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

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.

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.

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.

If you have more than 1,000 messages sitting around in Mail, you are sure to have noticed things can get a little slow. Here’s a neat tip that really speeds things up in Mail.app!

http://www.hawkwings.net/2007/03/01/a-faster-way-to-speed-up-mail

This involves using Terminal, which should be used with care as it can be potentially hazardous to your system. Be mindful of where there are spaces in the commands.

Enjoy a much faster Mail experience!

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.

Everyone’s talking about the iPhone (although no one is talking with it yet), and while this article is about communication, this is the last sentence that will mention the iPhone. For the moment, pass on, you hordes of latest gadget-lovers! We have other fish to fry. Last Website Wednesday Night we had a caller bring up the question of video conferencing between Macintosh OS X and Windows XP. In the past we’ve promised we’d share at least one way to make this work, and today is that day.

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.