Apple Mac OS X Find Out How site

Apple launched a Mac OS X tutorial site it calls Find Out How. The brief (2 minutes 30 seconds each from what I see so far) video tutorials can be viewed online or downloaded from iTunes.

Amazon Buying Audible: Wonder if This Affects Apple iTunes?

According to MSNBC: Amazon Buying Audible for $300M. Since Audible provides audio books to iTunes, I wonder if this means that iTunes will drop Audible audio books? Hope not.

Pixelmator 1.1.2 Automatic Upgrade

I posted a commentary about the Pixelmator image editor on the O'Reilly Media Mac Center last week Wednesday. The 1.1.2 upgrade had just been released but I had not upgraded from 1.1.1. I fired up Pixelmator earlier this evening to prepare a screen capture to use with another blog posting over at Mac Center. A small window came up notifying me of the 1.1.2 upgrade and asked if I wanted to upgrade now or later. I chose to upgrade right then and the process went smoothly and quickly. It is always great when a point release is detected and upgraded automatically. And, I appreciated that the updater gave me the choice to upgrade at a later time if desired. Good stuff.

Installed Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and FileMaker Bento This Weekend

I installed Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and FileMaker Bento this weekend. I have some, um, interesting initial experience comments about it that I'll post over on the O'Reilly Mac Center blog later this week.

FileMaker Bento is very interesting. It is not quite what I expected. But, it does look pretty interesting and potentially very useful. More on this later too.

Bye Bye Mighty Mouse

I read a lot of negative reviews of Apple's Mighty Mouse but did not try one until this week. I tried to get comfortable with it for the past couple of days but could not. So, I replaced it with a Microsoft optical mouse.

Sync Yahoo! Contacts with Mac Leopard Address Book

I found it interesting that Yahoo!'s Mac Address Book sync instructions states it only works with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5).

How can I sync my Yahoo! contacts to the Mac address book?

There doesn't seem to be any Yahoo! recommended way of syncing iCal though. A few blogs point to instructions to use a phone as an intermediary point between iCal and Yahoo! Calendar. However, my phone isn't supported by iSync. So, I'm out of luck there.

Jochen's Macworld 2008 Favorites

Fellow Mac Center blogger Jochen Wolters wrote a great blog item summarizing his favorites from last week's Macworld 2008 in San Francisco. He covers products ranging from software to backpacks to hardware accessories. Good stuff.

FileMaker Bento

FileMaker Bento arrived today. The best price I could find was at Amazon ($45.38). I've never used FileMaker Pro before. But, the low-cost ($49) Bento personal database idea seemed like something I could use to get better organized. One gotcha... It looks like Bento is Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard specific. Do not buy this unless you are running Leopard or upgrading concurrently. More on Bento after I get a chance to install it and use it a bit.

iFixit Mac mini Disassembly Guide (hard to find)

iFixit.com is a Mac repair business. When my Mac mini broke (out of warranty) last year, I recall heading over there and finding a good disassembly guide. But, only now do I actually want actually take it apart. However, when I went to the site today, I couldn't find any Mac mini references on the site. No links, no search results, etc. I finally found the reference indirectly by a Google pointer to a Digg entry. If you are looking for iFixit's great disassembly documentation, you can find it here...

Mac Mini (PowerPC) Disassembly

I hope iFixit leaves it up on the web. It is a very useful piece of information not found anywhere else (that I could find anyway).

You can find Apple's own Mac mini support area here...

Apple - Support - Mac mini

Fix for iPod touch January Upgrade Sync Problem?

iPhone Atlas says that this Apple support article (Restore error messages on the iPhone and iPod touch) resolves the iPod touch sync problem that I ran into (see this O'Reilly Mac Center blog item). I'm not keep on wiping the touch (part of the instructions is NOT to restore from backup) and then manually resyncing and setting up WiFi again (a slow process) though. Will think about this for a while

Pixelmator: Low Cost Image Editor

My favorite (ok only) Mac Open Source image editor, SeaShore, is a bit flaky. It crashed this evening in the middle of editing an image for a blog post. I'm pretty sure I could have restarted SeaShore and coaxed it into finishing the job. However, I just happened to buy the MacHeist 2008 bundle recently. One of the products in the bundle is Pixelmator, ($59) which is an image editor. So, I installed it and used it instead of SeaShore. Looks good so far. And, I was able to finish merging two images and post it to my MobileViews blog.

O'Reilly Mac Center

The new O'Reilly Mac Center formally launched this week (Macworld Expo week in San Francisco). It takes over from where the old Mac DevCenter left off. I'm one of the regular bloggers for that site and will be talking primarily about Mac applications (of course) there. I posted items today about the iPod touch January Upgrade, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, and my weekly summary of freeware, Open Source, and web services.

I'm planning on using this personal blog as a kind of staging area. This means that some items mentioned here might become a longer form more in-depth blog entry later on for the O'Reilly site.

If you have any suggestions for Mac OS X apps for me to take a look at, contact me at Todd//AT//MacsAndStuff//dot//com