Published by Nick Young April 28th, 2007
in Pictures.
or not… Apparently Steve Ballmer recently said that the Zune phone is “not a concept you’ll ever get from us”. In other words, we’ll let Apple develop the iPhone, then wait 5 years to see if it’s a hit. If it is, we’ll try to play catchup and produce an insanely crappy ‘iPhone Killer’. History does repeat itself! I can’t say that I’m all that disapointed, lol. If your curious as to what the Zune Phone will look like, I think Jean-Paul Buquet hit the nail on the head with his ‘iPhone Killer’ comic :)
Source: MacsimumNews.com
Published by Nick Young April 27th, 2007
in Poll.
I decided that I’m going to take this weeks poll in a different direction. All the polls that I’ve posted in the past have been mostly serious. We need a little splash of Hawaiian shirt Friday around here. So this week I pose the age old question, Pirates or Ninjas?
Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with Macs or Apple for that matter. To be honest, I really don’t know. I leave that to your imagination. Do Pirates and Ninjas relate to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in some off the wall comparison. Or better yet, which would use a mac? Pirates like the booty and Macs are all about sex appeal. But the sleek Apple design would definitely appeal to a Ninja. Its a toss up. I’d love to hear how you think Pirates and Ninjas relate to Apple/Macs. It’s all up to debate!
Now, on with the results of the last poll…
The previous poll here on Keynote 2 Keynote, pleased me. The results, displayed above, show that the readership here at K2K is quite varried. The readers have owned anywhere from 1 to 5+ Macs. There are even a handful of haters amongst us, don’t worry, I know where they sleep! Anyways, of those who voted, 57% of the readers are total fanatics and have owned 5+ macs. To those of you in this category I present to you the following AppleGeeks comic :)
Published by Nick Young April 26th, 2007
in Tutorial.
While staring at my Menu Bar today I thought to myself, there’s got to be a way to move those icons around. I tried the ol’ faithful drag with no luck. Then, as only a true keystroke freak would attempt, I began testing out modifier keys. I began with the normal keys. ctrl… alt… aha! The Apple key did the trick :)
If you feel the need to rearrange your menu bar icons, then simply hold down the command key, click on one of the icons, and drag it to a new position. Neat huh? If you have other menu bar icons from applications like Quicksilver, You Control: Tunes, or Visor you’ll immediately notice that this trick doesn’t always work.
There are two types of Menu Bar icons, the built-in OS X menu bar icons and 3rd party application icons. You may use this trick to rearrange the OS X icons among each other. However, you cannot move the OS X icons into the 3rd party application icon territory. I should also note that you cannot move the Spotlight icon either.
At some point in time you may want to clean up your menu bar a bit and remove any unused icons. The command + drag trick also works for removing icons. Just hold the command key down and drag the icon off the menu bar. You’ll see a small puff of smoke appear as the icon is removed, similar to what happens when you remove an icon from the dock. Be sure that you only remove icons that you really want off your menu bar, because there is no way to easily undo this. If you make a mistake or change your mind you’ll have to go poking around the System Preferences to find the option to turn the icon back on again.
I don’t know how I didn’t run across all this sooner. I’m sure there are long time Mac users that still don’t know this simple trick! I guess that’s why I’m here :)
Published by Nick Young April 25th, 2007
in Tutorial.
You’ve got a snazzy desktop picture, and a killer GeekTool stats/info display. But something is missing. Your dock just doesn’t jive with everything you’ve got setup. Not even setting the dock up to auto hide will please you. I was in that boat a few weeks ago, and now Mathew, the proud owner of a brand new MacBook is as well. Matt wrote me a quick email today asking for assistance.
I was wondering whether you’d ever come across a way to get the dock background to disappear/become transparent? I can’t seem to find an option anywhere and you seem to be the kinda guy who’d know such things!
Ask and you shall receive Matt :) I use an application created by Unsanity called ClearDock. ClearDock is free, easy, and available as a universal binary. Once ClearDock is installed it’s somewhat hidden. You can find it in the System Preferences and then under Application Enhancer.
At first glance you’ll notice that there are a few options that you can set. If all you care about is a transparent dock background then uncheck the Re-Color The Dock Background check box. That will give you a nice transparent dock like this screenshot. The other features that ClearDock offers are changing the color of the dock’s background, the dock’s border, and the color of the running application’s triangles. With a hint of creativity you can come up with a wild scheme like this :)
Hope this helped Matt!
Published by Nick Young April 25th, 2007
in Uncategorized.
In case you didn’t know Time Magazine prints a The Most Influential People of The Year edition every year. Luckily the decision isn’t only up to the Time editors. Thats right, you can cast your vote and rate each of the 200 candidates. And guess who made the list? The big kahuna himself, Steve Jobs. Thanks to Macenstine for getting the ball rolling and trying to get the word out to vote for Steve. But if we want to have any chance at winning this thing we need to keep the momentum rolling.
It’s time for you to do your duty and help out our fearless leader! It only takes a few seconds to vote. Go to the Time Magazines voting page and click on Steve Jobs’s name. Then crank the rating up to 100 and click Submit. But wait, there’s more you can do to help the cause! Give all the rest of the candidates ahead of Steve Jobs a rating of 0 :) This should move Steve up the list fairly quickly.
Earlier today Angelina Jolie was 2 spots ahead of el Steve-O, which made me want to crawl under a rock and die. But things can change in a hurry! Steve is now 4 places ahead of her, as he should be. But what really irks me is that J.K. Rowling is rated higher than Steve Jobs. Give me a break… Harry Potter is more influential than the man behind the iPod, iPhone, and the Macintosh? I can stomach Steve not getting first place, but losing to Harry Potter just isn’t right. Get out there and Rock The Vote!
Published by Nick Young April 24th, 2007
in Tutorial.
Right when I was sitting down at the computer trying to figure out what to write about a new comment was posted here on Keynote 2 Keynote. The comment from Dave included a question. What a coincidence, I needed something to write about and Dave provided me with an idea for a quick tutorial. Here’s Dave’s question.
Do you know a way to get transmission to automatically start up and download?
I’m guessing that you mean startup automatically when you boot up your Mac? If so you’re in luck Dave. Not only do I know how to automatically startup transmission, but the method will work for any application :)
The bread crumbs lead to the System Preferences and this is where you’ll begin your journey. Once you open the System Preferences you want to click on Accounts, it’s in the System category towards the bottom. Near the top of the Accounts window you’re looking for the button that says Login Items, click that. Note: This tutorial is for OS X 10.4.9, if you are using a previous version of OS X the Login Items may be located somewhere else.
Once you make it to the Login Items window you want to click the + button that’s depicted in the screenshot above. The + button brings up a dialog box which allows you to select a program that you would like to launch at startup. Click Add once you’re finished. At this point you’re 99% finished. If you’d like the application that you are launching at startup to be hidden (ie using the Apple+H keystroke) by default then click the checkbox next to the item. This will keep you desktop nice and clutter free if you end up adding lots of Login Items. Wasn’t that fairly painless? You can now setup any program you’d like to launch when you boot up your mac using these simple instructions.
Now back to Dave’s original question. Transmission is designed to begin downloading as soon as the application is launched. So if you setup Transmission as a Launch Item your torrents should begin downloading as soon as you boot up your Mac! I Hope this answered your question and maybe enlightened a few other readers as well :)
If anyone would like some further reading about Launch Items, MacFixIt.com has a pretty decent Q&A article about the subject.
