January 2007 - The Mac Zone

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The Mac Zone - January 2007

Apple updates iPod Shuffle

Today, Apple released 4 colored iPods to go with the silver once they have been selling since WWDC 2006. The new colors are similar to the ones in the nano line, except black is replaced by orange.

As cool as it is to have new colors to choose from, I would still prefer the silver/gray shuffle.

Also made publicly available by Apple today was the 802.11n enabler for Macs with Intel Core 2 Duo processors.

From Apple.com:

If you have a Mac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor (except the 17-inch, 1.83GHz iMac) or a Mac Pro with AirPort Extreme, you can enable it to access an 802.11n wireless network using the AirPort Extreme 802.11n Enabler software.

Most of the Core 2 Duo mac's had 802.11n hardware built in, and if you have one of those Mac, you can buy the enabler from the Apple Store online for $1.99.

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January 30th 2007 @ 22:32

Posted By: mdeleon - Category: No Category

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Macworld 07 coverage

As much as I would love to be, I won't be at Macworld for the Stevenote today, but there is plenty of coverage online that I'll be following.

Some of the sites that will be live blogging that I'll be checking constantly are: TUAW, Engadget, and SchwarzTech.

For a full list of sites offering live coverage, go check out Glenn Wolsey's blog

The keynote starts in about two minutes, and Apple has already taken down their online store and put up the "We'll Be Back Soon" sticky.

So expect some new products to be up at Apple's store in a few hours and refresh those browsers.

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January 9th 2007 @ 16:57

Posted By: mdeleon - Category: No Category

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Screencast: Automator

If you have Mac OS X, then you've probably gone through the applications folder and found something called Automator. If you haven't used automator, then then this screencast is for you.

Automator is one of the extras in OS X that is a real gem. It has saved me lots of time and has also increased my productivity especially with the workflow of several projects I am working on. Automator can be as basic or advanced as you want it, but this screencast starts out with two basic automator workflows or actions that can be put together quickly.

The first action I put together was a birthday greeting that gathers all of the upcoming months birthdays from my address book and then sends the email addresses to mail with a greeting that can be personalized with a message and image. It works like a charm and I'll probably be using it from now on, and I'll most likely add on an action to add those birthdays into my iCal and set up alarms to remind me of the upcoming birthdays.

The second action is an image resizer. If you're a blogger or have gone through the task of uploading digital photos, you probably know it's a good idea to resize the images you upload to the web. Even my 3.2 megapixel digital camera outputs giant-sized photos in terms of pixels and I used to open each photo I was going to upload to my webserver/flickr/blog in Photoshop and resize them to about half the size. This process also made the uploading faster because the file size is reduced quite a bit.

I'm happy to say that I no longer go through that process thanks to the action I show you in this screencast. One thing I may add on to this action is an option to upload to image shack or my webserver through FTP. I'll most likely cover extending the current actions in future screencasts as well as get into some advanced actions. If you have automator, watch the screencast and then go play with it and see what you can do with the different applications you have.

Note: The audio was recorded a little low so you may want to turn up your volume.