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Today On MacMania:
Address Book Secrets
To begin with, I wanted to give you a few insider secrets on how to use Apple’s wonderful Address Book software to its full potential, a question inspired by listener Thomas who asked me to do some Mac switcher tips. On the surface, it looks like quite a simple application, but under the hood, it is an extremely powerful app, and somewhat of a life-manager for me. I have hundreds of contacts divided into categories such as my friends, clients, attorneys, business partners, and listeners. Currently, I have absolutely no cards in the address book on my G4, so I thought that would be a perfect place to start if you’re new to Address Book. Lets say that I wanted to add a card for myself, so I would click the “+” button on the bottom of the second column, which will create a new entry, or card, and put you into editing mode. Once you’re in editing mode, you will be able to enter all of the information for your card in the third column, such as first and last names, pictures, companies, phone numbers, instant message information, addresses, and more. But besides those, you can make your own custom fields! For example, I made a “Listeners” group on my MacBook that gives me a place to put all of my listeners who have emailed me (I’ll talk about groups later), and, since many of my listeners don’t have email addresses that I know, I wanted to put their Twitter. If you visit the preferences from the “Address Book” menu, you’ll notice a tab entitled “Template.” Within this tab, you have the option to customize all of you address book entries with information that Apple didn’t include in the template by default. This is what helped me in entering Twitter names. I clicked the “Add Field” drop-down and chose the “URL” option. Now, the template has an extra field for a URL, and if I change that to “Custom” from its drop-down, and call it Twitter. All I have to do now is enter a Twitter URL into that field and I’m off.
The second thing on the agenda for this topic is the concept of groups. Virtually all address book solutions have them, but, if you’re new to computers, you may not know what they mean or how to use them. Groups are a way of grouping together contacts into different sections depending on what type of contact they are, but keeping them all in the main area as well. This means that I can have separate compartments, per say, that allow me to put cards into them and organize. Groups are trivial to set up, because all that one must do in order to create one is to click the “+” button on the left column. Now, you have a group that you can just rename and drag cards to.
G.ho.st
I was turned on to a very cool website recently called Ghost, from www.g.ho.st. Ghost is a completely cloud-based operating system that will allow you easily compute online while keeping files in sync and using a consistent workspace. It’s completely cross-platform and Flash-based. I went over to the website on my G4, which is a pretty wimpy machine compared to most other Macintoshes out there, and created an account. but you can also use a guest account. Once I had created my account, I confirmed my email, logged in, and I was off. Anyway, I logged in and noticed that I got a popup blocked from Firefox, my browser of choice, so I made sure to allow popups from that site, because the whole cloud OS is run within a popup. It finally was completely launched after about two minutes, but I didn’t expect too much more on a 2002 machine. Anyway, once it was up, there was a dialog that popped up and told me a bit of information such as the fact that I now have a 5 Gigabyte cloud drive now. It also told me how to use the email client. I then launched it on my white MacBook, which is a much faster machine boasting four gigabytes of RAM and a dual core processor. Upon doing this, it only took around fifteen seconds to completely launch and bring me into my interface. Once I was in, I got a virtual computer setup wizard that guided me through. I clicked the button to begin, and entered a small amount of personal information. A very cool feature I found is that you can also get your details from Facebook, by clicking the button, which opens a pop-up window, and allowing access. I can then select a few options for the OS, enter in which language and avatar I want to use, and I’m off. On first launch of the web client, you have a desktop full of windows, a desktop, a bar on the right that allows you to easily access common functions, and a taskbar that resembles that of Windows. The windows that pop up when on your first launch include a window that allows you to add buddies and chat with them, a window that lets you easily invite friends, and a window entitled “My VC,” which I assume stands for “Virtual Computer.” Once I had closed out all of those, I noticed that the desktop contains some pretty nice things, including shortcuts to your “Programs” menu, a mail application, an IM client, as well as cloud-based office applications like Zoho. There is also an analog clock that floats above the desktop and is completely moveable.
After I familiarized myself with the interface, the first thing I did was try out the mail application, which resembled Outlook Express. I clicked the “Preferences” tab and then went into the “Accounts” section to see about adding in my Gmail account. I found that I needed to click “Add External Account,” and enter in my information down below. When I clicked “Test Settings,” I got a failure, and nothing I tried seemed to work, so the email client is a thumbs-down. The Zoho applications are wonderful, as I have first-hand experience with them, but the last thing that I tried out was the instant messenger, which they decided to call “iLoveIM.” Within iLoveIM, I was supposed to enter credentials for one of my IM services, and none of them worked. It wouldn’t even let me type! Another thumbs-down for the IM client.
Overall, I can see how the concept of this type of OS can be useful, but it really isn’t practical the way they implemented it, so, at its current stage, I wouldn’t recommend it, but you are welcome to check it out.
Stickies In Dashboard
I wanted to share a tip with you that I think you may find very intriguing. As you probably know, Leopard and Tiger both have the application “Dashboard” within the core of the OS, and in Dashboard, you can easily use widgets to organize your life. There are widgets for sports, movies, Mad Libs, and more, and you can download thousands more completely free ones from Apple’s widget download site. One of my favorite widgets, however, comes built right into
the OS, and that is the widget for Stickies. Stickies originated as an application on the Mac back in the OS 8 days, and is still an application to this day that is widely used on Leopard, but now, Apple has integrated it beautifully into Dashboard. Stickies is a way of putting virtual Post-It notes on your Mac’s desktop, but they can get in the way, so Dashboard was an ingenious place to put them. Anyway, just get to them with the “+” button on the bottom of Dashboard, and scroll to the page that contains them. Then, just click on it and it will open in Dashboard! Close the widget chooser, and you’re off. Now, whenever anything pops into your head, all you need to do is click on it there and type it in. This is extremely helpful to me, because now I’m able to more easily jot down a thought the second it comes into my head, and that, plus OmniOutliner, is what makes for a good show each and every week.
External CD Drives
I got a question over on Twitter from listener Anthony, who wanted to know a bit about the best external CD/DVD drives for his computer. His has failed, and he would like to use an external one. If you’re on a budget, there’s one from Other World Computing that is only $69.99 U.S., and it boasts hybrid Firewire and USB 2.0 connectivity, and it burns CD’s/DVD’s and plays them as well, plus it has LightScribe capabilities. It also has been fully tested and is guaranteed to work with iLife, iTunes, Apple’s built-in disc burning software, Toast, and many more. The drive is natively supported on 10.4.3 and later, including Leopard, and, since Anthony told me he was on an Intel Mac Pro, that oughtn’t be a problem. Thanks for tweeting, Anthony, and I hope this helped!
Full Screen Browsing
I got another question tweeted to me from listener Craig, who wanted to know how to do a true full-screen experience in either FireFox or Safari. I’ll start with the tougher one, FireFox. There is no true way to use FireFox in full-screen on your Mac, but there is a hack from LifeHacker that utilizes JavaScript and a bookmarklet. Here is the JavaScript code that you must add to your bookmark’s “Location” field:
“javascript:window.resizeTo(1280,800);”
Yours may be different in terms of the numbers, but this is because I’m on a MacBook with a 1280×800 screen resolution. To find out your screen resolution, just go to your System Preferences from your Apple menu, and look under “Displays,” where you should find the resolution. Then, just change the numbers. Also, as an added tip, put this in your bookmark bar for quicker, easier access.
Safari is a much easier question, because there is an awesome plugin that utilizes the SIMBL architecture called MegaZoomer, which can be downloaded here. Once again, however, you will need the SIMBL plugin installed first. Now, if you restart any Cocoa application (why it wouldn’t work with FireFox), then you should be able to simply push “Command+Enter/Return,” and you will be brought into a glorious full-screen mode.
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