Apple Canada is now offering $45 credits to Canadian residents who still own a first, second, or third-generation iPod purchased before June 24, 2004. The lawsuit came about because the rechargeable batteries on said iPods lasted just three hours instead of the eight claimed on the packaging.
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Mac OS X’s force quit mechanism can be a boon when an applications freezes, often consuming a large amount of system resources as it flails. However, force quits do not always execute properly, leaving hung or stalled applications in their problematic states. ………. Fortunately, Apple’s “Force Quit” dialogue box is only one of the many ways to approach targeting a process to kill it. Alternative Approaches include: Activity Monitor Use Activity Monitor to display a list of all the running processes on the computer. You can see if one is displayed improperly or if it’s using up large amounts of resources, and then kill it specifically to see if that clears the hang. (see this article for more) The Terminal Use the terminal to kill a process by PID (Process ID). The PID can be looked up several ways, but the most common are to use Activity Monitor or the command line equivalent “top”. Using the command line is a more basic approach to killing the process. FULL article at Mac OS X and iPod Troubleshooting The OpenOffice.org Community this week released a public beta release of OpenOffice.org 3.0, the open-source productivity suite for Mac OS X as well as Windows and Linux. The beta release will be the first to run on Mac OS X without X11, but is primarily designed to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next major version of OpenOffice.org: it is not recommended for production use, according to notes on the project. Version 3.0b brings a new “Start Centre”, fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar. Updated spreadsheet features include improved calculations with a new solver component; support for spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to 1024 columns per sheet. The word-processing module, dubbed Writer, has an improved notes feature and displays of multiple pages while editing. The project also claims numerous Chart enhancements, and an improved crop feature in the drawing module. Version 3.0 will also support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard and can open files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). The software already offers read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.). OpenOffice.org 3.0, the first version to run on Mac OS X without X11 windowing system, will offer the look and feel of familiar “Aqua” applications and introduces partial VBA support. Microsoft removed support for Visual Basic for Application (VBA) with the latest release of Office 2008. In addition, OpenOffice.org 3.0 integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and “thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications,” the project said. OpenOffice.org 3 beta is immediately available in US English for MS-Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and OpenSolaris platforms. The final release is due in September and users are encourage to submit bug reports and feedback. The new rules for buying a Mac May 9, 2008 (MacWorld) The world has a lot of unwritten rules — in social etiquette. In baseball. And in buying computers. For years, we have unquestioningly followed numerous unwritten rules when buying a Mac. Like many customs, these rules were once based on a foundation of facts and reason. But in the past few years, many long-standing Mac truths have been upended. All Macs run on multiple-core Intel processors now. IMacs are no longer hobbled by crippling feature limitations. And speedy external peripherals have drastically lessened the need for add-on cards. In other words, the old rules no longer apply. If you’re planning on buying a new Mac, you need facts about the modern lineup so you can choose the computer that’s right for you. In this article, we take a look at some common assumptions and explain whether they align with today’s realities. FULL article at Computer World
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SuperMegaUltraGroovy and Toastycode Announce TapeDeck for Mac OS X 10.5Posted by: Nyxks in Press ReleaseWaterloo, Ontario - SuperMegaUltraGroovy and Toastycode today announced the immediate availability of TapeDeck: an innovative audio recording application written exclusively for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. TapeDeck is a new audio recorder designed with a quick-capture workflow in mind. New recordings, called “tapes”, can be started with a single mouse click (or keystroke). TapeDeck records directly to compressed MP4-AAC audio, making it useful for many applications including simple high-fidelity recordings of a band, practicing speeches, and capturing hours and hours of lecture. TapeDeck was designed to emulate a real cassette tape recorder with a few key differences. Every recording is automatically saved and organized in the searchable “tape box”. There’s no need to “tape over” anything, because a new recording is always just a click away. TapeDeck also adds many welcome improvements to traditional tape recorders, such as a never-ending supply of tapes to record on, far better audio quality, lots of space to write notes, and full compatibility with iTunes and the iPod. Rather than filling up a hard drive with raw AIFF or WAV audio, TapeDeck records directly to standard MP4-AAC files at one of three configurable compression settings. Users can add titles and even “liner notes” to each tape; TapeDeck allows fulltext searching on this data and makes it available to Spotlight, Quick Look, and iTunes as well. Tapes even look great in the Finder and Cover Flow. The rich animation features new to Mac OS X Leopard are put to dramatic use in TapeDeck’s user interface, which is full of sound and motion. Live level meters, rotating cassette spindles, live search, and UI sound effects make TapeDeck truly fun to use. TapeDeck costs $25, and is available now. The unregistered version has approximately 2 weeks of gradually declining battery life, and only short, low-quality recordings are permitted. TapeDeck requires Mac OS X 10.5.2, and runs well on any Mac that runs Leopard. About SuperMegaUltraGroovy: Chris Liscio founded SuperMegaUltraGroovy in 1999, writing BeOS audio software during his undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo. SuperMegaUltraGroovy is best known for FuzzMeasure, the 2006 Apple Design Award runner-up in the Scientific Computing Solution category. About Toastycode: Daniel Sandler started releasing software under the Toastycode label on the fourth of July, 2006 with the debut of Pyrothèque, his love letter to a misspent youth in a computer lab full of Mac Pluses, ImageWriters, and pixellated fireworks. Apple, Mac OS X, Leopard, Finder, Cover Flow, Quick Look, Spotlight, iTunes, and iPod are trademarks of Apple, Inc. ### Chris Liscio |
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