After much whining and complaining from some of you, I have decided to get back to my blogging. It has been a long break from My Mac Geek, but I now will try to keep up. Alot has happened in the Mac World, and you can believe I have been on top of it. I have gone through 5 (count them) 5 iphones.

I am now on the 32 GB 3Gs. Loving it.

We will have some announcements today about some ipod releated products and services. I will update when those come in. Until then. Thanks for your support and your emails threatening me to come back.

The new imac desktops were released yesterday.

I have been able to play with them briefly and here are my thoughts:

Obviously from the looks of it it is the same basic design as before. The imac kept it’s Leno Chin on the bottom of the mahine under the screen. It has gotten  significantly thinner. and has received a new color and material change. It is now Aluminum and black.

Most importantly it has been upgraded with slightly faster processors as well and a better graphics card and more ram. The keyboard is a completely new design. WAAAAAY thinner with dedicated keys for certain function that are used regularly.

Check out the pics below for a visual.

If you want to know everything there is to know about the apple iphone go over to www.applephoneshow.com for the latest news, tip, & tricks.

You are all familiar with Flickr, Yahoo!’s photo sharing site, I assume. Flickr provides Mac users with a free utility to upload, tag, and group photos called Flickr Uploadr. Sadly for Intel Mac users it wasn’t a Universal Binary, but the wait is over. Flickr Uploadr 2.3 is a Universal Binary, starts up faster, and has a few new bells and whistles.

Flickr Uploadr 2.3 is free.

A few pics of the interface are waiting for you, after the jump.
Photo upload:

Batch upload:

OK. This is not exactly mac related but I figure anyone who can appreciate a nice apple product will appreciate this one too.

This Camera is made by Sanyo. Itis their third revision of the HD Line. This is not your grandmas camcorder though. This one does not use a tape and it does not even use a hard drive like a lot of newer camcorders do. It uses SD memory cards. I have been looking at this camera for several months and finally made the purchase last week.

Here are a few details that stand out:

Camera accepts Secure Digital and SDHC cards. up to 8GB in size I use a 4 GB and a 2 GB card

Camera records 720P which means it records in HIgh definition and will play on all HDTVs directly and natively

Camera is small and fits nicely in the palm of your hand or in your pocket.

Camera ALSO shoots 7 megapixel still photos on the fly. No switching modes. just press the button and you are shooting stills. (love that)

Best of all…. It is cheap!!! It sells as low as 609.00 at Amazon.com I picked mine up for $650 at Costco online for their return policy, but wow what a deal!I have been shooting with it 3-4 times and am very impressed.

I popped in the card, took it to disneyland with the kids, shot 20 minutes worth of HD on a 2 GB card , went home, stuck the camera in it’s convenient dock (with HDMI out) and Iphoto automatically opened and was ready to import my photos AND movies. after they transfered, I opened up the clips and played them right out of iphoto. could not have been easier. I also turned the tv on and watch the video straight off the camera via the HDMI cable and it looked incredible!!

All in all this is a Great Camera with a tons of potential. In my case, I wanted a camera for my upcoming trip to Sweden in June so I would not have to lug around a video camera and a still Camera. I will just pop it in the pocket and shoot when needed. Love It!!!

5 of 5 on this one!

CantoPod: get favorite lyrics on your iPod (with over 200.000 lyrics to choose from)

Dictionary: hook up your ipod with dictionary that includes over 40,000 definitions and pronunciation guide ($9.95)

Encyclopodia: this incredible tool can get wikipedia.org into your iPod, if you’re one of those who can’t imagine web without wikipedia defintely check it out

GoogleGet: weather+news combo tool. When it comes to news, best option would be to have something like RSS reader that can convert feeds into iPod readable format, however I wasn’t able to find any free tool for that, what I got is Igadget which will cost you ($15). Post it in comments in case you know about any other alternative

iDirectionz: store driving directions on your iPod

iPodGym: turn iPod into your gym advisor; iPodGym is a website where you can find over 80 exercise videos (incl. descriptions) all of which can adopted to the iPod format.

iPodwizard: windows program that let’s you change fonts, graphics and text on you iPod

Ipod-notes | Ipod-ebook-creator: these 2 nifty tools let you easily create iPod compatible ebooks from regular text files. Actually, Ipod-notes goes even further by letting you create ebook from a webpage, check it out. In case you need some free ebooks to start with, drop by Project Gutenberg Library

piPod – guide to the best pizzerias in the five boroughs of NYC

Senuti (Mac OSX): this application syncs files off your iPod and sends them directly to your iTunes library. It can also play songs directly off iPod

Weather for Me: downloads weather forecasts from Myforecast.com and puts it on your iPod

Ipodlinks: variety of icons and wallpapers

Ipodwizard: ipod themes

Video Converters

videora iPod Converter: free video conversion application, you may use it to convert regular PC video files (avi, mpeg, etc) into iPod compatible format

Media-Convert: web based media converter

HandBrake: Rip DVD movies to your iPod. (MacOS X, Linux and soon Windows)

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has posted a short story on the top five mistakes made by new mac users. It includes closing an application window, thinking it has quit, downloading software and then running it from the disk image (runs slowly, can’t eject disk image), Windows .EXE files littered around the desktop after they’ve tried to download software and install it.The comments attached to the article are entertaining, and pick up many other common mistakes.

The thing that strikes me is that most of these problems could be resolved by Apple. For example, when a user downloads an EXE file, Safari could easily give the user a quick warning that it’s a Windows program and won’t install on Mac. (Before you say, “ha! What if it’s in a ZIP file?” Safari already checks inside ZIP files to see if something is a “program” that Safari should give a security warning about.)

Here’s a precis list of things that TUAW and its users said in comments, and a few of my own:

1. Closing an application window, thinking it has quit.

2. Downloading an app and running it from the disk image.

3. Creating endless untitled folders

4. Using Safari’s Google search to get to a website

5. Confusing the concept of wallpaper with screensaver

6. Double-clicking a window thinking it will maximise it, but instead sending it to the dock

7. Not understanding the usefulness of column view and leaving everything in icon view

8. Not using any keyboard shortcuts

9. Thinking that now they’ve got rid of Windows they won’t have problems of _any_ sort on their Mac

10. Renaming desktop icons to random characters because they don’t understand the difference between the enter and the return key on Mac. (Enter puts an icon into rename mode).

11. People trying to find the menus on a window, not realising they’re always at the top of the scree

12. Trying to resize windows from the edge rather than the drag area on the corner

13. Trying to use the CTRL key rather than CMD key for shortcuts.

14. Thinking it’ll be easy to get a stuck CD out.

15. Installing a program every time they want to run it because they think the installer _is_ the program.

16. Where’s “the internet”? (looking for the Windows Internet Explorer “e” icon)

17. Repeatedly hitting the Apple key expecting the Apple menu to pop up (confused with Windows Key and Start Menu concept)

18. Thinking the green “+” button maximises a window to full screen (not realising that Apple’s maximise philosophy is to only make a window as big as it needs to be to comfortably fit the width of content currently being displayed)

19. Looking in vain for an uninstaller app, because they don’t realise that uninstalling an application on Mac is as easy as dragging the program icon into the trash.

20. Minimising windows all the time rather than using “hide”, leaving the document section of the doc littered with forgotten minimised windows (that are quietly occupying system resources).

21. Double-clicking dock icons.

22. Inadvertant click-drags and removing programs from the dock in the process.

23. Saving everything to the desktop or somewhere on the hard drive other than their home folder

24. Trying to load documents or programs multiple times because they don’t recognise the progress indicators (sound of hard drive grinding, CD spinning, Mac spinning beachball, browser status bar)

25. Not understanding that the dock is used to both launch and return to a program …

26. Inability to work with multiple documents on-screen at the same time, because they have only ever learned to use Windows’ maximise mode which always makes everything full-screen

27. Confusing “delete” with “backspace” (because Apple has two keys named “delete” on the keyboard, one of which does forward delete and the other backward delete. Way to go, usability geniuses).

28. Expecting “home” and “end” keys to go the beginning and end of a line, rather than beginning and end of a document.

29. Not realising that when you copy a folder over an existing one, OS X -replaces- the destination folder rather than merging the contents, which is what Windows does.

30. Looking for the “complicated” way of doing everything. For example, trying to go into system preferences and right-clicking on the networking icon in order to find available wireless networks, rather than just clicking on the Airport icon in the menu bar and selecting the relevant wireless network.

If you’ve got a digital camera, iPhoto is the perfect companion. It enables you to import your pictures into your Mac, view them, edit them, and share them with ease. You can make good photos look stellar and turn your not-so-good ones into something better. iPhoto 6 features advanced editing tools (including RAW support) for professional photographers and amateurs alike. Here are some of the cool things you can do with iPhoto 6.

Import Photos

Once you connect your camera to your Mac, just click Import in iPhoto to download your pictures.

1. Connect your camera to your Mac. (See “Connect Your Camera” if you need help doing this.
2. Open iPhoto; the application switches to Import mode.
3. Type a name and description for your import in the Roll Name and Description fields, respectively.
4. Click Import.

View and Organize Your Pictures

Use settings in iPhoto preferences to change the way your iPhoto browser looks.

Once you import your pictures and movie files into iPhoto (you can also manually add files by dragging them from the Finder to the iPhoto Library icon in the Source column), it displays thumbnails (small image copies) of your files in the browser window. The Source column on the left allows you to select your Library, certain albums, slideshows, books, and more. Select any source item to view its images in the window.

• To change the size of the thumbnails, move the zoom slider in the bottom-right corner.
• To change the look of the browser window, choose Preferences from the iPhoto menu and click Appearance. You can select any options you want in the pane to display border outlines or drop shadows, change the background from white to black (or somewhere in between), and organize the thumbnail placement.
• To help you search for particular photos better, add keywords to your photos. Click the keyword button (the button with a key) to display the Keywords pane, which comes with a few default keywords such as Vacation, Kids, and Birthday. To assign one of these words to a photo, select a thumbnail and drag it onto the keyword in the Keywords pane. You can assign more than one keyword to any picture. To view photos by keyword, click a keyword in the Keywords pane (click Reset to return to your full library).
• To add your own custom keywords, choose Preferences from the iPhoto menu and click Keywords. Click Add to create a new keyword entry and type a name for your keyword such as “My Dog,” “Company Party,” or “Good Blackmail Material.” Close the window; your new keyword appears in the Keywords pane. (Drag the divider above the Keywords pane to increase the view.)

  

  For better organization and search capabilities, add keywords to your photos.

Edit Your Images

The Adjust palette features an assortment of tools that allow you to make your photos look the best that they possibly can.

If you want to make your photos look their best, edit them. Select a thumbnail and click the Edit button to open the image in the editor. The toolbar below the image displays all the available editing tools you can use. Here’s what each tool does (from left to right).

• If you need to rotate your image, click the Rotate button. Each click makes your image rotate 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Option-click this button to rotate the image clockwise.
• To crop your picture, choose a preset size or choose Custom from the Constrain pop-up menu. A crop selection box indicates which part of your image will be retained. If you chose Custom, a dialog opens, allowing you to enter your own dimensions before you see the crop box appear. You can then move the box anywhere to frame the area you want to keep, and resize it to zoom in on the details; the crop area’s proportions will be retained when you resize it.
• Click the Enhance button to have iPhoto automatically adjust your photo’s color and contrast.
• If someone in your photo has red-eye (not the medical condition; the photo-ruining one where a person’s eyes glow a bright red), click the Red-Eye button, then click the center of each eye to remove the red.
• If you need to remove blemishes, marks, or other small items from a photo, click the Retouch button. Use the zoom slider to zoom in on the details, move the crosshair pointer over the thing you want to remove, and then drag short strokes to blend the blemish into its surrounding areas.
• To turn a color photo into a black-and-white one, choose B & W in the Effects button menu. Or, to give a photo an old-fashion look, click Sepia in the Effects button menu, which transforms your image into a sepia-tinted photo.
• If you want total control of making your picture look its best, click the Adjust button to open the Adjust palette. Use the sliders to adjust your picture’s brightness, contrast, color saturation, color temperature, tint, sharpness, straightness, exposure, and levels.
• When finished, click Done to save your changes and return to your library.

Make a Slideshow

Use the Ken Burns Effect to make your still images come to life in your slideshows.

1. Select the photos that you want to display in your slideshow by selecting thumbnails in the Library or choosing an album.
2. Click the Slideshow button.
3. Type a title for your slideshow in the Source column.
4. Choose an effect (if you want one) from the Effect pop-up menu, and choose a transition style from the Transition pop-up menu.
5. If you want to add a motion effect to your pictures, select the Ken Burns Effect checkbox.
6. To add music, click the Music button and select one of the sample songs, or select Library (or a playlist) to select something from your iTunes library.

Make and Buy Photo Books

For your prize photos, create a photo book that can be viewed electronically onscreen, or send it directly to a print service from iPhoto to buy one for coffee table viewing.

iPhoto makes book-making easy; just choose a style, and drag and drop your photos onto the virtual pages.

1. Select your favorite pictures in the Library, then click the Book button.
2. In the dialog, choose a book size and type from the Book Type pop-up menu.
3. Select a book design theme from the left column and click Choose Theme.
4. Select whether you want iPhoto to layout your book for you (click Automatically), or you want to do it yourself (click Manually).
5. Your book appears in the Source column; click the name to name it.
6. Your book pages display in a book-editing window. Click the pages icon in the top view bar to navigate to each page overview. Click the pictures icon below it to view all photos that are still waiting to be placed in your book (if you had iPhoto make your book, you won’t see anything here).
7. On the cover page, type whatever text you want to appear on your cover.
8. To add pictures to a page, click the pictures icon to display all photos, then drag one down to a book page. If your image is too small to be fit for print, an exclamation point icon appears to alert you.
9. To delete an image from a page, drag it from the page; your photo will be held in the pictures bar for later placement.
10. To swap around photos, drag one image to another on a page.
11. To add more pages, click the Add Pages button.
12. If you want to turn your electronic creation into a real book, click Buy Book. iPhoto assembles your book and then takes you to a book order screen for purchase.

Make and Buy Calendars

Turn your photos into personalized and practical calendars for friends and family.

Wouldn’t it be great to give all your prize photos as calendars to your friends and family? Since you’ve already done the hard part, taking the great pictures, iPhoto makes this priceless gift a snap.

1. Calendars contain photos that are relevant to particular months, so start by creating an album for the calendar project. Each page can have more than one photo, so you can include more than 12 photos in the album.
2. Select your calendar album and click Calendar.
3. From the dialog box that appears, choose a theme for your calendar from the list on the left, and click Choose Theme.
4. Include any calendar information from iCal calendars, as well as national holidays and even birthdays you’ve entered into the Birthday field in your Address Book.
5. Click Autoflow to fill the images from your album into your calendar. You can rearrange them later as needed.
6. When your calendar is ready, you can click Buy Calendar to order and upload your calendar project to Apple for professional-quality printing.

Make and Buy Cards

Share your travel with everyone you know and add a personal touch.

Besides photo books and calendars, you can use the photos in your iPhoto library to create greeting cards and postcards. When you’re done, choose professional printing for your cards and take “wish you were here” to a whole new level!

1. Choose the picture you want to use for the card in your iPhoto library.
2. Click Card
3. Choose Greeting Card or Postcard from the menu, choose a theme, and continue.
4. Add text to your card. You can change backgrounds, choose frame designs, and add caption text to your cover picture.
5. Click Buy Card to order your cards, and your card will be uploaded for professional printing.

Putting your Photos on CDs

Protect your photos against disaster by backing them up to DVD, or CD.

After organizing and sharing your photos in iPhoto, you can make sure they’re not accidentally lost or damaged by copying them to a CD or DVD. The photos you copy onto CD or DVD are copied complete with their keywords, titles, comments, and so on.

1. Select your Library, roll, album, or individual photos you want to burn to a disc.
2. Click the Share menu, and choose Burn.
3. Insert a blank CD or DVD into your drive.
4. Name your disc.
5. Click the Burn button in the Burn Disc window.

Share Your Photos

You can make your entire iPhoto library (or certain albums, slideshows, and books) available to up to five computers on your local network. Here’s how to do this.

1. From the iPhoto menu, choose Preferences.
2. Click Sharing.
3. Select the “Share my photos” checkbox, then select what you want to make available. Anyone on your local network who has the “Look for shared photos” option selected will be able to view your photos in your selected albums.

So here is a quick tip on a great program that helps you to design professional looking cd/dvd covers and labels.

First of all I have used dozens of programs or techniques to create nice looking covers and labels for tapes or dvds or cds. None of them have been as smooth and easy to use as this one. Disc Cover is a slick and intuitive Mac OS X software to create labels and covers for CDs, DVDs and more. Variety of professionally made designs are just fine for a quick start. The program imports data and images from iTunes, iPhoto, Finder, iDVD and many other sources. You can easily experiment with styles and graphic tools. It is a great program and is so easy to learn. Check it out.

The URL is http://www.belightsoft.com/products/disccover/overview.php

It only costs $34.00 but it is worth every penny. You can buy it online via download or pop into the apple store and buy the nice colorful box.

Here are some samples of what you can create with this program.

Different Elements
Take a look at the media elements that can be designed and printed in the program.

f Amazon’s hot holiday seller list is any indication, a lot of you got new Macs this holiday season. If you switched to a Mac from a PC, you’ve probably noticed that there are a lot of differences between the two. To ease this transition for all of the new Mac owners out there, I’ve put together a quick guide for Mac newbies making the big switch.

Mac OS X Keyboard symbols

You’re a lifehacker and you know all the good keyboard shortcuts on your Windows PC. So the first thing you’ll want to do is get familiar with keyboard shortcuts on your Mac. This seems easy enough – except for the fact that Macs use a strange and foreign set of hieroglyphics for their shortcut keys. Some of the most familiar shortcuts are:

The Apple/Command key is the main modifier on your Mac. Contrary to its Windows counterpart, the Windows key, the Command key does much of the work that the Control key does on a Windows PC. So don’t go hitting the Apple key expecting a system menu to pop up out of nowhere, because it ain’t gonna happen. Instead, plan on using this for your most common keyboard shortcuts.

Like I said above, the Control key on the Mac isn’t used in the same way as the Control key on a Windows PC. I use it most often when I’m “right-clicking” on my Mac – often referred to as Ctrl-Click. The Ctrl key also comes in handy in a lot of other ways, like the Ctrl-Tab tab switching in Firefox.

I use the Alt/Option key most often to skip words in a document (and highlight words when used in conjunction with the Shift key) – much like the Ctrl-Arrow functions work on a PC. Like the Mac Control Shortcut, the Option key finds its way into your shortcut workflow here and there (for example, it’s also very handy for accenting letters), but not as often as the Command key.

Though Command, Control, and Option are the three main modifiers/symbols you’ll see on your Mac, you’ll certainly stumble onto several other cryptic communiqués when you’re trying to figure out a new shortcut, like the wacky Escape symbol and the big upcase Shift arrow. For a more comprehensive list of the Mac’s keyboard symbols, check out this handy reference table.

Keyboard shortcuts

Luckily, when it comes to the actual keyboard shortcuts, a lot of the shortcuts on your Mac are the same as they are on your Windows PC; generally you can just swap Command for Control for a lot of the standards. For example, the Ctrl-C/X/V for Copy/Cut/Paste become Cmd-C/X/V. Simple, right?

Instead of boring you with a long list of keyboard shortcuts like those, I’m just going to highlight some of the less obvious shortcuts.

• Force Quit: When a program freezes up on your Windows PC and you want to force it closed, you hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete. On your Mac, you’ll hit Cmd-Alt-Escape. This brings up the Force Quit dialog – a similar tool to the task manager for the purpose of closing unresponsive apps.



• Window switching: If you’re any sort of keyboard junkie, you’ve used Alt-Tab on your Windows PC all the time to switch between open windows. Your Mac works in a similar manner, with a small variation. Command-Tab switching between running applications, while Cmd-`/Cmd-~ (the backtick/tilde key) will switch between open windows within one running applications (i.e., Cmd-Tab will switch to Firefox, but Cmd-` will switch between open Firefox windows).
• Minimize/Hide: You can minimize a window to the dock from your keyboard by pressing Cmd-M. Alternatively, you can also Hide an application by pressing Cmd-H. The difference between a Minimize and a Hide is that hiding an application hides every window of that app, and it does not push anything to the Dock. Instead, all application windows disappear from your view until you switch back to the application. In my experience, the benefit of using Hide over Minimize is that you can Cmd-Tab back to a hidden application and it will be restored to your screen; if you Minimize a window and then Cmd-Tab to the app, the window will remain minimized to the Dock.
• Opening the selected file: Chances are you’ve opened a file or program on your Windows desktop by selecting the file and then hitting the Enter key to launch it. If you’re anything like me, you do this a lot. The problem is, when you try doing the same thing on your Mac, your Mac thinks you want to rename the file instead of open it (don’t ask me why). If you want to open the file, you have to hit Cmd-O (for open).
• Backspace vs. Delete: On Macs, the Backspace key as you know it is called Delete. And the Delete key deletes from right to left, just like the Backspace key. If you want to delete text from left to right (à la the Windows Delete key), you have to press Function-Delete (particularly if you’re on a laptop).Finally, if you want to delete a file or folder from the comfort of your keyboard, select the file and press Cmd-Delete. It’ll go straight to the Trash.
• Closing windows and apps: In the Windows environment, whenever you close the last open window from a program, that program quits. Things work differently in the Mac world.Cmd-W will close the active window (incidentally, Ctrl-W will also close most – but not all – Windows apps), however – unlike the Windows world – once you’ve closed the last window of an application, the app continues to run. If you actually want to quit a Mac app, you hit Cmd-Q (for Quit). When you first start working on a Mac, you’ll want to keep this in mind so you don’t end up wasting your system memory on several apps you’re not using

For a deeper look at Mac keyboard shortcuts, check out our Mac OS X and keyboard shortcuts tags. Specifically, you might want to check out a few secret (and not so secret) Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts.

Login Items

Any Windows user worth his/her salt knows about a handy tool called the System Configuration Utility, which, among other things, lets you control which applications you want to run on startup (generally these are system tray apps). Similarly, you can use the Login Items tab of the Accounts menu in the preference pane to define which apps/files/scripts will run every time you start up your computer.

Here’s a little further reading on managing your Mac’s startup.

Installing apps

This may seem like somewhat of a no brainer for Mac veterans, but when you switch to a Mac from a PC, you may find the installation process of new applications a bit confusing at first. That’s because, in general, there’s absolutely nothing to it. When you download an application (generally in the form of a compressed .dmg file, which will mount as a drive when you open it), you’re pretty much done with the installation process. You can run an application (marked by the .app extension) from anywhere on your computer, and there’s really no installation to it. Broadly speaking, the installation of a new Mac app generally consists of moving the new application to your Applications folder. Many apps make this very simple, like the mounted Firefox .dmg above.

Unless you have your own system for arranging apps on your Mac, copying new apps to the Applications folder is a good practice. What you don’t want to do is forget to move the app from the .dmg folder to your hard disk.

Hard drive structure

Another slight source of confusion you might encounter when switching to a Mac is the structure of your hard disk, namely what difference there is between the Macintosh HD and the Home folder (named with your login ID). Simply put, your Home folder (marked in Finder by the tilde [~]) is sort of like the C:\Documents and Settings\User section of your Windows PC. All of the user-specific data is kept in the Home folder, like your documents, pictures, music, and Desktop shortcut. It’s not a particularly difficult thing to understand, but it can seem a bit confusing if you’re not used to it.

The Dock

The last thing I’m going to touch on is the Dock – that cool little quicklaunch/taskbar rolled into one. You can launch, quit, minimize, and restore applications from the Dock. It’s not strictly the same as the Windows taskbar, but in general it pulls a lot of the same duty. If you’re a big keyboard shortcut user, chances are you won’t use the Dock all that much, but it’s a good idea to get a feel for what’s going on there.

Further reading:

10 things every new Mac owner should know

Common new Mac user mistakes

If you haven’t already seen the amazing things that await Intel Mac owners in the world of side-by-side OS bliss, you need to take a look at how to run Windows and Mac apps side-by-side with Parallels and a little side-by-side Windows and Mac OS with Parallels.

If productivity is your goal, you should also be sure to check out Quicksilver. Even if you don’t delve into everything QS has to offer, you’ll still have one hell of an application launcher.

Finally, I should point out that this is far from the last word on the topic. I did my best to remember what stuck out the most to me when I started working with my Mac, but I’m sure there’s a lot more territory that can be covered. If you’ve got any questions on the subject – say there’s some Windows function that you can’t seem to find an anolog for on your Mac – let’s hear it in the comments. If you’re a seasoned Mac user with a few tips of your own, we’d love to hear those, too.