Lion's Mail: How to Fix the Toolbar

Ah, Lion. It's almost as if someone is trying to make our Macs harder to use. Here's one example: the default setting for Lion's Mail app has the toolbar displaying icons only. Problem is, some of the icons are new, and we don't know what they do. Solution: set the toolbar to show the icons and their labels. So much better, and so easy to do.

Here's what the toolbar looks like in Lion's Mail, by default:

Yeah, I know you can figure out most of these, but it's not supposed to be a puzzle.

It would be better if the toolbar looked more like this:

So let's do it.

1. Select "Customize Toolbar..." from the View menu.
2. At bottom left corner, change "Show Icon Only" to "Show Icon and Text."
3. Click "Done" (bottom right).

That's it! So much better. And so easy to do.

You can always go back to Customize Toolbar... and make other changes, including adding and deleting buttons such as "Add To Address Book" and "Smaller Bigger." And, if you get really good at things and you want that quarter-inch of vertical screen space back, you can change back to "icon only" or even to "text only." Nice to know you have choices.

I love football, part 2

The football season is finally here! And with that comes the complex time-management task of watching all the important games with a limited number of TVs in the house. My method: keep tabs on the games via the internet, and if a game starts to look interesting, switch over to it on the TV. I use this page on ESPN’s website because it lets you see the scores of all the games, real-time.

I particular like the “GameCast” feature, which gives you a graphic of the field so you can see where the ball is, and a description of the last play. Here’s how it looks:


You can open up a couple of “GameCast” windows and keep an eye on all of them at once. If you have a TV in the same room as your Mac you’re all set-- put one game on the TV, and watch the rest on the internet. When GameCast shows you that someone’s about to score, or that the game’s almost over but still very close, you’ll know about it in time to switch the TV to that game. Sort of the poor man’s “picture in a picture.”

This works for the Pro’s too, of course.

Time Machine to the rescue

I mentioned in a previous post that installed 10.6 “Snow Leopard” on my MacBook, didn’t like it, and “rolled back” to 10.5.8. Rolling back meant using Time Machine, and I’m here to sing its praises and to talk you into using it.

What’s Time Machine?
Time Machine is backup software provided as part of Mac OS X 10.5 (and 10.6). It backs up EVERYTHING on your hard disk(s). All you need is a place to put it. Typically that’s an external hard drive, this one from Amazon. (This is a very nice drive: pre-formatted for the Mac, saving you the trouble of reformatting). All you do is connect the drive. The Mac will detect the drive, ask you if you want to use it for your Time Machine backup, and you say “yes.” That’s it.

You can read Apple’s official Time Machine write-up here.

How do I use it?
For backing up, you do nothing. Everything is automatic. Your entire hard drive will be backed up when you first connect the drive, and from then on Time Machine backs up everything that’s changed in the last hour. If it hasn’t changed, Time Machine doesn’t back it up. That saves space.

Obviously this can’t go on forever, because you’d run out of space on the backup drive. So, Apple stores 24 hourly backups, a month’s worth of daily backups, and weekly backups after that. When you are close to running out of space Time Machine lets you know.

How do I get stuff back?
So, now you want to retrieve an accidentally deleted file. Or your QuickBooks file’s gone bad and you know it worked yesterday, so you want to get that one back. All you do is start up the Time Machine application (in your Mac’s Applications folder), and from there get overwhelmed, and from there call me. I can show you how to get your files back from my command post at Boyce Labs. After you’ve done it once it’s a snap. Regardless of whether you need my help or not, be assured that your stuff is there, backed up.

How do I completely restore my Mac, such as going back to 10.5 after installing 10.6?
Excellent question. First, you start from a DVD such as the 10.6 installer. Then, you look for a menu titled “Utilities.” Then, you choose “Restore System from Backup.” After that, you choose your backup disk (that’s easy-- there is probably only one). You then get to choose which edition to back up from. All of your backups are listed, along with the dates and the operating system version. That makes it easy. In my case, I chose the latest 10.5.8 backup, and was off to the races. It was a slow race (3 hours plus) but in the end, I was back on 10.5.8.

Is that all there is to it?
Ah, no. Not quite. I noticed a few little odd things on my restored 10.5.8 machine. First, after restoring, Mail acted as if it was launching for the first time, doing the same import steps that it did when I went from 10.4 to 10.5. Second, my Address Book and iCal and Bookmark synching via Mobile Me needed to be reset. That wasn’t a big deal for me but might throw a beginner off.

The Stirring Conclusion
Get an external disk. Set up Time Machine. There’s no easier way to back up and when you need it, Time Machine will save the day.

Snow Leopard: I say "Wait."

Wish I could say “Go get it, install it, you’ll be very happy” but I can’t. I installed Snow Leopard on my MacBook yesterday, had a few problems, and went back to 10.5.8. My advice: wait until Apple has a 10.6.1 update before installing Snow Leopard. That’s what I’m going to do.

There are plenty of nice additions and refinements in Snow Leopard but it’s the things that didn’t work that wrecked the deal for me. Here’s what I found in an hour of having Snow Leopard installed:

• Printing was very, very slow.
• The machine ran very hot (no fun to work on a hot laptop).
• RapidWeaver (the program I use to make this website) wouldn’t run.
• 1Password wouldn’t work without a work-around that I didn’t want to do.

I don’t think that my experience is unique. Certainly my machine isn’t anything out of the ordinary, and I’m using mainstream software that lots of others use. So, I expect that Apple and the others will hear about these issues in some way or another, and when they do they’ll fix them.

Maybe we should get Steve Jobs to be a fan of Christian Boyce and Associates on Facebook. If you see him, mention it.

This, by the way, is the 100th post to the Boyce Blog.

Top Three iPhone and iPad Tips

Even beginners can do amazing things with iPhones and iPads. And, because it's so easy to do so much, a lot of people don't look for ways to make it even easier. I am here to tell you: there are ways. Here are my three favorite time-saving, effort-reducing, better-result-producing iPhone and iPad tips, things that you can learn in a jiffy and put to good use forever.

Listen to this blog post!

1. Text Expansion

You're familiar, of course, with the iOS auto-correction feature: you type something incorrectly and the iPhone or iPad fixes it on the fly. You can leverage auto-correction by defining your own "mistakes" that are in fact shortcuts, and "corrections" that are really expansions, saving yourself gobs of typing.

Here are some examples.

When I type "cbem" my iPhone "corrects" it into "macman@ioperating.com." ("cbem" is only four characters while my email address is 25-- what a savings.) I have another shortcut that expands "ty" into "Thank you." I have a third that changes "yw" into "You're welcome" (we are very polite over here but we don't like to type more than we have to). I have a shortcut to expand "cb" into "Christian Boyce", and another that changes "mbp" into "MacBook Pro."

Add it all up and you'll see that with those five expansions alone (and I have more) I'm getting 74 characters typed for 11 characters of actual typing. Actually, it's better than that, because these shortcuts take, at the most, four characters, and I can probably type four characters without an error; I probably cannot do 25 characters (my email address) without an error. Errors lead to more typing, and more chances to make mistakes.

These text expansions work in every app that accepts typing: emails, text messages, web pages, reminders-- all of them. These are system-wide things, not exclusive to a single app.

Set up your own text expansions by going to Settings / General / Keyboard / Shortcuts and tapping the + at top right. The phrase is what you want the shortcut to expand into. The shortcut is what you'll type-- the trigger.

Here's one that I just made:

I type "ml" and my iPhone expands it to "Join our mailing list and never miss a post!" Pretty handy. Especially if you want people to join your mailing list.

Set up one or two of these, use them a couple of times, and they'll soon be second nature-- and you'll soon be getting more typed in less time. Error-free, too.

Note: the easiest way to make this not work is to put the Shortcut in the Phrase box and the Phrase in the Shortcut box. The Shortcut goes on the bottom. I've done this before and not just at 5:04 AM.

Note #2: shortcuts trigger when you type them in isolation, not when they are part of a larger word. That keeps my shortcut "cb" from expanding into "Christian Boyce" at inappropriate times, such as when I'm typing "MacBook." So, technically, I have to type "cb" and then one more character to trigger the expansion. "One more character" could be a space, but it could also be punctuation (comma, period, exclamation point, question mark, etc)-- something to show the iPhone that the shortcut is not part of a larger word-- just as it is for all other iPhone auto-corrections. If you type a shortcut but it doesn't expand try tapping the spacebar afterwards. That'll trigger it.

Let me take a moment to test out that last shortcut we made: Join our mailing list and never miss a post! Hey, it worked.

2. One tap for .com/.net/.org etc.

As you've probably noticed, the iPhone and iPad display various keyboards at various times. When you're typing an email address, sometimes you're lucky enough to be using a keyboard designed for it (a big clue: it has an "@" on it). In those cases, when you get to the end of the email address-- the part where you type ".com" or ".net" or ".org" etc. tap and hold the period. That pops up something with all of the common suffixes, with ".com" pre-selected. You can tap, hold until the pop-up pops up, and either slide over to the desired suffix or, if you want ".com," you can simply tap, hold, wait for the pop-up, and let go.

This picture tells the story.

Short and sweet, and super handy. This nice little tap-saver brings a smile to my face every time. Too bad it only works with that one special keyboard (the one with the @).

3. Shake to Undo

Ever delete a Mail message, then wish you hadn't? Every delete a bunch of text, then change your mind? In either case, all you have to do is shake your iPhone and you'll get a little message, like this:

That pretty much sums it up-- do something, change your mind, and shake to undo. Try it sometime before you need it.

That's the end of our little blog post for today: my absolute favorite iPhone and iPad tips, cultivated after years of study. I hope you learned something new and interesting. If you did, please feel free to click one of the "sharing" buttons below and send this to a friend.

NFL Prime Time Calendar for 2011, in iCal Format

Here is an iCal calendar showing the times and teams for every prime-time NFL game for the 2011 season. The calendar is provided by Scott Crevier of South End Zone and if you're a football fan I strongly urge you to visit his site.

In years past, I've modified Scott's full NFL schedule using AppleScript, producing a calendar of just the prime-time games, but Scott agreed to build the prime-time calendar himself this year. Scott's calendar has the advantage of being kept up to date as the season moves along.

If you click the link here, iCal will launch and ask you whether you want to subscribe to the calendar.


The answer is "Yes" so click Subscribe (don't change the Calendar URL-- that has to stay as shown). In the next box, you may wish to rename the calendar, change its color, and turn off the Alerts and Attachments and Reminders. You may also want to change the update frequency to every day rather than every week. See below.


The NFL season is right around the corner. Subscribe to this calendar and you'll know who's playing on Monday Night Football (and Sunday Night Football, and Thursday Night Football), and when.

(Those who are interested can read how I created the prime-time calendar myself in years past, starting with South End Zone's full NFL schedule and using AppleScript to systematically remove every game that started before 4 PM Pacific time. Writing the AppleScript was a fun exercise but this year's calendar from South End Zone is better due to the updating.)

iPhone, uPhone, we all scream at our iPhones

Especially if we’ve installed the 2.0 software, which you can’t avoid if you bought a 3G iPhone. Basically, the software’s not ready, but we’re using it. And that leads to very bad behavior. I spent most of the weekend with my iPhone connected to my iMac, trying to get it iworking again. And still it’s not right. Let that be a lesson to you.

Meanwhile, I can’t wait for the new iPhone 2.1 software, which supposedly solves all kinds of problems. I’d be happy if it just solves one: the one where one program crashes and from that point forward, NONE of your apps work.

By the way, the backups that the iPhone does during synching aren’t very useful. Don’t think that they will save the day for you. Odds are that they are corrupt in some way. Mine were. So, when I wiped out my iPhone and “started over” I was putting bad stuff back onto the iPhone. Nice.

Drop in on an Apple Store at the end of the day when the Geniuses are tired of trying to solve iPhone problems and you may get one of them to tell you something like “look, it doesn’t work right, we know it, and we want to see the new 2.1 software more than you do.” That’s what they told me tonight. I believe them.

Command-D, your time-saving friend

I’ll bet you’ve seen a dialog box like this before:


Or maybe like this one:


Or this one:


You probably already know the keyboard shortcut that lets you click the Save button without using the mouse: you hit Enter, or Return. That’s great, when you want it. But what about the rest of the time? What about when you really don’t care about the document, and you DON’T want to save the changes? How can you click the Don’t Save button from the keyboard?


The answer, in almost every case, is Command-D. Memorize this one (D for Don’t is the way I remember it) and you’ll reach for the mouse a little less. That will save you a little bit of time over and over and over. Try it and see.

Snow Leopard Highlights

Based on Apple’s “Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements” page, we have some nice stuff to look forward to in Mac OS X 10.6. Here’s a quick list of what matters most to me.

1. Rewritten Finder. Finally, after all these years, Apple has rewritten the Finder, in Cocoa. They’ve been telling everyone else to use Cocoa for years and finally Apple’s doing it themselves. This will make the Finder faster. Yay.
2. Faster Time Machine backups. Faster is better. (If you are not using Time Machine, email me and let me talk you into it. Time Machine will save the day for you someday.)
3. More info in the Airport Menu. Now you can tell which signal is the strongest, so when you are “borrowing” internet from the neighbors you’ll know which neighbor to borrow from.
4. Automatic updating of printer drivers! Hallelujah. I really hope this works. I’ve seen enough of HP’s “Support & Drivers” page to last a lifetime.
5. Automatic text substitution. This is the thing that turns “teh” into “the” and “recieve” into “receive” in Microsoft Word, Entourage, etc. Now it will work in Mac programs such as Mail, iCal, and who knows where else. This will speed up your typing. Mine too.
6. Better iChat reliability and other iChat improvements. I love this one. We use iChat to provide screen-sharing remote support, and when it works, it’s great-- and now it’s going to work more often. Super.
7. Faster/better Mail program. It’s supposed to be faster at everything: faster to launch, faster to display the contents of a folder, faster to search, faster to move messages.
8. Microsoft Exchange compatibility. If your workplace has an Exchange server, this matters a lot to you. Otherwise, no. Basically it lets you use Mail, iCal, and Apple’s Address book on your Mac rather than Outlook on a PC. A much better solution than Entourage, by the way.
9. Faster in almost every way. That’s a good thing.
10. Date in the menu bar! I can’t believe it took this long.

This is my list in advance of actually having the software installed. Let’s see whether I come up with a different list once it’s installed.

Tip of the Day, August 25th 2008

Here’s one for all the Apple Mail users.

Ever send someone an email with an attachment? Of course you have. Most people write the message, then click the Attach button, then climb around in what some of you call “the dead-end box” (where you’re supposed to somehow track down the thing you want to attach).

Here are two methods that are a lot easier. You start in the Finder, not in Mail. In this example, I have a document I want to email, and I’ve clicked on it ONCE to select it. Here’s a picture, and you can see what I’ve selected.



Now we have two choices. One choice is to click and DRAG the document to the Mail icon in the Dock. When the Mail icon highlights, let go. Presto-- you’ll get a new document, with the attachment attached.

The other choice requires less dragging. Leave the soon-to-be attachment where it is (still highlighted) and go to the Finder menu (next to the Apple menu), slide down to “Services,” choose “Mail” and then “Send File.” It’s really just one move-- takes less effort for you to do it than for me to tell you how.

Believe it or not, I only “discovered” this second method TODAY. That Services menu has been around a few years, but it hasn’t been very useful... at least that’s what I thought. Now I think I am going to take a good look at Services and see whether I can “discover” something else cool.

The key to these methods is you start with the attachment, not with Mail. Try it once or twice and you’ll be a convert.

How to Send a Group Email from Your iPhone or iPad

(And a mini-introduction to Launch Center Pro, which is on sale for $2.99.)

Listen to this blog post!

Ever send a message to a group of people from your Mac? If you have, you know it's easy if you've created a "Group" in your Contacts app, and then addressed the email to the Group. (Even better: address the email to nobody, and put the Group's name in the BCC box so the email addresses aren't advertised to each recipient.) Having a Group set up in the Contacts app saves you the time it takes to add each person as an email recipient individually every time you want to send to the whole group. If you send mail to the same sets of people frequently the time savings can really add up.

Not sure about "Groups"? Need an example? Here's one: a group containing the members of your softball team. Here's another: your immediate family. One more: the members of a committee you're on. And one more after that: the members of the City Council. You have to send emails to the members of those groups all the time, and it's a pain to add each recipient every time. So, on your Mac, you go to Contacts and make a Group for the softball team, and another one for the family, and another one for the committee, and another one for the City Council, and when you want to send an email to the people in a Group you just address the email to the Group and everybody gets a copy. Easy. At least it's easy on the Mac.

Then you go to to your iPhone or iPad, and you try to do it there. Turns out it doesn't work, even though the Groups you made on the Mac transfer over to the iPhone and iPad. It's not because you're doing it wrong. Apple's Mail app on the iPhone and iPad is just not as good as Apple's Mail app on the Mac. Yes "someone should do something about this," but as of iOS 7 that's the way it is.

Now, if you search the internet for "how to send a group email from your iPhone or iPad" you will find some clever ways of doing it, most of them (like this one) based on stuffing all of the email addresses into a single card in the Contacts app. It works. And if all we wanted to do was send an email to multiple people without having to type their names over and over, and if I wasn't trying to teach you something new that will help you ten times over, I would advise you to do it that way.

But we have bigger goals.

How would you like to send an email to a group of people, have the subject already filled in, as well as a head start on the message itself, all in a couple of taps? Wouldn't that be awesome? Of course it would be.

And how would you like to do all of the above in a groovy iOS app, and know you had only begun to scratch that app's surface, giving you something new to play with as you wait for Apple's iOS 8? I think you'd like it very much. I know I do.

Without further ado, I give you Launch Center Pro.

Launch Center Pro is the best way to speed up and automate the things you do over and over on an iPhone or an iPad. It's extremely powerful, and extremely well done. I'll give you the mini-introduction by showing you how to do the Group Email thing. If you want to learn more I've put a list of websites and tutorials for further study at the bottom of this post.

Note: The regular price for Launch Center Pro is $4.99 and that's what I paid. This blog post took so long to write that the price changed before I was done!

(Note #2: I'm going to give screenshots from the iPhone version but the iPad app is similar. You can take what you learn in this blog post straight to the iPad without any trouble.)

Here's Launch Center Pro's main screen, the first time you start the app.

Sort of looks like the iPhone's Home screen.

I don't know who Jon and Anna are but we are going to replace them with our own stuff. Note the Settings button at top left, and the Edit button at top right. We're going to use the Edit button soon. But first, let's tap on that button at bottom right, the one that says "Email Anna." When you do that, you get an email, pre-addressed, pre-subjected, and pre-filled in. That's almost exactly what we are trying to do, except it's addressed to only one person.

One of the neat things about Launch Center Pro is that it doesn't replace the Mail app. Instead, it (somehow) controls the Mail app and tells it what to do: make an email addressed to Anna, with a particular subject and a particular message body. You can of course edit the message before sending it, and it will show up in your Mail app's Sent folder-- in fact, everything about this message is just like every other mail message, except that we used a shortcut to get this one started.

Very nice, but we want to make our own. Here's how we do it. Tap the Edit button at the top right. You'll see this:

Tap the X in the corner of the Email Anna icon and you'll see this:

You'll be asked whether you want to delete the "Action" and the answer is yes. So delete it.

Now we can tap the "+" where Email Anna used to be, and make our own shortcut, or "Action." You get a choice between making an Action or a Group-- we'll make an Action.

The first time I did this I thought "I'll bet this is going to be complicated." Wrong (again)! What could have been complicated is made easy-- all we do it make choices from a list, and bingo, our Action is built for us. Tap the "+" at the bottom right corner, where Email Anna used to be, and you'll see this screen:

(Lots to see here but remember, this is the mini-introduction to Launch Center Pro, not the full-on tutorial, so we are going to focus on the stuff we need for our Group Email project and leave the rest for you to explore.)

The Action Composer is where we build our Actions, and it's what makes Launch Center Pro usable by regular people as well as high-end users. We're going to start by tapping System Actions, which bring us to this screen:

It's a long list. Scroll down until you see Mail (not "In-App Email" in this case). When you tap Mail you get some more choices, and here they are:

We're going to choose Email with Body & Subject. Tap that and we get this:

Now this is easy. Let's fill in the blanks with something I use every day, in Real Life.

In Real Life, I make appointments to help people with their Macs, iPhones, and iPads. When I make those appointments it's imperative that I alert my Office Manager, Dee, so that she knows right away what I've done. Otherwise, she might schedule another appointment for the same time period, leading to a conflict.

Over the years we've developed a system where I send Dee an email with "Appointment Alert!" as the subject (so she can pick it out from the millions of other emails she gets) as soon as I make an appointment. I like to get a copy of the email too, for reference. Writing that email is not a giant task, but on an iPhone it's a little bit clumsy, and it's something I have to do all the time. When I realized I could create, title, and address those emails in two taps using Launch Center Pro I was sold.

Here's how the screen looked after I typed everything in-- for the last time! The "Name" field at the top is just for me to remember it by-- I could have called it "AA" or anything else.

Tapping Done at top right takes us back to this screen, and if you look at the URL you'll see why the Action Composer is such a cool thing. Yes, Launch Center Pro actually works via URLs, but no, you don't have to know anything about them. The Action Composer does it for you.

You can choose another icon if you'd like. You can use one of Launch Center Pro's, you can build your own, and you can choose a photo from your iPhone's photo library. Plenty of options there but I chose the regular Mail icon. Tap Done to show that you're done with the Action, and Done again to get out of Edit mode.

Here's how it looks over here.

From now on, if I want to send that email to Dee and to me, with the subject line already filled in (and possibly with some standard text in the body-- I should think about that), all I have to do is launch Launch Center Pro, and then tap the Appointment Alert! button. That's two taps, and zero typing. Pretty nice.

So... if you want to send a Group Email from your iPhone or iPad, get yourself a copy of Launch Center Pro. Make a new Action that makes a new Mail message with Body & Subject. Put in the desired recipients-- even make some of them CC or BCC-- and you are all set.

And if you think that's cool, remember: we are only scratching Launch Center Pro's surface.

For further study:

• Launch Center Pro web page
• Launch Center Pro introductory video
• A Comprehensive and Updated Guide to Launch Center Pro by Alex Guyot at MacStories

Tip of the Day, August 24th, 2008

Did You Know-- ?

The Preview program that comes with OS X 10.5 can do some pretty spiffy things. In fact, it can do some of the things Photoshop can do, and some of the stuff that Acrobat can do, and a whole bunch of stuff that neither can do. And it’s free.

In Part I of this tip (today’s blog entry) I’ll outline some of the really handy features built into Preview. Part II will explain how to use these features. Email me and tell me which features you want explained first-- this is your chance to influence the blog.
You can use Preview to...

1. combine two or more PDF documents.
2. delete one or morepages from a PDF document.
3. rotate one or all pages in a PDF document.
4. crop one or more pages in a PDF document.
5. mark up or otherwise highlight a PDF document.
6. adjust color/brightness/shadows/etc. in a JPG document.
7. adjust size and resolution in a JPG document.
8. save documents as PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF, PNG... and Photoshop format.

Pretty neat. Try some of these things on your own. If you can’t figure out how to make them work, do what researchers at the Christian Boyce Center for Advanced Macintosh Studies do-- namely, “guess.” In Preview, your guess is likely to be right.

That’s it for now. Vote for the features you want explained. We’ll follow up within a few days.

Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple: My Thoughts

This is Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone at MacWorld Expo in January 2007.


This is Steve Jobs introducing the iPad three years later.

I don't know of another big-time CEO who so obviously loves his products. Look at his face. He can hardly contain himself. I can't decide which picture I like more. So here they are, both of them.

***
As you surely know, Steve Jobs resigned his position as CEO of Apple today via this letter to the Apple Board of Directors "and the Apple Community" (which I thought a nice touch). I've received numerous comments via email, text, phone, and in person, all saying "It's a sad day." And I agree. But, as I've written before, it's hardly the end of Apple. It's also hardly the end of Steve Jobs' involvement at Apple-- he's still on the Board of Directors, and now he's Chairman of the Board, and he's still an Apple employee. Yes, it's a step back, but no, he's not leaving Apple. Not just yet.

(Apple's going to be fine. Tim Cook, whom Steve Jobs personally picked to be CEO, is going to take the job. Cook isn't Steve Jobs, but he's been Chief Operating Officer at Apple since 1998, and he wouldn't have lasted that long if he didn't understand what's important to the company and what makes Apple special. I've read that Apple has codified "the Apple way," going so far as to create a series of courses that formally explain and teach the company's core beliefs. Those beliefs may have started in Steve Jobs' mind, but they aren't going to end there. Obviously, Steve Jobs is not replaceable in the sense that we're all different, and Jobs is more different than most. But the company is in good hands with Tim Cook.)

So what's so sad about today's news? Plenty: An unmatched leader is unable to continue doing the work he loves. That's sad. The public has probably seen its last Steve Jobs keynote speech/product introduction. That's sad too. Reading between the lines it's easy to assume that Jobs' health is deteriorating, and of course on a human level that's even sadder still.

Steve Jobs tried to change the world-- and he did it. He had a vision of how ordinary people could use computers and technology to make their lives better, and now, after all these years, the world understand what Jobs meant. The Mac, the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, the iPhone, the iPad-- all game-changers, instantly copied, with the ideas being so good that even the copies were better than what was there before.

Steve Jobs changed computers, music, phones, and with the iPad, "everything." He changed the world, and now it appears he might not be around to enjoy it very long. That, to me, is saddest of all.

UPDATE: According to Ars Technica, Tim Cook sent a letter this morning to all Apple employees, saying "I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change." Read the full text of Tim Cook's letter at Ars Technica.

Snow Leopard, available August 28th

Looky here-- Apple finished Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) early! The software, which costs $29 for Macs with 10.5 already installed, will be available this Friday.

If you want to know more about Snow Leopard, scroll down (or click here).

If you want to buy a copy of Snow Leopard, scroll down a little more (or click here).

I will install Snow Leopard as soon as possible and report my findings, good and bad. Stay tuned.

iPhone 5 Battery Replacement Program

Listen to this blog post!

Maybe there's something wrong with your iPhone 5's battery after all. Apple has found that a "very small percentage" of iPhone 5 units (the 5, not the 5s, and not the 5c) "may suddenly experience shorter battery life or need to be charged more frequently." If that sounds like your iPhone, check out Apple's serial number checker on their iPhone 5 Battery Replacement Program page and see if your phone qualifies. Apple will replace the battery at no charge.

Note: this program went into effect on August 22nd, 2014 in the United States and China. It will be active worldwide starting August 29th, 2014.

If your iPhone doesn't qualify for the battery replacement program, and even if it does, check out my post on stretching your iPhone's battery life for some tips.

How to be a Faster Mac User, Part 1

Want to be a faster Mac user? Watch this video and see how it's done. Click the picture to start the movie.

Dave F. wins the coffee cup because I saw him click the little tiny up/down triangles in a dialog box and that inspired me to write this blog post. You can get a cup too– just send me an email with a question worth blogging about and if I answer it on the blog you will get a cup.

How to Print Faster, and Save Ink

Inkjet printers, as a group, have a couple of features in common:
1. Replacing the ink costs more than the printer did, and
2. Printing takes a long, looooong time.

I can't make the cost of ink go down but I can show you how to make your inkjet use less ink, and print faster (a LOT faster-- in my tests, doing it "my way" cut printing time by a factor of SIX!). The trade-off is print quality, but there are plenty of times when all you want to do is print out an email, or someone's address card, or a recipe for barbequed turkey, and quality is not an issue. There's a time and a place for everything. Anyhow, here's how you do it.

By the way, this will work with Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7.

First, find something to print and bring up the Print... dialog box. If it looks like this, click the triangle in the blue box (circled here) and expand the box.


If you're using Lion, it's a little different. In Lion, you "Show Details."


Either way, you end up with a bigger Print box. Now look for a pop-up menu in the Print box. I've circled one here, but programs can modify the Print box in various ways so your Print box pop-up menu may look different. However, the choices will be similar.

Click that menu and you'll see something like this. Choose "Paper Type/Quality" or whatever you can find that looks the most like that.

In the box that appears next, click on the Quality pop-up (shown below) and choose the fastest, least-ink-using choice as shown here.



If you hover over the various options here you'll see a yellow flag telling you what you should expect. Here's what you get when you choose "Fast draft" on an HP printer:

Sounds good to me. Now print!

In my testing, by using the "Fast draft" option I was able to print an entire six-page document in 55 seconds. Using the typical settings (that is, if I just went to Print but didn't change anything) it took 63 seconds for the first page alone! I stopped the test at that point because I didn't want to waste the ink.

If it sounds like a lot of work... well, it's not. It's a medium amount of work. But, if you do it once, and you like the results, and you don't want to do it again, you can save the settings as a so-called "Preset." What you do is make all of your choices, then click the Presets menu as shown below.

Slide down to "Save As..." and name your "Fast draft" settings something like... oh, I don't know, maybe something like "Fast Draft." This saves all of the choices that you made by hand, so next time you want to print something, you either print it "Standard" (which is to say, the usual way), or you choose "Fast Draft" from the Presets menu. You can make and save as many Presets as you like-- in this picture, you can see I have a few already.

To the best of my knowledge, only one person in the entire world has ever saved a Preset in the Print dialog box, so how about you try it and we'll be up to two. It really is a very cool feature, whether your goal is to go cheap and fast, or to go high-quality on glossy photo paper. It's a real time-saver to be able to set a whole bunch of options by simply choosing your custom preset and it costs nothing to try.

Note: the Fast Draft setting is going to get your page out lickety-split but it's not the right choice for photos or a college term paper (Spencer) or anything else where looks matter. Still, when speed is what you want, and you don't want to use up all your ink, the Fast Draft setting is exactly what you need.

One More Thing: Laser printers probably won't have a "Fast Draft" setting but they sometimes have a "fast" or "light" option, so look around in the Print box and see what your options are. You won't find the same settings I've shown here but you'll still be able to print quickly and with less toner than you would normally.

The money you'll save on ink and toner can go toward properly celebrating National Sponge Cake Day. Hurry up, it's upon us.

More About the Dock (part 2)

Every Mac has a Dock, and every Dock has things in it, and just about everyone clicks on things in the Dock to launch various programs. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all... but you can do more with the Dock than just click on things. For example:

Let’s say you have something on your desktop (or in a folder) and you want to send that thing as an email attachment. The typical routine is something like this (and let’s keep track of the clicks):

1. Launch your email program (Apple Mail or Entourage, probably) or switch to it. That’s one click.
2. Make a new email message. That could be one click, or a trip to the menu bar.
3. Click the Attachment button. We’re up to three clicks.
4. Hunt around in the box that comes up and try to find the thing you want to attach. This could take a lot of clicks.
5. Optional step 5: fail to find the thing you want to attach and give up.

Even if you do find your item and attach it there’s a lot of work involved. At least four clicks, and no guarantee of success. Better to do it in ONE STEP. Check it out:

Here’s a nice picture of a duck. I want to send it as an attachment.



All I have to do is drag it to the Mail icon. Mail will create a new email message with the duck as an attachment. One step, simple as that.

Here’s the result.

One step, and I’m ready to address and send my email-with-an-attachment. Easy as pie. Try it!

That there’s a one-step drag-and-drop method should not be a complete surprise to you. The Macintosh is full of nice touches and there is almost always an easier and faster way to do things. Dragging and dropping will come into play over and over as you use your Mac, and since dragging and dropping is a one-click effort, it will always be the easiest way to do things (measuring by number of clicks).