iGaga’s MacBlog

Bento: Big On Ease, Style & Stretch

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 04:46:27 -0500

Read my article on The Apple Blog at
http://theappleblog.com/2008/01/21/bento-big-on-ease-style-stretch/

BTW, Did you know that FileMaker is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple?

Macworld Conference & Expo 2008

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 05:14:34 -0500

The Largest Ever. Excitement builds. We are less than one week away from MacWorld Conference and Expo held January 14-18, 2008 at The Moscone Center in San Francisco. With over 400 exhibitors and a 28 percent increase in pre-show registration, it promises to be the biggest show in expo's history. Stay tuned. Or should I say iTuned? (sorry)  The show brings together Mac devotees from many fields. These include the traditional Apple strongholds of education, small business, advertising, music and publishing. The production areas of print, image, video and sound are the haunts of that 900-pound Mac gorilla as well as home office and small business.  Steve’s Keynote And The Hot New Rumors Steve Jobs gives the keynote address at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, January 15th. Like most Mac devotees, I wonder what he'll announce this year. Is it hardware or software accounting for the gleam in his eye? Will he satisfy all the hot new rumors swirling about water coolers and Apple blogspots? Introduce the multi-touch MacTablet? Or iTunes movie rentals?  Feeding the rumors was the recent (December 28) New York Times article claiming that Apple has been in talks with Hollywood moguls for digital movie rental rights via iTunes as well as the leaked 1.1.3 iPhone update. It supposedly fixes and expands many facets of the software, a scaled-down version of OS X, loaded onto Apple’s brisk-selling phone.  Who knows what Steve Jobs will say, but all eyes and ears will be focused on the simulcast.  Mac Base Grows Dramatically In U.S. Although nationally both consumer and corporate computer-related sales were weaker than expected late this year, the Mac base is growing in the U.S.  Gartner estimates Apple's Third Quarter U.S. growth this year to be in the double-digits with shipments growing a whopping 37.2 percent compared with SQLY.  This correlates nicely with the large increase in pre-registration for Macworld Expo and the increases in Macs reported across the nation on college campuses. Take Cornell for instance. In 2000, their Mac toters made up only five percent of students and faculty; now students’ personal computers running OS X comprise 21 percent of the total. Or Princeton: 60 percent of on-campus computer sales in 2007 were Macs.  In 1998 the Eastern event was moved to New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. But in 2004 and 2005, the summer shows were moved back to Boston. This time without Apple. Jobs wanted it to remain in New York in order to cater to NYC’s large creative crowd and when it was moved, Apple refused to attend. In late 2005, IDG cancelled further summertime shows.  Now there is just one Macworld Expo, managed by IDG World Expo and held in San Francisco each January.   2008 Expo Highlights  In addition to the keynote address, there are pavilions for developers (located, presumably, on “Mac Developer Boulevard”), special interest and user groups. There's a Dice Career Fair for Mac professionals, a Learning Center sponsored by Macworld, a Podcast Studio, a Dream Studio for making music, even a John Lennon Bus Tour — I'd hop on that one — and, get this, a Microsoft Blogger Lounge. However, I doubt we’ll meet Bill Gates there: he gives the International CES keynote in Las Vegas January 6.  Exhibitors include old stalwarts like Adobe Systems and Quark, Alsoft, Belkin, Extensis, FileMaker, Griffin, LaCie, Marware, Newer, OtherWorld Computing and Roxio. Relative new names are also represented, Parallels, VMWare, ProjectWizards and many others supporting or accessorizing iPods and iPhones.

Don’t Give Up On Sound

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:42:02 -0500

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to watch the “Don’t Give Up On Vista” video that appeared on the home page of the New York Times website. I could see the video on my MacBook, a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running OS X v. 10.4.11, but could not hear the sound.

When I clicked on the Sound icon in the menu bar, the slider was grayed out. However when I plugged in external speakers I got sound. Now I was stumped.

First I looked in Sound Preferences. In the Output pane there was no evidence of Internal Speakers and all options were grayed out. But I knew my internal speakers were functioning because earlier I had heard the boot chime.

When I looked in the Input pane, it showed external speakers plugged into the Audio line-in port. I was able to move both the Balance and the Output sliders, check and uncheck the square next to Mute.

I unplugged the external speakers, trashed the com.apple.soundpref.plist in ~/Library/Preferences, logged out and logged back in to see if this would fix the problem. It didn’t.

Then I used an external firewire drive as the boot disk. The Sound Preference Output pane was still grayed out. No sound from the internal speakers.

After rebooting to my MacBook’s hard drive, I was going to call Apple with what I thought was a hardware problem, probably somewhere on the board. But I had some writing deadlines and did not feel like driving to the nearest Genius Bar and I was even more reluctant to ship my MacBook to Apple for repair.

Since I had spent most of the morning trying to fix my internal speakers, I decided to listen to the "Don‘t Give Up” video again. And in order to get sound, I’d have to plug in my external speakers.

This time it just so happened that the sun was behind some clouds so there was not very much light in the room. And I had to bend down close to the left side of the MacBook to plug in the speaker cable. As I did so, I peered into the port and could see a red light shining inside. That's funny. I didn’t remember seeing a red light there before: wonder what it means. Must be on the logic board close to the Line-In port, I thought. So what to do? — I’m not going to spend time taking this thing apart — I used a bent paper clip and stuck it inside the port to poke around a bit, for what reason I do not know. (Be polite and call me curious.) And I figured I had a hardware problem anyway, what more harm could I do? (Lots. Like void the warranty. . . .)

After a couple of gentle jabs producing lots of static (I don’t recommend you’re doing this by the way), the red light went out. Then I heard PC talking. I moused up to the sound icon and this time I was able to move the slider bar up to increase the sound.

Later I read that the internal speaker malfunction is caused by a faulty I/O board. Apple will replace it since my MacBook is still covered by AppleCare. But I think I’ll wait for a while to see if it happens again.

Oh. And if you’d like to see the “Don’t Give Up on Vista” video, click here.

A Mean Clean For A Glossy Screen

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:56:55 -0500

Use A Microfiber Ultra Suede Lens Cloth
See my article on The Apple Blog. http://theappleblog.com/

Mac Keyboarding

Wed, 9 Jan 2008 09:41:42 -0500

Apple’s Aluminum Keyboard was the best stocking stuffer for me this Christmas. It is small and cool-looking and has 2 USB 2.0 ports so I can hook up my digital camera to it( but not the iPhone). What’s more, my cats do not like to sit on it.
Best of all is the action, position and feel of the low-profile keys, similar to the feel of the keys on the MacBook’s built-in keyboard. If only I could admit to typing — and I do not — I would say that all in all this is the best keyboard I’ve used in absolute years . . .
. . . even including the old ADB Mac keyboard. I don’t mean the new old ADB keyboards, the flimsy ones that came with the 7500s or the beige G3s, I mean the old old built-to-last IIci or IIcx ADB Mac keyboards. The ones sold separately. So back then if you were thinking about buying a Mac, you first purchased the keyboard for around $160 and that made a sufficient-enough hole in your pocket as to put you onto the other side of commitment. You remember those, don’t you, Virginia? — they were swell, we became so attached that we even used to lug them around the city to jobs. Well, the Aluminum’s a lot lighter. And the key response? Well, in memory, you can’t beat the old ones, but, I’m not so sure they were all that much better. Especially when you compare design and cash outlay.
Not as a test or anything, but just because I am a klutz, about a week ago I got some coffee on the keyboard. (Mind you, we’re not talking Major Spill.) Nonplussed but recovering quickly enough for someone with “experienced reflexes,” I mopped up what I could see. The keyboard has not stopped working yet.
Matter of fact, I am seriously considering buying one for the office.
One eensy negative: I have not yet gotten used to the position of the function key and have to look away from my work each time to use the fn+F11 in order to get to the desktop. (I could probably take care of that somewhere in the Keyboard system preferences, but got other of fish to fry right now.)