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

From time to time, for a plethora of reasons - we may lose connection with Mail. No, that sentence was not just an excuse to use the word plethora. Your Mail settings may have changed, you could be having issues with your ISP, but regardless of the issue - Mail troubles can be confusing and frustrating. But there’s help!

Under the Window menu in Mail, is a little tool called Connection Doctor. This feature arrived with Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” , and was designed to diagnose and fix networking issues directly from Mail.

We’ve had reports of some issues from a variety of customers regarding Apple OS X Mail. The issue seems to cause sent messages to occasionally end up in the Drafts folder, and appear as though they have not been sent, though they have. I have done some research to try and find a solution to this, but so far have been unsuccessful. I have noticed in my research, however, that people from all over the Apple community are experiencing the exact same issue with all kinds of different mail services, including Apple’s .Mac Mail. Evidence suggests that this is an existing bug with Mail.app.
Here are some examples:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-57000.html
http://forum.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=600

If you have attempted to partition an external drive to include an OS boot disk on a new Intel Mac, you may have noticed a few options. In Disk Utility, you have three options for partitioning.

GUID Partition Table - used to create a boot disk for an Intel-based Mac.

Apple Partition Map - used to create a boot disk for Power PC Macs, or non-startup disk for any Mac.

Master Boot Record - used to create a boot disk for DOS/Windows machines.

Make your Mac into an internet router! Sometimes it’s convenient to use a friend’s internet connection for a moment, when visiting them at a hotel, or a Starbucks, for instance. You can share to and from many of your connections, including airport (wifi), ethernet and even firewire.

Visiting a friend at the Hyatt Regency yesterday to listen to his presentation at the InHowse Designer conference (brought to us by How Design ), I found myself in his room afterward. He could get internet access through an ethernet cable by his desk, or through WiFi, however, the connection is good for only one computer… unless, you use that one computer to provide access to other computers.

For those of you who want a better understanding and want to go beyond the basics, there’s amazing depth of features available in Apple’s Mail.app. As of this writing, not updated since last Summer (2005), this site from Sam’s Publishing still has valuable information.

My friend Joe came to our office today, he’s been trying to use Yahoo Messenger on his 12″ PowerBook to communicate with his friend in Italy, on her Windows system.

Here’s a tutorial he’s going to try, let us know how it goes:

http://www.mvldesign.com/video_conference_tutorial.html

We have a caller tonight that is having problems opening Pagemaker files, from OS 9, in InDesign.

InDesign CS 2 should open Pagemaker files from 6.x -7.x. If you have InDesign CS (not version 2), and you have a version of Pagemaker between 6.0 and 6.5, you may have to update to InDesign CS 2 to open those files.

Other things you might try include standard operating procedures:

Open a document as a copy:

A. Start InDesign & choose File > Open.
B. Select Copy & find your file.
C. Select your file & click Open.

For those people in search of alternative web browsers for Mac OS X, and for Windows, too, we keep recommending Firefox and Opera to Mac users, along with Apple’s Safari , but we haven’t yet talked about how to synchronize your bookmarks, or even just move them over! once you’ve made the switch to a new web browser. Given many people horde, er, I mean collect many, many bookmarks (”favorites”), this is potentially an important issue we’ve neglected to address, as my family was quick to point out.

Having “discovered” the capability accidentally just recently, I wondered when did Apple introduce this useful trick? I found out, along with solving other mysteries of iTunes, AirTunes, the Airport Express and its imitators, through visits to a local Apple Store and some good old-fashioned gumshoing, er, I mean Googling.

When Apple’s Airport Express first flew onto the market two years ago this month, you may have thought:

We had a caller looking for audio software to manage live recordings. If you’re looking for specific functions, Apple’s archives are a good place to start, that is, if GarageBand, Apple’s software free with new computers or iLife upgrades, is not enough for you:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/audio/

Note that the latest version of GarageBand as of this post on June 15, 2006, version 3.0.2, has a bevy of tools for podcasts, both live and canned, and should not be discounted until tried. I’ve used GarageBand for everything from recording our radio show live, through preparing ring tones for both my wife’s phone, and my own.