Tips for Taking a Screenshot on Your Mac
I’m not sure exactly how many times per day I use the built-in features of my MBP to take a screenshot of a web page that I am on, but it’s more than once per day for sure. Why? I think it’s more because I can than for any other reason and also because it seems like the most effective way to get my point across to my team (whether it is a web developer, writer, or SEO staffer). The shortcuts that I use are second nature to me but I recently found out that some of my employees had no idea they even existed (what a shame). So here is a quick list of some cool things our Macs can do with built-in screenshot functionalities:
The iTunes Syncing Issue…and the Fix
First and foremost, I love iTunes. It has to be one of the (if not the) most used apps on my 27-inch iMac and my 17-inch MacBook Pro. I mean, come on, damn near everyone uses iTunes. In the recent update, however, I have been experiencing issues when enabling the conversion of songs to 128kbps AAC format, which I might add saved over 4GB on my 32GB iPhone, 64GB iPad and 64GB iPod touch. Sacrificing a teeny tiny bit of sound quality saved me all that space on all my iDevices. However, seems like the iTunes software keeps converting the songs after the have already been converted every time I sync my iPhone, iPod or iPad, making the syncing progress rather long when a typical sync is usually snappy. I thought that I was the only one having this problem until a friend of mind heard me talking to myself asking “I wonder why iTunes keeps doing this?” while I was enjoying my Caramel Macchiato in Starbucks. He mentioned to me that he was experiencing the same issue. On top of that, I recently have been getting a few emails from my friends mentioning the issue.
Repair Your Permissions, Speed Up Your Mac
Over time all our computers start to take a bit of a performance hit, things start to slow down, things just don’t run the way they should. Sometime applications lag and don’t do exactly what they are designed to do. There is a quick fix to all of this which should help speed up a few things. In disk utility there is a the option to repair disk permissions.
Repairing disk permissions goes through and corrects any errors with any permissions, which will make buggy applications correct themselves, and could speed up the overall performance of your mac.
How-To: Monitor your network on your Mac with Wireshark – Snow Leopard Tutorial
Wireshark is an amazing utility that lets you view and analyze captured packet data from your network. It has become a must-have for many institutions and their admins.
It features support for inspection and decryption of literally hundreds of protocols, with more being added constantly. It supports live capture, and also allows you to save, export, and compress data for further analysis later offline. It’s display filters are top notch, as well as it’s UI.
How-To: Use Facebook to Assign Address Book Photos
In theory, the idea of having a photo assigned to each Address Book entry is both smart and simple. Make sure you remember the right face with the right name. It’s incredibly handy if you also have an iPod Touch or iPhone. However, dragging and dropping hundreds (if not thousands) of photos onto names in your Mac Address Book? Tedious and ineffective.
In today’s MacApper How-To, we’re going to show you a little app to bridge the divide between Facebook and your Apple Address Book.
1) Head on over to the Apple.com downloads section, and grab a handy little app called AddressBookSync.
How-To: Sync your Palm Pre with your iTunes Library
In our recent MacApper Podcast we discussed the iTunes 8.2.1 update that eliminated the Palm Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes. One of the Pre’s major selling points was it’s ability to masquerade as an iPod and sync natively with iTunes. If you’re a Pre user feeling left in the dust, or looking to buy the Pre, this is a simple way to get that sync back between your iTunes library and your Pre.
How-To: Remote Lock for your Mac
Apple’s new Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe MobileMe features got me thinking: shouldn’t there be an easy way to do something similar for your MacBook? After searching for Freeware and coming up empty, I came up with my own solution. I doubt the Department of Defense will take it up as new practice, but it’s handy never-the-less. This trick is crude, but it will “lock” your Mac from anywhere you get cell coverage.
Intro to Web Development: Using Dashcode as an Editor
You now know about the tools required to code and publish web pages, let’s look at one of them in particular: Dashcode.
You may know dashcode to be a really useful tool to create dashboard widgets – but what are dashboard widgets but miniature web pages. I’ve chosen this tool because it’s simple and free to download. Here is where you can find Dashcode:
Cocoa Development Part 2: Tools
Last time we talked about some great programming books, and how to start developing. Today we will dive into some of the great tools available to Cocoa Developers.
Cocoa Development Part 1: The Beginning
Cocoa is an API consisting of many old frameworks from the NeXTSTEP days and new ones that Apple has introduced since then. Cocoa uses a language called Objective-C, which, being based on C, means that you can use C as well. Before you start to even learn how to use Cocoa and write code in Objective-C there are a few things you will need.
