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.
Tutorial: Mac Internet Sharing (with Xbox 360)
A very hidden and somewhat unused feature of Mac OS X is the internet sharing application which can be found in System Preferences > Sharing > Internet Sharing. This feature is very basic and easy to setup but it allows you to share the incoming internet connection on your Mac with other computers in your vicinity. You can even turn your Mac into a wireless hub using this feature. We’ll help show you how to set this up properly in this guide, along with a step by step tutorial of how to use your Mac’s internet connection in order to get your Xbox 360 online without having to purchase a wireless adapter.
Keep iCal and GCal in Sync For Free
The blogs have been buzzing as of late about Google’s introduction of the CalDAV protocol into its Google Calendar service. For those of who who live on the planet Jupiter, Google Calendar is the excellent free online calendar service that resides in the cloud. One of the major trends in technology is maintaining a connection between apps in the cloud, and apps on your physical machine. With the introduction of CalDAV to Google Calendar, it’s never been easier to keep iCal and Google Calendar in sync, let alone for free.
Make Your Own Menubar SSB With Fluid
We at MacApper are big fans of Fluid, the Site-Specific Browser (SSB) creator application from Todd Ditchendorf. This handy little app, which we’ve discussed before, allows you to take your favorite websites and turn them into applications in and of themselves. Basically, you get a fully functioning browser without all the clutter of toolbars and icons of your conventional browser (although you can get that stuff back if you want it). However, with the latest version of Fluid 0.9.2, a couple of new very useful features have been added. In this MacApper tutorial I’ll be explaining how you can create your very own SSB, which you can choose to put in your Menubar as a menubar item or actually on your desktop. Click on after the jump to see how to get started.
Safari-esque Firefox: Themes, Extensions, And More
On the Mac, there are many web browsers available. Mozilla Firefox is a great cross-platform browser, but until recent betas it hasn’t been very efficient or overall good-looking on the Mac. Apple’s Safari is simple and elegant, but lacks any official plug-ins, making it difficult to do the kind of advanced work that you can with Firefox extensions. For today, we’re going to be focusing on these two popular browsers. Many people seem to like the simplicity and integrated interface of Safari, but wish that they could have the wide array of extensions available for Firefox at their disposal.
