Filed under: Tips and tricks

A friend's MacBook had slowed down to a snail's pace. Despite looking everywhere for the issue, streamlining everything I could, and yelling at it, it failed to accelerate to usable speed. So I recommended we start from scratch and build it back up with only the things she was using, free of all the other downloads and aborted installs of various software she never used or cared about. It also housed a prior system, and a PC migration from a few years back. All told, the computer was a bloated, duplicated whale of files and applications for what was essentially a light-load writer's computer.

So I backed up the essential parts of her system using Time Machine: documents (including her novel and decades of prior writing, published and unpublished), ten years of family photographs, a 41GB iTunes library, among other things, and then....backed it up again elsewhere, outside of Time Machine.

And again.

And just for good measure, once more time, to yet another drive. I wasn't going to be the (ex-)friend who lost her novel.

What I wanted to do was do the ol' "erase and install" that prior system software discs allowed you to do. But clicking around Snow Leopard left no obvious method for this. But instead of booting Snow Leopard while inside of Mac OS X, if you just directly reboot the computer off the disc itself (holding down the "c" button after the system chime, letting go when you see the Apple logo) you get a few more options. Once you've gone into the installer program, you'll see "Utilities" at the top, and if you select Disc Utility, you can see your hard drive. If you click on "erase" (like I did, with one hand over my eyes) you can wipe the drive clean with various security options, and then you can do a fresh install of Snow Leopard on your computer on a pristine hard drive.

Once you've done that, you can either transfer your files back in directly, or use the installer program's built-in migration utility to restore any or all files from Time Machine.

And now? The world awaits the Next Great American Novel, untragically unlost by yours truly.

So, like me, you've been doing a lot of driving around with your iPhone lately, and you've come to the conclusion that just having it sit next to you on the seat isn't the best way to do things. You need an in-car mounted dock, but you're not ready to shell out a bunch of money for something with "premium" in the title. Solution? Follow these directions and make your own. For just a couple of bucks in materials, you can build what looks like a pretty worthwhile way to mount your iPhone in the car.

It's basically a little PVC pipe with some foam to hold it in place on whatever extra ridges or slots you might have free in your dashboard, and some plastic coated wire at the top to hold your phone for you. Hey, you get what you pay for -- it won't pair with your iPhone, and any charging it provides will have to come from an external charging cable that you buy. But if you just want something to keep your iPhone handy and up off of the seat next to you -- or out of the cupholder, I do that one a lot, too -- this weekend project might just do the trick.

[via Lifehacker]

A commonly cited statistic, repeated on day one of just about every communications course I've taken, is that people are more afraid of speaking or presenting in public than they are of dying. I've never been able to find an official source for this statistic, but it's indisputable that most people recoil in terror at the thought of giving a presentation, whether it's to an audience of five or five thousand.

Steve Jobs obviously does not share this phobia. His stage persona during keynote presentations has been carefully crafted to convey to audiences his enthusiasm for whatever it is he's discussing that day. Whether you call it the "reality distortion field" or just good public speaking ability, Jobs's skills as a speaker are seemingly unmatched in the realm of CEO presenters.

Carmine Gallo is one of many communications experts who's scrutinized Jobs's presenting skills; in fact, he has literally written the book on the Apple CEO's style, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, which we reviewed last October. Rather than shell out for the whole book, though, you can get a nice synopsis of the key aspects of Steve Jobs's presentation style from Gallo himself in the YouTube video below:

Now in its fifth iteration, iChat has gained a host of features as it has matured. However, the addition of new features has brought on new complexities and requirements, including both hardware and bandwidth issues. For instance, at the time of its release, iChat 3 users needed a minimum of a Dual 1 GHz G4 and a 384 Kbps Internet connection to initiate a four-way video conference on iChat 3. Photobooth and Backdrop effects, which came along in iChat 4, call for a minimum an Intel Core Duo processor. And then, of course, one must climb the proverbial firewall.

Fortunately, there's iChat's Connection Doctor. Besides telling you what your system is capable of (for example, screen sharing, multiperson video conferences and video recording) and the audio and video quality of your video chat (resolution and frame rate), the Connection Doctor can also tell you if networking issues (i.e., a firewall or port issue) are the source of your video conferencing maladies. To launch iChat's Connection Doctor, click on "Video" on iChat's menu and then select "Connection Doctor." It's just what the doctor ordered.

Although Firefox can be dressed up with a host of extensions, many of which are great, most of the time I like my browser to be a plain Jane. That's why I prefer using Safari most of the time. Well this, and the fact that I can't stand the jerky scrolling of Firefox (when using a mouse scroll ball) compared to Safari on the Mac.

One of the neat features in Safari is its "Activity" window, which you can use to examine each element of a webpage -- be it an image, audio file, or video file. To access it within Safari, click on "Window" and select "Activity." Whatever opinion you may have of Flash, much of the content on the web -- both audio and video -- plays through a Flash-based media player. As the iPhone doesn't support Flash (except sorta kinda), the Activity Window provides a means to download otherwise unplayable content onto your computer, which you can then transfer to your iPhone. Opening an element (say an MPEG-4 video) listed in the Activity Window is as simple as double-clicking it. Alternatively, you can also copy the URL of the element and paste it somewhere to use in another app.

I've been reading the Unplggd blog from Apartment Therapy a lot lately, because I recently moved into a new place and am trying to fill it up with cool stuff. And someone over there must be an iPhone fan, because I've seen not one but two great and simple tricks for the iPhone there recently. The first is the most billiant thing I've ever seen -- if you happen to be listening to music or a conference call through the speaker on your iPhone and need it a little louder, you can just find a pint-size glass, put the iPhone in there, and voila, simple iPhone echo chamber. I'm surprised at both how easy this is and how well it works, but it does. Very impressive.

Second is a little more obvious -- if you're using an iPhone to read off a recipe in the kitchen, with your hands messy and wet, you can put it in a baggie like I do, or you can CryoVac it, if you happen to have one of those sitting around. Either way, the capacitive touchscreen still works through a thin layer of plastic, and your iPhone will live to see another day.

Ok, so the second tip is not quite as great as the first one. But a pint glass! Trying to listen to all of those boring conference calls with my iPhone's speaker will never be the same again!

Reader Kevin C. sent us a tip the other day -- he recently got a Bose SoundDock II, which is a nice little speaker dock, as a Christmas gift, and he wants to know: with his iPhone sitting all the way across the room, is there any way he can control the iPhone from his Mac? Obviously there are lots of ways to control your Mac with your iPhone, from Apple's official Remote app to multiple VNC programs on the App Store. But in this case, we want to go the other way: control your iPhone's iPod app with a Mac.

Turns out there isn't a way to do it -- unless you jailbreak your iPhone. Using Veency, a jailbreak app that Erica covered about a year or so ago, you can head into your iPhone from your Mac and do anything you want, from changing tracks in iTunes to even sending text messages. Here's an older how-to on getting it working.

Unfortunately, other than that (according to our research -- commenters feel free to jump in, of course), you're out of luck -- Apple is fine with sending commands from the iPhone to the Mac, but not the other way around. Maybe Bose needs to come up with a way for you to stream music over Bluetooth to their speakers so you can keep your iPhone with you.

Update: Our commenters come through as always: Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil will supposedly send audio from your Mac out to your iPhone, and while I haven't tried it myself, we're told that the Bose dock will then play that audio for you. So instead of playing sound on your iPhone, you can just send it music from the Mac and control things that way. And Jeff points out that Belkin makes a Bluetooth dongle, so you can stream music that way as well (and just carry your iPhone with you). So there's a few solutions to try.

For all the things Apple does right, there are some strange decisions in the integration of iPhoto and MobileMe. iPhoto has a wonderful way to create animated slideshows with music and professional looking transitions and you can look at them all day on your Mac, or send them to your iPhone or AppleTV. But things get ugly when you want to post them on the web for family and friends using MobileMe. It's baffling, but there is no direct way to upload an animation you've created to MobileMe, even though you can easily send stills or even iMovie videos to the web.

Well, it can be done, but it's a non-intuitive work around.

First, create your slide show in an iPhoto folder the usual way. Then hit the "Export" button on the lower right of the iPhoto screen. From there, you can determine the size of the QuickTime movie you want to make. If it's for the web, I'd suggest the large size.

The movie will render, and then be placed in your iPhoto Slideshows folder inside the Pictures folder. From there, you have a couple of options, none of which are well documented: One way is to open your newly created movie in the latest version of QuickTime. Then from the Share menu, select "MobileMe gallery" from the options presented (you'll get the screen you can see in the thumbnail above). Another way to go is to is to import the movie into iMovie first, and then export it out to MobileMe from there. You can also drag the movie back into iPhoto (and yes, I know this is nutty) and then click the MobileMe icon to upload it there.

Why can't you do this directly from iPhoto? Search me. It should be there -- maybe we'll see it in the app's next version. If you have another method to do this let us know.

I better be careful next time I walk out of my Apple Store here in Santa Monica -- apparently burglars are targeting Apple Store customers here in the Los Angeles area. Over 100 customers have apparently been targeted after leaving the store and keeping a computer or other purchase in their car. The thieves wait for customers to walk away from Apple Store bags in their car, either at home or at another store, and then they break in and take them. For some reason, no computers have yet been returned, either, which makes cops think that they're possibly being "shipped out of the country or fenced right away." But of course that would require an organized ring, and police aren't even sure these are all related yet.

How to prevent this from happening to you? Don't leave an expensive computer unattended in your car (duh), or just make the Apple Store the last stop on your list. I've made a few pricey purchases while driving around out here (most recently, I picked up a PS3), and no matter what the neighborhood, I didn't feel safe about leaving it unattended. Even when I'm just carrying my iPod around, I always lock it out of sight in the glovebox before parking the car. As with all of these types of situations, a little bit of care goes a long way.

I'm an avid user of Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as are probably many of you. I browse the Internet regularly on three different computers, and so it helps immensely to have all of my Firefox bookmarks and passwords synced. But the one fly in my ointment has been my iPhone's mobile Safari installation -- because I don't usually use Safari as my browser, I haven't yet figured out a way to get all of my usual bookmarks on to the iPhone.

Until now: this writeup by Shawn0 (via the good folks at Lifehacker) presents a quick workaround to get your Xmarks-synced bookmarks up and running on your iPhone. Unfortunately, he uses Internet Explorer to do it, but given that we're all on Macs, I discovered that it worked just fine with Safari. Set up Xmarks on your Safari installation, sync it up with your usual bookmarks, and then set iTunes to sync your mobile browser's bookmarks with Safari. The one big drawback is that you'll have to start up Safari every once in a while to make sure your changes get all the way out to the mobile device, but that's better than not having them synced up at all.

And yes, you MobileMe users are laughing at us Xmarks users right now, because Apple's service syncs all of these things automatically. But I've never known Xmarks to go down, and this solution costs the low, low price of free per year. If, like me, you haven't landed on a solid way to sync bookmarks out to the mobile browser yet, here you go.

Previously, I've mentioned that, despite their similar DNA and file interoperability, Microsoft Office for the PC and Mac are different in their own little subtle ways. This is part function: for example, Microsoft Excel on the Mac uses the 1904 date system, while its PC counterpart uses the 1900 system. But it's also part form. Upon first launch, Microsoft Word and Excel on the Mac present a more palette-oriented user interface, with a "toolbox palette," when compared to their pre-ribbon Windows counterparts. For some, this difference in UI schemas may serve as an annoyance.

Though I'll be using Word for this example, you can also make these changes in Excel using the same steps. To make Microsoft Office on your Mac look more Windows-like (pre-Office 2007, that is), first close the "toolbox palette." Next, click on "View," and then click on "toolbars," where you'll be presented with a host of toolbars to choose from. Despite a myriad of choices, choosing the "standard" (which is already selected by default) and "formatting" toolbars provides you with the most similar UI layout to that I've often seen in Microsoft Word on a Windows machine.

While it would be reasonable to assume that wanting to get rid of the toolbox palette would be more applicable to new PC-to-Mac converts, this isn't necessarily so. Regardless of one's sentiments toward Microsoft, most offices are, well, Microsoft Offices running on Windows. A consistent looking Word and Excel on our Macs could better facilitate one's workflow.

At this point, midday on Christmas Eve, basically all shipping deadlines have passed. If you're lucky you can find a store that has items for people on your gift list, but let's get real: You're choosing between gas station beer cozies, dancing reindeer and clearance VHS tapes. If you want to find something that will please your peeps now, I have a few ideas for you below.

* Paid upgrades. A lot of people of varying levels of geekitude are users of "freemium" services like Flickr and Evernote. They'd probably appreciate an upgrade to a paid account (or an extension of their existing paid account). This is nice because it's practically instant, and it isn't like the size or the color will be wrong. Print the email out and put it in a card, or get super creative with the presentation, and you're done.

* Online smarts. You can get a gift account for something like Lynda.com or Safari and help your nerd friend achieve +5 Intelligence in the subject of their choosing. There are a wide range of topics here, so your recipient will likely find something they enjoy.

* Software licenses. Know someone who uses the previous version of a particular application because they never got around to getting that new license? You can get a lot of software licenses online now, so buy someone you love a license for that program they love. Or encourage someone to dive into software you already love: Something like Scrivener (if they are writer-types) or TextMate (if they have been really good).

* Geek Time. If you are a consultant by trade, or just the alpha geek in your particular circle, get a card for someone and offer them a block of time with unlimited access to your brain. Or give them a certificate for a specific task: help setting up that iPod, upgrading to Snow Leopard, or implementing a backup solution. (Tip: This can be a team gift, if you know someone else got them some tech.) There are a lot of ways you can go with this one.

* Photo albums online. It always seems like someone is missing at Christmas time, so what better way to include them? Get some nice shots of all the gift opening and toss them on the photo sharing service of your choice. Get a short URL from someplace like bit.ly and customize it, then send it off in an email or give the person a call. Get extra points for having a group photo holding up a "Merry Christmas Uncle Albert!" sign.

If you have any additional ideas for last minute gifts, let's see them in the comments.

Update #1: ryemac3 has a great suggestion: vanity domain names. Get your parents the site they've always wanted at 'thewilkersons.net' and watch the fun!

One of the lesser-known changes in Snow Leopard is the update to the Image Capture application. This little gem of the Mac has always been available to grab photos from devices such as digital cameras and scanners, but with Mac OS X 10.6, Image Capture has turned into my personal hero.

In 2007 and 2008, my in-laws both passed away and in the process of closing out their estate, we inherited many family photos. When I mean many, I'm talking about boxes and albums filled with them, enough to fill a spare bedroom in our house! Rather than just tossing the photos, we wanted to keep them because many of them were cherished family pictures, and others (taken by my father-in-law) were spectacularly good travel photographs.

I've had an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner for a few years, and the software that came with it was adequate. However, I just didn't feel like I wanted to spend the time and effort to scan a bunch of photo prints, and was considering sending them off to be digitized professionally. Then, in a fortuitous experiment, I tried Image Capture 6.0.

This latest version has made it possible for me to slap down a bunch of photos on my scanner without regard for orientation, and have the scanner digitize them individually for placement in a folder. All it takes is making sure to check the Detect Separate Items checkbox, and Image Capture analyzes the overview scan to pick out the individual photos, straighten them out, and save them to a folder, auto-numbering them in the process. Once I've digitized a large batch, I drop them into a folder on my wife's MacBook Pro, where they're dragged into iPhoto, tagged, edited, and organized. The originals? They go into the trash.

Image Capture is faster than the Epson software that came with the scanner, it allows me to scan a lot of photos very quickly while working on other things on my Mac (like writing TUAW posts), and it's making it possible for me to burn through digitizing thousands of prints without spending thousands of dollars using commercial scanning services. The best part of this entire project is that in the process of converting atoms to bits, we're going to recapture some space in our home. Your mileage may vary depending on the scanner model you're using, but if you haven't given the Snow Leopard edition of Image Capture a try, check it out.

As a seasoned world traveler and Apple geek, I'm always fascinated to see how others in the Mac and iPhone community make lemonade from lemons when they encounter difficulties on the road. The Mac Observer's Jeff Gamet was recently in Italy (and may still be there) and from the sound of a recent post, he must have arrived well before part of his luggage did. The result? He had a lot of photos on his iPhone that needed to be moved to his Mac, and didn't have a USB cable to link the two.

His solution? Use Dropbox and the hotel's Wi-Fi connection instead of emailing photos and then saving the attached photos to a folder on your Mac. The simple answer involves making sure that you have a Dropbox account (doesn't everybody?), the Dropbox iPhone app [Free, iTunes Link], and access to a Wi-Fi network.

Within the Dropbox app, tap on the Camera button, then tap Existing Photo or Video. From the iPhone's photo albums, you can send your photos to any one of the folders in your Dropbox. As Jeff points out in his post, this has the added benefit of making sure that your vacation photos are backed up online.

Once you've moved the photos to your Dropbox, it's a simple matter of moving or copying them over to your Mac's photo library by literally clicking and dragging them (or option-clicking and dragging if you want to make a copy and keep the originals in the Dropbox) to the iPhone app icon in the dock.

There's only one issue; you have to move one photo or video at a time with the current version of the Dropbox app. Let's hope that Dropbox can address that in an upcoming version of the app.

[Tip of the travelin' hat to Jeff Gamet, The Mac Observer]