tips and tricks - page 53

Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!

But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

• The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
• For the first time since the eighties, it now includes a Saturday. Expect big crowds, lots of kids.
• There’s 250 exhibitors, down from 400 last year. Here’s the Exhibitor List.
• Attendance is expected at about 30,000 visitors. (But most Expo visitors this year got free passes instead of paying the usual $25 fee).
• People are hoping this isn’t the last Macworld but consider the history. As Jim Dalrymple notes: “Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Boston/New York — it failed; Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Tokyo — it failed; Apple pulled out of Apple Expo Paris — it failed.”
• Macworld Expo Floor Hours: Thu 2/11 12pm-6pm; Fri 2/12; 10am-6pm Sat 2/13; 10am-6pm
• Twitter hashtag is #macworld2010

And here, in chronological order, is the top 5 things to do at the show:

The festive season is so close you can almost taste it. The kids are pestering to put up Christmas decorations; so why not give them something fun to do this year?

SymmetriSketch is a great free vector drawing application (also available for Windows and Linux users) that lets you play around with symmetry across a 2D plane.

Good news! Two doses of it, in fact.

First: QuoteFix for Mac fixes the problem of top-quoting in Mail! Now you can use Mail and reply to email messages underneath the text of the message you’re replying to, as God intended things to be.

Second: I got this tip from Tim Gaden’s Hawkwings blog, which has had a fresh burst of energy over the last month or so, and is now buzzing with tips about using Mail (and other cool things to make your Mac using life easier). If Hawkwings isn’t in your RSS reader or on your list-of-sites-to-keep-an-eye-on, I urge you to add it there.

Addendum for people who can’t see what the fuss is all about

There’s an old internet joke that you’ve probably heard a thousand times:

A: Because people don’t like reading backwards
Q: Why is top-quoting a bad idea?

Email is a very personal thing. Most people don’t care how their replies are displayed in their email software, but for those of us who’ve been around long enough to remember when “email client” was the term used for “email software”, some things – like whether you quote at the top or the bottom – matter a lot.

Most modern email services top-quote. By which I mean when you hit reply, the original message is underneath and your reply is on top. Makes no logical sense, but people have got used to things being that way. It’s just How Email Works for millions.

Gmail made things a little better, by retaining top-quoting but keeping messages in context as threaded conversations. Combined with its “Show quoted text” feature, it makes top-quoting bearable.

Thing is, Mail top-quotes too, and those same people – you know the ones I mean – hate it for that. Now, at last, there’s something for them. QuoteFix sorts it all out and makes it work the way it should. There. That’s better isn’t it?

So it’s nearly the middle of November, which means that those of you doing NaNoWriMo this year should be almost half-way through your novel. Assuming you’ve kept up the daily word count.

Among NaNo writers there’s a thriving subculture of AlphaSmart users.

“AlphaSmart?” you say. “What on earth is that? Doesn’t sound like a Mac.”

Apple’s products are generally well built and very dependable. When things do go wrong, Apple normally backs its products with excellent technical support and warranty service. Normally, if your Mac or iPhone develops a problem, Apple’s return policies or warranty service will make it right.

In spite of Apple’s best efforts, some Apple products manifest chronic problems — they’re “lemons.” What follows is a guide, which details some of your options should you get stuck with a lemon.

Ken Clark’s post about using Dropbox for iPhone to automatically import photos to Yojimbo is a wonderful pointer to new possibilities, and got me thinking about a few that can’t be done yet – but could be, if future versions of Dropbox add one or two features.

Ken’s trick depends on a little bit of Applescript to make it work. But not everyone knows Applescript, which is where another app called Hazel comes in handy.

One of the dumbest decisions Apple made regarding iPhone and iPod touch is devices wiping all traces of an app when it’s deleted, but providing no means for saving preferences and progress. Unless you use an uninstaller to remove an app or game from your Mac, you can usually pick up where you left off after a reinstall; savvy Mac owners can also fiddle around with preferences, moving them between Macs to ensure consistency across machines in app environments or videogame progress.

iPhone and iPod touch don’t allow such things. Spend hours making headway in Peggle and then, for whatever reason, delete and reinstall Peggle (by accident, or through having a restore go wrong), and your progress is gone—you have to start again. It’s like 1980s arcade games after the plug has been pulled, or cheap, miserly Nintendo DS games that lack a battery back-up in the cartridge, erasing progress and high scores when the device is powered down. For a platform Apple’s pushing as the best solution for handheld gaming, it’s asinine that you cannot export and import videogame progress and save states.

There is a workaround, however, using the shareware app MobileSyncBrowser, but it’s not for the faint-hearted…

If you have a Google Voice account, you can make free VoIP calls on your iPhone. You’ll need to sign up for an account at Gizmo.com and download the free Fring app for your iPhone, but after that you’re done. You can make free outgoing calls to (up to three minutes) and receive unlimited incoming calls through Google Voice.

Hit the jump for instructions.

Since I mount my iPhone on my windshield for easy access to my music, I thought it would be appropriate to drill a hole in the plastic to let me take pictures and video while driving. It wasn’t difficult to do. If you have a dremel or a drill you can crank this out in 3 minutes. The plastic is durable enough to handle the pressure of the drill and there isn’t any cracking.

I have the Griffin WindowSeat which comes with adapters for ipod touch and the 1st gen iPhone. It’s a great deal/gift for someone who has an aux input in their car.

Hit the jump to see a video showing the DIY dash cam at work.

You just installed Snow Leopard. Now what?

Here’s the best 10 tips and tricks we found for putting the beast to best use.