All things went fairly well OSX Re-Install

It took me the whole of Saturday to be able to get the Mac OS X operating system reinstalled. The first time that I tried, I got it wrong, but it wasn’t really a problem. I lost about half an hour while that was installed and I just started again. What I forgot to do, was to do a wipe and partition of the disk before actually doing the install. So what happened was, that I just had an over the top install and not the completely fresh, start from scratch version that I wanted.

It seemed a little tedious at times

There were times during the process when I had to remind myself of the reasons why I wanted to do a nuke and pave. There are so many things to think about when you’re not using the Migration Assistant. While there were some things that were a little bit of a challenge, there were other parts of the deal that were very easy. The easy parts were when an application that uses data that is either in iCloud or Dropbox. Mostly I just had to wait a minute or two for the data of the application to populate. In fact there were occasions when it was just there and I didn’t have to do any searching for it.

Licenced to thrill

Even though I was quite meticulous in the way that I logged all of the applications and the serial numbers or licences, I did have a little trouble with a couple of applications. One application would not let itself be reactivated on my newly reinstalled operating system, even though I had the correct password and username safely tucked away in AppShelf. There was another occasion which I know I had found the details for, where I had to go looking again, to get the username and serial number. Not really a problem, as most of the stuff I needed was available within my Gmail account.

Final Cut Pro X and the Projects

I kind of wanted to clear up the mess of projects that was in Final Cut Pro especially seeing as the project folder added up to 240 GB. If I had copied all those projects and Final Cut Pro events back onto the hard drive it would have gobbled up a large chunk of space. On account of the fact that I do such a lot of video I really could do with a larger hard drive on the iMac. At first look, it seemed that I would have a lot of work to do to have all the things in place to start creating videos again. On closer examination and by doing some work with a video that needed to be finished off, I found that everything was looking pretty good. The main thing was that the intros and outros that I had created either in Final Cut Pro or in Motion 5, were still available. So in the end it was fairly easy to set up a new project for Mac20Q videos for YouTube, with the correct frames per second and video dimensions. With that done I was able to start dragging and dropping the video clips, along with the video opening sequences and closing sequences.

All of my Automation – Keyboard Maestro and TextExpander

I do all of my writing, even when I am dictating using Markdown. I have a nice little workflow that works well for me. With some of it, I rely upon a certain amount of automation. I use one macro that is from Keyboard Maestro that initiates when I type in a three letter code. It goes off to Safari and collects the URL of the frontmost tab, it provides a dialog to have me to enter a reference. Then it puts that reference in the space where the three letter code was and finishes off with putting the full reference with the URL at the bottom of the document.

For the life of me I couldn’t remember where I got that Keyboard Maestro macro from. During the reinstall of the operating system I lost it from the application. So the note to self, is to add that to a checklist in case I have to do something like this again. I did try creating the macro myself from scratch and although I was getting somewhere with it, it ended up faster to work harder with my search. Mind you, even when I found the macro I was looking for, there was something wrong with it and I had to do some tweaking in order to make it work.

DragonDictate working the same as before

DragonDictate version 3 for some strange reason didn’t require me to do the voice training again. I have no idea why this was the case and I really did expect to have to read the training text once more. There is a possibility that the profile that was used before is stored in the cloud somewhere and that DragonDictate was able to just pick up on that and start again. In DragonDictate and also one or two other applications I did have to mess with text sizes in order to get it looking the way did before. These were just minor inconveniences though.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating

I will be looking quite carefully at how the computer operates over the next week or two. Hopefully I can expect an end of the kernel panics and the unexplained closedowns requiring a start-up. If it does happen and there is a kernel panic after having done a reinstall of Mac OS X Mountain Lion then what I will do is to collect all the evidence together and then talk to AppleCare.

Keeping a close on things

In terms of the slowdowns I had noticed prior to the reinstall of Mountain Lion, again I think I will need a week or two to assess my iMac. Just so long as there is no underlying hardware problem, I fully expect the computer to be running just as good as new. I still wish that I could afford to get a couple of little extras in order to make it better than new, such as a larger spinning hard drive and a faster SSD. I have seen that the SSD’s are getting much cheaper, but are still a little out of my price range.

Up until now I have had two web hosting providers. The long term one I have been using, has been GoDaddy and in the main they have provided a good service. You do have to get used to the screens of upsell, that you have to go through when you want to buy something as simple as a domain name. It is though, very easy to get a domain name from them and to get it added to your web hosting. I have found that I could easily have a new website up and running with a WordPress installation within an hour or two. I also have to say that it was very useful to have an unlimited account. I didn’t have any limits on the number of domains I could run, nor limits on the amount of bandwidth. The price for that service was pretty reasonable. The only thing that would bother me occasionally, would be the occasional slowness of the site to respond.

I have also been using a web hosting provider called NameCheap. The first site I put on here was Thunderbolt Reviews This hosting provider has been a little bit more fiddly to set up sometimes, but also has provided what I needed for getting the websites out onto the Internet. Last month I saw that NameCheap had a offer available to celebrate their five years of providing Internet web hosting. Honestly, it was just too good to miss. I bought two years of web hosting for about two thirds of what one year with GoDaddy would cost. I am very pleased that I don’t have to worry for two years with regards getting and paying for web hosting.

Now for the trials and tribulations

It really is not terribly easy, if you want to move a WordPress installation from one place to another. To do so you do need to be able to legitimately call yourself a geek, a net head and a proper nerd. While I am to a large extent quite geeky, I have to admit that I have been struggling with making the moves with the WordPress installations. I have quite a few that I need to move. The more difficult ones to move are from GoDaddy to NameCheap, but also I need to move a few websites that are already on NameCheap.

I did find some instructions and they seemed to be quite good for moving these websites. I followed the instructions and at the end of it it didn’t quite work. Not sure if I missed a step, or if something was missing from the instructions, but it failed anyway. So what I am doing now is to get as many backup copies of all of the content from the sites, so that at the last resort I can just create a new WordPress installation and repopulate it.

The next thing that I’m going to try is to use the export feature from WordPress. I will export from the old WordPress installation, set up a new WordPress installation and use the import feature. I will still have a certain amount of fiddling and twiddling to do after that. At least though I will have the important job covered of having all my content readily available.

Using the Mac for creating my backups

I do have most of the text of the websites contained within Scrivener. What I am doing now is to make sure that absolutely everything is within Scrivener. Not only that but I have also set up a Bento database that has the text within it and also has other information such as the SEO details. I use the WordPress plug-in called SEO All in One and I need to make sure that I don’t lose that data.

In the Amazing iPad website I have 211 posts, 141 posts in the Mac 20 questions website and another 42 in NoStylus.com. So you can see that I have my work cut out for me to get this all sorted out. At least when I’m finished I will have all of my domains and hosting in one place. I will be able to get back to the business of creating content for the Wizardgold YouTube channel and lots of articles for all of the websites.

Back in the saddle after the summer work

I had two and a half months of working in a campsite, which is nothing less than tedious but does at least give me some money to buy stuff. Here at the Wizardgold headquarters we were in need of a new Wi-Fi router that would give us the faster connectivity that you need for iPad and MacBook Pro computers. Not only that, but at the same time I bought the Apple TV and the Wi-Fi 802.n would be very useful for that too. I will be telling you in an article about how I got on using the Apple TV, that for now I will just tell you that I like it. I bought the Apple AirPort Express for the dual band Wi-Fi and straightaway I did notice things seemed faster with my iPad. I have left the slower speed Wi-Fi connected to the network so that if we have guests may want to connect they will be up to use that. This is a very good idea, because if you have just one G device on the fast network it slows it down for everybody else.

Apple iPhone 5 News – Mac podcasters a week of blowing hot air

Apple have finally made the announcement for the event which is certainly going to be about the new iPhone. The Apple iPhone 5 coming out next week is the hottest news in the Mac world. Apple have cleverly arranged it to be on the 12th of September so that they can have a graphic of the number 12 that gives a shadow that looks like a number five. Over the last year, ever since the announcement of the iPhone 4S, the Mac fan boy podcasts have been bleating about the lack of a number five in the name of the phone. Of course, in the last few months of the upgrade cycle, the heat has been turned up, resulting in copious quantities of hot air. Everyone wants to talk about the latest radical iPhone 5 design.

Rumours and damn rumours

I have already made my views clear on the presence of rumours and talking about them on the Mac podcasts. It really isn’t a surprise that the Mac pundits get over excited and want to give their views upon what they think Apple will announce, but really it does get tiresome. Why try and guess the iPhone 5 2012 release date?

If you do have to listen to any of the Apple news podcasts, I would recommend that you stick to one of them and in my view the best is the Maccast by Adam Christianson. He will tell you that there has been an announcement made and that it looks like it will be all about about a coming event for a new iPhone. Perhaps Adam might be drawn into an overview of the various rumours, but then he will move on to some actual proper news. One of the things that makes the MacCast the best podcast out there is that Adam also does tips and tricks to help Mac users. Much more satisfying than fake Apple iPhone 5 news.

The iPhone 5 and live blogging

It is a shame that Apple are unable to present a streaming view of the announcement, as only the chosen few of the journalists and media will be present. There will be a whole host of Apple fans on the look out for latest Apple iPhone 5 news, Some of the commenters and the rumour sites that follow Apple will manage to have somebody there, that will live blog the latest news to the great unwashed public. If you are expecting to be able to follow a live blog then you may need to have a couple of choices available. This is because generally the Internet is not able to keep up with the amount of traffic on these various Mac websites. The amount of interest in such announcement from Apple is also a factor why the announcement is not broadcast live as a video feed.

Industrial espionage and the iPhone 5

I have seen on Twitter that there have been many supposed leaks of information regarding the new phone from Apple. A kind of corporate espionage. This has been in the form of blurry photographs of the innards of the iPhone, that have come from various sources. Enterprising rumour mongerers have even gathered together photos from various sources to see if these bits look like they will slot together. The idea is that it might give some sort of clue as to the shape and size of the Apple new iPhone 5.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the rumour blogs actually went to the next step of trying to bribe employees of the Chinese manufacturers to spill the beans. It only takes somebody who knows someone, who perhaps knows somebody, that has a brother or a cousin working in one of the factories in China. Sophisticated blogs could get themselves a corporate spy to commit their intellectual property theft and have secrets to talk about instead of rumours. James Bond, get out of here! Just about all of the people that actually work for Apple are always tightlipped regarding the new products, but with such a news frenzy perpetually present, it is no surprise that a certain amount of industrial espionage does takes place. At least it gives Leo Laporte something to talk about.

What are you going to do this week?

Will you listen to the Mac pundits pontificating and speculating? Or will you do your best to ignore it until the actual announcement is made by Tim Cook and Phil Schiller at the iPhone 5 event in California. Personally I’m not interested in the views of these people that really don’t know anything at all. I may even unsubscribe from all of the Mac podcasts for the next week, except for the MacCast, to save myself from getting annoyed. There is one other Mac podcast which looks at Apple news, the Mac podcast from British Tech News that I might also keep. They will do a certain amount of speculating and talk about what might be coming, but at least they will be irreverent and funny while they are doing it. They are usually quite happy to acknowledge the fact that they are talking crap. They don’t mind admitting that nobody knows the real story until Tim Cook speaks on the stage next week. Will you be buying the totally gorgeous iPhone 5 as prmised in the Apple iPhone 5 News?

Using styles with iWork Pages App and working with iCloud

I might be a rabid markdown user, preferring the purity of writing with pure text, without the distraction of images or fancy formatting, but I do like the application Pages. Byword is a super app for writing in Markdown. Pages is more than a word processor and is more like a desktop publishing application. I know we don’t seem to use that phrase, DTP any more, but I come from an era when desktop publishing was very popular. The application PageMaker was the big thing and there was another one called Quark. On account of the fact that I was a big user of Coreldraw, I preferred to use it, for the documents I was creating that were only one or two pages long. The application Pages that is part of the Apple iWork suite is without a doubt, a whole lot better than anything I have used before, especially in terms of ease of use. iCloud takes it to another level of productivity.

Putting on the style in iWork Pages

There are two modes of applying styles to your text in Pages. You have character styles, which will be applied to selected text and then you have paragraph styles. With a paragraph style you don’t have to have the text selected. Just so long as the cursor is in the paragraph you want to affect, you can apply one of the styles to that whole paragraph. You can click on a button to display the styles draw, then one click on the name of the style will format your text for you very easily.

Styles within templates

There are templates that come with the Pages application and within those templates there are styles. The styles are there to suit the type of document being created. You can create your own templates just the same as you can create your own styles. Usually the best place to start off, is to take a template that you already like and to customise it to your own personal document designs.

iWork Pages Fast document design using styles

The reason for using styles and templates is for efficiency and continuity of the design within the document. By using a style to dictate how a specific header, title, or the body text will look, wherever it is being used within the document. Within iWork Pages it is even possible to select every bit of text that is using a particular style. As I show in the video, you do have to be aware that if you make changes to some text that has style applied to it, you have to remember to update the style. This is so that the changes that you have made to the style will be applied all through the document.

Mountain Lion, iCloud and Pages

It sounds a little bit like the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but here we are talking about the changes that are in Pages following the release of Mountain Lion. The Save As feature which was taken away in Lion is now again available in Mountain Lion. Apple have done a bit of a turnaround with this on account of older users of computers getting confused. Poor souls! They were not able to get their heads around the new way of working which in a lots of ways is more sensible and logical. Apple have made Save As available, but it is slightly hidden. This is Apple’s way of encouraging grumpy old gits, that don’t like change, to jump into the 21st-century, while still appeasing the die hards.

Duplicate – don’t Save As !

The new way of working in Lion and in Mountain Lion, it is recommended that instead of using the Save As command, to use the duplicate command instead. Some people think that it is possible to lose data from previous versions of that document where changes have been made. It shouldn’t really be a problem though, because you can browse previous versions from the application. Not only that, but you also have Time Machine running, which will be keeping versions of your files going back in time. Basically the idea is that your computer is continuously recording what it is you are doing with your files and you always have access to go back to any previous version of your work.

Only a problem for the old farts and not for the new users

It seems that it has something to do with the fact, that instead of working on a copy of the file, you actually work directly on the file in real-time. With the old way you are making changes to a copy of the file in volatile memory and then saving it back over the top of the original still sitting in the folder. The new way is more application centric rather than files and folders centric , taking the lead from iOS. When you are making changes to a file in an application like Pages, the actual original file is being altered directly. It may seem like a small distinction, but it is in fact a completely new paradigm of working. I suspect that new users coming to computers or those migrating from iOS to using a Mac desktop computer, will not have any problems with this way of working. What are you waiting for? Go and do an Apple Pages download. BYW. it is Apple iWork Pages and not iWorks Pages when you are talking to the other Mac users.

Mountain lion release date

Apple fans all around the world are going to be getting excited this week with the imminent arrival of Mountain Lion. The rumours regarding the Mountain Lion release have been flying out, left, right and centre. Apple stated that the release date of the next big cat for OS X would be in July. Seeing as we are now towards the end of July, the Apple fans are getting a little bit twitchy. Many believe that the actual date for the Mountain Lion release date will be the 25th July which will coincide with an Apple announcement regarding earnings. It is expected that as the end of the Apple earnings announcement they’ll say, by the way, Mountain Lion is available and you can get it from the Mac App Store tomorrow.

The Mountain Lion gold master release in the hands of developers

The GM release is already available to developers and this is a definite sign of how imminent the new OS is. It has been noted that on previous releases the gold master release is in fact the final release. When the proper version is made available there are no changes to it compared to the gold master. One thing that we know for sure, is that when the software is made available, there is going to be a huge hit on the Apple servers. It may make perfect sense to decide to wait a day or two before trying to download the latest OS X cat. Not everybody though, will have the patience to wait a couple of days to be able to enjoy the new Mountain Lion features. There will be much more iCloud integration to enjoy also.

There is already a lot of information out there about Mountain Lion

On account of the fact that the Apple operating system developers need to work hand-in-hand with the creators of the third-party software, the Apple community already knows what is coming. Even though there is a nondisclosure agreement in place, there will be a certain amount of loose talk and bean spilling. It is not too difficult to get a Mountain Lion developer preview and to use the latest Mac operating system before the general populace gets their grubby little paws on it. We know quite a lot too from this year’s WWDC.

The best Mountain Lion features

Personally, I am looking forward to the inclusion of voice control included in the Mountain Lion release. This is because I already use Dragon Dictate for most of my writing, for the weblogs that I contribute to, such as for Video Magical. I can already use Dragon Dictate to open and close applications as well as for dictating whole articles. I do have some difficulties dictating into other applications, aside from the Dragon Dictate window, so I am hoping that Mountain Lion will fill that gap with the speech recognition software.

Control your Mac with your voice

Other Mac users will also likely be looking forward to OS X voice control of the operating system and applications, following getting familiar with Siri. It only makes sense, with the closer integration between Mac OS X and iOS that users should be able to do tasks in a similar way, whatever Apple computer is being used. It remains to be seen whether an Internet connection will be required in order to use the operating system provided voice control, as per with Siri. It could be that the Mac OS X voice control will take advantage of the larger storage space available and the heavier duty hardware and an Internet connection will not be required. Which way this eventually works, it remains to be seen.

The Mountain Lion review is coming

As soon as possible after the Mountain Lion release date, I will install it on my iMac so that I can give you a Mountain Lion review. So even if it might make sense to wait a couple of days after the release date before installing, I will be downloading as soon as possible. I have to do this so that I can give you a proper hands-on Mountain Lion review.

What else am I looking forward to with the Mountain Lion release?

Within the list of Mountain Lion features you will find the Mountain Lion Gatekeeper. There are a number of things to consider with regards the Gatekeeper. The idea behind this part of the Mac OS X of Mountain Lion, is to keep Apple users safe from viruses and malware. Also connected to Gatekeeper is the requirement from Apple for developers to sandbox their applications. We no longer have the advantage of security through obscurity. Macs are much more mainstream and therefore more likely to come under attack by malware makers.

Sand boxing and Gatekeeper have advantages and disadvantages for us users. Sand boxing means that one application can’t do something that will affect another application. This way an application can’t be used as a backdoor to be used by hackers for nefarious purposes. The only trouble with this, is that there are a number of applications which by the nature of the capabilities and functions that they provide, can no longer be sold through the Mac App Store due to the sandbox requirements. Some applications are already available in two versions, one for the Mac App Store and one sold from the developer’s website.

Using Mountain Lion Gatekeeper

There are three main settings in Mountain Lion Gatekeeper and the first of these is to have it set to only allow applications that are available in the Mac App Store. This will be the setting for the users that require the feeling of safety for being inside the Apple walled garden. There are a number of advantages to buying applications from the Mac App Store including the ability to put on more than one Apple Computer that you own, or belong to your family members. All of the developers that produce the applications are identified and verified as being okay. Applications are checked as being sand boxed and if an application is found to be malware it will be kicked out of the Mac App Store. If it is found to be intentional black hat type of malware, then I expect the developer would also lose access to the Mac App Store as a sales venue.

Mac App Store and identified developers setting within Gatekeeper

In Mountain Lion, the default setting will be set so that you can use applications from the Mac App Store and developers that are identified. As well as being able to run any applications from the Mac App Store, you will be able to run third-party applications that have been digitally signed by identified Mac developers. This will be a safe setting that most users will tend to use. This will partly be due to the fact that it is the default setting and also because you will have a reasonable level of peace of mind while using applications not from the Apple App Store.

It could happen that malware could be found in one of these applications, but is quite unlikely. If an application from an identified developer is changed by the man in the middle attacker, then that application would not run on your computer. You do have to realise though that these applications are not really getting a seal of approval from Apple. It is just the case that the certificate that is provided by Apple can be revoked, if it is decided by Apple that there is malware being distributed.

With Gatekeeper you can run software from anywhere

This is the setting if you are happy with the way things work at present, or prior to Mountain Lion Gatekeeper. If you are using an administrator account on your Mac you can change to this setting. In any case you can also override Gatekeeper by doing a right click on the application in the Finder and choosing Open. The app will launch without any complaining. When you have done this once with an application it will continue to open every time after that. It is clear that the Mountain Lion Gatekeeper is there to promote good behaviour and to get you to not run software that you don’t really trust. The choice of what applications to run are still in the hands of the Mac user. The Apple haters that complain about Apple being dictatorial – the Apple way or the highway – don’t really have a leg to stand on with regards their naysaying.

A review of Mountain Lion Gatekeeper

Overall it seems to be a very well thought out way to try and keep the Mac system as safe as possible for all sorts of users. The default setting will keep the basic user safe and a total novice and can be kept safer, by changing it to the Mac App Store only setting. The power users don’t really have too much to complain about either, as you can still run whatever you like.

The sand boxing requirement for the Mac App Store could possibly mean a certain amount of fragmentation of the Mac ecosystem of applications. Good non-malware type of applications could be forced out of the Mac App Store by the sand boxing rules, which is a bit of a shame. This could mean that there will be two versions of an application which could cause a user confusion if moving between machines with different settings. We may see Mac applications that are orphaned in terms of development, but we may have to see how this pans out in the real world after the Mountain Lion release date.

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Doing things with your Address Book and CoBook

One of the things that you are bound to do with your Mac is to keep track of your contacts. The application that you are likely to use for this is called Address Book, which is fairly good at doing the basic things that you need to do with contact management. With the Address Book app you can put in your names, nicknames, business names and so on, along with addresses and e-mail addresses. What has been missing though, is the integration with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. This may be changing with the move to Mountain Lion during July of 2012 with the addition of Facebook integration to the operating system. There has already been the addition of Twitter to the connectivity in a previous upgrade to OS X. What does it take to have a really useful fully functioned digital address book?

Alternative free address book software

While it may be possible to add customised fields to Address Book for Mac, it is not quite the same as having built-in integration and with iCloud bridging the gap between Mac OS X and iOS. Another way that you could deal with addresses and contacts would be to use an application like Bento. Bento will pull in the address book details and you can create your own fields as you wish, but there are still no tools to make the job easier for you to integrate the social networks. This is where the smart electronic address book application comes in and it is called CoBook. CoBook is a free address book application and you can let it search through your social networks to either add or merge with what you have in the Apple Address Book application.

Working smart with name and address details in CoBook

It is very easy to set up CoBook after you have installed it. You are given options to connect to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google Voice. The CoBook installation also asks you if you want to have CoBook as your default application for addresses. If you are giving it a try then, I suggest you try that option first. Without a doubt I would recommend that you make a backup of your address book, before you do any of this testing with CoBook. Generally CoBook does work fairly well, but there have been one or two small difficulties and having a backup will keep you happy.

Choosing the initial level of integration connecting CoBook to Facebook and the other networks

The first option is to choose the manual option. This option is really for those that really want fine-grained control of how the social network contacts are synchronised into the address book. You may not want to have all of your Facebook people in your day-to-day address book. Then there is the second possibility which is to only have the social names merge with the names and addresses you already have in your Address Book. For me this is the most useful of three options. You have a certain amount of the job automated for you and then you can still manually add some of your Facebook people, if you need to. The third option is to do a full merge and this is where everything from the social network is added or merged to your CoBook address book. Whether you would use this option really depends upon how large your social network is. You wouldn’t really want to have hundreds or even thousands of people brought in from Twitter or Facebook. I think the Address Book on the Mac with CoBook, works better for those people that you know really well and personally.

CoBook App Review – YouTube a20q.info/LVHY9L

— David Allen (@Mac20Q) July 14, 2012

CoBook free address book alternative

So when a name is merged or added from Facebook you will see that the contact is tagged as being a Facebook friend. And the same thing happens with your other social networks that you connect up with. You can use these tags to just look for your Facebook friends or for just your Twitter friends and so on. There are also buttons that you can click on that will take you to the Facebook page, from the person’s details in your CoBook data. When you mouseover the area in CoBook, where it tells you that the person is a Facebook friend, there is a pop out which shows all of the profile information from Facebook. Very handy indeed.

Actually using CoBook on your Mac

You can get to the CoBook application when it is running easiest, if you have it set to pin to the menu bar. There is a keyboard shortcut that you can also use. Using the menu bar is a good option if you have lots of keyboard shortcuts and you don’t fancy learning a new one. Control shift and space bar is not that difficult to remember though.

There is a whole lot of editing that you can do with your contact. You can merely refresh it, add or disconnect the social networks on a one by one basis, as well as editing the basic data. When you have all the data organised you can do the basic things, like find address by name, so much easier and more efficiently. I like that in CoBook you can get rid of any Mac Address Book duplicates. It sometimes happens that you can get duplicates, even in a small address book when synchronising. CoBook will probably help you get a more personalised address book.

CoBook Review – Address Book for Mac alternative

The CoBook app for the Mac is free to download now and try. It gives a lot more options if you are a social network sort of person. Aren’t we all like that these days though? Take the free contact manager, Address Book app, that comes with your Mac and make it that much more useful. It is handy to have your contacts properly organised and at your finger tips by using CoBook. Do make sure that you make a back up before you start the synchronisation with Facebook, Twitter, Google Voice and Linked in. It is not that likely that you will have problems, but a back up is alway a good idea, just in case. My recommendation is to give it a try out and you will probably like it and keep it on your Mac. CoBook Mac app is going to be residing on my iMac for the foreseeable future in any case. Use this free address book as you personal and business contact manager.

WWDC Keynote 2012 – Well I’m glad that is out of the way.

In the months before the actual keynote address at Apple worldwide developers conference 2012, it has been painful to listen to the podcasters speculating and pontificating about what Apple might do and say. The Apple fan boys with the unicorn fairy dust in their hair, have been salivating at the possibilities of all sorts of new devices. Quite a few of them have been predicting televisions made by Apple. They were wrong. Some were expecting the iPhone 5 to be announced. They were wrong also.

So what did Apple announce at WWDC 2012?

There are new MacBook Pro’s and also MacBook Air’s and as you would expect they are thinner, lighter and faster. There were announcements regards the release date of Mountain Lion and the previously vague date of sometime in the summer, has been updated to sometime in July. The retina display looks like it will be amazing. I still have not seen a Retina display in the flesh. I need to buy a new iPad and a new iPhone too. USB 3 becomes available on the new laptop models, the Air and the MacBook Pros. How on earth is it possible to make those MacBook Air computers so thin? I see that the optical drive is gone from the MacBook Pro, something else that is becoming obsolete. The MacBook Pro with the Retina display get a HDMI output too.

Mountain Lion Mac OSX is coming

There were a couple of things in Mountain Lion Mac that were new announcements. I think the most notable of these was the system level dictation capabilities. Seeing as I am always using Dragon Dictate, and loving it, I will be very interested to see what the Mountain Lion OSX version of dictation has to offer. We will be pressing the function key once to start the dictation function and we will be able to toggle the dictation off also. Apple claim that it will learn your speech patterns and get smarter the more you use it.

So far I have gone over the basics of what was in the * WWDC keynote*, but I plan to watch the full keynote later today. I have already started to listen to a couple of podcasts that have been commenting upon it. One of the things that many people will be pleased with, is the price of Mountain Lion. You will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion from either Snow Leopard or OS X Lion for the price of $20. There will be no excuses for not upgrading to the latest Apple operating system. I will be updating my iMac and my wife’s MacBook Pro as soon as it becomes available in the Mac App Store. As part of the process you will be able to check Mountain Lion system requirements. Another thing that you might decide to do before you upgrade, is to look at your applications for Mountain Lion compatibility. As far as I can tell it does seem that most developers are keen to have their applications compatible with Mountain Lion as soon as possible.

Putting some final touches to iCloud

The main thing that needs to be sorted out with iCloud as it is at the moment is the way that iCloud synchronises documents in Apple Pages, Numbers and the Keynote application. Finally we will be able to work on documents on our Mac OS X computers and they will be synchronised properly through iCloud the same as they are within iOS. It seems that it has also been made easier for developers to include iCloud document sharing with their applications. This will give dropbox like functionality to many more Apple applications.

Shared Photo Streams

With the demise of photo galleries in MobileMe that inevitably some photo sharing available from within iCloud. At some point in time between the launch of Mountain Lion this July and iOS 6 in the autumn, iCloud will be upgraded. You will be able to share single or multiple photos from your Photo Stream with a select audience. If the person you’re sharing with doesn’t have an Apple device then they will be held to view those photos on the web.

Mountain Lion Mac Messages

I have never really liked or found useful iChat, but I started to like the beta version of Messages. Where this has become useful is because my mother and my sister and also one of my sons have iPhones now and my brother has an iPad, now I can send messages directly to them using this app. It looks like the system will tie together the application with the phone number and the Apple ID more tightly to ensure that the messages get through.

And then there is FaceTime

What would have been really nice would be for messages and face time to be integrated into one application. For whatever reason, this is not the case at the moment with the next Mountain Lion download. I suppose there could be an opportunity later to pull these two applications together, but I’m now starting to think that is going to be unlikely.

It was announced that the WWDC Keynote live event that face time would now be possible over the mobile networks and not just Wi-Fi. This could have quite a large impact upon the amount of data being used and it is quite possible that some users could hit the limits of their mobile plans.

When exactly will we be able to do a Mountain Lion download?

Apple have said that July is the month for the Mountain Lion release date and I would expect that to be in the later half the month. I think it should be possible to be patient for 5 to 6 weeks and not necessary to get the Mountain Lion developer preview. I can well imagine that on the actual day of the Mountain Lion release there were lots of $20 heading towards Apple and a huge strain on the servers to get Mountain Lion out to the users.

• Will you be first in the queue along with me for the Mountain Lion download?

• How will you set up your Mountain Lion Gatekeeper?

• Were you disappointed that there was no WWDC iPhone 5?

• What is your favourite thing in the WWDC keynote?

• Would you have liked to see one more thing coming from the WWDC Keynote?

• Are you planning to buy a new MacBook Pro or MacBook Air?

What to do with a little Trickster

You know how easy it is to get distracted these days while you are working with your computer. One minute you are writing an article and all of a sudden you find that you are replying to something on Twitter or Facebook. Or you could be working on a project and have a number of files being worked on all at the same time, you close one of these applications down and then find later that you need to get back to it quickly. Maybe you download a file through a web browser and you have some automation in place to put that file in a specific place and you need to get to it quickly. There is the Mac OS X Lion built-in Spotlight search, but that takes time and you are keen to get in there and get the job done quickly. This is where best productivity apps like Trickster can help you. The Trickster application monitors your workflow and the files that you work on and makes those files quickly and easily available with a keystroke, or click on the menu bar.

Finding files on your Mac with Trickster

This application is an update on a previous productivity app called Blast. I did try out Blast, but to be honest, it didn’t really make itself useful enough to me for me to continue using it. Trickster does the same sort of thing, but does a much better job of it. A quick click on Ctrl-Z, if you are keyboard type of person, or you can click on the icon in the menu bar. So you don’t need to worry about where you have saved a file of any kind. It is just not necessary to worry if you have closed the wrong window. Your document is just one click away in one of the best productivity software applications, Trickster.

Less searching and more finding of files

In a lot of ways, this fits in with the way that Apple expects you to work in the post PC world. Let the application decide where the file is kept on your computer, because you can always get back to it. You can get back to your files through the recent files used in the menu of your application. Alternatively you can use Trickster to get you back into your work.

Best Productivity Apps usage

If you have just downloaded a file and you can’t be bothered to search in your downloads folder, you can find it with Trickster, quick as a flash. If you have been busy and working on a lot of files, then you can find files easily within Trickster with some filtering. There is already, a certain amount of filtering by type of document. You can see all of your movie files in one place, there is a place for your docs and a place for your images. If there are certain files that you want to designate as being more important, then you can flag them. You have a flagged files folder in Trickster and I am finding that to be a very useful feature.

I did open one file, a PDF, in the preview application which comes with Mac OS X and it did not turn up in Trickster. The reason that it didn’t appear was because I didn’t actually make any changes to the file. Once I had added some notes and highlights to text, then it became available in Trickster. At first I thought it was a bug within the application, but on reflection, it seems fairly reasonable for it to work that way.

Favourite folders and files in the Trickster sidebar

When you have your favourite folders in the sidebar, which is to the right of the application, you can easily drag and drop files from the list into a folder. This makes it easy to move files on your Mac. Not only can you move files with drag-and-drop within Trickster, you can also drag files to the e-mail application to put that document within an e-mail you wish to send.

I’m finding it a little weird with the application, that when I drag a file to the applications in the dock, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I can drag a picture to Pixelmator dock icon and Pixelmator will open up with that file. I can drag the same image to Art Text 2 in the dock and the application does not open. I get the same behaviour when I try and drag to Keynote also. Yet if the application is open, be the Keynote or Art Text app, I can drag and drop the image into the application directly. I suppose with this Trickster being a version one of the application, not including its transformation from being called Blast, it is to a certain extent still a work in progress. Mind you, you can see that with a lot of software, even applications that have been around for years.

Is trickster worth getting?

I have to say that I do find Trickster an excellent little Mac productivity software application and well worth the price of four euros to buy it. A good productivity tool for your computing tasks. That is at the half price offer that is available to buy the application at the moment. I’m not so sure that I would be quite so keen to buy it at the $10 price tag. It really does a very good job of finding files for me, as often I need to work with recent files. I have it set so that it finds files of the last week, but that can be changed so that it is the last two or three days. You can also set it to keep track of files for longer periods if you want it to. When you use Trickster alongside the application Found and of course the Mac OS X Spotlight, you certainly have a good set of tools for searching for anything on your computer. So when you are looking for best productivity apps for Mac, Apparent Software would be a good place to look.

If you want to find any file on your Mac, then you have tool built-in to Mac OS X, Spotlight. It does a good job, generally and you can find any file Mac style very quickly. There are times when you want to take it a stage further and have a file finder that is a Spotlight alternative. You have the application that is called Houdah spot, which has all sorts of tagging and finding features built into it. Yesterday I came across another application which could be used as a Spotlight alternative and it is called Found. I came across the application called Found at more or less the same time as I discovered Trickster. Both of these applications are located in my menu bar now and provide me with more ways to search for my files.

Tricking out file search software with Found

You start up this Found application by hitting the control key twice in succession. The application pops out as a slider on the left side of your screen and you can type in the search term for whatever you are looking for. Found will search through your files based upon how your files are named. Found does not search through the content, nor does it look at the Meta data, for example the tags you have added. Searching through the content is promised in an updated version and I would hope that searching for files that have been tagged will be added later also.

The Found application on the Mac

One of the best things about Found which makes it better than Mac OS Finder is that it will do a search in the cloud for you. If you have a number of Google accounts for your e-mail and Google Drive, you can get Found to search for your files. Just as you can find any file Mac, with spotlight the file search software, built into Mac OS X, you can find files that are contained within Google drive and also in Gmail.

Within Found you can make a copy of a Google doc or grab a spreadsheet and e-mail it to somebody else. Best of all you don’t have to open up your web browser and login to your Google account to do so. Found the file finder application will index the data in the cloud for you, making it possible to do your searches even if you are off-line.

Found the file Finder Spotlight alternative

Another really good point in favour of Found in comparison to Houdahspot, is that the software is free. It may be that later when there are other capabilities added to the software, such as searching inside the content, that the application may become a paid for application. It does of course depend upon the price and the functionality that gets included, as to whether value is provided and whether you would continue to use it.

A better file finder for your Mac

No file tagging within Found

My favourite application with regards to adding open meta data tagging is Default Folder X. This adds extra to the save dialogues and one of the facilities that is added, is the ability to add tags when saving your documents. Tagging is particularly useful when you are working on a project that spans a number of different file types. This will often make it much easier for finding all files for that project by doing a search for the tag. You can use the tags within Mac OS X Finder directly, or you can use an application like TagIt, another free app, to help you. So tagging would be very useful for working on an eBook project. All of the files from the text document which might have been created in Mou or Byword or perhaps Pages along with all of the media files, such as the drawings and pictures, audio clips or videos.

It seems that there is still no perfect file search software for your Mac, but the application Found is a good addition to the arsenal of Spotlight alternatives. I will be hitting the control key twice quickly, to bring up the application first before I check into Spotlight. Although if it is a file that has been used recently then I may well pick up the app Trickster from the menu bar before I try Found.

Free books for iPad

Now that it is so easy to publish iBooks, there are many authors who are using this self publishing route to build up a fan base of readers for their work. Like so many things on the Internet these days, the way that it often works is that you give a certain amount of your stuff away for free and you have premium content that you expect consumers to pay for. You can easily make your iBooks iPad ready, either producing them using tools like Apple Pages or better still the iBooks Author application. An author can make free ibooks for iPad and within the book create links that go back to a website, so the reader can find out more about the author and his or her works. Just the same, the author can have links to paid for content within the free iBooks.

Where to download iBooks

You can get your hands on iBooks of a variety of genres from the iBook store, either from within your iOS device or from within iTunes. It is also pretty easy for you to download free ibooks for iPad from an author’s website where they are sharing or selling their books. Can you read iBooks on Mac? If you want to read a book that is in an ePub version, then there are one or two applications that will allow you to read iBooks on Mac. Applications such as Stanza. Personally I don’t find the reading experience with regards books, to be the best way forward on a large screen computer such as an iMac. I prefer to download iBooks to my iPad which gives a much more intimate experience. Sitting on the sofa with the iPad, feet up and a nice cup of tea with a biscuit. What could be nicer than that? I have got a couple of iBooks iTunes books for free including one which is based on the Beatles Yellow Submarine. I found an interesting book about the painter Francis Bacon which is another of those free iBooks for iPad. It’s obviously not that hard to get your book into the iBooks file format and put into the iBook store publishing system.

IBooks Author Windows

I have to wonder when people are searching for iBooks Author Windows, are they looking for a way to create iBooks for iPad, in the iBooks file format that is for textbooks, on Windows computers. While I suppose that it is possible somebody is looking for specific details or how to use iBooks Author on the Mac, I suspect that there are some numbskulls that want to do Mac things on a Windows computer. The only thing you can say to these people is to “Get a grip, go buy yourself a Mac!“ Once these people start using a good computer of quality, they will enjoy it so much that they wonder how come they waited so long.

iBooks vs Kindle

The Kindle is a marvellous device for reading books, particularly when you’re on the beach or some other place where the light is bright. You can continue reading when the iPad user might have to wait for some clouds to pass by. Then again when you’re using your iPad and the lights are turned off, you can continue reading, when the Kindle user has to find something else to do. The point is that if you are an author or writer and you want to publish something, then you should really get your work out in all formats possible. You want it so that your novel or textbook, or even your poetry is available in as many forms as possible.

Free iBooks for iPad but writers have to eat also

I do fully endorse the free and premium (Freemium) content model, with the author building up a following of fans that will buy the premium content, as well as consume the free stuff. It is not right, that there are some people that expect to get everything for free online. Writers, authors, artists, filmmakers and new media content producers also need to put bread on the table. So if you have enjoyed some of the free content put out by the author, show your appreciation by occasionally buying a book, a piece of music, a video or whatever. This way the author will be able to continue producing both free and paid for content for us to enjoy. That includes free iBooks for iPad.