While investigating whether Apple’s pro video market was already shrinking prior to Final Cut Pro X’s release or whether it is solely in response to that release, Jacqui uncovered some resentment towards Apple’s hardware releases. Evidentially video pros look at the huge successes Apple is having with the iPhone and iPad and feel neglected. Some of them evidentially think that Apple is putting all of their energy into releasing consumer products and they’re suffering as a result. They cited how long in the tooth the Mac Pro is getting as evidence of Apple’s inattention.

With the current iteration of the Mac Pro about to turn 18 months old—and even at the time of that update, the previous version was nearly two years old—these users are becoming increasingly jaded about Apple’s commitment to the pro market. And because Apple’s Final Cut products only work on the Mac, the Mac Pro is a big part of the equation when it comes to production houses choosing which software to use.

They’re worried that 18 months between Mac Pro revisions mean that Apple is neglecting the pro market. They feel that Apple wouldn’t let that sort of thing happen to their prized iPhone or iPad. Except Apple has. The iPhone 4 was on the market for 16 months before being replaced by the iPhone 4S.

Maybe video professionals need to reset their expectations. Set aside feelings of not being important enough. Just concentrate on who provides the best video production software for you today and who will provide the best in the future. It might be Apple.

Alongside this update to Pages, Apple has also published a support document that provides some guidelines for when you should use ePub and when you should use PDF. Simply put, if the layout is more important than the text use PDF, otherwise ePub is ideal. Fortunately, iBooks for the iPad and other iOS devices can display both ePub and PDF documents.

In their support document, Apple also provides an “ePub Best Practices” Pages document that you can use as a template for any new e-books that you want to create. They also provide instructions for importing the styles from the template into an existing document to provide the structure needed by e-book readers to for the table of contents and navigation.

You can use the first page as the cover, but it looks odd.

Actually exporting the ePub file is easy enough. Simply select the Export option from the Share menu and you’ll be presented with a sheet where you can select ePub as the format. You’ll then be asked for some basic meta-data about the document. Once you’ve entered the Title and Author, you can press the Next button to choose a location to export to. And, that’s it. Just drag the file onto the iTunes icon in your dock and sync it to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. You’re done.

I used Apple’s template to convert the original “Ease into the switch” article into an ePub book. Download it to see what kind of results you can get from just a few minutes of reformatting.

One question remains; when does this come to the iPad version of Pages?

It’s easiest to create a new rule by selecting a message that is like the kind you’ll want the rule to automatically handle in the future. For instance, you may want electronic statements that you receive to all be moved to a new mailbox. First choose New Mailbox from the Mailbox menu and name it “Statements.” To set up a rule to move statements there, select one of the them. Then go to Preferences from the Mail menu in the menu bar.

Select the Rules tab on the far right-hand side of the window. Choosing the Add Rule button will slide a sheet down from the preferences window. By default you’ll see one condition that specifies Any Recipient Contains something that is probably your e-mail address or whichever one appears on the to line of the currently selected message. You can work with this condition and add others. But, for the purpose of my example, let’s change the first part of this condition from Any Recipient to Subject. The text box will switch to the subject from the currently selected message. In my case, this is “Time Warner Cable Bill Statement” which is perfect but in some cases it may make sense to trim this text down to catch all the messages you intended. By the way, having this text box pre-filled is the reason you want to select an example message before setting up your rule. Selecting the right message first eliminates the need to type the values you want the rule to operate on in most cases.

To finish setting up the new rule, specify the action you want performed. We want to move these messages to a “Statements” mailbox, so select it from the mailbox pop-up menu. Don’t forget to give this rule a description that will remind you exactly what it is for. Now choose OK and you’re done. Mail will ask you if you’d like to apply this rule to existing messages – you should, unless you have a good reason not to.

To confirm that it worked, simply go to the newly created mailbox in the left-hand pane of the Mail window and look at the messages that were moved. From now on any new messages matching the condition you set will be moved to this folder.

If you have other messages that you’d like to perform some sort of action on when you receive them, try setting up a rule for them now. The example I provided above is one of the more common actions. There are several others and you can even create custom actions via AppleScript to get really fancy.

Select any application and press the Force Quit button

You can also press the Command-Option-Escape keys on the keyboard to bring up a Force Quit Applications window. From this window, you can select the application that isn’t responding and press the Force Quit button. Pressing Command-Option-Escape again while this window is front-most will force the Mac to restart.

“Apple is the Multi-Touch leader, pioneering the use of this innovative technology in iPhone, iPod touch and Mac notebook trackpads,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Apple’s Multi-Touch technology allows us to offer an easy to use mouse in a simple and elegant design.”

Magic Mouse features a seamless touch-sensitive enclosure that allows it to be a single or multi-button mouse with advanced gesture support. Using intuitive gestures, users can easily scroll through long documents, pan across large images or swipe to move forward or backward through a collection of web pages or photos. Magic Mouse works for left or right handed users and multi-button or gesture commands can be easily configured from within System Preferences.

The Magic Mouse laser tracking engine provides a smooth, consistent experience across more surfaces than a traditional optical tracking system. Magic Mouse uses Bluetooth wireless capabilities to create a clean, cable-free desk top and its secure wireless connection works from up to 10 meters away. To extend battery performance, Magic Mouse includes an advanced power management system that works with Mac OS® X to automatically switch to low power modes during periods of inactivity. The wireless Magic Mouse is powered by two AA batteries which are included.

Pricing & Availability
Magic Mouse comes standard with the new iMac and is available at the end of October through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $69 (US). Magic Mouse requires Mac OS X Leopard® version 10.5.8 or later.

iTunes now lets you organize everything into an upper level “iTunes Media” folder structure, which then breaks out neatly into logical groupings: movies, apps, shows, and so on.

via holman runs the voodoo down.

You can easily remove any of these icons you don't need.

There’s nothing in each one’s menu to allow you to remove them and there aren’t easy to find settings for them in System Preferences (though, they are usually scattered around there). If you want to remove one, just hold down the ⌘ (Command) key and drag it out of the menu bar. Lift your finger to stop dragging once you’re clear of the menu bar and poof it’s gone. This is similar to how you can drag icons out of your Dock  – only with that you don’t need to hold down the option key.

iPhone 3G S – a set on Flickr.

The need for computer security long ago passed from a minor annoyance to something that could affect our personal and financial safety. Just as disasters, crime, and tales of tragedy tend to dominate the news, stories of information security failures never fail to grab the headlines. When it’s a story with the potential to smear a media darling like Apple, you can bet the article will be right up there next to the latest celebrity embarrassment. But with a little consideration of these five tips, you can evaluate the reality level of any given security story.

via TidBITS Safe Computing: Five Tips for Reading Mac Security Stories.

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

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.