Tag: apple

Hidden recent items stack in 10.5

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Hidden recent items stack in 10.5

Something that Apple doesn’t turn on by default in Leopard (10.5) – You can add a Recent Applications/Docs/Volumes stack to the Dock. Might be useful for some when you’re jumping around a lot.

“You can add a Recent Applications stack to the Dock. To do so, open Terminal and type this command:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'

After that, type killall Dock to restart the Dock and see your new folder. The only thing is that I haven’t found a way to have it show as a fan, it only shows in tile view. But it is already a nice trick. ”

If you don’t like it — just drag it off of your dock and it’s gone.


Apple CA v$ USA

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Apple CA v$ USA

Let me preface this by saying – I’m far from an economist;

Our dollar is now worth 8-10% more than the US Dollar. Stands to reason that prices at the Apple CA online store would be 8-10% cheaper. People are getting pretty pissed off that this isn’t the case — prices are still an average 10% more for Canadian customers.

It’s understandable that small retailers who purchased electronics a while back at a different exchange rate would have to be slower in bring parity to pricing (in order to retain price margins and make money); but this is Apple. Apple products we buy come from the States.

I can’t wait for the day that the Mac Book Pro is 2199.00$ US and 1999.00$ Can.

“Many Canadians were hoping that with the recent processor bump to Apple’s MacBook and MacBook Pros, the company would also take the opportunity to correct the disparity in pricing for its notebook computers. No such luck.”

Read the full article at Wired.com

Leopard and Alex

Steve

Leopard and Alex

One of my favorite new features of Leopard is the new professional voice they have included. “Alex”, is the new voice of Mac OS X. Before you read any further listen to this sample: Alex voice test A (mp3) or this one: Alex voice test B (mp3).

How it works: Voice synthesis on the Mac has been around for more than 20 years now, but outside of screenreading and special applications it’s never been a marquee feature (that is, if you don’t count Talking Moose — now once again available for OS X. Woot!). Even though the Macintalk and Speech Manager voices have improved a lot over time, the best of them still sound distressingly artificial.

Enter Alex, a dramatically more comprehensible voice that includes fine breath and pause control to enhance understandability, especially for high-speed reading; you can listen to a sample of Alex at this post. From the samples of Alex that I’ve heard, he compares favorably with high-end synthesis voices like AT&T’s Natural Voice and Cepstral. For anyone using VoiceOver or wanting to be able to track information while not watching the computer, Alex is a natural.” — TUAW.com post

One interesting thing is that the file that contains “the voice” is the largest single file installed on your Mac with Leopard, weighing in at 670 meg (/System/Library/Speech/Voices/Alex.SpeechVoice…).

Some more about it | Check Google

Our Apple WIFI home network

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Airport Extreme

After many miserable failures with a number of brand-name wireless routers; I broke down and bought an Apple Airport Extreme N/Gigabit. Plank wireless runs off an Airport Extreme and we’ve been very happy with it so far.

What a difference;

  • TIVO transfers finally work. which Linda has really wanted. Our last Linksys would fail intermittently causing the TIVO transfers to crap out. Problem is TIVO transfers can’t “resume”, meaning if they fail you have to start all over again.
  • Disk sharing rocks. I got Linda a “music hard-drive” for a present a while back, now it’s available without plugging into it. You can turn on an option to have drives connect automatically and they’re available in your menu bar if you want.
  • Much faster. Macs connect much faster when first signing on. Transfers between computers are much better. Everything seems quicker.
  • Easier setup and admin. The Airport admin tools are great – easily to check all the prefs/settings and logs. Miles ahead of any other consumer wireless station I’ve seen.
  • Upgrading. We’ve haven’t updated the firmware yet but they seem to make it very simple and alert you when there’s new software available.
  • Restarting it can be done via you laptop. Overall you just have a lot more control over the station.

It might be expensive, but to us it’s been worth the money already. Plus the fact that we wasted close to 200$ on previous routers and networks equipment. We successfully setup one B device, one G/N device and one G TIVO wireless adaptor within 10 minutes.

www.apple.com/airportextreme

[Rating: 95/100]

Apple starts pushing ‘Web Apps’

Steve

Apple starts pushing ‘Web Apps’

This is very interesting. Apple has a new top-level directory where they are featuring highlighted ‘Web Apps’ that work well with the iphone/itouch. This plus the fact that there are rumors of a soon-to-be released SDK for iphone/itouch development start to reveal Apple’s hand.

From what I’ve seen – the Facebook app is the killer so far (guess that’s what you can do with a whole lot of developers + $). We’re not developing for this yet but you just know we are checking some of our work on Warren’s iTouch now.

www.apple.com/webapps