Dateline Friday July 11th. The day that rabid PR executives worldwide had decreed to be known as I-day, or iPhone-day, or perhaps frI-day. Who knows. Whatever, big business had successfully managed to smuggle enough mind altering chemicals into my coffee to ensure that I would decide to join the day one gang and become one of the iPhoned.
So how did I do. Initial efforts had gone poorly, very poorly. As a result of registering my interest with )2 I was the luck recipient of an e-mail instructing me to click on a link. Checking my content filter were set to "stun" I clicked. A mere hour had elapsed since receipt of the mail, but this proved to be too long. The phone that makes Jesus look like an amateur magician was sold out online. Already. It looked like it was going to be a store vist. Me in an actual Apple line. Would there be mimes to entertain us. Would we bond with fellow line travellers, making friends for ever, peopl ewho when we mailed each other with our phones would look at the little signature "sent from my iPhone" and smile with warm rememberance?
A totally fake excuse of collecting some t-shirsts meant that I had a reason to head from Cirencester to Cheltenham, via the girls school. Luckily for me the girls are great gymnasts so I didn't actually have to stop the car, simply eject them on the move in the general direction of school. The road to Cheltenham is narrow and twisty, and had my car been fitted with TOW rockets or machine guns would have been littered with the burning shells of cars that were driving just. too. slowly. Still 9.30 was a good time to getr in line.
The quick walk from car to O2 shop took me past the Carphone Warehouse outlet, where a mini queue was already in place, should I divert. No. there it was the holy grail. Some red police tape, a few cones and... the queue. A nice lady even came out, counted us and pronounced all of us in the line as blessed, well as blessed as people who are denied 16Gb phones because they only had 8Gb models in stock could be.
But, what cruel fate was this. Another, not nearly so nice lady asking if any of us were business customers. Me!! I'm an importnat business customer, in line for two handsets!! Me!! No! No!! NO!!! "I'm sorry sir, we can't process business customers today. We've made this totally arbitary decision, sorry!"
And that was that. The scant solace of my t0shirt collection failed to remake my morning. O2 are now out of stock for weeks, but the Cirencester Carphone Warehouse is gettng more in on Tuesday so it looks like a plan B is scheduled for then.
Updates on Tuesday.
Sunday, 13 July 2008
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Make the most of mail
Web apps such as Firefox and Safari seem to have inspired people to both create and use a wide range of plug ins that are designed to customise the users experience to help specific browsing styles, but maybe because it's such a workaday program most people seem to use Apple Mail as it comes, straight out of the box. While basic mail (and particularly Leopard Mail (mail3) makes a pretty good job of your e-mail there are a few ways to make the mail experience more useful. So here are a few additions to mail that you might find useful.
First off, Letterbox. This plug in changes the standard mail view to three side by side columns ratehr than stacking the preview window under the mail list window. On wide screen monitors (and Mac Book Pros) this makes much better use of your screen real estate and can save lots of time, particularly when scanning long lists of mail.
Growlmail is part of the hugely useful Growl suit of plug ins and add ons that allow a range of notifications of events happening on and to your Mac. Growl mail will notify you via a pop up window of new incoming mail, and give you a heads up on who it's from.
Similarly, MailAppertiser is another flexible mail notification plug in. A dark smoked effect pop up window displays new incoming maeesages plus their content for a specified amount of time allowing you to decide wether to ignore or deal with any new messages. Mail Appetiser is available for both Tiger and Leopard mail.
With many more plug ins available to fulfill specific tasks, it should be worthwhile investigating how you could improve your mail experience.
First off, Letterbox. This plug in changes the standard mail view to three side by side columns ratehr than stacking the preview window under the mail list window. On wide screen monitors (and Mac Book Pros) this makes much better use of your screen real estate and can save lots of time, particularly when scanning long lists of mail.
Growlmail is part of the hugely useful Growl suit of plug ins and add ons that allow a range of notifications of events happening on and to your Mac. Growl mail will notify you via a pop up window of new incoming mail, and give you a heads up on who it's from.
Similarly, MailAppertiser is another flexible mail notification plug in. A dark smoked effect pop up window displays new incoming maeesages plus their content for a specified amount of time allowing you to decide wether to ignore or deal with any new messages. Mail Appetiser is available for both Tiger and Leopard mail.
With many more plug ins available to fulfill specific tasks, it should be worthwhile investigating how you could improve your mail experience.
Friday, 6 June 2008
10 hidden gems
OK so you;re getting the basics but you can always learn a wee bity more. Here (quickly) are ten handy hints that you might not know you can do with OSX Leopard (or other versions of OS X)
1) Time Machine. It works great on files but did you know you can use it from inside apps such as iPhoto. If you've deleted a needed photo it's no problem. You can entrer the time machine interface while running iPhoto, navigate back to the missing image and restore it right back into your library.
2) Application switcher. I love it but almost no one I speak to seems to even know it exists. To switch betwen running apps simply hold the command (or apple) key and hit tab to cycle through each app via a big icon bar in the middle of the screen. Holding the shift key reverses the direction of travel through the apps.
3) Spotlight as an application launcher. Thanks to the speed boost in spotlight under Leopard you can now youe it as a great application launcher without cursing the speed. Click on the spotlight icon. Type the first few letters of teh application you want to launch (three or four letters usually does it) and hit return. Bingo open application.
4) Create quick and easy movies in Photobooth. Need to send a video message to a friend. Open Photobooth, select the video button and away you go. Short videos that you can send via e-mail or share on the web are just a single click away.
5) Summarize text. One of the little used system wide services in each applications pull down menu. Select a large body of text in any application or on th einternet and select summarize. OS X will present you with a short summary of the contents of the text.
6) Screen zoom. Eyes getting tired. Need to see what that tiny dot in the corner is. Just hold the control key down and move your mouse up ( or use 2 finger scrolling up on newer Mac portables) and teh screen wil magically zoom in. Reverse process to zoom out.
7) Quick clean up. Need to close everything in a hurry. Don'rt waste time clicking on the red close button on every window. Just click on one button while holding the option key and all open windows will instantly close.
8) Colour code your window backgrounds. Sounds odd but it can help differentiate project windows. Open a window and select icon view. Then select view options and select colour (or even picture) from the buttons at the bottom of the menu
Enjoy!
1) Time Machine. It works great on files but did you know you can use it from inside apps such as iPhoto. If you've deleted a needed photo it's no problem. You can entrer the time machine interface while running iPhoto, navigate back to the missing image and restore it right back into your library.
2) Application switcher. I love it but almost no one I speak to seems to even know it exists. To switch betwen running apps simply hold the command (or apple) key and hit tab to cycle through each app via a big icon bar in the middle of the screen. Holding the shift key reverses the direction of travel through the apps.
3) Spotlight as an application launcher. Thanks to the speed boost in spotlight under Leopard you can now youe it as a great application launcher without cursing the speed. Click on the spotlight icon. Type the first few letters of teh application you want to launch (three or four letters usually does it) and hit return. Bingo open application.
4) Create quick and easy movies in Photobooth. Need to send a video message to a friend. Open Photobooth, select the video button and away you go. Short videos that you can send via e-mail or share on the web are just a single click away.
5) Summarize text. One of the little used system wide services in each applications pull down menu. Select a large body of text in any application or on th einternet and select summarize. OS X will present you with a short summary of the contents of the text.
6) Screen zoom. Eyes getting tired. Need to see what that tiny dot in the corner is. Just hold the control key down and move your mouse up ( or use 2 finger scrolling up on newer Mac portables) and teh screen wil magically zoom in. Reverse process to zoom out.
7) Quick clean up. Need to close everything in a hurry. Don'rt waste time clicking on the red close button on every window. Just click on one button while holding the option key and all open windows will instantly close.
8) Colour code your window backgrounds. Sounds odd but it can help differentiate project windows. Open a window and select icon view. Then select view options and select colour (or even picture) from the buttons at the bottom of the menu
Enjoy!
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