Why I like Apple, reason #427.1: spellcheck knows “kinda”
Computers Behind Blogs: The laptop behind utilware.com, most of the time. Sometimes the MacBook Pro 15 gets involved as well, but usually it´s my trusty Eee PC 900. And, as shown above, it fits on the airplane tray table along with your dinner.
A new version of Pages is available with iWork ‘09
Not to be a buzzkill, but let me recap what I would personally ever use from this upgrade:
- I can email my documents from within Pages.
- uh
I’m wondering if maybe it would have helped to mention a couple of key new features in the other iWork ‘09 suite, as well.
A contrarian view on MacHeist
If you believe the (recurring) buzz on the internet around MacHeist, it’s impact on the Apple software development community ranges from push indie developers out of the market all the way through to causing the eventual demise of the Apple platform.
But there’s another perspective. I’m a busy guy, and I don’t get to spend much time exploring Mac applications. Sure, from time to time I’d like to see if there’s a good to-do organizer out there or an HTML editor, but I simply don’t have the free cycles to do so.
So for just a few bucks (what was it, $40?), I was able to get my hands on a dozen or so interesting apps that I would never have otherwise seen (and some of which I’ll probably never get around to downloading). Sure, I got a massive discount on them - but the important part is that I now have fresh indie software on my Mac.
And that means a lot. Maybe I won’t end up liking Acorn or The Hit List, but now I have a sense of what’s out there. I might stick with the products that came in the bundle, or I might investigate their competition and purchase one of those instead. After all, the per-package cost of everything I bought was just a few bucks, so my switching cost to something different (and not part of the Heist bundle) is minimal.
And that, in my mind, is the underlying value of MacHeist to the indie software community and the Apple platform.
You know you’re having a good Sunday morning when it involves a 1TB SATA, Vice-Grips, canned air, rubber cement, and a collection of Torx drivers
Migrating a HD from a MBP to a MB
Over the next few weeks, we need my MacBook Pro for some customer research work we’re doing. Rather than trying to migrate all of my data, settings, and applications onto another machine, I pulled the hard drive using the great walkthroughs at ifixit.com and dropped it into an older MacBook Black.
As expected, it booted right up, and I’m largely back in business. Total elapsed time for the switchover: about 8 minutes. There are a few things I still need to take care of, however:
- iTunes wants me to reauthorize
- Creative Suite 4 wants me to reauthorize
- I had to re-pair my bluetooth keyboards (but not the mice)
- iWork is giving me the welcome screens, although it’s still registered
- MobileMe stopped syncing Address Book, Calendar, Bookmarks, and my iDisk
I’m thinking that once I get the new 500GB into the MBP, I’ll try the following trick to move my authorizations:
- Reboot the MB into firewire target mode, and plug it into the MBP
- Boot the MBP holding down the Option key, and select the firewire drive
- Log into my account and deauthorize iTunes and Adobe CS
- Shutdown both machines
- Reboot the MB into normal mode, login, and authorize iTunes and CS4
Wish me luck. If this all fails, I’m going to have to do some surgery on the machines again to get my original HD back into the MBP to do the deauthorizations. In the meanwhile, must resist urge to sync my iPhone with the (now deauthorized) iTunes.
Update: well, that worked. I was able to get the deauthorizations to work using the firewire disk mode I described above and restarted syncing in MobileMe, and now I’m pretty much good to go on the MB.
Embedding an LCD behind the apple logo. So sweet.
I’ll take the MacBook, thanks.
Where the author nitpicks mercilessly
I like to put my Applications folder on my dock, set it to “Display as Stack”, and see the little Address Book icon as a reminder of what folder this is. However, every time I run Adobe Acrobat Connect, it installs a shortcut to ‘Acrobat Connect Professional Add-In’, which then appears in front of the Address Book in the stack. A shortcut of all things. Which I subsequently delete.
</whine>
Something tells me that tagging this face in iPhoto 2009 is going to throw off the face recognition algorithm for a while.
Apple VoiceOver
When I first started reading through this, I was absolutely certain that I was going to find out that Apple had paid native-langugage voice actors to go through and read essentially every major song title that there was out there, and that these title clips would be downloaded through iTunes and incorporated into the song metadata.
Boy, was I wrong. Or should I say bzzozzy, I wzzazzz wrozzzng. I still remember a plug-in voice cartridge I had for my Commodore VIC-20 in the mid-1980s which allowed you to program it, phoneme-by-phoneme, to speak through its speaker. This sounds effectively identical, unfortunately.
Oh, and “cosmopolitan music libraries”? Eck.
i wish apple would make an external keyboard that glows from within like their macbook pro keyboards do
