Author: jjmarcus

Apple Specialist, Mac Whisperer, Cloud Wrangler - Your Remote CTO

iPad … ?

LG wrote:
So, about the iPad.

Can’t wait!
Can you back up the data, same as with a lap top?

Most of the data on my iPhone is synced either over the internet (email, contacts & calendar, notes, passwords, clipboards, bookmarks) or over a cable with my Mac’s iTunes and photo management app (music, photo, movies, voice memos). Beside that material, iTunes backs up all my phone service settings and app data whenever I plug in the cable. So I just need to make sure my Mac is backed up.
What are the biggest cons?

Right now, this is mostly anybody’s guess. I could list the major gripes of Apple’s not including Flash support, which I have resolved not to miss, or a bloody camera, which decision Apple can roll up and choke on.
Cost?

Less if you wait a few months. I don’t think they’re gonna make the mistake of dropping the price in 3 months like they did with the iPhone, but eventually used and refurbished models models will be on the market.

2010 is set to be pure mobile fun. The recent massive success of Google’s Android operating system, now proliferated on dozens of phones, means that the iPad won’t be the only decent tablet for very long. New features, lower prices … good times!
Protecting the screen?

Don’t click on this pretty funny link if you’re easily offended. There are going to be enough cases on the market to make your head spin, but any i-anything owner needs to be ready to pay for screen repair. 

In other words, good luck!
I’m thinking of one for my college student.

I wish I had had one in school. I’d go for the $499 one. It’ll be plenty. (I’m going to buy the $629 model with wifi and 3G.)

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Don’t try to email a really large file

I’ve always tried to discourage people from emailing files bigger than 10MB, even if their email host says they can. Email just wasn’t built for it. Turns out, Apple Mail wants to discourage this behavior, too. Or, more likely, it just has a massive freaking bug that should have been addressed years ago.

The bug is, if you try to send an email with an attachment that’s too big for your host, Mail.app can’t get the message out the door, and it stays stuck like Winnie the Pooh in Rabbit’s door, blocking anything from coming in or out.

To continue to mix my animal metaphors, this bug coincidentally randomly bit four different clients in the same week, so I figured I’d post the solution:
  1. Quit Mail.
  2. Go to ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes.
  3. Move Outbox.mbox to the Trash.
  4. Open Mail again.
That should fix it.

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Online sketching & painting

I'm no artist, but since the iPad announcement, I have gotten excited by the creative image-manipulation possibilities opened by touch-on-a-tablet. What a cool portable canvas! 

I addition to mobile apps, some very impressive browser-based applications have come online, so to speak. All of these options give us the chance to express ideas digitally without necessarily having a computer around, or an expensive program whose myriad features we might barely tap.      

So I just wanted to name some of the good ones I know and see if anyone wants to add to the list:

Brushes has been on the iPhone for a little while, and was made famous by the artist who created a cover for the New Yorker on his phone. 

Sketchpad – Online Paint/Drawing application: My browser couldn't do this before. And it ain't Flash. 

Aviary.com: Just heard about this on This Week in Google. Aviary used to cost, but they just slashed the price clean off. Image editing, video effects editing, vector drawing, image markup, sound editing… None of the individual components of this incredible suite of tools would, by themselves, replace their desktop-installed competitors. They're kind of sluggish, and lack ergonomics like shortcuts. But it's a boon to have them available whenever, wherever. And they have a plug-in for Google Apps. 

SketchBook Mobile [iTunes] by Autodesk: Looks like the best sketching tool for the iPhone. I like the layers feature a lot. Autodesk is the developer most entrenched among architects, and SketchBook comes in way handy for marking up drawings in the field.

There are tons of photo-manipulation apps for the iPhone, like Photoshop Mobile and TiltShift Generator (both of which, by the way, also have web apps here and here), but I'll just leave off here or I'll be hunting and testing all night.

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Problems Adding Memory

> I’m trying to add memory to my iMac. I had one computer loaded with > 2 of the 1GB cards. I replaced one of them with a 2GB card, thinking > I would now have 3GB of memory. But now the computer info says I > have one bank with 2GB card and one bank “empty”. Do the memory > cards need to be the same size?

They don’t *have* to be the same size, but newer Macs with Intel Core 2 Duo processors (or older dual-proc G5s) prefer it. But if one stick isn’t registering, it’s either in wrong or the wrong kind of memory. Try shutting down and reseating the RAM.

The easiest place for Mac owners to go is http://crucial.com. Download Crucial’s little, easy system scanner, and let it tell you what to order. Their RAM is reliable and a fine value.

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Worried you might be a spammer?

Begin forwarded message:
From: <postmaster>
Subject: Undeliverable: ****SPAM****
it looks like someone has used my email address to send out spam. Aside from changing my password, do you have any advice about what I should do?

The chances are best that there is someone out there who has your email address in their contacts list on a Windows computer, and that computer has a virus. The virus trawls their address book and sends out spam to everyone, while “spoofing,” i.e. faking, the identity of the sender.

Unfortunately, it would be hard to track down the infected machine. We hear about this kind of situation pretty regularly, and it usually goes away pretty quick. Rest assured, your Mac is not a carrier of this bug.

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Real transcription software for Mac @emwolff

I thought MacSpeech Dictate did this, but apparently it was worth releasing a separate app. Word up!

Say “Hello” to MacSpeech Scribe

Say Hello to MacSpeech Scribe

There’s a new member in the MacSpeech product family, and its name is

MacSpeech Scribe. If you record spoken-word audio files full of notes, concepts, outlines, and other ideas, now with the click of a button you can produce a transcript of those audio files. It’s like having a personal transcriptionist right on your Mac.

Just open a spoken-word audio file with MacSpeech Scribe, click the “Transcribe” button, and watch as a transcript appears before your eyes. What’s more, as long as your audio file contains spoken punctuation, it’ll appear in your transcript too. MacSpeech Scribe supports up to six different voices through individual speech profiles, and it recognizes 13 English language dialects.

Like MacSpeech Dictate, MacSpeech Scribe requires only minutes to train and boasts an accuracy rate of up to 99%. It also lets you easily add new words and acronyms, edit and navigate transcribed documents, and more. MacSpeech Scribe supports a wide variety of high-quality audio file formats, including .wav, .aif, .aiff, .m4v, .mp4, and .m4a.

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Multi-page scanning in 10.6

I’m losing patience with Image Capture in 10.6. I want to scan a multi-page document into one single PDF file.  I want to use the flatbed option on my printer/scanner, because either the paper feeder leaves black lines on my scanned documents or my original images won’t feed through the paper feeder. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how NOT to scan and create single image documents.

It was surprising for me to find that the consumer-level scan software distributed by scanner manufacturers no longer work in Snow Leopard. I kind of like what Apple did, but there is one major problem with it: Scanning can happen in three different places — Image Capture, Preview, and the printer/scanner queue for a given device — and while the engine is the same, and while it’s nice to have options, the whole setup strikes me as not fitting smoothly within the rest of OS X workflow. Plus it’s confusing.

So the possibility you need might be tucked away in Preview (see below), or it might be worth pursuing a third-party solution (see below, but less far down). Here’s what I found:

2) A hidden app on your Mac. I played with this, and it’s a little rudimentary. Be sure not to move the makePDF app from its folder:

3) Try this suggestion from Apple Discussions:

You can make single page .pdf files into a multiple page .pdf files in Preview. Open Preview, and its sidebar. Then drop each page ON TOP of page in the sidebar, then go to File-Save As, and name the new multiple page .pdf.

You can also scan directly from Preview. Open Preview, then go to File > Import From Scanner. It will open up an Image Capture page from which you can scan. No need to open Image Capture.

Clarification from the same thread:

When you open up Preview and click on File > Import From Scanner and select your device, then click on the Show Details button and select Format: PDF and the Create Single Document button.

4) Finally, a hardware/software combination that I’ve been oggling. May not have to do with your problem, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless:

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Our standard setup for an external HD

First buy a LaCie Quadra drive, cos it’s the best value for a reliable drive with FireWire 800. Then plug it in, via FireWire if you have it, to your Mac. Then:

– Open Disk Utility
– Click on LaCie device (not the Setup Assistant partition)
– Go to Partition tab
– Change drop-down to 2 partitions
– Call partion 1 “Macintosh HD Clone” and make it the same size as her internal drive (120GB? 250?)
– Call partition 2 “Time Machine Backup” (size is whatever’s left)
– Hit Options button > use GUID Partition Table (so the hard drive is bootable on an intel machine)
– Click Apply.

– Time Machine will ask if you wanna use the disk. Choose the “Time Machine Backup” volume.

– We use SuperDuper (USD$27.95 from http://shirt-pocket.com) to clone the internal Macintosh HD to Macintosh HD Clone on a weekly basis for a super-important bootable backup.

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Glowing Apple MacBook skins

Robert Marcus wrote:
Like my new mac sticker?

Just kidding. Have you seen this and others? If not here's the link from Wired: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/amazing-iron-man-macbook-sticker/

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Jonathan Marcus <jjmarcus@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 11:35 AM
Subject: Re: Like my new mac sticker?
To: Robert Marcus <joggernut@gmail.com>

That's sweet. First one I knew of that took advantage of the Apple is this:

CreationOfAdam.jpg

From http://www.pvpstuff.com/skins.html (heard about on MBW episode 156: http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/MacBreak_Weekly_156). The glowing Apple's not in the shot, but it's right where the fingers touch.

(BTW, I'm putting this on the blog.)

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Up close and personal with the iPad

Photo by Karl Mondon / Bay Area News Group

Link to slideshow at the Contra Costa Times

My pal Karl, a Bay Area photojournalist, took this about 10 minutes into Steve Jobs presentation yesterday. We texted afterwards:

Karl: So…what’s the verdict? I tried to rub one on my thigh to see if I’d hear violins, but it was too loud in there, and security was starting to eye me.

Me: Heehee! I’m sure there’ll be an app for that. Jobs knows, the porn industry is thrilled by this thing. Well, I’m psyched, of course. Wish it had a camera, and I wanna hear if heavy reading brings eye fatigue, but, shoot, it’s clearly a game-changer.


Karl: Sweet. Hope it’s a bonanza for the J2 MacWhisperer.

Me: Thing is, these devices are so bloody easy, people just do what they want with ’em, and they just work. Once we set someone’s iPhone up, we get very few calls afterwards asking us how to use it. It’s ridiculous. That’s why they design them without the fancy stuff. You want a tablet with two cameras, front and back? (c.f: Jason Calacanis’ predictions at http://twitter.com/jason/.) Somebody’ll make one, probably with Android, and it’ll be good. It may not be as baby-butt smooth as the iPad, and it will owe an elephantine debt of gratitude to Apple’s Platonic ideal of “tablet,” but it will do things the iPad won’t. So goeth evolution, which I guess means they won’t get to use iPads in Kansas.
Other friends wrote in:

Not a problem if they would just make Bluetooth tethering actually do something. GD AT&T. I’m glad it doesn’t have 3G. Love the Kindle Whispernet!

>Jobs certainly did not deign to mention that one can run Amazon’s Kindle app for iPhone on this thing, adding tons of purchasable material to whatever deals Apple has made with publishers.

Very happy with iWork and Camera Connection Kit. Those were deal breakers for me. I’m gonna be looking real hard at some of these replacing laptops for some of my folks. Put a server-managed iMac on their desk and one of these ZERO support beauties in their hands and I’m a happy IT guy.

There’s little question to me that the iPad and its ilk will be replacing laptops and desktops for many people. So many of our clients don’t do anything beyond email, web surfing, and document processing with their computers, and while they love their Macs, the Mac OS is clearly too much and too confusing for many folks, who wish their computer would “just work.”

I’m very pleased, not just because it was one of my predictions, that they highlighted the creative possibilities the iPad presents. It’s a great canvas, and I am going to be happily doing presentations and proposals and spreadsheets on it. Yet I still don’t have a sense of how you save files on it, or whether you can open, say, a Word doc attachment from an email into the Pages app. Google Docs support, pleeeeeeeeeeease?
Also, I was very amused and beaming that, last night, my 9-year-old daughter said, “It would be cool if it could be a keyboard and a painting pad for your computer.” Woah, I hadn’t even thought of that! I’m already using Touchpad Elite [iTunes link] to control my Macs over VNC. The iPad might very well take the place of a Wacom tablet, sans the pressure sensitivity.

Prices seem great without 3G, pricey with. I’m sure most of that addition $130 has nothing to do with hardware. Probably $4 hardware, $126 profit for Apple, AT&T, etc.

I was thinking the same thing. It’s really a jerky gouge, especially considering how much he was touting their pricing. And I’m gonna have to buy the 3G version; I probably won’t pay for the service every month, but I it could be handy, and I think it will be more attractive in resale.

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