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March 31, 2007

Do Something When

Posted in: Software

Do Something When is a system preference pane that allows the user to watch for drives mounting and un-mounting, allowing them to launch or quit applications, whenthese events happen. For example, you can launch iTunes when your music hard drive gets mounted, you can quit iTunes when you eject the drive.

March 30, 2007

Notae - organize your notes

Posted in: Software

Notae keeps all of your thoughts together. It lets you tag each item with words that are important to you, not just with predefined labels. Then, when you need that data the most, Notae lets you quickly search your data by content or tag to find what you’re looking for.

March 29, 2007

Burn damage-resistant copies of your files with TrueDisc

Posted in: Software

If you backup your files to optical disc, you know how fragile those backups really are. Scratches, labels – even just age or poor manufacturing – can make those discs unreadable within months. TrueDisc transforms your files into special “master copies” and burns those master copies to disc.

March 28, 2007

Your personal library of science - Papers

Posted in: Software

Do you have dozens of PDF files from your favorite scientific articles scattered on your harddrive? Do you also try to desperately organize them by renaming and archiving them in folders? Papers will revolutionize the way you deal with scientific papers. Search for papers using PubMed, directly retrieve and archive PDFs, and read and study them all from within Papers, your personal library of Science. For a review of Papers head over to Ars Technica.

March 27, 2007

How to mount a Windows shared folder on your Mac

Posted in: Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks

So you've made the switch to Mac, but kept your old PC, and now you've got both connected to your home router. How do you access your Windows files from OS X? Sure you could set up an FTP or SSH server, but that's overkill for a regular home network. Turns out that Mac OS X can connect to Windows shared folders very easily. Read on to find out how.

GTD with Thinking Rock

Posted in: Software

Thinking Rock is a free software application for collecting and processing your thoughts following the GTD methodology. A lot of our mental energy is directed towards trying to remember and manage all the things that we want or need to do. Thinking Rock will allow you to clear your mind so that you can become more proactive and concentrate on what is important to you.

March 26, 2007

Using your Mac as a NAT router

Posted in: Hardware, Tips & Tricks

No doubt you know that sharing your internet connection on your Mac is easy. For instance, if want to turn any Mac with a built-in Airport card into a wireless router (e.g. with a cable or DSL modem plugged into the built-in ethernet port), all you have to do is go to the Sharing pane of your System Preferences select it and hit start. However, what if you want to do something a little bit more complicated? This tutorial covers some other ways for turning your Mac into a router, including over FireWire and adding a second ethernet port via USB (which can be really tricky). Unique essay written on your requirements along with the highest academic standards

March 25, 2007

Trapper Keeper - the fastest way to note

Posted in: Software

What if it were as easy to get stuff into your Mac as it is to find it with Spotlight? Enter Trapper Keeper, a light and accessible utility for managing your notes. Always available in the menu bar, if you’ve used Spotlight, you’ll find it instantly familiar (as in instant results).

Setting up an automated workflow to convert files for Apple TV on OS X

Posted in: Hardware, Mac OS X, Software, Tips & Tricks

Jason writes: "With the arrival of my Apple TV yesterday I needed a solution to get my Xvix/WMV/Divx files converted and imported into iTunes so that I can watch them. I already have Quicktime Pro, which with the recent release added the ability to “Export to Apple TV”. Since I have a lot of files, and no desire to sit around and convert these one at a time, it seemed like a perfect job for Automator."

Apple TV: The first 24 hours

Posted in: Hardware

David Chartier writes: "After spending a good 24 hours with a shiny new Apple TV, I agree with Mossberg and Pogue: this thing rocks."

"Apple has produced a great device that makes getting your iTunes and iTunes Store content from your Mac/PC to your TV and entertainment center, and with a nearly 10x lead in the digital media market at 118 million active iTunes users, they have quite an audience for it as well."

March 23, 2007

The very cool Apple TV screensaver

Posted in: Hardware, Multimedia

Leopard not ready for April

Posted in: Mac OS X

There have been a lot of rumors lately from "unconfirmed" sources about Leopard's expected ship date. For a while, everyone was sure it was going to ship mid-to-late March. Then mysteriously, the ship date (according to these anonymous sources) got shifted to mid-April—perhaps because we are already in late March. Oops. Developers who work closely with Apple have been dying to tell the world how very, very wrong we all are.

March 22, 2007

Apple TV Has Landed

Posted in: Hardware

In looks, it sits at the top of the heap. Apple TV is a gorgeous, one-inch-tall, round-cornered square slab, 7.7 inches on a side. It slips silently and almost invisibly into your entertainment setup. (You can’t say that for the Xbox, which in comparison is huge and too noisy for a bedroom.)

The heartbreaker for millions, however, is that Apple TV requires a widescreen TV - preferably an HDTV. It doesn’t work with the squarish, traditional TVs that many people still have.

March 21, 2007

Lack of Mac malware baffles experts

Posted in: Security

Apple's Mac OS X remains almost completely free of any sort of malware threat despite several years of availability, a significant market share, and even an entire month dedicated to pointing out its flaws.

And security experts are not exactly sure why. In an article for the McAfee Avert Labs blog, security researcher Marius van Oers pointed out that Mac malware is "pretty much non-existent at the moment".

Black Ink - solve crosswords with style

Posted in: Software

Black Ink makes it easy to download and solve free puzzles from the Internet.

The ultimate crossword solving application for Mac OS X, Black Ink's intuitive interface and advanced puzzle solving tools are a joy for crossword lovers of all ages and skills.

Black Ink was developed by Red Sweater Software after acquiring MacXword from Stephan Cleaves in January, 2007. Cleaves developed and published the software under the Advenio brand with business partner Michael Dupuis, where it was widely acknowledged as the leading crossword application for Mac OS X.

"I've been solving crosswords since I was a kid, all through college, and as a much needed break in my professional life," said Daniel Jalkut, founder of Red Sweater Software. "MacXword was the best application anywhere for solving crosswords, which is why I was so excited to acquire it and make it even better."

Black Ink connects users with the puzzles they are passionate about. Download new puzzles from the Internet, solve them with an advanced on-screen editor, or print them out for the long weekend away from the office. Black Ink covers all of the puzzle-solver's needs.

Black Ink costs just $24.95, and offers a 30-day fully-featured evaluation period. Red Sweater is pleased to offer existing customers of MacXword a substantial upgrade discount. See the Red Sweater Store for more details.

March 20, 2007

Apple's next-generation iMacs to add a touch of grace

Posted in: Hardware

People familiar with the matter say Apple has called upon its award-winning design chief Jonathan Ive and his team to cut the fat from the the current iMac line and outfit a pair of new Core 2 Duo-based models in a form factor that will be both slimmer and sleeker than today's offerings.

For Apple, the impending iMac makeover will represent the first major industrial design overhaul to hit its flagship all-in-one consumer desktop line in nearly three years. The last eye candy to accompany an iMac update came back in August of 2004, when the company retired its "sunflower" iMac G4 design while introducing the portrait-style iMac G5.

Mac OS X security: investigating security breaches and illegal use

Posted in: Security, Tips & Tricks

Knowing how to investigate a security breach, potential crime, or policy violation on a Mac computer or server is crucial for understanding the incident and building a chain of evidence that clearly identifies the culprit. In this article, Ryan Faas describes data forensic methods as they apply to Mac OS X and shows you how to ensure that evidence on a compromised Mac is not contaminated during an investigation.

Twitter, OS X, and your home

Posted in: Internet, Software, Tips & Tricks

Home automation is a topic that both excites and daunts some of us. Gordon Meyer from O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter has incorporated some of those "hacks" to interface with Twitter. Twitter, for those who aren't familiar, is the (infamous?) microblogging platform that allows users to update their statuses via a multitude of platforms—IM, SMS, e-mail, web—as well as receive notifications from friends via those same platforms.

March 19, 2007

iPhone components on their way

Posted in: iPhone

iPhone components are already in production, according to some reports, and are gearing up to be delivered to Apple sometime in "early April." This was in response to Apple's specific request to ship the items by that time. The natural deduction to make, based on this information, is that Apple plans to start assembly of the parts very soon thereafter.

March 18, 2007

Interview: Tony Arnold of VirtueDesktops

Posted in: Interviews

VirtueDesktops, a virtual desktop manager for OS X, has been around for quite some time. However, with the introduction of Spaces in Leopard, Tony Arnold, creator of VirtueDesktops, decided to stop developing the popular application. MacApper interviewed Tony on creating, developing, and ending VirtueDesktops, as well as what’s coming next.

March 16, 2007

First Impressions: Mailplane - the desktop Gmail client

Posted in: Internet, Software, Tips & Tricks

The fusion of web services and desktop software is a holy grail of computing bliss that few can claim. Anyone who has ever gone back and forth on whether to use the convenience and innovation of Gmail on the web vs. the power and integration of a desktop email client like Apple's Mail.app knows what we're talking about. While the melding of these two universes might seem like an impossible hope to some, Mailplane is a new desktop Gmail client in private beta that just may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

iTunes 7.1 finally supports Full Keyboard Access

Posted in: Software

It’s only taken Apple engineers about a decade, but they have finally properly implemented support for Mac OS X’s Full Keyboard Access in one of their most widely used applications, i.e. iTunes. (I have been complaining about the lack of support for Full Keyboard Access in Apple’s own applications, including iTunes, for years.)

March 15, 2007

Monitor your Mac and more with GeekTool

Posted in: Software

One of the best ways to keep up with information about the state of your computer is to embed it in your desktop as simple, plain text. Sure, Dashboard/Yahoo/Google/Vista widgets are big, colorful desktop toys, but they also can be distracting, space-hogging and stingy with vital information. If you like to monitor your system using age-old command line tools like uptime and top, you want the free GeekTool on your Mac. Today we'll cover how to automatically embed command output, text files and even monitoring images - like web site traffic charts - onto your Mac desktop with GeekTool.

March 14, 2007

Backing up with Aperture

Posted in: Software, Tips & Tricks

Apple’s Aperture application is an extremely versatile digital photography workflow tool. In Aperture, once an image has been imported into a project in the library, the original file, called a master, is never modified. As images are adjusted and edited, instead of the space-intensive duplicate-edit-save cycle of Photoshop and other tools, Aperture’s workflow stores changes as very small recipe files called versions. When a particular version of an image is displayed or exported, Aperture reads the master from disk and applies the recipe. Changes to a recipe can be made and unmade at any time and in any order, resulting in a non-linear, non-destructive and very flexible workflow.

March 13, 2007

Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.9

Posted in: Mac OS X

The 10.4.9 Update is recommended for PowerPC and Intel-based Mac computers currently running Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.8 and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes or compatibility updates for a variety of applications and technologies.

  • RAW camera support
  • Handling of large or malformed images that could cause crashes
  • Image capture performance
  • Mouse scrolling and keyboard shortcuts
  • Font handling
  • Playback quality, and bookmarks in DVD Player
  • USB video conferencing cameras for use with iChat
  • Bluetooth devices
  • Browsing AFP servers
  • Apple USB Modem
  • Windows-created digital certificates
  • Open and Print dialogs in applications that use Rosetta on Intel-based Macs
  • Time zone and daylight saving for 2006 and 2007
  • Security updates

11 ways to optimize your Mac's performance

Posted in: Mac OS X, Software, Tips & Tricks

Ed Eubanks writes: "Every now and then, my Macs begin to feel a little sluggish. There are many potential reasons why: I tend to run 8-10 applications all the time - and sometimes push 15 or more. This alone will bog down any Mac. When those don't speed things up, I've found a number of things I can do to encourage my Macs back to their youthful snappiness. Here are a few tips I've found for restoring my Macs to full speed without spending a penny."

March 12, 2007

Apple aiming for TV breakthrough

Posted in: Hardware

Apple's intentions seem clear: It wants to be the company that finally figures out how to tie the television to the Internet and make video downloads as common as music downloads. "With Apple TV, we believe we are providing a new, better way for people to seamlessly and wirelessly enjoy their digital lifestyles," Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer.

iTunes - music's new gatekeeper

Posted in: Various

Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of all 940 Best Buy stores or featured on the front page of Target's ad circular. How do bands get these boosts? Who decides whether Arcade Fire is plugged at the top of the iTunes site - or whether Nickelback gets no mention?

A more secure OS X before Leopard

Posted in: Mac OS X, Security, Tips & Tricks

In this howto, the author will show you some things he has done to secure OS X beyond it’s default settings. There are very basic, and some advanced things in here.

March 11, 2007

The beginner's guide to command line magic

Posted in: Tips & Tricks

Many of you may have heard of the supposed power of Mac OS X that it gains from Unix-y underpinnings. Like one of those proclamations that make you seem smart, but you’re not sure why, the BSD-like innards of OS X are something that Mac enthusiasts like to cite, but rarely get their hands dirty in. So for those of you who have always wondered how to make your life a little easier or more powerful or impressive with command line voodoo, check out this little beginner’s guide.

March 10, 2007

Extreme base station puts the others to shame

Posted in: Hardware, Reviews

Apple has created an attractive package, both in form and features. The Extreme looks like a warmer for a really expensive coffeemaker, whereas its competitors look about as cheerful as an Imperial Probe Droid or worse. Looks aside, it features a USB 2.0 port. Plug any USB hard drive or (nearly) any printer into the port (or plug in a USB hub and use 'em both), and they'll be wirelessly available to any Mac or PC on your network that's running Apple's AirPort client software - another strong vote for media sharing and network backups.

Apple working on Flash notebook?

Posted in: Hardware

Apple is looking to develop a laptop that eschews conventional hard drives in favour of Flash memory, according to an analyst. The new ultra-mobile device could be classified as a "sub-notebook", and would use Flash memory chips for storage and a stripped-down version of Mac OS X similar to the iPhone's, according to Wu.

March 09, 2007

Palm Responds to the iPhone

Posted in: iPhone

Palm has hired a top Silicon Valley software designer as it seeks to respond to the challenge posed by Apple’s new iPhone. The designer, Paul Mercer, a former Apple computer engineer, began work three weeks ago at Palm on a line of new products, a company spokeswoman said, but she declined to comment further on the project.

Apple’s iPhone is still several months away from being available, but its flexible interface is already shaking up the cellphone industry, including Palm, which makes the hybrid phone-organizers known as smart phones.

Photos of cats that love Macs

Posted in: Various

There are many cat lovers among the Mac community and here are some very cool photos of their pets in love with Apple hardware :)

Every photo on this page links to the respective Flickr page where you can get a larger version and find out more about the author as well as the Macs in the photos.










Richard sent this photo of his cat who really likes to take naps near the Mac on his work desk. He isn't sure if she prefers the radiator or the Mac but I'd bet it's a combo! :)


Digg!

Camino gets a point upgrade from the Mozilla team

Posted in: Internet, Software

Aside from bringing the application up-to-date with the latest security updates from the Mozilla/Firefox code base, there are a few fixes and new features: better support for importing iCab bookmarks and Internet Explorer ".url" shortcuts, an updated Java plugin, and support for restoring corrupted bookmarks from a backup.

Apple: America's best retailer

Posted in: Various

The high-tech wundercompany has landed - not only on our street corners and in our malls, but also for the first time, on the top 10 of Fortune's Most Admired Companies.

March 08, 2007

Four Skypes in one box

Posted in: Software

There are four versions of Skype: for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows Mobile. Can you run all of them in one computer and have them talk to each other?

Organize your PDF library with iTunes

Posted in: Software, Tips & Tricks

Your receipts, ebooks, scanned newspaper articles, tax forms, gadget manuals and client contracts can be available at your fingertips whether or not you're by your filing cabinet. And you can organize them using iTunes.

Using Quicksilver to configure firewalls

Posted in: Security, Software, Tips & Tricks

This blog post will show you how to make a firewall-related workflow more intuitive.

March 07, 2007

Secrets of Safari's Activity window

Posted in: Internet, Software, Tips & Tricks

One of the often overlooked features of Safari is its Activity window, hiding in plain sight in the Window menu (or just press Command-Option-A for fast access). The Activity window shows activity related to the Web pages you are viewing. If you try to load a page and it stalls out with “loading,” for instance, the Activity window will show you exactly which item is causing the problem—just click the disclosure triangle next to the page in question, and you’ll see entries for every item on the page, and (if those items are loaded) their size or (if they’re not loaded) a message showing their status.

24-inch iMac is nearly perfect

Posted in: Hardware, Reviews

Mark Kellner writes: "It's taken 25 years or thereabouts from the arrival of my first computer, a Sanyo MBC-1000, but I believe my search for the "perfect" desktop one is over. The device sports a massive 24-inch liquid crystal display, big enough to make watching a video of the NBC-TV series "Law & Order" enjoyable."

March 06, 2007

Steve Jobs, spymaster

Posted in: Various

A judge ordered Apple last January to pay the $700,000 legal fees of two websites that reported on an unreleased product code-named "Asteroid." Apple had sued the sites seeking the identities of leakers within its ranks, but lost the case. Does Apple sow disinformation among its workers to sniff out leakers?

Apple patches 8 major flaws in Quicktime

Posted in: Security, Software

Apple has issued a collection of 8 security updates for both the OS X and Windows versions of its QuickTime multimedia software. French Security Incident Response Team (FrSIRT) issued its most severe security rating of "critical" for all flaws.

All 8 flaws affects current versions of Quicktime for Windows Vista, XP and 2000. Seven of the vulnerabilities also affect OS X versions 10.3.9 and later.

March 05, 2007

Use iTunes to create your DVD case inserts

Posted in: Software, Tips & Tricks

If you create slideshows with your photos and burn them to DVD for playback in set-top players, you might want to enhance your packaging with a nice album cover and liner notes.

E-mail security with Apple Mail

Posted in: Internet, Security, Software, Tips & Tricks

Some times sensitive data needs to be sent via email and as it travels to it’s destination it can be intercepted by hackers, ISPs, the office IT geek or even a strict government. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss how to use Apple’s Mail application to send secure emails that are signed and encrypted. How does it work? Both parties get a free personal certificate from a trusted source and then we let Mail do the rest.

March 03, 2007

Maynor demos MacBook Wi-Fi hijack, admits mistakes

Posted in: Security

Looking to put to rest one of the most bizarre vulnerability disclosure disputes in recent memory, hacker David Maynor offered an apology for mistakes made, provided a live demo of the controversial MacBook Wi-Fi takeover and promised to release e-mail exchanges, crash/panic logs and exploit code to clear his tarnished name.

Reclaim hard-drive space

Posted in: Mac OS X, Software, Tips & Tricks

Hard drives have a way of filling up—especially laptop drives. Install OS X and your favorite apps, and then add your music collection, photos, and videos—and that space can disappear in a flash. If you can’t get a larger hard drive for your portable Mac, the easiest way to get more storage space is to get rid of stuff you don’t need. To start the process, consider the following suggestions.

March 02, 2007

VMware Fusion Beta 2 answers Parallels

Posted in: Software

VMware released a second beta of its Fusion virtualization software. This marks the second major release this week of virtualization software for running the Windows operating system on Macs. VMware rival Parallels released version 2.5 of its software on Feb. 27. Among the improvements in the new version of VMware’s Fusion is an ability to run Windows-designed 3-D gaming software.

Apple releases Backup 3.1.1

Posted in: Software

With Backup 3, protection is easy to set up and schedule so backups can happen automatically, without your constant attention. Built-in Tiger Spotlight makes it easy to select exactly the files you want to back up. Backup 3.1.1 is highly recommended for all users of Backup 3. New in this version: backup and restore with external drives, memory management and the restore of bundled file types.

Apple sets Wi-Fi on fire

Posted in: Hardware, Reviews

At $179, Apple's AirPort Extreme 802.11 draft-n wireless base station is priced like brand X, but Cisco couldn't have done it any better. Apple's claim of 5X performance and 2X coverage relative to 802.11g is no mere boast; it was proven for this review. Apple's new base station is easy to manage from Windows and OS X, and current AirPort Extreme admins will appreciate the rewritten AirPort Utility's expert features like logging and performance charting.

March 01, 2007

Keep some PDF info private

Posted in: Software, Tips & Tricks

You may not realize it, but every time you save a PDF in OS X, you’re potentially sharing at least a bit of personal information: your name. This may not be a big issue to you, but for someone whose job is, for example, to anonymously review and comment on manuscripts, it could be a problem. Read this article to get tips on how to make some of the information disappear.

Using Safari can slow your system down as much as 76% vs Firefox

Posted in: Internet, Software, Tips & Tricks

While how fast a browser can render a web page is certainly an important weapon in the browser war arguments, the difference is usually a matter of seconds at the most. To my mind, a more important measure of speed is how a browser affects the overall speed of your SYSTEM.

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