(This one is for AOL users. If you are one, read on. If you aren't one, read on anyway. I'll bet you have at least one AOL-using friend that can put this information to use.)

Actually, I could have called this "Eliminate Your AOL Bill." Keep reading.

Once upon a time, AOL (America Online) was the Number One way for people to get online. AOL provided software, an email address, and a phone number with a modem at the other end that would answer your dial-up call and put you on the internet. That was a long time ago.

AOL charged for that. It makes sense that they did; if nothing else, all of those phone lines and modems cost AOL real money. So you paid, maybe $19.95 per month, maybe $14.95 per month, and if you have an AOL account that is more than a couple of years old, you probably are still paying. But you don't have to.

Turns out that AOL will give anyone a free email address. And, if you already have an AOL address, you should check to see whether you're paying for it or not. If all you want from AOL is an email address, follow this tutorial and quit paying them. It's really easy.

Step One: use Safari (or Firefox, or whatever) and go to www.aol.com. (You can do this on your computer or your iPhone or iPad. Even the PC people can do this, so tell a friend. Your friend will thank you.) If you're already checking your email on AOL, look for a tiny "AOL" link at top left. That'll do it.

Step Two: click where it says "SERVICES" The red arrow shows you where. You're not going to click and hold and slide down the menu that drops down. You're just going to click on "SERVICES" and let go.



Step Three: in this screen, click where it says "Account Updates." It's nice and bold, at the top left. Red arrow, man.



Step Four: you'll have to sign in (if you haven't already), and you'll have to supply the secret answer to your secret question. I can't help you with those things-- that's why they call them "secret." Once you've done that, you'll see this screen. Click where it says "Change My AOL Plan."


They'll ask you whether you need a dial-up connection or not. Hopefully, you know the answer to that. (If you're not sure, contact me and I will help you find out. Hint: if you're one of my customers, you do NOT need a dial-up connection. You have a high-speed connection already.)

Step Five: Now for the fun part. They'll tell you at the top what your current plan is. If it says anything other than "Current Plan: $0.00/month" you're about to save some money.

Here's what you might see:


Scroll down the page and you'll find the Free AOL plan. That's the one for you. Click the big orange "Get This Plan" button and that is that. You'll see something like this when you're done:

So... what are you missing by going with the free plan? Just a couple of things, which you probably don't need:

• No "live" technical support
• No dial-up access (but so what-- you have your own high-speed connection, yes?)
• No McAfee security (also, so what-- the version AOL is "giving" you isn't compatible with Macs!)

In other words, you're not missing anything. So get rolling here and save yourself some money. You'll keep your email address, and your email will keep right on working, without interruption. You just won't be paying for it anymore. Even a few bucks a month add up.

If a few bucks a month don't matter to you feel free to click here, or use the PayPal button below. Heh.

Written by +Christian Boyce
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I thought I'd put a few of my favorite Steve Jobs links here, all in one place. Enjoy.

Playboy Interview, February 1985. Long, meaty interview with Steve Jobs, at the time head of Apple. Fantastic reading. Three months after this interview was published, Jobs was out of Apple, fired from the company he started.

MacWorld Expo 1997 Keynote Speech. Jobs is back with Apple, thanks to Apple's acquisition of NeXT. Gil Amelio (the Apple CEO who oversaw the acquisition) is out, and Apple is operating without an official CEO. In his first big public speech since his return, Jobs outlines his plans for bringing a reeling Apple back to health. He is particularly gracious in giving thanks to the outgoing Board members for working hard under difficult circumstances. Watch and listen as Jobs alludes to "the crazy ones" that Apple makes computers for (soon to be the theme of some very memorable ads). Great stuff throughout.

Stanford Commencement Address, 2005. Twenty-two minute video (counting the introduction by Stanford's President John Hennessy). Jobs' pancreatic cancer had been diagnosed the previous year, and the perspective it gave him is evident throughout the speech. Highly recommended.

Original iPhone introduction, MacWorld Expo 2007. "This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years." Steve Jobs at his very best. Part 1 here. Part 2 here.

Written by +Christian Boyce
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Ah, Lion. It's almost as if someone is trying to make our Macs harder to use. Here's one example: the default setting for Lion's Mail app has the toolbar displaying icons only. Problem is, some of the icons are new, and we don't know what they do. Solution: set the toolbar to show the icons and their labels. So much better, and so easy to do.

Here's what the toolbar looks like in Lion's Mail, by default:


Yeah, I know you can figure out most of these, but it's not supposed to be a puzzle.

It would be better if the toolbar looked more like this:


So let's do it.

1. Select "Customize Toolbar..." from the View menu.
2. At bottom left corner, change "Show Icon Only" to "Show Icon and Text."
3. Click "Done" (bottom right).

That's it! So much better. And so easy to do.

You can always go back to Customize Toolbar... and make other changes, including adding and deleting buttons such as "Add To Address Book" and "Smaller Bigger." And, if you get really good at things and you want that quarter-inch of vertical screen space back, you can change back to "icon only" or even to "text only." Nice to know you have choices.

Written by +Christian Boyce
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Here is an iCal calendar showing the times and teams for every prime-time NFL game for the 2011 season. The calendar is provided by Scott Crevier of South End Zone and if you're a football fan I strongly urge you to visit his site.

In years past, I've modified Scott's full NFL schedule using AppleScript, producing a calendar of just the prime-time games, but Scott agreed to build the prime-time calendar himself this year. Scott's calendar has the advantage of being kept up to date as the season moves along.

If you click the link here, iCal will launch and ask you whether you want to subscribe to the calendar.


The answer is "Yes" so click Subscribe (don't change the Calendar URL-- that has to stay as shown). In the next box, you may wish to rename the calendar, change its color, and turn off the Alerts and Attachments and Reminders. You may also want to change the update frequency to every day rather than every week. See below.


The NFL season is right around the corner. Subscribe to this calendar and you'll know who's playing on Monday Night Football (and Sunday Night Football, and Thursday Night Football), and when.

(Those who are interested can read how I created the prime-time calendar myself in years past, starting with South End Zone's full NFL schedule and using AppleScript to systematically remove every game that started before 4 PM Pacific time. Writing the AppleScript was a fun exercise but this year's calendar from South End Zone is better due to the updating.)

Written by +Christian Boyce
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Inkjet printers, as a group, have a couple of features in common:
1. Replacing the ink costs more than the printer did, and
2. Printing takes a long, looooong time.

I can't make the cost of ink go down but I can show you how to make your inkjet use less ink, and print faster (a LOT faster-- in my tests, doing it "my way" cut printing time by a factor of SIX!). The trade-off is print quality, but there are plenty of times when all you want to do is print out an email, or someone's address card, or a recipe for barbequed turkey, and quality is not an issue. There's a time and a place for everything. Anyhow, here's how you do it.

By the way, this will work with Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7.

First, find something to print and bring up the Print... dialog box. If it looks like this, click the triangle in the blue box (circled here) and expand the box.


If you're using Lion, it's a little different. In Lion, you "Show Details."


Either way, you end up with a bigger Print box. Now look for a pop-up menu in the Print box. I've circled one here, but programs can modify the Print box in various ways so your Print box pop-up menu may look different. However, the choices will be similar.

Click that menu and you'll see something like this. Choose "Paper Type/Quality" or whatever you can find that looks the most like that.

In the box that appears next, click on the Quality pop-up (shown below) and choose the fastest, least-ink-using choice as shown here.



If you hover over the various options here you'll see a yellow flag telling you what you should expect. Here's what you get when you choose "Fast draft" on an HP printer:

Sounds good to me. Now print!

In my testing, by using the "Fast draft" option I was able to print an entire six-page document in 55 seconds. Using the typical settings (that is, if I just went to Print but didn't change anything) it took 63 seconds for the first page alone! I stopped the test at that point because I didn't want to waste the ink.

If it sounds like a lot of work... well, it's not. It's a medium amount of work. But, if you do it once, and you like the results, and you don't want to do it again, you can save the settings as a so-called "Preset." What you do is make all of your choices, then click the Presets menu as shown below.

Slide down to "Save As..." and name your "Fast draft" settings something like... oh, I don't know, maybe something like "Fast Draft." This saves all of the choices that you made by hand, so next time you want to print something, you either print it "Standard" (which is to say, the usual way), or you choose "Fast Draft" from the Presets menu. You can make and save as many Presets as you like-- in this picture, you can see I have a few already.

To the best of my knowledge, only one person in the entire world has ever saved a Preset in the Print dialog box, so how about you try it and we'll be up to two. It really is a very cool feature, whether your goal is to go cheap and fast, or to go high-quality on glossy photo paper. It's a real time-saver to be able to set a whole bunch of options by simply choosing your custom preset and it costs nothing to try.

Note: the Fast Draft setting is going to get your page out lickety-split but it's not the right choice for photos or a college term paper (Spencer) or anything else where looks matter. Still, when speed is what you want, and you don't want to use up all your ink, the Fast Draft setting is exactly what you need.

One More Thing: Laser printers probably won't have a "Fast Draft" setting but they sometimes have a "fast" or "light" option, so look around in the Print box and see what your options are. You won't find the same settings I've shown here but you'll still be able to print quickly and with less toner than you would normally.

The money you'll save on ink and toner can go toward properly celebrating National Sponge Cake Day. Hurry up, it's upon us.

Written by +Christian Boyce
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Today Apple released its first update to Mac OS X Lion: 10.7.1. You can read a little about it on Apple's site. If you're on Lion already, this update is a must. Here, 10.7.1 runs in glorious silence, quite a difference from my Mac's "roaring" (get it? Lion? Roaring?) fans under the initial 10.7.0. That's a big plus.

It's likely that Apple was working on this update even before Lion's initial availability, which means that much of 10.7.1's improvements is stuff that Apple already knew about. And that means that bugs that were found after Lion's release could still be present-- but I'd expect a lot of them to be fixed in 10.7.2.

If you're on 10.7, Step One is be absolutely positive that you have a current backup. You can go to Time Machine's menu and tell it to "Back Up Now" (that's what I did). Step Two is get 10.7.1 via Software Update under the Apple menu. Step Three is restart, which the Installer will insist upon. You might get some disk activity and fan noise immediately after the restart, but it ought to go away in time. You can restart again after that and from then on it ought to be smooth sailing.

You can probably tell that I am not keen on Lion. I prefer Snow Leopard for several reasons, some of which I will write about someday soon. But, if you're already on Lion, you'll be happier after installing the 10.7.1 update. Just be sure you have that backup, just in case.

Written by +Christian Boyce
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You have questions, we have answers. It's a match made in Heaven. Today's question:

"What happened to "Search For" in the Finder sidebar? I liked being able to use this occasionally and don't understand why it was dropped. Is there any way to get it back? Thanks. Sincerely, Anonymous."

What a great question, with a double-duty answer. With one blog post we can solve a problem for Lion users while simultaneously introducing Snow Leopard users to something they might not know about. I can't wait.

Here's a refresher, for those of you wondering what Anonymous is talking about. The Finder in Snow Leopard has something in its Sidebar that Lion doesn't have, and I've bordered it here in red.

By default, without you doing anything, Snow Leopard has this nifty "Search For" section, and when you click one of the items in that section the Finder shows all of the files that match. Here, I clicked "All Images" and Snow Leopard's Finder is showing 9,997 image files, from all over my hard disk.

You will also notice the "Today," "Yesterday," and "Past Week" items. Click them to find all of the files that have changed for the given timeframe. If you've ever forgotten what you named a document, but you know you worked on it yesterday, clicking on "Yesterday" in the Search For section will help you find it.

You can see that this "Search For" stuff could be handy. But Lion doesn't have it. Here's a look at the Sidebar in Lion's Finder-- no "Search For" to be found.

It's just not there. What a drag.

The good news is you can put it back with just a little work on your part. The really good news is that you can do even better than the standard Search For section (and that goes for you non-Lion users-- what you'll learn here will work for you in Snow Leopard and "regular" Leopard too).

Here's how you do it.

First, click on the Desktop, or the Finder icon in the Dock, or on a Finder window-- the point being that Step One is to be sure the Finder is the active program. Not sure? Look up by the Apple menu. If the next thing to the right says "Finder" you're ready to go. If not, click the Desktop (or the Finder icon in the Dock, or on a Finder window) and make it so.

Next, go to the File menu and choose Find. You're going to find something.

In this case, we're going to find every image on the hard disk-- that is, we want "Kind" to be "Image." Here's what the top of the Find box looks like. (Note the Save button. We're going to save our Find criteria when we're done.)



Click where it says "Any" and change it to Image. You will get another little menu next to that menu, where you could, if you wanted to, choose to only find JPEG or PNG or whatever. Leave it set to "All." Then click the Save button.

What you're doing here is saving the Find requests. Give it a good name and be sure the Add to Sidebar box is checked. Don't worry about where to save your search-- Apple takes care of that part for you. See the picture below.



Now have a look at your Finder's Sidebar. Your saved search will be there. It won't have a red arrow pointing to it like mine does here but it will be there.



Nice going. Now try another one! Go to File, come down to Find, and let's make one that says "Last modified date is yesterday." Here's how it looks:



Save that one with a good name... then do one more for "Last modified date is today" and you're well on your way to recreating the complete "Search For" section that Apple left out of Lion.

Here's how Lion's Finder Sidebar looks on my Mac after adding the three saved searches we did here (and I have clicked on the All Images search so you can see what it does).

You can really go to town with this technique, searching and saving and displaying your saved searches in the Sidebar as much as you want to.

Here's the kicker: you can do all of the above in Snow Leopard (and Leopard) too! Of course, you don't have to do it, because Apple's put All Images, and Today, and Yesterday in the Sidebar already-- but you can do so many other things using this technique! Search for every document that has the word "Barbeque" in it! Find every image that was modified within the last 30 days! Find every PDF whose size is greater than 5 megabytes! The sky's the limit. Do your Find, click the Save button, give it a good name-- and from then on, any time you click the saved search in the Sidebar, it's as if you manually did a Find the hard way.

If you're wondering whether these saved searches are "live", the answer is YES. You're saving the search criteria, not the search results. Every time you click a saved search in the Sidebar it does the search all over again. It's always fresh.

Here are a couple of bonus nifty things that you should know about.

• Technically, what you're doing here is making "Smart Folders." That's what Apple calls them.
• You will see similar "Smart" items in iPhoto ("Smart Albums") and in iTunes ("Smart Playlists").
• You can drag your Smart Folders upward in the Sidebar but only if you click on the little gear icon (not on the name).
• You can control-click a Smart Folder and "Show Search Criteria" if you want to make adjustments, or even just to remember what your Smart Folder does.
• You can Command-drag a Smart Folder out of the Sidebar if you want to get rid of it. However, this does not really delete the Smart Folder. It just gets it out of the Sidebar.

Gee that was fun. Thanks for the question, Anonymous!

Written by +Christian Boyce
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Apple's Mail program is really smart about guessing who you are sending an email to. Type the first few letters of a person's name (or the first few letters of his email address) and Mail fills in the rest. All you have to do is accept Mail's suggestion, by pressing either Tab or Return on your keyboard.

(Bonus Hint: alternatively, you can type the first few letters of a person's last name. Mail will still look it up.)

This works very well when Mail has only one suggestion. It works just slightly less well when there are several matches-- for example, let's say you're going to email your friend Jack. You type "j" and then you type "a" and Mail shows you a list with Jack, Jason, Janet, Janice, Jamal, Jackson, James, etc. That's easy enough to deal with-- just type a little more, and the list narrows down to the one you want.

Where it really works very poorly is when someone you've written to changes his email address. Mail remembers the addresses of people you've emailed before, so even though you've changed the person's name in the Address Book, Mail keeps suggesting the old address. That can be a problem.

For example, let's say you have a friend, Joe Smith, with an email address as shown here:

Send him even one email at that address and Mail will very helpfully suggest "joe@joesmith.com" every time you begin addressing an email with "joe."

Now let's say Joe changes his email address to something a little different (or, let's say you had it wrong all along-- no wonder he didn't write back!). Let's say his new address is this one:

You've changed it in the Address Book, but look what happens when you start addressing an email to Joe. Mail suggests both the current email address and the old one, like so:



Obviously, it would be nice if Mail would forget about Joe's old email address. Here's how you make that happen.

Choose "Previous Recipients" from Mail's Window menu as shown here:

You'll get a little window, where you can type in what you're looking for to narrow it down. Here's what it looked like after I searched for joe smith:

Click the address you want Mail to forget about, then click "Remove From List," and that is that. Next time you address an email to Joe, Mail will suggest just the new address, as shown below.



Pretty cool.

This works the same way in Mail whether you're using Lion (10.7), Snow Leopard (10.6), Leopard (10.5), or even Tiger (10.4). Have a look in your Mail program's Previous Recipients window. I'll bet you'll find a bunch of addresses that can be cleared out (including some that were typos, which Mail remembers anyway).

In case you wondered: Mail looks for email addresses in both the Address Book and in the Previous Recipients list. It does not look at the addresses of people who have sent emails to you unless they are already in your Address Book or Mail's Previous Recipients.

Written by +Christian Boyce
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Even though Mac OS X Lion has kept a lot of us busy looking for work-arounds and otherwise solving problems, it also has some nice touches which bear pointing out. Here are a few that I especially like.

1. Finder: New Folder with Selection. Select some files, then choose File/New Folder with Selection (n Items) and it does what it says it says it will do. (The "n" is the number of items selected.)



BETTER: control-click on one of the selected items and choose New Folder with Selection (n Items). There it is, right at the top.


Either way, you get a folder called "New Folder With Items" and it is ready for you to rename (no need to click it, just type the new name).


You've probably done something like this in iTunes (New Playlist from Selection). Now you can do it in the Finder.

iCal: double-click an event to edit it. Doesn't sound like such a big deal, but in 10.6.8 you double-click the event, then you click the Edit button. Lion's iCal eliminates the extra step. Thank you, Lion! You don't need a picture for this, just try it.

Mail: Favorites Bar. Drag your favorite mailboxes ("folders" to you and me) to the Favorites Bar for quick access, then hide the mailbox list so you have more room for mail. Go from this three-column view....
to this two-column view, leaving more room for the stuff you really need (that is, the mail that you are reading).
The important parts are highlighted in red (the Favorites Bar) and yellow (the Show/Hide button, which shows and hides the third pane of the Mail window).

If the Favorites Bar is not showing in Mail, choose "Show Favorites Bar" from the View menu. Note: you can file a message by dragging it onto an item in the Favorites Bar. Very nice.

I hope to find more stuff I like in Lion. If and when I do, I will let you know.

Written by +Christian Boyce
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My first look at Lion's Finder was a mix of "that looks familiar" and "holy cow, what happened here?". Some of Lion's Finder looked like Snow Leopard's, but some of it didn't. Turns out that some of the stuff that didn't is the result of some questionable default choices (by Apple), and since it's easy to change things, I did. Here's how.

First, I didn't like the way Apple made Finder windows look. It felt like something was missing. Have a look.


In fact, something was missing: the slider to change the size of the icons, and the information about how much room was left on the disk-- along with the rest of the bottom of the window frame. One quick trip to the View menu and I'd turned on the Status Bar, leaving me with windows looking like this:


That's better. Now I can use the slider at bottom right to make the icons larger, and now I can see how much room is on the disk (and the number of items in the window).

After using the slider, the thumbnails are large enough to be useful.


Note: of course you could change the size of the icons by going to View/Show View Options (or, Command-J, thanks for reminding me Dave), but that's a bit of extra work. Just show the Status Bar and be done with it-- you'll have the slider right there all the time, for all Finder windows. One change and you're done.

Bonus: with the Status Bar showing you have something else to click on when you want to move the window.

I say turn the Status Bar on and leave it on. I also say turn on the Path Bar (in the Finder's View menu) and leave it on too-- that way, you'll know "the path" to the window you're looking at. For example, with the Path Bar on, I can see that the folder I'm looking at ("texas flowers") is in the Pictures folder, on the disk called "cboyce." I find that incredibly handy. You can double-click any item in the Path Bar and you'll jump straight there. That's even more incredibly handy.

The next thing that Apple turns off by default in the Lion Finder is our old friend the scroll bar. You can get the scroll bar back-- go to Apple/System Preferences.../General and look for "Show scroll bars:" and then click "Always."

(The scroll bars in Lion are a little thin for my taste, and there aren't any arrows to click on at the ends of the scroll bars-- something I really hope Apple changes its mind on soon. For now, no scroll arrows, none at all. Ugh.)

While you're in there, try changing the size of icons in the Finder's "Sidebar." Here's what it looks like with the Sidebar icon size set to "Large." (No, you can't change the color-- it's going to be shades of gray for the Sidebar in Lion, not that I see that as an advantage.)

Personally, I like my Sidebar icons "Medium."

You might want to come back and change your settings here someday down the road so remember where they are (and I agree that it's weird that some of the Finder's preferences are handled by selecting "Preferences..." from the Finder menu, while others are handled by going to System Preferences/General).

By the way, there's no little "lozenge" at the top right of Finder windows to toggle the toolbar and sidebar on and off. Instead, you have to go to the View menu and "Hide Toolbar" or "Show Toolbar." Why hiding the Toolbar also hides the Sidebar, I don't know. And there is no preference for putting the lozenge back on. I would just leave the Toolbar (and Sidebar) showing all the time. At least you know how to hide it if you want to.

But wait-- there's more!
What's wrong with this picture?



What's wrong is they forgot to show my hard drive on the desktop (or, rather, Apple's default setting is to NOT show hard disks on the Desktop). That's fixable: choose Preferences from the Finder menu and check the box for "Hard disks." Here's a picture of how it looks right out of the box-- I ended up checking all of the first four boxes. Why not. I can turn them off later I suppose.

And that's about it. I have my scroll bars back, I have my icon-resize slider back, I have my hard disk back. I miss seeing color in the Finder's Sidebar but I'll have to live with that for now. Truth is, I think Lion's Finder is a little bit lost, to make a bad joke. The way I see it, Apple "fixed something that wasn't broken." For now, I'm managing, but I'm hoping for some minor changes in a future Software Update.

Written by +Christian Boyce
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A lot of people come to the Boyce Blog via Google, and I get a report of what exactly they were looking for. Lately, I've had a lot of visits from Google searches for "Lion won't work with Microsoft Word", but that's hardly the only one. I thought I'd wade through the last few days of reports and give the people what they're looking for. If I don't answer YOUR question send me an email. The ones I'm answering here are the ones that have been "Googled" multiple times. Funny they seem to all be about Lion.

Google search: "How to run Palm desktop on OS Lion"
Boyce Blog answer: You don't. Very sorry. Palm Desktop is a PowerPC application, and like every other PowerPC application, will not run under Mac OS Lion. The most recent system that can run PowerPC applications is Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). There is no way around it: Palm Desktop will NOT run if your Mac is on Lion. Don't expect Palm to put out a new version-- they won't.

If you are using Palm Desktop and contemplating a move to Lion, export your Palm Desktop data before you install Lion. Export your Contacts as vCards, then import into Apple's Address Book. Export your Calendar as vCal, then import into iCal. If you have already made your move to Lion contact me privately and we can talk about your next step.

Google search: "Lion won't open Microsoft Word" (very popular search)
Boyce Blog answer: It will if you are using Office 2008 or Office 2011. Microsoft says that they will support both versions with priority being given to the 2011 version. You will not be able to use any part of Office 2004, or, Office X because they are PowerPC applications, and as you now now, PowerPC applications will not run in Mac OS Lion. If you are already on Lion, get Office 2011. Here's a link to Microsoft Office 2011 on Amazon, where you will save at least $20 over the suggested retail price.

UPDATE: you can download Microsoft Office 2011 (Home and Student Family Pack-- 3 Installs, or Home and Business-- 2 installs) from the Amazon Mac App Store via this link. Sorry, they don't have the single-installation versions available for download but if you need it now, you need it now.

Google search: "Can't open FileMaker with Lion"
Boyce Blog answer: Once again, probably a case of a PowerPC application. FileMaker 10 and 11 will work, but only version 11 will be upgraded to be fully compatible. At this writing, 11.0v3 is the latest version and it has a couple of small issues. A free upgrade from any version of FileMaker 11 to 11.0v4 will come in August, according to FileMaker. If you have FileMaker 9 or 10, upgrade to 11 via this link. If you have 8.5 or older (or no FileMaker at all) you will have to buy the full version. Here's the link for that. You'll save $20-$30 off FileMaker's price.

Note: FileMaker documents have not changed formats since version 7. So, your old FileMaker documents (databases) will open up just fine with FileMaker 11. It's the older program that is the problem. Your data is just fine.

Google search: "Are there any programs that will not work on Lion"
Boyce Blog answer: Maybe one or two... Actually, many. One more time: PowerPC applications will not run in Lion, period. They won't even start up. Other apps will start, but not quite work right. There's a pretty good list of what does and does not work at www.roaringapps.com.

You can find out rather quickly which of your applications are guaranteed to NOT work by following these steps:

1. Apple Menu/About This Mac
2. Click "More Info..." and wait for System Profiler to launch
3. Scroll down to "Applications" and click on it
4. Make the window wider, then click on "Kind" to sort by Kind. Anything that says "PowerPC" in the Kind column will not work. (Anything that says "Classic" in the Kind column won't work either-- they didn't work in 10.6 or 10.5 either)

Here's a picture, with the important stuff in yellow. "Intel" is OK. PowerPC is not OK. Do this before you install Lion please.

Google search: "big slowdown after installing lion"
Boyce Blog answer: There's a BIG slowdown after installing Lion, but it's temporary. The slowdown is caused by Lion's Spotlight feature as it has to re-index your entire hard drive. This can take some hours (mine took overnight) and your Mac's fans will run full-blast during this process as it is very CPU-intensive (and therefore very heat-inducing). Just let it happen. It's normal, it's expected, and it's temporary. (When you're done, take advantage of Spotlight's great searching powers-- top right corner of the screen.)

That takes care of our top five searches from the past couple of days. Remember, if you have a question and you can't find an answer, send me an email and I'll see what I can do. Do a little Google-ing first though. Who knows, the answer might turn out to be another page of this site!

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Safari 5 introduced a new feature to Apple's web browser, namely Extensions. Extensions allow programmers to "extend" Safari's abilities beyond what comes standard. Here's a link to Apple's official Safari Extensions Gallery page, with many many many Extensions to read about and download. Four extensions that I've found handy are AdBlock, ClickToFlash, AutoPagerize, and Page One.

AdBlock does what you'd expect: it blocks ads. Check out these before-and-after shots. First the regular page, then the same page with AdBlock installed and active.


Much better. Go get it. Here's the link. Note: it's donation-ware. Try it for free, then donate whatever you think is right.

ClickToFlash prevents Flash animations from loading until (or unless) you click on them. Fantastic. You get a nice, peaceful web-browsing experience but you can still click the Flash videos that you want to see-- which will turn out to be "not very many." Here's a before-and-after (the circled ad rotates through seven different deals on the FoodSaver-- very distracting):

With ClickToFlash installed and active, the same page looks like this:

You can still see the space where the ad would be, and if you click it once it will show you the ad and all of its seven-image animation. AdBlocker would have hidden the ad completely, and that's not so bad either. You can use both AdBlock and ClickToFlash simultaneously and that is what I do. Use this link to get ClickToFlash. It's free.

AutoPagerize (donation-ware) and Page One (free) both attempt to make multi-page web articles (the ones that make you click to go to page 2, and then 3, and then 4, etc.) easier to read by putting all of the pieces together, all on one page. Both are terrific though AutoPagerize works on more sites, while Page One does it a little more neatly. Either way, you won't see much of this sort of thing anymore:



BONUS: you can often use Safari's built-in Reader to turn a multi-page story into a single-page one that is cleaner and nicer to read. You don't need an extension-- it's part of Safari. All you do is click the "Reader" button (circled in red here) in Safari's address bar (not that it is always there-- it only shows up when Safari thinks it knows what the main story on a page is). One click takes you from this (a four-page story):

to this:

It's hard to see, but in the top right corner it says "Page 1 of 4." What that means is you get the whole story in one scrolling window, with no ads and no other distractions. Pretty nice.

UPDATE: I put in the "after" picture so you can see how AdBlock works. Oopsy.

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Apple put out a "supplemental" 10.6.8 update today (July 25th, 2011). Among other important fixes, it restores network printing functionality that broke with the original 10.6.8. Apple puts it this way: "resolves issues with certain network printers that pause print jobs immediately and fail to complete."

Sounds good to me.

Go to Software Update under your Apple menu and get this fix.

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I installed Mac OS X Lion onto my MacBook last night. Once installed, Spotlight began indexing my hard drive, and that's a pretty intensive process that really slows everything down (except for the fans inside the MacBook, which were going full-speed). Considering the "About 10 hours remaining" in the following dialog box...

...I thought it would be better to leave it alone, have dessert, go to bed, and try it again in the morning. With breakfast. Which is what I did. Here's how it went.

Let's Get Started
The first thing I noticed about Lion is how clumsy I am with it, especially with the scroll bars and window resizing. This is going to take some getting used to. I will probably have something to say about the new Finder, and it will probably not be totally positive, because my first impression with Lion's Finder is it's not as good as Snow Leopard's Finder. Quite a disappointment.

Main Course
The Apple apps all seem to work just fine, as you would expect. Mail upgraded my old Mail and it's better than the old mail. iChat works. Safari works. Address Book works but I like the old one better. Spotlight works but needs configuring (somebody, remind me to write about that). Pages and Numbers '09 work (but man is it weird to see Pages say "saving" when I quit without saving! That's Lion for you.)

Third-party apps, including Microsoft Word 2011, Microsoft Excel 2011, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2011, seem to work fine. I launched them all, made a new document with them all, and printed from them all. Nothing fancy, and of course I can't test every feature in every program so there may be something that does not work. But, at least for the basics, Office 2011 seems to work.

Office 2008 (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) open and print. AutoUpdate DOES work (choose "Check for Updates" from the Help menu of any of those three apps). Microsoft's AutoUpdate used to be PowerPC code, and it is probably hanging around in your Applications folder, a mistake by Microsoft's installer-- it looks like this, and it won't work in Lion:
(when you see it in Lion it will have a circle and a slash through it).

The version of AutoUpdate that works looks like this:
and it lives in a totally different place (see below).


You don't need to know where it lives, but you do need to know that it works. So, basically, if you have Office 2008 installed already, you're probably good to go. If you're only up to Office 2004 (which definitely does not work), you should probably buy Office 2011 (amazon link). Note: contrary to what I thought I knew a few days ago, Office 2008 can be installed under Lion. I tested that first-hand here. I had my doubts about the installer but I was able to install Office 2008 on my Lionized MacBook without any trouble.

Outlook 2011 works (part of Office 2011 if you pay for the Business version). Entourage 2008, which you really ought to ditch anyway (Microsoft did-- that's why they ship Office 2011 with Outlook instead), doesn't work very well for me. In fact, it won't do anything other than launch and crash. Your mileage may vary but if I'm having trouble, who's to say you won't too?

FileMaker Pro 11 seems to work, more or less. It isn't as fast as it was in Snow Leopard but that may be due to increased RAM requirements. Look at these screenshots of FileMaker Pro 11's opening screen-- the first, under Snow Leopard, the second, under Lion. Seems to be having some problems.

Wow.

Other issues in FileMaker include an inability to export files in Excel's "xls" format (requires Rosetta, which is not available in Lion). This is not such a big deal because you can export to the "xlsx" format (the newer one) without Rosetta. However, if you have a FileMaker database with scripts that call on the xls export step you are going to have some work to do changing things over.

If you use Evernote, which I do, you will be sorry to hear that as of this writing Evernote's Safari Web Clipping button does not work. They know about it, and they're fixing it.

Fujitsu's ScanSnap scanner works, hallelujah. This is the greatest time-saver and desk-cleaner-upper ever... scans both sides of a sheet of paper in seconds, one-button operation, and if you couple it with Evernote you can search for items by their content! No more worrying about naming things perfectly or filing them perfectly. Very handy, and I'm thrilled that this works fine in Lion.

I Think I Will Have a Second Cup, Thank You
Lion is more or less working here. Apple will probably have an update of their own soon-- my advice would be to wait for that first Apple update, at the very least, before installing. Most likely Apple already had a list of things they wanted to fix but they couldn't wait forever to get Lion out the door. Let them get that first update out before you make your move.

UPDATE: Here is Microsoft's official statement about Office 2008 and 2011 and Lion. According to them, everything more or less works, and updates are on the way-- for Office 2011 first, then for Office 2008. (I like how they say that such and such action "may" result in a crash. I think I would bet on it.)

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At this very moment I am backing up my MacBook in preparation for a Lion install. I want to be able to go back to 10.6.8 in a hurry if I have to, so what I've done is purchase an internal hard 500 GB hard drive (same size as the drive in my MacBook), stick it into my NexStar Hard Drive Dock, and using Super Duper make a complete clone of the MacBook's internal drive. Once that's done, I'll take the old drive out, put the new drive in, and then (with the original drive safely stashed away) I will begin the Lion upgrade. If something goes terribly wrong I can take the Lionized hard drive out, put my 10.6.8 hard drive back in, and I'll be back in business. Whether I have trouble or not I'll make another post here relating my initial Lion experience, hopefully by midnight tonight.

In the meantime, if you're looking for an excellent review of Lion, read John Siracusa's lengthy Lion write-up. Yes, it's long, but it's worth it. Mr. Siracusa has written a detailed review of every Mac OS X version and they are always excellent reading. In fact, it's Mr. Siracusa's reviews that keep me from feeling the need to write one myself. Everything's covered, and long as it is, it's very readable. He even tells you which parts to skip.

If you don't want to read John Siracusa's 18 pages on Lion, try Robert Mohns' Lion review over at Macintouch.com. This is also great stuff, just not as detailed and without Siracusa's legendary deadpan humor. There are plenty of other reviews to be found but these two are the best.

If you're looking for a master list of what works with Lion and what doesn't, you're just like me. There really isn't an official list. There is a nice bit of collective work, relying on reader contributions, over at RoaringApps.com, but it is hardly complete and certainly not official. However, it's the best there is as of this writing and a useful place to start. Note that some of the reports at RoaringApps were posted in the months leading up to Lion's release so it's possible that the final "shipping" version of Lion took care of some of the issues seen there. (How weird it feels to write about Lion "shipping," when it comes to us over the internet, with no box or cellophane or truck or plane-- or ship. We are living in a modern world.)

That's it for now. Gotta wait for that backup to finish.

UPDATE: Lion is up and running on my MacBook. The backup took longer than I thought it would and so did the installation of Lion. And, with Spotlight re-indexing the drive (apparently it has to do this), the fan is going full-blast and the machine is sluggish. I expect the machine to feel speedy again when Spotlight is finished.

So far, I've done VERY brief tests of Microsoft Word (from both Office 2008 and 2011), and they both seem to work. The AutoUpdater worked in 2008-- that piece of Office 2008 had itself been updated, and placed in a new location, leaving behind the older, PPC version of Microsoft AutoUpdate. The older one won't work but it doesn't matter-- the new one will. And if you have kept your Office 2008 installation up to date, you will already have the new Microsoft AutoUpdate.

There are some neat new features in Lion and we'll start covering those soon. The focus for now is on compatibility, so if you have a question about a particular app, let me know and I'll see if I can test it for you.

UPDATE 2 (7-25-2011): Microsoft Office 2008's main problem with Lion is in the Microsoft Setup Assistant. It will not run properly under Lion. So, if you already have Office 2008, you have a chance of it working in Lion, especially if you don't use Entourage. If you try to install Office 2008 after you put Lion on, you'll have problems. It just won't work. Office 2011 is then your only hope (available via Amazon here).

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We all like new stuff. With Apple's new Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) coming out tomorrow and for only $29.99 it's oh-so-tempting to download it as soon as possible. But I wouldn't do that if I were you. You might end up with a better operating system, but you might also end up with a printer that doesn't print, a scanner that doesn't scan, installers that don't install, and programs that won't launch.

Your best course of action is to wait. While you're waiting, do your homework: find out whether your printer will work with 10.7, and whether your scanner will work with 10.7, and whether your programs will work with 10.7. I would guess that they might not.

Here is a partial list of software that I know you will have trouble with after installing Mac OS X Lion.

• Microsoft Office 2004
• Quicken (any version except for "Quicken Essentials")
• FileMaker Pro 7 or earlier (those versions won't run at all-- later versions have issues too)
• Palm Desktop
• Adobe Creative Suite CS2 or earlier (Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, InDesign CS2, etc.)
• AppleWorks

In some cases, solutions exist but they all cost money. For example, you can upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 , upgrade to Microsoft Office 2011 (get the Business Edition if you want Outlook), upgrade to FileMaker Pro (but don't rush out to do that-- I would not bet on the current version working on Day One)). In other cases, there is no upgrade to be had-- not for Quicken, not for Palm Desktop, not for AppleWorks. In those cases, you'd be looking for another program to use. You'd better think about exporting the data from those applications before you install 10.7-- if you can't launch, you can't export.

UPDATE: you can download Microsoft Office 2011 (Home and Student Family Pack-- 3 Installs, or Home and Business-- 2 installs) from the Amazon Mac App Store via this link. Sorry, they don't have the single-installation versions available for download but if you need it now, you need it now.

I am sure that in time most (but not all) of the incompatibilities created by Lion will be dealt with. The key phrase is "in time." Don't expect everything to work right away. My advice: wait. Let someone else find out that stuff doesn't work. Give developers time to gather bug reports and put out some updates. Make your move to Lion after that.

When you do decide to go to Lion, please make sure that you have a backup. If things go wrong it would be nice to be able to go back to 10.6.8.

UPDATE 2: the people at RoaringApps.com are compiling an extensive Lion compatibility table. See it at http://roaringapps.com/apps:table. Notable on the list: Microsoft Office 2004 (does not work), Microsoft Office 2008 (tested, has some problems), Microsoft Office 2011 (tested, has some problems). What a great time to switch to Apple's iWork. Here's a link to a good deal on it at Amazon.

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Sometimes you have a PDF that you want to compress, usually because you want to email it and you know it's too big to send. Here's an easy way to do it, and it uses Apple's Preview program, something that comes with every Mac. (If Acrobat opens when you double-click a PDF, try Control-clicking on a PDF's icon and then choosing "Preview.")

Here's the Get Info box for the Keynote '09 Manual (you know: click on the icon once, then File/Get Info). You can see the size (boxed in red): 13.8 megabytes. That's too big to email, so you need to compress it. Turns out it's really easy to do.

Get your document open in Preview, then choose Save As... from Preview's File menu.

UPDATE: In Mac OS X Lion, Preview's File menu doesn't have a Save As... command! It does have an Export... command, and that's what you'll choose in Lion. Everything else is the same.

You'll get this box:

(If you don't see a box this big, click the triangle (boxed in blue here) to expand it.) Notice the "Quartz Filter: Reduce File Size" (boxed in red). You have to choose that. Ordinarily, it says "Quartz Filter: None." Change it to say "Quartz Filter: Reduce File Size." Below: the other choices, in case you're interested. I don't think I've ever used any of them. Experiment if you'd like but for our purposes here, use "Reduce File Size."

You should give your reduced-size PDF a new name before clicking "Save" because you will want to be able to compare the reduced one to the original. You don't want to over-write the original. At least I don't think you do.

In this example, I got info on the reduced-size PDF and looky how much smaller it is:


The reduced-size version is less than 25% as big as the original. That's great. This one, we can email.

Of course, before emailing it we want to check the quality. Here are some screen shots showing you the original and the reduced-size versions (look in the title bars-- the smaller one says "smaller").




Virtually identical. However, compression is not always so neat and clean. In some cases the quality will not be very good after being compressed. But, a lot of times it will be, and since Preview is right there on your Mac already, it is certainly worth a try.

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Today's tips are all about Safari. They will save you time. I guarantee it, or double your money back.

Click the picture below to start the show. You'll see, in vivid color, how to access the Google search box from the keyboard, how to open links without leaving the page you're on, and the fastest way to type in a new web address.




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Mac OS X 10.7, otherwise known as "Lion", is coming soon. If you are on 10.6.8 you'll be able to download it in a few weeks for $29. It might be better if you don't, because you might not be able to use some of the software you're used to using. Such as Quicken.

Yes, Quicken. After all these years (five of them), Quicken is still not Intel-native. Instead, it's written for the older PowerPC chip (PPC). Apple provides software called Rosetta which translates PPC programs into something the Intel Macs can use, but it slows everything down and while it's available in every version of Mac OS X from 10.0 to 10.6, Apple is leaving it out of Lion. What it means is you will not be able to use Quicken on a Mac running Lion.

You can read all about it here, straight from Quicken's support web site.

It's easy to get mad at Intuit (Quicken's publisher) and say they should have built an Intel-native Quicken by now (five years after Apple announced the switch to Intel chips). In fact, it's so easy that a lot of people have gotten mad and said that already. I wouldn't bother. Intuit has a very poor track record when it comes to listening to customer feedback regarding their Macintosh products and I would not expect them to change their tune now.

If you're already using "Quicken Essentials" you'll be OK-- Quicken Essentials is Intel-native. But, most people use the "real" Quicken, because Quicken does more than Quicken Essentials does. Essentials can't pay bills online, and it can't track investment activity (though it does show you how much each investment is worth). The reports aren't as good in Essentials either.

Intuit will sell you a copy of Quicken Essentials, which WILL run on Lion, for $24.99 (half-off) if you use this link. If you're using Quicken 2006, or 2007 on a Mac, and you really want to run Lion, spend the money and get a copy of Essentials and see how you like it-- BEFORE installing Lion. (If you're using an older version of Quicken you will have to upgrade to Quicken 2006 at least before moving to Essentials. That will complicate things. Thanks Intuit!)

QuickBooks is a different story. QuickBooks might work with Lion (at least it's Intel-native, so there's hope). With Quicken, there's no hope. Actually, there is a tiny bit of hope: Intuit might try buying or licensing Rosetta and folding it into Quicken itself. I don't think they'll be able to do that, but if they do it would be a slick solution. Better, of course, would be for Intuit to hire more Mac programmers and have them build an Intel-native version of Quicken. Even better would have been to start this effort a few years ago.

There are plenty of other programs that won't work in Lion too. Anything that it written for the PowerPC chip simply won't work. Easy way to find out whether your programs are PPC or not: open the Applications folder, click once on an application, then Command-I to Get Info. Look toward the top of the Get Info window. You want it to say "Kind: Application (Intel)." See below.


Note: just because it's an Intel application doesn't mean it will work just fine in Lion. There could be some issues, but at least we have a chance.

If you see something like the following, you're sunk. This application will not ever work on Lion.

(What a coincidence. We were just talking about Quicken!)

You can do this on a one-by-one basis, which is fine, or you can do it all at once. To do it all at once, go to the Apple menu and choose "About This Mac..." and then click the "More Info..." button. That will bring up the System Profiler, and in there you can click on Applications and see what kind of app each item is. See below.

Just remember: PowerPC apps will not work on Lion. Intel apps might, and it's likely that most of them will (maybe after an update or two). Classic apps won't work on Lion either, in case you were wondering.

This looks to be a somewhat messy transitional time in the Mac world. Some software is going to be left behind. Some people are going to stick with 10.6 as long as they can in order to keep using their older software. If you're thinking of buying a Mac in the next few months and you have some PPC applications it might make sense to buy a Mac before Lion comes out, so it will have 10.6 installed and therefore, Rosetta. Eventually you won't have a choice, but right now you do. Do some legwork now and figure out whether you're going to have issues with Lion so when the time comes you'll be ready.

Written by +Christian Boyce
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We interrupt the iMom Project to bring you this news about the Mac OS X 10.6.8 update. If you have a networked printer there is a chance that the printer won't work after you update to 10.6.8. 10.6.7 works perfectly but 10.6.8 has a problem. Think it over before automatically clicking "Install".

UPDATE: the 10.6.8 "supplemental update" (available via Software Update, in the Apple menu) fixes the problem. (7-25-2011)

The problem has been traced to a small change in the printing system. It appears to be a mistake. Fortunately, the fix is relatively easy. Just go to this web page: Mac users: After updating to 10.6.8, Getting “paused printer” message. FIXED! and download the Network Printer fix. Takes just a few seconds. Thanks to Eliran Sapir for the web page and the fix.

If your printer is connected with a USB cable don't worry, this issue won't affect you. But if you use a networked HP printer, or a networked Xerox, or a networked Canon or networked Minolta, or many others, you may run into the problem. The symptom is you try to print and right away the printer reports "paused" even though it is not. You won't make it work by resetting the printer system or reloading drivers or repairing permissions, so don't bother. Just use Eliran's fix. It only takes a minute and you'll be back in business.

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I know, everyone knows how to use Google... but not everyone knows how to use Google IMAGES to search by COLOR. They will if they read this blog entry.

Suppose you go to Google and you search for something. Here, I've searched for Yoda. I want pictures, so I'll click either of the three red-circled "Images" links.

The result of course is a page full of Yoda images.

Of course you can use the options in the left-hand column to choose an image size (use "Medium" or "Large" if you intend to print the image). But... how about those color options? Who would have guessed that you can find images of Yoda that match a color scheme?

Here's what you get when you click the green square.

Of course, Yoda is green. So you don't see a major effect here. However, look what you get with blue, and black, and purple. Very interesting, and just what you need to match your bag and shoes!



Of course it works with other searches, not just for Yoda. Here are some examples of color-filtered Texas wildflowers. First, the non-filtered search...


Then red (it shows right there on the screen)...


Then yellow...


Then pink...


Then blue. Neat.

I think it's rather amazing. I don't know when they added this feature, but as always, as soon as I noticed I wrote it up here.

I talked Saturday with with Digital Village, a terrific radio program based in Los Angeles, about Apple's recently concluded World Wide Developers' Conference. We talked about iCloud, iOS 5, and Mac OS X Lion. This link will take you to Digital Village's archived audio page-- my part is right at the top (or, if you're coming in late, it's in the June 11th 2011 section). Lots of other good stuff to listen to while you're in there. Have a look around.

From their web page:

"Digital Village is a weekly broadcast about the impact of technology, computers and the Internet on media and popular culture, hosted by Ric Allan and Doran Barons.

Rather than endless product reviews, we focus on how the technology is changing the way we communicate."

That works for me.

There's this bad thing called Mac Defender. It comes from bad guys (Russians, just like in the movies). Then there's this good thing called Apple Security Update 2011-003. It comes from good guys (Apple, Inc.). You want the Security Update 2011-003 because you DON'T want Mac Defender. So, Step One: go to your Apple menu, choose "Software Update...", and install Apple Security Update 2011-003. You can read about it by clicking here but this is a case where you can take my word for it. Get the update and read about it later if you want. For Mac OS X 10.6.7 only. Sorry, Mom.

Mac Defender has gotten a lot of press. It's a scam, pure and simple: a fake anti-virus program that does nothing other than put your credit card info into the wrong hands. It works like this: you're reading a web page when all of a sudden a message appears telling you that your computer is infected with viruses and other malware, and that you need to take care of this problem right away, and Mac Defender offers to do it for you, for a fee. In fact, the warning message is faked; the Mac Defender virus warning is canned, and when "they" say they can clean up the problem they mean that if you give them your credit card info they'll quit with the phony "you're infected!" messages. Pretty easy money-- but that's not the end of it, because now they have your credit card info and you can bet they'll use it.

You know better than to give your credit card info to some total stranger, even if they have a trustworthy-sounding name like Mac Defender. Right? Right. And you know the internet is not locked down nice and tight-- websites are hacked all the time, so malicious code can be put onto a site that you thought you could trust. (It's happened even to Google, believe it or not.) So, it's not going to work to say "Well I never go to those bad websites, I only use Google and PBS.org and ChristianBoyce.blogspot.com"-- the bad guys can stick their nasty code into any site if they try hard enough. Passwords are learned, weaknesses are exploited. Bad things happen. Just don't let them happen to you.

If you get a message on your Mac (or your iPhone, or your iPad) and it says "pay me, quick" it's probably a scam. Take a picture of the screen (Command-Shift-3) and email it to me and I'll help you figure out what's going on.

The really good news here is that Apple has figured out how to stop scams like this in their tracks. Get the Security Update 2011-003 and you're all set. If you are on Mac OS X 10.5, you're somewhat on your own, but just keep being smart and somewhat suspicious and you'll be fine. And of course send me those screenshots (Command-Shift-3).

Here's a nice write-up about the Mac Defender phony anti-virus thing, though it's a little out of date now that Apple's come up with the Security Update. Good reading anyway. Thanks to PCWorld.com for this.

If there's something you type all the time, and it's more than a few characters, why not have your Mac type it for you? This tip will show you how.

Let's say, hypothetically, that your name is "Christian Boyce." Now, let's say you stay up late doing blog entries and AppleScripts and kitchen cleaning (I did say "hypothetically"). Wouldn't it be a drag if staying up late made you tired and you accidentally made a typo while typing your own name? It Could Happen.

Actually, it probably did happen. I don't remember. I'm tired from being up late doing blog entries and AppleScripts. But it's not going to happen anymore, because I've gone into the Language & Text preference pane and set up my own little short-hand substitution. All I have to do now is type "cb" and it's magically expanded to the full "Christian Boyce." You should try it (but use your own name).

Here's the Language & Text preference pane (start by going to the Apple menu, then System Preferences). We're interested in the "Text" part. Yes, I know the name doesn't make a lot of sense.

You can see that Apple provides a few substitutions for you already-- (r) becomes ® and so on. Neat, but not as neat as turning your initials into your name. To do that, click the + at bottom left of the preference pane, and type your shortcut on the left and what it expands to on the right. See below.

Close up the preference pane and start enjoying your shortcut. Ah, but where? Turns out that these substitutions don't work everywhere. Here's a list of applications where the text substitutions definitely work:

• Mail
• Text Edit
• iChat

If it doesn't work for you in those applications, put your cursor somewhere that allows you to enter text, then control-click to reveal a menu. Choose Substitutions/Text Replacement. Then it will work. (To trigger the expansion, type the shortcut, then a space or a return or punctuation.)

You can even make a shortcut that expands to more than one line. For example, you could put your entire mailing address into a shortcut. Imagine typing "hadd" and having your entire home address get typed for you. Neat.

The same sort of thing works in Pages '09 except you turn it on in Pages' own Preferences, and it does not read the list of custom substitutions that you made in System Preferences/Language & Text. Instead it has its own list. Word 2011 has a similar feature but it's under Tools/AutoCorrect.

Hint: don't use a real word for your shortcut. You'll be triggering it all the time. For example, "had" would be a poor choice for the Home Address shortcut. You'd try to type "I had the fish" and it would come out with your address in the middle. Ooopsy.

This is not the end-all, be-all text expansion/substitution method, but it's built into OS X 10.6, so you may as well use it. If you want to do something a little fancier, and you want it to work in practically every application, you should look into TypeIt4Me, TextExpander, and Typinator. Of these, I am leaning toward Typinator. Watch this movie and see how it could work for you.

Suppose you were writing an email using Apple's Mail program. Suppose you made some typing mistakes (who me?). Suppose your email looked like this:



Not very good! But, those red underlines do show you where you made mistakes, and there are plenty of ways to make corrections. I will cover those in a future blog post. For now, though, let's learn how to have Mail correct the problems as you type rather than just underline them. It's a simple one-step procedure.

All you do is get an email window up, and then go to the Edit menu and turn on Correct Spelling Automatically. With that checked, the exact same typing is corrected, behind your back, without you doing anything at all.



Here is how it looks when you make the same typing mistakes, but with Correct Spelling Automatically checked. I'm not kidding. Every single mistake was corrected without me doing ANYTHING. You should try it.



Turns out that this automatic correction works a bunch of other places but Mail is where you will use it the most.

Sorry to say that this only works in OS X 10.6 and higher. Another reason to get to 10.6.

One of my customers has a Mac Pro tower, and the hard drive went bad last week. A replacement drive was only $60, and it was even bigger and faster than the one that died. Of course the new drive was blank... but we had a Time Machine backup so we restored from that and in less than an hour the customer was back in business.

Turns out we'd only set up this backup system two weeks earlier, so we really lucked out. Let's make sure that you're lucky too. If you don't have a Time Machine backup, let's get you one. You'll need an external hard disk, such as this one:


Seagate GoFlex 1 terabyte external drive, $159.99 from Amazon, with free shipping.

You also need a Mac with OS X 10.5 or higher, and there are a lot of other reasons to have 10.5 or higher so if you're on 10.4.11 let's get you to 10.5 at least. You 10.4.11 people know who you are. (Unless you don't-- in that case, go to the Apple menu and choose "About This Mac" and see what it says in there).

Time Machine is Apple's own backup software, built into the system starting with 10.5, and it works like a charm. If you are on 10.5 or 10.6 you already have the software and it's already installed.

If you buy a drive that is formatted for a Mac (like the Seagate above), all you do is connect it and answer "Yes" when asked whether you want to use it for Time Machine. If you buy some other drive you will probably have to format it as Mac OS X Extended (use the Disk Utility, in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder). Either way, from then on you'll be backing up automatically every hour, nothing for you to worry about, and when your Mac's disk quits working the cost of the backup drive will seem like small potatoes. Recovering data from a dead hard disk will cost you at least $1,000 and usually more. It does not make sense to tempt fate here-- use Time Machine and have that backup for when you need it. Eventually, you'll need it. Make like a Boy Scout and be prepared.

Ever want to type something like that, but all you could get was "Ole"? Or maybe you want to type "¿Que pasa? but you can't find the upside-down question mark. Either way, this is the article for you. We'll have you typing all kinds of groovy accents and symbols and other neat stuff in no time.

You could memorize everything but that's no fun. Here's how you can learn for yourself where the special characters are.

1. Go to System Preferences and click on Keyboard.


2. Check the box that says "Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in menu bar."

Close up System Preferences and look in your menu bar for a new icon. It looks like this:

Enlarged, it looks like this:

3. Click the Keyboard & Character Viewer icon in the menu bar and choose "Show Keyboard Viewer." Now you see a representation of your keyboard. Here's mine.



Try holding down the shift key on your real keyboard. You should see something like this:


Of course this is nothing new. You already knew that you would get capital letters if you held down the Shift key. Notice, by the way, that when you press a key on the keyboard it changes what you see in the Keyboard viewer. Here, the shift key is down, so both shift keys on the screen are highlighted.

4. Now for the good stuff. Hold down the Option key. You'll see something like this:

Ignoring for the time being the orange keys, look at all of the other great stuff in there. Now you know how to type a perfect bullet: Option-8. You can type a cent sign (¢) with Option-4. You can type that upside-down question mark using Option-1. If you think about the Option key as being something like a shift key, you'd be on the right track. The keys do different things when you hold down Shift, and they do other different things when you hold down Option.

Turns out they do other other different things when you hold Option AND Shift at the same time. Here's a look:

If you've ever wanted to type an Apple logo, now you know: it's Option-Shift-K. And there's our upside-down question mark: Option-Shift-question mark.

Now, back to our orange keys. When you hold the Option key by itself it shows you those five orange keys. If you keep the option key down, and then type one of those keys, and then you let go, and then you type a vowel (usually) you will get a special character, along these lines:

à, è, ì, ò, ù

á, é, í, ó, ú

ä, ë, ï, ö, ü

â, ê, î, ô, û

That's going to come in handy someday. Especially if you need to properly type "résumé" (and you might-- there's a recession on you know). Or "Löwenbräu" (and you might-- there's a recession on, you know).

You might have noticed that I did not use the Option-n combination yet. That's because it doesn't work on the vowels. Instead, it works on the "n" itself. So, you type Option-n, then let go, then "n" again, and you get...

ñ

Perfect for typing "hasta mañana," a great way to end.

UPDATE: this is all very nice if you are using a Mac with OS X 10.6 or higher. If you are on 10.5, you'll find the controls for turning on the Keyboard Viewer and the Character Viewer under "International" in the System Preferences. If you are on 10.4, it's time to upgrade. Get to 10.5 if on a G5 machine, 10.6 otherwise.

Facebook has a nice little security hole, and someone has already done a "proof of concept" hack to show that it's easy to get into someone's account. The hack involves "listening" as people log into Facebook using an open network (such as what you'd find at Starbucks) and capturing names and passwords. Once that happens, the hacker has all he needs. He can log in with the captured Facebook credentials and post things and comment on things and delete things and generally cause a bunch of trouble. You don't want that.

Unfortunately, the person who developed the hack released it into the wilds, making it possible for anyone with a little knowledge to hack into other people's Facebook accounts. Fortunately, it's really easy to prevent anyone from hacking into YOUR Facebook account, and double-fortunately, here I am to tell you how.

First, go to the Account menu and choose "Account Settings."


Second, click "Change" in the Account Security section.


Third, make your settings look like this and click Save .

The most important one is "Secure Browsing (https)". The others are optional, but it would be interesting to know that someone has logged into your account, right when it happens, wouldn't it? If that does happen, make another trip to this same Account Security section in Facebook's settings and if it's not authorized, you can click an "End Activity" button to turn off that machine's access. Don't be alarmed (like I was) if you see something like this in Facebook's settings:



When I saw this, I thought "Whoa, who was accessing my account in Anaheim at 4:36 PM?" Turns out the location is VERY approximate. If you hover your mouse over the location, they show the IP address for that location, and it turns out they were off by a few miles. The IP they reported was my own. (You can determine your own IP by going to www.whatismyip.net).

Changing this one security setting takes less time to do than to read about. Do it now and you're all set.

Mail is even better when you customize the toolbar to be just the way you like it.. This video tutorial-- less than two minutes long-- will show you how it's done. Click the picture to start the show.



UPDATE: I should have mentioned that you can customize the main Mail viewer window's toolbar AND the individual Mail message window's toolbar-- changes in one do not affect the other. So, customize Mail's main viewer window's toolbar, then double-click a message to open up a message window and modify that toolbar also. If you want.

This is a business card.



So is the black-and-white mess below. And the messy one is easier to put into your address book. That's because it's a "QR code," and it turns out it contains all of the information in the card above-- and you can read it using your iPhone's camera and add it to your address book without doing any typing at all. I'm telling you, it's the Next Big Thing.



The QR code format is rather broad. Storing name, address, and phone numbers is only the beginning. You can use a code, and your iPhone's camera, to generate a pre-addressed email, or to go straight to a website-- no typing required. And lest you think that this is an iPhone-only thing, it's not. Just about any decent smartphone can do it.

Obviously, there are two aspects to these QR codes: making them, and using them. I'll tell you how to do both.

First, let's make a QR code. You can search the internet for a QR code generator, but I've already done it and the best QR code generator is by Kerem Erkan, in the beautiful country of Turkey. Click the link and make yourself a code. It's fun. Here's one I made, using a Code Action of "Browse to a Website" (the simplest kind, but have a look at the other options in that Code Action menu).

In a minute, after I show you how to read a code, you can figure out which site I chose. When you create your own QR code, type in the desired web site URL, and then click the Generate Code button at the bottom. You'll get a nice big code-- click on it and drag it to your desktop for later use.

Now, let's figure out how to read these codes. What you need is an iPhone app called Qrafter. (There are nearly 200 iPhone apps that can read a QR code, but once again I've done the work for you and found the needle in the haystack. You want Qrafter.) It's free, so you have nothing to lose. Here's a bigger button to click.


While you're at the iTunes Store, have a look at Qrafter's screenshots.The main screen is shown below, and it could hardly be simpler. Just touch the giant "Scan with Camera" button, aim your iPhone's camera at a QR code, and in a second or two the image is recognized and decoded. It feels like magic, even after you've done it hundreds of times.



You can experiment with the Settings (at the bottom of the screen) yourself, but I recommend the options shown below. You'll also want to click the "Info" button at Qrafter's bottom right to learn a little more about the program.



Now let's go back and scan the codes we saw earlier.

Touch the "Scan with Camera" button and aim it at the first code... and you get all of my contact info, perfectly done, no mistakes. Scroll down a bit and you'll see a button to "Create New Contact" and another to "Add to Existing Contact." Touch the one that's right for you and all of my name/address/phone number info is added to your Contacts app. Easy, fast, and error-free.

Try the second code-- the one I generated with a "Browse to Website" Code Action. If your settings are like mine, you'll go straight to the website I chose. If not, you'll have to touch a button to "Open URL in Safari." Try it and see (and then change your settings so that "Scan and Go" is ON). Try the code you made and dragged to your desktop-- I think it will work.

You can use Qrafter to scan QR codes in magazines and other places too-- who knows what you've been missing.

So... now you know how to create a QR code, and you know how to read them. All you need to do now is figure out how to use them. Here's one way: I've printed up stickers with my business card info on them and stuck them to the backs of my business cards. Next time I have cards printed, I'll include the code, but the stickers work great.

Here are some other ideas:

• Make a "Browse to Website" QR code with your blog or website address on it, and put it on your business cards or stationery.
• Make a "Google Maps" QR code showing your business' location and put it on all of your company materials.
• Make a "Free Formatted Text" QR code with additional information about a product or service, or a list of ingredients for a dish at a restaurant-- or send "secret" messages to your friends (secret, that is, until everyone catches on to QR codes).

QR codes are easy to make, easy to read, and they don't make typographical errors. They take you from print (the code) to the web, or to email, or to a phone call, or to a text message-- all with a simple scan of a code. Fast, accurate, easy, and bridging the print and online worlds-- that's a pretty tall order, but QR codes deliver, and that's why I'm convinced that QR codes are the Next Big Thing.

UPDATES: The "QR" in "QR Code" stands for "Quick Response." And, it turns out that you can store over 4000 characters in a QR code. That's almost enough to store the text of this particular blog post. Find out more about QR codes using this link to Wikipedia. Very interesting stuff.

It's not easy keeping up with Google-- they make changes all the time, and they almost never make a big deal about them. Google Instant Previews is a good example of that. What it does is show you "Instant Previews" (hmmm!) of each website in search results, which makes it a little easier, sometimes, to figure out which website you want to go to.

For example, here I've searched for Barbecue Recipes, and as expected I found a LOT of results: approximately thirteen million, four hundred thousand. I don't want to plow through thirteen million four hundred thousand websites. I don't even want to plow through the ten on the first page. I want, somehow, to find the right one on the first try. I'm looking for one with a nice layout, with pictures as well as text. Google Instant Previews can help.

Start by clicking the magnifying glass to the right of any item in the search results. I've drawn a big red arrow here to show you where to look.


When you click on a magnifying glass you get a preview of that site, and since what you've really done is turn Instant Previews on for everything on the page, all you have to do now is hover over each item in the listing. No need to click another magnifying glass-- in fact, if you do, you'll turn the feature off.

Here I've just turned the feature on, showing a preview of the second site in my search results.


Now I can roll the mouse around and hover over other items in the search results, giving me a quick idea of what each site looks like.


I don't like the looks of this site with the green sidebar-- no pictures, at least not on the first page. Based on the previews, I could make a decision about which site to go to, saving me a little time. I know, I know: don't judge a book by its cover. But I'm busy. Seeing the cover helps.

You can watch a nice video by Google Themselves that explains it a little further. Turns out Google Instant Previews is even handier on the iPhone. Check it out. Here's the link.

I did a little experimenting today and found some new (to me) Safari shortcuts. Maybe they are new to you too. Try 'em out and see how they work for you.

Option-Down Arrow: scrolls down one windowful. Fantastic. No more "click click click" to scroll down.
Option-Up Arrow: scrolls up one windowful. Duh.

(Yes, the above do exactly what "Page Down" and "Page Up" do... but if you're on a laptop, you don't have Page Down and Page Up keys. And, even if you do have Page Down and Page Up keys, the Option-Arrow shortcuts may be easier to hit. You don't have to reach as far, that's one plus.)

Space bar: scrolls down one windowful. Same as Option-Down Arrow but easier to do.
Shift-Space bar: scrolls up one windowful. Same as Option-Up Arrow.

Command-Down Arrow: scroll to the bottom.
Command-Up Arrow: scroll to the top. This one you'll use a lot.

(Yes, these functions are handled nicely by "End" and "Home" but I kinda like Command-Down Arrow and Command-Up Arrow better. Command is not the same as Control, so be sure you're using the Command key (on either side of the space bar) before you give up on this one.)

Control-Down Arrow and Control-Up Arrow: same as Option-Down Arrow and Option-Up Arrow. Nice to have options but the Space bar method is the best choice.

Not Really a Shortcut, but Impressive Anyway:
Select some text on a web page. Then, go to Safari's Edit menu, slide down to Speech, and slide over and choose "Start Speaking." Your Mac will read the selected text out loud. Advice: don't select a lot of text the first time you do this. (There is a way to stop it-- Edit/Speech/Stop Speaking.)

Not New to Me, But Too Cool and Useful to Not Include:
Here's the scene: you want to download something from a website. You click a button that says "Download Now" or something like that. The download begins. And then you never find the thing you downloaded. Sound familiar?

Your problem is solved quickly and easily using the "Downloads" window in Safari. If the Downloads window is not showing, go to Safari's Window menu and choose "Downloads". It's a toggle, so if you choose "Downloads" from the Window menu while the Downloads window is showing, the window will close. FYI.

Notice the magnifying glass buttons at the right in the Downloads window. I've circled one in red below. If you click one of those magnifying glass buttons the corresponding file will be revealed in the Finder! That's way better than you shoving Safari out of the way, opening up a window in the Finder, and climbing around trying to locate the thing. Even if you know where downloads go, this is still the fastest way to find the file you want. Give this a try and you'll never go back to the dig-around-in-your-hard-drive method.

Click the picture and learn how to use Bookmark Collections and Tabs in Safari to speed up your web browsing. Guaranteed to save you time. Your friend(s) will be impressed.

Ever buy something online, and right at the end you see a little box that says "Enter your promotional code here"? Ever wonder how you're supposed to get those codes? I get them from Retailmenot.com. Retailmenot.com provides discount codes for use on other websites (and printable coupons for use in stores, and news about special offers). I've made checking with Retailmenot.com a habit-- every time I'm about to buy something online, I open another browser window (File/New Window, or Command-N) and see if Retailmenot can help me save some money. A lot of the time they can.

It's an easy website to figure out. Here's what it looks like (note: it's better on a Mac than on an iPhone):



You can search for a store-- here's what happens when you start typing "Jcpenney":


Rather handy. When you see the store you're interested in you can click on it and boom, you're shown a list of discounts and special offers for that store. Here's part of what that looks like (it's a long list).



Retailmenot is pretty clever. They'll show you deals for other stores and online merchants that are similar to the one you've chosen. And sometimes they just come out of the blue with a great idea. Here's one they recently showed me from Amazon:



Who knew? That's a great deal. Thanks, Retailmenot.com!

Back by popular demand, it's VIDEO. A picture is worth a thousand words, so a movie should be worth even more. Let's test that theory out.

A couple of weeks ago we had a contest about Safari Bookmarks and cool ways to make them. Nine-year old Zach won it with the first tip in this video. The second tip is provided at no additional charge, though Zach probably already knows all about it.

Have a look. Click the picture below to start the show.





NOTE: the first tip in this video also works in Firefox. The second one does not. Use Safari.

I'm back from Macworld 2011 and as usual, it was a lot of fun. Also as usual, it was a lot of walking but this year I wore tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots. It took a while but I'm getting smarter.

There was plenty of cool stuff to look and play with and you can read about some of it here, here, and here. Rather than describe every interesting item I saw at Macworld I'm going to tell you about the things that I bought. You know I had to like it if I spent my own money on it. Here, then, is what I bought.

Camera Plus Pro (iPhone app for cropping/fixing/enhancing photos), $1.99. Share your modified pictures via email, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Picassa with just a couple of taps. You get a lot for your money with this one.

Here's a picture I took with my iPhone 4.


Here's how it looks after cropping and sharpening and a little "warming" using Camera Plus Pro. I could touch that triangle in the lower left-hand corner and post it to Facebook in a jiffy if I wanted to.


Here's what the interface looks like for cropping. Easy enough to do.


L5 Remote (iPhone app combined with an infrared transmitter), free app, $49.99 for the transmitter. Use your iPhone as a custom universal remote control for TV and stereo. Create multiple remotes (swipe to move between them) for different rooms. I can make one for controlling Mom's TV and another for controlling my own stuff.

Here's an example of what you can do. Note the buttons at the bottom for various stations-- Tennis, Golf, ESPN and ESPN2, etc. Set those up and you'll never have to remember that ESPN is channel 417 and ESPN2 is channel 429.


Two things I'm going to buy soon:

Kensington "SoundWave" Sound-Amplifying iPhone mount (for use in the car-- attaches to windshield with a suction cup or to an air vent with a clamp), $29.99 with free shipping (via Amazon.com). I've decided to use my iPhone as a GPS, but I need to attach it to the car somehow. This Kensington device is the ticket. The part that makes this thing special is the sound from the iPhone comes out of its bottom speakers and is routed through some tubes into a couple of flared-out openings, and it makes the sound louder-- a very important thing when using a GPS in the car. Without some sort of amplification the iPhone isn't loud enough to be heard in the car. This holder's design approximately doubles the iPhone's volume. And you don't have to take the iPhone's case off to make it fit.


IRIS "Scan Anywhere 2" scanner. List price is $199 but the people at the IRIS booth told me it will go on sale at Frys.com with a $75 mail-in rebate starting February 1st. They expect the price to get down to about $120 after the rebate. This scanner is about as big as a box of aluminum foil so it is very portable. It connects to your Mac with a USB cable and you can shove paper into it a sheet at a time and it scans just fine. The really big news: you can do it even without being connected to your Mac. The Scan Anywhere 2 has rechargeable batteries in it, and it has built-in memory, and it has an SD (camera card) slot, AND it has a USB port for attaching a USB "thumb" drive. So, you can use the Scan Anywhere 2 on an airplane, or in a hotel room, or really just about anywhere. Then, after doing your scans, you connect it to your Mac (or pull the SD card or USB stick and connect that to your Mac), and it mounts on the desktop like an everyday drive, and from there you can drag the scans to wherever you want to drag them. Very neat, especially at $120.

Here's a picture.

Macworld 2011 begins today in San Francisco. Historically the largest annual Mac-related love fest held near a large body of water, Macworld has evolved over the years to a smaller show, with iPods and iPhones pushing Macs aside. However, it is still held near the same large body of water.

I think I've been to every Macworld Expo, which means something like 25 of them, which also means that I'm not 22 anymore. Hmm. I expect to see a lot of iPad-related things at the show, but one thing about Macworld Expo is you really can't predict it. One other thing about Macworld Expo is you can "do" Macworld in thirty minutes by listening to my Macworld Report on KPFK-FM radio this Saturday at 10:30 AM. Click here to listen (or tune to 90.7 FM in Los Angeles). Not now, silly-- Saturday at 10:30 AM. Of course it is OK to practice in advance.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a recording of my Macworld report. Twenty-two minutes and 46 seconds.

You probably think you know all about making bookmarks in Safari, and maybe you do. But, do you know know all about editing bookmarks in Safari? You will in a minute.

Let's start with making a bookmark. Click the plus sign to the left of the URL, or go to the Bookmarks menu and choose "Add Bookmark..." Or use Command-D. There are a couple of other ways too-- more on that later.



Whichever you choose, you'll end up with this box:


So far, so good. Pay attention to where you put the bookmark. For this example, we'll put our new bookmark into the Bookmarks Bar because there's something we want to do with it.



If you're following along your Bookmark Bar will look a lot like this. Except yours may be so full that there is no room for more bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar. That's OK-- that's the problem we're going to solve here.

By default, Safari names your bookmark using the name of the website. Sometimes it's a little long, and that can crowd the Bookmarks Bar. If you're right on top of things you can shorten the name before you click the "Add" button. But, if you're that good, you'd be writing this blog, not reading it. And nobody's perfect anyway. Here's how you shorten the name of a Bookmark Bar bookmark after the fact.

Step 1: Control-click on the bookmark you want to shorten. You'll get a menu like this:

You want to edit the Name of the bookmark, not the Address. The Name is "The Boyce Blog." The Address is "http://christianboyce.blogspot.com." Totally different.

Here's the box you get. Shorten the name as desired. Maybe just take off the "The." That's Step Two.

What you're doing here is purely cosmetic. The link goes to the exact same address. It just has a shorter name. You can change the name to anything you like. But shorter is better-- that's the whole point here. And there is no Step Three.

OK, that was easy. Now let's do one that REALLY needs shortening: Amazon.

Note: Amazon.com offers your humble blog writer a TINY referral fee when you start your shopping via a specially-coded link. Here's the link-- let's click on it, and then we'll add the bookmark, and this time we'll pay attention when we add the bookmark so the name's not so long.

You can tell that the name is going to be LONG-- you see it at the top of the window. "Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVD & more"-- that's going to take up half the Bookmarks Bar!


(Actually, Safari will shorten the name for you automatically but it's messy. Do it yourself instead.)

Step One is add the bookmark-- click the plus, use the Bookmarks menu, or Command-D. Be sure it goes into the Bookmarks Bar.

Step Two: let's shorten the thing right now, getting it right the first time. Just change it to "amazon" as shown here. Click OK.

So now you have a bookmark/shortcut to Amazon that doesn't take up half your Bookmarks Bar. Yay. And when you use that shortcut it adds a few pennies to the Christian Boyce Coffee Fund. Double-Yay.

Now... let's say you want to rearrange things on that Bookmarks Bar. That's easy-- just click a bookmark and drag it around! Drag left or right and the other bookmarks make room for it. Drag it DOWN and you'll throw it away, with a very nice puff of smoke effect. Make a few bookmarks that you don't really want so you can practice this-- it's fun.


Firefox users: guess what? It works almost exactly the same way for you! Control-click on a bookmark in the Bookmarks Bar and you'll get this menu:

Choose "Properties" as shown here and you'll get this box, which you can edit as desired.


Way back at the beginning of this I told you that there are other ways to add a bookmark. If you know another way, email it to contests@christianboyce.com for a chance at an Official Christian Boyce Economic Stimulus Coffee Cup. Entries must be received by midnight, January 31st 2011.

You want this. Good luck.

Steve Jobs is a lot of things, but he's not a mind-reader. I mention this because article after article tells us:
• "For years, and across a career, knowing what consumers want has been the self-appointed task of Mr. Jobs" (New York Times)
• "Jobs' greatest gift hasn't been for invention as much his uncanny ability to anticipate what people want" (The Associated Press)
• "He is perhaps singular in his ability to know what people want" (The Christian Science Monitor)

I say bah.

Steve Jobs can't tell what people want. But he doesn't have to. He knows what he wants, and he knows that when he shows it to you, you're probably going to say "I want that."

I am willing to bet that you NEVER sat around thinking "You know what I want? I want some raw fish. And wrap it in seaweed. And make it expensive while you're at it." And then someone introduced you to sushi and you said "I want that." You didn't know you wanted it because you hadn't thought of it. And if the person who introduced you to sushi had asked you what you wanted to eat you sure as heck wouldn't have said "raw fish, wrapped in seaweed, very expensive." No chance-- because it would never have crossed your mind.

Henry Ford said "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse.'" Steve Jobs has cited that quote a few times, usually when someone asks him why Apple doesn't use focus groups to help design products. More to the point, he's put it this way:

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

That makes sense to me. The point is that a lot of us don't really know what we want-- but show us something, and we'll know whether we want that particular thing or not. The hard part is in the imagining. There is nothing magic about this, and it happens in other fields, notably writing (hardly anyone can start with a blank page and put something good on it, but almost everyone can tell whether someone else's writing is worth reading). Steve Jobs has done a great job of putting ideas on paper and turning them into products. And, when he shows them to us-- and that includes me-- we all say "I want one!" Actually, I usually say "I want two!"

Knowing that people WILL want something (once they see it) is different than "knowing what they want." Lucky for us, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs didn't ask us what we want-- because if they had, we'd all be riding a faster horse, and though horses don't have charging ports for iPhones it wouldn't matter because the iPhone wouldn't exist.

When you search with Google you sometimes get MORE than what you want, and it clutters up the results. For example, suppose you're looking for Mac help in Austin, Texas. You type in...

Mac help Austin Texas

... and you get a pretty good list. But, there are a lot of repair places listed, and you don't need repairs, you need help. You can make the "repairs" items go away by modifying your search like so (the minus sign is the key):

Mac help Austin Texas -repair

Pretty good. But, it turns out there's a cosmetic company called MAC and they're showing up at the top of your search. Change it again, using the minus sign:

Mac help Austin Texas -repair -cosmetics

That just about does it (though, at this writing, the top item is a help-wanted ad, where someone needs a chicken sitter! I do not make this stuff up).

So, what have we learned? Use the minus sign in front of words that you DON'T want included in the search results. Be sure that the minus is preceded by a space, and that there is no space after the minus. You want this:

-repair

not this:

- repair

Get it?

Bonus Tip: Google doesn't care about the capitalization. So mac help austin texas -repair -cosmetics gives the same results as Mac help Austin Texas -repair -cosmetics. Save yourself a tiny bit of work there.

Apple introduced its Mac "App Store" today and I love it. I think you will too. First things first: your Mac has to be on 10.6.6 or later. Here's a link to the 10.6.6 Combo Update. You can't use the update unless you're already on 10.6.something, FYI.

When you install the 10.6.6 Combo Update you get one new application-- the App Store-- placed into your Applications folder, and it's also given space in your Dock. Give the App Store icon a click and you're in-- that's all there is to it.

Here's what you see when you launch the App Store. By the way, I don't like the App Store's icon, even though it's blue. I think they could have done better.



In many ways, the App Store is just like the iPhone's App Store already in place for the iPhone, and it has all of the iPhone's App Store advantages:

1. Very, VERY easy to purchase an app, 24 hours a day
2. Apps install themselves-- all you do is choose an app and pay.
3. Payment handled through your Apple ID, the same one used for iTunes purchases and iPhone app purchases-- no need to supply credit card info again and again.
4. Well-organized, searchable collection of apps.
5. Lots of free stuff.

Yes, you can find apps all over the web, but that's part of the problem-- they're all over the web. In the App Store, everything is right there in one place. It's easy to find apps, even if you're not looking for them-- for example, I downloaded the free "Alfred" shown above, and am having a great time playing around with it. I probably would not have stumbled across Alfred if not for the App Store. I am sure that you will find plenty of neat apps that you weren't necessarily looking for when you go to the App Store. It brings a little extra fun to the Mac.

Installing an app purchased from the App Store is completely automatic. When you click the little "free" button under the app (or the one that says "$4.99" or whatever-- you have ONE thing to do, namely enter your Apple ID name and password. The app then flies across your screen in a nice arc, landing in your Dock. That's it! No disk image to deal with, no dragging to the Applications folder, no message about this app being something downloaded from the internet, do you want to use it etc. Could not be simpler.

If you know what you're looking for you can search for it (top right). If you're just looking around, try looking at the free apps, or the paid apps, or the "Staff Recommendations." Or browse by category: Business, Education, Entertainment, GAMES (hi Zach), Photography, Productivity, etc.-- 21 categories in all.

One more thing: in many cases the App Store will save you money. For example, if you want the latest iPhoto, but don't want to spend $49 for the entire iLife suite, you can spend $14.99 and get just iPhoto-- and get it right now. How cool is that?!

Nothing's perfect, and if you want to read about all of the imperfections here's a nice link. I think the good far outweighs the bad, and I'm sure that the App Store will be a big hit with Mac users and software developers alike. I see that the people who programmed Angry Birds for the Mac have the 3rd-highest gross for the day-- and at $4.99 a pop, they must have sold a zillion copies, because the programs at numbers 1 and 2 sold for $79.99 and $14.99, and the program in position 4 sells for $29.99. Which reminds me: parents, encourage your kids to learn how to program for the Mac and iPhone. Someday they might strike it rich. The Angry Birds guys did. Happy New Year indeed.

Executive Summary: we waited three years for THIS?!
Don't bother buying it, unless you absolutely have to. And, keep in mind that in some ways it's not even as good as the previous version.

Microsoft's Office, like McDonald's hamburger, is very popular without being very good. Thanks to clever bundling arrangements on the PC side, Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint and Excel have become a workplace standard. Until recently, Mac users who wanted to view documents created by PC users were almost forced to purchase a copy of Microsoft Office for the Mac, even if they really didn't want to use it themselves. (There are some excellent non-Microsoft options available for Mac users today, notably Apple's iWork, a word processor, presentation program, and spreadsheet that are a pleasure to use. And they can open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents just fine.)

Microsoft was not particularly quick to get this version out the door-- the previous version was released in 2008-- but it still feels rushed, and frankly it's a huge disappointment. Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, which had suffered under previous "leadership," was under new management, and Office 2011 was supposed to be the product that showed that Microsoft "gets it." Based on my experience with Office 2011, which I bought with my own $200, it's plain that Microsoft still doesn't get it. They don't get what's important to Mac users, they don't get how to make software that's a pleasure to use, they don't get that the out-of-the-box experience matters.

They also don't get that iPhone users would like to sync their calendars, carrying with them the events and appointments that they've entered into Office 2011's Outlook. Well, maybe they do get that. But they didn't provide that feature. Yes, that's right-- if you're going to use the calendar in Outlook from Office 2011, you won't be able to sync it to your iPhone. Not. At. All. From what I hear, the iPhone is fairly popular with Mac users-- what was Microsoft thinking?

If they made a word processor that couldn't do the letter "Z" it would not be more surprising than this lack of calendar synching. Apple's been doing calendar synching through Sync Services, something that is available to everyone who programs for the Mac, for something like five years. Even Outlook's predecessor, the not-very-good Entourage, could sync calendars (though, to be fair, Entourage's synching was very unreliable, producing duplicates galore). It's a mind-boggling omission.

You might be thinking that I'm just getting started, and I am, but I'll spare you the details. I will, however, describe some of the more notable gaffes that I've found in just a few days of using Office 2011.

Notable Gaffe #1: lack of awareness that computer screens are wider than they are tall.


This is Microsoft Word from Office 2011. Gee, that empty gray space looks nice and there sure is a lot of it. Meanwhile, the toolbars and "Ribbon"-- a much-trumpeted feature that is, for the most part, simply a way to turn on and off toolbars-- shove my document so far down that I get about half a page on the screen. Word could gain more than an inch of document space by putting toolbars on the sides of the window-- where all of us have extra space-- but no. Toolbars should be horizontal. Thus spake Microsoft.

Big deal? Yes. Thanks to this one poor design decision, every single user of Microsoft Word will spend extra time scrolling and zooming in and out trying to see how his documents look-- every user, every document, forever and ever amen. They call this "Print Layout View" but if you can't see the whole page at once, it's not very useful... thus the endless zoom out to see how it looks on the page, zoom back in so you can edit. A giant time waster, multiplied across thousands or maybe millions of documents per day. No wonder we're not keeping up with China.

Notable Gaffe #2: registering the product-- which you must do before using it-- is a pain.
Here's the product key (serial number) from the back of the CD cover (actual size, with most of the number blurred out for security):


and here's the message I got when I typed it in:


As you can see, according to Microsoft, "The product key is not valid." I clicked that blue link to contact Microsoft Customer Service and Support, and got this:


I would have clicked "Activate By Phone" if such a link existed. But, as you can see from the figure above, the link does not exist. How helpful. (They're lucky I don't call "Inaccurate Help files" Notable Gaffe #3. Maybe I will anyway.)

Since I wasn't getting very far using the "Help" system I decided to try, try again. I very carefully typed and retyped that product key and each time got the "Invalid" message. Finally, I found my mistake: the real number is BK92B, not BK928. Microsoft has used the same weird computer-printout font to print their Mac product keys for about ten years, but as is typical of Microsoft they don't seem to look at their own products and think "how could we make this nicer for the user?" (The font face and the font size is bad, but to make things even worse, the ink they use to print the product key spreads, so the fine points of the characters get clogged up, making things even harder to read. Come on, Microsoft!)

Notable Gaffe #4: Confusing and awkward "Product ID" craziness
If/when you manage to get the product key entered correctly, you get this screen:


That's a completely different number than the product key I just entered. Why can't I use my product key to identify my product? And, what's the difference between "registering" and "activating"? Yikes.

It turns out that "registering" means you put in your name and email and sign up for "tips & tricks, product update notices, and special offers just for our Office for Mac users." Activating merely turns the product on. That's a big difference, yes, but why not use the same number for both? And, when am I supposed to do the registration? They force you to activate, but leave registration up to the user, without telling him how to do it. Hint: if you want to do it, open any Office 2011 program-- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook-- and under the menu named for the program, choose "Online Registration." Wouldn't have been hard for Microsoft to put a link to the Online Registration webpage right here in this window, but no. Yet another example of a tiny bit of extra work that Microsoft could have done, which would have made things a lot easier for EVERY user of Office. ONE person at Microsoft could have added that link in 15 minutes. Instead, each and every Office 2011 USER gets to spend time trying to find how to Register (they don't ALL read this blog), and the cumulative amount of time lost by the users is way, way, WAY more than the 15 minutes it would have taken one person at Microsoft to fix this. I have to find that person and talk to him. Of course a lot of people never bother to register-- this screen is the last time they think of it. There's no way for me to know how many people actually bother to register, but it can't be 100% of Office users-- so Microsoft's lack of attention to detail here ends up costing them too. Holy cow, what a mess, and it would be so easy to fix-- but only if you're in the right position at Microsoft, and only if you care.

Bonus Gaffe: when you go to "About Word" (or Excel or PowerPoint or Outlook) you'll see the Product ID at the bottom of the window (see below).

But, you don't see the Product Key. So, if you have multiple copies of Office 2011, each with its own Product Key, you'll have no way of knowing which Product Key was used during the installation on a particular machine. Better write it down somewhere, because if you inadvertently use the same Product Key on two machines you'll have a situation where only one or the other machine can be used with Office at any particular time. There's no predicting the Product ID based on the Product Key, and vice versa, so if you haven't kept track of which Product KEY was used for which machine, you're going to be in a jam when you someday reinstall. This "feature" has been present in at least the two previous versions of Office 2011, and maybe more. All it does is waste time and cause frustration, and it could be EASILY fixed-- for example, they could show you part of the Product Key in the "About..." window. As mentioned above, once Microsoft has something going they don't go back and say "Gee, this really could be better, let's change it." So much for constant improvement and refinement.

Double-Bonus Gaffe: they tell us, during Activation, to "Keep the following Product ID in your records" and it sounds as if this may be our last chance to see that number... but, as seen above, the Product ID is available ANYTIME, from within the program itself. They could have simply said "You can get the Product ID at any time by going to the Word menu and choosing "About Word." Maybe they didn't know! Somehow, it doesn't seem that Microsoft actually tries this stuff themselves, or reads the dialog boxes. So easy to fix, but again, they'd have to care enough to try. Of course it was exactly the same in the previous two versions of Office, dating back to 2004-- no surprise there (and no improvement either).

Smaller but still notable blown opportunity: Poorly designed Document Gallery (template chooser)

At first glance, this looks pretty good. (You get a similar Gallery for PowerPoint and another one for Excel.) The idea is, you click once on a thumbnail in the middle section of the Gallery, obtaining a slightly enlarged "preview" of the chosen template in the right-hand pane. It's rather neat, and in some cases you get some font and color options in the right-hand pane too as shown here. But, if you double-click the preview's icon, nothing happens. You have to either click "Choose" at the bottom of the box or go back to the small thumbnail and double-click that (and it feels weird, after using the preview pane to make changes to the color scheme, to go back and double-click the small thumbnail still showing the original set of colors and fonts). The natural thing would be to double-click the big preview, now that you've made changes to it, but that doesn't work.

They Just Don't Get It award: floppy disk used as a symbol for "Save."


Here's part of Word 2011's Toolbar. Circled is the icon for "Save." I wonder whether anyone using Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac uses floppy disks anymore. Actually, I know they don't, because Microsoft Office 2011 requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later, and no version of Mac OS X supports floppy drives. Apple last sold a Mac with a floppy disk drive in 1998. Before that, the floppy disk icon had some meaning (but not a lot-- we had hard drives for saving stuff, so the floppy was a lousy symbol for "Save" even before 1998), but it has zero now. All it does is make Microsoft look silly and careless and out of touch.

I could go on (and on). There are so many omissions and weird design choices and carryover dumbness from previous versions (my favorite: the character count that shows how many characters there are in your Word document, but adds "an approximate value") that I could be writing for a month. I think though that the point's been made: Microsoft Office 2011 is not very good, and I do not advise buying it except in special cases. You can contact me to see if I think you're a special case.

If you want a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation package that works the way you'd expect it to, with the ability to open and save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, get Apple's iWork '09. It costs a lot less, does a lot more, and is a million times nicer to use. Click here to get a 30-day demo for free.

If your Mac seems a little slower than it used to be it might be in need of a tuneup. Here's the procedure we run for the Macs we're responsible for. Done once a month, this routine will help your Mac to run its best.

It's a three-step program.

Step 1: Run Cocktail

Cocktail does a lot of important stuff that has techie-sounding names, such as "repair permissions", "clear caches", "clear logs", and "perform Unix "cron" scripts." Fortunately, Cocktail knows what all of this stuff is, even if you don't, and it knows how to do it right. My advice: download Cocktail, choose the "Pilot" option (right-most button in the Cocktail toolbar), make it look like the figure below, and then click "Run." Might take a few minutes but it's totally unattended. Let it do its thing, including the restart, and all will be well. HINT: restart your Mac BEFORE you run Cocktail, because it will run better if there aren't other programs in the way.

You can run Cocktail a few times without paying for it but eventually you will want to register it. $14.95 for one computer, $29.95 for five. There are other ways to perform Cocktail's tasks but none that is as easy. NOTE: there's a "Scheduler" button up at the top of the window. Click it and you can set Cocktail to run on a repeating schedule. You won't make things worse by running Cocktail more often, so if you feel like having it run every Monday morning at 4:15 AM go right ahead. That happens to be the way it's set up here and look how I've turned out.

Bonus: the makers of Cocktail provide a free iPhone app with lots of maintenance hints and tips. Worth a look.

Step 2: Run Software Update (repeat until there are no more updates). Restart when they tell you to.

Generally speaking the Software Updates are good things. Sometimes, rarely, a software update will have unintended consequences. For example, a recent software update caused problems for people who emailed PDFs via automatic means, from FileMaker, AppleScript, or Automator. The problem was fixed in a subsequent update but the weeks in between were rough. If you're not sure, ask someone (me).

Step 3: Update your Microsoft stuff (if you have any)
Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage or Outlook) has an automated software update system that is supposed to keep those programs up to date. Apple's won't do it, so you have to use Microsoft's. Look under the Help menu in any version of Microsoft Word (or Excel, or PowerPoint, or Entourage, or Outlook) for "Check for Updates." The Microsoft AutoUpdate program will launch and tell you whether there is anything for you or not.

After you get one update you may "qualify" for another. Keep trying until there are no more updates. NOTE: after you choose "Check for Updates" you should quit Word (and Excel and PowerPoint and Entourage/Outlook). The updates cannot install when these Microsoft programs are running. I agree, it's kind of goofy to complain about the programs being open when that's how we got to the updates in the first place-- fodder for another article.

And that's it! It takes a little time, but when done monthly it should be less than half an hour from start to finish, counting the restarts.

NOTE: our Managed Service Plans include monthly maintenance at no charge for up to two machines, and at a reduced charge for others. I do the work personally, over the internet. You ought to look into this-- it's a time-saving, money-saving program and it's all in your favor. Click here to learn more.

Printing mailing labels is easy, especially if you're using Apple's Address Book. There are plenty of reasons to like the Address Book but the mailing list printing is one of my favorites. Here are some tips for printing beautiful labels with minimal work.

BONUS: a lot of this applies to printing envelopes, so even if you're not a Mailing Label guy there's a lot of good stuff in here for you too. Yes, you could stand at the printer and feed envelopes one at a time for your entire Christmas card list, for example.

Here we go.

Step 1: Get your list together. You'll almost certainly want to print labels for a group of people, not for just one and not for all of them. So, it's time to make a Group. Here's a picture.
One way to make a group is to click where the blue arrow is pointing. That gives you an empty untitled group, so you rename it (easy) and then you click on "All Contacts" and one-by-one drag cards into your group. That second part is not so easy-- it's a lot of dragging. Far easier: start in the "All Contacts" group, then click on ONE person that will be part of your group. Then, hold the Command key, and click on the rest of the people who belong in the group. Then, go to the File menu, and choose "New Group from Selection." It does exactly what the name suggests. Rename the group (double-click on its name) and you are ready for Step 2.

Step 2: Be sure that the addresses in your group are labeled properly. The Home address should have a "Home" label next to it, for example. If the label is wrong click the Edit button and fix it. You'll be glad of this later.

Step 3: Click on the name of the group, then go to File and Print. It is very important that you click on the name of the group. Otherwise, when you go to print, you won't be able to print labels for the whole group. Everyone forgets to do it once in a while, even when he knows better.

The Print box looks something like this. First, be sure the Style pop-up (middle right) is set to "Mailing Labels." Next click the "Layout" button just below that. That's where you get to choose the the type of label you'll be using. BIG HINT: use an Avery brand label. The Address Book is ready for any of more than 100 Avery sizes. Here, I'm using Avery 5161 (2 across, ten down-- a little more than a penny apiece).


Step 4: Now click on the Label button.

This is where you get to specify what gets printed. Notice the "Addresses" menu. By default, it says "All." You might think that means "Print a label for all of the people in the list." What it really means is "Print a label for every address in the list." So, if a person has a home and a work address, you'll get two for that person. Unless the people in your group have only one address each the "All" option is not what you want.

When you click on the "All" pop-up you see something like this (I say "something" because you probably don't have a Texas category, nor a "Primary Mailing" category-- those are custom, beyond the scope of this article). The way this list works is, if you choose "home", you print only the Home addresses. If you choose "work" you only print the Work addresses.

The wild card is the "Distribution List" option. This can be a handy thing but no one knows how it works. It's worth finding out so read on!

A Distribution List lets you print a Work address for some of the people, and a Home address for others, and an "Other" address for still others, all in one group, all in one shot. It is a lot better than intentionally mis-labeling someone's Work address as "home" just because the rest of the addresses in the group are Home addresses. So, cancel out of the Print box and choose Edit Distribution List from the Edit menu. Here's how it looks.

The problem with this box is we're interested in mailing addresses, and they're showing us email addresses instead. That's OK. Just click and change it to Address.

Now you have a box like this.


All you do is click on the address you want to print, when you print this particular contact in this particular group. The address turns bold to indicate you've chosen it (see above). You can manage ALL of the Distribution Lists right here in one box-- just click on a group, and then work your way down the list of addresses at the right, clicking once on the address you want to use for each person. Important Note: it is perfectly OK to choose to print Joe Smith's home address when you're printing from a Friends group, and to print Joe Smith's work address when you're printing from your Prospects group. Apple's Address Book lets you use a different address for each person on a group-by-group basis. The Address Book remembers what you've chosen for each group so you don't have to do the work twice.

In practice it is pretty hard to remember which address you've chosen for each person in each group, so you may go back to this Distribution List box a lot. Once you get it right, you can choose that "Distribution List" option in the Print box, to great advantage. Without the Distribution List there's no way to print some home addresses and some work addresses and some "other" addresses from the same group, all in one shot. So get to know the Distribution List and save yourself a ton of time and trouble.

There's a lot to the Address Book but none of it is very hard. There's just a lot. Take it step by step and you'll be fine. In case you're wondering, this is about ten zillion times easier than doing it in Word with one of their templates. Don't even bother.

Everyone knows how to print... it's just File/Print, or Command-P for the keyboard people. What else is there to know? Plenty. Here are some tips that will have you printing faster/better/more efficiently than ever before.

Tip Number One: Expand the Print dialog box.
When you bring up the Print dialog box, it might be kind of small, like this:



If you like 'em small, this box will work just fine... but if you want access to bunch of handy features, click that downward-pointing triangle in the blue square, up at the top of the box. When you do that, you get an expanded box. Just look at all of those options (see below).


Ah, that's better. You get a nice preview (now we know it's going to take 24 pages to print), and you get to specify how many copies, and which pages, and a whole lot more. Use the little arrows under the preview thumbnail to see what's one each page-- maybe you don't need to print everything after all.

Tip Number Two: Explore the Layout options.
In the expanded dialog box above, I'm printing from Safari. (One of the clues is the pop-up menu that says "Safari" on it.) If you click on the pop-up menu that says "Safari" you will see some other choices (see below). Choose Layout and you'll see things change up a bit.


After choosing Layout, here I've chosen to print two "pages" on each sheet of paper. All of a sudden my 24-page print job is going to take only 12 sheets. All I did is choose 2 from the "Pages per Sheet" menu (could have been 4, 6, 9, or 16 if I wanted it to be) and then choose an option from the Border menu. See below.

Pretty neat. One of these days this is going to help you.

Tip Number Three: Print your pictures using Preview
I hope that you're using Preview to open JPEGs and PDFs and other graphic formats. I could write a nice blog entry showing why Preview is so much better than Acrobat Reader, or I could just tell you it's better and hope you'll take my word for it. When it comes to printing, nothing has a better combination of features and ease of use than Preview-- certainly not Acrobat.

Here's a picture, opened in Preview, and we're ready to print.

This looks a lot like the Safari Print dialog but there are plenty of differences. Most important is the "Scale to Fit" button. You can see, in the box next to "Scale", that Preview had to scale the image to 70% to fit it onto the paper. Nicely, conveniently, this is what Preview does, by default. Very nice of them.

The Auto Rotate checkbox is almost always a good thing to have checked, so leave it checked.

Now, let's look at the bottom of the box, where it says "Images per page." Let's say that you want to make multiple copies of the picture-- smaller ones that you can give away. Choose a number other than 1 in the Images per page pop-up menu, and check the box next to "Print n copies per page." ("n" will be the number you chose in the Images per page pop-up menu.) You'll see what you're going to get in the thumbnail preview. Notice that "Auto Rotate" did its thing here, rotating the image so it fits better on the page.

You can't do it any easier than that.

Pretty neat, eh?

Apple introduced a new MacBook Air portable computer today-- actually, two of them. One has a 13-inch screen and the other an 11-incher. They replace the existing MacBook Air and offer several improvements over the older model, including longer battery life, better screens, instant on, and a great big multi-touch trackpad. The biggest difference under the hood is the use of a "Flash" drive rather than a traditional spinning mechanical hard disk. For all practical purposes the MacBook Air's new Flash drive is just like a digital camera card-- small, flat, no noise, no moving parts, all electronic, low power demands. You can get as much as 256 Gigabytes of storage space when you buy the MacBook Air and if I were buying one, that's what I would do. There's a 128 GB version, and a 64 GB version (for the 11-inch model only) but I'd go with 256. I wouldn't be mad at you if you got the 128, but I would not recommend the 64 GB model because I think you need more space than that.

You will enjoy this little video, courtesy of Apple, talking about the new MacBook Air and how it came to be.

Here are some things to watch and listen for as you watch the video.

1. Isn't it ironic that Apple has based this machine on Flash technology, when it was only a few months ago that Steve Jobs was telling us how miserable Flash is and that he wants nothing to do with it? Actually, maybe it's not ironic. It turns out that "Flash" is the name of two totally different things. The Flash that Steve doesn't like is resource-hogging software from Adobe, used in web page design. The Flash that Steve does like is a little storage device on a chip, like a camera card. Totally different things, with the same name. What a drag.
2. They refer to the camera as a "FaceTime" camera. Yesterday, we called it the iSight camera. Bye-bye, iSight. Hello, FaceTime. I'd expect to see more and more FaceTime stuff as time goes by-- including, I predict, coming soon to an iPad near you.
3. Does every interview with Jonathan Ive have him facing the same direction, slightly off-screen? So far, yes.
4. Bonus: Jonathan Ive says "Aluminium" as only he can say it, at the 2:27 point. Listen for it.

All four models are available for ordering from Apple's website today. Here's the link. By the way, you'll get the new iLife '11 package pre-installed, for free.

Update: two more things about the new MacBook Airs. First, they are fast-- about as fast as the "regular" MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Second, they are thin. Very thin. If they were any thinner they would only have one side! Heh heh. Extra credit for those who laugh at my joke.

Ever make a typo in someone's email address, and from then on Mail keeps using that mis-typed address? Or, ever have a friend change email addresses, and every time you try to email him Mail remembers the old address instead? What an irritation. Most people just live with it, but some people complain, and thanks to them we have this here blog entry that tells you how to Fix This Problem.

Step 1: in Mail, go to the Window menu and select "Previous Recipients."



You'll get a window like this one, but less blurry:

That's a list of everyone you've sent emails to. Find the ones that are wrong, click on them, and use the "Remove From List" button to get rid of them. Problem solved.

Microsoft Entourage users: I haven't forgotten you. You can indeed clear out an address from Entourage's "Recently Emailed" list-- but it's an all-or-nothing affair. Apple's Mail is better because it lets you pick and choose.

Here's what it looks like in Entourage. Get there by going to the Entourage menu and choosing Preferences.

Of course you won't see the helpful red box, but you'll figure it out once you're there.

Maybe I should have known this one and maybe everyone else already does. I guess we'll find out.

When you make an event in iCal it is assigned a "calendar" (category). The one that's assigned is the one that's selected in the list at iCal's left. Often, it's not the one you want. Here's how to change it quickly.

This is my list of iCal calendars, and I've selected "CB & A." If I make a new event it will belong to the CB & A calendar.

If I want to change it to "cb Personal" it used to take a bit of work:

1. Double-click the event
2. Click the Edit button
3. Choose a Calendar by clicking on the name of the calendar you assigned to begin with and then choosing another
4. Click the Done button.

That's too much work. My new method is a whole lot faster and easier. All it takes is a Control-click on your event, in any view (day, week, or month) and a contextual menu appears, with a "Calendar" item in it. Choose a calendar by sliding down to Calendar and then over to the calendar you want. Using this Control-click method you can assign a calendar to an event in one click.

Did you already know that?

I think you're going to like this one. Actually, I think you are going to hit yourself on the forehead and say "I can't believe it!" On to today's tip, for Apple Mail users.

When you're using Mail to read email your window looks something like this (but, hopefully, not as blurry):

Direct your attention to the area within the red rectangle in Picture 2:

See those little arrows next to some of the messages? They mean something. The curvy one means you replied to that message. The straight one means you forwarded the message. Ah, but that's not the tip. The tip is, if you click on a curvy arrow, it shows you your reply! If you click on a straight arrow it shows you your forwarded message. This can save you all kinds of time-- rather than searching through your Sent mail to find the reply you sent, you simply click the curvy arrow and voila, there it is.

Yes, it's been there all along, and yes, I'm sorry I didn't mention it earlier. I meant to.

Entourage users: you can click the link that says "Show Reply." Look for it.

Back in July I wrote about how cool it is to have icons in the Toolbar at the top of Finder windows, making it quick and easy for you to drag and drop without going all the way to the Dock. Today I discovered a groovy time-saving shortcut that makes putting those icons into your Finder's Toolbar super fast and easy.

This only works with icons that are already in the Dock, because that's where we are going to drag them from. First thing to do is be careful: make the wrong move and you will drag icons OUT of the Dock rather than dragging COPIES to the Finder windows. Nothing to worry about, just follow directions, which amount to a single step! Here it is:

Step One: HOLD THE COMMAND KEY while dragging an icon from the Dock to the top of a Finder window (the Toolbar). Which one is the Command key? It's the one that isn't Control, and isn't Option. It's the one with either an Apple, or a clover thingy, or both on it. It might even say "Command" right on it! Whichever, it's right next to the Space bar. Anyhow, if you hold the Command key down, and then you click and drag an icon from the Dock to a Finder window's Toolbar, you'll end up with the same icon in both places. Neat. You'll see a little green circle with a white "+" in it while you drag, if you're doing it right. If you don't see the little green circle with the white "+" in it you will tear the icon right out of the Dock, accompanied by a puff of smoke and a little "poof" noise. If you don't see the little green circle with the white "+" in it just drag the icon back to the Dock.

VISUAL AIDS:
Command Key (no it will not be outlined in blue on your keyboard):


Little green circle with a white "+" in it:

Puff of smoke (you don't want this):

Seems as though the icons in my menubar are multiplying. I know what they are but I don't remember putting them there. (In fact, I didn't put them there-- most were placed there automatically, during the initial installation of various programs.) Regardless of how they got there, now I want to rearrange them.

But how? You can't just click on them and drag them around... can you?

It turns out that you can. But you have to hold the Command key down while you do it.

Using the Command key trick I was able to rearrange the icons in my menubar in just a few seconds.

I started with this:


And I ended up with this:


Not a gigantic improvement but I like it. And it's so easy.

Caution: if you hold the Command key down and click on an icon in the menubar you should be careful NOT to drag the icon down, away from the menubar. If you do drag it down, don't let go-- unless you want to remove that icon from the menubar. There is always a way to get the icon back if you do remove it but it's easier to just be careful.

In case you're wondering: no, you can't rearrange the menus themselves. That is, you can't put Edit before File, and Help before that. I know you'll try but I'm telling you it won't work.

Note: not every icon is movable using the Command key technique. Here, I'm not able to move Evernote's elephant icon, and I'm also not able to move LogMeIn's gray circle with dots. Most of the other icons will be draggable-- expect it to work and be surprised when it doesn't.

Even in this email age we often want to print an envelope. Apple's Address Book can do it but it's complicated, and you don't have a lot of artistic control. Here's the Print dialog that Address Book makes you wade through-- all together now, YUCK.
I decided to use Pages, part of Apple's very excellent iWork '09 package, to make myself an envelope template that I really liked, as shown below.

(Here's your mini "how to make a template in Pages" lesson: create a document-- I started with one of Apple's supplied envelope templates-- and make it just the way you want it. Put something generic in for the name and address as I did. Then go to the File menu and Save as Template. Give it a good name and from then on you can create an envelope in Pages by using the Template Chooser.)

I named my envelope template "CB&A Envelopes" but you can call yours anything you like. Do pay attention to the name; you will need it in the next step.

You're halfway there. Now we have to make a little AppleScript to tell Pages to make an envelope from the template, and then to replace Name, Address, CityStateZip with the address we clicked on in the Address Book. It sounds hard but it won't be for you, since I've written the whole thing for you. Here it is.

--Put this file into your "Address Book Plug-Ins" folder, which lives inside your "Library" folder,
--which lives inside your hard drive. Remember to change "CB&A Envelopes" to the name of your
--envelope template, made using Pages.
--
using terms from application "Address Book"
on action property
return "address"
end action property
--
on should enable action for theperson with theEntry
if theEntry ≠ missing value then
return true
else
return false
end if
end should enable action

on action title for theperson with theEntry
-- the string in the next line will appear when you click on an address' label in the Apple Address Book.
return "Make Envelope"
end action title

on perform action for theperson with theEntry
set theAddress to formatted address of theEntry
set theAddress to name of theperson & return & theAddress
--
tell application "Pages"
activate
--You have to specify a template. Best to make your own. Mine is called "CB&A Envelopes"
set mydoc to make new document with properties {template name:"CB&A Envelopes"}
tell mydoc
set every paragraph to ""
set paragraph 1 to theAddress
end tell
end tell
end perform action
end using terms from

You can copy and paste what I have here into a new AppleScript Editor document (but remember to change "CB&A Envelopes" to your own template's name), or click here to download the file from me. Either way you still have to specify the name of your envelope template. If you can't find the AppleScript Editor look in your Utilities folder. If you still can't find it, look in your Applications folder for "Script Editor." Same thing, or close enough.

After placing the script into the proper location (Address Book Plug-Ins folder) launch Address Book and click on the label next to an address. The label is the part that says "Home" or "Work" etc. You should see a menu that looks a lot like this one:

Choose "Make Envelope" and what SHOULD happen is Pages comes to the front, an envelope is created based on your template, and the address you chose is filled in nice as pie.

This sounds like a lot of work but it's not. I've written the script for you, and that was the hard part. All you have to do is make an envelope template, make one tiny modification to the script, and save the modified script in the right folder. Do that once and you'll be able to produce envelopes any time you want-- with only a single click. You can email me if you need help making this work.

If you need a copy of Pages you can get it in the iWork '09 package, available at Amazon.com. Click here to get it.

Note: your envelope template, and the script, can be copied to any number of machines, ensuring that your entire staff can make the same great envelopes every single time, all with a single click. Note also that my template includes my logo, meaning I don't have to pay anyone to print envelopes for me 500 at a time. Very nice.

Note: this is a repeat of a blog entry from last year, with updated data for 2010. Preseason games are not included.

I wanted an iCal calendar of the prime-time NFL games (Monday Night Football, the Sunday night game, the occasional Thursday night game) but I couldn't find one online. I did find the entire NFL schedule, but that was way more than I wanted. Solution: I imported the entire NFL schedule, then wrote an AppleScript to remove every game whose starting time was before 4 PM. Simple. Here's the script, for educational purposes...

-- By Christian Boyce, macman@christianboyce.com

tell application "iCal"
set the_games to every event in calendar "NFL"
repeat with i from 1 to (count of the_games)
set the_start_date to start date of item i of the_games
set the_day to word 1 of (the_start_date as string)
set the_hour to character 1 of time string of the_start_date as string
--
if the_hour is not greater than 3 then
set the_event_id to uid of item i of the_games
delete event id the_event_id of calendar "NFL"
end if
--
end repeat
end tell

and here's the NFL Prime Time calendar, ready for you to click on and import.

Note: you will get the chance to put this calendar's events into one of your existing iCal calendars. That's probably not a good idea. Choose the "New Calendar" option when asked and I think you'll be happier.

Thanks to http://www.southendzone.com/ for the entire NFL schedule in iCal form.

Like the calendar? Did it help you? Leave a comment and let us know.
You can support the Boyce Blog by using the box below when you want to buy something from Amazon as that generates a referral fee for the Blog. Thank you very much.

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and a referral fee for The Boyce Blog.
That's what keeps The Boyce Blog going.
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RadioShack wants your old stuff. And they'll pay for it.

Start by clicking this link to the RadioShack Trade & Save program. Once you're there, you tell them what sort of stuff you're looking to get rid of. Here are the choices.



Suppose you have an iPhone 3G, and you're moving up to an iPhone 4 (which you can buy at RadioShack). You click on the Phones button, then choose Apple from the several manufacturers listed, then indicate which model iPhone you have. Click a few buttons to show what kind of condition your iPhone is in, click the "Calculate" button, and just like that they tell you what they'll give you for your phone. Neat. Looks like this:

Your next move is to send your stuff to RadioShack, which you do with a pre-paid shipping label that RadioShack will generate for you. When RadioShack gets your item(s) they'll look them over to be sure they're what you said they were, and then they'll send you a RadioShack gift card loaded up with money.

Of course, you may want to do this at a RadioShack store, and you can, as long as the thing you're trading in is relatively small. Here's the list of things you can bring to a RadioShack store:

• wireless phones
• GPS receivers
• digital cameras
• digital camcorders
• video games
• mp3 players

Everything else has to be done online, and then mailed in, but that's not much of a hardship. Still, I think I'd rather get my gift card on the spot instead of waiting for it to arrive in the mail, so where that's possible that's what I'll do.

Note: there is a slight possibility that you will not become rich by sending your old electronics to RadioShack. Some stuff, such as my 17-inch Apple Studio Display which cost $699 new, fetches an almost insultingly low price-- in the case of my monitor, $7.20. (I have to wonder about the 20 cents there-- I would have figured $7.35, easy.) Still, something is better than nothing, and since RadioShack is going to turn right around and sell your old stuff to someone else, your perfectly-good-but-not-the-latest-model electronic gizmo will get a new life with a new owner, and that's worth something too. Considering that I thought I'd have to tape ten dollars to some of my old stuff just to give it away this RadioShack program sounds like the best thing ever.

Now all I need to do is figure out what to do with the $7.20.

Pretty good motto.

Apple's iTunes university offers more than 250,000 free lectures, videos, films, and other materials-- from universities, museums and art institutions, and libraries all over the world. You'll find courses from Stanford, Michigan, and Cal (and from roughly 300 others-- click this link for a current list); lectures about past and current exhibits from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art), and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (and many, many more); and discussions and insights from The New York Public Library, The Royal Opera House in London, and the Carnegie Institution for Science among many, many others. And it's free. Unbelievable.
Did I mention that it's all free?

Some of the offerings on iTunes U are audio, some of them have video too. I'm currently watching a set of lectures on iPhone programming, recordings of classes given at Stanford University. It's just like being there, except that I don't have to do it at Stanford and I don't have to do it at any particular time. And, if I feel like taking a coffee break I can simply pause the lecture, and if I fall asleep in class I can rewind the lecture and watch it "again."

You want this. Trust me. Start up iTunes, click on "iTunes Store" at the left, and then "iTunes U" at the right. The rest is pure exploration.

Here are some screen shots to get you in the mood.

iTunes U categories

The class I'm "taking" at Stanford

Still from a Stanford lecture

Interesting-looking class-- I should take this one

Still frame from "Introduction to Drawing" class-- I should take this one too

Offerings from UC Davis

Interesting mini-series from UC Davis

From the University of Michigan

Whatever he's teaching, I'm going to watch

Find something interesting, give it a double-click, and watch it right there on your Mac. Or, download these things onto your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch and watch them on the go. Either way, it's all free free free, so get in there and start clicking. I guarantee you'll find something interesting.

I still can't believe it's free.

So much of what we do with files starts with a drag and a drop. You might drag an image to Mail in order to send it to someone, or to iPhoto to add it to the iPhoto Library. You might drag an image to Photoshop in order to open it for editing. All of these things are easy to do (and much more efficient than going to a program, then going to File and then Open... and then hunting around trying to find your file in the resulting "Open..." dialog box. They're even easier to do when you don't have to drag your files all the way to the Dock, taking up time and introducing the potential for accidentally "dropping" the thing you're dragging, and losing it "somewhere" on your Desktop.

Here's how you do it.

Our first picture shows a typical Finder window, with some images in it.

Realizing that it's a long way to drag one of these icons to the Dock in order to open with (let's say) Pixelmator, we look for a shortcut-- and we find one, by dragging the Pixelmator icon right up into the toolbar across the top of the Finder window! Here's what it looks like (marked with a red circle to make things clearer here). I'll tell you more about how to do it in a minute.

Now, if I want to open one of those pictures using Pixelmator, I just drag it up a couple of inches (or less) to the Pixelmator icon, wait for it to highlight, then let go.

Here's an example with a whole bunch of program icons in the toolbar. With these, I can drag a file to open it in Pixelmator, open it in Preview, send it in a Mail message, add it to Evernote, or add it to the iPhoto Library. Nice.

Of course, you have to get those icons up there into the Toolbar, but it turns out to be very easy. Just go to the Applications folder, find an app that you want to have easy access to, and drag it to the toolbar. Hold it for just a second or two and it should work. Note that EVERY Finder window will have the same complement of icons in the toolbar, which makes it easy (add program icons to ANY Finder window's toolbar at it will be available in EVERY Finder window).

If you change your mind and want to rearrange the icons hold the Command key (not Control, Command) and either move the icon or tear it off and let go outside the window. Poof. Note that you are NOT throwing away the program. You're just removing a shortcut from the toolbar. And it's perfectly OK to have the same program in the Dock and in the Finder window's toolbar. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Bonus: if all you want to do is launch a program you can click its icon in the toolbar. It's like having a second Dock, except somehow it's always closer to where your cursor is. I use this all the time and I'll bet you will too.

MacWorld Expo 2011 is six months away, but if you plan ahead a little you can save major buckos on admission. In fact, if you use this link before the end of the day on July 26th, you can get in for free. San Francisco in January isn't exactly balmy but who cares, it's SAN FRANCISCO, and it's MacWorld-- the biggest Mac (and iPhone, and iPad) love-fest on Planet Earth. You are likely to have a great time. Mark your calendar.

Note: they've changed the dates. The conference part of MacWorld Expo starts January 26th and the exhibits part (the part you can get into for free via this link) starts on January 27th.

As we've seen before, sometimes it's not the Mac that's slow. Sometimes it's the user. Even if you're fast you can get a little faster still. Here's another hint that will save you time, day after day after day. It's all about checking boxes. Read on.

The typical Print... dialog box looks something like this:


See those checkboxes at the bottom? I've marked them with red. Let's say you want to check them. Do you carefully position the pointer inside those little square checkboxes? Well, you could, and it would work-- but that isn't something you can do in a hurry (especially if you're using a trackpad instead of a mouse). FYI, I NEVER click in the boxes. Too much trouble.

It turns out that you can click anywhere in the words beside the checkboxes (shown in purple in the picture below).

That's a much bigger target-- more than ten times as big! It's easier to hit a big target, and easier means faster. This works (or it should work) for ANY checkbox (and for radio buttons too), in any program. Give it a try and save a few seconds multiple times a day. It doesn't sound like much but it all adds up.

Bonus: if your Print... dialogs aren't nice and big like the ones shown here you need to click the little black triangle in the blue square, shown below and marked in purple. There is a shortcut for clicking that triangle, but since you only need to do it once per program (and since it's a multi-step shortcut) I'd just click the thing and be done with it.

Everyone wants a faster Mac. It's a lot easier-- and cheaper-- to make yourself faster at using the Mac you have. Here's a great way to do it. First in a series.

Ever seen one of these? It's a Print dialog box with a couple of pop-up menus. If you want to make changes to the print settings you have to click the little up-down arrows in the blue area.

The problem with those little up-down arrows is they're LITTLE. So you have to be rather precise with the mouse, and that takes time, and it's the same with every pop-up menu, in every program, all day long. Except it's not.

Turns out that you can click ANYWHERE on the pop-up menu. Anywhere! Here's a picture showing you (in blue) where you can click-- that's a much bigger target, and much easier to hit. Knowing this, you don't have to be so precise anymore, and that'll save you time.


Here are some more examples. Which would you rather click on-- the big area in blue, or the tiny area in red? Go for the blue. Make it easy on yourself.

Here's the Appearance preference pane.

Here's a slight variation: an iCal event entry panel. Still, it works the same way. Click in the blue area.

So there you have it. With a larger target it's easier to put the mouse in the right place. Assuming you save two seconds per menu, and also assuming you deal with 37.4 pop-up menus per day (a number I just made up-- I mean, the national average), you'll save more than 5 hours in a year using this "aim for the larger target" method. That would let you spend more time ordering stuff through my Amazon link or baking cookies for sending to your favorite Mac guy.

By the way, this is my 200th post to this blog. How about that.

In the "better late than never" category, here's a calendar for your iCal with the time and date of every World Cup match.

Click here to get the calendar.

All you do is click on it. iCal will add it automatically. I would set it to refresh once per day-- not so important now, but when we get to the knockout round it will be nice to have the country names rather than "1st place Group C vs. 2nd Place Group D." You can turn it off with a simple uncheck-of-the-box later, or even delete it. So you're not stuck with this calendar for life.

Apple's Mail program gives you several ways to send digital photos via email. There's the hard way (make a new email message, then click the paperclip icon, then hunt around for your picture, then give up); the less-hard way (switch to iPhoto, find your picture, select it, and click the Mail icon), the easy way (drag a photo to the Mail icon in the Dock), and the super-easy way: use Mail's built-in Photo Browser.

Here's a picture of a new message's toolbar, with the Photo Browser button circled:


When you click that button you get a palette like this one:

Everything in iPhoto shows up in this palette. So does everything in Photo Booth. You can choose an album, like so:

You can double-click a picture to see it larger, you can search for a picture using the search box at the bottom, you can control-click on a picture to change the view to "View as List." Here's what that looks like-- could be handy someday.

I like the Icon View but it's nice to know the List view is available.

Once you've found the picture you want you simply drag it into the Mail message, exactly where you want it to be. For example:

That was easy... but there's one more thing. Look at the bottom right of the message window. There's a little menu, called "Image Size." Here's a better view.


You can click on it and change the size of the image. As you choose different options the message size (shown at the bottom left) adjusts instantly. Pretty neat stuff, really.

So... next time you're in Mail, and you want to attach a photo, click the Photo Browser button. It makes sending photos unbelievably easy.

Bonus Tip: look for a Photo Browser (sometimes called a Media Browser) in other applications too. You'll find one in Pages, Keynote, Numbers, RapidWeaver, iMovie, iDVD, Pixelmator, and probably a lot more, but (notably) not anything from Microsoft or Adobe.

(Note: last week one of my customers-- Tom Nevermann, AKA "The Moving Doctor"-- asked me to help him find a good deal on USB-powered speakers for his Mac. I took him to www.dealnews.com and set up an email alert for him, and now every time a good deal on USB-powered speakers comes along, Tom gets notified by email. That experience inspired me to write this blog entry as I know DealNews can save you some money too.)

I get a lot of questions that start with "Where's the best place to buy..."? Generally speaking I refer the asker to DealNews, the best website for finding great deals on tech stuff like Macs, software, printers, and networking equipment-- and a whole lot more. Here's a picture of the DealNews site, with their categories across the top. I never use the categories-- I just leave it on "Everything"-- but the categories give you an idea of the kinds of things that DealNews tracks.

Here's that same page, scrolled down a bit so you can see the deals (the top of the site isn't where the action is):

DealNews doesn't sell anything (except for advertising space). Their business revolves around getting people to come to the site, which they do by scouring the web for great deals and presenting the deals in an easy-to-navigate webpage. They don't care which store offers the deal- it might be Sears, it might be Buy.com, it might be Dunkin' Donuts. Doesn't matter to DealNews (although, if the store gets complaints, DealNews will quit showing their deals).

The more people come to DealNews the more they can charge for their advertisements, so DealNews does what they can to make you want to come back. One way they do it is by updating constantly, and that's a good reason for YOU to sort the deals in chronological order (look for a "sort by" pop-up toward the right), and also a good reason for you to check in on the site more than once a day. Deals don't last forever and sometimes they don't even last an hour. Keep that in mind when you find something you like on the site-- my advice is "buy it right now."

You can search DealNews (see the box at the top right). That's a good start, but a lot of the time the stuff you'll find has already expired. That's a drag, but DealNews has a "Get Deals via Email" feature (right above the search box) and with email alerts you'll know about deals as quickly as they're put on the site. You do have to sign up, but it's free, and they promise not to sell your email address or use it for anything else, so I think you can go ahead with this.

Setting up a DealNews email alert is easy-- you pick a store, or a product, or a category (or some combination), and DealNews will send you an email when something that matches comes along. You can set up as many alerts as you'd like, and with Christmas coming up (only 7 months away) you can sit back and cherry-pick the very best deals and save a bunch of money on your presents. I already have three presents stashed away in my secret present place, all purchased via a DealNews email alert.

Note to Suspicious Minds: you may be thinking "I'll bet they just post the deals of the people who pay the most! That's how they make their money!" Well, that might be true, but their Editorial Guarantee says they will never do that. I think they're telling the truth. If they took payola we'd find out soon enough, and when that happened we'd all go somewhere else for deals. They know that. It's in their best interests long-term to be honest, and that's what I think they are.

Of course they do take ads-- that's how they make their money-- but the ads are clearly labeled and they're not mixed in with the rest of the deals.

I check DealNews at least once a day. Recent deals that I've taken advantage of include free ice cream at Ben and Jerry's, 10-foot USB cables for $1.97 shipped, and a 42-inch 120 Hz Philips LCD TV (not for me, for a friend-- and he saved about $300). Go check it out.

In Case You Wondered
No, we do not get anything for recommending DealNews. We do get something for recommending products on Amazon.com, so if you can't find what you want via DealNews please feel free to use the Amazon link at the top of the page here. When you go to Amazon via that link they'll know we sent you, and a tiny referral fee comes our way when you buy something. It comes out of Amazon's pocket, not out of yours, so you have nothing to lose and the great feeling of supporting this blog to gain.

I'll bet you use iPhoto a lot-- not just for storing and organizing your photos, but for editing them too. The usual method of editing starts with you choosing a photo to edit by viewing thumbnails, as shown below.

Then you double-click a thumbnail and get the editing window shown below. The picture you chose is highlighted in the thumbnails across the top of the window, and the image itself is enlarged in the center of the window, ready for you to crop or straighten or whatever. That's not a bad way to do it but it's not the best way.

Next time, try this: hold the Control key and click and hold on a thumbnail. You'll get this nifty "contextual menu" and you can choose "Edit Using Full Screen" from it.

Your picture will zoom to take up the entire screen. Move the mouse to the top of the screen and you'll see thumbnails again-- that makes it easy to choose another picture. Heres' what that looks like.

Move your mouse to the bottom of the screen and you'll see these buttons-- same as in the normal "double-click-to-edit" view, but with two more buttons: Info, and Compare. "Info" is pretty obvious, but Compare is worth a little explanation.

Here's what happens when you click on "Compare"-- it shows you the picture you were editing, AND it shows you the next picture, side-by-side. You can quickly scan through your photos using the left and right arrow keys (that will load the next picture into the frame with the border) and when you find one you like, you can edit using the tools across the bottom.


You can also choose photos to compare by clicking them in the thumbnail bar across the top of the screen. And, if you want to compare more than two, hold the Command key down and click on as many more as you'd like.

Even if you never make use of Info and Compare it's always nicer to work on a larger image. Give the Control-click-Edit-Using-Full-Screen method a try. You're going to like it.

I've thought quite a bit about this Apple, Adobe, and Flash issue. I think it comes down to this: Adobe is saying "Hardware doesn't matter." They have an idea for an app (for a smartphone) or an idea for a desktop application (for a Mac or a PC), and then they try to make it run on all of the machines they can. They don't care which phone you use-- iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, something else-- they just want to get their program to work on it, and if they're able to make it work on your phone, you can be sure that it will look exactly the way it looks on someone else's phone. Even if you have an iPhone with lots of cool hardware features, and the other guy has some other phone that isn't as good. Adobe starts "at the top" with an idea of how they want their app to work. The hardware that it runs on is irrelevant to them.

Same thing with their desktop applications (Photoshop, InDesign, etc.). They have an idea of what their program should be, and then they try to fit it onto Macs and onto PCs. They ignore much of what makes a Mac special, because that's not interesting to them. Adobe's focus is on getting Photoshop to run on as many machines as possible-- and to look exactly the same, whether you're running a Mac or a PC. Again, the hardware doesn't matter to them.

The problem with this, of course, is that some machines are simply better than others. Some phones have accelerometers, and GPS devices, and touch screens. Others don't. Macs have features that PCs don't, notably the Mac OS X operating system and a set of user interface guidelines that make using a Mac a consistent, predicable experience-- unless you're using Adobe applications, with their own Print and Save As and Open dialog boxes, a complete thumbing of the nose to the ones Apple provides for all developers to use.

If you're making smoothies it doesn't really matter if your blender is a Waring or a Hamilton Beach. If you're painting a house you can use a brush from Ace or from Home Depot (but use the one from Home Depot, I have stock). In cases like that, nobody cares about the hardware, because when you get right down to it all blenders blend, and all paint brushes paint, and there's not a lot of difference between them. When you're dealing with phones, and desktop/laptop computers, there IS a lot of difference between the offerings from different companies, and when Adobe ignores those differences, you (the iPhone and Mac owner) end up with the same crummy experience that people with lesser phones and computers get. And it's not very good.

In my opinion, hardware DOES matter. It matters a lot. So does the operating system. Adobe doesn't think so, Apple does, and that's the root of this conflict.

You may have heard that Apple's iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch do not run Flash. Flash is Adobe's plug-in software, used by web designers for animations and video. Apple doesn't like Flash because it's buggy and slow, and-- I suspect-- because it leads to sloppy, cheesy websites with gratuitous rollover action.

Adobe gives away the Flash plug-in-- you probably have it. They sell the tools that developers use to MAKE Flash (you watch it for free, but the people who make it pay to make it). This is a nice business for Adobe, with no real competition. They'd like to keep that going.

Adobe also makes tools that help people make applications for cellular phones-- including, but not restricted to, iPhones. Using Adobe's tools, which they sell, a programmer could write ONE program and have it work on an iPhone, a Blackberry, a Google Droid, etc. That's not possible with any other tool today. You can imagine how appealing this is to a programmer-- write your app once, and sell it to everyone with a smart phone, whether that device is an iPhone or not.

The trouble with Adobe's write once, works everywhere approach is that all smart phones are not created equal. A programmer then has to develop for the least common denominator-- that is, the set of features common to all smart phones. (Example: iPhones have accelerometers built in, so when you rotate the screen your email and your web page etc. can rotate automatically. Other smart phones don't have accelerometers. A programmer writing an app for a wide audience would not include features reliant on accelerometers because those features would only work on the iPhone.) The result is a watered-down, dumbed-down, why-did-I-spend-all-this-money-for-an-iPhone-if-the-apps-don't-take-advantage-of-its-features experience. It was the same way with Java-- you might remember. I remember, and Apple remembers, and Apple's not going to let it happen again.

Apple's recently changed its agreement with iPhone app developers to say, in effect, "use Apple software to create your apps. Otherwise, they won't be approved for sale in the App Store." Pretty compelling argument to the developer! Apple wants to ensure that applications take full advantage of the features they've built into the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPhone OS, and eliminating a middle-man (Adobe) that may not be motivated to do so is a good move in terms of guaranteeing a high-quality experience for users of Apple's devices.

Adobe's come down on Apple, officially and unofficially, saying that not supporting Flash is bad for users, nevermind bad for Adobe, and that forcing app developers to use Apple's tools will lead to stifled creativity etc. This has gone on for a few weeks now, played out on blogs and in interviews, but now Steve Jobs has addressed the issues in a nice long letter. It's interesting reading. Provide the coffee and I'll talk it over with you.

Here's the link to Steve Jobs' letter.

I have to admit, I thought I might not get to Option key Tip Number 10... but here it is!

I'll bet you've chosen "About This Mac" from the Apple menu-- it shows you a box something like this.

Processor, Memory, Startup Disk-- all interesting stuff to know.

The "More Info..." button launches the System Profiler application, an important trouble-shooting tool. But, if you hold the Option key, the first item in the Apple menu changes from "About This Mac" to "System Profiler," saving you a click. It doesn't sound like much but they all add up.

And that's 10.

Our Option key Tip-a-Palooza continues...

Your documents will look better if you use the right characters. For example, mañana looks better than "manana," and resumé looks better than "resume." The Mac's always been able to generate these characters (not true for PCs), so why not learn how and start using the right characters today. Check out the handy table below.

Character	Keystroke(s)
• (bullet)	Option-8
¢	Option-4
ñ	Option-n, then n
é	Option-e, then e
™	Option-2
®	Option-r
º (degree symbol)	Option-0 (that's a zero)

You may be wondering how you'll ever remember these things, but take a look at the keyboard and some of them will become fairly obvious. For example, the cent sign (¢) is on the same key as the dollar sign ($). The bullet (•) is on the same key as the asterisk (*), which some people use for bullets (until they read this blog entry).

OK now-- that's 9.

Ever try to empty the Trash and get a message like this?

Of course you have. Then you click "Empty Trash" (or hit Enter on the keyboard), and then you might get this message too:

(I say "might" because if you're on Mac OS X 10.6 AND you have some locked items in the Trash you will, and if you're using 10.5 or lower you won't.)

Most likely you will click "Remove All Items" and then-- finally-- the trash empties. Yay.

Skip all of this trouble by holding down the Option key when you choose "Empty Trash" from the Finder's "Finder" menu. Then it's a one-stepper. No messages, just a satisfying whooshy-crumpling sound.

Note: when you don't hold the Option key, the Finder's Finder menu looks like this:


Hold the Option key and it looks like this:


A little different, and as it turns out it makes a difference.

You noticed of course that without the Option key, the menu says "Empty Trash…" but with the Option key the ellipsis is gone. The menu now reads simply "Empty Trash" (no dots). Those three little dots in the menus actually mean something, namely that you are going to get a dialog box when you choose that item. Dialog boxes almost always have a "Cancel" button in them, and that gives you a chance to bail out without doing anything. This goes for every menu item with three little dots-- every menu item in every menu in every program. Watch for it and see. Three dots equals "dialog box coming up." Really.

And that's 8.

Ever click a link in Safari, hoping to download a PDF, and instead of downloading it opens up in the browser (or worse, in Acrobat)? That's a drag. Try it fifty times and fifty times it's the same-- you don't get a copy of your own.

Unless, of course, you hold the Option key when you click.

Here's a great example (he said modestly). Suppose you're looking for tax forms on the IRS website.


You find the form you want, and now you want to get a copy and save it to your hard disk. Without the Option key, when you click the Form 1040 link you see the form, but you don't have the form. Here's what it looks like in your browser:


Nice to look at, but it's not "yours." Try it again, but this time hold the Option key when you click the link. Presto!The file is downloaded to your Downloads folder, or to your Desktop, or wherever it is your downloads go. From there it's just another PDF, something you can double-click and open.

BONUS: Actually, you can do more than double-click and open it. You can fill it in! Try clicking on the 1040 form and typing. It works. And since it's "your" copy of the 1040, you can save it for later. Nice.

BONUS 2: If you can't find the file, and you're using Safari, go to the Window menu and choose "Downloads" (if you're using Firefox you'll find Downloads in the Tools menu. It works about the same way.). Safari's Downloads window will look something like this:

Double-click the 1040's icon to open it, or click once on the magnifying glass to reveal it in the Finder. You're on your own from there.

And that's seven.

Another hard drive bit the dust this week. This one was in a three year old MacBook. Fortunately, the machine had been backed up regularly using Time Machine. When the hard drive died we replaced it with a new one, started up from a Snow Leopard DVD, connected the backup drive, and copied everything from the backup to the new drive. It took about an hour to get the old drive out, the new drive in, and to set up the transfer from the backup, and another hour to actually do the transfer (giving us the opportunity to go for pastrami sandwiches). Without the backup we would have had to send the drive out for data recovery, leading to a big bill and several days of being without the machine. With the backup, it was no big deal.

I hope you're getting the message: hard drives eventually wear out. If yours hasn't yet, consider yourself lucky, but get an external disk and back your stuff up anyway. If you have questions about how to do it click this link and read all about it. If you're still stuck send me an email.

All of a sudden, the iTunes App Store has a "wish list" feature. Didn't used to, and it made shopping for apps a little harder than it had to be because you had to write down the names of apps that you thought you might want to go back to. Now (as of a week or so ago) it's all built in. Here's how it works:

1. Start iTunes and go to the "iTunes Store" section
2. Find an app that you want to add to your Wish List"
3. Click the little triangle to the right of "Buy this App" (or on free apps, to the right of "Free App"), revealing a menu
4. Choose "Add to Wish List" as shown in the picture below.

Note: if you add a free app to your Wish List you'll get this message:

They're probably right-- it's free now, but might not be when you decide to buy it. Just download the thing now and decide later whether you want it.

To see the items in your Wish List you go to the far RIGHT side of the iTunes window, click the tiny arrow to the right of your AppleID, and then choose "Wish List." Easy. Here's what it looks like, with the Magic Finger showing you where to click.


When the Wish List comes up it will look something like the picture below. And no, these aren't really things I want. They are just here to help you get the idea. If you really want to buy me something make it something involving coffee, chocolate, and whipped cream.

Neat stuff, and I think I will be using this quite a bit to help me remember various apps that I want to compare. Thanks, Apple. Very nice of you.

The Option Key Tip-a-Palooza continues with one of the handiest tips ever, namely the Option-drag technique. Basically, it comes down to this: when you drag things around they move, right? Right. Except if you hold the Option key! If you hold the Option key when you drag stuff you'll make copies.

Here's an example, using iCal.

Suppose you have an appointment on Tuesday, like so (light week):


Let's say you have such a great time eating ice cream on Tuesday that you want to do it again on Wednesday. If you drag that appointment to Wednesday it moves to Wednesday, and it's gone from Tuesday. Looks like this when you're done.


If what you really wanted to do is eat ice cream on Tuesday AND Wednesday you can do it-- just hold the Option key down while you drag! Here's what it looks like as you do it.



And here's what it looks like when you let go. I'm hungry.


This is much, much easier than entering an event twice. Or even copying and pasting. And it works in a lot more programs than just iCal, including...

The Finder (Option-drag to duplicate a file or folder)
Microsoft Word (highlight some text, Option-drag to insert that text somewhere else)
Microsoft Excel (highlight some cells, Option-drag (grab the EDGE of the selection) to copy those cells elsewhere. Great for headings!)

That's six.

You took this photo...

and now you want to rotate it so the label is readable, right-side up.. If you're using iPhoto, the Rotate Button looks like this:

If you click that button three times the picture rotates, in 90 degree steps, to the proper position. Yay. But, if you press the Option key, the Rotate Button changes to rotate the other way, so you can turn your sausage right-side-up in a single "Option-click."

It doesn't sound like such a big deal to save two clicks, but all those clicks add up. Ask someone with carpal tunnel syndrome.

This "Option-click" technique works in iPhoto, Preview, iWeb, and probably a bunch of others. It is worth experimenting. The nice thing is, the button's picture changes to show it's going to rotate things the other way when you hold Option.

Here's the properly-rotated picture, done with a single Option-click. Tasty stuff.

And that's five.

You probably know that Apple's Address Book lets you create "Groups" of people, and you might also know that a given person can be in multiple groups. For example, you might have a Family group, a Soccer Team group, and a Christmas Card group, and your brother might be in all three of them. That's pretty neat, but unless you have an incredible memory there's no way you're going to remember which groups your brother is in. And there's no indication in the Address Book that a given person is in any group at all, let alone an indication of which one(s).

Unless of course you hold down the Option key. Of course.

In the picture below I've found a person's card, clicked on it in the "Name" column, and then held down the Option key. That produces the yellow highlighting, letting me know in an instant that Mom is in the "Mass email list" group, the "test group" group, and the "California" group. Let's face it, that's pretty cool.


And that's four.

Our Option Key Super-Tip marathon continues with Tip #3.

Here's the situation: you have a mess of Finder windows open, like so--

Now you want to close them. So you either go to the File menu and choose "Close Window" or you click the red button at the top left of the first window... and then you do it again... and again... zzz.

If you really want to close them all hold the Option key when you go to the File menu and you can do it in one shot. See below.

(on the left: the regular File menu. On the right: how it looks when you hold the Option key.)

Bonus: if you hold the Option key and click ANY Finder window's red close button you will close ALL Finder windows. Very nice.
Double Bonus: this Option key technique works isn't specific to the Finder. It also works in Safari, Mail, Microsoft Word (but only if you use the Option-click-the-red-button method-- the Option-click-File/Close method does not work), and Microsoft Excel (same restriction as for Word).

That's three.

If you hold the Option key down before you click on the battery icon (10.6 laptop users only) you will see "Condition: Normal" (I hope) or "Replace Now" or "Replace Soon" or "Service Battery." And, if you actually do choose that "Condition: " menu item you'll get a Help screen that gives you some explanation. Pretty neat.

That's two.

You really ought to get to know the Option key on your keyboard. It helps you do all sorts of neat stuff. I am going to write Option key tips until I can't think of any more, or until enough people ask me to stop. Anyhoo, here's Option Key tip #1.

If you are using Mac OS X 10.6, and you make use of Apple's fabulous "Airport" wireless networking, you can learn a lot of things by holding down the Option key and clicking on the Airport menu. Here's a picture of the Airport menu. It's up by the clock, at the top right of your screen.


(double-size... blurry, but easier to see)

Normally, when you click on the Airport menu it shows you the available networks. With the Option key, and Mac OS X 10.6, you get that, but you also get a lot more. Looky here (Blue Pointing Finger added for emphasis-- you will probably not see a Blue Pointing Finger on your menu):

All of that mumbo-jumbo would help someone (someone like me) figure out why you might be having problems with your internet. Some of the more interesting info:

1. This Mac is connected to the Airport Base Station (or other wireless access point) via 802.11n. It doesn't get better than that. 802.11g is also common, but not as good. If yours shows "n" be happy.
2. The Transmit Rate will either be 130 Mbps (for newer Apple Airports, and other wireless access points with "n") or 54 Mbps (for older Apple Airports, with 802.11g). If it's NOT 130 or 54 you probably have a problem either with your Mac's Airport card or with your Airport Base Station. I saw this just the other day-- a customer's Transmit Rate was bouncing all over the place, between 2 Mbps and 20 Mbps, lousy either way. Another Mac in the same room showed 130. Conclusion: hardware problem with Mac #1, and a trip to the shop to replace the Airport card.

Try holding down the Option key and clicking on YOUR Airport menu. Mom, this won't work for you-- your system is only 10.4. Sorry.

UPDATE: you can get some of this info on 10.5 Macs too. Worth a try.

One of the best features of Mac OS X 10.5 (and 10.6) is Time Machine. It's automatic backup software, built into the system, and it works really well. It's easy to set up, and you can forget all about it after that-- until the day you need it. You'll be very, VERY happy to remember it that day.

Hard drives aren't made to last forever. One of my customers found that out last week, when her iMac's hard drive simply stopped turning. The machine was only two years old! Replacing the hard drive was the easy part-- but, as my customer said, "What about all of my stuff?" Luckily-- or, really, good on us for thinking of this a long time ago-- we'd been backing up the iMac with Time Machine, and we were able to restore all of her stuff to the new drive. Years of email, thousands of photos of grandkids, a big address book, a full calendar-- all restored in a few hours and with minimal fuss. No one likes having her Mac break down but getting everything back feels pretty good.

If your Mac is on 10.5 or higher, and you want to start using Time Machine, you'll need to get a big external hard disk to store the backed-up data. You'll want something much larger than the drive you're backing up, because Time Machine keeps multiple backups of your stuff (multiple versions, from multiple days) and more hard disk space equates to more days of backups. Here's a link to a nice drive from Seagate, makers of the best drives around. This one's 1.5 terabytes, which is about 1500 gigabytes, available from Amazon for about $120.

Here's a picture.

So, you get the drive, you plug it in, you get a message asking whether you want to use the drive with Time Machine, you click the Yes button, and that's it. Easy. Depending on how the disk is formatted you may have to reformat it for use with Time Machine but that's not a hard thing to do. If you need a hand with that I know a guy but I think you can do it yourself.

Apple has a very nice article about Time Machine via this link. Worth a peek.

(Note: besides helping you recover from a major hardware meltdown, Time Machine is also great for when you need to get an older copy of a single file-- maybe the current one's become damaged, maybe someone threw it away, who knows. Time Machine has rescued me more than once, mostly helping me bring back trashed files that I didn't think I'd ever need again. It's quite the little safety net.)

This is Dropbox. You want it. Here's the link. They have a little video there, right on the first page. It's worth watching-- it explains the whole thing. However, if you'd rather have ME explain it for you, read on.

Suppose you have a laptop and a desktop Mac. There is bound to be some item that you would like to have with you on both machines-- maybe it's a book you're working on, maybe it's a folder of website files for your 30th high school reunion, maybe it's a checklist of things you need to do when you go on a trip. In my case, it's all of those things. Problem is, it's practically unmanageable. If I put exact copies of the documents on my two machines, and then I use a document on Machine A, I have to remember to copy it back to Machine B. And I never remember.

This is a job for a computer. And good software. Enter Dropbox.

Dropbox keeps designated folders on my Macs in sync. If I add a document to one of those folders on one of my Macs I know it will show up on the other Mac in an instant. If I make a change in one of the synced documents Dropbox makes sure that those changes make it to my other Macs. I don't have to have all of my machines on at the same time to make this work-- if one is off, Dropbox will notice when I turn the machine on later and will sync things up right away after that.

Dropbox shows up like just another folder, and you can make as many folders as you want inside of it, and name them what you want to name them, just like any other folder, with the exception being that any item in the Dropbox folder will always-- ALWAYS-- be kept in synch on all of my Macs. And, believe it or not, on my iPhone too. (Click here for the iPhone app.)

Did I mention that Dropbox is free for the first 2 gigabytes? Did I mention that it keeps backups of the things you put in it? Did I mention that you can share files with PCs too? I should have. Anyhow, now I have.

I've shown Dropbox to a lot of Mac users and every single one has said "I want that!" Now they have it. And so can you. Go get it.

Radio station KPFK FM 90.7 in Los Angeles had me on their show March 6th, 2010. Here are links to the audio archive: one link for the first half hour, and another link for the second. It's an interesting show so I recommend you listen to both. However, the interview with me is in the second half.

There's a terrific radio program called "Digital Village" on Saturday mornings in Los Angeles. The hosts (Ric Allan and Doran Barons) discuss technology and its impact on communication. It's always interesting. You should check it out.

This Saturday, March 6th, I'll be Digital Village's featured guest. I'll be talking about last month's Macworld Expo, and iPads, and iPhones, and Macs.

The show starts at 10 AM Pacific time. My portion of the program begins at 10:30 AM, roughly speaking.

Three ways to listen:

1. Tune your radio to KPFK, 90.7 FM.
2. Click this link and listen over the internet (or go to http://www.kpfk.org/listen-live.html and try the various options).
3. Wait for the interview to be archived and for me to put up a link to it here.

Depending on how things go there might be time for some phone calls. Here's KPFK's phone number: (818) 985-5735

I don't know much about cars. When the mechanic says "You need a new alternator" all I can say is "OK... but how much is this going to cost?" At that point, as long as he doesn't say something outrageous I tend to give him the go-ahead. Then I spend the next few weeks wondering how much I overpaid.

Those days are over! RepairPal, a handy and FREE iPhone app, lets you get an idea of what the repair ought to cost, based on your car's make, model, and year. It also takes your location into consideration. Here's an example.

Suppose your car is a Ford Explorer, 1996. Suppose the mechanic tells you it's time for a new alternator and it will cost you $300. Start up RepairPal, put in your car's info, and then your location, as shown below. Then touch "Get Estimate."


Here you see a range of prices, a little bit higher at the dealers and a little bit less at the independent shops. Now you know enough to evaluate your mechanic's quote.


Scroll down a bit and you get more info... always handy to know more.


Touch the "Find a Shop" button and you get a list of places that ought to be able to handle the job. The one at the top paid to be there-- watch for that. The rest of the shops are sorted with the closest one to you at the top of the list. They even have ratings. How cool is that?


Knowledge is power. In a way, I'm sort of looking forward to having something go wrong with my car so I can pull out my iPhone and turn to RepairPal.

Turns out that RepairPal has a website too, so if you're not an iPhone user you can still use the service (which is free).

Every use Google Translate? It's really handy. I know there are other options but there are things about Google Translate that are hard to beat. Have a look by clicking here. Better yet, have a look by Control-clicking here, and then choosing "Open Link in New Window." That way, you can play around with Google Translate and read all about it here, with the windows side-by-side.

The first thing that I especially like about Google Translate is that it translates what you type as you type it. Try it. I don't know how they do it, but it works very nicely for me (Safari 4.0.4, Mac OS X 10.6.2). Here's a picture of the finished sentence, translated, but know that it was translating away as I entered my lunch request. Very cool. And of course there are plenty of choices for the "Translate from" and "Translate to" languages.

The second thing that I especially like about Google Translate is it can translate an entire webpage. All you do is type the website address into the box, where I typed in my "I would like a cheeseburger" sentence. If you are looking at a website and you get the notion to translate it, you could (1) select the URL, (2) copy the URL, (3) switch to Google Translate, (4) paste the copied URL into the box, and (5) click the Translate button. Or you could do it all in one step, if you do some one-time set-up. Obviously you want to do it in one step, so read on and I'll show you how.

In Google Translate, click where it says "Tools and Resources" at the left. Or click this link. Ignore all of that complicated-looking stuff at the top and scroll down until you see something that looks like the following picture.

Choose a language that you want to translate into. Click and hold on the blue underlined text for that language. If you let go you will get a friendly reminder from Google:

Do what it says: click and hold on a blue underlined language and drag it to your browser's toolbar. While you're dragging it looks like this:



When you let go you'll get a chance to name it. I used the name suggested by Google:

When you're done it looks like this (minus the red oval). That little button will be there forever, or until you take it off.



That's it for the setting up. Now for the fun part! Go to a web page, any web page. Let it load up. Click the button you made. If you happen to go to the same web page that I did, you will change this...

into this!

I don't know about you but I think it's amazing.

Bonus: notice that Google's put some controls at the top of the translated page. That means you can EASILY switch to another language, without starting over. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think. You can even tell me in Spanish.

I'm back from Macworld Expo. I spent about a day and a half there, plenty of time to see all of the exhibits once and many of them twice.

The show was much, MUCH smaller than last year. We knew in advance that Apple wouldn't be there, but we were all wondering how many others wouldn't be there. The answer: about half of the vendors from last year stayed home.

Off the top of my head, here's a list of big companies that WEREN'T at Macworld this year:

• Canon
• Epson
• Adobe
• Quark
• FileMaker
• Intuit
• Google
• Logitech

Quite a list of heavy-hitters. Even so, the show was a lot of fun, and there was still plenty to see. I plan on attending next year and I encourage you to do the same. Dates for next year are already set: January 25th through 29th, 2011. Click here to add the dates to your iCal calendar. (Really, please click it. It's my first click-and-add-it-to-iCal link.)

Here is a short list of things that caught my eye at Macworld. Check 'em out.

iPhone apps

• Business Card Scanner, $1.99 (Macworld Expo special-- regularly $5.99). Take a picture of a business card using your iPhone and the program reads the information and adds it to your Contacts on the iPhone. Since you're surely synching your iPhone with your Mac that means the contact will be on your Mac too. Very neat. I bought it and it works. It's not always perfect but it's always good enough to be pretty helpful.
• Grocery Pal, free. Tell it your zip code and it gives you all of the specials for the stores around you. Limit it to just the stores you like if you want to. Add items to your shopping list for each store and do price comparisons across all of your stores. Search for items easily. By the way, blueberries are 2 baskets for $3 at Ralphs this week.
• Square-- not yet available, but boy oh boy does this look good. It lets you accept credit cards as payment even if you don't have a merchant account. The Square people will take some small percentage of the transaction, currently estimated at 2.99%. No yearly fee, no per-transaction fee, no muss no fuss. This will be great for when you go out to dinner with friends-- you could pay the restaurant with your credit card, and your friends can pay you with theirs. Neat. The app will cost 99 cents and the scanner thingy will be free.

Mac stuff

• TopazLabs Photoshop bundle, $129 (Macworld Expo special-- slightly higher now). This amazing set of tools, which also works in iPhoto, lets you do incredible things to your photos. Some of the tools help you to rescue badly exposed or backlit photos, others help you to take the noise out of noisy jpegs, others let you have a great time experimenting. Get a 30-day trial and go to town.

Click here to see a slide show of some pictures I fixed up last night with Topaz in about two seconds. Look for the navigation (next, previous, home) at the top.

I still have a lot of Macworld paperwork and notes to go through so I may be adding to this list.

Take a look at the Excel document below. Notice anything? Of course you did-- each column is a series, progressing from a starting item to an ending item in some sort of regular way.



It took me 59.4 seconds to enter this data. Really. That's one cell of data per second-- very, very, very quick, and it's not because I'm such an amazing typist. Actually, I let Excel do most of the typing for me, using a feature called Auto Fill. All I did was type the first row of data. Excel did the rest. Here's how it works.

1. Type something into a cell and hit Enter (or Return).
2. Click on the cell again to select it, and let go.
3. Look for a little box at the lower right-hand corner of the selected cell. Move the mouse over that until the cursor looks like a little black "+" as shown below.

4. Click the lower right-hand corner with that black plus, hold the mouse button down, and drag down (or to the right). Excel fills the cells with the right stuff. Amazing.

The four steps above will work in a lot of cases. In fact, they work for the first four columns in our example. But, when you get to the last two columns, those steps don't work, and that's because Excel doesn't know whether we want to go up by one, or two, or five, or whatever. We have to tell it.

The trick is to enter not just the first item in the column, but also the second. So, in the example here, I typed a 1 and then below it a 2. Then I selected BOTH cells, via click-and-drag, and THEN I clicked the lower right-hand corner and dragged down. For the column at the far right, I entered 5 in the top row, 10 in the next row, selected both cells, then dragged that lower right-hand corner.

You'll know you're clicking in the right place when the cursor looks like the black "+".

Next time that you have a lot of data to enter into Excel look for the chance to use this Auto Fill method. It will save you a LOT of time.

Bonus: if you type "Jan" Excel will enter "Feb" and "Mar" etc. If you type "1st Quarter" Excel will enter "2nd Quarter" and "3rd Quarter" etc.

Bonus 2: you can select more than one cell in the top row, then grab the lower right-hand corner of the selection, and then Auto Fill all of those columns at once. Try it.

The big Macworld Expo show starts this Thursday in San Francisco. For the first time in Macworld's history, Apple will not be there. (In case you didn't know, Macworld Expo is put on by the people who own Macworld magazine. Apple was never the host of Macworld, only an attendee.) It should be an interesting show anyway. Prediction: there will be several super-cheap iPad knockoffs available for you to waste your money on. I mean "buy."

You can get a free pass to Macworld by clicking this link and signing up. That will save you $25 over doing it at the show. Do it do it do it (Dave). You can buy me a cup of coffee on the show floor with the money you save.

For the first time in fifteen years I will NOT be doing a remote radio interview from Macworld. KPFK is having a pledge drive and it has pre-empted the Digital Village program that usually has me on. The hosts have told me that I'll be their first guest as soon as they get back on the air. Watch this space for details.

Pictured above: a Dock with the magnification feature turned on. This feature, which makes Dock icons squirm as you move your mouse over them, is absolutely adored by some people, but not by me, because a squirming target is harder to click on.

Tonight, for some reason, I thought it would be fun to experiment with the Dock (which was better in OS X 10.5 than it is in 10.6), and I found an interesting shortcut: if you hold the Control and Shift keys you will temporarily switch the Dock's magnification feature ON if it's set to be off, and OFF if it's set to be on.

Armed with this knowledge, you're now able to very gracefully and surreptitiously and temporarily turn the Dock magnification feature off when you use Macs with Dock magnification set to "on." This will be especially useful for those of you who make a living helping others with their Macs, double-especially if the Dock magnification "feature" drives you nuts. Oh wait, that's me. Never mind.

You know that feeling you get when you suddenly discover that there's a much easier way to do things? That's the feeling I got when I "discovered" Tripit.com, because Tripit makes one of my more tedious tasks go away. Which task is that? The one where I type flight information into my calendar so I have it when I need it.

Anyone who's done it knows the routine: you make your travel plans online (typity-type, clickety-click), then you get to type even more into the calendar, trying very hard to be careful, but take it from me, it's hard to be perfect.

Enter Tripit.com. Go there and sign up for a free account. Then, when you make plane reservations and subsequently get a confirmation email from an airline, you forward the email to "plans@tripit.com." Tripit reads the email, puts the information into a handy little private space for you on their site, and then-- the best part-- they put your trip information into an iCal feed, which you subscribe to ONCE, and all of the information about the flying out and flying in is automatically part of your iCal calendar, forever and ever amen.

I made a Rule in Mail to automatically forward my Southwest Airlines "Ticketless Confirmation" emails to plans@tripit.com, and by golly it works. My calendar has ALL of the information-- flight numbers, departure times, arrival times, confirmation numbers, you name it-- and of course I can subscribe to the same iCal feed on my iPhone, so my iPhone's calendar is up to date too. You can change the information if you'd like, so the trip that Tripit titles "Oakland, CA 2/11/2010" can be retitled "MacWorld Expo SF 2010." That's what I did.

Tripit has a "pro" account but the free one is great as it is. If you fly frequently this is a no-brainer. Go to tripit.com now and sign up. You will save yourself a lot of typing, over and over and over. I wouldn't do any of the stuff that asks you to upload your email address book-- that will just irritate your friends-- but that's not required anyway. Just do the minimal free stuff, and you will reap the benefits time after time.

If you can't figure out how to subscribe to your Tripit calendar let me know. I can help you.

Bonus: if you use the USA Today's free iPhone app called "AutoPilot" you can connect to your Tripit calendar information very easily. Give that a whirl too.

I wrote a couple of days ago about Photo Booth and how you can use it to record a movie and then email it. It's easy, and it's fun-- so easy, and so fun, that just about all of you recorded a movie and emailed it to me. That's the good news.

The bad news is that these files are a little on the large side. But, there's more good news: you can easily compress a movie to less than half its original size while retaining almost all of the quality. All you need is "iSquint," a free download available by clicking here.


When you start iSquint the first time you'll get a sales pitch to upgrade to another program. Just say no. You'll then get a window that looks like this:

The settings are important. When you Optimize for iPod you get a movie that fits an iPod's screen just perfectly (that is, it's 320 pixels wide by 240 pixels tall). When you Optimize for TV you get a movie that's 640 x 480. Tiny Quality gives the smallest file size, while "Go Nuts" Quality gives the largest file size. I like "Standard." I also like "H.264 Encoding." I could explain what H.264 means but Wikipedia's already done that, so click this link and read all about it. All you really need to know is that H.264 is a kind of compression, and it works great. There's nothing better.

iSquint is really easy to use. Just drag a movie file into the big box (the one under "Drag files below."). Then click "Start." Your original movie will be untouched; a compressed copy will be created and saved in the same location as the original. In my experiments, my movies compressed almost in half under "Standard" Quality and almost by a factor of 4 if I went "Tiny." Choosing "Optimize for iPod" gives another 4x compression since iPod screens are 1/4 the screen dimensions of a Photo Booth-generated movie. Note the "Add to iTunes" button-- that will put your movie into iTunes, handy if you want to eventually get it onto your iPod or iPhone.

You can email the compressed movie using the drag-it-to-the-Mail-icon method I wrote about here.

Be aware that compressing a movie results in some reduction in quality. Here, for example, are three versions of the same frame in a movie.



First is from the original movie, the second is from one compressed with "Standard" settings, and the third is from one compressed with "Tiny" settings. Look around the eyes and the hair-- the original is sharper and has more detail. (The sound is better too, though you can't tell by looking at the picture.) You will have to experiment to find settings that work for you. Keep in mind that the settings that work great for one movie may not be so great on the next one. It's a case-by-case thing. Luckily, all you have to do is move the slider and click "Start" to see another variation.

(Note: if you've recorded a movie in Photo Booth it will be easiest to drag the movie to the Desktop, and from there into iSquint. The compressed movie will be put on the Desktop when the compression process is complete.)

Looking forward to seeing your new, smaller movies.

Doing a little experimenting today-- thought it might be fun to make a video showing how to use Photo Booth.

Click where it says "Click to Play." You MIGHT have to click a little triangular button after that-- look around, it's worth it. And no, I don't know why you might have to click that button. I'll try to find out.

In years past, the first week of January meant "incredibly cool and awesome" new products from Apple, presented by Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his keynote speech at MacWorld Expo. Apple's not going to MacWorld this year, and MacWorld's been moved to February anyway, and gee it feels like something's missing.

This video-- a condensed edition of a recent Steve Jobs talk-- isn't a substitute for the real thing, but it helps. Check it out.

Ever use the "Help" menu in 10.3 or 10.4. or 10.5? If you have, you know it's the slowest thing ever. But, in 10.6 (Snow Leopard), it's fast. Really fast. So, now, it's useful. If you'd previously given up on getting help from the Help menu, and you're now on 10.6, give it another try. You'll like it.

It's time for the college football bowl games. Here's a handy iCal calendar with the entire schedule. It's updated to show you the most recent information (dates, times, TV network, and even the scores). Click the link, add it to your iCal calendar, remember to tell it to refresh (recommendation: daily), and you'll have the information at your fingertips. Or at least on your computer.

Thanks to DavidGagne.net for the calendar.

Google Maps is fantastic, better than Mapquest in my opinion. If you're not using it you are missing out on a terrific service, and of course you can't beat the price (it's free). Enter maps.google.com into your browser, type in any address, and presto, you're looking at a map of that location. You're only a click away from getting directions, and traffic, and more. It's super.

Even more super is being able to bring up the map without typing in the address. That's what you can do if you use Apple's Address Book (the brown one whose icon is shown at the top of this hint). Bring up a contact in Address Book and click next to the address. If it's a home address, click where it says "Home." If it's a work address, click on the word "Work." You can see part of the word "Work" in grey in the picture below. That's where I clicked.


Select "Map this Address" and you're taken to Google Maps, where the address you clicked on is displayed on a map. Like so:

Isn't that cool?

(By the way, if you're wondering why your menu doesn't show "Make Envelope" it's because you don't have my custom "Make Envelope" AppleScript installed on your machine. It turns out that Apple allows us to create our own menu items that do anything we want them to do, and I thought it would be handy to be able to create an envelope by clicking on an address. So I did the programming and now I have the "Make Envelope" option on all of my machines. If you have an idea for something you'd like to do with an address send me an email and we'll figure out how to do it.)

One of the things I like about iPhoto is it kicks in automatically when I connect my camera. One of the things I don't like about iPhoto is it kicks in automatically when I connect my iPhone for synching or charging (iPhoto kicks in because it thinks of the iPhone as a camera, and wants to import its pictures). You might be thinking "Go into iPhoto's preferences and tell it not to connect automatically, as shown below"--


... but if I do that, iPhoto will NEVER launch automatically, and I usually want it to-- just not when I connect my iPhone. I do want iPhoto to open when I connect my camera, but I don't want iPhoto to open when I connect my iPhone. I want it both ways-- but how can I do that?

The answer is "You use the Cameras preference pane, available via this link." And guess what: it's free.

(Note: if you're using 10.6 (Snow Leopard) you have something like Cameras built in. It's in the Image Capture program, inside the Applications folder. You don't improve things by having two programs trying to control your cameras, so if you're using 10.6, find the Image Capture program, make your adjustments there, and forget about installing Cameras. If you're using 10.4 or 10.5, Cameras is the way to go.)

When you install Cameras you get a new item in your System Preferences, in the "Other" section. At first, it's pretty empty in there, but as you connect cameras to your Mac you'll get messages like this one:

(The "No Name" camera is the camera card in my Olympus. I want iPhoto to open when I connect that camera.)

I get a similar box when I connect my iPhone the first time, but I make a different choice:

I could leave it at that, but there are some other options. If you open the Cameras preference pane in System Preferences you see your list of cameras and the instructions for each one, like so:


You can click in the "When Connected" column for more options:

So... if you want some other program to launch when you connect your camera, Cameras can take care of that too. (So can Image Capture.)

I used Cameras until I updated to 10.6, and it worked great. As of 10.6 I'm using Image Capture, and it's also working great. Thanks to these programs, the days of iPhoto launching itself when my iPhone connects for a sync are over, and while I'm not sure that I'm doing anything productive with the few minutes I'm saving each day it's nice to think that maybe I am. Give this tip a try and save some time for yourself.

Amazon has Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition at $89.99, almost $60 off of the list price (The Apple Store sells it for $98). This is an especially good deal because you get three installation serial numbers in the package, meaning your $89.99 covers three machines. Microsoft Office is a little on the clumsy side but if you're getting documents in Word and Excel formats you'll be glad that you have Office installed.


Another good deal: Apple Airport Express for $94.95 (Apple's price: $99). Use this to extend your wireless network, and/or to play your iTunes music from your Mac through your home stereo-- wirelessly.


And another: iWork '09 Family Pack for $80.49. This is the 5-installation Family Pack, at only $1.49 over the single-user version at Apple. Apple charges $99 for the 5-user pack. Amazon sells the iWork '09 single user package for $72.99, if that's the one you need.

All in all, it pays to check Amazon's prices. Use the Amazon box at the left-hand side of this page to do your search, and simultaneously support the Blog.

It took a few weeks but Amazon finally has the new Apple iMac 27 inch Quad-Core in stock. You can click this link to go straight there. The price is $1972.98, or $26.02 less than Apple charges... and you don't pay sales tax if you're in California, and there's no charge for the shipping either. When you consider the sales tax it costs you $210 more to buy it from the Apple store. The warranty is through Apple either way, so it seems a lot better to get it from Amazon. (Those of you not living in California should go through the motions of buying the iMac through Amazon to see what your total will be. Regardless, it's probably going to be less expensive than going directly through Apple.)



Amazon also has the new Magic Mouse, reviewed by me here a few days ago. You can click this link to go to the Magic Mouse page on Amazon. You get free shipping and no tax (in California, and maybe where you live too).

Note: purchases made on Amazon through the links above benefit The Boyce Blog. Such contributions-- which come from Amazon, not from you-- keep The Boyce Blog going, and are very, very much appreciated.

Well looky here: another nifty improvement in the Date & Time preference pane, thanks to Snow Leopard! Finally, all of a sudden, and only in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, your Mac can show you the correct time for wherever you are-- automatically! Those of you who travel with a Mac laptop will appreciate this-- no more trips to the Date & Time preference panel to set the proper time zone. You do have to turn this feature on, so get in there and do it now!

I've been digging around in Snow Leopard, looking for something new, and I found something in the Date & Time preference panel. Finally, after years of waiting, we can display the day, the date, and the time in the menu bar, all at the same time! Until Snow Leopard, you got the day and the time, but not the date (not without clicking on the time). Now you get all three at once.

Here's what it looks like. No click required!


Maybe you're good at remembering the date. I'm not. I found myself heading to the menu bar to find out the date several times a day-- but not anymore! I will probably save myself hundreds of clicks per month. Not sure what I'll do with the clicks I'm going to save but it's nice to think about.

Anyhow, if you're on Snow Leopard, go to the Date & Time preference pane NOW and check the "Show Date" box as shown in the image below. A click saved is a click earned. Etc.
I know, I know: there are plenty of third-party ways to get the same effect. I think it's better that it's built-in, that's all. So check it out and save yourself some clicks.

There it is: Apple's Magic Mouse (held by someone else's nicely manicured hand). I have one (a Magic Mouse, not a nicely manicured hand) and so far, so good. I've used it for a week and I'm happy. It's super-precise, it's wireless (yay), and there aren't any parts to get gummy and quit working. Plus it slides very well on the desk.

Setting up the Magic Mouse is easy, except for getting it out of the box. Generally speaking, unboxing an Apple product is a delight, something you want to share with a friend (putting it back in the box, taking it out again, over and over). Not so the Magic Mouse. But once out of the box, it's trivial to set up.

If you're using Mac OS X 10.6.2, you need only to turn the Magic Mouse on (it runs on two AA batteries, which are not only included, but installed at the factory). You can see the on-off switch at top right in the photo below. The Magic Mouse in the picture is on.



If you're using Mac OS X 10.5.8, you will need some software, available here. If you're using 10.4.11 you will not be able to use the Magic Mouse. Sorry Mom.

Everyone wants to know how it feels in the hand and the answer is "it doesn't." That is, you don't hold it in your hand, you hold it with your hand. You don't rest your hand on the Magic Mouse, you rest your hand (the heel of it) on the desk, and hold the Magic Mouse lightly. And it's comfortable that way.

The scrolling-via-the-touch-sensitive-surface is very convenient, and it's nice knowing that it's never going to get gunky. I use the scrolling feature all the time. I love that the Magic Mouse is wireless, and that it's not too