Monthly Archives: March 2009

The reduction of Apple packaging

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I’ve mentioned before that one of the ways Apple is lessening their impact on the environment is through smaller packages.

Smaller packages take fewer raw materials to construct. This means less energy needs to go into harvesting those materials and producing the packaging. It also means less material needs to be recycled and less material will undoubtedly end up in landfills.

Reduced packaging also means that more units can be transported or stored in the same amount of space. Fewer plane or train miles are required to transport the computers and other devices from the manufacturing plant to the point of sale. Retail stores can stock more Macs and iPhones in the same square-footage (or less) store which puts fewer demands on real estate acreage and requires less energy for lighting, cooling, or heating.

Author and developer Jeff LaMarche just got a 17″ MacBook Pro and offers some photographic evidence of the progression of smaller and smaller packages from Apple.

What is Spotlight?

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Spotlight is a feature that was added to the Mac a while back with the release of Mac OS X Tiger. It is a way to search your hard drive to find the file you need. That sounds pretty simple doesn’t it? Well, it is.

Spotlight always knows what is on your hard drive. It doesn’t have to go through a periodic process to update its index. If you have a Finder window open with “aubergine” in the search field, and let’s just say you don’t have any files that refer to eggplant as aubergine, the window will be empty because it could not find that word in anything. Now add a new document named “ratatouille” and type “aubergine” in the document somewhere. Immediately after you save that document, the ratatouille file will appear in your Finder window.

That example was meant to illustrate how quickly Spotlight knows about what is on you computer. But, it also illustrates another feature of Spotlight. The ability to search for stuff inside of files. And it does that just as swiftly. But it doesn’t end with finding text inside of a document, you can search to see which photos you took with a Nikon camera instead of your Canon. You can search for anything on one of the cards in your Address Book. You can search for almost anything.

The easiest way to use Spotlight is to click on the magnifying glass icon in the right side of your menu bar – Apple has a guideline of always putting the search field in the top-right corner of a screen or window. A search field will drop down that you can start typing into. Wait… now might be a good time for me to explain what I mean when I say “search field.” Everyone knows what a text field is, it’s a place to store some text that the user types in or that the computer fills in. Apple has a distinct version of a text field that they call a search field. They’re immediately recognizable because they have rounded sides giving them a pill-like appearance. There will be a magnifying glass in the left side of some of them. If that icon has a little downward facing triangle next to it, you can click on the icon to select recent searches you’ve made.

OK, with that bit of exposition out of the way, lets get back to the Spotlight menu. As I was saying, it is in the top-right corner of the screen. Click on the Spotlight icon and type something into the search field. As you are typing Spotlight will begin searching your computer and returning results. For example, aubergine begins with “au.” If I have anything about Australia, it will show up in the Spotlight menu until I type the “b” in aubergine. Yes, it’s that quick. The Spotlight menu categorizes everything it finds and will return the first few items for each category. If what you’re looking for isn’t there, select the Show All item at the top of the menu. This will open a Finder window with all of the results. By the way, you can rearrange categories and eliminate specific ones from the Spotlight menu by changing your System Preferences for Spotlight. There is also a preference for hiding specific locations from Spotlight.

Get familiar with the Spotlight menu, it's a real time-saver

Get familiar with the Spotlight menu, it's a real time-saver

I said this is the easiest way to use Spotlight. It is and it is also one of the easiest and quickest ways to launch an application. If Spotlight finds an application that’s name matches your search term, that application will be the Top Hit. For example, when I want to launch Pixelmator, I use the Command+Space keyboard shortcut to open the Spotlight menu and then type “pi” followed by the Return key. Since Pixelmator is my Top Hit, it is already highlighted and hitting Return will open it. If I wanted to open my contact card for Fuel Pizza, I would use the down arrow key to move the highlight down until I had selected Fuel Pizza and hit Return. You can also select items from the menu with your mouse.

Have you ever tried to open a file from inside an application and had trouble remembering where it is? No need to answer; that was a rhetorical question. I know the answer is “yes” because it happens to all of us. With Spotlight, you don’t need to remember where it is. Just remember enough about the file so that Spotlight can find it. Every File Open window in Mac OS X has a search field in the top-right corner. Enter your search terms in there and the contents of the sheet will show the results. As with the Finder, you’ll also see a little Spotlight toolbar at the top of the results area. This will allow you to refine your search. It will have a few file locations that you can limit the results to. But, it also has a plus button that adds additional layers of refinement to your search. Clicking that plus button allows you to refine your search by all sorts of things like the kind of file, the camera aperture setting for each photo, and the bit rate of audio files.

This should get you well on your way to becoming a Spotlight guru. Let me know what questions you have about Spotlight and I’ll answer them.

My first app; Shuffle Dialer

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I’ve been working on a few iPhone apps lately, and I just had my first one approved for sale on the iTunes Store. Curiously, this isn’t the first application I started working on. But, it is a concept that kept coming to mind as I was working on my other app and learning iPhone development. I took Daniel Jalkut‘s advice and started working on this smaller app as my first one for the App Store. There is more to come!

Here is the description of Shuffle Dialer as it reads on the iTunes Store:

Do you ever find yourself losing touch with friends or family? Why don’t you do something about it? With Shuffle Dialer you can reach out and touch somebody… at random! It’s a great way to reconnect with people that you care about.

Shuffle Dialer calls the contacts already on your iPhone and will even allow you to limit shuffling to a particular group of contacts. You can also tell Shuffle Dialer how many seconds to countdown before dialing.

On the iPod touch, Shuffle Dialer makes a great toy application for young children. My one and a half year old daughter loves pretending to call people with it. She hears the ring tones as it dials and a friendly “Hello?” on the other end of the line. iPhone users can enter this mode by turning the dialing switch off in the settings.

Early upgrade pricing on iPhone 3G for AT&T customers

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Are you an existing AT&T customer without an iPhone? Have you stayed away from the iPhone because AT&T wasn’t extending the subsidized price of $199 to customers that weren’t out of a contracts? Now is your chance to get on board. As a word of caution, this deal is probably happening now because AT&T wants to reduce their stock in anticipation of new iPhones sometime around June.

Great unit conversion app for the iPhone OS

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On the Mac, I love using Apple’s unit converter Dashboard widget. I have wanted something like that for my iPhone, but I haven’t seen anything that looked as easy to use… until now.

Tapbots has released their new application Convertbot [app store link] – and it is great. You can tell they really focused on the user experience before they ever started up Xcode. You’ll use the (now almost instinctive in humans) iPod touch wheel motion to select the conversion units for whatever you’re converting. Then, you tap on the read-out to bring up a number pad for entering what you need to convert. That’s about it.

Tapbots has a great demo on their Convertbot page. I encourage you to actually watch their demo movie rather than just the animated iPhone on their site. The animation seemed confusing to me at first, but their demo explains everything and really shows how easy to use Convertbot is.

The only fault I can find with this app is that it seems like it should start up faster than it does. It may be waiting to update currency exchange rates before displaying the interface. Don’t get me wrong, though, it doesn’t take as long as some games do – I can’t count to “Three-Mississippi” before it is ready.

Keeping your Mac’s Trash in the corner

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One of the first things I do on any new Mac is change the Dock so that my Trash is always in the corner rather than floating around as icons are added or removed from the Dock. This makes it very easy to drag items to the Trash because it’s always in the same spot. It’ll always be in the bottom-right corner if your Dock is positioned on the bottom or the right of the screen. And Trash will be in the bottom-left corner if your Dock is positioned on the left of the screen.

You have to set the Dock preferences so that the end of the Dock is pinned to the edge of the screen. But wait, that doesn’t show up in System Preferences for the Dock! Instead, you have to use the Terminal to enter some commands to set a hidden preference. This is really easy to do even if you’re not comfortable with the Terminal application or command line interfaces in general. But, typing the wrong thing into the Terminal can be fairly destructive – you’ve been warned. If you’re ready, Terminal can be found in the Utilities folder within your Applications folder.

Just type the following commands into Terminal one after the other and your Dock will disappear for a second and when it comes back the Trash will be in the corner.

defaults write com.apple.Dock pinning end

killall Dock

Sully's Flight experience now on the iPhone

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The makers of X-Plane, the hyper-realistic flight simulator for the Mac, have made another variant of the simulator for the iPhone OS. Sully’s Flight recreates the experience of Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s January 2009 landing in the Hudson River. All of the details including the aircraft, weather, and flight path are based on those of the day and you will hear the actual US Airways Flight 1549 radio communications played in sync with the flight. This app will give you an accurate simulation of the flight that day.

Upgrading memory for the new Mac Mini

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For those of you that are interested in the new Mac Mini that Apple released, here is some great information on upgrading the memory for it. You’ll have to be adventurous enough to be willing to “crack” open your Mac Mini with a putty knife, so be forewarned! By the way, all of the new Mac Minis use Core 2 Duo processors.

If you have one 1GB RAM module pre-existing in your mini, you could install a 2GB module in order for the machine to recognize 3GBs. However, the mini MUST be a Core 2 Duo.

Apple Announces Incredible New iPod shuffle

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Apple® today introduced the all-new iPod® shuffle, the world’s smallest music player at nearly half of the size of the previous model, and the first music player that talks to you. The revolutionary new VoiceOver feature enables iPod shuffle to speak your song titles, artists and playlist names. The third generation iPod shuffle is significantly smaller than a AA battery, holds up to 1,000 songs and is easier to use with all of the controls conveniently located on the earphone cord. With the press of a button, you can play, pause, adjust volume, switch playlists and hear the name of the song and artist. iPod shuffle features a gorgeous new aluminum design with a built-in stainless steel clip that makes it ultra-wearable.

“Imagine your music player talking to you, telling you your song titles, artists and playlist names,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod and iPhone™ Product Marketing. “The amazingly small new iPod shuffle takes a revolutionary approach to how you listen to your music by talking to you, also making it the first iPod shuffle with playlists.”

iPod shuffle is based on Apple’s incredibly popular shuffle feature, which randomly selects songs from your music library. And now, when you can’t remember the name of a song or an artist playing, with the press of a button iPod shuffle tells you the name of the song and artist. iPod shuffle can even tell you status information, such as battery life. With the ability to hold up to 1,000 songs and the VoiceOver feature, you can now easily switch between multiple playlists on your iPod shuffle. iPod shuffle can speak 14 languages including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The new iPod shuffle comes in silver or black and features a sleek and ultra-wearable design with a built-in stainless steel clip. iPod shuffle is the smallest music player in the world and is incredibly easy to clip to almost anything and take with you everywhere you go. iPod shuffle features up to 10 hours of battery life.*

Pricing & Availability 
The third generation 4GB iPod shuffle is now shipping and comes in silver or black for a suggested price of $79 (US) through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. iPod shuffle comes with the Apple Earphones with Remote and the iPod shuffle USB cable. iPod shuffle requires a Mac® with a USB 2.0 port, Mac OS® X v10.4.11 or later and iTunes® 8.1 or later; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows Vista, Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 3) or later and iTunes 8.1.

*Battery life and number of charge cycles vary by use and settings. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information. Song capacity is based on four minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; in 256-Kbps AAC format, song capacity is up to 500 songs; actual capacity varies by encoding method and bit rate.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.