of connections, FireWire.  Peters comments after receiving his drive are below as well as my reply, if you’re in need of some extra space or a drive to use with Time Machine, head over to Amazon and grab one of these Seagates, they have Five Year Warranties and Amazon gives thirty day moneyback refunds too, so the risk is minimal!

Brendan

finally got my seagate 750. Been copying like mad. Excellent drive very cool design. Thanks for the recommendation. I may order another. These video files take up lots of space.

After I formatted the drive(mac OS journaled) it showed 698 GB available. Is that what you get after formatting?

I’m super happy you like the drive. It’s true you lose about a tenth of the drive in formatting, it’s really noticeable on the newer Macs that ship with 1TB drives, you only have 900GB to play with after formatting. We never used to notice when our drives were 250GB, but we were losing about 20gb on those drives. 

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!

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!