A thing of beauty

Have you seen the new ipod nano yet?

I popped into the Applestore recently and I have to say I think it looks wonderful. I know I'm a bit of a Mac freak, but I do think this little device is a wonderful piece of design.

If I didn't already own an iPhone, and iPod Touch, a MacBook, an iMac and of course an iPad, then I might be tempted to go shopping.

After all, my old Nano has bitten the dust, and this one does have a pedometer built in, just hat I need to keep track of all those steps I take while I listen some inspiring music!

Wireless at church

It has to be said, an Airport Express is a wonderful thing!

I knew you could use one to create a wireless access point to a network, but I hadn't tried it until this morning. It took five minutes at the most, and most of that time was spent thinking about the set-up and configuration questions.

So now I have wireless in the church study, and maybe even on the platform in church, given that my study is next to it.

I guess the next step is to link the audio out from the MacBook to the PA system and I can play Youtube videos on the big screen!

Create Booklet

Ever since changing to a Mac I've been looking for something that will produce a booklet nice and easily. I've tried a couple of things including Clickbook which worked brilliantly on the PC but never seems to do what I want it to do on my Mac!

I may have found the solution courtesy of a friend of mine who pointed me to this neat little utility. It may not have the bells and whistles of Clickbook, but at least I get a booklet at the end of it in the format that I want.

The next step, and I hope the author finds it in his heart to do this soon, is to be able to shift the margins so that when I print out my address list for my diary, there is a suitable margin for the hole punch!

Removing old addresses

Many of you may already know, but it's taken me a little while to work out how to delete an email address from Mail. I'd always thought that Mail used Leopard's Address Book and that if I deleted someone's old email address from there it would disappear from Mail. Not so.

The old address still appears in the "To:" field when you create a new message. That, quite frankly, is rather annoying. The solution however is quite simple. In Mail simply open the previous recipients window (you'll find it under on the menu bar) and delete the address from the list.

It's one of those little things that I just didn't know until today, and now you know if you didn't already!

Was it me he was talking about?

I've taken to using my MacBook as a notebook in seminars and talks. The only problem is that it does get noticed. I can't believe that David and I were the only two people in the whole of the Big Top taking notes directly to our computers, but apparently we might have been. Perhaps it's the glowing Apple motif that gives us away. At any rate there was a reference to those folks over there (pointing in our direction!) who are Googling away. And today we had our own bit of fun with Ally, David and I sitting in a row with Macs open and ready!

To give you an idea of how useful using the MacBook can be, I was in a seminar the other day and wanted to add a copy of a small (A6) handout to my notes. Quickly I used the built-in camera to take a picture, which I then edited in iPhoto and flipped the right way around and then dragged it into my notebook application. All very neat, all very easy.

So it has to be said that whilst I could just take hand written notes, and I do take notes like that, the MacBook is a really great tool.

Spring Harvest is about at an end. One last celebration evening and then the final morning. We'll pack up and get off after breakfast. There will be a pile of post to deal with and Easter Sunday is just around the corner.

Spring Harvest is not as significant an event for me as the Global Leadership Summit, but it's still a valuable time and I'm sure it continues to inspire many Christians to continue to live out their lives for the glory of God.

Tumblr

So, Ally got me using Twitter, mainly I think so that she can keep an eye on me while away at University. And I always thought it was me as her father that would want to keep tabs on my daughter!

Anyway, it's been fun tweeting and it made me think about how interactive can, and ultimately should, we be via the internet. I've resisted the urge to sign up for Facebook or Myspace or the over fifties version run by Saga. However that's a debate for another day.

The thing with Twitter is that it isn't really a route to use for quick thoughts and quotes etc. Jeff put me onto Swurl and I've set up a homepage there to collate various streams (blogs, music, Twitter, wish lists). 

And because Swurl does the job of putting everything you want to put in one place in... well one place actually, there's no need to spend all day updating a whole range of social sites with duplicate information. It also means that if, like me, you write more than one blog, then you can pull all of them into one place for anyone interested to read all your musing but who doesn't use RSS or similar to aggregate blogs. But that still doesn't solve the problem of posting a quick thought without logging in and creating new posts.

So, to complete the picture so far, I've added Tumblr to my streams. It's a simple, quick thoughts kind of approach to blogging. Using my Blog title "the view from here" I now have a Tumblr homepage, but all the things I post there will automatically appear on the Swurl page. I'm also working on how to add my Tumblr blog to the sidebar of my main blog but I'm having a few problems getting the size right.

Being a Mac user I've also found a dashboard widget, or rather two dashboard widgets for Tumblr. 

The first is available from the Tumblr site, the second from the Apple downloads site. I prefer the second one because it has some automatic formatting built in for posting regular text or pictures or quotes. 

Both are free, so you just choose your preferred style I guess.

Dropbox

This is "one to watch" if you're interested in synchronising files across multiple Macs and even PC's.

Still in beta, the website makes some impressive claims and it looks quite promising

The iMac has landed

So, my desk has taken another change with the arrival of an iMac earlier today.

I have to say that I was somewhat apprehensive of the new arrival. How would the set up go? How much time would I need to set aside to keep track of everything? Would I be able to find all the drivers and software licence keys? 

Well I needn't have worried. Just plug the MacBook into the firewire connection and go and have a chat with a visiting friend whilst the two Macs made friends with each other. It took quite a while, but eventually my iMac had all my data and all my software installed and running.

Unfortunately my modem seemed to stop working for some reason, but a spare one was sitting on the shelf and after a few quick cable swaps, I was back on the internet and things were looking good.

I took the opportunity to add a hard drive to my Airport base station, but that's not the most reliable connection. Even as I write, the disk has disappeared from my desktop, and I'm not sure I like Time Machine. All those hourly back-ups seem so unhelpful for me personally speaking. Once a day would be fine, and I can do that in other ways, so I may turn off Time Machine and just schedule a once a day back up.

The next thing will be keeping the two machines synchronised. 

What was nice was how easy it was to import the two "hacks" I'd created to synchronise my mobile 'phone. I've blogged about the Nokia 6085 and Samsung E250 before as I recall, but being able simply to drag and drop the files from the MacBook to the iMac was as straightforward as it should be. Of course there may be problems synching my Palm and 'phone with the iMac given that they are usually synched with the Macbook. I'll see what happens.

Breaking news... Time Machine has just fired up for it's hourly back up and remounted the disk, so that's okay.

Anyway, I'm pleased with the iMac. It's nice to have a full sized screen to look at again, and a keyboard to use that has a forward delete key on it!

Do my eyes deceive me?

Having become a pro-Mac person, I tend to pay a little more attention to announcements made by Apple about what's around the corner. I have to confess that my experience with my Mac tells me that it's more than likely going to be a positive change, and that is not going to cost me the earth to embrace if I so choose.

So it was with some interest that I took notice of this year's announcements from the Developers Conference. And this is where I came across something hitherto unheard of in my limited computer experience. Yes, they have announced an upgrade to the operating system, but guess what? It's actually going to use less disk space, fewer resources and be more efficient.

No long list of new features, just improved performance. 

Heart warming isn't it.

Multiple Macs

I've just taken the plunge and ordered a nice shiny iMac for my desk. I love my Macbook, but I find the screen a little small and my neck aches when I sit at the desk to use it for long periods. I know there are various solutions, none of which are as expensive as putting a 20" iMac on the desk, but having only the one computer makes me feel vulnerable having had laptops and desktops with which to work for some time.

The problems in the past, with older Windows based technology, was how to keep stuff synchronised between the desktop and the laptop. Now with Leopard and .Mac some of that has been solved, but I'm not sure everything has been solved and was wondering what other Mac users have tried to keep files synchronised between their Macs. I know that my friend Andy White blogged about Chronosync some time ago, but what else do people find helpful?

Another day another 'phone

While I wait to reach the point of being able to reconcile buying an iPhone with the hefty cost of the contract you have to use it, and the fact that I really can't actually justify it, I found myself out shopping for a new mobile 'phone for church use. While I'm away on Sabbatical we are going to have a mobile as a contact point.

The best offer I found was for a Samsung E250. It wasn't the cheapest, but it was good value and Ally, my daughter is happy with her Samsung. Being a Mac user, my first thought was, "will it sync?"

It seems as though whilst iSync is a good idea, it's hard to keep up with new 'phone models, so it's almost inevitable that you get the "can't sync" message. The good news is that there's a fix.

I found my fix through a forum, and it didn't cost me anything, which is rather nice! The link is to a translated version of the page, but the instructions are pretty easy to follow.

Of course iSync would be really good if you could synchronise specific contacts using the notes in address book. But you can't have everything... well not just yet.

Presentation Software

While we were away at Spring Harvest we came across ProPresenter from Renewed Vision. I'd be interested to know if anyone has experience of this package. From what I've been told it looks very good.

Given that there are only four of us who use Macs at church, it might be an uphill task to get the church to go Mac for presentation software, but the ability of this package to queue DVD's could swing it.

I know there are other Mac options too that might be worth a look.

BusySync

I haven't tried this alternative to Spanning Sync, but I was wondering if anyone else. If you don't want to pay the higher price for Spanning Sync, this might be a cost effective alternative.

It's from BusyMac.com.

iCal default alarm

In Leopard, iCal has a default alarm setting, the only problem being that the default sound really doesn't get your attention. This has been a bit of a frustration for me, so I decided to see if there was a way around this and find one I did. 

On the Macworld site there is a hint that shows you how to change the default alarm sound for all new appointments. You can find the article here.

A word of warning, for some reason, although I typed the command line for terminal exactly it didn't work for me. I don't know enough about Unix to know what I was doing wrong but it rejected the -/Library... string as an invalid path or file. Perhaps there was a subtle error I was making.

Anyway, in the end I downloaded the trial version of plistedit pro and that got the job done nicely. I now have a more attention grabbing alarm for my reminders.

Office on the Mac

It's taken me a whole week to pluck up the courage to confess that I've bought and installed Microsoft Office for the Mac 2008.

Sadly there are some things, well one thing, that Word does that Pages doesn't and it's a really useful thing to boot. Obviously Apple still needs to have conversations with report writers and others who use wide tables and graphics interspersed with ordinary text. Word lets you mix landscape and portrait in a single document, Pages sadly does not. C'est la vie.

So there it is. Somewhere there's a smug Windows user thinking I told you so, but the truth is, if it were not for this one thing I'd wouldn't have even considered Office.  

A synchronised life

I recently bought a new mobile 'phone because I wanted to enter the world of Bluetooth. The long and short of it is that I'm thinking/planning to change my car and many of the newer model come with Bluetooth installed. So, buy a Bluetooth 'phone I thought.

Now the logical course would have been to get an iphone, and believe me I'm all for being logical. The problem is that in the UK there is only one cellular provider you can use and they lock you into a £35 a month contract for the privilege. I'm not about to start spending £35 a month just for the iphone when I probably don't actually spend £35 a year on my mobile anyway.

So I needed an alternative and decided to stick with Nokia and go for a simple Bluetooth version. I ended up buying the 6085 and it works a treat. The only problem was that when I tried to synchronise it with my Mac, it wouldn't work. Imagine my horror when I checked out the Nokia site to see a whole list of 'phones that would work and the one model so obviously missing was the one I'd just bought!

The upside of this story is that last night, with a little help and encouragement from super-mac techy David, I found a solution which is working fine. I can now synchronise my contacts and calendars between the Mac and the 'phone thanks to James Lloyd who should be hailed as a hero!

I am now one happy sychronised baptist minister. The question is: will this help me not to miss appointments?

MacBook and laptop go to Starbucks

Because March begins with the same letter as MacBook, I thought I'd begin the month with a short post in praise of the Mac.

I know that a MacBook is more expensive than a Windows laptop, but I have to say that there are some things that make it worth the extra. Take for instance Thursday. Anne and I took Ally over to Chelmsford for her last University interview. Having walked up to the Reception building, we left her there to get on with her day, and we set off back into town to Starbucks to run a wi-fi experiment. Anne works for a big multi-national company and we wanted to see if she could connect using a wi-fi hotspot so that , when we're away later in the year, she won't have to run back to the office in London to do a job she could do remotely.

So we chose our drinks, sat at a table, and got out the laptop and the MacBook.

The laptop booted up, searched around for the wireless network, eventually made a connection and we opened internet explorer (sorry Andy if that took you by surprise, I know you consider IE to be the work of the dark side). Nothing. No connection, no welcome screen, just the "can't find the page" message.

The MacBook. Opened it up and it wakes up to a new world. Finds the available networks, I choose the one I want to try, open Safari and it says: What do you want to do now? It's not my homepage, but somehow it is obviously working with the wi-fi hotpspot to help me rather than confuse and frustrate me.

Same scenario in MacDonalds where the wi-fi was free!

You see the MacBook just worked. It's a delight to use. There are moments when it does things I don't expect and things close unexpectedly, but there are times when it just does what you want it to do without having to delve into all sorts of proxy settings and connection profiles.

So, if you are about to change your old PC or laptop, give some serious consideration to a Mac. The offers on laptops might look good, but watch out for insufficient amounts of memory to run Vista. The £300 laptop on sale in the High Street might not be able to cope with memory hungry Windows applications.

Sales pitch for the month is over now, I promise not to mention how good my Mac is for at least another month (unless there's a really good reason!)

Mac Mail's annoying little habit

There are things about Mail that I like, but there are some things that frustrate me! For example, why doesn't Mail have a button so that you can step through your messages? And why does Mail check the spelling of the whole message each time you send a reply?

For the last point I found a solution quite by accident. If, like me, you have "check spelling" set to happen when you send a message, a second click of the send button stops any further checking and sends the message as it is.

So, once you've checked the bits you want to check, just click send and you will avoid all the unnecessary checking of the rest of the message.

The MacBook

So, it's been almost one week in the company of the new MacBook and I think I'm beginning to understand the thing. It's a very different beast compared to a PC running XP. I've eventually found the forward delete key and I'm getting used to using the key instead of the key.

What has been really useful is having two people nearby who are Mac users. Ally has made me a list of useful commands and hints, and Mark, a friend from church, has loaned me two books by David Pogue (Switching to the Mac and Mac OS X Tiger edition). I'm actually running Leopard, but the book is still very handy. Without these I think I might have wondered what on earth I'd done moving away from a familiar interface to this strange new world. There's just so much to learn but I'm surprised how much I've got used to already. 

Something that came with the package was OmniOutliner. I've been experimenting with this today and I'm quite impressed. There are some helpful introductory tutorials on the website (Omnigroup) which helped me get started and I think it will prove to be very useful for all sorts of things. 

So overall, I'm pretty impressed with the MacBook.

And so the revolution begins...

Although my previous story about the barefoot man may lead some to think I gave up on pursuing the MacBook dream, the truth is that I was only waiting for Leopard to arrive. 

The trip to the Apple Store was a convenience precipitated by a journey through London. 

So, here I am sitting with my new MacBook trying to figure out if I've made a sensible or crazy choice! My daughter is of course convinced that it's the best decision her father had made for some considerable time!

What I have learnt so far is this:

1. When you get a new toy the 'phone never stops ringing

2. Staying up late to play with said new toy does not help you get started the following morning

3. A new MacBook is no substitute for a conversation with your wife, whom you haven't seen all day.

4. It's not like Windows!!

5. It's addictive

6. I think I'm going to like it

All jokes apart, it's a very streamlined little machine. I chose to have the extra gig of memory added in the hope that it will whizz along and I won't spend too much time waiting for an application to run.

There's a lot to learn and the curve looks quite steep, but I'm pleased that I've already figured out how to run a presentation using the remote control and how to build transitions for a slide. I've added some photo's from my digital camera and I've got a trusty little list of useful commands supplied by my Mac-crazed daughter. 

So here we go, a brave new world is dawning on my desk!