Friday, November 16, 2007

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) (13 сообщений)

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  • TUAW Tutorial: Custom Stack Drawer icons

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    Many folks commented on our recent post about adding those gorgeous drawer icons to your Stacks. As great as the originals are, however, a lot of you also wanted to know how to customize them. Fortunately, the original author was kind enough to make the blank drawer PNG available, so in this little tutorial I'll show you how to make your own customized drawer icons using nothing more than Preview. Obviously you can get much sophisticated results using a more serious image editing application, but Preview can do enough to get you the results you see above and since everyone has it, I thought it best to focus on using it despite its limitations.

    Continue reading TUAW Tutorial: Custom Stack Drawer icons

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  • 1.1.2 Jailbreak updated to include activation, PPC support

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    The latest release of the 1.1.2 jailbreak now includes activation (the bit that allows you to use the phone without the connect-to-iTunes screen even if you don't have an AT&T account), YouTube support, PowerPC support and, best of all, a statically compiled readline -- so you don't need that libreadline library installed as a separate piece. You can read more about the jailbreak and download the zip file from its Conceited Software page.

    Thanks to Fasone

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  • Beta Beat: DropCopy for iPhone

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    Eric Redlinger of 10base-t dropped me a note to let me know that DropCopy for iPhone now has a stable beta release. DropCopy is a Mac-based utility that allows you to copy files from one machine to another by dropping them onto a sharing window. The iPhone beta extends that functionality to support phone-to-phone, phone-to-mac, and mac-to-phone file transfers. You can download a copy of the beta here (download link). I'm really looking forward to giving this a try. Good work, 10base-t guys!
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  • Seven cool features of Leopard that might get stubborn friends to upgrade

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    There are dozens of little niceties in Leopard: like how Front Row now lives on my iBook (sans remote) and allows me to operate the thing as a sort of thin-client media jukebox (courtesy a Mac mini server). Or how Font Book now prints books of your fonts (especially nice for those non-techies). With the 300+ new features, I still have yet to fully explore this thing, but I'm certainly starting to believe this is the Mac OS Apple really wanted to deliver a few years back. There's no doubt in my mind this is a big turning point for the platform, and I really believe user adoption in 2008 will be unprecedented as a result.

    Following is a list of features and specific "cool things" I think you can point out if you are trying to explain to a friend why they should upgrade.

    For the record, I installed Leopard on a 1.24 GHz iBook G4, and it runs beautifully, which in itself is a selling point.

    1. Finally, a Record button for your actions
    Automator now has a UI recorder. Anyone who remembers the good old days of macro recorders before OS 8 will look at this and sigh, but I, for one, welcome my new robot overlord. Automator is finally useful for mortals with UI recording. Oh sure, it isn't perfect, but it really beats trying to explain just the concept of Automator to the average human. Never mind the metaphors and the workflow within Automator itself -- eyes will glaze over. UI recording is absolute heaven when you do a lot of drudge work, like contracts, filling, prepping photos, etc.

    2. Mail gets GTD fever
    If power users turn up their noses at Stationary in Mail, point out how they can now put their notes, to-do's and RSS into Mail. I haven't really set all this up as I'd like yet (the iBook isn't my primary work machine), but my unfettered hatred of Mail.app is somewhat lessened now by the fact that it is starting to behave like a "real" email client. The notes and to-do's are icing on the cake, but also very important if you like to get things done and stay organized. A few smart folders and you have a truly powerful system. Still, it is disappointing to see Apple take half a decade to figure out the whole "archive mailbox" thing, but pobody's nerfect I guess.

    3. Web clipping makes Dashboard relevant again
    My wife quit using Dashboard long ago. It simply served no purpose for her. But web clipping, baked right in to Safari? That had her mildly interested. Tracking the top 3 Twitters, or whatever the top story on Perez or TMZ happens to be with a keystroke is a selling point for folks who aren't using RSS. The only downside is that you need a pretty big screen if you want more than a couple of pages to appear.

    4. Shared drives finally "just work" and Shared Screens work with other OS'es
    Granted, there have been issues with networking in Leopard, but seeing shared Macs in my sidebar? That's pretty sweet. In previous versions of OS X you had to click on Network, now it just shows up. Is a few clicks a big deal? Well, for the average user, yes, this is a big deal. The average user doesn't like to explore. They can be timid, and frankly, don't necessarily know (or care) what the Network thing even is. Displaying networked components directly in Finder will greatly increase the probability that users will at least see everything. It has already saved me time when trying to reconnect and move things around my home LAN. For me, the real fun was seeing how VNC "just worked" when I was able to access my Mac mini (which was already running as a VNC server) via Screen Sharing. Even though the mini runs Tiger, and despite a slightly wonky connection, overall it was super easy to set-up. Think about it another way: average users don't want to run a third-party application like Chicken of the VNC. Average users don't necessarily trust those apps (thank you, Bonzi Buddy) and it is a lot easier to remotely control a machine if the functionality is built into the OS. Oh, and did I mention you can share screens with Linux? I finally have a use for that old Dell laptop and my Ubuntu CD!

    Continue reading Seven cool features of Leopard that might get stubborn friends to upgrade

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  • TuneCore offers iTunes Music Video sales

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    Earlier this year, I posted about TuneCore, a service that allows you to sell your music on iTunes. Now TuneCore has given us the heads up that the service has expanded to include Music Video sales. You can upload your music videos to iTunes and sell them alongside all the normal music labels.

    Selling your music video is kinda pricey. Expect to pay $125 plus $20/year for a 5 minute-or-less video. Compare that with the $20 you'd pay to upload an album with eight tracks that I priced out in my original post.

    Unfortunately, the service I'd really like to see isn't there yet. You can't use this feature to host non-music videos. TuneCore writes that iTunes has a different set of standards for short films, shows and movies and that you can only sell music videos at this time. Hopefully regular videos will soon follow because I know of a lot of wedding videographers, ballet and karate schools, and other for-profit and not-for-profit organizations who would love to get access to the iTunes store to sell their products.

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  • Drop your iPhone data plan, keep voice

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    Sick of paying $20 a month for EDGE? Want to save $240/year? TUAW reader Josh tipped us off to his iPhone News post that reveals that you can now remove it from your plan. If you rarely use EDGE and live around ubiquitous WiFi (like I do), this is a great way to save some money.

    I gave this a try myself but my GoPhone account didn't have the on-web option shown here. So I gave AT&T a call. It was, as always, an adventure and although I was told that you had to do this over their IBR IVR voice recognition system, I did find a service agent who was able to help me in person. (The IBR kept putting me in Spanish mode for some reason. Go figure.)

    So as of my next billing cycle, my iPhone will now drop its EDGE/Data plan. This means I'm losing visual voicemail and EDGE access. Neither is a big deal for me. I can still check my voicemail by calling my iPhone on a landline, typing star (*) and entering my passcode. It also drops my monthly cost to $29.99/month--more than I want to be paying but not quite so much as before. I keep my AT&T account and, presumably, some level of Apple support and warranty service.

    This option won't be of interest to those of you who pull down the big megabytes over EDGE but for us WiFi folks, it's fab.

    Update: You may want to install Services.app, a program that allows you to disable EDGE while retaining calls and WiFi service.

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  • Set custom iPhone CSS signatures

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    Here's a great how-to that I've been meaning to post for a while. Blogger David F. Bills posted a tutorial for adding custom CSS signatures to your iPhone email defaults. The process involves copying over your preferences file and adding the CSS code to the SignatureKey preference.

    This gets very interesting when Bills shows you how to add a custom image to your signature. You actually have to encode the image directly so it arrives with your message. Otherwise, spam blockers may block the image download if you just use an HTML link.

    It's a really easy to follow method and I had very little trouble getting it set up to include the signature shown here. My biggest obstacle came from my tendency to paste everything in TextEdit. For this project, PropertyListEditor works better and more reliably due to the length of the pasted key.

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  • iPhone PXL format goes dark

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    The iPhone Package and eXtension Library (PXL) was the open source community's response to Nullriver's wildly popular Installer.app. It worked with the iBrickr tool on Windows and Breezy tool on OS X. During its heyday, it enjoyed mild success but the release of iPhone firmware 1.1.1 put the first nails in its coffin. Breezy stopped development. iBrickr has not yet been updated to support 1.1.1.

    The main PXL repository has closed up shop. A note on its main page states that Extremis, the repository maintainer, will no longer be maintaining the PXL packages. Since no volunteers have stepped forward to pick up the reins, the PXL project is for all purposes dead.

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  • Cocktail 4.0

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    Cocktail 4.0 is out and brings to this system utility a host of new features. The biggest item in Cocktail 4.0 is Leopard support. 4.0 also adds Sparkle updating, new Automator actions, better help, and lots of bug fixes.

    Cocktail allows you to tweak a dizzying number of things about OS X. This is a must have tool for all you Mac geeks out there, and it is a steal at $14.95 for a single license.
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  • TUAW Responds: Reader requests 1.1.2 Header Bundle

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    TUAW Reader scw wrote in asking if I could put together the headers for the 1.1.2 Frameworks in a downloadable format. Scw, your wish is our...um...command Number 1 Priority request. I took out some time and zipped up a complete 1.1.2 header bundle for you. TUAW hopes this helps you update your files for 1.1.2.
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  • Opaque Leopard menubar solved

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    The famed annoyance of the translucent Leopard menubar has finally been solved. Steve Miner has posted a tip that involves changing an environment variable by editing a plist to make Leopard think it's running on an older Mac that doesn't support the translucency. Once done, it will make your menubar solid white. The guys at Many Tricks (of Butler fame) take this to the next level with Menu Bar Tint, which places a pleasing tint gradient over your now blindingly white menubar, and thus returning your Leopard desktop to harmony. So there you go, if you just what an opaque menubar, run Miner's trick; if then want it to look better, have a look at Menu Bar Tint.

    Update: Gruber points out that commenters on Mac OSX Hints have discovered that Miner's original tip includes a kind of scaling factor. Apparently a setting of 0.63 gives you a greyish menubar "like the opaque menu bar Leopard shows on systems with older video cards." Doing it this way does not require you to have Menu Bar Tint running all the time, and yet apparently still gives a gradient (see below).
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  • Fidelity Market Monitor for the iPhone

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    I'm going to honest with you, dear reader, I know next to nothing about stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. This blogger's little mind just can't wrap itself around financial matters, but our friend's at Fidelity Investments make it their business to help fools like me. Today, Fidelity has launched the Fidelity Market Monitor for the iPhone (and your iPod touch too!).

    The Market Monitor is a web app that lets you track 25 stocks or mutual funds, gives you access to charts, stories about those stocks on Fidelity.com, and the ability to click a link and call Fidelity (in case you have a hot stock tip you must act on right away).

    This differs from the iPhone's stock widget in both the source of the stock information, and the added bonus of links to related Fidelity news posts. Does that make it better than the Stock widgt? That's up to you to decide, I'm too busy gathering some money to buy a bridge in Brooklyn from this nice guy I know.
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  • TUAW talks Flickr with Connected Flow

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    I have a disclosure to make: I love FlickrExport - Connected Flow's very excellent plugins that allow you export photos straight from iPhoto, or Aperture, to Flickr. It's the reason I took to Flickr - at a time that their website uploader was somewhat basic. Fraser Speirs, the man behind Connected Flow, was kind enough to chat with TUAW about the future of the plugin, and shared a few words about his forthcoming application.

    Continue reading TUAW talks Flickr with Connected Flow

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