Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Different way of shopping on Amazon.com
Browse and search Amazon.com online stores using intuitive and straightforward interface of this desktop application. You can easily find your favorite books, electronics or other items.

Mac Amazon Browser

A new Apple reseller opened a shop in my local shopping mall. Unlike most of the department stores that sell Apple products here, this one was modeled loosely on proper American Apple Stores. The fittings were pristine and elegant, the sales people were friendly and not pushy, and best of all — I could play with the products as much as I liked.

So this was my first real hands-on look at the iPod Touch. It was almost uncanny; I’d read so much about it, and the similar iPhone, and seen so many demo movies, that when I did get to play it was being re-united with an old friend.

I tapped and swiped and pinched my way around the interface and found that, just as Andy Ihnatko had said, it all seemed so totally seamless – and obvious. I appear to have a lot of luck with hand held devices: the keyboard worked like a charm for me. I hammered away two-thumbed in the Notes section of a contact, completing a whole paragraph before glancing up at my handiwork.

There were only two errors. Incredible.

That’s it: I’m officially in love. It’s that “Seeing the 128k original Mac for the first time and realizing that this is the future” moment all over again.

Today I downloaded NeoOffice which, in short, is Open Office after it’s been extensively modified to fit right into the Mac environment. I already have an earlier copy of Open Office. It worked in a sense, but I could never get past the fact that here was an application running on my Mac that looked like it was channeling Windows 3.0.

NeoOffice fixes that. It’s not quite Cocoa quality, but it’s close enough. What really got me excited though, are a few features that it has, that take me back to my days with Office on the PC. I used Word so much that over time I trained it to auto-correct and auto-complete an enormous number of words and phrases that I tended to use over and over.

I didn’t care about 80 percent of what Word could do – just the remaining 20 percent that was those automation tools; I even hid all of the toolbars and rulers, leaving Word looking more like Notepad (but with nicer fonts).

Now I’ve jumped right into doing the same with NeoOffice. It’s every bit as useful to me as Word once was, if not more so, and it’s free.

I am one happy chappie!

NeoOffice 2.2.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

Funny thing about rounded corners. You either love them or you hate them; I’m quite schizophrenic on the subject. When I first built the Andrew’s Mac Tips site everything had rounded corners.
 

 
Lots of people liked them and wanted to know how I did it. I liked them too, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble; but eventually I decided that they didn’t really serve any purpose, and they looked a little too “whimsical.”

Then I went all sharp edged and simple and square.

Mac OS windows have rounded top corners as a rule and I can understand that; there’s a lot of history to them, and they — in a subliminal way — suggest that if you want to resize a window: don’t look here, do it at the bottom-right corner.

As for the menu-bar: I was a little peeved — when I first saw Macs — that it too was rounded, but I came around. When Panther gave way to Tiger they went for a shiny title-bar, but it looked (and still looks) more like a smudge than a sheen to me.

Now Leopard has a new title-bar; all the focus has been on the fact that it’s semi-transparent. But look! No more rounded corners!
 

 
The Mac OS just lost its trademark. If the new title-bar reminds me of anything, it’s the title-bar of the iPhone. Are we slowly transitioning to the iPhone paradigm — one notch at a time?

I suddenly found that Safari would quit if I clicked a button or control on a Web 2.0 site like LooseStitch or Back Pack.

A while back when I was trying Getbuzzword, an Adobe installer popped up and installed a new player plugin, so I suspected that; dreading the thought of somehow reverting to an earlier version.

Turns out though that the fix was to re-visit the PithHelmet preferences where I recently switched the block mode from Safer to (the less safe) Faster.

That’ll teach me to be impudent.

Hark at me with all the panicking– this is the first glitch I’ve had in months!

 
Just started playing with this. It’s still in alpha, but works great, and looks gorgeous. Jumping in phase over. Now to find out what iusethis is all about…
 

“AppFresh helps you to keep all applications (third-party and Apple), widgets, preference panes and application plugins on your Mac up to date, from one place. It works by checking the excellent iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.”

AppFresh - All Software Updates for your Mac in One Place

Plug the address of your website into this and have a go. I certainly learned a thing or two.

“Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like webite traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.”

Website SEO Score Tool

If, like me, you find that Google Mail takes forever to load when using Safari, you might like to try accessing it via the mobile interface.

It’s not pretty, but it sure is fast. Enter the following address into your address bar:

https://mail.google.com/mail/x/

Gmail Mobile

I remember these things…

It’s the little custom icon that can appear in your address bar and favorites list. Here’s a nice web 2.0 way of designing your own.

favicon.ico Generator

I use my nano mainly to listen to podcasts. For various reasons that aren’t important here, I prefer to download them as files directly from their sites, rather than from the iTunes Store.

I use a smart playlist to transfer the latest ones to the iPod. I couldn’t figure out a way to have that playlist know that I’d already listened to enough of a particular podcast on the iPod that I no longer wanted it to sync to it.

Then I decided to use the ratings stars. When I’m on the go and I decide I’m done with a track and don’t want it on the iPod any more, I rate it with three stars. Next time I sync those three stars appear on the Mac, and the next sync takes the track off the iPod because of the rule in the screenshot above.

There’s probably a more elegant solution than this that I’m just not seeing. This works for now. Any suggestions?