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- TUAW and Marketcircle team up for a Daylite / Daylite touch giveaway
Filed under: Software, iPhone, iPod touch
The Labor Day weekend here in the US always heralds the unofficial end of summer, which means it's time to stop playing and to start getting back to productive work. Marketcircle, the makers of the Daylite Productivity Suite and the companion Daylite Touch app for iPhone and iPod touch, has combined forces with TUAW to help you get out of your summer sloth!
Whether you're a student or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the Daylite Productivity Suite (click here for a TUAW review) is a powerful tool for keeping track of your calendar, your contacts, projects, emails, and just about everything else in your life. Coupled with Daylite touch for mobile access, you'll get your priorities straight in no time at all.
Marketcircle and TUAW want to give away copies of the Daylite Productivity Suite to two lucky TUAW readers, each with a companion one-year license for Daylite touch. To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment below describing your top organizational priority. Here's the requisite legal jargon:
- Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, and to legal residents of Canada (excluding Quebec), who are 18 and older.
- To enter leave a comment below describing your top organizational priority.
- The comment must be left before September 7, 2009, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
- You may enter only once.
- Two winners will be selected in a random drawing.
- Prize: One copy each of Daylite Productivity Suite and a one-year license for Daylite touch.
- Click Here for complete Official Rules.
TUAWTUAW and Marketcircle team up for a Daylite / Daylite touch giveaway originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: iPhone - Apple - IpodTouch - United States - TUAW
Переслать - Traveling this weekend? Win a $100 gas card from App Cubby and TUAW
Filed under: Cool tools, iPhone, Holidays
According to statistics released this week from AAA, 39.1 million Americans are expected to take a trip of 50 miles or more away from home. That's a lot of driving, a lot of gas, and consequently a lot of cold hard cash. TUAW and App Cubby would like to help make this holiday more fuel efficient -- and for one lucky TUAW reader, a lot less expensive.
Tracking fuel economy over time is the best way to make sure you and your vehicle are driving as efficiently as possible. With Gas Cubby [iTunes link] on sale from now until Labor Day for only $2.99, you've got one less excuse for not being more aware of your gas consumption. Gas Cubby makes tracking fuel economy quick, easy, and, dare we say, fun (that's what Dave had to say in his review of Gas Cubby 2.0).
Leave your favorite green driving tip in the comments and we'll select someone at random and send that person a $100 Shell gas card.
- Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
- To enter leave a comment telling us your favorite green driving tip.
- The comment must be left before Monday, September 8, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
- You may enter only once.
- One winner will be selected in a random drawing.
- Prize: Shell gas card ($100 value)
- Click Here for complete Official Rules.
TUAWTraveling this weekend? Win a $100 gas card from App Cubby and TUAW originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: IPhone - AppCubby - Apple - TUAW - Eastern Time ZoneПереслать - TUAW's review of the DroboPro, plus a discount deal for readers
Filed under: Enterprise, Hardware, Peripherals, Features, Reviews, Deals, Mac OS X Server
Data Robotics delivered their "super-sized" version of the Drobo earlier this year. DroboPro has 8 drive bays into which you can drop 3.5" SATA drives of almost any capacity, from the old 160 GB model you've been using to hold the backup of your iTunes library to that 2 TB Western Digital Caviar drive you just purchased. Using a proprietary storage technology called BeyondRAID, Data Robotics makes it easy to use a DroboPro to give you a big box 'o storage right now, and easily expand in the future.
Data Robotics recently lent me a DroboPro for a detailed review, and I was able to give it a thorough workout. Read on to find out more about the DroboPro and an excellent deal available to readers of TUAW.Continue reading TUAW's review of the DroboPro, plus a discount deal for readers
TUAWTUAW's review of the DroboPro, plus a discount deal for readers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Mac OS X - Apple - TUAW - DroboPro - Data RoboticsПереслать - Snow Leopard: what's to love (or at least appreciate)
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, OS, Software, Snow Leopard
As you're probably well aware, Snow Leopard broke a lot of applications, some utilities, even some older hardware. For non-developers, Snow Leopard may seem to have more negatives than positives right now. That will change -- things will smooth out as everyone catches up -- but I thought I'd point out the things that have really made me happy in Snow Leopard. As I promised in my post on what Snow Leopard broke for me, this will be a cheery post. I'm not ignoring the multitude of comments on that post, which amount to a short novel on Snow Leopard breakage, I'm just trying to lighten the mood.
No more pesky font conflicts
I'm pretty good about managing fonts. I had some niggling conflicts with Helvetica Neue, though, that I just couldn't get to disappear. The first time Snow Leopard booted, it didn't just nag me about the conflict, it offered a new button to move the offending file to the Trash. Bam. No more font conflicts and no more searching for the culprits.
System Services
Services in Leopard are highly-evolved, and in my opinion, downright amazing. Sure, all of my existing custom services broke, and many services bundled with applications aren't functioning, but again, this will smooth out with time. The simple fact of the matter is that the Services menu now functions the way it probably always should have. You no longer have to go up to the Application menu, select Services and then navigate to the service you want in a confusing list. If you had a lot of services in Leopard, you know what I'm talking about. I could never remember the exact name of a service, and there was a 70% chance it wouldn't be in a subfolder named after the application. That's no good, and Service Scrubber could rarely hack through my jungle of services in order to shorten the list. Instead of all that, we now have Services which show up in a contextual menu (right click/control-click), and are contextually intelligent, showing only applicable services. Further, you can create your own services using Automator, and make them do anything you want. It's never been this easy, even with tools like ThisService.Continue reading Snow Leopard: what's to love (or at least appreciate)
TUAWSnow Leopard: what's to love (or at least appreciate) originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Snow Leopard - Operating system - Apple - TUAW - Unofficial Apple WeblogПереслать - Snow Leopard 101: Application Switcher Exposé
Filed under: Mac 101, Snow Leopard
One of the refinements in Snow Leopard is a slightly under-the-radar trick for using Exposé from the Application Switcher. The Application Switcher is a quick way to jump between open applications, similar to the Windows Alt-Tab (at least that's what it was last time I used Windows). On a Mac, it's triggered by holding down the Command key (next to the spacebar) and then tapping the Tab key. Subsequent taps of the Tab key will start selecting the next app in the row of applications, ordered by their most recent usage (so the last application you switched from is one Tab away). Shift-Tab moves backwards through the list. You can also navigate using the left and right arrow keys ... and in Snow Leopard you can press the up or down key to show all of the windows of the selected application using Exposé.Once Exposé is up, you can navigate the open windows using the arrow keys, and press Space to temporarily zoom a window for closer inspection. Pressing Return will switch to that application, with the selected window in the foreground. Escape will cancel the whole deal, dropping you back to your current working window. Also, once you've entered Exposé from the Application Switcher, it behaves just like Dock Exposé, and pressing Tab will advance to the next application in the list and Exposé its windows. See the video below for a quick demo, noting that the window zoom is triggered with Space, which isn't shown in the keyboard HUD on the video.
Thanks, Alexandre and Jonathan!
TUAWSnow Leopard 101: Application Switcher Exposé originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Snow Leopard - Apple - TUAW - Exposé - Operating systemПереслать - Xcode 3.2 Daily Tip: Restoring Monaco
It's a Menlo world in the new Snow Leopard Xcode. 10.6's Xcode uses the Menlo Regular-11 font for the standard Xcode template. If you miss Monaco (and I know I did), it isn't hard to restore the look and feel of Xcode 10.5's defaults. That's not to say there's anything wrong with Menlo. Menlo is a lovely font. It's just not a familar font and some strange part of my brain keeps freaking out every time I look at the screen.
I'll probably force myself to adapt to Menlo at some point but for the moment, I'd rather just stick with Monaco. So to do that, here are some quick instructions. As you'll see you'll need to create a new theme based on the Xcode default theme and update its font settings.
To start, open Xcode > Xcode Preferences (Command-,). Choose Fonts & Colors. Select the Xcode Default theme and click Duplicate. Enter a name for the new theme (e.g. Normal Xcode Theme) and click OK. Select the new theme, and then select all categories within the theme. To do that, click on any item and then choose Edit > Select All (Command-A).
With the categories all selected, double-click in the font column. A font panel appears. Select Monaco 10 in the font panel and then close the panel. Click OK in the preferences pane and boom. You have returned to a font comfort zone.
Got any Xcode font preferences? Can you recommend a font that's better than Menlo, Monaco, or the good old standby Courier? Let us know in the comments.
TUAWXcode 3.2 Daily Tip: Restoring Monaco originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Snow Leopard - TUAW - Xcode - Software development kit - Unofficial Apple WeblogПереслать - AT&T tries to repair the PR damage
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, iPhone
We've complained often about the PR mistakes that AT&T has committed. Customer communication has been poor or absent.
The result has been sinking approval for the company, and AT&T is pretty much getting the blame for any problems the iPhone has.
After finally announcing a date for MMS functionality yesterday, AT&T is taking the proverbial bull by the horns and talking about the issues that have left many customers angry and hoping for a way out of their AT&T contract. Namely: 3G coverage concerns and bandwidth issues that affect speed and connectivity.
So now we have a YouTube video with a dude that looks a bit like 'Mac' on the Apple TV ads (or Stephen Colbert's kid brother). He's a bit untidy and has a couple days of stubble, not the usual AT&T pristine spokesperson (think Bill Kurtis on the AT&T Mobility ads). He identifies himself as 'Seth the blogger guy.'
I couldn't find the new video on the AT&T Wireless site, but it may be there somewhere. I did notice that the company still hasn't updated the MMS information, so it still says 'coming late this summer'. Oh well.
The video is below.
We've seen Seth before. He was hauled out in all his geekiness in July to talk about AT&T free Wi-Fi at company operated hotspots. We also had the pleasure of his company in June to talk about the unpopular iPhone 3GS upgrade policies.
Well, does it work for you. Feel all better now? I didn't think so.
TUAWAT&T tries to repair the PR damage originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: iPhone - Apple - AT&T Mobility - Multimedia Messaging Service - YouTubeПереслать - Unsung Snow Leopard feature: multiple-language spell checker
Filed under: Software, Tips and tricks, Snow Leopard
OS X has had a system-wide, built-in spell checker for a while now, but until Snow Leopard, it could only check the spelling of whatever your default language was. But what if you needed to prepare a document in another language, say for a college Spanish assignment? In that case, you'd end up with a document with pretty much every single word underlined in red, with no reliable way to spell check it.
But now, OS X offers simultaneous spell checking not only in four different varieties of English, but also in Spanish, French, German, Italian, and six other European languages. You can mix and match these languages in a single document, and the built-in spell checker will intelligently adapt to whichever language it thinks you've switched to. Pages from iWork '07 doesn't seem to benefit from this new feature, nor does the 2008 version of Word, but it works just fine in Safari and TextEdit. With TextEdit you get an added feature: once it figures out what language you're typing in, autocorrect will work for that language just as well as it does for English.
So, for example, when you write in Spanish, the computer's dictionary knows it has to look for words in Spanish.
Or, if you'll forgive mi español descompuesto,
Entonces, por ejemplo, cuando tú escribes en español, el diccionario de la computadora sabe que tiene mirar por palabras en español.
That last sentence would normally have red underlines under nearly every word, but using TextEdit in Snow Leopard the spell checker adapted to Spanish spelling as soon as I finished typing "entonces." It also auto-corrected espanol to español, which is much easier than having to type option-n, n to get the tilde above the n.
The adaptation seems to happen on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. In other words, the spell checker doesn't seem to be intelligent enough to recognize when you switch languages in mid-paragraph, much less mid-sentence. The spell checker will do its best to figure out the primary language of the paragraph; for example, if you type a few words in English but the rest of the paragraph is in Spanish, the English words will show up as misspelled.
There's some potential for confusion if you switch back and forth between languages within paragraphs, but between paragraphs there's no apparent issues.
This would have come in really handy a couple of years ago; after opening some old Spanish assignments I had, I found some of my compositions riddled with minor errors (mostly misplaced accent marks) that the spell checker in Leopard or Tiger never would have caught.
¡Viva la Mac!
View the video below for a brief glimpse of the new spell check behavior in action:
TUAWUnsung Snow Leopard feature: multiple-language spell checker originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Apple - Snow Leopard - TUAW - Mac OS X v10.5 - OS XПереслать - Will Snow Leopard really make my computer any faster?
Filed under: Macbook Pro, MacBook, Leopard, Snow Leopard
We've seen the benchmarks. We've heard from the techno-geeks. According to Apple, Snow Leopard should result in some impressive speed gains, and hefty hard drive space recapture. But does this speed bump actually result in tangible benefits for the average user? Do you really get back a functional amount of hard drive space? I undertook an intentionally low-tech approach to find out, looking at the space on the drive, and using my iPhone's stopwatch function to time various functions before and after upgrade. I took measurements on two computers: a low-end, bare bones white MacBook used lightly as a secondary computer, and a higher-end MacBook Pro used heavily as a primary computer. The white MacBook was generally speedy and efficient before the upgrade, due to the fact that it had very little installed on it. However, the MacBook Pro was bloated and slow due to lots of programs, with problems magnified by years of hard drive image flashes over various computer upgrades, typical of the non-technical business user.
All start up times are true start up times. In other words, I didn't deem the computer to have "started up" until I had full, no-lag control of a fully-propagated desktop. Same went for the programs whose start up times I tested -- none were deemed started up until the program was responding to input and usable. I picked some common programs that I felt reflected typical use. I turned on auto-login to the primary account on both computers to gain timing accuracy. Not all the results are comparable between computers; certain programs were on one computer but not the other. But, in general, the task was instructive.
Continue reading Will Snow Leopard really make my computer any faster?
TUAWWill Snow Leopard really make my computer any faster? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Snow Leopard - iPhone - Apple - TUAW - Unofficial Apple WeblogПереслать - Cartoon Creator: a great introduction to animation in an app
Remember flip books? Get a stack of paper and draw something on the first page. On the next page, draw just about the same thing moved slightly, repeat until you run out of paper. Staple the pile together, flip through the pages and if you did it right, your drawings move like an animated cartoon. That, in a few words, is the basis of movement in all animation and motion pictures. When you go to the movies, the projector displays 24 frames per second giving the illusion of movement.
Flip books used to come in Cracker Jack boxes, be sold in stores, and steal hundreds of hours of kids lives who were taken with the idea and who made lots and lots of them. I was one of those kids.
Well, there's an app for that. Cartoon Creator [iTunes link] is a fun app that makes flip books on your iPhone or iPod touch running OS 3.0 or later. Choose a pen and a color and go to work. Draw something on page, click the empty face button and an overlay drops over your first page allowing you to see what you did but also letting you draw a slightly moved version. Wash, rinse and repeat until you have a full animation that will play back at any speed you determine.
The app has some very nice options, like three different pens, each with a thinner or thicker line, lots of colors to choose from, and a bunch of cartoonish sounds that you can attribute to any page. If you are creating an animation of a brick being thrown through a window, why not assign a glass breaking sound to the page where the brick hits the glass?
In addition, and this is something near and dear to my heart, it does anaglyph 3D, (red and cyan) with the appropriate glasses. This works remarkably well. The app gives you the ability to draw on three planes. Along with regular drawing that appears on the plane of the screen, you can draw behind the screen and in front of the screen as well. After digging out my anaglyph glasses, I found this to be some of the best anaglyph 3D I remember seeing. The image is sharp, clear and very dimensional.
This is a really nice app, and a great introduction to animation and 3D. It would be perfect for kids. My flip book period took most of my ninth year. It would also be great if you can actually draw. I have absolutely no talent in this area.
When you run the app, you are presented with a an uninviting lined screen titled 'Cartoons.' Big detriment there, but the web site provides full instructions on how to use the app. This is a problem I've seen with many apps. Load it and then what? At the very least having a link to the site would be a help.
Another problem with the app is that you can't delete anything but a particular page. If you are a screw-up like me and want to delete an entire animation, you can't. Any time you start an animation, an entry named Untitled appears and you can't get rid of it. That may not seem like much of an oversight to someone who can draw, but it's me reviewing this app and a delete option would get more use than anything else.
These two slights are minor and I'm sure can, and hopefully will, be fixed in a an update. As it stands now, it's a fun app, does great 3D, can waste countless hours and might even teach kids about animation.
At $.99US it's worth the money and at the same time you'll get to feel good about yourself when you think of all the trees you're saving.TUAWCartoon Creator: a great introduction to animation in an app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: iPhone - Apple - IpodTouch - TUAW - Cracker JackПереслать - Xcode 3.2 Daily Tip: Upgrading Xcode
Filed under: TUAW Tips, Developer
For those about to code, we salute you.
Developers: are you ready to upgrade your new Snow Leopard install to Xcode 3.2? The Xcode installer package appears in your Snow Leopard disc's Optional Installs folder. Double-click the mpkg file to open the installer and begin the installation process.Xcode 3.2 offers a number of really great new features, several of which will be highlighted in upcoming daily tips. Standouts include the new built-in static code analysis, the two new LLVM compiler front ends (GCC 4.2 and Clang), and the new Build Results window.
Until you install, you may run into problems using the standard C compiler from the command line. (It threw errors about not finding <stdio.h>, etc.) This despite the fact that I had already re-installed the iPhone SDK.
Once I upgraded to the new Xcode, and rebooted, the command line cc started working again. The reboot step seemed necessary because cc didn't work until I did so. There might have been a less extreme alternative I'm not aware of to use instead. (If you know of one, please let me know in the comments!)
You'll need to re-install your iPhone SDK packages as well. Make sure you download the SDK versions that were built specifically for Snow Leopard. The iPhone Dev Center provides both Leopard and Snow Leopard SDKs for each of its standard and beta distributions. Install these packages after upgrading to Xcode 3.2. I did not and ran into trouble with project creation (as well as the already mentioned command line cc) until I finally got the install order corrected.
Update: Remember, the iPhone SDK packages do not include Xcode 3.2, so just downloading the iPhone SDK for Snow Leopard will not upgrade Xcode.
Thanks go to hatfinch for his help.
TUAWXcode 3.2 Daily Tip: Upgrading Xcode originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Snow Leopard - Apple - Xcode - TUAW - IPhoneПереслать
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