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Author Archive for Weldon Dodd

Snow Leopard in Depth: Grand Central Dispatch

Written on July 06, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 4 people have commented

At the beginning of the decade, Intel was imagining that by 2010 it would have processors with over 1 billion transistors running at a clock speed of 20GHz. As we move into the second half of 2009, the reality is that we will soon have 3GHz mobile chips with four cores on them and 2010 [...]

Apple TV & Remote Updated

Written on June 25, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 9 people have commented

I have really enjoyed my Apple TV since the beginning, but I will admit that I enjoy it a lot more with the Remote application on my iPhone. Apple has updated the Remote app and the Apple TV firmware, making the Apple TV even better when used with an iPhone or iPod touch, and perhaps [...]

File-sharing 101 for Small Teams

Written on June 17, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 3 people have commented

Despite all the advances in “Cloud Computing” over the last year or two, a large part of most people’s work is still contained in individual files like documents (Word, Pages, PDF), spreadsheets (Excel, Numbers), text files (HTML, text, notes), delimited data files (CSV), presentations (Powerpoint, Keynote), and images (JPEG, GIF, PNG). Finding the right file-sharing [...]

Snow Leopard In Depth: Exchange

Written on June 12, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 27 people have commented

Even though Apple builds great products for the consumer, the company often misses the boat with business users. Snow Leopard stands to make serious inroads with Mac users in wingtips and pinstripes with native support for Microsoft Exchange Server. Mail, iCal, and Address Book will all be updated to talk directly with your Exchange account [...]

Apple Design Award 2009 Winners

Written on June 10, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 6 people have commented

Apple announced the winners of the 2009 Apple Design Awards last night at a special ceremony hosted by John Geleynse, director of Software Technology Evangelism, and Shann Pruden, senior director for Developer Relations. These awards are an annual affair to recognize “technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement in iPhone and Mac software development.”
The depth and [...]

Snow Leopard In Depth: QuickTime X

Written on June 09, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 19 people have commented

QuickTime has been around since well before OS X, dating back to 1991, but this old dog gets new life in the next version of the Mac OS. QuickTime X, as the new release has been named, follows the theme of Snow Leopard by incorporating both refinements and new technologies. QuickTime player has a new [...]

Snow Leopard: An Even Better Leopard

Written on June 08, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 25 people have commented

In between new notebooks and fawning over the iPhone, Bertrand Serlet got up on stage to talk about Snow Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X. Apple took a few digs at Microsoft for stumbling with Windows Vista and trying to play catch-up with Windows 7. The picture that our friends in Cupertino are [...]

QuickBooks Online Now Available to Mac Users

Written on May 05, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 8 people have commented

We had a sneak peek of the new QuickBooks Online back in January at Macworld Expo, and now the Mac community can start using the service. Intuit announced today that the new release of QuickBooks Online is finally compatible with the Safari browser and, thus, is available to Mac users.

Boxee Adds Pandora Radio and Hints at the Future

Written on March 25, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 5 people have commented

Yesterday, boxee released an update to their media center software for Apple TV and Mac OS X at a New York meetup. CEO Avner Ronen took the stage at Webster Hall to show some significant features in this latest alpha release including Pandora Radio, RadioTime, a new API for add-ons, an XUL-based framework for web-based [...]

Password Management Roundup: 5 Apps to Keep Your Passwords Safe

Written on March 24, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 27 people have commented

Let’s say you’re trying to take over the world and bring all governments under your control. You have to keep records of all this stuff on your computer, of course. Now what if your plan is almost foiled because you chose a stupid password like the Egyptian variant of your Greek name? That’s not very [...]

WeatherCal Adds a New Trick to the Bare Bones Lineup

Written on March 24, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 5 people have commented

WeatherCal may be a one-trick pony, but it is one nice looking pony all the same. This $10 release from Bare Bones Software marries weather data and iCal in a very elegant utility.
In a nutshell, WeatherCal creates calendar events in iCal with the five-day forecast for any location around the world. It starts out by [...]

Fonts 401: Additional Font Resources

Written on March 19, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 2 people have commented

There were a few additional resources that did not fit in our rundown on font management applications. So continuing our Font School series, here are a few additional apps and articles on fonts.
Some Reading

Best Practices for Managing Fonts in Mac OS X – 5th Edition — This free PDF from Extensis is a great place [...]

Fonts 301: Managing Fonts and Font Problems

Written on March 18, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 5 people have commented

Who needs font management? If you have ever installed additional fonts on your Mac, then you do.
Because of the Mac’s wide adoption in the desktop publishing and design world, managing fonts in OS X has long been an important, if unpleasant, task. The Apple tools have always been meager, but Leopard has made important improvements [...]

Five Developers React to iPhone 3.0

Written on March 18, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 13 people have commented

With all the big announcements from Apple’s iPhone briefing yesterday, the web has been abuzz with talk about the impact this will have on the iPhone. I managed to corner a few iPhone developers that have paid releases out in the app store now to get their first reaction to the news.
Smule
The team at Smule, [...]

Fonts 201: Font Management Apps for the Mac

Written on March 17, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 20 people have commented

If you are a designer, then you know the joy of having thousands and thousands of fonts available to use in your projects. You probably are also familiar with the despair of waiting for apps to launch, font menus to draw, and the horror of kernel panics when you get Font ID conflicts, the stray [...]

Fonts 101: A Font Primer

Written on March 16, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 10 people have commented

Over the next few days, I will be covering everything from font management apps to how to deal with font problems. By the end of the week you’ll hopefully have a solid handle on how to manage and troubleshoot fonts on your Mac. We’ll begin this series by taking a look at the history of [...]

Airport Firmware 7.4.1 Update Available

Written on March 06, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 62 people have commented

While we were expecting new firmware for previous generation Airport Extreme and Time Capsule devices to drop this week, some will be disappointed that this update does not magically update the hardware as well.
Airport Firmware 7.4.1 enables the Back to my Mac disk sharing feature announced this week for previous generation Airport Extreme and Time [...]

First Look: Amazon Kindle for iPhone

Written on March 04, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 26 people have commented

That sound you heard across the Internet late Tuesday night was every tech blogger on the planet clicking on iTunes to download the new Kindle for iPhone app. This free app lets you read any of the hundreds of thousands of books that are available in Amazon’s Kindle Store. The Kindle for iPhone boasts the [...]

Software Updates Explain Dual-Band Networking

Written on March 03, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 8 people have commented

Along with all the hardware updates, Apple has released a few software updates as well.

AirPort Client Update 2009-001
AirPort Utility 5.4.1
AirPort Utility 5.4.1 Windows

The Airport Client and Airport Utility Updates add support for the latest Airport Extreme and Time Capsule models announced earlier today and provide some further details about how dual-band networking will be implemented. [...]

New Airport Extreme and Time Capsule

Written on March 03, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 6 people have commented

The Airport Extreme and Time Capsule were updated today with some new features that, while they don’t change the basic capabilities of the devices, do make them more flexible. Both devices now offer “guest networking” and simultaneous dual-band networks. All of the new features apply equally to the Airport Extreme and the Time Capsule. The [...]