Long Island Macintosh Solutions and Training for Your Office and Home
Here you will find a log with postings to helpful Mac related links on the web and software tools that can help you address specific problems or needs.
This page will be "live" in the sense that it will be updated regularly to reflect recent news from Apple as well as other interesting and helpful information on applications, technical news, troubleshooting articles and hints.
You may subscribe to the RSS feed to receive these updates automatically.
I hope you find them useful.
It's now the third week of April, and I finally started to use Dictate myself. I must say that the software is quite extraordinary as the dictation process is both easy to learn and addictive. I find myself dictating most of my e-mails and I'm starting to control a computer with my voice as well. In fact, the small blurb of text, has been completely dictated onto my website! If you decide to give Dictate a try, I think you will be impressed.
For Macintosh users, computer Speech Recognition has been the stuff of science fiction and fantasy. Now, it seems, all that is getting ready to change.
At Macworld Expo 2008, MacSpeech unveiled new Speech Recognition software for the Mac called Dictate. Dictate is based on the widely praised and used Dragon NaturallySpeaking Technology that has been available to PC users for years. Now that technology is coming to the Mac. The MacSpeech team gave demos of Dictate in an expo booth that was often full to overflowing. Dictate was honored with a Macworld Best in Show award for 2008.
Set to be released in mid-February of this year, you can find more information by clicking on this link to the MacSpeech website.
The release of Mac OS X Leopard will make available to Mac users a series of brand new applications that are Leopard only.
Bento from the team at Filemaker is one of the first of these Leopard only applications. An easy to use database that uses the new capabilities of Leopard and data you already have in your system - contacts and calendars - to make you more productive.
You can find out more and download a trial copy of Bento at the link below.
If you are looking for an alternative to creating a variety of documents on your Mac, you might want to consider the free, open source alternative NeoOffice.
NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.
You can find an excellent description of NeoOffice and the NeoOffice project on their wiki.
The NeoOffice home page with links to the download and updates can be found at the link below.
The folks at Karelia Software - the creators of Sandvox which is the tool I used to produce my company website - recently pointed me to a Safari add-on that makes searching the web similar to searching on your local Mac.
The add-on is named Inquisitor 3 and comes from a clever Mac developer David Watanabe. Once installed, your web searches bring immediate results "as you type." The more you type, the more detailed your results become. No need to hit the return key to begin the search process. Your search is now "live."
You can find the download to Inquisitor 3 at the link below. Good hunting!
Quicktime, developed by Apple, is the native media player for the Macintosh. It will play both video and audio and is everywhere in the Mac world.
Other types of media - especially video content in the Windows Media Player format - can sometimes be troublesome unless you know this small trick.
If you are having problems playing video from certain websites, CNN for example, the quick fix is Flip4Mac WMV. This System Preference takes video and audio in the Windows Media Player format and plays is seamlessly on your Mac. It is an essential download for all Mac users and, once installed, plays without any intervention from you at all.
You can find out more information at the link below as well as the Flip4Mac free download itself.
If you're in the market for a new HD camcorder that is compatible with the just released iMovie '08, Apple has published a list of camcorders that support iMovie '08. Categories are broken broken out into Tape Based Camcorders, Tapeless Camcorders and Other Tapeless Devices.
The support page also highlights Known Compatibility Issues including the fact that AVCHD DVD camcorders are not supported.
Click on the link below to view the page.
Finding a Public WiFi Hotspot can be easy if your know where to look. Here's a website that can make your search a bit easier.
Enter a Zip Code or city name to define your search area. Choose the distance from the zip you would like to search (1, 5, 10 miles for example), and the kind of Hotspot you are searching for (free, pay or both).
In a matter of seconds, you will be presented with a list of Public WiFi Hotspots near you.
If you are like me, at least one of your e-mail addresses has been captured by a spammer. What started out as a trickle of offensive or useless e-mails has become a flood and you are looking for a way to stop it!
The first step is to check the spam filter settings provided by your e-mail service. Stopping spam at the mail server is your first line of defense. Much of the spam sent my way is caught before it even gets to my MacBook Pro.
The second step is to install a good spam filtering tool on your Mac. For the past 12 months I have been using SpamSieve from C-Command Software and I recommend it highly. In that time SpamSieve has been right in stopping spam 99.6% of the time - clearly a great score.
SpamSieve works with Apple's Mail client as well as Entourage, Thunderbird, Eudora and other mail clients. If you need help setting it up, I am always available for a visit.
You can find more information about SpamSieve here.
If you care at all about your data - especially those photos, music and documents that cannot be replaced - then backup is critical. While backup to a local disk is "good," backup to a secure offsite server is even better.
Several options are available today and include the following:
.Mac
When your mail provider places a limit on the size of the files you can send, two solutions come to mind to share large files over the internet.
They work on a simple idea: You send a message to the recipient with a internet link. When your friend or colleague clicks on the link, the large file is automatically downloaded to their desktop.
Check out these two solutions.
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