The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2006 second quarter ending April 1, 2006. International sales accounted for 43% of the quarter’s revenue. During the quarter, Apple shipped 1,112,000 Macintosh computers and 8,526,000 iPods, representing 4% growth in Macs and 61% growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.

Full article can be found at Yahoo Finance .

Jason Snell is the editorial director of Mac Publishing, including Macworld magazine, Macworld.com, Playlistmag.com, MacOSXHints.com, and MacUser.com. He’s been covering the Mac for more than a decade. Jason began his career at MacUser in 1994 and has written and edited extensively on Mac issues ever since, both in print and online. He has been writing and publishing on the Internet since 1991.

Area of expertise:

Senior spokesperson, Commentary on Mac/iPod industry and Apple news.

Head over to Safari!

As discussed on the show tonight, unlike Windows where you go to the Tools to set the default web browser, in OS X, no matter which browser you’d like to use, set the default within the General preferences of Safari, Apple’s own, free web browser.

You’ll see the first pop-up menu is called “Default Web Browser:” and it should show any and all browsers you have installed on your system.

After the Adium post, Cody writes I’ve got to try Meebo:

http://www.meebo.com

“… It’s web based, does msn, yahoo, jabber and aim coded in ajax and it runs reallllly smooth”

http://www.adiumx.com/

Recommended to me by Todd Dailey, wonderful human being that he is, during a discussion about encryption. Adium allows you to log into multiple services at once (ie: AIM *and* .Mac), use tabbed windows, and what brought me to Adium, is it’s most excellent encryption (OTR, or “Off the record” messaging).

Oh, the graphics are really cute, too.

A top OTR link is here, if you’d like more info on it:

http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

I’ve always thought that the way things “poofed” when you dragged them out of the sidebar was cute. But the first time I accidentally dragged a CD from the Sidebar, poofing wasn’t cute at all. It was really annoying.

I don’t like extra icons cluttering up my desktop. So I have my Finder preferences set to display hard drives, connected servers, CDs, DVDs and iPods in the Finder window’s Sidebar.

The first time I wanted to eject a disk in OS X, I tried dragging into the Trash, just like I had always done in OS 9. The icon poofed and the disk didn’t eject. I did manage to eject the disk, but the next time I inserted a CD, it didn’t show up in Sidebar.

Is your bloated iCal slowing down your computer? Use a simple preference to remove tons of information in one easy step.

Here’s how:

1. Open iCal.
2. In the Finder menu, click on iCal and choose Preferences from the menu.
3. In the dialog box, click on the Advanced button.
4. Select the delete events option and choose the age of the items that you want to remove.
5. You’ll get a dialog box warning you that iCal’s about to do what you asked. Tell it yes.

That’s it. You’ve cleaned up your calendar and should have a faster-running computer.

The next time you need to add bold or italic text to a Microsoft Word document, don’t click the B or I button in the Formatting toolbar. Use keyboard shortcuts to apply basic character formatting.

To add bold, press Command B then release the keys and start typing. To end the bold styling, press Command B again. For italic text, press Command I and release the keys. To end italic text, press Command I again.

Use some keyboard shortcuts to open and close new Finder windows automatically.

Double-click on a folder in Icon or List view and it opens in the current window. Hold down the Command key when you double-click and the folder contents open in a new window. Hold down Command and Option when you double-click to open a new window and have the old window close automatically.

Use Safari’s Mail Llink command to email a webpage to friends and family.

Let’s say you that you find a webpage that you want to share with a friend. Just choose File > Mail Link to this Page or press Command Shift I. The command automatcially opens a new Mail document with the link neatly in place.

If you want to send them the entire webpage choose File > Mail Link to this Page or Command I instead.