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For some time now my MS Word application was acting up, crashing regularly and working very slowly. I got tired of thinking that it was “normal” behavior for a Microsoft (MS) application and started looking for solutions. It turns out I was being unfair to MS this time, the problem lied on the Font Validation application that comes with Mac OS X.

When you install applications that brings fonts to the Mac OS X environment they get automatically organized in the Font Book.app. The Font Book.app is located in the Application folder of Mac OS X by default, go and launch it and I will give you some tips to make it healthy again. Read the rest of this entry →

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows you to update people on what you are doing as well as see what others are doing instantly, all in 140 characters or less. The main use of twitter has been described as the office water cooler, which is where you stop to take a break and talk to others.

Much like Facebook, twitter is causing sensation, everyone in social media understand the importance of using twitter regularly. If you own a brand or you simply want to stay updated about what’s happening around you, then being on twitter is the way to go.

Ever since I got on twitter I’ve tested a number of applications on the Mac that allows you to update twitter and read your feed instantly without the need to visit their website. Some of these applications are Twitterrfic, TweetDeck, Twhirl, etc., I’m not telling you what I didn’t like about those applications, but I will tell you what I like about Tweetie.

Tweetie lets you be up to date on what’s happening on your twitter feed, much like other applications, it lets you post, reply, and re-post any tweet from your friends. This is very convenient because you don’t have to stop what you are doing and launch a web browser to check what your friends are up to, the application is sitting right there on you desktop.

A large number of twitter applications for the iPhone were released the minute the iPhone SDK was available, but one of them became an instant hit. Tweetie for the iPhone was a hit despite being one of the applications for the iPhone that had no free version, everyone who tried it loved it, I never got my hands on it but people like Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.tv has talked about the applications numerous times on their show.

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If you don’t know what emoji is then here it goes, back when Apple was trying to get in the Japanese cell phone market they noticed that a big feature all cell phones had was emoji. Emoji is the Japanese term for the pictures characters or emoticons used by Japanese wireless carriers (Wikipedia).

I felt so envious when I saw them for the first time, why in the world we can’t have the same emoticons here in the US market. It doesn’t seem to be incompatible with the cell carriers, the only problem I think is preventing this from happening is the fact that not all US phones are emoji capable. Read the rest of this entry →

As soon as I learned about Photoshop Elements 6.0 (PSE) for Mac, I posted my impressions on my business blog. With the intention of being more informal about it, I’m revisiting the topic here on my personal blog (here.) One other thing that made me think about it was an interview that Victor from the Typical Mac User podcast did to the product manager of PSE.

Some of my complaints that I had back then when PSE was announced, were that Adobe.com had the announcement tied with photos from PSE for PC not for Mac, this was somewhat confusing. They have updated the images since and now you can how this new version is looking.

Victor touch on some topics about this new version that are making me very anxious about upgrading, the first and not discussed item is the fact that this time the application is universal (PPC and Intel compatible.) The interview touched on the guided edit functions, I’m hoping I got the idea right because having a small help video that shows you systematically how to get the desired results is awesome.

The group shot feature is cool and all but I don’t think I’ll be using it a lot, the concept is that sometimes you try to get a group shot and someone closes their eyes. Then another person don’t even smile, and so on, you can now with a click of a button merge images of the same group shot to create a perfect one. Clever, but I don’t take that many group shots anyway.

One thing I didn’t get from the interview was how they made a big deal about layers on PSE, that has always been there and PSE is not the only software that works using layers. I love the flexibility of having the layers option because it’s so easy to add and/or remove elements when you are just playing with your images. That feature alone makes PSE worth the expense.

Here is a comment-plus-tip comment about Bridge, and this application comes bundled with PSE. The function of this application is more of a photo organizer, for most of us, iPhoto is our only way of organizing photos because it makes it easy and convenient. The way I use Bridge is by only organizing photos that have nothing to do with me or my family, in other words if it’s client related, blog related, or anything else, I use Bridge.

Regardless of your taste in photography, unless you are a pro or work in photography for a living, I recommend PSE to everybody. I’m dying to get my hands on it, I’m sure it will be worth it. Chat with me about this, leave your comments on this post, I’ll make sure to replay to everyone. Thanks Victor for such a great interview.

There are many ftp client software in the market, for those of you who are looking for a web based ftp client here is a review. First, the basics, ftp stands for file transfer protocol, this technology allows you to transfer files to and from web hosts (among other places.)

I learned about net2ftp.com about 6 months ago, I was at a friend house and I needed to upload a file to my web host, I didn’t wanted to install software on my friends computer so I started searching for a web ftp client. Back then, I remember being frustrated because I’m used to my Mac interface and free windows ftp clients looked weird to me.

The first thing you see when you arrive to net2ftp.com is a form where you input your host information to log in, if you know where in your host you want to go you can select the folder where you want to arrive from this screen. It gives you some options, normal of any ftp client, like login in anonymously, passive mode, SSL mode, binary or automatic, etc.

Once inside you have a bunch of options to work within your files, among the ones I use the most are, upload, delete, chmod, download, zip, and size. These free tool come with its limitation, one example is the size of the file, they claim that you can upload files up to 5MB, in real life I haven’t been able to upload anything bigger than 1MB. It has a time limitation, which is what I think limits uploads the most, of 30 seconds.

You can upload different compressed files and they will show up uncompressed on your host, files like .zip, .tar, .tgz, and .gz. I have to mention to be careful with compress files you create on your Mac, here are some “._” files that ends up being a problem inside a Linux server host. Also, never, ever upload a file that contains a apostrophe, or you will end up with a file that only your host will be able to remove.

You can navigate thru all your files, when uploading file with the same name it replaces the old one with the new one. Deleting file is extremely easy, so be careful when deleting anything here. To conclude you should know that net2ftp is open source, you can even download the code and create your own web ftp client and they offer some integration options with some web-blog sites like drupal.

Did you like this post? Share it with your friends, feel free to leave comments correcting or adding to anything I wrote here, thanks for reading.

Back in June, I wrote about the missing in action Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 for Mac, I complain and complain about Adobe not releasing updates compatible with Intel chips. The reason we needed Photoshop Elements to be a universal application is to gain some performance over the utilization of Rosetta to run Elements for PPC on our Intel Macs.

That was then and today is a different story, last week Adobe released Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac with some new features, new look and is a universal application that will work right whether you have a PPC or Intel Mac. I haven’t upgraded yet, my next purchase is Office 2008, but looking at the information found over Adobe’s site, I’m not too excited about it.

The first thing I do not like is the price, $89.99 USD for the full version and $69.99 USD for the upgrade seems a lot to me. While you can preorder now, there is no word on the download version, which was the way I bought version 4. To top this small details, whether you get into Adobe Elements site via PC or Mac the first thing you see is the PC version, shouldn’t they look out for this, you have to scroll down and select the “looking for Macintosh version?” link.

Adobe is smart about taking you straight to the new features to see if you can forget they change the user interface (UI) to what I call the kindergarten edition of Photoshop Elements. I know that if I want professional looks I should get a version of Photoshop CS but its ridiculous, it has more colors that a set of crayons. The dark gray environment reminds me of Adobe Lightroom, is not that bad but I hope there is an option to change that to a lighter tone.

Back to the UI for a second, the videos Adobe posted to show off the new Elements have the screen minimize, maximize, and close buttons that looks like the Windows one. This makes me think that this is no even the final version. The menus are in inside the screen as opposed to the regular Mac interface, what is Adobe up to, why would they show off screen shots of Windows software and advertise it for Mac.

About the new features, well they are all welcome, I’m impressed the group shot feature. Having the option to select multiple photos on a group and pick the best looking to build a perfect image is a killer feature. All the other features and just enhancements, you could do them with Elements 4, they just come to be easier for the novice user.

I think Adobe took too long to release this update, in the Apple campus Adobe now has more competition than ever. Programs like Pixelmator and Gimp, might get you to think twice before getting Elements 6 for Mac. Personally, I will wait to have more information to make my purchase decision. Share this post with your friends, subscribe to my feed if you haven’t yet, and thanks for reading.

A week before Macworld, Apple released hardware updates for their Mac Pro and Xserve products, while I wont be covering the Xserve updates I have to say that they look strong. In the other hand the Mac Pro is the best machine I’ve ever seen and the fastest Mac ever -Apple said.

I’m very impressed with the technology behind this machine and definitely understand why Apple went with Intel for processing power. Not even AMD is getting close to the specs these new Intel Xeon chips have, up to 3.2 GHz Quad Core processors capable of managing 32GB of Memory, these specs are hard to match.

After reading the specs in detail and reading what the industry and bloggers are saying around the web, it looks like the Mac Pro still lacks some features people were expecting to see. The first one, a Blu-ray player option, Apple is a supporter of the Blu-ray format yet no one has seen anything Apple related with support for any HD format.

Apple 23 inch and 30 inch displays are advertise as HD capable and that’s it, no word on whether drives will be an addition on future dates and this drives people crazy (me on the one hand.) I personally think that they are long due to these offering and I can’t simply understand what the delay is.

Did anyone notice that Bluetooth is not an option anymore? WiFi is! This is very weird, the previous model had an optional WiFi-Bluetooth ad on for $99 USD, the new models have integrated Bluetooth and an optional WiFi Extreme card for $49 USD.

One thing I don’t understand, if you can stick up to 4TB why would anyone need a raid card that cost $800 USD to manage a raid on your Mac Pro. Is this true for all flavors of raid (0, 1, 5, and 10) I guess I’m missing something here, my experience with raid arrays is not enough to understand this.

With this new release, Apple included Memory running at 800MHz, which is nice to know that Apple is finally implementing this speed on their memory line. Almost all current processors have a system bus of 800MHz, maybe by Macworld 2008 we have iMacs, MacBook and MacBook Pro running same type of memory.

The addition of the NVIDIA 8800 GT makes this Mac the best choice for many people, let’s not forget that there is another optional graphics card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory, which is killer. If you are thinking on gaming, me too.

Finally, reading Apple’s website I notice something interesting, Apple advertise the Mac Pro as a 1600MHz dual independent frontside bus couple with the 64bit architecture capable of a processing power bandwidth of 25.6GB a second. At this rate, you can manage lots of application and files at the same time on one of these systems, making you the most productive guy/gal on earth.

More than often applications track their own updates, this is part of job of a developer when building good and secure applications. If you are unsure, check any of your applications and either in the Help menu on Windows or Application menu or Help menu on a Mac you will find an option line for checking for updates.

The other option is to have an application version tracker on your computer, this little application can help you track the version of your software to keep you up to date and secure. I don’t have much experience on this kind of applications for Windows, but there is a Version Tracker Pro, which is not free ($29.95 USD) and some people seem not to like according to Download.com.

For Macintosh there is the same Version Tracker Pro but it cost $49.95 USD, other options like AppFresh (Free) is another applications that despite a couple minor bugs it works great. I use AppFresh and the couple of issues I have are because of identifying versions that do not exist on some applications, after tracking the behavior I can see that is not really a problem with the software but because we are still transitioning from PPC to Intel.

Let me talk to you about a third method of tracking updates for the applications that you like the most, this is really the tip I want to give you. If there are application that you can’t live without, find out who the developer is and try to subscribe to his/her blog or newsletter. This often lets you know in advance, about when updates will become available, also you will learn about what other applications they are working on to get more great application.

Let me give you an example, the one application that I use the most that is not Apple brand is Firefox, this people have a blog, which you can find at blog.mozilla.com. At their blog you can find updates notifications, beta software notifications, warnings and security issues, and information about other projects they handle other than Firefox.

It is a great idea to subscribe with all the developers that work on your favorite applications, especially if your income depends on that particular application. Give it a try, get all of them and unsubscribe if you think is not worth it, but I guarantee that you will find most of them a useful tool to have around. Tell your friends about this article if you like it, stay subscribed and thanks for reading.

Symantec has released their 11th edition of Norton AntiVirus (NAV) for Mac, this version comes updated for Leopard among other small enhancements. They are also including a new widget with the application and the promise that this version of NAV has very low impact on you Mac performance.

I own NAV for Mac version 10.0, and for the most part I haven’t use it for over a year. Not entirely true, I did reinstall it when I upgraded to Leopard, but I haven’t even run it once. The reason I bought NAV back in 2005 was because I felt that I needed to protect those who I share files with in the Windows world.

When I first installed it I ran most of its services and guess what, it consumed all my resources to the point that was very annoying. I had to quit most of its services like auto-scan, scan on mount, etc. to regain some system performance to the point where I wasn’t running it at all. After two years, I found no reason to own the software and today I’m in no hurry to get their new version.

Is this the right thing for me to do? The truth is that as a Mac user I have a scary sense of security, this behavior can lead me to leave my doors open to a malicious attack. Especially now that Apple is gaining more momentum with the Macintosh and more hackers are noticing the increase in market share that we have.

I don’t think I’ll be upgrading to NAV 11.0 but I have picked up a couple of articles of others that are giving their first impressions. MacNN has an article that was picked up by various Mac centric blogs that talk about their first impressions and the new features. Follow this link to read it, but what I’m really looking forward to read in the next couple of days is a hands-on review about the software and its impact on performance.

Do you think you need NAV? Do you own any type of Antivirus for your Mac? I think this is a waste of money, I won’t be buying it for now and until I see that there’s any real threat I won’t be recommending it.

I finally got to play with Miro, I don’t even remember where I first heard of it but it was a good experience overall. The concept behind Miro is like an aggregator that helps you manage your favorites shows and videos from around the Internet into one place for your enjoyment. The interface is very clean and easy to navigate, and with the download includes a small tutorial that lets know how to use the software.

Miro integrates very well with Mac OS X and display notifications of your downloaded file on Growl. You have the ability of creating your own channels on your software or you can add one of the preset channels. There’s more, you can search for items on the web, like on YouTube, and have those moved to your Miro software for your enjoyment.

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