Author Archive

I’ve had my iPhone for months now and, until about two weeks ago, I was secretly unhappy with how it handled my email. You see, I get lots of email. Lots and lots, as a matter of fact, and it comes into twelve different accounts. I used to use Apple’s Mail to manage it on my MacBook, and all was good. But when I got my iPhone, I discovered that the phone’s lack of spam-filtering power made it literally unusable for my deluge of email.

I’ve been looking for an application that does this for a long, long time. Little Known Software’s Signature Profiler is a plug-in for Mail that was recently updated to be compatible with Leopard. The plug-in’s core functionality has not changed: it allows you to create dynamic signatures and tie them to specific accounts in Mail. Yes, you can handle multiple signatures in Mail out of the box, but you can add snazzy features that change in every email you send by installing this simple plug-in.

With the introduction of the new iMac a few months ago, Apple released a newly-designed keyboard. It has been received positively, mostly because its industrial design is both visually stunning and potentially reduces the risk of repetitive stress injuries due to the smaller incline. However, several people, including this humble author, have a beef with the fact that Apple rearranged the special-function keys along the keyboard’s top. For no apparent reason, Apple decided that they should move these keys around and, in some cases, remove them altogether.

The good news is that, in at least one case, the missing functionality can be re-found with a simple, little trick.

Our friends over at Lifehacker, are running a great tutorial on how to use SuperDuper (an application we’ve covered before) to copy your Mac’s entire drive onto an external drive. If your drive fails, you can boot your Mac from the external copy without missing a beat. This is a project that we have written about in the past and one that I recommend you undertake. I don’t have a ton of new information to offer outside of the LifeHacker tutorial (which is good) except to point out that there’s another great application, Carbon Copy Cloner, which will help you do the same thing and–unlike SuperDuper–is pure freeware, instead of shareware. Of course, you get what you pay for, and SuperDuper does a lot more as a backup application than Carbon Copy Cloner. So check them both out and see which you like.

This is not an application review; I’m just taking the opportunity to get up on my soapbox and rant. The generally useful site LifeHacker, posted a tip today about an Easter Egg built in to Spybot Search and Destroy (an anti-spyware application that you can use to keep your PC free from malicious software). For those of you who don’t know, an easter egg is a hidden part of a program that is usually something like a game. The idea is that, while you’re sitting and waiting for the application to finish scanning your PC, you can play a clone of the popular Minesweeper game to help pass the time.

Several years ago I worked in a summer camp where Color War was a really, really big deal. During the three-day-long event, campers and staff competed in all sorts of contests, ranging from sports, to singing, to eating, dancing and arts and crafts. One of the highlights of the entire ordeal was a trivia bowl which pitted kids against each other in a quiz show format.

During one of the years that I was in charge of the camp’s technical equipment, we discovered that the quiz show system, which had been built by hand over twenty years earlier out of parts purchased at Radio Shack, had stopped working and was beyond repair. I figured that we could create our own system using computers, but nobody could do it in time and we ended up buying a rather expensive college-bowl-type buzzer system at the last minute. It was really frustrating because I just knew that somewhere, someone had created a quiz show application that would do what I needed… and I couldn’t find it.

Back when the iPhone first appeared, lots of people wrote articles about ways to escape your existing phone contract with another carrier so you could switch to AT&T without paying early termination fees. These ranged from the morally questionable, like abusing free roaming until they fire you, to the absurd, like claiming to be dead. Other people suggested services that claim to help you sell the remainder of your contract to someone looking to get a bargain on one. I enjoyed the former and investigated the latter… but wasn’t successful with either one.

This may be the simplest tip I’ve ever written, but so many people have been surprised when I mention it to them, I figured I would write it up for everyone. It’s a common-sense technique to make sure that, once you decide to plonk down your hard earned cash for an iPhone and enter in to a two-year contract with AT&T, you get the biggest bang for your buck.

I don’t have any magic secret here – your phone is still going to cost you at least $500 – but I have a tip that might serve you well down the road (as long as you are not already an AT&T subscriber).

Everyone has this problem - you have tracks in your iTunes library that don’t have cover art. Whether the tracks came from some obscure CD that iTunes has never heard of or elsewhere, the problem of missing cover art didn’t used to be a problem. However, once Cover Flow appeared in iTunes, the artwork became more prominent. Then, with the release of iPhone, cover art has become even more important. With Cover Flow possibly coming to iPods soon, it will become an even larger part of our music listening experience.

Back at WWDC, when Uncle Steve announced that application developers would only be able to write iPhone applications via the web browser, many people were disappointed (to put it mildly). However, since the product launch, we’ve seen some pretty amazing applications appear for the phone, which goes to show how amazing Mac developers are and how shrewd Apple is to put so much faith into them. One such company is 37Signals, the makers of a slew of web applications that run on any platform in any web browser.

You’re going to waste a lot of time with this one.

TubeTV, a newly-released piece of freeware from Chimoosoft, allows you to search for, download and convert video from Google Video and YouTube for permanent enjoyment in iTunes and, from there, your iPhone, iPod or AppleTV. Yes, you can already search and enjoy some video content from YouTube on two of these devices, but TubeTV lets you get all of it, at your leisure, downloaded permanently for your enjoyment.

Most Mac users fall into one of two camps: they either love the Dock, or they hate it. I fall somewhere in the middle, but, by default, I keep my Dock hidden at all times (via a setting in the Dock sub-menu of the Apple menu) and don’t store any applications there. The only time anything ever appears in my Dock is when it’s running. That works well for 90% of my Dock-OCD, but what about applications that I run all the time? For example, I use Dashboard and Quicksilver, both of which run all the time and both of which have icons in the Dock. What’s a clean-Dock-nutcase like me to do?

You may not know this, but if you have more than one Mac and you’d like to share your Internet connection between them, there’s no need to buy an AirPort base station. Mac OS X comes with the software you need to turn almost any Mac into a base station all by itself.

So, if you have, say, an iMac in your home office and two MacBooks floating around your home, you can share a single cable modem connection between all three computers without purchasing any more equipment.

It’s funny to think about, because of the enormous impact it has had, but YouTube hasn’t been around that long. It was founded on Feb 15, 2005, less than three years ago and, despite the fact that almost anything you ever want to see can be found on YouTube, there was online video before it. There was Quicktime, for example, Apple’s own video format, as well as Windows Media and Real Video. There were others, of course, but Apple, Microsoft and Real were the kings of the online video game.

I don’t know about you, but my life is complicated. I have three different jobs, four kids and 11 different calendars in iCal to keep track of it all. That’s a lot of information to track and, while iCal is great at managing my schedule, its memory footprint is simply too large for me to run it all the time.

I use a third-party add-on application to give me just the calendar data I need, when I need it, in a small calendar that drops down from my menu bar whenever I want and remains hidden the rest of the time. The app is called MenuCalendarClock, is available to work with either iCal or Entourage and is, according to the developer, “the ultimate calendaring utility for the Mac.” (I agree!)