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By John, on February 11th, 2007
Our address book has been on our home computers since since the early-1990′s. First in Lotus Organiser, for a long time in an MS Access database, then in Act! and finally in Palm’s Desktop application, which we switched to when we changed to using Macs a few years ago. Looking back, I think the software I was most satisfied with was Act!, which is very flexible and powerful. It should be, as it’s aimed at business users, rather than home users. However, when we switched to the Macs, Act! only ran under Windows, and the Windows emulation software for Power PC Macs was slow, which is why we migrated the address book to the Palm Desktop.
We started using Palm PDAs in mid-1990s and since then, have always had the challenge of keeping contact data on a number of Palms and two or three computers in sync with each other. It’s not easy as the sync conduits which Palm supplies doesn’t handle multiple PDAs being synced with one PC well – they get confused and you can easily end up having several copies of the same contact in your database. It’s not a problem if you spot it quickly – you can check the date when each version was modified and manually delete the older copy, but it used to generate a lot of work until we got Palms which don’t forget their contents when the battery is empty, as when that happened, the conduit would usually allocate different internal keys when the contents of the database were recovered to the Palm after re-charging it and then sync them as new records to the other PDAs. I have manually removed 500-odd duplicate contacts more times than I care to remember because of that.
Of course, life gets even more complicated when you also want to keep the Palm Desktop synced across multiple Macs. We also print address labels for addresses in various international formats (the UK address format is by the worst to cater for as the British have almost completely unstructured multi-line addresses) and do a Christmas letter in OpenOffice (OOo), which gets printed out using the mass-mailing function in OOo. Both the labels and the mass-mailing documents rely heavily on OOo macros to format the addresses and other personal data correctly before it’s printed.
Where is all of this leading, you may be asking yourself? Continue reading SyncTogether
By John, on February 3rd, 2007
One of the “charms” of using Apple computers is that Apple reckons that you can discover the finer points of using their software by stumbling over the niffty features of programs when you first need them, rather than drawing your attention to them in the “help” screens.
For as long as I can remember, probably since I first switched to the Mac in fact, I have been irritated and puzzled about why sometimes when I print out an e-mail, the print is ridiculously small on the paper, although on the screen it looks fine, it prints like this:
On other occasions, a mail would print just fine:
Continue reading Printing from Apple Mail
By John, on January 1st, 2007
If you are looking for an excellent utility to backup or copy your iPod’s music into your iTunes library, one of the best is Red Chair Software’s CopyGear for Mac.
They come originally from the Windows corner and also offer a tool-set for Windows called Anapod Explorer which includes CopyGear and additional utilities . . . → Read More: CopyGear for Mac OS X
By John, on October 29th, 2006
A useful replacement for JHymn which unfortunately stopped working when iTunes 6.0 was released. FairGame strips the DRM (digital rights management) copy-protection from songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Saves copying the music to CD just to reimport it as MP3 into iTunes. (By the way, this is an OS X tool, . . . → Read More: FairGame
By John, on October 24th, 2006
The scanning of our thousands of slides continues; every day we manage another 150 – 200 slides (more if we are at home at the weekend). Every few days I copy the new ones over the WLAN from the Dell PC in the cellar where the (quite noisy) slide scanner runs, to our Macs . . . → Read More: Copying files, but only those not already copied
By John, on October 15th, 2006
One short update to the last post – after swapping the Iomega drive for the LaCie unit shown in the photo, I started to have problems putting the Mac to sleep. Every time I put it to sleep, it waited a couple of seconds and sprang back to life; it would then continue cycling . . . → Read More: LaCie external drive and USB ports
By John, on October 9th, 2006
Just before the weekend a smallish package arrived here. A Mac mini to replace my old G5 1.8 GHz tower, which is over three years old. I ordered the mini as I don’t need a new screen so an iMac would have been overkill, and I wanted a quiet computer – the G5 may . . . → Read More: Hardware upgrade
By John, on June 5th, 2006
Now I can think seriously about upgrading to an Intel-based Mac
Patrick Luby has just announced that the alpha version of NeoOffice 2.0 for Intel Macs is available. (It is one of the few applications that can not run on an Intel platform using Apple’s Rosetta emulation software, due to restrictions regarding running . . . → Read More: NeoOffice 2.0 Intel Version now available
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