The Newsletter for Sonoma County’s Mac and Windows Users

Oct. 2009 Vol.1 No 10

COMBINED MEETING AT 10:00 a.m. FREE OFFICE SUITE SEE YOU Oct. 10th Invite a friend. Date: Saturday, 10/10/2009 Time: 10:00a.m.

Place: Sonoma Public Library 755 West Napa Street, Sonoma, CA

Table of Contents User Group Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 October Meeting Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Start iTunes 9 in Safe Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Kill the iPhoto AutoLaunch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 President’s Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Apple Quits Chamber of Commerce . . . . . . . . . 6 Presentation Zen Book Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Find Your Lost iPhone/iTouch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Snow Leopard Compatibility List . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Social Brands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Burning Audio Files to D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Create Smart Burn Folders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

5 Reasons to Watch Google Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Running Disc Utility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 How I Use Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 New Book Releases and Tips ‘n Tricks . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Detecting Photoshopped Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 iPod Touch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 5 Unexpected Uses for the Spacebar . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 5 Unexpected Uses for the Option Key . . . . . . . . . . . .22 OS X Browser Speed Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 6 Reasons Desktop E-Mail Still Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Potential Security Vulnerability in Flash . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Creating Burst Effects in iPhoto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

SVCG

OFFICERS FOR 2009

President

Beth Pickering [email protected] Secretary Kathy Aanestad [email protected] Treasurer Joan Fabian [email protected] Newsletter Kathy Aanestad [email protected] Members-at-Large Chip Allen [email protected] Elizabeth Palmer [email protected] Dave Bixler [email protected] Jeanette Barekman [email protected] Dennis Astrubel SVCG Evangelist Veda Lewis [email protected] Webmaster Kathy Aanestad [email protected] Board Meetings Open to all members. General Meetings S.V.C.G. meets second Saturday of each month at Sonoma Public Library, 755 West Napa Street; HOURS: Mac: 9AM-10:30AM, Windows: 10:30AM-noon unless otherwise notified. Guests Welcome. No Charge.

Donating Used Computer Equipment The URL listed is for the Computer Recycling Center. All of the info needed (and then some) is listed on the site. http://www.crc.org/

SVCG User Group Benefits & Discounts O’REILLY Members receive a 20% discount on O'Reilly books and conferences. Contact Kathy for the code. New Riders Books http://www.newriders.com BECOME A NEW RIDERS CLUB MEMBER. You can save up to 20% on all books every day at newriders.com simply by becoming a New Riders Club Member. Membership is free and easy. All you have to do is answer a few, short questions in our ongoing, online survey, which you can access on any book page. Don't worry. All of your information stays with us--we won't sell it or give it away to anyone. After you've filled out the profile, you'll save 20% automatically whenever you log on to http://www.newriders.com as a member. It's that easy! Note that you may use your User Group Coupon Code ON TOP of your Club Member savings. Just remember to log in first when making a purchase and then enter the code at checkout as well! Contact Kathy for code.

PEACHPIT

About this publication Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter is published monthly by Sonoma Valley Computer Group. Desktop publishing services donated by: Kathy Aanestad. Call: (707) 935-6690, email aanestad@ vom.com. © 2009, SVCG. All rights reserved. Sponsored by our local ISP, DataProfessionals, on 19480-8th St. East.

Mailing Address: Sonoma Valley Computer Group PO Box 649 El Verano, CA 95433

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JOIN THE PEACHPIT CLUB You can save 30% on all books every day at peachpit.com simply by becoming a Peachpit Club Member. Membership is free and easy. All you have to do is answer a few, short questions in our ongoing, online survey, which you can access on any book page. Don't worry, all of your information is confidential and stays with us--we won't sell it or give it away to anyone. After you've filled out the survey, you'll save 30% automatically whenever you log on to http://www.peachpit.com as a member. It's that easy! USER GROUP COUPON CODE User group members should note that once you've become a Peachpit Club member, you may use your user group coupon code ON TOP of the permanent savings you earn as a member of the club. Just make sure you've logged onto the site before you make a purchase to ensure this permanent discount will be in effect, then enter coupon code (case-sensitive) at checkout! This coupon code is an exclusive offer that may not be used in conjunction with any other coupon codes. Contact Kathy for code information.

OCTOBER MEETING SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 MEETING STARTS AT 10:00 AM Beth Pickering will demonstrate OpenOffice.org (OO.o or OOo), a FREE office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office ‘97-2003 formats - among many others. OpenOffice.org is based on StarOffice, an office suite developed by StarDivision acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free, open and high-quality alternative to users. OpenOffice.org is a free software, available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). OpenOffice.org is a collection of applications that closely work together to provide the features expected from a modern office suite. Many of the components are designed to mirror those available in Microsoft Office. The components available include: a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation and a database, a vector graphics editor, and a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulas, similar to Microsoft Equation Editor. Platforms for which OO.o is available include Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX.[10] The current primary development platforms are Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris. A port for Mac OS X exists for OS X machines which have the X Window System component installed. A port to OS X’s native Aqua user interface is in progress and is scheduled for completion for the 3.0 milestone.[11] NeoOffice is an independent offshoot of OpenOffice that is specially adapted for Mac OS X.

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SVCG Plugged into Technology

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Start iTunes 9 in Safe Mode

Kill the iPhoto Auto-Launch?

I stumbled upon a feature that some may find helpful in troubleshooting iTunes 9. If you hold down Command and Option when launching iTunes, it will start up in Safe Mode (after you confirm via a dialog that appears).

Every time I plug my iPhone into my Mac to synchronize or recharge the battery, iPhoto launches. How do I stop this from happening? Whenever you shoot photos or videos on your iPhone, your new media shows up in the Camera Roll album of your iPhone’s Photos app. And once there’s media sitting in that Camera Roll, your Mac will think that you’ve connected a digital camera whenever you plug in your iPhone to sync with iTunes.

Safe Mode prevents third party visualizers and device plug-ins from loading. I don’t know if this was present in earlier versions of iTunes, but couldn’t find any reference to this feature when searching here.

Since iPhoto, by default, automatically launches whenever you connect a digital camera, iPhoto will open up in anticipation that you’re going to import the photos from your digital camera (that is, your iPhone). You can turn off this behavior by going into iPhoto’s preferences, clicking on the General tab, and then choosing No Application in the dropdown labeled Connecting Camera Opens.

YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE Sonoma Valley Computer Group Membership Application/Renewal Form New Applicant ___

Renewal ___

Name:_______________________________ Address:_ ____________________________ ____________________________________ Home Phone:__________________________ Work Phone:__________________________ E-mail Address:________________________ Send __ $20 (individual) __ $30 (family) check to: Sonoma Valley Computer Group POB 649 El Verano, CA 95433

Platform: __Mac __PC __WinXP __Win98 __WinVIsta __OS Leopard __OS Tiger __OS X __Linux Computer Make/Model:____________________ How did you hear about SVCG? __class ___club member ___newspaper ____newsletter User Level:

__ Novice __ Advanced

__ Intermediate __ Expert

___ I give permission to use this info in the club roster which is for members only

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PRESIDENT’s MESSAGE Greetings all--

FEES - To FEE or NOT TO FEE ... Since our expenses are minimal (we no longer pay for printing/mailing our newsletter and do not have meeting room fees), and our treasury is in really good shape, the Board has decided to change the dues structure for 2010. Active members - those who volunteer to work on the board or projects such as our library service - will owe no dues. Non-active members - those who attend meetings and/or receive our newsletters - will pay $10 for dues. There will be calendars at the meetings to sign up to help people on the computers at the library on Fridays from 11 to noon. That’s one hour a month, or every other month depending upon how many people sign up. So please do your part to help the club.

HOLIDAY PARTY Our holiday party will be Dec. 12th. Since it is a joint meeting at 10 am. The club will buy the food. We will also share favorite websites or anything else computer-related.

NOVEMBER COMMUNITY EVENT ONLINE JOB SEARCHES AND WRITING RESUMES Since most of the questions our library volunteers are being asked involve online job searches and writing resumes, the Board decided these subjects would benefit our community the most. Our event will take place on our Nov meeting date (Nov 14th) from 10 am to noon. Our speakers are already lined up, but if you can help with the publicity (distributing flyers, library posters, etc.), putting a display in the library’s lobby, and handouts, the Board could really use your help. Contact any of Board members if you would like to participate. Thank you --Beth

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Apple Quits Chamber of Commerce Over Climate Spat

Eye-Fi Geo

By WSJ Staff

SD MEMORY CARD WIRELESSLY TRANSFERS PICS FROM YOUR CAMERA TO YOUR IPHOTO LIBRARY

From Environmental Capital’s Keith Johnson:

by Derrick Story, Macworld.com

And then there were five — defections from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its climate-change policy, that is.

Once again, it pays to have a Mac. The new 2GB Eye-Fi Geo memory card for digital cameras is designed with Mac users in mind, allowing for wireless transfers of your pictures from the camera to a Mac. It also provides unlimited geotagging of those images. And it’s only available at the Apple Store for $60.

Apple today resigned its membership in the Chamber “effective immediately.” That’s a harsher tone than the other departures — three utilities said they’d let their membership lapse at the end of the year, and Nike simply quit the Chamber’s board of directors.

The workflow is simple. Once you set-up the card using the included USB reader and EyeFi Manager software, you put the card in your camera, fire off a few frames, leave the camera on, and if you’re on the same local area network as your Mac, you can watch as the images are sent wirelessly to your Mac for display and storage. You can have the images organized in folders, but I recommend that you enable the iPhoto option in the Eye-Fi Manager that allows the pictures to be sent directly to Apple’s consumer photo management application and categorized by Event. The ability to upload to iPhoto isn’t unique to the Eye-Fi Geo since other Eye-Fi cards also have this feature, but the Eye-Fi Geo is one of the most affordable options for geotagging and uploading directly to iPhoto.

At issue, again, is the Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to the Obama administration’s climate policy, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. Apple has recently been on a green crusade to catch up to tech rivals Dell and Hewlett-Packard which have shinier environmental reputations. And of course, Al Gore is on the Apple board. From Apple government-affairs vice-president Catherine Novelli’s letter to Chamber of Commerce boss Tom Donohue: We strongly object to the Chamber’s recent comments opposing the EPA’s effort to limit greenhouse gases…Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the Chamber at odds with us in this effort. We would prefer the Chamber take a more progressive stance on this critical issue and play a constructive role in addressing the climate crisis. However, because the Chamber’s position differs so sharply with Apple’s, we have decided to resign our membership effective immediately

If you’re a Places fan, then make sure that the geotagging option is enabled in the EyeFi Manager. When you capture the images, the Eye-Fi Geo will be on the lookout for any Wi-Fi network within range, will note its location, then add that information to your images when you upload them via the Eye-Fi Manager. iPhoto will follow suit by automatically adding the Places data to each shot. Like magic, you’ll know where your pictures were recorded. The only time this didn’t work for me was when the Eye-Fi card couldn’t identify

The Chamber of Commerce says that it is not opposed to action on climate change, just the actions that have actually been proposed in Congress, or floated by the EPA. Still, Apple’s departure is just the latest sign of how quickly the U.S. business community is fracturing over the climate issue.

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a Wi-Fi network during the picture taking process. The EyeFi Geo’s geotagging works only if you transfer the images wirelessly. If you place the card in a reader and transfer the files, you won’t get the geotags.

But in the future, whenever you connect any digital camera (including your iPhone) to your Mac, you will have to manually launch iPhoto if you want to import photos.

Since you’re shooting JPEGs only (you’d have to purchase the more expensive Eye-Fi Pro to wirelessly upload Raw files), the transfer rate is relatively fast. I shot 40 high resolution Jpegs with my Canon T1i (approximately 6MBs each), then watched as they were uploaded to my Mac in 13 minutes. iPhoto grabbed the pictures as they came in, so I was viewing them at full resolution within 15 minutes of turning on my camera. And it’s so easy, that you literally walk away during the process and be greeted by an iPhoto Event full of images upon your return. It’s much faster to transfer images via USB using a card reader, but as I mentioned before, the photos won’t be geotagged.

http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/kill_iphoto_ autolaunch?EMC-ZR6187445606

Tip of the Week: Advanced Spotlight Features By Matt Klein, Smalldog.com When Spotlight debuted with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), I came to the realization that it’s not really necessary to keep your files organized in a neat hierarchy of folders and files. While I’m sure plenty of you disagree with that, and in fact feel Spotlight a resource-hungry non-necessity, you’re crazy. Ok, not crazy. To each his or her own.

The Eye-Fi Geo is compatible with Snow Leopard, Leopard, and Tiger Macs. The card doesn’t provide uploading to online services, such as Flickr and MobileMe out of the box, but you can purchase the WebShare service for $10 a year and add it to the card. Macworld’s buying advice

My desktop contains one folder most of the time. I call it Miscellany. It just sits there, all the time, getting bigger and bigger. Occasionally I clean it out, but for the most part it just sits there like a pet rock. I use Spotlight to find everything, and would be lost without it at this point.

If you shoot photos using JPEG and you also use iPhoto (and especially if you like iPhoto’s Places feature), then the easy-to-use Eye-Fi Geo card packs a lot of power into a small package. [Senior Contributor and professional photographer Derrick Story teaches iPhoto on Lynda.com and runs a virtual camera club at The Digital Story.]

If I want to find an email sent sometime this month from Rebecca mentioning Toby, I’d ask Spotlight for Toby kind:mail from:rebecca date:this month and I’d get a list of emails from Rebecca mentioning Toby. Or, an iChat from Jon in which he professes his love to Red Delicious apples, I’d ask Spotlight for delicious kind:chat from:jon and it’d pop right up. There’s so much more to Spotlight than most people use it for. Spotlight even powers the help system built into Mac OS X. If you click the Help menu and type Spotlight, you’ll come up with an article called “Searching for specific types of items” that’ll explain it all in depth.

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Presentaton Zen by Garr Reynolds

Book Review- by Veda Lewis This book was a lifesaver! I’ve known about Garr Reynolds for years, visit his blog Presentation Zen, from time to time but had not read his book. Last week at the office, I was presented with the ideal time to read the book. I came across a PowerPoint presentation on our company intranet prepared by a colleague in another unit. The show had a granite background, lots of text centered on the slide (basically, their speaker’s notes) and canned clip art graphics. Rather than send in a critique, I seized the moment and pulled out the lifesaver, Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds.

ordinator. I attended his presentation on branding your group. I was amazed at the clean, focused delivery. His visual aids were actually visual aids, not speaker’s notes. The graphics were bold, simple, and consistent, focused and left me wanting more. As Garr states in his book, you want to leave your audience hungry for just bit more. After attending his talk, I decided to accept a pending job offer and make a career shift from a technical area to training development and delivery. My goal was then and is still to help make presentations more effective and more fun. I thanked him then and I thank him now for such a great gift.

I did a quick storyboard, created speaker’s notes, and gave the design freshness and simplicity. With Reynold’s book as a backdrop, this task took me only about three hours. The presentation is about 27slides. I created a document, not a “slideument”, to quote from the book. Bravely, I submitted the revision to the presenter and his boss. More on that later. You may think that you don’t do enough presentations to invest in this book. Think again. The less frequently you present, the more important it is to let a professional help you. The frequent presenter may learn some basics if his audience is willing to step over that line and tell him/her how they could improve. In the end, the professional should not schedule their next presentation without reading this book. A presentation is a terrible thing to waste. Garr’s book walks the talk and shows you great design throughout the layout of the book. This book is not just about slides. It’s about connecting with your audience, not taking yourself too seriously, and telling your story. What happen with the revision I created? Well, the presenter ran with some of my ideas, but the whole package was too much for him/her to swallow. However, their boss saw the difference and has invited me to assist with their presentation efforts. This is a great result for me. So, for the second time in my career Garr Reynolds has come to my rescue. When was the first time? In early 2001, Garr was working for Apple Computer as a user group coSonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

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Find Your Lost iPhone or iPod touch with iPhone OS 3.0 You enable Find My iPhone via the Settings application on the iPhone or iPod touch. It’s hidden in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars section under your MobileMe account. You don’t have to sync calendars and contacts if you don’t want to, as those options can be turned off. The Find My iPhone/iPod touch item is at the bottom; merely slide the switch to On.

by Glenn Fleishman  article link: Darn it - where’s my iPhone? My iPod touch? My keys? Okay, my keys are in my hand, but I have no idea where the other two are. Ow! Now I remember where I left the barbells. I’d better find my Mac - I know where that is, at least - and fire up MobileMe.  Let’s see, go to me.com, enter username and password, click the Account icon at the top, re-enter my password (for what reason is beyond me), and then click Find My iPhone. Ah ha! It’s in my house according to the map. I’ll click Display a Message, and have a sound play, too.

 After enabling the option, use a browser to log into MobileMe, as I describe in my bumbling steps at the start of this article. The Account tab in MobileMe has added ever more options since launch, with Find My iPhone being the latest. (Apple inconsistently calls this Find My iPhone for both the iPhone and the iPod touch in some places, and in others uses the specific device type.)

 Under the couch cushions. How typical. **Pairing Location with MobileMe** -- Find My iPhone, which works with both the iPhone and the iPod touch, is a nifty feature that Apple added to iPhone OS 3.0. It requires a MobileMe account to work (accounts start at $99 per year), but has no other cost attached. The service is intended to help with both misplaced and stolen phones; it lets you trigger a message on the device or erase all the data on it.

 The Find My iPhone page shows one entry for each device. I have both an iPhone and an iPod touch, both of which are set to be found, and I can scroll to see both. When the page first comes up, the last known position is shown, along with the date and time the device last checked in. MobileMe then - I presume - sends a push message to the phone to update that data. An Update Location button appears after MobileMe is satisfied that it has the best location.

 With location services built into the iPhone, it’s trivial for an iPhone to send its current coordinates at any given time. The original iPhone uses a combination of Wi-Fi and cell tower locations; the iPhone 3G and 3GS add GPS to the mix (see “iPhone and iPod touch Become Self-Aware,” 2008-01-15). The iPod touch must connect to a Wi-Fi network to both find and update its location. An iPhone needs a connection to either a Wi-Fi network or a cell data network to send the small amount of data necessary.

 As long as the device is online - indicated by a green dot and the text “Online” - you have the option to send a message, a beeping alert, or both to the device. Any message you send to the device is also sent to you via your MobileMe mail account.



 If you use the Display a Message dialog’s Play a Sound for 2 Minutes option, your iPhone or iPod touch will sound an alarm even if you have turned off all audio notifications. That’s a nifty option both to freak out a thief and to find your phone when it’s hidden away in a car or your home.  When I described Find My iPhone to my wife, the owner of an original iPhone, she was initially slightly appalled. She thought this would become known as the cheatingspouse or stalker feature, because anyone with access to someone’s MobileMe account - which could be a spouse or partner or an ex - would also have live access to someone’s position.  That’s worth considering, references to current and prior relationships aside, if you’re not the only person with your MobileMe account password. MobileMe partitions multiple accounts with separate passwords and account features in a family pack ($149 per year), so that shouldn’t be a concern. **When Your Phone Goes Missing** -- As someone who has become rather aware lately of laptop theft - see my friend David Blatner’s account of his PowerBook being ripped off in “What I Learned from Having My Laptop Stolen” (2009-03-24) - I had wondered how recovery software companies might work around the “one program runs at a time” limit in iPhone software.  Apple skirted that issue by building in such a feature at the system level and bundling it with its own service. Laptop recovery software costs run from about $40 as a one-time fee to $40 to $60 per year, depending on the firm. The addition of Find My iPhone improves MobileMe’s value and utility more than just a little for me.  Find My iPhone isn’t designed just for dealing with the possibility of theft, but the Remote Wipe feature cer-

Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

tainly is. Click the Remote Wipe button in MobileMe to reset the device to its factory setting, and your iPhone or iPod touch will delete all your personal data, files, and applications.  It will be interesting to see how this finding feature is used with a stolen phone, because law enforcement doesn’t always take an interest in items that are worth less than a few thousand dollars, even if you have a picture of the alleged thief and his or her address. However, with a live map, perhaps that would improve your odds. (For the first heart-warming story of how Find My iPhone reunited a geek and his iPhone, read this post from the blog The Intermittent Kevin.)  Ken Westin, the head of GadgetTrak, which makes recovery software for laptops and smartphones, said he was pleased that Apple has added this feature, especially the remote data wipe option; he calls it a “greatly needed service.” But, he noted, a lot more than a pin on a map could be done.  Westin’s firm gives away GadgetTrak for iPhone that, when active, looks just like a Safari window. This requires that you launch and leave the app up whenever you’re not using your phone. GadgetTrak can’t do more because that would require having a constantly running monitor program.  Westin said that in his experience with smartphone theft, thieves typically remove SIM cards - the authentication module used on GSM networks worldwide - as soon as possible. Although the iPhone and iPod touch can connect to Wi-Fi networks to report location, thieves might be clever enough to prevent that, and to turn off the Find My iPhone switch. He also pointed out the double-edged sword of pairing a MobileMe account with Find My iPhone’s service: if you don’t wipe your phone, a thief has access to anything on the phone provided by MobileMe, possibly including your calendar and address book, and the capability to send and receive email. (Setting a passcode significantly improves your odds of keeping your data safe.) The moment you wipe the phone, you’re secure, but your ability to locate the

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Snow Leopard Compatibility Which apps work with Mac OS X 10.6?

phone disappears.  Westin also noted that even with a map in hand, Apple isn’t providing assistance to go to law enforcement, something GadgetTrak and other laptop recovery software developers offer. **A Base on Which to Grow** -- Apple has certainly provided a baseline here for both misplaced and stolen devices, but the company usually then relies on third parties to fill in the missing pieces in its own offerings.

Do yourself a favor and check out: http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/start BEFORE installing Snow Leopard.

 That’s impossible at the moment, but I would suspect that with tens of millions of these devices out there, and the high resale value of both iPhone and the iPod touch, Apple could allow some developers inside the kimono eventually.

The list will tell you which apps are compatible with Snow Leopard and which are NOT!! Initially I read that Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6 was not compatible with SL, but I see from this published list that it is compatible.

 At least I know where my equipment is at the moment. Now, if I could only find my glasses.

☺☺☺ FABULOUS WEBSITES

ACADEMY OF SCIENCES WEBSITE http://www.calacademy. org/events?e=254&d=22& m=09&y=2009

John Siracusa’s Review of Snow Leopard. http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-osx-10-6.ars

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The Most Social Brands of 2008Apple Wins by Sheer Volume of Mentions, at Least Posted by Abbey Klaassen Pop quiz: What was the brand or branded product most often mentioned in social media at the end of last year? If you guessed the iPhone, as probably 90% of you did, you’d be right. But you might be surprised at just how dominant Apple and its brands are in terms of online chatter: IPhone is joined by Apple and iPod in the top 10 most mentioned brands or branded products list. The analysis is from social-media-services provider Vitrue, which launched a social-media index last year. It measures the conversation volume around 2,000 brands on a variety of social-networking, blogging and micro-blogging sites. This survey stuck to a pretty rudimentary metric -- it measures mentions, not the sentiment of those mentions or the word pairings. “This is measuring velocity and volume in December 2008,” CEO Reggie Bradford told Ad Age. We asked him for full disclosure of how many are clients and he said, “Some are, some aren’t, and many more clients didn’t make the list.” He wouldn’t specify who exactly has employed Vitrue’s services, but noted that of the top 20, “just a handful” were clients. In addition to Apple and its branded products, media brands also dominated the top-10 list: CNN bested Disney and MTV for the No. 2 spot. The rest of the top 10 was consumer-electronics-heavy: XBox, Starbucks, Sony and Dell.

Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

The only auto to sneak into the top 20 was Ford, at No. 12. Honda was the next-most talked-about, in the No. 25 spot. Surprisingly, Lincoln followed that, at No. 28. One important caveat, however: It’s unclear whether the chatter was positive or, perhaps, related to the government auto bailouts from late 2008. Anything surprise you about the top 50? (The rest can be found on Vitrue’s blog.) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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iPhone CNN Apple Disney Xbox Starbucks iPod MTV Sony Dell Microsoft Ford Nintendo Target PlayStation Mac Turner Hewlett-Packard Fox News BlackBerry ABC Coke LG Best Buy Honda eBay Sharp Lincoln NBA Pepsi General Motors McDonald’s General Electric Walmart NFL Mercedes BMW Samsung

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Nike Subway Dodge Pandora CBS Mercury NBC Disneyland Last.fm Toyota Cadillac Chevy

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Burning audio files to CD Question: I’m working on an iMac with Snow Leopard installed and iTunes 9.0. I purchased an album in the iTunes store.  I then wanted to burn it to a physical CD so that I could listen to it in my car.  The resulting CD has songs in ACC format.  My car stereo which has recognized audio disks I’ve burned in the past, won’t recognize this disk.  However, I have been able to play this audio disk on other CD players that we have around as well as on my iMac.  Why won’t my car recognize it?  Did I do something wrong? Reply: AAC is not an “audio” format, it is a compressed digital audio format, like MP3.  Some newer CD players can recognize these digital files and play them back as if they were standard audio files (as can a computer), but many car CD players cannot.  A “standard” CD player cannot play these back, they are not the “audio” file format it is looking for.  

may know you can create smart folders (File -> New Smart Folder) to store often-used searches, did you know you can mix the two to create smart burn folders? Assume you have a set of files you’d like to regularly burn to disc, and that can be identified by a common characteristic—they all reside in one folder, or have a certain extension, or you’ve coded them all with an identical Spotlight Comment. To make it easier to burn these files regularly, first create a burn folder as usual. Instead of dragging items into it, though, next create a new smart folder. Set the criteria such that your desired files are found in the search results, then click Save. In the new dialog that appears, name your smart folder, and then save it into your newly-created burn folder. That’s all there is to it—now you have a smart burn folder that will be constantly updated with all relevant files. When it’s time to burn your backup, you’ll automatically get all matching files, without having to do any work on your own. Thanks to Mac OS X Hints reader ‘tedw’ for pointing this one out.

To burn a disc in “audio” format within iTunes, you need to change your iTunes preferences for disc burning to “Audio CD,” then it will work.  You will find, however, that you can fit much less on one CD as standard audio files are much larger than AAC or MP3 files.   This should be the same in different versions of iTunes, although exactly where you go to set this preference may differ slightly from one version to another.  

Create smart burn folders by Rob Griffiths, Macworld.com While you may know you can create burn folders (File -> New Burn Folder) to ease burning DVDs and CDs, and you Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

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Five reasons to watch Google Wave Haven’t gotten your invite yet? Here’s why you should look forward to trying this new service. by Tony Bradley, PC World Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from the Biz Feed blog at PCWorld.com. Google is inviting another 100,000 people to play in the Google Wave test pool. The developing duo of Jens and Lars Rasmussen envision Wave revolutionizing online communication and collaboration. I am not sure it will be revolutionary, but at first blush it seems at least evolutionary and worth taking a closer look at. Google Wave is part social networking, and part unified communications, and all Google. Wave combines e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, document sharing, wikis, and

multimedia content to provide a seamless communications platform. Unless you’re one of the lucky (relatively) few invited by Google, you can’t play with Wave just yet. But, I’ll give you five reasons you should be anxiously looking forward to giving Google Wave a try: 1. Single point of access Many of the functions of Google Wave already exist, but require logging into separate applications—email, instant messaging, office productivity, blogging, etc. Google Wave will provide you with one platform that ties all of these separate applications together. 2. Next-generation communication Wave really blurs the line between the various methods of communication you are used to. You can instantly add new participants to a wave by dragging them from your contact list. You can also link to other waves, photos, and other content elements by

A Wave is part e-mail, part instant message, and part document. It combines text, photos, video, maps, and other elements into a single communication stream. Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

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simply dragging them into the wave.

it sound, perhaps it is all of the above and none of the above at the same time.

3. Real-time sharing and collaboration

No matter what arena it plays in, Google Wave seems like an intriguing new technology and one that I am anxious to get a chance to play with hands on. Where is my invite Google peeps?

Arguably the most compelling aspect of Google Wave is the real-time collaboration functionality. Wave participants can comment inline and the statements are accompanied by the user’s avatar and a timestamp allowing you to easily identify who said what, when.

Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience. He tweets as @PCSecurityNews and provides tips, advice and reviews on information security and unified communications technologies on his site at tonybradley.com.

Users can see text appear in the wave as it is being typed— even as they typo and backspace to correct the text. Wave participants can view and edit the same content at the same time-collaborating in real-time. Even cooler is the Playback function which allows new participants who just joined the wave to play the wave stream back post by post. They can add comments and edit text as they go through the stream and get caught up on their own schedule so they can join the real-time conversation.

Have a safe and sane Halloween

4. A life of its own A wave is like an e-mail or instant message on steroids. The entire wave has a life of its own. Participants on the wave are notified as the wave is updated or modified. The wave can be easily searched based on any content of the wave, dynamically updating potential results as you type. You can link to waves from other e-mail and instant messaging clients, and you can also embed waves within Web sites or social networking services using Google Wave API’s.

Booooo

5. It’s in the cloud One of the things that Google has always brought to the table is Web-based access. Not only is it nice to combine email, instant messaging, and other online communications in one place, it is also nice to be able to access the platform seamlessly from anywhere in the world. Have Web access? You can Wave. It still remains to be seen if Google Wave is a competitor for social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, or if it’s a unified communications tool competing against Microsoft and Cisco. If it’s as revolutionary as Google makes Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

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Running Disk Utility

How I Use Spaces

Question: I see recommendations to run Disk Utility every so often, and especially before an upgrade, to repair permissions and check the disk.  Recently I read that you have to run it from a clone to fix your regular boot drive because it can’t repair things on the drive from which it is running.  But usually you just see advice to run it, without the apparently important caveat of running it from another drive.

By Dan Bizzozero I discovered recently in an informal poll of my co-workers that I seem to be the only one in love with Spaces. When Leopard was released nearly two years ago, Spaces was touted as one of the biggest new features, allowing up to sixteen separate virtual desktops. While hardly a new idea in the computing world, I always found the implementation in other distributions cumbersome and clunky. Apple applied their expected touch of polish and turned a useful feature into a useful, easy, and fluid feature.

Is that because you can run it from your main HD and see if it finds any problems, and if it does then you need to re-run it from a clone to do the repairs? I have always run it from the Mac HD and it always has a huge list or permissions that didn’t get repaired.  Is that because I should have been running it from the clone? Reply: Yes to running Disk Utility to verify drive and repair permissions before an upgrade. No to repairing permissions from another drive. It’s technical, but if you run to check another mounted boot drive, the reference files that it check would not be from the correct source and can mess up your other OS. Always run repair permissions on the same drive you booted from.  Not all errors will get fixed.  10.5.8 seemed to report more errors. 10.6 is reported to eliminate most of the reported errors.  Unless you computer or applications are not working correctly, you can safely ignore those errors. Repair Disk in Disk Utility can only be done on a drive you did not boot from. Your only option is to boot from the install DVD or a clone and run Repair Disk. Verify Disk can be run at any time on any drive.

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Space is located in System Preferences, paired with Apple’s other extremely useful window management feature, Exposé. Make sure the “Enable Spaces” box is checked, along with “Show Spaces in Menu Bar,” which creates a small menu items for a quick reference to which space you are currently in. I also find it handy to map Spaces to a hot corner, for quick switching between spaces. Once it’s enabled, you can assign applications to always open in a particular space; this is where the true power of Spaces shines through. If you’re like me, you are probably browsing the web, listening to iTunes, checking Twitter, sending emails, and finishing a presentation all at the same time. With more than two applications open at once, the desktop can become very cluttered and hard to manage. Sure, Exposé does make jumping windows very easy, but I don’t necessarily need to have iTunes and Twitter in the way of my Keynote projects and emails.

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Spaces also allows me to group applications onto a particular desktop and then use Exposé to work between those programs. This makes it much easier to multitask with your Mac and can actually improve your workflow quite dramatically. This works fantastically when working on presentations, photo editing, podcast recording, or even file browsing.

Aug 27, 2009 $23.99 (Save 20%)*

My personal Spaces philosophy is as follows: web activity in Space one, iTunes in two, downloads in three, email and Word documents in four. Not only does this allow me to mentally organize myself, it means I can have all these items open at once and not worry about minimizing or manipulating window sizes when working between them. The bird’s eye view Spaces gives uses also allows you to drag applications between desktops and even rearranges entire Spaces with each other.

Excerpted from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide by Maria Langer

Mac Tip of the Week #237 Exposé

Spaces is now one of my favorite Mac OS features and is now completely integrated into my everyday workflow. To learn more about Spaces, check out Apple’s video tutorial on YouTube.



peachpit’s new releases

Little Mac Book, Snow Leopard Edition, The By Robin Williams Aug 27, 2009 $15.99 (Save 20%)* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Peachpit Learning Series By Robin Williams, John Tollett Aug 27, 2009 $27.99 (Save 20%)* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide By Maria Langer Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

When you’re heavily involved in your tasks, it’s easy to clutter your Desktop with an array of Finder and application windows. Rather than hunt and click through the pile to find the one you’re looking for, use Exposé instead. Max OS X 10.6 adds Exposé integration with the Dock. Now you can view all open windows in a specific application by simply clicking that application’s icon in the Dock. And when windows are displayed in Exposé, they now display in a neat grid, making them even easier to see and access. For a tutorial on how to use Exposé, go to: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2503.

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Mac Tip of the Week #238

Mac Tip of the Week #240

Excerpted from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Peachpit Learning Series by Robin Williams, John Tollett

Excerpted from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Peachpit Learning Series by Robin Williams and John Tollett

Make a New Screen Recording

Protect Your PDFs

If you want to record the activity on your screen—for instructional purposes, or perhaps to record a streaming event on the Internet, or for any other reason— use QuickTime to make a screen recording.

In most applications, you can create a file in Portable Document Format (PDF) by choosing File > Print and clicking the PDF button. Choose Save as PDF to create your document as a PDF; then click the Security Options button and specify a password. Users will need to know the password to open, copy, or print your password-protected PDF.

Open QuickTime, then from the File menu, choose “New Screen Recording.” In the “Screen Recording” window that opens, click the red Record button. A dialog sheet drops down to confirm your request. Click “Start Recording.” To stop recording, click the “Stop Recording” button that appears in the menu bar (click “Show Me” to highlight the button in the menu bar). Or, press the Command Control Escape keys to stop recording.

Mac Tip of the Week #239

just for fun!! http://www.jacksonpollock.org/ From club member, Stephanie Clark, a fabulously fun website. She says, “Here’s a website to delight. Using your mouse, click and draw to your heart’s content........different colors to boot! Enjoy.”

Excerpted from The Little Mac Book, Snow Leopard Edition by Robin Williams

Polish Your Click Smarts

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c o l l o

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You probably already know that double arrows are a visual clue that a dialog box option contains a menu. You can click that double arrow to open the menu. What you may not realize is that you actually can click anywhere in that horizontal bar—you don’t have to click exactly on the arrow.

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Detecting Photoshopped Images Interesting short video on how to spot ‘photoshopped’ images on the web/magazines/TV ads, etc. h t t p : / / w w w. f a c e b o o k . c o m / v i d e o / v i d e o . php?v=544434273604

Michael Galpert on Detecting Photoshopped Images

iTunes App Store Essentials: Go Green

by O’Reilly Media That celebrity in a bikini? Duplicate people in a crowd? These aren’t real. Those are the work of Photoshop or Aviary. Michael Galpert shows us how to detect these fake images. For more reading on this check out eHow’s article (http://www.ehow.com/how_2049756_detectfake-photos.html).

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As stewards of Mother Earth, we’ve selected a few key apps to help you go green. Find recycling centers across our beautiful country with iRecycle. Find fresh, in-season food while supporting your local farmers and economy with Locavore. And find ways in your everyday life to make a difference with green living tips from The Green Book. Your great-grandchildren will thank you.

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iPod touch by Jason Snell, Macworld.com The launch of the original iPod touch in late 2007, in the aftermath of a summer of sheer iPhone frenzy, was anticlimactic. The new device was hobbled by its hardware (no speaker or volume controls) and its software (Apple originally omitted Notes, Mail, Stocks, Maps, and Weather). It was, quite simply, Not An iPhone. In the two intervening years, though, that afterthought of a product has become a powerhouse, with hardware and software improvements turning it into the match of the iPhone in every way except the fact that it’s not a phone. It turns out that 20 million people wanted an iPhone without the phone, compared to the 30 million who wanted the iPhone itself. When we write about the iPhone OS at Macworld, we generally just use the term “iPhone” to keep things simple—and frequently earn the wrath of iPod touch users who don’t want us to leave them out. The iPod touch is now as big a hit as the iPhone. It appeals to people who don’t want to commit to 24 pricey months of cell phone bills, and to people who refuse to use AT&T’s cellular services in general. With the addition in 2008 of the App Store and the vastly improved second-generation iPod touch hardware, the iPod touch became a versatile device that acts like a remote control, a game machine—you name it. Just after the iPod touch’s second birthday, Apple has announced an update to the product line that’s a bit perplexing. From the outside, these new iPod touch models are identical to the second-generation models from 2008 (). Despite numerous rumors (and some supporting photographic evidence) to suggest that the iPod touch might be receiving a version of the iPhone’s onboard-camera hardware, these new iPod touch models still lack a camera. (Sorry, Boy Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

Scouts, there’s also no compass or GPS.) Now, it’s not fair to ding Apple for failing to live up to rumors, but I do think it’s fair to suggest that it’s high time that the iPod touch include a camera, given the robust camera support within the iPhone OS, and given that there’s now a video camera on the latest iPod nanos (). It’s too bad that these new models can’t capture a quick snapshot and take advantage of all those great apps that support the iPhone’s built-in camera. I’m a little less upset by the lack of a built-in microphone, since you can get one on a set of headphones, or a GPS receiver, since the iPhone 3G and 3GS take advantage of the position of nearby cellular towers to quickly acquire a GPS location—and accessing cell towers is most definitely not part of the iPod touch’s purview. Still, as the iPod touch evolves, it would be nice to see it gain more of the iPhone’s hardware features, since many apps are written with specific support for those features. On the inside, the two top-of-the-line models (a $299 model offering 32GB of storage space and a $399 model with 64GB of storage) are quite different from their predecessors. With new, faster processors and graphics chips, the late-2009-vintage iPod touches have gained the same speed boost that the iPhone did when it leaped from 3G to 3GS. Like the 3GS, the new high-end iPod touch models offer support for Voice Control, a feature that lets you hold down the button on your headphones and command your iPod to play songs from a particular artist, playlist, or album. They also support hardware encryption, meaning it’s much faster to erase your iPod and make its contents unrecoverable, because all the device has to do is erase its decryption key, rather than every single byte in its storage. (The $199 8GB iPod touch model, on the other hand, is just the equivalent of the $99 iPhone 3G—a collection of year-old technology that’s been kept around to be sold at a bargain price.) In almost every one of my tests, the faster iPod touch was within a few percentage points of the iPhone 3GS (), and undeniably faster than any previous iPhone

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OS model. The iPod touch started up in an iPhone OSrecord 16.3 seconds, a test iPod touches have always excelled at since they don’t need to ready themselves to connect to a cellular network.

as well as audio-only files such as those you play in Apple iTunes and GarageBand.

Macworld’s buying advice

Spring-loaded folders are one of OS X’s most-overlooked timesavers. In the Finder, drag an item, hover over a folder, and after a brief pause (so the Mac knows you’re not simply hesitating before dropping the item in) a Finder window springs open, revealing the folder’s contents. This makes it easy to see that you’re moving or copying an item into the correct place if your folder names are less than descriptive. It also simplifies getting into subfolders.

Functionally, the new iPod touch models are identical to the second-generation models we reviewed last year, especially when updated to version 3.1 of the iPhone OS. What we said then still goes: The iPod touch is a terrific media player and portable computing device that doesn’t require any of the commitments or ongoing costs of the iPhone. The new high-end models add the blazing speed of the iPhone 3GS, making them even better for games. If you’re in the market for a game machine, video player, portable Internet device, and music player all in one—and if you don’t want to pay AT&T every month—you can’t do better than the iPod touch.

Five unexpected uses for the spacebar Tap into this unassuming key’s hidden productivity tricks by Sharon Zardetto, Macworld.com Ancient Greek and Latin writings had no spaces between words; you just had to be familiar with where words started and stopped in order to read textlikethis. But we should be grateful to the spacebar for more than just its sacred word-separation calling, because it can also perform quite a few tricks in various environments. 1. Play and pause In any application that provides Play and Pause controls, you can use the spacebar to alternately play and pause the content. This includes movies and slideshows, Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

2. Open spring-loaded folders instantly

You set the length of the spring-open delay in the General pane of Finder -> Preferences. Or, avoid the delay altogether by pressing the spacebar to open a hovered-over folder instantly. Even if you turn off the spring-loaded folders feature by going to Finder -> Preferences and deselecting the Spring-loaded Folders And Windows setting, pressing the spacebar still opens a folder when you hover over it holding an item to drop into it. Spring-loaded folders work from the Dock, too. Press the spacebar to open a folder in the Dock without waiting, whether or not spring-loading is turned on in the Finder’s preferences. 3. Access screenshot options When you need to document some aspect of your Mac’s behavior, a screenshot of the full screen is seldom necessary. Sure, you can press CommandShift-4 to select an area to capture to the Desktop (or Command-Shift-3 to save the whole screen as a file on the Desktop), but if you add the spacebar you’ll access more options. Pressing the spacebar before you drag across an area to capture it changes your cursor to a camera and lets you select an entire window (or a dialog box, or a menu without its title) by clicking on it. Pressing the spacebar after you’ve dragged a selection rectangle—but before you let it go—allows you to move

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the selection rectangle around on the screen to adjust its position before capturing the shot; let go of the spacebar with the mouse button still down if you want to adjust the size of the rectangle after you’ve moved it. 4. Zoom in on windows in Exposé One of the more clever feature tweaks in Snow Leopard involves the space bar. When you invoke Exposé, Mac OS X displays your open windows in a grid on your screen, at a substantially reduced size. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize which window is which when you’re in this view, and the window’s title isn’t always a good enough clue. Now you can use your space bar to zoom in and preview your Exposé windows. Just move your cursor over a window and press the spacebar. If it’s the window you want, press Return. If not, you can press the spacebar again to zoom back out.

ample. Once you’ve selected a component, press the spacebar in lieu of clicking the mouse. So, for instance, with All Controls on, tabbing around on a Web page includes not only the search and other text fields on a form, but all its clickable spots, and the spacebar “clicks” the selected item. Sharon Zardetto has been writing Mac tips since the Mac was born. One of her current ebooks is Minifesto: Time Machine .

Five unexpected uses for the Option key Access hidden features with this keyboard star by Sharon Zardetto, Macworld.com

With All Controls turned on the in Keyboard Shortcuts preference pane, tab to a menu (the blue halo shows it’s selected) and use the spacebar to open it. Use an arrow key to highlight a menu choice, and then use the spacebar again to trigger the command. 5. “Click” on items using the keyboard Prefer to move around in dialog boxes or Web pages using the keyboard instead of the mouse? Select All Controls under Full Keyboard Access in the Keyboard Shortcuts preference pane (in Leopard’s Keyboard & Mouse preferences, or Snow Leopard’s Keyboard preferences). With All Controls active, a press of the Tab key selects, in turn, every component of whatever you’re working in—a dialog box, for exSonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

The Option key is the unsung hero of the keyboard. Since the earliest days of the Mac, it has provided access to special font characters; revealed alternative commands in menus; and let you Option-drag to create a copy of something, such as a Finder icon or a graphic selection (from MacPaint to Photoshop CS4!). Its capabilities have only increased with time, so it’s always worth pressing Option to modify a click or drag, just to see what might happen. Here are five of my favorite Option key tricks. 1. Reverse your scrollbar preference Most of the time, I use the scrollbar—for example, in Apple’s Safari or Microsoft Word—to move my view a full page or screen at time. (By default, when you click on a scrollbar, that’s what it does.) But sometimes—in a long document, for instance—I know that I want to go to a point about three-quarters of the way through the document. It’s easier to click where I want to go—three-quarters of the way down on the scrollbar—than to click and drag the scroller to get there.

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You can choose between these actions—Jump To The Next Page or Jump To Here—by setting the Click In The Scroll Bar To option in the Appearance preference pane. Or, have it both ways: Option-click in the scrollbar to temporarily reverse the setting you’ve made in Preferences. So, if your setting is Jump To The Next Page, an Option-click in the scrollbar will instead jump you to a particular spot.

to open the Sound preference pane to switch output devices: press Option before you open the Volume menu, and instead of getting the volume slider, you’ll see a list of available input and output devices. (To make the Volume menu appear in the first place, go to the Sound preference pane and select the Show Volume In Menu Bar option.)

2. Open preference panes using function keys

4. Option-click to open multiple Inspector palettes

You love the convenience of dimming or brightening your screen with a quick press of F1 or F2, but sometimes you need to adjust other aspects of your display. For instance, you might want to temporarily change the screen resolution to test something. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get to the Displays preference pane as quickly as you can change the screen’s brightness?

The Macworld article Rule the Office notes that you can open multiple Inspector windows in Keynote and Pages by using the View -> New Inspector command. But this always opens a Document Inspector, so you must then click on the icon for the Inspector you need. Instead of using the menu command, Option-click directly on an icon in an existing Inspector palette to open a new Inspector for that category.

Wish granted! Hold Option while pressing either of the function keys that controls brightness, and the Displays preference pane opens. This works with other function keys, too: hold Option while you press any of the volume function keys (F3-F5 or F10-F12, depending on your keyboard), and the Sound preference pane opens. If you have your system set up so that you need to press the Fn key to trigger the special features on the function keys (the ones represented by icons), then just add the Option key to the mix: FnOption-F1, for instance.

5. Choose a startup disk when booting You’re staring at your blank Mac screen; you have two (or more) startup drives for your Mac, but you forgot to specify the one you want to use in the Startup Disk preference pane. You don’t have to start up,

3. Switch speakers from the menu bar You need to switch from the internal speakers to your headphones for a Skype call, or you’re the last one in the office so you want to blast your iTunes playlist through your external speakers. If you’re using Snow Leopard, and your Volume menu is in the menu bar, you don’t have Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

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change the setting, and restart: just hold down Option when you turn on the Mac and you’ll see available startup drives displayed on the screen. Choose the one you want and you’re good to go. Sharon Zardetto is long-time Mac writer. You’ll find another Option trick for volume settings at her MacTipster blog.

OS X Browser Speed Wars: May the Fastest App Win

most mainstream, known for its customizability Flock 2.5: A browser for the socially-minded Mac user Camino 1.6.8: Firefox, basically, but tweaked for Macs Current Webkit-based browsers include: Safari 4.0.2: Apple’s very own browser. Stainless 0.6.5: Cool features for the technically inclined (under development). Cruz 0.2: For the social networker who likes to multi-task (under development). If a browser has not yet reached version 1.0, we didn’t include it in our overall benchmark scoring as it could have skewed the results. Early-stage stripped-down betas can appear superfast, and could lack some functions that can skew benchmark-based comparisons. Testing Methodology

No matter how happy you are with your current Web browser, chances are you’ve wondered if another browser would make your Web wanderings faster, easier, or at least a little more festive. We speculate about that too (probably far too often), so we decided to run some tests, compare features and figure out which browser currently rules the Web. The Lineup Browsers are powered by engines which transform a raw mess of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a more or less tidy website. Mac browsers typically use the Mozilla Gecko or Webkit engines. Opera uses its own proprietary engine, Presto. Current releases of Mozilla Gecko-based browsers for the Mac include: Firefox 3.5.1: Once the geeky alternative, now alSonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

To gauge basic performance levels we used Mozilla’s Dromaeo JavaScript testing suite which aggregates a number of tools including Dromaeo, Apple’s SunSpider suite and Google’s V8. We measured CPU/ Memory usage with iStat pro. Streaming video playback was determined by comparing how smoothly the same set of three YouTube videos played in each browser. We installed freshly-downloaded copies of each browser and tested on a Mac Pro (2.66GHz QuadCore Intel Xeon with 8GB of SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7) and a MacBook Pro (2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 8GB SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7). Each browser ran in its default configuration with no thirdparty plug-ins and a minimum set of bookmarks. That’s the closest we could get to creating a level playing field but there’s a flaw here: over long-term usage, a browser’s performance may slow as information is added to its database, extensions can also bog things down. Bottom line: Benchmarks are not the Voice of God. There are too many variables that come into play,

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such as network latency when testing browsers. And while a sluggish but feature-rich application is not a good application, features and functionality matter far more to most of us than whether a browser can load 15 tabs a few fractions of a second faster than another browser. Test results General Performance: Overall, Safari was the fastest of all the browsers we tested, with Camino a hair behind Safari. Firefox exhibited the slowest startup times of any tested browser, but beats Safari by an average of two seconds in speedy page rendering, primarily due to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Opera was a bit faster than Firefox on start-up times but really shone in the tab-tests -- opening up eight, and then 15 tabs faster (but we’re talking percents of seconds here) than the other browsers. Safari was the next fastest on the tab test, with Firefox and Camino neck in neck near the back of the pack. Spider Test: Flock didn’t score well at all, coming in dead last in all tests but its capabilities not its performance are what makes this browser attractive to some. Resource Usage We tested each browser by opening 15 tabs -- nine of them flash-heavy -- and checked CPU and memory usage in iStat pro after 10, 20, and 30 minutes. Firefox, Safari and Opera did the best on this test; Firefox showed 9% CPU utilization at 30 minutes, Safari and Opera had consumed 11%. Camino was in second-to-last place, with a 13% CPU utilization score. Flock ate up the most resources, spiking to 15% on occasion. None of the browsers gobbled enough resources to create a performance lags in other applications or the browser.

Six reasons desktop e-mail still rules Webmail may be convenient, but conventional e-mail programs still offer many advantages by Joe Kissell, Macworld.com More and more people rely on a Web-based interface for accessing their e-mail, be it Google’s Gmail, Apple’s MobileMe, or another provider’s webmail service. Although such systems have the virtue of nearuniversal accessibility—and although they have, in the past couple of years, improved dramatically in usability—I’ll still take a desktop e-mail client (such as Apple Mail, Microsoft Entourage, or Mozilla Thunderbird) any day. Why? Well, there is the issue of outages like the one Gmail experienced this week. I like to be able to access my e-mail whenever I want. But beyond that, webmail still lags far behind desktop clients in several key areas. Here are my top six reasons conventional e-mail programs are still better than even the best webmail. 1. Integration with other applications Mail ties directly into Mac OS X applications such as Address Book, iCal, iChat, and Keychain. Similarly, most other desktop e-mail clients can also connect to other desktop applications in one way or another. But with webmail, you’re generally stuck with whatever services that provider offers. Gmail happens to offer quite a few, but if you want to use, say, iChat instead of Google Talk to reply to someone who sent you email, it’s not convenient. Plus, click a “mailto” link in a Web browser (or any other application) and you get a new, blank message in your default e-mail client. To achieve the same effect with a webmail system, you may have to install extra software, switch to a different browser, or jump through other hoops. 2. The power to redirect If you forward a message, and the recipient replies,

Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

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the reply goes back to you. But if you redirect a message, replies go to the person who originally sent it. The capability to redirect messages is extremely useful when you receive someone else’s mail by mistake, or when another person is better suited than you to reply to certain messages. Mail and Entourage (among other clients) have a Redirect command (Message -> Redirect in both applications). Gmail, MobileMe, and most other webmail systems do not. 3. Drag-and-drop attachments If you drag a file (such as a JPEG picture or a Word document) into a new message window in a desktop e-mail client, the program attaches that file to your message. This is often the quickest and most convenient way to send someone a file. But try the same trick in a webmail program and you’re more likely to see the path to the file inserted as text in your outgoing message. Attaching files in webmail programs usually involves clicking on a link or button, using an Open dialog box to locate the file, and then repeating the procedure for each attachment. In other words, a common task becomes uncommonly time-consuming. 4. One place for all your accounts Sure, MobileMe can check another POP account, Gmail can check multiple POP accounts, and you can forward mail from other accounts to either service. But what if you want multiple POP, IMAP, and Exchange accounts all in the same place—and on top of that, you also want the capability to drag messages from one account to another? Desktop e-mail clients are far more likely than webmail to bring everything together in a consistent, elegant way. 5. Better rules MobileMe’s webmail interface offers no rules for filtering your mail. Gmail does have filters, but they pale in comparison to those offered by the likes of Mail, Entourage, and Thunderbird. If you want comSonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

plete control over how your incoming mail is sorted and processed automatically, the rules in desktop clients nearly always give you more flexibility than what webmail offers. 6. The full Mac user interface In a desktop e-mail client, menus, keyboard shortcuts, toolbars, and other aspects of OS X’s user interface work the way you expect them to (and are often customizable). In webmail, you have to take what you get. For example, maybe there are keyboard shortcuts for things like replying and composing new messages, maybe not. If there are shortcuts, they’re probably different from what every other Mac program uses. You’re limited by the capabilities of your browser, which means you may have to switch gears and use a different, less familiar way of working. Because OS X comes with an excellent e-mail client built in (Mail) and others, such as Thunderbird, are available at no cost, I always recommend using such a program except in cases where a user lacks an individual account on a Mac (to keep his or her data separate from everyone else’s) or is using someone else’s computer temporarily.

Potential Security Vulnerability In Flash By Ed Shepard smalldog.com If you’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard, please note this important message from Adobe: The initial release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) includes an earlier version of Adobe Flash Player than what is available from Adobe.com. We recommend all users update

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to the latest, most secure version of Flash Player (10.0.32.18) — which supports Snow Leopard and is available for download from http://www.adobe.com/ go/getflashplayer. The earlier version of Flash Player included with Snow Leopard contains several security vulnerabilities. These are patched in the more recent version of Flash Player, released by Adobe on July 30th. Macworld Magazine notes that Flash Player is an attractive target for hackers, since millions upon millions of computers worldwide have it installed. All Mac users should make sure their version of Flash is current. This is most important for Snow Leopard users, since their version is almost certainly out of date and thus, vulnerable.

Nikon D90 and a tripod to take this nighttime shot at Volunteer Landing in Knoxville, TN. Daniel set up his tripod and camera by the river just after sunset, during the so-called “blue hour.” By not shooting too late into the night, he was able to capture a rich blue color in the sky. He mounted a Tamron 14-50mm f1:2.8 lens on his D90 and took this shot at a 30 second exposure with an ISO setting of 200. To create the sharp starburst effects on the bridge lights, he shrunk his aperture down to f/14 which diffracts the light. The smaller the aperture (at f/12 or smaller), the more pronounced the starburst effect (also called a sunburst) will be. The exact number of points that appear around a light will vary depending on the type of lens and how many blades it has. Johnson recommends sticking with a shorter focal length as zooming in can cancel out the effect.

Creating starburst effects in photos by Heather Kelly, Macworld.com

The first of our reader-submitted snapshots features a very cool lighting effect that’s easy to recreate. Aspiring photographer Daniel Johnson used his Sonoma Valley Computer Group Newsletter

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Sonoma Valley Computer Group POB 649 El Verano, CA 95433

Topic:

• OCTOBER USER GROUP MEETING Date: Saturday, 10/10/2009 Place: Sonoma Public Library 755 West Napa Street Time: 10:00 a.m.

OPEN OFFICE _ FREE SUITE SOFTWARE PROGRAM

OCTOBER MEETING 10/10/2009

COMBINED MAC/WINDOWS MEETING STARTS AT 10:00 A.M.

for Mac and Windows Users