Mac Mode

Usually I don’t post about rumors here, but there are exceptions to everything.

Macenstein:

the Mactactic twist here is they use that data to create countdowns that predict the exact day each item will be updated. For instance, are you looking for a new Mac Pro? You’ll have to wait 1 month and 2 weeks. Mac mini? A new release is only 2 weeks and 6 days away.

Macenstein is talking about the Mac Buyer’s Guide which italicizes the warning that: This page is based on rumors and speculation and we provide no guarantee to its accuracy.

Freeverse Think:

Let’s limit our attention to one application–any application–at any time. Let’s make it easy to change focus when we have to. Let’s allow ourselves to bring other apps up quickly if we need them, but put them out of sight again just as quickly.

I’m not sure exactly what this does from a quick look, but I’m saving it to download and check out later.

IMified is available at http://www.imified.com/ I’m writing step-by-step instructions for how to use this and will be posting at http://www.makeyougohmm.com/ shortly.

Update 7:25am PST: The step-by-step at Hmm is here.

At the beginning of 2007 I started creating a weekday updated videoblog affectionately dubbed Hmmcast. Despite having a nice iSight camera hooked to my Mac I haven’t used it yet.

The iRecord sounds like it might come in handy:

Just open iRecord, and video recording is as simple as pressing the red button. Take a quick photo by dragging the picture to your desktop.

I have used Quicktime Pro … on Windows (don’t shoot!) for compressing to MP4.

Download Squad has a nice how to create an RSS feed widget:

Apple has taken the ease of use of Xcode and whittled it down to scale, providing all the tools necessary to quickly and easily develop your own Widgets.

Apple has a guide too on working with dashcode.

Tools needed
dashcode

It’s good to see Apple making this process more non-programmer friendly. This will expand the amount of widgets and possibly inspire people to learn programming. It’s always good to inspire people to learn more.

The Guardian has an article detailing a discussion with Apple’s Steve Jobs where he comments on the direction Apple might be heading. Also it takes a look at Steve’s ego.

Guardian Unlimited:

In fact, it doesn’t really matter who is presenting or what is being discussed. When Steve enters a room, everything stops and attention turns to him. When he walks in you get the feeling that he has sucked all the other thoughts out of the room. As for quoting him precisely - you don’t take notes if you want to live. (At Apple’s most recent sales briefing, nobody was allowed to have a notebook, phone or computer out while Steve spoke.)

The Mac blog Macenstein has a subscriber magnet with its Mac Chick of the month pictorial with this month featuring Mandy Lynn.

Subscribed.

Just enter the promo code “MACSANTA” and save 20% for anything listed on this page through 12/25. They have an RSS feed too so you can keep up with new additions.

FreewareOSX offers a list of freeware programs for Mac OS X organized in the following categories: audio/video, communication, internet/P2P, games, graphics, programming, screensavers, utilities and word processing.

Thanks Digg.

All Things Marked offers a tutorial on how to manage multiple libraries with iTunes 7:

iTunes 7 has some new and improved features to help people manage their music, movies, podcasts and pictures. One of the long-awaited features is the support for multiple libraries. A library (in the iTunes realm) is an XML file that stores the information about your media you use in iTunes. All of the songs you have in iTunes are referenced in the XML library file. I will show you how to manage multiple libraries with iTunes 7. This is good for people with iPod

This is something I’ve been wanting to learn how to do for some time. Thank you!

My buddy darkmoon from LUX.ET.UMBRA points to Clonetool which is donationware that clones your hard drive so you can easily move your system. Then again, if I’m upgrading to an Intel Core Mac, wouldn’t I just want to backup the important files/programs I use on the Mac? There aren’t that many apps I’ll be moving to my next Mac when I buy one. When will that be? Perhaps next year. The eMac, though getting a bit old, works good for what I’ve been using it for to date.

Offered to keep Mac readers in a holiday mood and because these trees look pretty cool:

Mac OS X only: Freeware program X-MasTree puts a customizable Christmas tree on your desktop, complete with a days-to-Christmas countdown.

via Download of the Day: X-MasTree (Mac) - Lifehacker

I’m a fan of Easter Eggs, having written in depth about this before and challenging Microsoft OS stance on Easter eggs being “grounds for termination.”

The site eeggs.com has an updated list of Mac OS X Easter Eggs and hidden secrets.

From the same folks who made my currently most used to date Apple gadget (RadioSHARK) comes iKaraoke:

sends the music from your iPod to your stereo minus the lead vocals, so you can step up to the mic and sing the lead in your favorite tunes.

Hat tip to Techie Diva.

Just checked Wraparound out and while it is intended for those with multiple monitors it works slick with one monitor too.

Via freemacware:

When the cursor reaches the edge of the screen, it can now wrap around to the other side and keep going. It can work horizontally, vertically, or both.

Feels like much less work navigating with the mouse with screen wraparound.

From the learning and memorization corner comes Ebbinghaus:

An iTunes like application which let’s you easily learn new stuff.

Thanks Freemacware which notes:

Ebbinghaus will teach you with repetition. But Ebbinghaus has a great color coding feature that will keep track of your progress. You also have the ability to input photos. This would be great for memorizing things like country flags.

Adsense widget:

view your Google AdSense™ reports directly from your OS X Dashboard.

With the recent purchase of an 80GB iPod 5g and video purchases from the iTunes store it hasn’t taken very long to empty my eMac’s hard drive. Fortunately I had already partitioned off an external network drive for use on the Mac and set that to be the master drive for iTunes.

But first … had to copy over the iTunes music folder from the eMac which took a little over an hour to move the nearly 18GB of music and video.

My next question is can I set iTunes to recognize multiple drives? Thus by adding another external drive I should be able to keep building on our music and video library.

My wife recently wanted an iPod and bought the 80GB iPod black. We are in the process of putting our entire family’s music on the Mac through iTunes. Since her music tastes differ from the rest of ours in many cases (I prefer more 70s and 80s classic and hard rock and she likes more pop and the kids are over the map), we have begun exploring creating different playlists for each of us. This way whomever is listening to the iPod can listen to the type of music they are interested in.

We learned that by setting the shuffle to “songs” (SETTINGS->SHUFFLE->Songs) it is possible to shuffle within playlists.

I just did some searching through Google to see what creative playlist generating others were doing and came across this strategy from maximumaardvark:

I created five smart playlists. The first three are simple: I call them ‘x-star radio’, where x is a number between 3 and 5 inclusive. The ‘3-star radio’ playlist contains all songs rated 3 stars that have not been played in the last 10 weeks. The ‘4-star radio’ playlist contains all songs rated 4 stars that have not been played in the last 4 weeks. The ‘5-star radio’ playlist contains all songs rated 5 stars that have not been played in the last 2 days (since I use the 5 star rating to mark songs that I am, like, so totally in love with right now). The fourth playlist is a smart playlist that contains all of the songs added to my iTunes library within the last 21 days. I tie it all together with a fifth playlist called ‘@Radio’ (the @ keeps it at the lexicographical top of my playlists). It’s a smart playlist that is defined as the union of the other four.

Sounds like a good strategy. Anybody reading have other good playlist techniques? Here’s a good guide to creating smart playlists I found.

iPodfolder (Freeware, Mac or Windows):

Backup your iPod Music to a folder on your Mac or a folder on another iPod.