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

I’m a big fan of lists, so here are my favorite, most well-written weblogs about tech, Macs, efficiency, Lifehacking, Getting Things Done, etc.  They’re all fairly famous, but with any luck you haven’t heard of some of them.

• Daring Fireball
• Graceful Flavor
• 43 Folders
• LifeClever
• Rands In Repose
• Theocacao
• Lifehacker

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

Changes in Boot Camp 1.2 beta

Boot Camp 1.2 beta contains several updates and is intended for all new and previous Boot Camp beta users.

Boot Camp 1.2 beta includes:

• Support for Windows Vista (32-bit)
• Updated drivers, including but not limited to trackpad, AppleTime (synch), audio, graphics, modem, iSight camera
• Support the Apple Remote (works with iTunes and Windows Media Player)
• A Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp information and actions
• Improved keyboard support for Korean, Chinese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, and French Canadian
• Improved Windows driver installation experience

If you’ve been hearing this term “Web 2.0″, but don’t know what it means to separate form and content, this is a fantastic video that explains it all. If you are a future web designer, or are one already, but need a way to explain what it is you do to your out-of-touch relatives, here’s how. It’s Web 2.0 in under 5 minutes.

I tried to embed the video but was foiled at every attempt, so here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

It’s kind of like faster-user switching, but staying within the same Account!

A prospective customer of ours, new to the Mac, found, downloaded and is enjoying the software, and wrote us:

The website is here:
http://virtuedesktops.info/index.php/downloads/

The actual download is not easy to see.
It is here.

http://virtuedesktops.info/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/VirtueDeskt

This is a beta and a non-apple solution.  The upcoming release from apple (leopard) is supposed to have this function built in.  This beta has worked well for me.  The worse thing that has happened is that it has quit once or twice.  So I keep a copy on my desktop to restart it.

Back when I used Windows I had this fantastic tool called WinDirStat that would let me visualize graphically my hard drive usage. It helped me find and delete huge video files I no longer needed and the like. When I switched to Mac, I found a port of it called Disk Inventory X , but it seemed to be really slow and hog resources. Then recently I heard about GrandPerspective . It’s native and really fast. It’s not as pretty as WinDirStat, but it’s got it where it counts.

I’m not sure who came up with the three-pane system most software mail clients (and some web clients) use, but I’m desperately curious as to what they were thinking. It’s one of those things we don’t normally think about because, well, we’ve just been using it forever and gotten used to it, but how many times have you had to fiddle with that middle divider to get just the right amount of body showing and still be able to see more than a few e-mails. It just doesn’t make any sense to cram two fields that need to be long on top of each other. Enter Letterbox .

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is essentially a means of controlling another computer remotely. It can be done on a LAN or over the internet. People use it for all sorts of things, but offhand, it sounds like it would be great for tech support, right? Assuming the problem isn’t a network one, you could just VNC into Grandma’s computer and fix the problem. Unfortunately not. VNC usually requires a bit of configuration, most of which if not all needs to be done on the client-side. And since Grandma is the one who needs tech support in the first place, she’s probably not going to be capable of forwarding ports through her firewall. Even if you managed to set it all up in advance, invariably an IP address will change or you’ll need some type of information that Grandma just can’t give you.

This e-mailed to us from Adobe:

Dear Adobe Photoshop user:

We are pleased to let you know that the Photoshop family is growing!

Photoshop software has always been at the forefront of digital imaging innovation and we’ve given you a taste of things to come with the Photoshop CS3 beta. Today, we want to share the news that Spring 2007 will bring not just one, but two versions of Adobe Photoshop: Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended.

There are so many different ways to set something like this up. This final installation of this blog series if going to mainly focus on what I’ve experienced so far, and what I plan on doing with my network.

So, my network at this time includes:
Airport Extreme
Airport Express
Cable Modem
Epson R200
LaCie 250GB External
Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro
Core Duo Macbook
tv or Mac Mini eventual purchase

As you may have noticed by now, I’m pretty serious about this project. I have been ripping DVDs every day since the tv was initially announced back in September under the code name “iTV”.

I had no idea where I would end up when I started, but now that I am finished with Parts One and Two, I know what I need from here. I will share with you know some things to consider.