Category Archives: Macintosh

New to the Mac? This category will help you make the transition with guides and tips on how to begin using the Mac and how to grow with yours as you become more comfortable in your new environment.

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

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.

The Omni Group Releases Four Applications as Freeware

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The Omni Group has  released four of their software applications as freeware: OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter. All versions are  fully functional with no licensing restrictions, and are available at no cost from The Omni Group.

“As a small company with limited resources, we have had to make some  difficult decisions about where to focus our attention as our business  continues to grow,” said Ken Case, CEO of the Omni Group. “By making  these applications – which are not currently under active development – available as free downloads, we hope that more people are able to enjoy using them without the barrier of cost.”

OmniWeb is a powerful web browser with many unique time-saving, customizable features; OmniDazzle is a set of visual screen effects that can be used for presentations or capturing screenshots; OmniDiskSweeper is a disk cleanup utility; and OmniObjectMeter is a Mac OS X memory optimization developer tool. More information on these and other Omni Group products can be found on their website.

About The Omni Group

One of the first companies to develop software for the Mac OS X  platform, the Omni Group is today a leading developer for Apple  products and has designed several productivity applications for Mac OS  X and iPhone. Founded in 1993, The Omni Group is located in Seattle, Washington.

What’s new with Safari 4?

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Today Apple released a beta version of Safari 4 that is packed with new features. This means that they are aware of bugs in the software. It also implies that they feel it is feature complete – they don’t have any other features planned before releasing the final version of Safari 4. They would, however, like to get bug reports back from users via a convenient bug button in the toolbar.

There are quite a few new features. The most visible changes are top sites and tabs on top. They’ve incorporated an Apple TV style view of the top sites that you visit. They’re arranged in a curved matrix displaying a minimum of six pages or as many as 24. By default, it shows 12 of your favorite sites (you can change this by clicking the Edit button in the bottom left corner). Pages that have changed since you last visited them have a very visible star in the top right corner. You can rearrange the pages by dragging and dropping them, and you can pin them to a specific place so it’s always there. You can always get back to the Top Sites view by selecting Show Top Sites from the History menu or by keying Command + Shift + 1.

Tabs on top frees up some of your screen’s real estate to give more space for the window content. It does this by moving tabs from their own bar to the title bar. It doesn’t appear that you can turn off the tabs feature anymore; there is always a plus button in the top right corner of the window that you can click on to create a new tab. Another change that they’ve added is a handle on each tab you can use to re-order them, or drag them to another window, or tear them off to create their own window.

Another big change to the interface is the addition of Cover Flow to you bookmarks. I can see this coming in very handy particularly for the collection of recipes I have bookmarked. Since history is viewed from the same area as your bookmarks, you can also view your history using Cover Flow.

Also using Cover Flow is the new history search, which lets you search through all the text on any of the pages in your history. I honestly thought Safari 3 already did this, but perhaps it wasn’t able to search against the full text of pages in your history.

Less obvious visually, but something that should be noticeable when you visit sites that use a lot of scripting (such as Digg) is Apple’s new JavaScript engine which they now call the Nitro Engine. According to a variety of benchmark results that Apple published, Nitro Engine gives Safari a performance lead over Google’s Chrome which held the fastest browser crown for a short while.

I don’t particularly like Apple’s new full-page zoom mode that takes over where their old text zooming left off. Safari now scales images along with the text and as a result if you’d already right-sized your window with the green button on the top left corner of the Safari window, you’ll need to keep right-sizing it again every time you zoom in or out. I preferred the old way where only the text was increased or reduced because I rarely think to myself “that image is just too small to see.” Thankfully you can toggle between full-page and text-only zooming by selecting Zoom Text Only from the View menu.

They have improved their address and search fields with this release, though. Typing into the address field will give you some options to choose from rather than typing out the full address. Safari will give you a top hit that they say best matches your browsing history, it will also suggest pages you’ve visited recently from your history, as well as a selection of relevant pages from your bookmarks. Typing in the search field will give you some search suggestions via Google and will also give you some other search terms you’ve tried recently. Apple has also made is easier for people to… find the Find feature by placing it at the end of these suggestions. Now you can go to the bottom of these suggestions to find your search terms in the current page. That’s a pretty neat way to expose some functionality that is normally only used by people familiar with the Command + F keyboard shortcut or the Edit menu.

Safari offers suggestions when you type in the Address or Search field

Safari offers suggestions when you type in the Address or Search field

They’ve included a lot of other changes “under the hood” that should result in a much improved browsing experience once Safari 4 is released and once web developers take advantage of some of the leading-edge standards that Safari supports. But, the last new feature I want to mention is that Safari now uses an iPhone Safari style progress indicator in the same position as on the iPhone (to the right of the address field) rather than filling the address field background with a blue bar as the page loads. Consistency is a good thing.

If you’re adventurous and would like to know how to tweak a few of the new things added such as turning off the search suggestions, check out Observation Point for the piece called Hidden Preferences in Safari 4 Public Beta.

Oh, and if you’re still on Windows, you might like the fact that Apple has gone with a native Windows look and feel for Safari 4. No longer will Safari for Windows have a Macintosh theme applied to it.

Sharing Large Files with the MobileMe iDisk

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During the announcement of MobileMe, one of the most exciting new features was the ability to share large files using your iDisk. The demonstration was pretty cool. Just upload something to your iDisk, and then click on a share file button within the iDisk web application. You could set how long you wanted to share the file or how many downloads before it automatically unshared itself. But, for some reason, Apple decided to pull this feature before they went live with MobileMe at http://www.me.com/.

I’m excited to say that they have finally released it. And it is a very cool new feature to use when your file is too large to send via e-mail. Just go to the iDisk web application on MobileMe and select the file you need to share. It doesn’t have to be in your Public folder anymore. Once you’ve done this you’ll see a Share File… button in the detail (right-most) column that you need to click on.

Share files that are too big to e-mail by clicking the Share File... button

Share files that are too big to e-mail by clicking the Share File... button

From there you can fill out a form to send a link to someone telling them where to go to get the file if you want to and you can also set how long the link will be available for in days, weeks, or months – I’m a little disappointed that you can’t set the number of downloads allowed. You can also set a password that the person will need to enter to download the file if you wish.

The sheet that slides out after clicking the Share File... button

The sheet that slides out after clicking the Share File... button

If you need to change anything after you’ve shared the file, you can click on the Sharing Options… button that is displayed in the detail column to get back to the same sheet you initially filled out the sharing details on. If you don’t remember which folder the file is in, there is a Shared Files item you can click on on the left side of the window to reveal all of the files you are currently sharing.

A view of all of your shared files

A view of all of your shared files

Apple also has a brief video tutorial that shows how to use this new feature.

Video stabilization & more with iMovie ’09

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I’ve put together an example of what you can do with the new iMovie ’09. I recorded the video this weekend using a Canon HG10 high definition video camcorder. I then edited it using iMovie ’09. I didn’t spend a long time editing this movie. I let iMovie make most of the decisions and as a result was done in less than 30 minutes.

Themes

Themes are a new feature for iMovie ’09 that iMovie ’08 did not have. Older versions of iMovie did have themes as well, but they were one of the features removed when Apple completely re-wrote iMovie for 2008. iMovie currently has five themes: Photo Album, Bulletin Board, Comic Book, Scrapbook, and Filmstrip. Apple generally adds to the selection every time a new version of iLife comes out. You can select the theme you wish to use when creating a new project and you can optionally tell iMovie to add transitions and titles. You can also change them or remove them from either the titles or transition section.

My video has the Comic Book theme applied to it. The theme is responsible for generating all of the animated transitions and titles. In fact, it was also responsible for the placement of them all except for two lower-third titles that I placed at about 5:04 into the video.

Video Stabilization

iMovie analyzed all of my video for stabilization right after it was done importing it from my camera. That took about two hours for around 18 minutes of footage (you could reduce this by telling iMovie exactly what you want to smooth the camera movement for, but I let it run over night) This analysis lets iMovie know how to alter the video to reduce camera shake and make your camera movement smoother.

Another one of the tricks iMovie uses is zooming in to help it reduce shakiness. It gives you a slider that allows you to adjust the level of zoom to use to stabilize your video. And, your clip will have an icon that changes as you adjust the slider to show you how well iMovie can stabilize that video clip.

iMovie '09's Clip Inspector lets you adjust the zoom used to stabilize your video

iMovie '09's Clip Inspector lets you adjust the zoom used to stabilize your video

All of the clips used have video stabilization enabled and I left them at the zoom factor that iMovie picked for each. You can see two things about video stabilization in the end result. It does a good job of smoothing out the camera shake – all of my video was shot with the camera in one hand and a coffee in the other. And there is a waviness to some of the stabilized video – apparently this is a result of the CMOS sensor my camera uses. According to Apple, you’ll get better results with other cameras.

The example video is below, and you can see the same video without stabilization on YouTube.

Notes

The soundtrack for this video is courtesy of Nine Inch Nails through Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licensing and the songs appear on the “Ghosts I-IV” album. The first song is “18 Ghosts II” and the second song is “24 Ghosts III.”

5 tips for shopping on the iTunes Store

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Finding the song you’re looking for or just looking for something that strikes you in the iTunes Store can be daunting. After all, they have over 10 million songs to choose from and loads of podcasts, movies, TV shows, and now applications for the iPhone or iPod Touch. Here are five tips on how to improve your experience of shopping on the iTunes Store.

Search

Use the search field in the top right hand corner of iTunes. When you have the iTunes Store selected in the pane on the left side of the iTunes window, this field switches from searching your library to searching the store. A simple search will return anything that matches what you typed in – songs, albums, videos, movies, etc.

Type the name of that song you're looking for here.

Type the name of that song you're looking for here.

You can narrow the results you got to a particular type of content by selecting it from the pull-down menu on the top-left corner of the iTunes Store.

If you’re still having trouble finding the needle you’re looking for in the haystack of results, click on the Power Search button. This will give you very specific control over what you’re searching for.

Limit your search to whatever type of content you select here.

Limit your search to whatever type of content you select here.

Browse

You’re probably familiar with iTunes’s browse mode from looking through your library. Browse is the mode where you’ll have three columns for Genre, Artist, and Album above the list of songs in your library. It is turned on by selecting Show Browser from the View menu. This works for your library or the iTunes Store. With the iTunes Store, the number of columns and what they hold will change. For instance, if you’d like to find a music video by the First Lady of France, just select Music Videos from the first column, French Pop from the next one, and Carla Bruni from the last column. Then you’ll see the video for her song “L’amoureuse.”

Popularity

Whenever you’re looking around in the iTunes Store, you’ll see the Popularity column. This can be a big help if you’re looking at an album with a lot of tracks on it, or if you got a few more results than you expected when you searched for “Landslide.” Click on the column header labeled Popularity and you should see an arrow pointing downward appear in the header. You’ll then see all of the items sorted with the most popular downloads at the top. You can see an example of this up above in the browsing screenshot. This will usually help you find what it is you’re looking for unless you have particularly eclectic tastes.

Arrows

Apple puts little arrows to the right of song titles, artist names, and album titles when you have a song selected. You’ll see them for other fields too, but they always do the same thing. They’ll take you directly to the search results for the item you have selected. This is great if, say, you’re enjoying “Belief” off of the Continuum from John Mayer and would like more from that album or maybe you’re watching a great episode of Battlestar Galactica and would like to watch another.

Genius

Finally, one of the newest features of iTunes is Genius. It has two parts, Genius Playlists and the Genius Sidebar. The sidebar is what will help you find new stuff on the iTunes Store. If you don’t see the Genius Sidebar on the right side of your iTunes window, you can turn it on by selecting Show Genius Sidebar from the View menu.

If I select “Love Missile F1-11” from my library (hey, it’s a song from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), the Genius Sidebar will give me a link to their Complete My Album feature for this album so that I can either buy more songs from it or buy the rest of the album minus what I’ve already spent on tracks off it. It will also tell me that Sigue Sigue Sputnik‘s top album on the store is Dress for Excess and it’ll show a few of their most popular songs. If the song you’ve selected is a part of any of the collections iTunes has assembled, those will show up here. This song happens to be a member of their Synth Pop iTunes Essentials. The sidebar will also give you some recommendations, at the top of the list for “Love Missile F1-11″ is “The Edge of Forever” by The Dream Academy. That song was also in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and iTunes is recommending it to me even though John Hughes didn’t want the movie to have an official soundtrack.

President Barack Obama's Podcast

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US President Barack Obama provided his first address to the nation on January 24, 2009. But, he did it in a way no other president has. I first saw it on YouTube after reading about it on Digg (a social news site). But, they’ve also provided a video podcast of Obama’s addresses. If you subscribe to it through iTunes, you’ll always have the latest address downloaded automatically.

At this time, his inaugural address is also available through the podcast. And, judging by the full title of the podcast, “President Obama’s Weekly Address & Speeches,” he intends to make other speeches he gives available through this podcast as well.

Continue reading →

Conficker Worm Now an Epidemic

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According to Panda Security, the Windows worm outbreak that I reported on last Thursday is now an epidemic. Panda found that 6% of the two million computers they scanned were infected by the worm.

Read my article from last week for information on what to do to. Additionally, F-Secure notes that “Downadup disables Automatic Updates, so updated versions of MSRT [ed: links for this are contained in last week's article] will need to be downloaded manually, it will not be automatically installed on infected machines.”

Multi-button mousing with your Mac

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One of the biggest issues that detractors of the Mac have had over the years is that Macs don’t work with two-button mouses. And one of the curious things about detractors of the Mac is that they apparently have never used one. Macs work with multi-button mouses. They have done so for years. Until recently, Apple only sold one-button mouses, but Mac OS X has supported multi-button mouses since it was first released on March 24, 2001. Apple now only sells multi-button mouses.

The multiple button Mighty Mouse that Apple designed retains the overall form of the Apple Mouse that it replaced and works as a single-button mouse for those that don’t feel the need for multiple buttons and to reduce stress on the index finger since the mouse can be clicked with your entire hand.

So, if you feel the need to right-click, you’ll want to change your system preferences since the mouse defaults to acting like one with a single button. System Preferences are accessed through the Apple menu in the menu bar. Select the Keyboard & Mouse icon that is in the Hardware grouping. Then select the Mouse tab at the top of the window and you’ll see all of the preferences you can set for your mouse. By default both the left and right side of the mouse are set to act as the primary button. Regardless of which side of the mouse you click on, it’ll always register as a “left-click.” So, you’ll want to set one of those to the secondary button. If you’re a right-hander, then you will be most comfortable setting the right side to the secondary button. Keep in mind that the secondary button is registered if only that side is touched when you click the mouse. I really like this feature because I can still use the mouse like a single-button mouse (clicking with my entire hand), and when I need to context-click on something I just click on the right side of the mouse.

You can also set what happens when you click either the scroll ball or the side buttons. There is a key on your keyboard that will activate the Dashboard, so I don’t understand why Apple defaulted the scroll ball to this function. And, the Exposé key on your keyboard will reveal all windows for you, so the side buttons could also be put to better use. My recommendation is to use the two extra mouse buttons for Exposé, but you can set them to whatever you want. I’ve got the scroll ball set to show me the windows for my current application (Exposé – App Windows) and the side buttons set to expose the desktop (Exposé – Desktop). I feel this is best because if you’re going to your desktop, you’re probably going to be dragging something to or from it and dragging works well with the side buttons. You can also see from the screen shot that I increased the tracking speed to be closer to what I was used to on Windows. Adjust this slider to whatever makes you comfortable.

Now you’re all set. You can close the system preferences and use the mouse the way you want to from here on out. Just remember that if you have more than one account set up on your Mac, the other people can configure their own preferences for the mouse. So, you can turn on all of the buttons on your account but make all of them (including the scroll ball and side buttons) act as the primary button for your young child’s account.