The May issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.
April showers certainly brought May flowers for Apple, notably the kind that grow from the branches of the money tree. Rob provides a rundown of Apple’s latest financials in this month’s Welcome. Wes has the blogosphere round-up on the latest digital rights hubbub, set off by the open letter by Steve Jobs to end DRM on music. When you’re already using the coolest computing system in the world, where do you go next? If you’re Mark, you start letting a robot clean your carpets.
Lee takes us through Photoshop’s bag of tricks concerning color, hues, saturation, gradients, and all sorts of other goodies you can tweak your photos with. In closing out her series on web accessibility, Miraz looks at the capabilities of Firefox and Opera. Matthew does some hacking on what is still my favorite Mac to have owned, the Cube, shoving a XFX GeForce 6200 graphics card into our beloved lucite box.
Lee shares some great photos he snagged at the 2007 AirFest, held last month at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. And it may look like this month’s Cortland is having a severe case of schizophrenia, but trust us, it hits on several plot points of importance.
Miraz thinks Digital Photography Expert Techniques is pretty good, but badly missnamed, as it is about workflow after the fact of shooting photos, rather than during, the latter of which being what I would have thought from the title. Lee has a double-dose of reviews this month–I guess May turned out to be Lee Bennett theme month–looking at a pair of iPod accessories: the Dock Extender, which I am gear-lusting for; and the PocketDock Line Out USB.
Chris raves about the Elevator, Griffin’s replacement for the iCurve, which I used to use extensively. David uses Pando, which I’ve been following closely, but have not yet had a need to use. Ed closes this month’s issue out with a look at Yep, billed as “iPhoto for PDFs”. Personally, I store a lot of my PDFs in EagleFiler, but Yep certainly does look interesting.
As always, you can read this month’s ATPM online, as an offline webzine, a screen-optimized PDF, or a print-optimized PDF. We offer a variety of flavors for your consumption. Enjoy!
Tag: Mac
No, the title doesn’t refer to this blog. (Though I’m trying.) It refers to the publication I’m proud to be a part of, About This Particular Macintosh, and comes from Claire Rottenberg’s Quality Mac Websites:
ATPM is a professional, interesting and well-written and edited magazine. It has a large variety of content, ranging from short news bits to in-depth articles and product reviews, so there is something for everyone in each month’s issue. Take a look at the latest issue and I’m sure you’ll find something worthwhile in it and, like me, will become a regular reader of ATPM.
Kudos to the great volunteers we have on staff at ATPM, and thank you, Claire, for the kind words.
The April issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.
Chris Dudar, the staff’s resident 3D artist, provides us with some great cover art this month. Good work, Chris!
Wes kicks things off by noting the response from a lot of the tech crowd to Windows Vista: yawn. Those that have given a flip have turned on those who don’t care for it, like Chris Pirillo, and prominent switchers think it’s time for Pirillo to get a Mac. This and more in Wes’s monthly blogosphere roundup. Mike notes that while it’s not all all roses all the time with Macs, it still beats the alternative.
Mark notes that there is scientific evidence that size does matter. For display size, you plebeians! Display size! Sheesh… Ed returns with another GTD column, focusing on the hunting/gathering aspects of information collection. Lee continues Photoshop for the Curious, this month exploring levels and curves. Miraz looks at the browser side of things when it comes to web accessibility.
Chris Lawson manages to tie together Billy Madison, blogging, reviews, and business ethics, all in one tidy package. Lee provides us with this month’s desktop pictures, shot in New England in 1997. In this month’s Cortland, our hero finds himself traveling to other dimensions, while persons from other dimensions travel to ours, and the Dark Lord I.T. is trying to travel to other dimensions, or our dimension, or…Heck, there’s just a lot of dimension-traveling going on this month!
Matthew picks apart the open-source sound editor, Audacity, while Lawson pores over an accessory many a business traveler will want to take a look at, the Keynamics Aviator Laptop Stand. Linus plays around with Dodge That Anvil!, and Lee is less than impressed with the new HomeDock Deluxe from DLO. Ed peruses Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Mac OS X Backups 2.0, a tome I heartily recommend. And the man that leads off the April issue closes it out for us, as Chris Dudar reviews the app that helped make this month’s cover art, Wings3D.
As always, ATPM is available in a wide range of choices for your reading pleasure.
Oh, right. The March issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. You’d think someone on the editorial staff would be more aware…
Angus decides to reward Microsoft’s recent marketing efforts regarding the Zune and Vista by purchasing a brand-new 17-inch MacBook Pro. Yeah, when I first read his column, I had problems with the logic there, too, but someone informed me it has something to do with this thing called “sarcasm”. In this month’s Bloggable, Wes tracks the biggest news making the circuit of the Mac blogosphere, Steve Jobs’ recent condemnation of DRM for music downloads.
Mark has a quick hit on publishing formats, notably the resistance coming against Microsoft’s Office Open XML, because the words “Microsoft” and “open” go so well together, don’t they? (I like this sarcasm thing. Must note to use it more.) Lee continues his fabulous series, Photoshop for the Curious, this month walking us through color calibration. I really could use one of those monitor calibration tools. Miraz has a great column on web accessibility this month, one I can really relate to, given how I am amongst the spectacled crowd. (We also learn Miraz’s age this month, and please note this was volunteered by the author; our mothers taught us well enough to know better than to ever ask that of a lady.)
This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of ATPM reader Le Anne Brown, and feature the land of Tasmania (coincidentally, the home of ATPM‘s own Tasmanian devil, former staffer Raena Armitage). Strange things are afoot for Cortland at the swing dance-hosting lodge, which appears to be more than meets the eye. Staffer Linus Ly doffs his editorial cap for that of an artisté, introducing the ATPM readership to Qaptain Qwerty.
You may notice a striking similarity between Qaptain Qwerty and the review of Art Text. As a member of the editorial team, allow me to reassure you, this is not accidental. Ed got his hands on a piece of tech that’s found its way on to my personal gear lust list, the SnapScan S500M, by Fujitsu.
I never thought I’d have the opportunity to write, “Ellyn lays the smack down with Smack Mahjong“, but you can’t pass up those opportunities when they present themselves. Finally, Lee reviews the intriguing TuneView from Keyspan: leave your iPod connected to your entertainment system, but have its screen in the palm of your hand with the TuneView remote. Sounds sweet.
As always, you can enjoy About This Particular Macintosh online, or in a manner more appropriate for your reading preference.
So I have this email signature. Actually, I have about three. One is the somewhat standard signature I use for all ATPM-related correspondence. The other two are personal sigs which vary only in the email address contained in the signature. One is for the address at this domain, and the other is my Gmail address.
I have set up these signatures with keystroke shortcuts in TypeIt4Me, which I encourage you to check out. Without going in to too much detail, these three signatures are shorthanded “asig”, “gsig”, and “rsig”, and this works very well. For the most part.
I seem to have this memory muscle problem with the last abbreviation. The other two I can rattle off with nary a conscious thought going from my brain to my fingers on the keyboard, but the last has proven to be rather elusive. Instead of typing “rsig” I find myself typing “risg” instead. I even did it in the previous sentence, and had to backspace and fix it.
The obvious and lazy solution is to create a new abbreviation in TypeIt4Me that automagically puts in the proper signature when I mistype the actual abbreviation, because there’s little chance “risg” will ever be a real word in the English language, but that still doesn’t help with why I’m mistyping it in the first place. Bizarre.
This post is coming to you from MarsEdit 1.1.3, the first release of my blogging app of choice since Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software acquired it from NewsGator. This update fixes my biggest druther with MarsEdit, where images flicker when you’re previewing your post. Thanks, Daniel!
Speaking of not taking long, Lee and I were chatting via IM last night while he watched the Oscars, and, of course, there was talk regarding the iPhone teaser commercial. I wondered jokingly how long it would be before some post showed up somewhere detailing all of the stars shown in the commercial. Lee provided the answer: two hours. And here I thought I didn’t have a life. I’m sure there’s now a post somewhere detailing each of the movies or shows featured in the commercial, but I’m too lazy to google it.
Bandwagon, going live in two days, is an iTunes backup for Mac users. They’re offering free one-year subscriptions if you blog about them, and like Eric, I can be a cheap date.
Tired of Tetris™? No good at first-person shooter games? Want something quicker than world-building or war strategy games? Frenzic may be the answer you’re looking for.
A joint release from The Iconfactory and ARTIS Software, Frenzic is an addictive puzzle game that you can play solo or against others online.
Jobs and company should seriously be looking at getting this game on the upcoming iPhone.
Sorry, Windows users need not apply.
Update, 1:00 PM CST: If you decide to register Frenzic, feel free to add me as a friend.
Julio Ojeda-Zapata, for the St. Paul Pioneer Press:
I praise Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system, and I also curse it.
[…]
But after waiting five years — as in half a decade — for this thing, I think I should get something revolutionary, a PC operating system so astonishing it makes the competition look laughably primitive. The almighty Microsoft made this, right? So Vista–being released to consumers Tuesday–has to be jaw-droppingly superior, right?
Well, it’s not. Vista hardly rocked my world during weeks of testing. It’s a fine Windows upgrade, but it’s also a shameless rip-off (and not quite the equal) of another major operating system, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X.
That begs the question: Why not just use OS X?
Those upgrading from XP likely will have to get a new computer anyway because Vista doesn’t work properly on most older PCs. […] So, instead of purchasing a Windows PC, they could–and typically should–get an Apple Macintosh computer running OS X.
[Emphasis in the original. –R]