Step back a little over 25 years. The first Mac is introduced to Apple’s board of directors. What it represented was the most advanced personal computer in the world. It felt better. It looked better. It performed better. There was just one problem. You couldn’t find any software to use on it. It was Guy Kawasaki’s job to convince software developers to develop programs for the Mac. That was a tough sell, because Mac’s market share was meager compared to the huge slice owned by clunky MS-DOS boxes. WYSIWYG bought Mac loyalty amongst the graphic design and education communities, but Apple couldn’t never overcome the Microsoft juggernaut and remained relegated to the side lines. Eventually Windows brought most of the advantages of Mac to the PC world, although in an arguably significantly watered down version.

Fast forward to 2007. The first iPhone is introduced to the world. What it represented was the most advanced mobile device in the world. It felt better. It looked better. It performed better. And this time, Jobs eliminated the problem that sunk the early Mac. He insured that there was tons of things you could do on it. Apple was so successful in encouraging development of iPhone Apps that today they have just nudged over the 100,000 mark, according to 148apps.biz. In June of 2009, when Apple announced they were at the 50,000 mark (that’s 50,000 new apps in just 5 months!), VP Phil Schiller showed a bar chart with the number of available apps dwarfing the competition, including Google (just under 5000), Nokia (just over a 1000), Blackberry (also just over a 1000) and Palm (a meager 18). Ironically, Windows Mobile didn’t even get included on the graph, showing how they have completely missed the boat in the mobile space.

So, what are the lessons learned for Jobs?

• It doesn’t matter how cool your hardware is. All that matters is what you can do on it.
• Don’t rely on “build it and they will develop”. Prime the app development pump so you come out of the gate with a clear advantage
• Turn development into a democracy. Establish an app development ecosystem (in all fairness to Apple, this is possible today where as in 1984, software development relied on a handful of companies)
• Don’t worry that the vast majority of iPhone apps gather dust. It’s the perception of choice that’s important. How many Windows programs have you ever used?
• The competitive advantages of hardware will only work for so long. The competition will catch up, and may even pass you. But the sheer bulk of functionality offered by being the runaway leader in available software is a much more difficult thing to overcome.

This time around, Apple has done everything right with the iPhone. in fact, the biggest challenge they have now is being a victim of their own success. They’ve created an Innovator’s Dilemma for themselves. Because they have become the de facto standard for mobile, they have to consider things like backwards compatibility and offering innovation without alienating their existing users. Still, that’s not a bad problem to have!

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Dave’s Answer:

Now that there are more expensive applications showing up in the Apple iPhone Applications Store (aka the “app store”), you’re not the first person to find that leaving “one-click” purchasing enabled has a high risk associated with it: instead of accidentally buying a $2.99 game, you might find yourself accidentally buying a $99 application.

The first thing you want to do is immediately cancel the download if you find this has happened to you: that’s the honest thing since you’re going to ask to get the transaction cancelled, right? You can do that by simply clicking on the “download” option on the left navigational list in iTunes and clicking on the small “x” to the right of the download progress monitor.

Okay, so now you want to report a problem. This is done by going to “View My Account…” off the “Store” menu:

Once you do that, you’ll see a list of your latest transactions, like this:

I’ve highlighted my own experience with this frustrating mistake, the same accidental purchase of the TomTom navigational system.

Scroll down a bit further on this screen and you’ll see that there’s a “Report a Problem” button:

Click on it and now you’ll see a new column appear on your transaction record:

Click on “Report a Problem” and fill in the form that pops up, explaining exactly what happens. And then wait and hope for a positive response from Apple…

Disabling One-Click Purchases in iTunes

The other half of this problem is to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, and for this, you can simply turn off one-click purchasing. This is done by choosing “Preferences…” from the iTunes menu, which brings up this:

Click on “Store” and you’ll see exactly what you need to tweak:

When you’re looking at free apps, “purchase and download” sounds like a plan, but when you’re checking out expensive applications, well, you already know it’s a dangerous setting to have. Change it, click on “OK” and you’ll never have this again.

Hope that helps you out!

And as for me? I’m glad to report that in less than 12 hours I had a response from Apple telling me that they’d reversed the charge and suggested I change the configuration to use a shopping cart (exactly what’s explained in this article). Nice job, Apple!

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I have the 17in MacBook pro which is great even though I’ve had it since December 2007. I’ve been considering selling it for cash toward a new 13 inch MacBook Pro so that I can blog, do podcasts, etc. However I don’t know if getting the new one is the right choice considering there’s no slot for another battery. I’ll be without power for about five hours a day in Freetown.

I’d feel safer having an additional battery in case the power is out for an extended period of time. Should I just look for the previous version of the MacBook? Would I be sacrificing a lot of power?

Dave’s Answer:

First off, I have to say that sounds like a very exciting trip, and if you time it right, you can pop down to South Africa for part of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the most popular sporting event in the world. I’ll be watching it, so don’t forget to wave to the camera!

I’m glad that you’re thinking about the unique challenges of working in a country where they don’t have constant electricity, however, because it’d be a big problem to take your 17-inch MacBook Pro, which I’m guessing gets about two hours of battery usage, if not a bit less, and try to work through that five hour period. Not good.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this problem. One of which is to buy a new computer, as you suggest. The new MacBook Pro’s have a rated battery life of 7 hours, according to Apple, which they rate with the screen at 50% brightness and the Internet being accessed via wifi. Since five hours of no electricity is probably going to also mean that there’s no Internet access unless you have a standalone sat-phone connection of some sort, you should be able to turn off wifi entirely and definitely work through that five hour period without too much difficulty.

I have a new 15-inch MacBook Pro and I’ll say that the battery life is wonderful. I can use it for 4-5 hours with wifi access and the screen up to about 85% brightness. Having hacked up my previous MacBook by putting in a high-performance hard drive and ending up with about an hour of battery life.

The downside of the new MacBook Pro line is that the higher performance battery is built into the unit, so there’s no way for you to pop one out and put in another if something goes wrong while you’re in the field. If you’re going to just be there a few months, it’s probably not a big deal, but if you’re contemplating a longer trip, that could be a serious limitation.

It’s a trade-off: if you buy an earlier 13-inch MacBook Pro model, you’ll have the replacable battery, but it won’t last anywhere near as long. The newer units obviously have better performance, but that’s probably not going to be noticable versus a one-generation old MacBook Pro, particularly for most typical uses.

Another thing to consider, though, is that there are supplemental power devices you can use to help nurse that battery life along. Specifically, I’m thinking the new mini-solar panels that are starting to become available on the market. The timing is good: Dec-Mar is summer in Freetown, with an average of only 0.5-inches of rain each month.

Now some of these solar panels can be kind of crazy expensive, notably the Apple Juicz from QuickerTek.com at $700, but you could pull completely off the grid for weeks on end if you needed to. Dig around in Google and you’ll find that there are also do-it-yourself plans for a device that’ll cost about $200 and do the same thing.

You’ll definitely want a power conditioner or surge protector, something to protect you from the irregular electricity in Sierra Leone. Check out TrippLite.com for some commercial grade solutions (about $200) or pop into your local hardware store to talk about options. Worst case, even the little Belkin surge protector for $25 is better than nothing.

However you set things up, I hope you have a terrific experience, and don’t forget to write!

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Hmmm…. that’s an interesting puzzle you present because I don’t know that either of the two tools you mention, Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote, support you creating a PDF version of your presentation where the first page is full size and all the subsequent pages are two or three-up (that is, there are two slides or three slides per page).

On the other hand, it’s a Mac, so there are PDF capabilities running deep throughout the system, including some pretty nifty features in the PDF viewer “Preview”. In fact, that’s how we are going to try and solve this puzzle…

First step is to save a PDF cover sheet that’s your first slide only. You can do this a couple of ways, but in PowerPoint, for example, I’ll choose “Print…” then “Save as PDF…” from the lower left menu:

Notice on this same window I’m going to specify that I only want pages 1-1 printed (e.g. saved as PDF) rather than the entire document. That’s done on the middle-right, where it says “Slides” and then has two boxes, one that currently has “1″ and the other “25″: change the latter to a “1″ too and you’ve got just the first slide as a little PDF doc.

Now, go back to the same “Print…” dialog box and choose 2-25 for the slides to print, and on the “Print What” pop-up, instead of having “Slides” as the option, instead choose:

You’ll probably want “Handouts (2 slides per page)”. Remember again to specify slides 2-25, don’t start with the first one, and then “Save as PDF…”

Now we have two PDF files, one that’s the cover page, and one that’s the bulk of the handouts. How to merge the two PDF files? Well, turns out that our friend “Preview” can do the trick, believe it or not!
Select both PDF files, then double-click to open Preview with them both included:

Notice the title of this window: “seo-page1 (1 page) (2 documents, 7 total pages)”. In my case, this is showing the name and length of the title page but it’s also acknowledging that I have two PDF documents with a total of 7 pages. Your should similarly indicate that it has all your slides, not just the cover page.
Now you want to choose “Select All” from the “Edit” menu, which highlights all the PDF documents in the right sidebar, then, from the “File” menu, choose “Print Selected Pages” and…

As you can see in the little preview window, it’s assembled the PDF documents exactly as we hope, with a single slide cover sheet and multi-slide-per-page handout sheets and selected them all by default. You can print this, but let’s actually save it as a combined PDF file instead.

Remember how to do that? Right, the PDF button on the lower left. Simply choose “Save as PDF…”, give it a new name, and you’re done.

Nice! Thanks, Apple, for giving the Preview app this slick capability.

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Leopard, the previous Mac OS X 10.5 is one of the most talked about operating systems available today. We’ve seen pros and newbies sticking to it and never looking back. Excellent user interface and a power packed performance makes it as an elegant performer. Apple however wants its users to get more. This quest has brought them to develop yet another release of Leopard, the Mac OS X 10.6 or what you shall better remember as Snow Leopard.

Here are some of the features that gets the Snow Leopard up and running.

Let’s take a Snow Leopard Safari

Apple calls Snow Leopard a refined and better version of Leopard and nothing that goes into reinventing a wheel. Leopard was well known for being simple and reliable, despite a few areas which needed some concern. Apple has looked to fine tune these aspects ranging from ejecting an external drive to the size of the core applications in Snow Leopard. Some of the viable and standout changes in Snow Leopard are;

• Lighter and faster – The primary focus of refining Leopard was to make it light and fast. The applications in Snow Leopard are considerably slimmed down contributing to a smaller footprint thereby saving up to 7GB of installation space. The sluggish installation time is also reduced by almost 45%. Snow Leopard has been tuned for faster booting and shutdown along with quick responsive processes and quicker wireless connectivity.
• Security – System applications on Snow Leopard are built on 64-bit code. This not only ensures an enhanced performance but also offers a better security just the 64-bit apps can use better security techniques in order to protect data from malicious software and hackers.
• Multi-touch framework – With Apple notebooks being standardized with multi-touch trackpads it will be possible for developers to enhance their applications using the code libraries and functions bundled in Snow Leopard on the lines of current multi-touch features available in Apple applications such as Safari, iPhoto and more. In-built feature of Snow Leopard also allows Chinese characters to be entered by just drawing the character on the multi-touch trackpad, instead of the conventional method where the user would have to enter the phonetic spelling of the Chinese character.
• ZFS file system support – Leopard provided read-only features for the ZFS file system which is a combined and logical volume manager developed by Sun Microsystems. ZFS, which is a 128-bit file system was designed for high storage capacities and volume management. It is of great application in servers and workstations with multiple disk drives. For all these reasons Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server supports both read and write features for ZFS.
• Microsoft Exchange Server support – The new improved Microsoft Exchange Server support means that mails, contacts, calendar items from Outlook can be easily accessed. Something which most of you would have been waiting for! iCal, Mail and Address Book in Snow Leopard will be enhanced with this exchange support making it business ready.
• Faster Backups – Leopard introduced to the world the revolutionary Time Machine which allowed the users to take backups of their hard drives with ease. With Snow Leopard, backing up hard drives is light years ahead, with backup time being reduced by up to 50%.
• Few others – Web spot is a handy feature being imported into Snow Leopard which allows zooming in on a particular section of a webpage. Snow Leopard also boasts a slick QuickTime with an improved interface of sorts. The new improved Expose in Snow Leopard enables organized grouping of multiple open windows and applications with ease. An ardent supporter of open source, Apple has also incorporated many tool kits and gizmos which are finely tuned specifically for developer’s delight.

What’s the deal?

Pre-existing Leopard users can avail a $29 upgrade to Snow Leopard, or a $49 upgrade package for a five installation family pack. For older Mac OS X users the upgrade would be available for $169, and the 5 license package can be availed for $229. (Remember, Amazon sells at 14% discount for Snow Leopard.)

LA Times quotes;

“Microsoft, which doesn’t have much of a hardware presence to recoup its costs compared with Apple, is unlikely to match that price.”

Giving Apple an upper hand in this price driven market. But on the down side Snow Leopard is compatible only with Macs running on Intel chips. Power PC Mac users will have reached the end of the road with the existing Leopard OS.

The wait is over. Mac users be ready to experience Apple’s self proclaimed “world’s most advanced operating system. Finely tuned.” This also comes at a time when Windows 7 is due to be released in October, this year. It is no secret that Apple and Microsoft are at war and only time shall reveal if Windows will fall a prey to the Snow Leopard.

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Dave’s Answer:

You aren’t looking for Events in this situation, actually: those are how photos are organized as they’re imported into iPhoto and should be named based on the specific events that they describe, as in “Day at Malibu Beach” or “Grandma’s Birthday” or “Cousin Joey gets Married” or whatever.

Each picture has its date and time detailed and stored, however, because just about every digital camera in the world now records what’s called EXIF information, that includes the date and time, but also includes ISO settings, shutter speed, lens focal length, and, if you have a GPS in your camera, latitude and longitude too, so you can map the photos by location later (a super-cool feature of Apple’s iPhoto, of course!)

Instead, what you want to do is create an Album, but not just any album, specifically you want to create a Smart Album, which is designed for just this purpose.

In fact, I’ve created a lot of Smart Albums because it lets me, for example, pull out just the photos that have all three of my kids tagged with the Faces capability. Super helpful, especially given that I have just shy of 5,000 pictures in my iPhoto library.

To get started, go to File –> New Smart Album:

Once you do that, you’ll see the basic Smart Album creation window:

Click on “Album”, however, and you’ll see that there are a LOT of different criteria you can specify to get exactly the selection you seek:

In this situation, you want to choose “Date”, so select that. Now you’ll see the conditional options within that category:

Since you want to specify a range, choose that and you’ll see that the date itself now splits into two. Specify the first day of January to the last day of December and you’ll have a year range:

That’s all there is to it: just click “OK”. You’ve now created a new Smart Album that will show up on the left navigation of iPhoto and will only contain the photos in the iPhoto library that match the date range you’ve specified.

That wasn’t too hard, was it?

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Dave’s Answer:

Oh heck yes. To be fair, iPhoto doesn’t have the photo editing capabilities of, say, Adobe Photoshop, but then again it’s also not hundreds of dollars and incredibly complicated to use either. In particular, for snapshots the edit tools are more than enough to fix what likely ails your photos right now.

There are two basic approaches you can take, actually: you can let iPhoto do the work, or you can do it yourself, tweaking and fiddling with enough sliders to make even Dr. Frankenstein happy. I’ll show both, so you can see how they compare.

First off, here’s the original photo I’ll be working with, a behind-the-scenes photo I took of the amazing Cirque du Soleil show “O”:

It’s a pretty cool photographic composition, but the photo itself is too contrasty and it’s hard to see any details in the shadow. Time to let iPhoto help us fix it!

If you click on the “Edit” button, you’ll find that the usual tools shown along the bottom change to:

To start, click on the “Adjust” button, which brings up a rather alarmingly complex window:

Here’s the good news: if you just want to mess around, you’ll find that iPhoto automatically saves your original so there’s no way to trash the original. So play a little bit!

Okay, you’d rather stay focused? I can understand that. When I’m looking at fixing or touching up photographs, I start by looking at the color distribution graphic “Levels” on the top. A good photograph (generally) has colors from across the spectrum represented, but as you can see here, the right side has no red, green or blue showing up.

My first tweak, therefore, is to simply drag and move the little pointer below the Levels graph so that the top range is shifted to where the colors are present, rather than where they’re not (or a bit further even, depending on your tastes):

The result is a quick improvement in things:

Not too hard, was it? Turns out that there’s a bit more we do to tweak this picture, recognizing that the blacks are pretty muddy in even the adjusted photo: there are no details on the performers’ black pants, for example.

To adjust that, we need to look a bit lower down on the Levels window, down to where it says “shadows”. This I adjust to taste: don’t go too far with this tweak (or any, for that matter) because you’ll blow out the pic and end up with something too contrasty and too grainy (due to the processing it’s doing):

Here’s the further improvement to the picture:

That’s the manual way and I know that I can sit and fiddle with things for quite a while before I’m satisfied with the results.

Sometimes, however, you want to move quickly and let iPhoto do the work, trusting its algorithms to adjust and tweak everything “good enough” for your needs. To do that, I’ll back up to the original picture (Ctrl-click on the image and one of the pop-up menu options is “Revert to Original”. That’s what I did) and click on “Enhance” on the edit tool bar.

The results? Not bad, not bad:

Which path you choose is up to your time, enthusiasm and how much you trust your own eye. Either way, however, I hope you can see that iPhoto has some pretty cool capabilities, of which I’ve only scratched the surface.

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Dave’s Answer:

I haven’t done much with Yahoo Widgets (aka Konfabulator), but in the spirit of being helpful, I’m going to go ahead and download them from the Yahoo Widgets site, along with some sample widgets. Of course, since we hear so little about Yahoo Widgets on the Mac side of things (and, as you say, have Dashboard already) I don’t even know if it’s current and an active project there at the Yahooplex, but let’s proceed.

First things first, download and install. The install window certainly looks pretty, at least:

As it suggests, I drag the plug-in into the folder alias.

Then nothing happens.

What the heck? This is an installer?

What you need to do is go back to the Yahoo Widgets page itself and click a second time on the big yellow “Get Started Now” button:

If the plug-in is installed, it changes to:

Alright, let’s continue by clicking on - ingeniously enough - “continue”:

Since you’re installing some software into the system directory, you’ll need to type in your administrative password:

Oh, and don’t forget that, like so many other applications, you need to agree to a complicated and obscure license that I am guessing no-one other than the Yahoo lawyers have ever read in the first place:

You good? Press “I Accept” and after a moment or three…

Here you can see the weather widget showing the current weather this evening in Cupertino. If you move down a bit on the Yahoo Widgets Dock, however, you’ll see that there’s a little button associated with the weather widget itself:

Move the cursor over that widget control button and - poof! - new buttons appear:

Now you can see what you want: the “x” on the top left kills the displaying widget, even though the control button remains in the Dock, as far as I can tell.

Yeah, this is not great user interface design, but these little widgets are tricky to code too. Whatever the case, that’s how to do it…

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Dave’s Answer:

I’ve been holding on to this question for a while now, waiting for a new computer of my own because I too have a Time Capsule and have been using Time Machine for quite a while now to have reliable and invisible backups of my different Mac systems. It’s a winner in my book and I have had to restore files from it more than once.

Having said that, I don’t really like the fancy “time tunnel” interface to get to Time Machine backups, especially from a computer other than the one you’ve backed up, but fortunately there are now third-party alternative apps that make this quite a bit easier to do: go to versiontracker.com and search for “time machine” to see what I mean.

So when I got my new MacBook Pro, I got the first chance to test out restoring from Time Machine…

Here’s what I saw on initial startup:

I chose “from a Time Machine backup” and then made the mistake of connecting to the unit via my wireless network. Bad mistake since I was going to be restoring hundreds of gigabytes of data (iTunes libraries, Document archives, etc). Why? Sssslllooowwwww city.

I restarted and this time when I got to the same prompt, I made the same choice, but had already hooked my Mac up to the Time Capsule via a direct Ethernet wire.

Once selected, the option changes color:

And it’ll be time to click on “Continue” to proceed:

It’s a little weird, but since it’s connected directly, you don’t need to enter a “name”, just the password. Enter that correctly and you can proceed by again clicking on the “Connect” button.

Which leads you to…

This is where the wireless connect stunk: two hours after seeing the previous progress bar, it was still spinning, which is why I restarted and tried again with a direct wire connection between the computer and Time Capsule device!

Connected directly it should only be a few minutes before you see:

Now we’re getting somewhere! Select what you want to have restored onto the new Mac and once everything has been calculated size-wise, it’ll enable the “Transfer” button.

Now you’ll see the following cheery, smiling Mac transfer window:

I hope you like it. You’ll be looking at it for rather a while…

Those time estimates? Yeah, well, they’re estimates…

Suddenly it moved to the next stage and the time estimate, uh, changed a bit:

Oh good, we’re moving backwards in time. Well, I guess we are using Time Machine, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised when we roll backwards in time after all?

A bit more time passes and:

then…

Almost done!

Finally, by George, I think we’ve finished the restore!

Next up is Apple inviting you to register your computer with their central customer database. I always do:

Wait, please, how are you going to use this?

Hey, looks like we’re done!

Click “Go” and your computer will restart and hopefully look exactly like your original desktop on your old computer. It worked for me:

So the long and short of it? It’s a great way to configure a new computer if you have a Time Machine system set up. Just be patient and do not try to do this via wifi: use a direct Ethernet connection. You’ll thank me when it finishes in less than a week.

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Dave’s Answer:

Ah, the joys of different Web browsers with different ways for you to accomplish specific tasks…

You’re right. There is no menu option that immediately suggests it’s how you can create subfolders, move bookmarks around, delete unused bookmarks, etc. Further, unlike Windows, Mac OS X doesn’t let you “right-click” on a menu item and them delete that item from the menu (a nice, though little used feature of Windows XP and Vista!)

Instead, if you’re using Mac OS X and you’re running Safari 4 as your Web browser, what you need to do is either choose “Show All Bookmarks” (do it in a new tab so you can flip back to this page for reference, if you’d like) or click on the handy little “book” icon on the leftmost edge of the Bookmarks Bar, as I’ve circled here:

Once you click on it (or choose the menu item) you’ll find that your browser window has changed rather dramatically:

This is the main bookmark organizational window you’ll want to work with.

For example, to delete or copy a bookmark, just Ctrl-Click on it:

To add a bookmark folder, we’re back to the “Bookmarks” menu:

The new folder shows up in the organize bookmarks view as you’d expect, on the lower left:

At this point simply type in the name you’d like the folder to have (I choose “Cool Stuff” for this demonstration), then click on the Bookmarks menu or Bookmarks Bar option and drag the folder from the left to the spot you’d like it to reside:

Once that’s set, you can simply drag and drop any bookmarks you want into the folder and everything will be neatly organized. If it’s on the Bookmarks Bar, you’ll find that it shows up with a small black triangle adjacent to the name, letting you know it’s a folder. Click on it and:

Neat and simple. When you’re done, just click on the little “book” icon again or just double-click any of the bookmarks.

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