I'm not a trackpad fan, but I will admit that gestures are cool. Ivan at Creative Bits has identified the gestures available in Photoshop, including
Alt (Option) key + double finger track to zoom and out within a document
Hold the Apple (Cmd) key to zoom the whole screen
There's more, of course, and you can read the full list here. We recently wrote about some fun you can have using trackpad gestures to zoom and pan images in a Quick Look window.
Ivan also wishes for user-defined gestures, something that only seems logical for Apple to implement.
America's favorite ex-con (that's Martha Stewart, not her dog Sharkey, as seen above) just loves her new MacBook Air, according to her blog. Like most MBA owners, she's "amazed" by how thin it is, and is thrilled that the trackpad "works much the same way as the Apple iPhone" -- in fact, her whole writeup reads exactly like an ad from Apple, complete with the link to the Apple Store at the end. Who knew Martha was such a Mac-head?
Although she does settle that debate about whether the book counts as a laptop or a laptop support unit: Martha still keeps her HP right next to the Air, not only because she likes to keep up with both platforms, but apparently because when aides come by her desk to work, she wants them to have choices. And we all know what choice is: a good thing.
Well, this was inevitable. When Steve Jobs dramatically presented the MacBook Air by removing it from a manila envelope, two enterprising artists saw an opportunity, and the result is AirMail.
It's a vinyl laptop sleeve for the MacBook Air that looks just like -- you guessed it -- a standard issue manila envelope. They're lined with fleece and even feature a tie enclosure. Each hand made bag costs $29.95US, and they begin shipping two weeks from today.
It's not the most durable bag available, but among the most clever.
MacNN is reporting on a patent filed by Apple that describes a laptop docking station that looks a lot like a hollow iMac. According to images filed with the patent, a laptop is slid into a compartment on the side of the dock, leaving the laptop's ports accessible.
There's no indication as to how the display works. Perhaps the docking station itself has a display that's powered by the laptop, though it seems silly to have two displays. It could be that the laptop in question is actually a tablet that docks with its own display facing the user.
The patent also mentions liquid cooling and a "telephonic handset." It's all interesting, but who knows if any of this will come to fruition. Perhaps we'll see next week.
UK drive recovery company Retrodata is warning customers of a rash of failures involving a particular Seagate drive model, a SATA unit made in China and used in Apple laptops. This specific mechanism, according to Retrodata's intake notes, seems to be prone to a spectacular self-destruct where the drive heads auger into the platter, rendering the data mostly dead.
How to spot the potentially affected drive: check System Profiler under Serial ATA, and if you have a Seagate drive with a 7.01 firmware revision... well, double-check those backups.
We've talked so much about Leopard already here at TUAW that I'd find it hard to believe you readers haven't decided yet whether you're ready to pick it up (or not), but just in case, here's a few concise reviews from around the 'net to let you know whether this is something you want or not.
PC Mag gives the OS a whopping 4.5 out of 5: "Leopard performs all such tasks even better than previous versions did-and Leopard is the only OS on the planet that works effortlessly and intuitively in today's world of networked computers and peripherals. Leopard is far from perfect, but it's better than any alternative, and it's getting harder and harder to find good reasons to use anything else."
Laptop Magazine isn't quite as harsh on the glitches, but also give it 4.5/5: "Part useful, part flash, all beautifully easy: Apple's Mac OS X 10 Leopard bounded into stores Friday, thrilling the Mac faithful with a solid and extremely useful upgrade."
CNET gives Leopard an 8.0 out of 10, saying that while Leopard is nice, it might not be necessary: "Should you pay for Leopard? If you're happy with the way Tiger works, then maybe not. If you need Bootcamp, however, then you must have Leopard. And if you're considering the purchase of a new computer, Leopard makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did."
And Macworld says that while you might not use everything, the stuff you will use is worth it: "Given the impressive value of Time Machine and improvements to existing programs such as iCal, iChat, Mail, and the Finder, most active Mac users will find more than enough reasons to consider that upgrade cost money well spent. Despite a few interface missteps, particularly when it comes the menu bar and the Dock, Leopard is an upgrade that roars."
Now, once again, odds are that either you've using Leopard right now, or you're already waiting on a specific reason to upgrade for it. But across the board, reviews on the new OS are generally good. And even though lots of users are dealing with bugs and unfixed errors right now, the best days of Leopard are still yet to come. Thanks to everyone who sent these in!
As a bag geek, I'm always excited to see something new and novel kinds of cases. While walking around the show floor at Macworld back in January, I was delighted to come across something I've been looking for as long as I can remember– a soft sleeve with rigid protection. The case in question turned out to be the Shuttle from Higher Ground, and I've had the chance to use and review it for the past month or so.
Ah, the Friday software update... how it brightens up the weekend. Just off the bench, Battery Update 1.2 is currently downloadable in Software Update. The firmware update is for all Intel laptops and promises better performance. Reuters is now reporting that Apple has acknowledged issues with some MacBook and MacBook Pro batteries, and Apple has posted an extended support page for battery replacements.
After Battery Update has been installed, the battery firmware will be updated for each battery you place in your laptop (either at startup, wake from sleep, or when you put the battery in). Hopefully this will improve battery life and reduce swelling...
Is an AMD Apple laptop in the works? That's the rumor that DigiTimes Systems published yesterday. According to Digitimes, Taiwan component makers are seeing increased orders for a kind of capacitor to be used in an AMD-based Apple notebook.
In September, AMD CEO Hector Ruiz speculated that Apple and AMD might do business together. However, the article mentions that a number of motherboard makers doubt the rumors, "noting the performance advantage Intel currently enjoys over AMD, especially for the Core 2 Duo processor compared with AMD's present CPU lineup. AMD is also considered to have insufficient capacity, the makers added."
Although I'm a Mac Geek by trade, I tend to avoid the terminal unless I'm out of other options. I'm a GUI kind of girl. It's the Mac OS that I love, not its Unix underpinnings. I appreciate the power of the command line - I just don't want to spend all day there. Still, once in a while I come across a tip like the one, which Glenn Fleishman posted in the most recent TidBITS, and I find myself unable to resist the urge to fire up the Terminal.
This tip solves a problem that I've experienced myself and many of my clients have complained about - laptops waking from sleep while in their cases because the latch won't keep the lid closed. This can cause overheating, which can lead to a variety of other problems, like hard drive failures, etc. My solution is, of course, to fix the latch! But there are times when that isn't convenient and even if it's convenient it doesn't happen often enough for some people to even bother stressing about it. By harnessing the power of pmset, the command line app that controls power management settings, you can fix it so that your sleeping beauty stays asleep, even when the latch isn't doing its job.
The command is an easy one - a single line. Ready for it?
sudo pmset lidwake 0
By setting the lidwake value to 0 you prevent the machine from waking until you tap a key on your keyboard, and since the value gets written just to a plist file, it takes hold right away. Of course you'll need administrator privileges since you'll be asked for an admin password before the command is executed.
For more pmset options, have a look at the "man" pages at Apple's Darwin Reference library, or open your Terminal and type "man" (without the quotes), hit return and then type "pmset" (without the quotes.)
Product recalls are certainly nothing new to the tech industry, but two significant PC players (Dell and Apple) having to recall a collective 5.9 million batteries has to sting just a little for Sony. Macworld is reporting that the Japanese company announced an estimate on the cost of said sting: between ¥20 billion to ¥30 billion (US$172 million to $258 million). The moral of this story? QA is a good thing.
Let's hope the upcoming summit in San Francisco on li-ion battery manufacturing standards - jointly held by the likes of Apple, HP, Dell and Lenovo - helps cut down on the exploding notebooks so we can all get back to our daily routines.
CNN is reporting Apple, who, like Dell, relies on Sony-manufactured batteries, is jumping on the recall wagon and recalling a whopping 1.1 million of the fire-prone beasties. There's no link yet on CNN's site, but here's the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's page on the matter. Just when you think Sony couldn't get any worse... And weren't we all so smug when we heard about Dell's misfortune?
UPDATE: This covers G4-based iBooks and PowerBooks only at this point.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in, although I happened upon it at CNN first]
Remember Scott's 'Smack your MacBook Pro' post from yesterday? It looks like Scott got his wish: now you can go a step further and get your own SmackBook Pro. That's right boys and girls, for the low low price of nothing (all code is released under the GPL), you too can have your very own smackable MacBook Pro. If you don't want to deal with the instructions, some commenters have compiled new versions; scroll down for the links.
It sounds like this might work on any Apple notebooks with a motion sensor, as I also noticed some commenters were tinkering with getting this to work on a recent 12" PowerBook. Either way, Erling Ellingsen has ushered in a brave new world of computing - a world where you can literally smack your computer to make it do something productive.
I don't have a MacBook Pro, so I'm not able to listen to its infamous "whine." Luckily for me, some enterprising soul had the idea to record his whining laptop and post the audio to the web. He notes that the sound his computer makes in person is a bit different that what the recording presents, but it's still pretty annoying. He also notes that he has since returned the MacBook Pro.
I'm still
scratching my head on this app, but I figured I'd post it and maybe you guys could help make sense of how an app like
this would be useful. UnPlugged is a one-trick pony with
the sole purpose of (drum roll please) notifying you when your Mac's power cable is unplugged. It can use Growl to
notify you, or a simple alert window in case Growl isn't your cup of tea.
Now, how is this useful? To
double-check: If a desktop Mac's power cable comes unplugged either from the wall or the Mac itself, it just shuts off,
right? As far as I know, Apple hasn't built any whiz-bang UPS technology into their recent desktops. So that leaves
iBooks and PowerBooks. Is there some kind of an environment or fairly typical situations people are getting themselves
into where they wouldn't know if a power cable became unplugged, given that it attaches right on the side of the
machine they're working on? Sound off, if you could, and help make sense of this peculiar little app.
UnPlugged is donationware, requires 10.3.9 or higher and is available from brik software.
I'm not a trackpad fan, but I will admit that gestures are cool. Ivan at Creative Bits has identified the gestures available in Photoshop, including
Well, this was inevitable. When Steve Jobs dramatically presented the MacBook Air by removing it from a manila envelope, two enterprising artists saw an opportunity, and the result is AirMail.
MacNN is reporting on a patent filed by Apple that describes a laptop docking station that looks a lot like a hollow iMac. According to images filed with the patent, a laptop is slid into a compartment on the side of the dock, leaving the laptop's ports accessible. 
UK drive recovery company Retrodata is warning customers of a rash of failures involving a particular Seagate drive model, a SATA unit made in China and used in Apple laptops. This specific mechanism, according to Retrodata's intake notes, seems to be prone to a spectacular self-destruct where the drive heads auger into the platter, rendering the data mostly dead.
We've talked so much about Leopard already here at TUAW that I'd find it hard to believe you readers haven't decided yet whether you're ready to pick it up (or not), but just in case, here's a few concise reviews from around the 'net to let you know whether this is something you want or not.
Ah, the Friday software update... how it brightens up the weekend. Just off the bench, Battery Update 1.2 is currently downloadable in Software Update. The firmware update is for all Intel laptops and promises better performance. Reuters is now reporting that Apple has acknowledged issues with some MacBook and MacBook Pro batteries, and Apple has posted an extended support page for battery replacements.
Is an AMD Apple laptop in the works? That's the rumor that DigiTimes Systems published yesterday. According to Digitimes, Taiwan component makers are seeing increased orders for a kind of capacitor to be used in an AMD-based Apple notebook.
Although I'm a Mac Geek by trade, I tend to avoid the terminal unless I'm out of other options. I'm a GUI kind of girl. It's the Mac OS that I love, not its Unix underpinnings. I appreciate the power of the command line - I just don't want to spend all day there. Still, once in a while I come across a tip like the one, which Glenn Fleishman posted in the most recent TidBITS, and I find myself unable to resist the urge to fire up the Terminal. 
Product recalls are certainly nothing new to the tech industry, but two significant PC players (Dell and Apple) having to recall a collective 5.9 million batteries has to sting just a little for Sony. Macworld is reporting that the Japanese company announced an estimate on the cost of said sting: between ¥20 billion to ¥30 billion (US$172 million to $258 million). The moral of this story? QA is a good thing.
CNN is reporting Apple, who, like Dell, relies on Sony-manufactured batteries, is jumping on the recall wagon and recalling a whopping 1.1 million of the fire-prone beasties. There's no link yet on CNN's site, but here's the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's page on the matter. Just when you think Sony couldn't get any worse... And weren't we all so smug when we heard about Dell's misfortune?
I don't have a MacBook Pro, so I'm not able to listen to its infamous "whine." Luckily for me, some enterprising soul had the idea to record his whining laptop and post the audio to the web. He notes that the sound his computer makes in person is a bit different that what the recording presents, but it's still pretty annoying. He also notes that he has since returned the MacBook Pro. 
I'm still
scratching my head on this app, but I figured I'd post it and maybe you guys could help make sense of how an app like
this would be useful. UnPlugged is a one-trick pony with
the sole purpose of (drum roll please) notifying you when your Mac's power cable is unplugged. It can use Growl to
notify you, or a simple alert window in case Growl isn't your cup of tea.
