appleJAC meeting-"Apple Folders, Messages, and AirTags" April 4, 2023, at 7:00pm. This will be an in-person meeting at Kennedy Hall at the Immaculate Conception School, 1208 East McCarty St, Jefferson City, MO 65101. There will also be an online video stream you can watch on our Facebook page (previous meeting videos are also available there).
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Here is another Apple Pro Tip.......
If you have a contact that appears in more than one Group, you can instantly see which of your Groups this individual appears in by simply clicking on his or her contact and holding the Option key. When you do this, every Group that they appear within will become highlighted.
This is handy if you want to clean up your Groups by deleting extra instances of people who appear in multiple Groups.
Why not make use of them....
Newer Technology, Inc. (NewerTech) announced the eSATA Extender Cable for eight and quad-core Mac Pros. This cable allows Mac Pro users to use the two unused internal SATA ports on the motherboard. In case you were wondering, eSATA is three times faster than FireWire (IEEE 1394b).
The cable, the first on the market, allows the Mac Pro to operate up to six hard disks.
eSATA Extender Cable
"The NewerTech eSATA Extender Cable is specifically and thoroughly engineered to be a "Perfect Fit Solution," so it accurately and properly routes inside a Mac Pro case. Users can connect any two SATA-I or SATA-II devices to expand their data storage configuration. A step-by step illustrated installation manual is included to make set-up easy, the announcement said.
The NewerTech eSATA Extender Cable is available immediately and is priced at US$24.95.
For years I used a product called DropDrawers to allow me to launch applications and keep my dock clean. Since going to Intel, there has not been a revision to this software. Now the developer has joined forces with DragThing to allow it to run like DropDrawers and I definitely like it.
The main purpose of DragThing is to make items on your Mac such as files, folders, applications, disks, URLs, clippings, and even windows, quickly and easily accessible, while taking up as little space on your screen as possible.
The main elements with which DragThing enables this speedy access are its docks. DragThing’s docks, unlike the Mac OS X system dock, are highly configurable and you can have multiple docks, customised to suit your specific circumstances.
DragThing also allows you to define a huge variety of hot keys. These hot keys can open items in docks, control various other aspects of DragThing and even control the visibility of and switching between other applications running on your Mac.
DragThing can also provide you with a Trash on your desktop, play sounds in response to actions like ejecting a CD, and a lot more besides.
The image on the right is how I have it configured.
DragThing is shareware. That means that you can download a copy freely to see if you like it, and if you decide to use it you should register your copy. In return for registering you will receive a serial number which will disable the reminder message at startup, and enable some extra features including floating dock windows and hot keys to open dock items.
A single user license for DragThing costs $29. Not a bad value for a nice tool.
So what do you do with the hundreds of emails you keep.... Thousands....
MailSteward will archive all of your email in a database for easy retrieval. Click on the Archive Email button and MailSteward will go to work storing copies of all your email text, HTML, attachments, and raw source, into a relational database file. MailSteward has a wealth of features for importing, tagging, saving, and exporting, including the ability to export your vital email information to a number of standard data formats.
• Safely archive your large volume of vital email information.
• Easily access your email database with fast, sophisticated searching.
• Protect your essential email data from data format obsolescence.
Take a look at the demo on the web site. It is worth your time.
Ever noticed how bad the old photos you have look after they are scanned? If you have 35mm negatives of your pictures, this is the product for you.
With a new stylish design, the Epson Perfection V350 Photo allows easy scanning of photos, film, documents, and even 3D objects. The Epson Perfection V350 Photo boasts a unique Automatic Film Loader that flips out of the top lid, allowing you feed a strip of 35mm film into the scanner. The Perfection V350 Photo also provides maximum resolution of 4800 x 9600 dpi, the same resolution that many professional photographers use for scanning their films and negatives.
The sleek, slim design has a flat scanning area of 8.5 inches x 11.7 inches, and can be used in either the portrait or landscape mode. The high-rise lid opens to a full 180 degrees for scanning large and bulky items. You can even scan three-dimensional items up to approximately one inch thick with the lid closed.
Four buttons let you perform the most common functions with just one touch. Automatically scan photos, negatives and documents using the Start button, and the software chooses the most appropriate settings. Copy documents and print with an easy copy utility. Scan a photo and attach it to a new e-mail message. Or, scan and create a single or multi-page PDF.
Optimize your scans when your originals are less than perfect. Epson Easy Photo Fix instantly restores color to old faded photos so that they appear to have been taken yesterday. Enhanced Backlight Correction fixes incorrectly or under-exposed images. And, with Advanced Digital Dust Correction, you can automatically remove dust on film negatives or slides while minimizing the risk that artifacts will be introduced.
I have to say, the automatic film loader is really sweet.... Highly recommended and only $150. That's a great scanner deal.
Getting the iPhone ready for its June launch has had an unintended consequence, however: QA and “some key software engineering” resources allocated to Mac OS X needed to be diverted from their work to finish the iPhone. As a result, Apple won’t release Leopard at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, as it had first planned.
“While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones,” reads the statement.
Many people have asked me about hiw they can video chat if they do not have a mac with a built in camera. Here is a little trick I bet you missed. In the lates update to Mac OS 10.4, Apple Includes iChat support for USB Video Class webcams. That's right. Since Apple discontinued it's iSight, many people thought they could no longer get a camera to work but now, an inexpensive USB 2 web camera can do the trick.
Google sure has some nice free applications. With products like Google Earth and Google Sketchup, many people look forward to new products they release. But this may be one you want to pass on.
Google Desktop on the Mac silently installs an Input Manager whose function appears to be to load bundles of code into applications targeted by Google. The Input Manager is installed in a location where it will be loaded into every application run by any user of the Mac. The fact that it loads other code on demand is worrying as it could be used for malicious purposes. Moreover, it is odd that Google installs this software without requesting the user's permission given the recent controversy on this very topic. Hopefully Google will fix the issues outlined in the article in upcoming revisions of their software."
Google Desktop is intended to index your hard disk and make it easier to find things but with Spotlight, what is the point on a Mac?
If you’re trying to search for a particular bookmark, you’ll want to know this trick: First, click on the Show All Bookmarks icon in the top-left corner of the Bookmarks Bar. Doing this makes the Collections column visible on the left side of Safari, but more importantly, it adds a Search field at the bottom center of the Safari window. When you type search terms in this field, it searches just within your bookmarks, so you get super-fast results.
Okay, you probably already know the ol’ Command-Shift-3 shortcut for taking a screen capture of your entire screen, and you may even know about Command-Shift-4, which gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture. But perhaps the coolest, most-secret hidden capture shortcut is Control-Command-Shift-3 (or 4), which, instead of creating a file on your desktop, copies the capture into your Clipboard memory, so you can paste it where you want. (I use this to paste screen captures right into Photoshop.)
