4 Apr
Computerworld has an opinion piece on the Top 25 overlooked and underrated features in Leopard.
I haven’t used iChat much but the iChat theater feature sounds interesting. The Guest log-in is a great feature too.
I didn’t know about the Mosaic screensaver. Guess I need to create some iPhoto libraries and check it out!
15 Mar
Senior engineering manager, Michael Lopp, from Apple discussed how the company comes up with their extremely palatable designs.
Seems rather straightforward, and I think many companies have a similar process… but just fail somewhere along the execution…
13 Mar
Update available for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. (12.0.1)
Increases stability and fixes some syncing problems with Entourage.
5 Mar
Fortune has recently run a couple articles on Steve Jobs and Apple.
The Trouble With Steve Jobs – gets into the options backdating that was found at Pixar and Apple as well as some insight into Steve Jobs.
What makes Apple golden – details how Apple is one of America’s most admired companies.
2 Mar
I’ve been using the iMac for 2 months now and realized that I hadn’t resized a photo on it yet. I had copied a few large photos onto the desktop and wanted to e-mail them to a friend – of course I didn’t want to blow up her mailbox with 2 meg files, so I thought I would quickly resize the images.
Looking through iPhoto and Preview, I couldn’t find any option to resize image. Annoying.
Turns out the way to resize a photo is to use iPhoto and then File / Export the image. At that point you can resize it.
Not intuitive nor user friendly.
Update: Thanks to June for pointing out my idiocy – there is an “Adjust Size” option in Preview under the Tools menu. My cursory search online led me astray.
26 Feb
You may be familiar with this scenario. You download a document from the internet – an application form or some other document that you need to fill out.
Why… why… why do people save these forms as PDF files? Even worse not even in the PDF form format where certain fields are editable but as a pure .pdf.
This means that unless you own a PDF editor, you have to download the form, print it out, and then either edit it with a typewriter or handwrite onto the printed form. Perhaps you can scan it in and convert it into a text document that you can then edit, but that is also an annoying step.
I went on a search for freeware that would allow me to edit PDF files. Windows wins out in this regard, I was able to find PDF-XChange Viewer. It is freeware from Tracker software products. It allows you to enter text into a PDF (admittedly clunky – you basically have to draw textboxes where you want to put text). It works for basic purposes.
Sadly, for Leopard on the Mac, I was unable to find any freeware tool that would allow me to edit a PDF file. I thought Skim would do it, but it doesn’t.
Score one for Windows.
And to go on a mild rant – while I love my Mac, it does frustrate me to hear about how they’re more stable and that things are just “more intuitive.” Ultimately I think people are simply more forgiving when it comes to a Mac.
Here’s an example of user-UN-friendliness. To re-index Spotlight:
“Open the Spotlight system preference, click the Privacy tab, click the plus button, and add the volume you want to reindex. Wait five minutes, select the volume in the privacy area, and click the minus button to remove it. Spotlight will index the volume again from the ground up.
Note: Before reindexing the drive, repair permissions. Also, if the drive has just recently been indexed, give it another day or so before reindexing. It’s possible that Spotlight hasn’t completely finished indexing the drive even though you’re allowed to use it.”
