I recently blogged about a missing feature from iPhoto which lets you burn a CD of photos that is not in iPhoto format, but instead a CD of JPG images that any computer can read and that you could take to the store for developing in a photo machine. Right after I posted that blog, I discovered a way to create an Automator action to do this for you.
I am not an Automator expert. In fact, this might be the second time I’ve used Automator. However, the process to create this Automator application is a piece of cake. Follow the steps in the movie below:
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Gefen Wireless 2.0 USB Extender (4 port)
Gefen, Inc.
www.gefen.com
US $399.00
Would you like to have your USB peripherals, especially shared printers, located away from different users’ computers?
If so, you should check out this accessory from Gefen, Inc., that allows up to four printers and other USB devices to be located away from your computers.
The Weeks Division of MyMac.com Labs had a chance to evaluate the new Gefen Wireless 2.0 USB Extender (4 port). Here’s what we found after using a review unit for several days.
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Mojo Courier 17″ Computer Case
Company: SpireUSA
Price: $100 US
The Mojo laptop case by SpireUSA is designed for couriers, bicycle messengers, and active commuters or students with strong shoulders. This bag’s many pockets are deep, but yours don’t need to be in order to purchase this spacious case suitable for 17″ and smaller laptop computers.
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Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard: Early-Bird Edition
Company: TidBits TakeControl Ebooks
Price: $10.00
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/default.html
Leopard is coming… are you ready? I know, you’ve been through this before, you’re a power user, know all the tricks that go along with upgrading to Apple’s newest OS… Or you could be a brand new user or ex-Window’s user who’s not really sure what to expect. Well, the crew at TidBits has taken a bite of the process of upgrading and it presents itself in Joe Kissel’s latest endeavor, Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard: Early Bird Edition.
40 Digital Photo Retouching Techniques, 3rd Edition
by Zack Lee
Youngjin Publishers
http://www.yougjin.com
ISBN-13: 978-89-314-3370-8
198 pages, full color
US: $16.95 CAN: $22.95 UK: £9.99
In the age of digital photography, with the right image adjustment techniques, we can look younger, older, and sometimes more attractive. If taking off a few pounds seems impossible in real life, it can at least be done with the magic digital image retouching. Just last week, one of my clients called me and said she really liked a particular engagement photo of her and her fiancé, but she was wondering if I could somehow get rid of her double chin. I was happy to oblige. I could retouch the image in Photoshop in under five minutes, no sweat.
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Inspecting the Inspector (expect the unexpected)
One part of iWeb that you’ll get to know very well is the “Inspector” window. This box is what makes almost all the changes behind the scenes. iWeb relies on this box and its sub-windows for almost everything you’ll need to do beyond dragging and dropping graphics and text boxes. So let’s talk a bit about the Inspector. Please note that the Inspector I’m talking about is the one for iWeb 2 (part of the aforementioned iLife 08) which added a few tricks not available in iWeb 1 (iLife 06).
The Inspector window has several tabs on it, each which performs various tasks. You can bring it up (if it isn’t already there) by using a menu command or by hitting the “Inspector” icon at the bottom of your site window.
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The first tab is the “Site” tab. This has two buttons on it; “Site” and “Password”. Under the Site button, you can name (or rename) your site, publish your site to a group, enter your email address, and see how much room is left in your “.mac” iDisk account.
Download the show here, in iTunes, or listen above
A special weekend edition of the podcast looking at Leopard. First up, Tim talks about installing the new Mac OS on both his G5 and Macbook Pro machines. Robert chimes in from his cell phone twice, once about buying Leopard, and again with his first impressions after installing it on an older iBook G4. Finally, John Nemo records four interviews from the Apple store, a really fun segment!
We would LOVE some of your feedback on Leopard. Send us an email here, or simply call 1-801-938-5559 and leave a message.
I’m been home sick for the past few days, whatever is going around came to visit me. So this morning, when the FedEx guy arrived at 9:32 am with a little bundle of joy, Mac OS 10.5, it kinda cheered me up.
The Good News… Leopard is here!
The Bad News… Leopard is here!
Background- I’m running a G4 PowerMac MDD 867 Dual, with 1.5 gigs of ram. (Yes, I know, I just made it) I prepared for Leopard by removing one of the old internal hard drives that I had 10.3.9 and OS 9 on, and added a WD 160 gig hard drive. I started the installation at 10:32 am and it finished at 11:31 am. (of course the last 9 minutes were shown as “less than 1 minute remaining.”
Restart, starts up, looks good… transfer all info and apps over from the primary HD and then things start to get a bit strange. Click on System Prefs in the dock and the beach ball appears… and spins and spins and spins. Finally, Force Quit.. several times to get it to do so. Right click on the desktop to change the desktop background and … nothing.
Ok, let’s try Disk Utility and have it Repair permissions.. click on it and 10 minutes later, the barber pole is still rotating. Ok, enough’s enough. Put the install DVD back in, restart and select Utilities. Click on Verify Disk, it does so, then click on “repair” and it tells me the “Disk could not be unmounted.” Click again and it goes through the process, no repairs needed.
Click on Repair Permissions… and the barber pole starts and keeps on going, 10 minutes, 15 minutes… time to quit out. Restart computer selecting the HD with Leopard on it. Starts up, able to change background picture, begin to check out things… Like the look of Mail, (version 3.0 (912.1/912); Safari 3.0.4 (5523.10) and what ever else I’m opening up. Oh, yeah, click on Software Update… you guessed it, spinning beach ball, doesn’t want to quit when told…
I really like the look of Leopard, the changes to the way folders display contents as a fan spread and I’m continuing to explore. Will get back and let you know how things proceed with repairing permissions and any other issues that may arise.
Enjoy!
Download the show here, rock with iTunes there, or jam above.
By the time you listen to this, Leopard will be out in the wild, possibly even on your hard drive running your Mac. But when we recorded this two days prior to the launch, Tim Robertson, Donny Yankellow, and Rich Lefko were left asking questions and talking about what they were most looking forward to.
As always, we would love to have some feedback. Send us an email here, or simply call 1-801-938-5559 and leave a message.
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Tim Robertson reviews both the iPhone Silicone Case from USBFever.com and the Jam Jacket for iPhone DLO.com.
Pixelmator
Company: Pixelmator Team
Price: $59.00 (US)
http://www.pixelmator.com
If you are a regular reader of Mac websites and a listener to different Mac podcasts, you’ve probably heard of Pixelmator. Pixelmator is a new image editing program by Saulius and Aidas Dailde – two brothers that make up the Pixelmator Team. I’ve had the opportunity to try out Pixelmator for a while now (I was allowed to try the beta version), and if you are looking for an inexpensive image editor, Pixelmator is worth a try.
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SHURE SE 110 ISOLATING EARPHONES
Company: SHURE INC.
PRICE: $119.99 MSRP
www.shure.com
The business of sound reproduction never sleeps. R&D departments are working overtime for your attention, and your money. With the advent and proliferation of so many portable music players, music listening has taken on a life of its own. On any given day one can see people listening while: walking, running, skateboarding, in-line skating, ice skating, skiing, bicycling, weight lifting, relaxing, riding the bus, and on and on. There is almost no activity left which cannot be supplemented with your “fave raves” (music).
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Over three years ago, Bruce Black was calling for a multi-button Apple supplied mouse. This article could have been written today!
Download the show here, rock with iTunes there, or jam above.
This week is a can’t miss episode with special guests John Farr and Beth Lock. These two have penned some of the best Mac and non-Mac columns, and Tim, Guy, and Chad talk them up for over an hour. One of the hosts favorite shows to date! Plus, David Cohen’s Fenestration, reader email, and Tim gets the Darth back in his iPhone.
As always, we would love to have some feedback. Send us an email here, or simply call 1-801-938-5559 and leave a message.
Data Backup 3.0
Company: Prosoft Engineering
Price: $59.00 (US)
http://www.prosoftengineering.com
Everyone hates doing backups. I know I do. Like most utility software packages, products like this are ignored until it is too late, and your precious data is gone. It’s funny how diligent I was at work (I suppose my job being at stake had something to do with it…), yet I almost never backed up anything at home. I’ve been playing the odds for a lot of years, and have so far been pretty lucky.
The reality is that because nothing has happened, you get lulled into a false sense of security. When it finally does happen (drive crash, deleted a vital file, etc.), the cries of anguish are deafening. Again, it’s never happened to me, but that doesn’t mean it won’t at the most inopportune moment possible, because that’s how these things go. That’s why I urge all of you out there in internetland to get yourself some backup software and one of those amazingly cheap external hard drives. There has never been a better time to buy one of these USB 2.0 packages of storage goodness. When you can by a 500 gigabyte drive (that’s half a terabyte!) for under $125.00, and 120 giggers for around 50 bucks, there’s absolutely no reason in the world not to embark on a solid backup plan right this very minute. Can’t afford an external drive even at these prices? Most of your Macs probably have a CD and maybe even a DVD burner. A CD burner can put up to 700 megabytes on a disk, and a DVD burner, around 4.5 gigabytes (almost 9 GB on the double-layer disks). You know, these nice internal and external hard drives are coming down in price for a reason–they’re built more cheaply, and are likely to fail more unpredictably than drives of the past. It might last 20 years, or it might go out in a blaze of glory tomorrow.
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Other World Computing NASPerform Network Storage
500 GB Model reviewed
http://www.macsales.com
Price: $209.99
I was very excited to review this product. I’ve looked at network storage devices from afar, mostly because of price, and almost all of them were Windows based, but really thought they looked very useful. The OWC NASPerform (NP) utilizes NDAS technology allowing it to connect a storage device directly to a network with or without a server. The prices are pretty good at OWC, and our favorite computer platform is fully supported finally, so it was time for this Mac user to jump in. The acronym NDAS stands for Network Direct Attached Storage.
This drive can be used as either a stand-alone external drive, plugged directly into your Mac via USB, or as a network drive, plugged into your network via Ethernet. When using this drive as part of your network, you can connect either wireless, via a wireless router, or directly to a hard-wired Ethernet network. More on that later.
Welcome back. In part two of “Using iWeb 08”, we’ll look at the main screen icons, and what they do. Check out part 1 here.
iWeb’s Basic Interface
Apple likes to create software with as many on-screen buttons as possible. This makes it easy to find commonly used functions and speeds up the workflow. The iWeb interface is no exception. While there are certainly many things you’ll need to do via the menu bar commands (or through keyboard shortcuts), you’ll find that most of the time you’ll be using the various icons or on-screen windows to accomplish your tasks.
The one you’ll use most often will be the “Inspector”, but we’ll get to that later. In this part we’ll talk about the icons on the bottom of your screen. Each one adds some functionality or allows easy insertion for common elements on to your web page.
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SE420 Sound Isolating Earphones
Company: Shure
Price: $400 US
http://shure.com
Shure is throwing another hat into the over-$250-super-premium-earphone arena. Summer 2006 brought us their ultra-expensive “500 series” with a price to match, reviewed here at MyMac.com. We had a few gripes in addition to the hoorays in our evaluation of this product, which has been rebranded SE530 to fill the top spot in the company’s newly-introduced budget-to-pricey comprehensive SE lineup.
Artie recently reviewed SE210 and SE310 here. These models received a high rating. He is currently listening to the brand new SE110. His review will probably be posted soon after this one you are reading.
Modular components are the highlights of Shure’s entire SE family. MyMac.com applauds the several different ways you can configure SE420 and its siblings. Audio delivery improves both objectively and subjectively as SE-series prices ascend. Knowing that fact, SE420 should sound r-e-a-l-l-y splendid.
Apple has decided to deliver a software development program for the iPhone and the iPod Touch in February.
This will open the door for third party software development for these items.
I’m very excited about this cave-in by Apple.
Now I WILL wait for a larger capacity iTouch before I buy. No telling how much software I’ll want to stuff into it.
What do you think??
Drobo Storage Robot
Company: Data Robotics, Inc.
Price: $499
http://www.drobo.com
MyMac.Com has reviewed different large multiple-disk storage products recently. They all share some common traits – multiple disks in an enclosure (USB or FireWire), looking like a large single volume, and some form of RAID technology applied.
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, and is a server room technology for allowing disks to be pooled. There are different types of RAID implementation, with differing types of data protection and performance. The most common RAID used on two-drive multiple disk products are RAID 0 (disk striping) or RAID 1 (disk mirroring). John Foster of MacBreak Tech refers to these as “Scary RAID” and “Slightly less scary RAID”, which should tell you plenty about how useful these actually are. The fact is that these systems offer at best only slight data protection, and at worse less protection than a single disk USB drive. If something fails, you may lose all of your data, and the unit may need factory repair. You may also need a replacement drive of exactly the same make an size as any others in the unit – problematical if you have had it for more than six months.
So, the whole topic is a techy nightmare. What is needed is someone to bring an Apple-like user approach, that is centered on usability, functionality and simplicity. Enter from stage left the Data Robotics Drobo Storage Robot.
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