The Grafx Blogs

Firstly, a huge thanks to everyone that attended the free training last Saturday. It was our first foray into this area and it seemed to go down well with all of you. We hope to cover different ground every week and will try and keep the whole thing relaxed and enjoyable.

This coming Saturday (Feb 13) we will be looking at iPhoto, iMovie and iWeb. If you haven’t already signed up then please let us know you are coming as we were at capacity last week!

A couple of notes from me from last week then:

To access your Macs serial number, simply go to the Apple menu in the top left corner of your screen and choose About this Mac. Then click here on the window that opens.

Time Machine is a great way to keep your data safely backed up, and anyone on Leopard or Snow Leopard should be using it. If you’d like us to optimise it for you, please email me directly or leave a comment below.

Anyone looking to upgrade to Leopard or Snow Leopard can contact me via email or the comments below and we’ll get that sorted out also. It’s a painless process, I promise.

If anyone has any questions, comments or just wants to join the discussion, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Finally, for those looking for a new Mac, we have made a couple of bundles that some of you may have missed at the end of last week. We have a MacBook Pro bundle, including the MacBook Pro, AppleCare, wireless keyboard and mouse, backpack, backup drive and 2 hours setup/tuition. We also have an iMac essentials bundle, including the iMac, AppleCare, UPS for power, backup drive and 2 hours setup/tuition. If you are interested in either of these, please contact myself or tony.

Finally, a reminder that any Mac purchased from Grafx comes with complimentary FastTrack service, worth £35. This gives you priority service any time you need that Mac repaired.

I know a lot of people reading this will have iPhones as well as Macs, so today I thought I’d share a cheap, but very useful little tool called Pastebot.

Now you can copy and paste on the iPhone, I know a lot of people are doing so heavily, and while this is great, sometimes you need a little more. Pastebot is an iPhone app (currently £1.79) which allows you to store anything you copy on the iPhone, so you can store multiple “clips” for future use. You can store text or images and even manipulate them to make all the text UPPERCASE, or make a photo black and white, that kind of thing. Pretty handy.

Even more useful though is Pastebot Sync. It’s a free Mac application which allows you to share your Mac clipboard with your iPhone, or vice versa. So next time you find something cool on your Mac and you want to paste it into a text message on the iPhone, you can! It’s super simple and very powerful. I highly recommend you check out Pastebot on the App Store and Pastebot Sync at their website where there is a great demo video.

One of my most used applications, Dropbox is great for students, people with multiple computers and those wanting basic read-only access to documents on the go (on iPhone).

Dropbox is deceptively simple. Once installed you will have a Dropbox folder, just like any other in your Home folder. Drag any file or folder in there and it’s sync’d up instantly and invisibly to your online Dropbox account. You can then access that from any computer with an internet connection (just through a web browser), or on your iPhone (free app here).

Ninja move: install Dropbox on your iMac and your MacBook to get the contents sync’d across them automatically. You don’t even need both on at once as you can change something on the iMac, turn it off, go to work, open your MacBook and a few seconds later it will sync down and be ready for you.

If you want a simple way to get a few important files backed up off-site, to share files with friends online, or just to get your files/preferences sync’d across computers it’s a great way to go. Loads more info on uses and features can be found here, with a short demo video below.

Dropbox is free if you want up to 2GB storage (enough for most people). If you want to you can upgrade to 50GB for USD$9.99/month or 100GB for USD$19.99/month.

You can see a demo video here.

This is an app I couldn’t live without, so I thought I’d share it with you. We all know how useful Apple’s Keychain is in saving our passwords, but 1Password takes it a stage further.

One of my favourite features is the secure password generation. Many of my customers use very insecure passwords, and nearly all of you use the same password for everything. This isn’t very secure. 1Password can generate massively secure passwords for you, and store them for you so you never need to remember them.

1Password integrates with Safari, Firefox and other browsers so you can enter your usernames and secure passwords at the click of a button. 1Password can also store details about you, your credit cards, your software licences and much more. This means that the next time you sign up for a new service (like Amazon or something) you can click one button and have the form filled out with your name, address etc.

It’s all stored securely so you don’t need to worry about security. There is also an iPhone app, so if you want to log int to Twitter, Gmail or even your online banking on the go you now can, securely.

The free trial is highly recommended and will save you a ton of time and effort which is what computers are for right?

It’s a tough thing to admit as a Mac user, but when Windows 7 hit the streets there was one feature I really liked about it. If you drag a window to the edge of the screen then it will snap to that edge, and resize appropriately.

This is a great feature, useful for moving things from one window to another, cut and paste, layout, proofing and file transfer among many other uses.

Now you can do this in Mac OS X! It’s a USD$7 app called Cinch. It’s a tiny download and when you launch it a new menu bar icon will appear in the top right of your screen. Just start dragging windows to the edge of the screen for easy access. The videos are below, and I can say from experience how useful it is. Simple but effective.

A demo video is available here.

I have been asked time after time to write a basic guide to home wireless networking. The problem is that there are things to think about and people loose interest quickly. For that reason I will talk you through my personal home setup, why it is how it is and what I would do to it to improve it in the future. Here goes…

Below you will see a sketch of my house. I have a large HiFi in the games room where we like to listen to music while playing snooker or darts. There are a number of other HiFi’s around the house that we’d also like to make wireless. Finally, it would be great to print wirelessly to the printer in the spare room and of course we want internet access from anywhere from the laptops.

These are the things you need to think about before you set up a wireless network – what do you want out of it and where?

With that done, it’s time to set up the first Airport Express. Take a look at the video below for how to do that, then do the same with the other Airport Express, each plugged into another HiFi around the house. Remember, all I did with the Airport Express was plug it into the wall and plug the HiFi into it also. Simple enough right?

The printer setup is exactly the same, except you need to plug the printer into the Airport Express instead of the HiFi.

More is coming next week including how to boost your signal and hop a signal around in bad coverage areas. Simple, but quite effective. See you

I first saw this about 5 years ago and have been using it ever since. This equaliser setting will obviously change the sound from the original master, but for me, on less than ideal home speaker setups it sounds better. You might want to check this out, regardless of the genre of music you listen to:

In iTunes, choose Window from the menu bar at the top of the screen, then choose Equalizer (or hit Command+Option+2 together). Change the settings as described:

db +3, +6, +9, +7, +6, +5, +7, +9, +11, +8 db

It should look a little something like the picture above. If you know of any better settings please feel free to email them to me, or check out the settings in the showroom to hear them loud and proud.

Some people have asked for some more top tips, so here are some of my favourites:

1. If you want to email a photo to a friend you can just drag the file from the desktop or any folder, onto the Mail icon in your dock and it’s automatically added to a newly created email as an attachment. You can do the same in Entourage too.

2. If you want to find special characters easily such as accents, ligatures or ©®π˚type characters try this: Open System Preferences, click on International and choose the Input Menu tab. Now check the boxes for Character Palette and Keyboard viewer. Close the window and use the flag you should now see in the menu bar in the top right of your screen to access the feature. It will show you for example that to create a © symbol you hold Option and press the “G” key or for an accented press alt ‘e’ then e again ‘é’… Simple!

3. You want to view a PDF without opening it? Select the file and press the spacebar to view it in QuickLook. The same works with text files, photos and even video!

4. You know you can click and drag for selecting text? Try a double-click and drag for selection of whole words. Triple click for paragraphs. You can also hold the Option (alt) button and drag to select text vertically – try it!

5. Want to find a document but can’t remember where you put it? No problem, just click the spotlight icon in the top right corner of your screen and start typing. Type the filename or any text contained within the file, like who a letter is addressed to or a topic it concerns. Spotlight will find it for you in no time.

6. Taking a picture of your screen! If you ever need to show an error message or just want to record an image of what is on your screen press cmd+shift 4. This will turn your curser into a cross hair. Click and drag over what you want to capture and hey presto on your desktop you will find a file named ‘Picture 1’.

7. Saving a file in a PDF format. Select ‘Print’ when in any application and you will have the option within the print window to ‘Save as PDF’. Perfect when you want to email a document to someone who does not have the same application as you or do not want the recipient to edit your content.

Here’s a bonus tip for you. Select some text you want to remember and hit Command+Shift+Y. It will take that text and put it in a Sticky note on your desktop so you’ll never forget it. Quick and simple and always available.

iPhoto can handle hundreds of thousands of photos now, but every now and then something goes a little bit wrong. A common issue with the iPhoto library becoming corrupt is that it can inexplicably stop your Time Machine backup from completing. Not good.

There is a resolution however; rebuild your library. It’s pretty easy and not at all scary. Just follow the steps below. For a full explanation of the process (which can take a while by the way), check out Apple’s knowledge base article about it here. Otherwise, we recommend using all the options in most situations.

To rebuild the iPhoto library:

1. Quit iPhoto if it is open.
2. Hold down the Command and Option keys on the keyboard.
3. Open iPhoto.
4. Keep the keys held down until you are prompted to rebuild the library.
5. A dialog will appear with rebuild options. Select the options you want to use.
6. Click Rebuild to begin the rebuild process. This may take a few minutes to complete.

Best of luck. If you have any issues, please feel free to email me.

I don’t like to promote a single service or application too much on a blog which is associated with work – it doesn’t seem quite right. In this case though it’s an application I use daily and it saves my bacon constantly. That app is Skitch.

Skitch is a super simple app for editing images and sharing them. I can make a step by step guide of how a customer should do something in seconds with screenshots, arrows and highlighting. Then I email it to the customer so they can resolve an issue without needing me to do it for them. The best part is that if they run into the same trouble again, they can refer back to that email.

Skitch is useful for all kinds of things

You can use it for all kinds of things. Skitch is so easy to use you won’t believe it, and the best part is that it’s free! Check it out at www.skitch.com