So Apple has finally started to update it’s Pro software starting with it’s Logic Pro and Mainstage products. So if you’re a music fan or pro then you’re in luck, you ability to address memory just went up from 4Gb to 64 exabytes (if you can afford that much memory – MacObserver reckons it’d cost approx. $450bn – or buy a machine that will fit it).
So if you haven’t yet made the google apps plunge for your business, the new year is the time to do so.
Despite Google having made the standard edition of google apps more difficult to find (by the way it’s here) I really don’t think that most businesses require more space than is provided for by the free edition; seriously 7gb and growing.
Re-directing your domain couldn’t be easier Google has a simple set of instructions for you to follow. It does involve changing CNAME entries and the like but it really isn’t very difficult and google has some great advice: available here with popular instructions for most domain hosts.
I’d also really advise if you want your employees to be able to easily access your services to set easy to find addresses such as: mail.yourdomain.com, calendar.yourdomain.com, doc.yourdomain.com and sites.yourdomain.com. Google has some easy to follow instructions here.
Uploading your archived email is also pretty easy. For windows users Google has it’s own special uploading program found here. For Mac users once you have setup your email (IMAP is essential) then you can just drag and drop your emails from the old files to the new and wait for the upload process (it can take some time) and you’re done.
For calendars, just export from outlook or ical in the vcal format and you can import your calendar directly to your new google apps calendar. Then share as you like amongst other employees. This is particularly good for office wide holiday calendars and the like, keeping everyone up to date with whats going on.
And really that’s the basic setup. Questions in the comments. Oh and if you need some help please don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
It’s finally here. Some of you may have been using the developer releases and hacks to get google Chrome working on your Mac, I certainly have, however, it is now possible to get the real versions, albeit with plugins disabled. To join the google love visit: here.
Unfortunately for lots of Mac users google has only made Chrome compatible with Intel chips, which is a real shame as I know a good number of older Mac users who would really benefit from Chrome.
Every once in a while I get a call like this morning from an old customer, who I no longer have remote access to, running an old version of OS X (10.4 in this instance) and they want me to guide them through a network problem they have (in this instance another computer had hijacked the manual IP used by their Mac) and I struggle to remember what the network settings panel for their version of the OS looks like.
After a quick google I was able to find this very useful website called: www.simplehelp.net which had pictures of what I needed. Though it wasn’t too clear how to navigate them at first (click on the highlighted part of the image) it did provide me with what I needed. So if your offering support I thought I’d post their screenshots for the following OSes:
So my aunt called me this morning and asked me to pop over and upgrade her VMWare Fusion 2 to the new version 3, which I had persuaded VMWare to give her a free upgrade to, after biting the bullet and buying version 2 as a replacement to parallels one day before the period for which they were offering free upgrades.
The upgrade process for the new program and her virtual machine went like a dream and in a little under twenty minutes after downloading version 3 we were up and running. This is, unfortunately, where the problems with VMWare tools began…
The initial installation ran the VMWare tools installer but it simply didn’t go anywhere and after about twenty minutes of waiting around for it I did some googling and came across this article on the VMWare site that advised me to uninstall the previous version of VMWare tools before proceeding. A few minutes later this was done, but now not even the installer ran.
After some additional googling I learnt that it worked by mounting an ISO to the virtual machine and then the hunt was on for where that file would be locally stored so I could manually burn it to a CD and side step this issue. After a good amount of time I found the ISO was stored here:
After a little playing around I copied it to a usb and mounted the usb in windows and voila I could now install the VMWare tools successfully. If it hadn’t been for the problem with VMWare tools this upgrade would have been an hour at most job, but as it was it took over two hours (ouch) so if any of you are having the same problem, rest assured that the solution really is quite simple.
Diligent as you may be sparkle is not always reliable for letting you know when an update is available and it was down to the guys and gals over at TUAW to let me know about the release of the new version of Handbreak (0.9.4), which is now 64bit compatible!
If by chance you haven’t heard of Handbreak before, it’s the leading free, open-source video transcoder available for the Mac (as well as PC and Linux platforms). It can take your .avi files or dvds and turn them into sparkling new mp4 files (with default options including encoding for iTunes, the web and the like) or anything else your heart desires.
I can highly recommend it, though running on a newer Intel Core Duo Chip or above is essential as video transcoding takes a surprising amount of time and the slower your processor the longer it takes!
I’ve been using Secrets, the preference pane he’s referring to, since March 2008 after I first stumbled across it via the renowned macosxhints.com site shortly after I believe it was released. It is a cheats way to change ’secret’ settings in both the OS and other programs for those of us who are sometimes too timid to resort to the terminal or just want to be able to tick a box to apply or more importantly sometimes unapply a secret setting.
It’s exactly the sort of program I love: simple, clean, straightforward, and community driven. It’s open source so if you stumble across a new secret whilst browsing an obscure blog, then you can post it to the site and once verified (I presume) it’ll be added to the program forthwith. If you want to refresh your secrets just click the handy update button and off it goes… reporting back new secrets under the new secret option at the top.
The fact that Secrets even exists is proof positive for me that many Apple users don’t always believe the Apple way is the right way and want the ability to easily change some basic fundamental settings of their favourite programs to perform the way that is best for them rather than they way Apple or other program writers have decided is best by default.
So let me let you in on a few of my secret preferences (in no particular order)
Mail – Send Windows friendly attachments (why this isn’t activated by default beats me!?)
Dictionary – Reuse dictionary definition window (I use dictionary alot, so I like not to have dozens of dictionary windows open, just the one…)
Dock – Dim hidden apps (absolutely essential, Apple should have added this feature as a default years ago!)
Finder – Enable finder quit menu item (yes finder sometimes I’d like to be able to just quit you, especially when my keyboard is not responding )
Finder – Use .DS_Stores on network (uncheck and bye bye pesky .DS files!)
iTunes – Allow half star ratings (for those songs that just don’t quite make a full five stars!)
These are just a fraction of the customisations I’ve activated so trot along to the Secrets website and join the Mac personalisation revolution now!
There have been many arguments over the years about Macs being more expensive than PCs and though I have often thought that the arguments justifying this opinion are mostly without base, they seem to have stuck quite firmly in the minds of the consuming public and the business community in particular. In one area though the reverse, since the release of OS X, has always been true: a Mac Server is significantly less expensive than a Windows Server.
However, a Mac Server has generally remained mostly outside of the purchasing range of a small businesses, especially those focused on low-cost, due to the general need to buy a Xserve, a rack, and all the associated costs. Now for those in the know, a Mac Mini accompanied by a copy of OS X Server (10 user version) has for many years been the easy route around this problem, but required a bit of know-how and was certainly not an off the shelf purchase.
Now this has all changed with the release of a new Mac Mini Server by Apple. For the low price of £799 (inc. VAT) you can have your own dual 500GB, 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4GB of RAM and an unlimited edition of OS 10.6 Snow Leopard Server. Now that’s affordable. Even for a small business with only a couple of computers. And off the shelf and with you within 3 working days!
Now for those Borg lovers who are already going blue at the notion that a Mac can be cheaper than a PC I have one reply: it’s the licences stupid. With the Mac Mini server you get an unlimited copy of Apple’s server product, no user restrictions, fully featured, add as much as you dare to the little powerhouse and if you need to add a second cheaply (and no rack required just a 12″ square of desk space).
Now back to the licences. Appleinsider has a great example of the cost comparison between the new Mac Mini Server and a similar SME orientated Windows servers:
See how cheap? I can’t wait to have an opportunity to install my 1st Mac Mini off the shelf server. If you’d like to read an indepth review I highly recommend the Appleinsider review by Daniel Eran Dilger. Read it here.
Update
Macminiloco has published it’s annual “The State of the Mac Mini”, which gives an excellent breakdown on the new Mac Mini. Read it here.
It’s the little details about Apple’s products that make them so great. I’ve been using Address Book for years. I store all my contacts in it, some 987 people and companies at last count. But Apple’s not perfect and for years I had to cobble together solutions from one place or another to ensure that my contacts were synced with my mobile, especially as because of the American focus of Apple they were particularly slow to realise the scope and penetration of mobiles in the European market and add native support in iSync for new models as they were released. Fortunately the developer and open-source community has always made up for this gap and I’ve been able, with a little hacking and manipulation, to keep my phone’s contacts synced for the last five years or so.
Syncing calendars has always been much harder and before I traded my Nokia N73 (never have I used a more robust phone, although I have to confess in it’s second life with one of my friends was short lived (it died under the heel of a stiletto – RIP)) in for an iPhone I generally ignored my calendar applications and relied instead on iCal for my daily schedule, after all my laptop generally comes with me as frequently as my phone, so not the end of the world. However, since the syncing of the iPhone was so good, I have moved on to relying on my phone…
This has however not been without consequences. I rely upon my calendar alarms to remind me of most of my appointments, if it is not alarmed, with a busy schedule I often don’t see some appointments that come without reminders, even when I’m staring straight at them. Over the last year one area that this has effected is my remembering of birthdays, when I relied on iCal I was required to be more observant, now I’m less so, and as Address Book’s automatic generation of the birthday calendar creates effectively a read-only event from the perspective of the calendar I’ve not been able to add reminders for myself. This is clearly a little detail too far for Apple…
Fortunately tonight I stumbled across the following solution, courtesy of the forums over at MacRumours and in particular the skill of Andrew Bussman who wrote the following AppleScript:
Code:
tell application "iCal"
tell calendar "Birthdays"
set all_events to every event
repeat with this_event in all_events
tell this_event
delete every sound alarm
make new sound alarm at end with properties {trigger interval:-21600, sound name:"Basso"}
end tell
end repeat
end tell
end tell
Which when you compile and run in AppleScript Editor adds an alarm to all your birthdays! It’s great and simple solution to the problem of adding alarms to your birthday’s calendar. Once run in a few seconds it adds a reminder to all your birthdays. I imagine the only problem will be that you’d have to run it again once you add any additional birthdays. I think Andrew has proved it should be a relatively easy process why can’t Apple solve this?
Oh dear… Off to a client this morning who despite agreeing with me about buying a new Mac ended up buying a new PC four weeks ago. It came with Vista not Windows 7 and despite it being “cheap” (I’m yet to find out how cheap) and urgently needed (they could have just boosted their ram (at significantly less cost)) it is still in its box. Why oh why are people so blindly faithful to the PC platform? Especially in SME? Sometimes I just despair.
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