Apple released Snow Leopard (a Mac operating system upgrade) last week to mostly mellow reviews. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal said ” If you’re happy with Leopard, there’s no reason to rush out and get Snow Leopard.” Wired Magazine said “If you upgrade to Snow Leopard today, it’s not going to change your life.” Snow Leopard’s most interesting feature seems to be its small footprint. By upgrading you’ll likely free up 7 gigs of hard drive space.
Is shutting off your Mac at the end of the day better than putting it to sleep? Although many Windows refugees prefer to power down, Gary Rosenzweig of MacMost explains that sleep is better in most situations because it uses very little power and makes for very speedy start ups.
Tired of buying Microsoft Office for each computer you use? OpenOffice is an open-source (i.e. free) software suite for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. It stores all your data in file formats that are compatible with Microsoft Office, and works on many computer platforms including Windows, Mac and Unix. The newest release, OpenOffice 3.1 is now available for download.
Unlike Windows users who need extra software to create PDFs, Mac users can easily convert any document or web page to PDF with tools built right into the Mac OS. The basic steps are to select Print from the File menu, then click on the PDF button in the lower-left hand side of the dialog box. For illustrated step-by-step help, read Ask Dave Taylor.
You can create a custom iPhone ringtone from most iTunes songs by purchasing the song for 99 cents, downloading it, choosing your start and end points using the iTunes software, then buying your custom ringtone from iTunes for another 99 cents. For details on this iTunes feature, read Dave Taylor. Chris Pirillo however, has a different method that bypasses paying iTunes and lets you create a ringtone from any song in your iTunes library for free.
The new iTunes 8 comes with a recommendation engine named Genius. If you give it permission to read your music library (which will take a bit of time, depending on how many songs you have), Genius will create playlists for you based on a single song as a seed and recommend songs from the iTunes Music Store. Learn more at Apple and at PC World.
Ever wonder about downloading YouTube videos onto your iPod? The problem is that YouTube (and most other video sharing sites) uses a Flash format, and your iPod needs a QuickTime format such as MP4. The solution is a piece of software that will assist with the video download, do the format conversion, and place the converted file in your iTunes folder for easy transfer to your iPod. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recommends iTube for Windows or PodTube for Mac.
Jing Project is a free tool for both Mac and Windows users, that lets you capture your computer screen as a static image or a screencast, and then share your screen capture as a URL. Which means that not only are they providing the software to create the capture, they are also providing free hosting. How could you use this? It’s up to you. Add your Jing captures to your chats, your social networking, or your websites. Use to for fun, or to demonstrate computer stuff to friends and co-workers.
Mac users with Intel-based machines have several options when it comes to running Windows on their Leopard machines: Boot Camp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion. Boot Camp is included with OS X, and provides a dual boot machine that runs either OS, but only one at a time. Parallels and VMWare are virtualization products that allow you to run both operating systems simultaneously, in different windows on the Mac desktop. For more details, read Sam at NotebookReview .
There are a variety of ways to convert an iPod from Windows to Mac, depending on how much metadata (such as playlists, album art, ratings, and date added) you want moved, and how your Windows iTunes library is configured. To transfer with CDs or DVDs, use iTunes Backup. To transfer a lot of music quickly (but not the metadata) try this technique from Cnet.com. Or, to use the iPod itself as a transfer hard drive, with these instructions from Apple.
