Thursday, October 1, 2009

Macworld September 2009

Cabledrop (add image)
Each adhesive CableDrop is a cute, round clasp that keeps a single unplugged cable from falling behind your desk. That means no more crawling underneath your desk to find the right plug. You can also attach CableDrops to your display, to hold, say, earbuds you're not using. A six-pack is $10.

Hulu Desktop
Has a front-row style interface. Requires a Mac with a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better, 2GB of RAM, and OS 10.4 or later.
www.hulu.com

Cram iPhone App
"Study for tests with flashcards and multiple choice tests on your Mac & iPhone. Featured as an Apple Staff Pick.

I Love Stars 3.0
Free, 4.5 Stars
The program puts iTunes' five-star rating scale in the menu bar. The rating scale automatically hides when iTunes ins't playing. It sounds an audible alert and flashes the rating scale as a reminder, after a song has played about tw-thirds of the way through. Keyboard shortcuts can be assigned to rate tracks. The author [Dan Frakes] uses Cmd-Option-5 to assign a five-star rating, for example.

iPhone 3.0 Software Update
Major Features
  • Cutting and Pasting
  • Buy/rent movies, music, and TV shows on the iTunes store
  • Voice Recorder
  • Mutiple iTunes accounts available
  • MobleMe subscribers can use the Find My iPhone service to locate a lost phone
iPhones have a visual voicemail feature that's apparently unmatched by other smartphones.

"Apple considers the memory and hard drive to be user-serviceable parts."

The 15" MacBook Pro models now have a nonremovable battery (lithium-polymer) that lasts for 1,000 charges, or approximately five years, instead of the 300 recharges that most notebook batteries get.

SD Card Emergency Disk
The new 13- and 15- inch MacBook Pros have SD card slots that can be used if you've made an SD card into an emergency boot drive. In Disk Utility, set the default partition table to GUID and format the card in the Mac OS Extended file format. Then run the Mac OS install disc that came with your MacBook Pro and set the SD card as the destination. To fit Leopard on an 8GB SD card, you'll need to do a custom installation and deselect the options for Printer Drivers, Additional Fonts, Language Translation, and Xn. About 30MB of free space should still be left on the SD card.

Password Assistant Tool in OS X
A Password generator is actually built into OS X . It's available as a small, black, key icon when changing passwords under the Accounts pane of System Preferences.

Top Password Tips

Excerpts:
"A brute force attack can easily defeat as password with seven or fewer characters. . .You'll get the best protection from a random password of at least 11 characters."

"One way to create to create a random password is to think of an easily remembered sentence, then use the first letter of each word, substituting numbers as appropriate. The string ZTwt12potYS, for example, follows no apparent pattern. But it's still memorable because it's derived from the sentence "Zachary Taylor was the twelfth president of the United States."

"Words, names, and dates someone might associate with you make poor passwords. But you can produce strong passwords by combining them."

Take Control of iTunes

Skip to next/previous track
Right/left arrow keys

Seek 5 seconds forward or backward in the current track
Cmd-Option-Arrow (left/right)

Make the search bar active
Cmd-Option-F

GimmeSomeTune 4.2
(payment requested)
The writer uses this iTunes Controller app.
Keyboard shortcuts to play, pause, and control the volume, and rate tracks. It can automatically download artwork and lyrics for the music.

Mac OS Hints

View Huge Preview Icons
- Run a spotlight search
- Enable the Icon view mode (Cmd-1) or View > As Icons
- In the bottom right corner of the results window is a slider that can make the previews large.
- Use the Cmd-1 shortcut to a

Control Hot Corners with Modifier Keys.
As you're selecting an action for hot corner, hold the modifier key (or keys) you wnat to use.

Interesting Ad
"Your iPhone ideas to Cash Flow in 3 Steps)
Zco develops, deploys, and supports your app.

Final Article
"Give Peace a Chance" by Harry McCracken

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