MacMAD Blog

The App store, as well as Android Marketplace, needs a systematic way to try an app on a trial basis. Right now, all risk is on the customer. If you buy an app and it doesn’t meet your needs, you are just out the price of the app, with apparently, no recourse. It’s really difficult to tell from comments and screen shots whether a given app is any good, or whether it will work for you. iTunes lets you hear a good part of a song before you buy. Apple should extend this idea to apps, by allowing a trial period.

Some publishers publish a trial or free version of their app, but what I’m looking for is a general scheme that works for all apps. I would be much more likely to buy a paid app, especially a more expensive one, if I could try it first.

Does anyone know of any existing way to do this?

-Jamie

For our May meeting, Dennis Crowley presented secrets of the MacOS.

We peeked into some seldom-seen corners of your favorite Mac applications. Everyone learned something at this meeting.

Resolving Duplicates in iTunes
In iTunes, you often end up with duplicate, or nearly duplicate songs, that you might want to eliminate. The menu option Find Duplicates ordinarily finds any two songs with the same title. If you hold down the option key, this menu item becomes Find Exact Duplicates.

Address Book
Most people don’t know that you can print envelopes and address labels directly from the humble Address Book application. Select File:Print, and explore the extensive print dialog box that appears. It contains many powerful options, including templates for printing on the commonly available Avery labels. You can even customize your return address with an icon. This is great for sending invitations or Christmas cards.

Show Birthdays in iCal
Add birthdays to your address book contacts with Card:Add Field:Birthday.
Birthdays from address book can show in iCal, but you must enable this in the preferences. In Address Book, you can customize the fields. You can change a field for one card, or add a specialized field to the template used for all your Address Book cards.

Tips for Mail
Did you know you can select multiple mail messages and then Save Attachments?

Also, you can select two or more mailboxes such as your inbox and outbox, and then select View:Organize by Thread. This view makes it easy to follow the conversations you were a part of.

Use the rules feature of Mail to help control spam, and to put mail in the desired folders.
Dennis uses the Previous Recipients list in a rule to help determine if a message is spam. Mail keeps this list of every email address you have ever used, whether they are in your address book or not. You should take a look at it occasionally to delete unwanted entries, and to add wanted ones to your address book. The previous recipients list is also used to make pop-up suggestions as you type email addresses, so your life will be easier if you delete incorrect entries.

Dennis likes the free plug-in Letterbox, which adds the option to moves the preview pane to right side of the window in Mail.

Smart Folders are a powerful tool in Mail. Smart folders show a kind of virtual view into your mail. For example, you could make a smart folder that shows any message containing “MacMAD”. Beware that if you delete a message from a smart folder, you are deleting the original message everywhere.

iPhoto Tips
iPhoto opens faster if you turn off sharing. If you’re not using photo sharing, you should turn it off.
If you hold Option-cmd while opening iPhoto, you will see several options, including the option to rebuild your iPhoto library. Make sure you have good backups before doing this.

iPhoto has its own trash. Deleted photos still take up space on your hard drive until you empty the trash from within iPhoto.

Preferences
Dennis went over some gems from the System Preferences. His best tip was to always explore the preferences pane of a new application to find out what it will do for you. You may find features that will pleasantly surprise you.

Other Apps
Dennis recommended the use of SuperDuper! as a backup utility. It makes a complete copy of your hard drive.

Use the free utility Monolingual to save space by removing unused foreign language support from your system and applications.

Apple’s Preview application can merge PDF files! If you have several separate PDF documents, you can drag and drop them to create a single merged PDF document.

Where did these tips come from? It should be no surprise, but Apple has some excellent tutorials on using the Mac. These videos tend to be short and to the point. See:
http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/ or for switchers from Windows, see http://www.apple.com/support/switch101/ .

Also, Macworld has some excellent tips. Visit http://www.macworld.com/howto.html .

Members are eligible for a 30% discount from Take Control Ebooks . Just ask one of the club officers. We are not allowed to put the discount code on the web. These books tend to cover their topic in great detail. If you are looking for in-depth discussion of a specific topic, try these.

See you next meeting.

-Jamie

Adobe has had some issues with security of their products lately. Because Flash and Acrobat are invoked from the user’s browser while browsing the web they are available to be exploited by malicious web pages. Because these products are widely installed, they are an attractive target for hackers. Adobe doesn’t seem to be taking these problems seriously enough, as you will see.

First of all, I urge you to make sure your copies of these products are up-to-date. Adobe has been releasing security updates to fix some exploits that are already being used by hackers. If you are using a Macintosh, there’s a good chance you don’t need or have Adobe Acrobat installed. That’s because Apple’s Preview comes with MacOS and does a fine job displaying PDF files.

If you don’t know why you need Acrobat reader instead of Preview, you should delete it from your Mac. Preview won’t handle some of the more esoteric features that can appear in PDF files, which is precisely why it is less likely to be hacked. If you do have Acrobat Reader installed on your Mac, this may be of interest to you.

One of the gee-whiz things Acrobat supports is embedded Java Script in PDF documents. Not only can it read the documents, it can execute them! That’s dangerous. That’s why security expert Steve Gibson (www.grc.com) has been recommending on the Security Now! podcast that users of Acrobat go into the preferences and turn off Java Script.

But what happens if you have Java Script turned off, and run into one of the rare PDF documents that actually uses that feature? Here’s what happened on the Windows version:

And sure enough, if you click Yes, it re-enables Java Script not just for that one document, but for all time, leaving the door wide open for the hackers.

This is very poor. Adobe is arrogantly assuming that they know better, and that you really should have that turned on from now on.

I have been seeing weird behavior in iPhoto and Aperture when editing photos. This is happening pretty much every time I try to use certain photo tools, such as crop or straighten. Here’s some examples. I took photos of the screen with a camera, because this is too weird for a screen capture, I think.

First, select an innocent photo of a bird in iPhoto, and select the straighten tool:

Now the slightest adjustment of the straighten tool:

Here’s another manifestation using the crop tool. That weird rectangle in the upper left shouldn’t be there. Also notice the appearance of the overview thumbnail (it looks like the same junk as the photo above).

The first time I saw this, I though my photo was probably ruined, and I would have to reboot. However, I have found that the problem is only on the screen. Fortunately, the photo is not permanently affected. Usually, as soon as you exit the edit mode and look at the picture, it looks normal again.

I called Apple Tech support about this once, but didn’t really get anywhere. The problem was present under Leopard and persisted after the Snow Leopard install. I am using a 20″ iMac 2GHz Core 2 Duo.

-Jamie Cox

We saw and discussed a video tutorial podcast from ScreenCastsOnline about iTunes 9. We were using iTunes to learn how to use iTunes. Humm.

Tutorial podcasts can be a great way to learn about your Mac. They are usually brief, and usually packed with a lot of information. There is something for everybody. I’ve been using a Mac since 1984, and still learn some useful tips from some of the basic tutorials.

Apple’s own video podcasts are a great way for beginners to learn about the Mac. All podcasts are free. Podcasts were originally audio, but many now have video.

We also took a look at iTunesU and the Free on iTunes page, both accessible from the front page of the iTunes music store.

Someone asked about importing a VHS tape into the Mac. To do that you need a hardware converter box, such as the EyeTV 250 from Elgato.

Several members are using the EyeTV software or hardware to record TV programs off the air. There is a TV tuner for the Mac from Hauppauge which is compatible with the EyeTV software.

For watching all that video on your TV, you might want to use an AppleTV, or a similar set-top box, such as the one from Western Digital mentioned at the meeting.

AT&T U-verse (TV/phone/internet service) is now rolling out in the Melbourne area. The service got some good reviews from those that have it. It’s not available everywhere, though.

-Jamie Cox

I don’t know why Apple’s iSync is sooo bad! For years, I have suffered with duplicate entries whenever syncing between two or more devices or services. Whether it’s Address Book vs. Palm, or .Mac vs. Google, a huge number of my contacts turn into duplicates. Even things I haven’t changed in years are affected.

On looking at the duplicate entries they are apparently identical. Why oh why can’t Apple’s iSync be smart enough to recognize these automatically?

Right now, I’m trying to clean up my address book which now has hundreds of contacts which have 2, 3 or even 4 duplicate entries. That’s a lot of work that I shouldn’t have to do. This stuff should just *work*. This is not rocket science.

I’m currently on the newest version of MacOS, Snow Leopard, MacOS 10.6.2, but as far as I can tell, nothing has improved on this front in many versions.

When syncing, it will also randomly pick some items that are in “conflict”. When you click Details, it asks which version of the contact you would like to save. However, in a horrible user-interface bug, it usually fails to show any of the contact details which would allow you to make an intelligent choice! You just get “John Doe, .Mac”, “John Doe, Address Book”, pick one. How do I know which one is right? It doesn’t show the phone number, email address or anything else! UI Fail.

I can’t be the only one. Anyone else have these problems too?

-Jamie Cox

P.S. It *is* nice that Apple added sync with Google contacts as an option, but it doesn’t work any better than the other options.

Here’s a quick list of interesting links and products from MacMAD’s October meeting:

iGlasses Provides detailed control over your iSight camera settings
MacHeist Cheap Mac Software bundles every week
TidBits Long time excellent Apple & Macintosh news
PodWorks Free program to access, play and copy songs from any iPod to any computer
PD+Rescue Allows you to rescue songs stranded on your iPod or iPhone after your computer fails or goes missing. PD+Rescue allows you to move songs back to your computer from the iPod

I recently had my first Intel-Mac kernel panic. If you’ve never seen this, a gray curtain slowly descends over your screen, and you get a message in the center of the screen saying that you must reset your Mac using the power button. If you had any unsaved work, it is lost. This happened twice on my iMac. At first I didn’t know why. I was afraid I would have to take it in for service. I also suspected a problem with my external USB hub.

However, when I took the USB drive I was working with down, and gave it to my wife, it crashed her MacBook Pro with a kernel panic as soon as she inserted it. That’s when I realized that even though it didn’t crash my machine right away, I had been working with that flash drive both times. Also, I had never used that particular flash stick before.

It was a a 1GB drive from Staples, and it had the U3 “feature”. If you’re not familiar with U3, it is an attempt to add functionality to flash drives by using a special partition on the drive that contains software to be launched automatically when the drive is attached, with no intervention by the user. This software is supposed to extend the functionality of the drive by providing encryption/decryption and other on-the fly features. This scheme is inherently dangerous. It could have been invented by malware authors, since it is perfect for the spread of viruses.

U3 is supported in Windows, and most U3 features are Windows-only. Most Mac users regard U3 as an annoyance, since it takes up some of the space they could otherwise use on the drive, and it puts a second, useless icon on their desktop.

The most frequently-asked-question about U3 is: “how do I get rid of it?”. To their credit, SanDisk, one of the leading manufacturers of flash storage provides a removal tool. It’s called “Launchpad Removal Tool for Mac“. It’s part of the Cruzer Utilities for Mac. It worked fine and the offending drive now works without crashing the Mac.

Heads up to Apple on this: The kernel shouldn’t panic when a drive is inserted. The fact that it does probably represents a vulnerability that someone could exploit in malware.

When shopping for flash drives, I recommend avoiding U3 drives altogether. Otherwise, get the tool and remove the offending partition the first thing.

-Jamie

Sometimes you need access to a computer which is not nearby. Maybe it has that special software or hardware installed, maybe it has your unique files, maybe it’s your Mom’s computer. In any case, the computer you have at hand won’t do — you need to access that other one.

In such a case, you need remote desktop software. Like many people, I’m a Mac at home, and a PC at work. But, I can access my work PC using the Remote Desktop Client from our friends at Microsoft. It’s a Macintosh client for accessing a remote Windows box.

Using RDC (Remote Desktop Client), the screen of my Windows computer at work appears on my Macintosh. Using my Mac’s mouse and keyboard, I can do anything I could if I were sitting in front of that other machine. The newer verison of RDC is an easy to use application that integrates well with the Mac environment. It features an optional full screen mode, so you can use every pixel of your screen for the remote system.

It’s a lot like using a virtual machine, like Parallels. So much so, that this may be a solution for people who occasionally need to run Microsoft software, but mostly use a Macintosh. If you already have an account on a Windows machine somewhere that you can remote into, you can get your work done that way, instead of installing a virtual machine.

Apple offers a similar product, logically enough called Apple Remote Desktop. It performs the identical function, Mac-to-Mac. There are a couple of important differences, though:

1. Microsoft Remote Desktop is free. Apple Remote Desktop is $299.
2. Microsoft Remote Desktop is available cross-platform. Apple Remote Desktop is Mac-Only.

Microsoft ships the remote desktop server and client with every Windows install, and you can download the Mac client for free. Apple on the other hand, charges big bucks for the client, and it is only available for the Mac.

Apple, you’re pretty far behind the competition on this one. You’re gouging your fans here. Ouch.

-Jamie