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Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category

Holiday Buying Guide: Picking the Right Digital Camera

Written on November 18, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 4 people have commented

With Black Friday rapidly approaching, the time of the year for spending is upon us. Although I’m sure all of us Mac lovers are considering which Apple product we’ll be blowing our budget on (mine will be a Magic Mouse), there are also the other gadgets in our lives to consider.
One of the most important [...]

iPhone Quick Tip: Extract Photos From Captured Video

Written on November 12, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 3 people have commented

I love having the luxury of video capture on my iPhone 3GS, because it’s available to me anytime I need it. The only problem is, it’s either video or photo capture, so I’m potentially out of luck if I captured one and decidedly would have rather had the other. Yeah, I kind of like having [...]

How-to: Enable Expose and Spaces for the Magic Mouse

Written on November 02, 2009 by Bryan Schuetz and 50 people have commented

So you’re loving your brand new Magic Mouse but are missing the ability to activate Expose and Spaces right from the mouse? Not to worry, we’ve got you covered. Using SIMBL and a neat little preference pane called MultiClutch, we can map our own custom shortcuts to the left and right swipes coming [...]

4 Unusual Halloween Costumes for Apple Fans

Written on October 30, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 1 person has commented

We’ve all seen the Steve Jobs, the iPhone, the iPod, and the Mac costumes, but what do you do if you want to stand out from the crowd? The motto of our beloved company has long been “Think Different,” and it’s about time we bring that to the Halloween arena, too.
The day itself is tomorrow, [...]

How-to: Create Services for Quick Search Box

Written on October 28, 2009 by Bryan Schuetz and 5 people have commented

I’ve been playing around with Google Quick Search Box lately and am especially enjoying this services plugin from Martin Kuhl which lets you activate and pass input to OS X services right from within QSB.
One snag though has been that services created through the new Automator template included in Snow Leopard leave out some vital [...]

Quick Look: Creating and Using Site Specific Browsers

Written on October 28, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 7 people have commented

The advent of the cloud over the past few years has meant that a lot of the tasks that we were used to doing on our Mac have now moved to the web. This brings with it a host of issues, from data ownership to reliability of services (see recent Sidekick fiasco) and whether the [...]

Complete Guide to Apple Certification and Training

Written on October 27, 2009 by Dave Greenbaum and 8 people have commented

Although I’ve been supporting Macs since they came out in 1984 (when I was in high school), I haven’t received any “formal” training. It has mostly been learning by doing, reading the occasional book and now of course, TheAppleBlog. Does formal certification really make a difference as a technician? You tell me.
Recently I got into [...]

5 More Ways to Become a Mac Minimalist

Written on October 27, 2009 by David Klein and 22 people have commented

My first post on becoming a minimalist with your Mac had great feedback, so I’m back with another round of tips to keep your digital workspace as simple as possible.
Reduce Finder Window Clutter

Right click on the top of any finder window and select “Customize Toolbar…” Drag out any items you don’t need. For example, I [...]

Quick Tip: Activity Monitor Dock Icon

Written on October 12, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 8 people have commented

I’m sorta picky about what I put in my Menu Bar. It probably stems from my MacBook’s 13″ screen turning pixels into a premium. Whatever the case, I audit the icons that are displayed there on a regular basis. If this sounds remotely familiar, the following tip may be a good way to remove System [...]

How We Live Blogged the 9.9.09 Apple Media Event

Written on October 08, 2009 by David Klein and 3 people have commented

I have always been curious about what kind of tools people have used to liveblog events (especially those involving Apple). As many of you readers know, Apple recently held a media event on 9.9.09. I jumped on the opportunity to attend and represent TheAppleBlog. Naturally, one of my responsibilities was to liveblog everything.
Here’s the plan that [...]

Pro Tip: Cure iPhone Earbud Entanglement

Written on October 08, 2009 by Olly Farshi and 28 people have commented

If you listen to music on the go, chances are you suffer from tangled and knotted wires on your buds. I’ve discovered an effortless solution for keeping my 3GS buds untangled. If you want to learn my secret, watch the video below.

A few months back, I purchased a pair of Skullcandy Full Metal Jacket earphones. [...]

14 Ways to Be Kind to Your Battery

Written on October 06, 2009 by Liam Cassidy and 27 people have commented

A little over ten days ago Apple launched a shiny new Apple and the Environment microsite showcasing the company’s commitment to greener production and business practise. So I thought it would be appropriate to take a leaf (pun intended) from Apple’s book and look at ways to be more energy efficient in my daily computing.
Mac [...]

There’s a Bounty On Your Mac: 43 Cents Per Malware Infection

Written on September 25, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 12 people have commented

Think affiliate programs are solely the province of SEO firms and experts? Think again. There’s such a thing as a malware affiliate program, and a very recent one targets Mac users specifically. It’s a sign that cyber-crime is beginning to target Apple more aggressively than it has in the past.
ZDNet.com reports that a group called [...]

Quick Tip: Adding Photo Albums to Any Page in iWeb

Written on September 25, 2009 by Charles Jade and 2 people have commented

Having finally gotten around to upgrading to iWeb ‘09, I’ve found the best new feature to be an old trick that stopped working in iWeb ‘08. It’s a simple method for inserting photo albums onto other pages, like blogs — and for iWeb ‘09 users it’s a hidden feature that shouldn’t be missed.
The greatest strength [...]

Windows 7 Takes Pricing Cue From Snow Leopard

Written on September 18, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 12 people have commented

Snow Leopard is selling like hotcakes. It’s selling  much better than Tiger, and a lot better than Leopard, too. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say those strong sales numbers had something to do with price. Microsoft appears to think so, too.
For a limited time, Microsoft is offering students the opportunity to grab one [...]

Get Your Google Reader Fix Natively

Written on September 17, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 19 people have commented

Although much has been said about the death of RSS I, for one, still get most of my news via RSS feeds every day. I find Twitter to be filled with too much extraneous junk, and services like Friendfeed and Facebook still don’t offer the feature set I want from my daily news aggregator. My [...]

How-to: Get Google Gears Working in Snow Leopard

Written on September 15, 2009 by Alfredo Padilla and 7 people have commented

Snow Leopard was a remarkably painless upgrade for me, but one particularly important piece of software was broken: Google Gears.
For those who don’t know, Gears is Google’s framework for storing browser data offline. It works with many Google services as well as some third-party products. I use Gears primarily with Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) like [...]

iTunes 9: Smart Playlists Are Now Smarter

Written on September 15, 2009 by Andrew Bednarz and 32 people have commented

Smart Playlists in iTunes have always been a powerful way to create specific playlists to meet your needs, from creating a rotating fresh playlist for syncing to an iDevice to creating a specific playlist for a party. Being able to say “give me my music that hasn’t been played in the last month, that is [...]

Getting Quicksilver to Jive With Snow Leopard

Written on September 11, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 19 people have commented

From what I’ve been reading on support forums, some users of Quicksilver saw no affect from upgrading their machines to Snow Leopard. I however, was not one of those people. And although I am warming more and more to Google Quick Search Box, I still supplement my usage of QSB with Quicksilver where the former [...]

How-To: Resurrect Your AppleTalk Printer in Snow Leopard

Written on September 04, 2009 by Dave Greenbaum and 27 people have commented

Did Snow Leopard leave your old AppleTalk printer out in the cold? Grab a hot cup of cocoa and warm your printer up with some of these handy tips to continue to use your classic AppleTalk printer with your state of the art operating system.
Print Via USB
Of course! Get a longer USB cable if possible, [...]