[WelMac] Welmac News & Update 12 May 08
WelMac news
news at welmac.org.nz
Sun May 11 23:32:33 AEST 2008
CONTENTS:
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1. MEETING UPDATE
2. APPLE TV GAINS MOVIE PURCHASES AND DVD DATE RELEASES
3. MAC 911 - SOLUTIONS TO YOUR MOST VEXING MAC PROBLEMS
4. SURFING FOR GREAT MAC FREEWARE
5. LATEST IMACS OFFER FASTER CPUS AND NVIDIA GRAPHICS OPTION
6. OPENOFFICE 3.0 BETA RELEASED FOR MAC OS X
7. TIME CAPSULE IS SO SIMPLE, JUST IGNORE IT
8. VODAFONE TO SELL APPLE'S IPHONE IN 10 COUNTRIES
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1. MEETING UPDATES
Wellington Meeting
The next main meeting of the Wellington Macintosh Society Inc. will
be held on Monday 26 May 2008. This meeting will be held in the Ante
Room on the ground level of Turnbull House, 11 Bowen Street,
Wellington from 7.10pm.
This month's topic will take a look at getting video into and out of
your Mac. Once upon a time, video was the preserve of professionals
who could afford expensive cameras and editing equipment, that is
until Apple came up with Quicktime in 1994. Now video cameras have
come down considerably in price and most digital still cameras and
many cell phones are also capable of taking low resolution videos.
With the introduction of YouTube and other similar web sites, getting
your videos out to a wider audience has never been easier, that is if
you know what to do. This months meeting will take a look at all the
various options of taking video images, getting them into your
computer and editing them into some resemblance of order and sharing
them with others.
As usual, we'll start with our Q&A session followed by a short
supper before the main presentation.
Kapiti Area Meeting
For those members living at or near the Paraparaumu area, our next
Kapiti meeting will be held at 7.10 pm on Monday 2nd June 2008 (which
also is Queens Birthday this year). It will be at the Rita King
Cottage at St Marks Church in Rosetta Road, Raumati. The topic of the
meeting will be the same as the Wellington meeting, i.e. At general
look at Video on your computer.
Mac Basics Meeting
This meeting is an introduction to computing on a Macintosh will be
held on Monday 12 May 2008 (tonight) starting at 7pm in the Turnbull
Room on the 1st floor of Turnbull House. This months meeting will
look at the third topic in our series of three, using the internet.
Mac OS X Special Interest Group
Monday 19 May 2008 starting 7 pm in the Turnbull Room on the 1st
floor of Turnbull House.
This meeting will be covering an introduction to Mac OS X for people
who are already familiar with Windows but having trouble finding
their way around the Mac. We'll also look at VMware Fusion.
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2. APPLE TV GAINS MOVIE PURCHASES AND DVD DATE RELEASES
by Jeff Carlson <jeffc at tidbits.com>
The Apple TV, the company's "hobby" (according to Steve Jobs) media
playback device, added to its appeal last week with a pair of movie-
related announcements.
<http://www.apple.com/appletv/>
First, it's now possible to purchase movies directly from the Apple
TV; before, they could be bought only from the iTunes Store on a
computer. Movies for sale are available only in standard-definition
resolution, not HD, even when an HD rental is available for the
same title.
This feature appeared briefly several weeks ago, inconveniently the
day I submitted the final version of my latest book, "The Apple TV
Pocket Guide, Second Edition," to Peachpit Press. I wasn't able to
successfully purchase anything on my Apple TV at the time, however,
and Apple didn't get back to me with an answer before the
capability disappeared.
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321563158/?tag=tidbitselectro00>
The other news from last week goes beyond the Apple TV. A
collection of movie studios announced that movies would be
available for the Apple TV and other on-demand services on the same
date that DVDs are released. Previously, Apple's position was that
movies would be available for rent or purchase 30 days after the
DVD release date (no doubt a limitation imposed by the studios at
the time). The participating studios include 20th Century Fox, The
Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal
Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Lionsgate,
Image Entertainment, and First Look Studios.
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/05/01itunes.html>
The new policy has been slowly adopted for weeks. The Oscar-
nominated film "Michael Clayton" appeared for rent at the iTunes
Store and on the Apple TV when the DVD was made available, but the
timing also coincided with the Academy Awards. I'm guessing the
success of that movie on iTunes (where it remained the top rental
for several weeks) helped convince other studios that the 30-day
limitation was silly.
Could this be the start of a clue among the movie studios? I'm not
holding my breath. But it does show that they're finally realizing
that although the main content may be the same - the movie - a DVD
and a digital download are different offerings. People who purchase
DVDs want higher video quality, something they can grab off the
shelf that doesn't require an Internet connection, and the
multitude of extras available on some DVDs. People who rent or
purchase movies from direct services like the Apple TV are looking
for near-instant gratification (depending on the capacity of one's
Internet connection) and, most of all, convenience.
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3. MAC 911 - SOLUTIONS TO YOUR MOST VEXING MAC PROBLEMS
by Christopher Breen
Troubleshooting .Mac iCal syncing
Reader Turner Kellogg is unhappy with .Mac's inability to sync his
calendars. He writes:
For some reason I'm no longer able to sync iCal with .Mac on my home
computer. When I try, I get a warning that tells me I have
inconsistent data. I thought inconsistent data was the whole point of
syncing! I've tried resetting the calendar in my .Mac preferences
several times with no luck. I've also unregistered my Mac and then
reregistered it to see if that would help. The next time I sync I get
the same thing even though I have it set to replace the data on my
computer with what's on .Mac.
You're on the right track, but you need to take it up a notch. By
that I mean that you should try mucking with your .Mac settings on
every computer configured to sync its data to .Mac.
That mucking takes this form:
Begin by making a backup of your iCal and Address Book data. I
explain how to back up iCal toward the end of this entry. To back up
Address Book, in Tiger choose File -> Back Up Address Book and in
Leopard choose File -> Export -> Address Book Archive. Should you
need this backup you can use Address Book's Revert (Tiger) or Import
(Leopard) commands to bring back your data. Now on to syncing.
On the Mac that holds your master calendar--the one where you most
often enter events--pull up System Preferences and click the .Mac
preference.
If you're running Tiger, click the Advanced tab, select the name of
your computer in the list of registered computers, and click the
Reset Sync Data button. In the resulting sheet click the right arrow
button so that you'll replace any contact and calendar data on .Mac
with the data on that Mac and then click the Replace button.
If you're running Leopard, the process is similar. The difference is
that you must choose the Sync tab in .Mac preferences, click the
Advanced button, and then choose your computer and click the Reset
Sync Data button. As promised, the data on your computer will replace
the information on .Mac.
Repeat this process for other Macs you've synced with .Mac. However,
this time be sure that when you ask your Mac to Reset Sync Data, you
click the left arrow button, which tells the .Mac preference to sync
the data on your computer with info from .Mac. With luck, you'll no
longer see the inconsistent data warning.
I mention "luck" because even though this technique should work, it
doesn't always. Some have found that they have better luck when they
first hand-copy their iCal data from one Mac to the other. You can do
this by choosing File -> Back Up Database (Tiger) or File -> Back up
iCal (Leopard) to create an iCal Backup file. Make a copy of that
file and take it to your other Mac. From within iCal on that other
Mac choose File -> Revert to Database Backup (Tiger) or File ->
Restore iCal (Leopard) and choose the backup file you created on the
original Mac. This will cause iCal to replace all its calendars,
events, and To Do items from the other Mac so be sure you don't have
any unique information in this copy of iCal. (And to be safe, you
might want to create a backup file of this iCal's data before
replacing it.)
Moving Mail accounts offline
Reader and Weeds cast-member Andy Milder has recently made the
transition from Entourage to Apple's Mail. Following that transition
he encountered this issue:
I've got a whole bunch of mail accounts that are halfway bogus and/or
I don't want checked. That is to say, accounts that on rare occasions
I'll check and download, but not always. Here's the $64,000 question:
Is there a way to customize the Get Mail button so that it only
checks the accounts I want checked? I've set the automatic checking
to not bother with them, but the Get Mail button seems to check 'em all.
You can't do anything with the button specifically, but you have a
couple of options for barring particular accounts from retrieving
mail. You've already mentioned that you can keep an account from
being automatically checked by opening the Accounts preference,
selecting an account, clicking the Advanced tab, and disabling the
Include When Automatically Checking For New Mail option. As you
rightly point out, this option has no effect on the Get Mail button.
However, the checkbox just above it does. Disable the Enable This
Account option and the account disappears from Mail's list of
mailboxes. You can press Get Mail from now until doomsday, and the
disabled account will be left unchecked.
If you want an account ignored only occasionally, this isn't the best
way to go as you have to dig down into Mail's preferences to switch
it on or off. A more expedient route is to Control-click the
account's Inbox in Mail's list of mailboxes and choose Take
"nameofaccount" Offline. (Alternatively, you can choose Mailbox ->
Online Status and, from the submenu, choose Take "nameofaccount"
Offline.) A tilde-like symbol appears next to the account to indicate
it's offline. Press the Get Mail button and the offline account will
be ignored. To bring it back online, you can simply click the tilde-
like symbol.
Fix Apple TV wireless syncing
We have a helpful crew here at Macworld. For example, not only did
Chief Gemologist, Dan Frakes, propose a terrific Mac 911 question,
but a couple of days later, answered it as well. We begin with the
question:
My Apple TV is having loads of connection problems. Unfortunately,
over the past few weeks I changed my network configuration in the
house and applied the Apple TV [2.0.1] update, so it could be due to
either. Essentially, the Apple TV appears to be connected to the
wireless network, and shows up in iTunes; I try to sync, and it
appears (in iTunes) to start syncing, but it eventually drops off the
network and out of iTunes. When I go to the TV, nothing has been
added to the Apple TV, and it claims it's not connected to the
network. So I connect it to the network again. Rinse, repeat.
After a "Huh, let me look into it" response from yours truly, he came
back with this:
If your wireless network is set up as a 5GHz network using wide
channels, the Apple TV can't maintain a connection. I disabled wide
channels (which, unfortunately, reduces performance) and the Apple TV
was able to join the network and, more important, maintain the
connection.
To earn my day's pay, allow me to add some details. Specifically, to
do as Dan suggests, launch AirPort Utility, select your base station,
make sure the AirPort item is selected in the toolbar, and click the
Wireless tab. With the Radio Mode pop-up menu set to 802.11n Only (5
GHz), click the Wireless Options button. In the sheet that appears,
disable the Use Wide Channels option, click Done, and then click
Update to do just that to your AirPort Base Station.
But hang on a sec, one tmartine in the Apple Discussion Forums
contends that you can fix the problem without disabling wide
channels. He suggests that while in the aforementioned Wireless tab,
you hold down the Option key, click on the Channel pop-up menu,
select 161, and click Update. Others have offered that any channel
over 40 will work just as well.
If you've had this problem and discover that tmartine's solution is
the goods, please make your voice heard by putting the Comments link
to good use.
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4. SURFING FOR GREAT MAC FREEWARE
by Tim Verpoorten
When a new Mac user finds their way to a local MUG or listens to a
podcast, or maybe even reads a Mac blog, they have a ton of questions
to ask about switching to the Mac. We're responsible for trying to
help them feel comfortable with the Operating System, and accomplish
what they need to get done. I know that I receive a lot of email
every month from new users that want to know exactly what
applications, for the Mac, can help do what they did on their PC. It
seems that the same groups of applications cause the new user the
most consternation. I'm asked about FTP programs, graphic apps, text
editors, apps to delete other apps, you get the idea. We all know
that there are core applications all users seem to need when they
work with a computer, either Mac or PC. Therefore our subject for
this article is "Essential Mac Freeware"
Quicksilver: http://docs.blacktree.com First let me start with the
Granddaddy of Mac Freeware. In fact, this app has been said to have
converted more Windows users to Mac users then any other application.
It's Quicksilver. Most folks start using Quicksilver as a launcher,
but that's just the start. When opened, it will create a catalog of
applications and some frequently used folders and documents. Activate
it, and you can search for and open anything in its catalog
instantly. The search is adaptive, so Quicksilver will recognize
which items you are searching for based on previous experience.
Quicksilver's greatest strength, however, is not search. Any item you
are able to find, drag, or otherwise pull into its universe is
endowed with many potential uses. Hitting <tab> takes you to the
action field, where you can use the same adaptive search to select
what you would like to do. Among other things, files can be emailed,
copied, compressed. Text can be modified, transmitted between
programs, or searched for on the web. Some actions even support an
indirect object, so you can send an item to a person, move files to
another folder, or open files with a specific application.
Quicksilver can be given the ability to understand the data inside of
files, allowing you to work with data in new, faster ways. Plug-ins
add both new items and new actions, allowing you to run scripts, send
instant messages, dial phone numbers, look up words in a dictionary,
queue up songs in iTunes party shuffle, and much more.
FireFox: http://www.mozilla.com The reason that Firefox is my browser
of choice is that it's cross platform compatible so that my Firefox
on the PC at work looks and acts like my Firefox on the Mac at home.
I can share add-ons and plug-ins. The bookmark syncing add-on works
perfectly to keep my bookmarks and bookmark toolbar has the exact
same links in the exact same place. FireFox works and has always
worked for me. I could live with Safari, but after this long with
FireFox, I think I'll stay with it. Us old folks are slow to accept
change sometimes. Also if you put FireFox on a new Mac user's
machine, and they've had it on a PC before, they'll feel right at
home. Sometimes a familiar face is all it takes to overcome a
switcher's initial trepidation.
Here's another freeware application that may seem like a duplication,
but believe me, any Mac user will be happy to have this chat
application installed whether they already use iChat or not.
AdiumX: http://www.adiumx.com Adium is a free instant messaging
application for Mac OSX, released under the GNU GPL and developed by
the Adium Team. With Adium, you can connect to any number of
messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services
and then chat with other people using those services. We all know
that most folks are using chat services that their friends or family
uses. If someone is on MSN, or Yahoo messenger, they'll feel lost on
iChat alone. Adium is the answer. The services that are supported in
Adium is AOL, ICQ, .Mac, Jabber, GoogleTalk, MSN, Yahoo, Bonjour,
MySpace, Gadu-Gadu, and other lesser-known clients. It has OTR
encryption, tabbed messaging, file transfer, and webkit message display.
We know QuickTime can run many of the video and audio formats that a
Mac user can encounter, and if you add,
Perian: http://perian.org (Perian is a free, open source QuickTime
component that adds native support for many popular video formats.)
you'll be ready for almost all the codex's out there. But sometimes I
want more from my video player. That's why I like to have a copy of,
VLC Media Player: http://www.videolan.org/vlc on my Mac. VideoLAN was
originally designed for network streaming but VideoLAN's main
software, VLC media player has evolved to become a full-featured
cross-platform media player. There was never a video that I found
that I could not run in VLC. The features and the speed makes it my
favorite media player.
I also suggest that all new Mac users learn how to backup their
favorite DVD's and video. With AppleTV along with other methods to
stream and watch movies, TV shows, and online videos on your
computers, iPods, iPhones and TV's it's important to understand how
to distribute and create content. Therefore, I suggest downloading
and using,
MacTheRipper: http://www.mactheripper.org MacTheRipper is a freeware
DVD ripper (extractor) for Mac OS X. It is dependent upon the open-
sourced libdvdread and libdvdcss libraries. This product is made to
backup DVDs you have legally purchased for personal use. MacTheRipper
is also able to extract DVDs that have been damaged or improperly
mastered.
I'll finish off this essential Mac Freeware column with a couple
utilities that we all seem to need at one time or another. The first
one is an FTP client. There are several choices, I like to recommend,
Cyberduck: http://cyberduck.ch Cyberduck is an open source tool that
can handle both FTP and SFTP. Multiple connections are supported.
Drag and drop is supported for transferring files between a server
and your Mac. A transfer queue keeps track of the pending file
transfers and supports resuming of both downloads and uploads. A
simple bookmark manager ensures that you always keep track of your
favorite servers. Core system technologies such as the Keychain and
Rendezvous are supported. Cyberduck integrates seamlessly with
external editors such as SubEthaEdit and BBEdit. Simple and full
featured, what more do you want from an FTP client.
You need to know what your Mac is doing. You need to know if the
transfer speeds are fast or slow, is your CPU getting eaten up by
some rogue application or process, and what about the temps inside
you Mac and the fan speeds of your laptop, are they running at their
highest efficiency? There are several nice freeware solutions for you
try, last edition we looked at:
iStatMenu: http://islayer.com I really like this app, but rather then
belabor the point here, I plan on doing a whole article soon on
Freeware maintenance utilities for the Mac.
So let's finish with a backup solution that everyone needs to
incorporate into their daily routines. There are several good
solutions, but the one I like is the freeware application from Mike
Bombich called,
Carbon Copy Cloner: http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html The key
to a successful backup plan is to actually do the backups regularly.
When left to most Mac users, the task often gets tacked on to the end
of a very long list of other things to do. When you eventually have a
hard drive crash, the data is simply gone. You know that feeling --
you just lost six years of family photos. Your kids being born, their
first birthdays, their first everything. The answer to this is
consistent and regular backups, placed on a schedule and handled
automatically by your computer. Carbon Copy Cloner can accomplish
this and the back-up it creates is boot-able and fully functional
when needed.
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5. LATEST IMACS OFFER FASTER CPUS AND NVIDIA GRAPHICS OPTION
by Mark H. Anbinder <mha at tidbits.com>
Apple recently released an update to its line of aluminum-clad iMac
consumer desktops. The 20-inch and 24-inch flat-panel all-in-one
computers now sport faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, replacing the
previous slate of 2.0, 2.4, and 2.8 GHz processors with 2.4 and 2.66
GHz options in the 20-inch form factor, and 2.8 and 3.06 GHz
processors in the 24-inch units (see "Apple Releases New Aluminum
iMacs, Refreshes Mac mini," 2007-08-13).
<http://www.apple.com/imac/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9107>
The iMacs can be customized with up to 4 GB of RAM, as well as larger
SATA hard drives, up to 500 GB in the $1,199 low-end configuration
and up to 1 TB for the $2,199 high-end iMac.
Hard-core gamers will love the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GS video card with
512 MB of video memory in the top-of-the-line iMac configuration (and
available as a $150 option on the 2.8 GHz 24-inch model). Apple says
its testing with Quake 4 demonstrates twice the performance from the
Nvidia graphics card over the ATI Radeon HD in the other iMac
configurations. (The first three iMac models offer varying Radeon
cards with 128 or 256 MB of memory.)
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6. OPENOFFICE 3.0 BETA RELEASED FOR MAC OS X
According the John Martellaro of the MacObserver web based
newsletter, OpenOffice.org has released the first beta of OpenOffice
for Mac OS X. This version doesn't need to run in the X11 environment
as version 2.x did; instead it runs natively on the Mac.
"The cool thing is, while the market leading office suite vendor
dropped VBA support and the Solver feature, OpenOffice.org recently
introduced limited VBA support and includes a powerful Solver component.
"In addition, OpenOffice.org integrates well with the Mac OS X
accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than
many other Mac OS X applications. Finally, people like OpenOffice.org
3.0 for Mac OS X because of its very good stability and performance.
Reportedly, some Mac users have switched to OpenOffice.org just
because of its extremely good stability, OpenOffice.org said.
The announcement also pointed out that not only is read and write
support included for Microsoft binary file formats (.doc, .xls
and .ppt) but OpenOffice can also open files created with Microsoft
Office 2007 for PC or Office 2008 for Mac (.docx, .xlsx. and .pptx)
The full feature list and download page are at the OpenOffice.org
Website. The Mac file size is 167 MB and is for Intel Macs only.
The OpenOffice.org group has said that they estimate the final
release to be in mid September, 2008.
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7. TIME CAPSULE IS SO SIMPLE, JUST IGNORE IT
John Martellaro writes that according to David Pogue at the New York
Times, the key feature of Apple's Time Capsule is to just ignore it.
That has implications for spouses all over the world.
Reviews are usually about features and usability. It's all about
whether the system does what it says, is flexible and reliable, and
is easy to use. In this case, Mr. Pogue's review focuses on a major
design element of the Time Capsule, that is, it's so easy to use, so
transparent, that the only thing to review is the fact that it just
works. So just ignore it. "The beautiful thing about this arrangement
is that it backs up your laptops automatically and completely, too–
without your having to hook them up to anything," Mr. Pogue wrote.
"Any time the laptop is open and turned on, like when you’re using
it, the Time Capsule backup is quietly doing its thing. An animated
icon on your menu bar–a tiny clock whose hands move backward–lets you
know when Time Machine is doing its thing."
When disaster strikes, one activates Time Machine [Leopard required].
"The sleek, modern-looking Leopard desktop falls away like a curtain,
revealing, startlingly, a deep-space star field, Mr. Pogue wrote in
awe. "The window that once contained your files remains floating
before you, with dozens of iterations of itself, like file cards,
receding into the background. You can now scroll backward through
time until the window looks as it did before the unfortunate event."
In addition, the device doubles as a wireless router and a networked
printer can be attached, usable by all the Macs on the network.
"You can’t imagine how satisfying it is to know that if your hard
drive dies, you will lose no more than one hour of work," Mr. Pogue
wrote. "This is a classic case of Apple’s insistence on simplicity
taking its own version of the network hard drive into a higher realm.
Setting it up was very simple, and using it is beyond simple -- you
just ignore it."
The unspoken words in the review go to the complex systems that some
people set up, so complex that the spouse has no hope of utilizing
the technology without an M.S. in computer science and a notebook
full of diagrams and instructions. In the case of the Time Capsule,
one need simply give the spouse, of either sex, a MacBook Air, and
let it seamlessly backup. No fuss. No technical exclusion.
That's what the Time Capsule is all about.
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8. VODAFONE TO SELL APPLE'S IPHONE IN 10 COUNTRIES
Apple’s popular iPhone will be moving into ten more markets around
the world in 2008. Mobile phone group Vodafone announced on Tuesday 6
May 2008 that it had signed a agreement with Apple Inc to sell its
iPhone in ten countries around the world.
"Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech
Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South
Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the
Vodafone network," Britain-based Vodafone said in a statement.
Vodafone is being clear on which countries it will offer iPhone
service packages, but isn't offering many more details. So far, the
company hasn't offered exact launch dates, iPhone pricing, or
information on how much service packages will cost.
Vodafone made its announcement ahead of Apple, and it isn't the only
cell carrier to make an announcement ahead of an official statement
from Cupertino. Rogers made the same move in late April when it
announced that it had partnered with Apple to bring the iPhone to
Canada before the end of the year.
Apple's iPhone is already available in the United States, United
Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany and Austria. The company plans to
sell 10 million units by the end of 2008.
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Some articles above have been reprinted with permission from TidBITS.
TidBITS has offered more than ten years of thoughtful commentary on
Macintosh and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and
access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit www.tidbits.com.
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