iPhone questions

After being on Princes St at 8.02 on Friday 11th July. I looked at the queue outside the carphone warehouse and the queue outside the O2 store (round the corner of the block, and to the door respectively), and chose the carhphone warehouse…20 minutes later with no movement, and the same customers at the desk, I calculated a wait of about 2-3 hours, (only about 20 people in front of me, but 15-20 mins per person and 2 desks…I decided that the risk of not getting one and the annoyance factor of waisting my day were not worth the potential benefit.

Also I was still in two minds about the 8GB vs 16GB. All the guys in the queue were talking about getting the 16GB, and I thought that if i got an 8GB just because i wanted to have one a few days earlier, I’d be pretty annoyed at myself.

So I went and researched it online, and without exception, everyone was advising getting the 16GB model (£60 more).  In many cases, this made sense to me, if it were a laptop, I wouldnt hesitate to get a bigger harddrive, but i still had a niggling feeling that going with the crowd isnt always the best bet.

So being a bit of a devils advocate, I decided upon the 8GB, and when I came to order online, it was actually the only one available.  My main reasoning for the 8GB is this:

1) This is a phone – my current phone has 32 MB and I manage ok, granted its a bit frustrating at times, but its ok.

2) I have all my songs on my macbook, which I always have to hand, and i dont envisage needing 1000’s of songs at any one time.  With the syncing being so fast and easy, I can add and remove as I need to.

3) The main reason was that again, as its a phone and not something I want to hold onto for ever, there will be a much newer, better, faster, stronger iPhone out in 18mths when my contract is up, and it will hopefully have fixed some of the bugs that people are talking about… better camera, video, MMS, etc.  And I’ll happily upgrade, with the £60 that I’ve saved, saying pricing is the same, in 18 mths I’ll have the lower sized iPhone (16GB – for about £30) which is a better option for me.

So thats my 50 cents. Dont think of the iPhone in quite the same way as the iPod or laptop, if you’re on a contract, then upgrades are going to happen, as 02 will want to keep you!

I got my soocial beta tester password today

I’ve been waiting for this for ages, just today I got my beta tester invite for soocial.

So I’m really stoked with it so far, it was really easy to install and I love using it in firefox’s sider.

I’m going to post about my overall syncing strategy (before it all changes with the new iPhone) but i’ve got a pretty good system right now

here it is in brief

Address book contacts : soocial syncs with address book, then gmail contacts too

Mail : IMAP google apps mail, means all my folders are synced including sent mail,

Calendar: Busysync for mac, to sync iCal with google calendars,

Phone: Missing sync, syncs phone with computer for calendar and contacts…

Its all working really nicely – happy days.

Steve Jobs in 60 seconds – iPhone 2.0 . 3G, GPS, nice

I woke up on Monday about 3am. I remembered that the WWDC mac conference was on, so I went and checked it out, 90 mins later, I was more convinced than ever about the merits of the iPhone, but at the same time, it was 90 mins later and pretty much daylight!
Then I found this, and next year, I’ll just wait for this, and watch it a few times…

Here is Steve in his element, but in 60 seconds…
I love the end part when they use all his superlatives…

converting m4a’s to mp3’s.

Recently I needed to upload some MP3’s. I’ll explain more about that later. But In iTunes all my files, or most of them had been imported from CD to m4a (AAC) format. So I was thinking of looking for some software to change them about and i discovered this on lifehacker.

You can just use the converter in iTunes to convert to mp3 and it’ll keep all your tags intact

just go into preferences->advanced->click the “importing” tab->import using mp3 encoder, choose your bitrate, then apply the changes

then just select all the .m4a files in your library click advanced->convert selection to .mp3 (or you can just right click on individual files). Nice one!

mac vs windows

ok, so i just installed a free version of vmware fusion as its a beta version…you can get it on the vmware website and they give you a serial number and everything…

its pretty good actually.

I was using it, and I remembered the one thing I liked better about windows when I switched to a mac.

The way it shows photos in thumbnail view…

I always found the way that mac in panther displayed photos was way inferior to windows xp in the thumbnail dept. Windows showed pictures as proper thumbnails, and tiger just did icons (rubbish).

Anyway, I noticed that leopard has proper thumbnails now, and by right clicking on them and tweaking, I think you can actually get a faster way to scroll through your photos than coverflow…

Right click in finder window, >> show view options
Then set the icons to larger and tighter spacing and change the dropdown menu to “snap to grid” so as you dont have to manually sort all all your icons.

Then click on Set as Default.

Now check that out for cool…

Any problems right click and select “clean up” to see things as they should be…

A few bug bears…

With windows when you resize the window, the icons fall into appropriate columns…
with mac, they just give you scroll bars… this is wierd.

Also why to I have to keep hitting clean up, that should be automatic.

Other than that, I think theres no reason to be on windows, esp with vmware virtual machines! (and maybe the cost of a mac)

tiff attachements in apple mail

Grrr. Yet another thing about apple mail

If you paste an image into a message or drag & drop an image from another window (say, a Web browser), Mail converts the raw image data to an attachment in TIFF format.

However… if you drag & drop the icon of an image file (or use the Attach button to locate the file using the file browser), Mail leaves the attached image in its original format. This difference is significant, because although most email clients can display JPEG images just fine, support for TIFF – especially in non-Mac email clients – is less common.

apple mail attachments

Again. Another thing I have noticed from going to using apple mail from entourage, is that mail deals with attachments really wierdly.

I mean, sometimes you just want to attach a file right?

But if its a jpg or pdf it comes up in the mail as if you have embedded it. No thanks
So I found this handy plugin
Note that without this, when you compose a new message, Mail always shows attachments in the body of your message. You can manually drag them somewhere else, but many email clients display all attachments in a separate list, regardless of where you place them in the message body.

Screen shots in Leopard

OS X has some great screen grab stuff, but they arent very well documented in help I dont think…

So here you go!

To change to pdf – type this into a terminal window

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf
(this works for png, tiff, jpeg too)

If that scares you to death…
maybe download this widget…screenshot plu

or for website this is userful. Its called Paparazzi

also Screen Mimic: Records animations of your desktop to .swf files.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The following are keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots.

Command-Shift-3: Takes a screenshot of the entire screen and saves it as a file on the desktop.

Command-Shift-4: Brings up a crosshair cursor which you can drag to select a specific area. Image is saved as a file on the desktop.

Command-Shift-4:Space:Click on a Window: After

Comand-Shift-4 press the space button the click on a window to take it’s screenshot. The image is then saved as a file on the desktop.

NOTE***: If you add the Ctrl button to any of the above shortcuts, instead of the image being saved to the desktop, the image will be copied to the clipboard.

For the geeks out there like me

Heres the full list of options

usage: screencapture [-icMPmwsWxSCUt] [files]
-c force screen capture to go to the clipboard
-C capture the cursor as well as the screen. only in non-interactive modes
-d display errors to the user graphically
-i capture screen interactively, by selection or window
control key – causes screen shot to go to clipboard
space key – toggle between mouse selection and
window selection modes
escape key – cancels interactive screen shot
-m only capture the main monitor, undefined if -i is set
-M screen capture output will go to a new Mail message
-o in window capture mode, do not capture the shadow of the window
-P screen capture output will open in Preview
-s only allow mouse selection mode
-S in window capture mode, capture the screen not the window
-t
image format to create, default is png (other options include pdf, jpg, tiff and other formats)
-T Take the picture after a delay of , default is 5
-w only allow window selection mode
-W start interaction in window selection mode
-x do not play sounds
files where to save the screen capture, 1 file per screen

Grab / Preview

Grab is a graphical tool provided in OSX to take screenshots. It can be located in Finder under Applications:Utilities:Grab.

The Grab tool can capture a marquee section, a whole window, the whole screen or a timed screen.

Grab’s default file format is TIFF.

Note**: Preview now has a Grab submenu in the File menu with selection, window and timed screen.

Small fonts in apple mail

I started using apple mail on my new macbook pro, and moved over from entourage, which I’ve used faithfully for 3 years.

I just thought, things are going down the iPhone route, and I want to make life as simple as possible, and I want to use iCal…to sync with my mobile.

Anyway, Apple mail seems to display some email newsletters with really small font size and i was having trouble reading it, so I found a few other people with the same issue, mainly HTML emails from microsoft outlook. Anyway here is the solution:

Close down Mail.app, open Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13

Now start up Mail.app and Bob’s your uncle — Arial at a size you can read.

Quick Look plugins

I have to say. I LOVE quicklook. Leopards new feature. I recenlty discovered that the best way to use it is to just hit the spacebar, and any file you are highlighting just pops up. Without opening the application.

So I can see word files, pdfs, movies, etc etc. Its great.

I also just found a few plugins, as I get sent EPS files from designers, and I dont have Creative Suite on my new mac, but its great being able to open these so easily. There is also one so you can see inside zip files…

EPS plugin

.zip plugin for quicklook

I wish my mac would speak the Queens English

It seems a little more complex than necessary to get British English on my mac.
It seemed to keep reverting to US english when i was doing a spell checker…

But I think I’ve finally cracked it.

Here’s the deal.

Going to system preferences/international/languages (not “input menu”) and putting British English at the top of the list should normally do the trick,

Use the Edit button in the languages pane if British English is not yet on the list.

also tried going to Edit > Spelling > Spelling > Dictionary and set that to British English?