Tag Archives: mac

Great-looking Color Palettes In No Time

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Have you ever wondered how to come up with a slick-looking color palette for your site? Maybe there’s some constraints that you gotta operate under, but you can still play with some elements… yet there’s so much room for screwing up and coming up with a very ugly-looking combination that screams for forgiveness.

Fear not! There is kuler from Adobe Labs, to help you non-designers (and even designers in a rush) to come up with great-looking color palettes to help you out of a color “hole”.

And if you are a Mac user, you can also get the kuler dashboard widget on your desktop.

Office for Mac: What a Difference 4 Years Make!

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Four years. That is how long it took for a new Microsoft Office for Mac to arrive, but it will be a reality this coming Tuesday, coinciding with the kickoff of MacWorld 2008 in San Francisco (no, I won’t be in attendance).

If you, like me, thought that MS Office for Mac 2008 sucked, make sure to pre-order your copy of the 2008 version by following the link below and you will also be contributing to make this blog a few pennies richer! :)


Apple Online Store

MacBook Running Leopard

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Well, I did the unthinkable: went crazy, lost my mind… I ran the upgrade to Leopard overnight, without babysitting it! And it worked! When I woke up this morning my MacBook was sporting a brand new Operating System and asking me for 2 simple screens worth of confirmation information (one for Registration and one for .Mac -so it wasn’t even for setup purposes).

Apple did it again: everything is in its place and running like a charm.

Getting Wireless Router to Like my MacBook

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(or maybe it’s the other way around…)

I used to have my Linksys Wireless Router set up to use WEP security and that went well until we brought the MacBook in. I couldn’t connect to it not even once. So, this week my friend Danilo recommended I switched to another protocol called WPA Personal.

It worked like a charm, plus I realized I am now more secure: according to Wikipedia WPA (which stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access) “was created in response to several serious weaknesses researchers had found in the previous system, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).“

Almost Done Leaving the Laptop PC Behind

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Getting the MacBook to be an all-solution for my needs is closer to becoming a reality. In the past few days I’ve spent some time finding solutions to migrate the two biggest items that reside in my computer:
-My e-mail of the past 7 years.
-My personal finances (of the same period).

Dealing with my e-mail is something for which I’ve found a fantastic solution. After reading through some painfully long processes to get the WHOLE mailbox to come over to my Apple (via GMail), Luis made me realize something that I hadn’t thought of: I don’t really need ALL my e-mail from the past 7 years! :)

So today I am close to done archiving close to 95% of my e-mail, which I will be burning on a DVD (or two). That will leave me with “only” 260MB worth of mail to migrate (if I end up doing it).

As a permanent solution I’ve opted to use GMail, so all my aliases end up there instead of GoDaddy’s interface. That way, I am pretty much platform agnostic, whether I am on my Mac at home or at work (did I mention we got migrated to iMacs in the office? Pictures coming soon!)

As for personal finances, I am still working on that. I won’t move away from the laptop (where I use Microsoft Money) entirely until the new fiscal year. By then, I hope I’ve identified a good solution for the Mac, hopefully without having to use Bootcamp or Parallels (to run Money on Windows there). It seems more and more, Jan. 1, 2008, I will just start with a new software for this, with starting balances in my accounts, instead of going back 7 years of data and trying QIF files to behave well between Money and any software I go to… but we’ll see.

Any suggestions you have for Mac-based personal (and small business) finance management software, I am all ears.

Adobe Lightroom

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OK. Tell me I am not alone in thinking that iPhoto just doesn’t cut it if you want to easily manage hundreds (or thousands of photos). Am I alone? :(

I admit I am a bit frustrated with how iPhoto handles our 12 thousand digital photo library taken over the years, mostly the ability to bundle them and tag them. Recently I consolidated our entire picture library in our Mac and I am disappointed at the performance of the software.

So I started to look around: obviously Aperture is an option, but the $299 price tag does not make me too happy. My search continued…

Today I learned about Adobe Lightroom, thanks to my friend Kris Krug. Until February 28, they are still offering the last Beta build for download, so I am taking it out for a spin. I wonder if anyone reading this has tried it, so you can share your insights about it.

If it’s as great as Kris says, I will stick with it… plus at $199 it’s not as elusive! ;)

Digg: The Traffic Hose

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Thursday evening I posted the video that my friend Danilo shot and edited on the arrival of 500 Mac Book Pros to Full Sail.

After I posted about that, I dugg the post and within seconds after hitting the Digg home page (after it had been dugg over 100 times), the traffic started literally pouring in.

It’s ironic, because the digg was in front of digg users probably for a matter of seconds (that is how fast content “moves” there -see Digg Spy, if you don’t believe me). Yet the net traffic it drove towards my blog was unprecedented:

-Almost 5,000 visits in the course of Friday alone. There were moments when there were well over 200 people hitting the blog in an hour
-Within ten days of the month of February, my previous monthly traffic record was shattered (I don’t know yet what the total traffic for the month will be, since there is still a healthy residual traffic coming as a result of the digg).
-Over 10 new blogs linked to “Ask Manny”, which had an immediate impact on my Technorati ranking: from somwhere around spot #129,000 the blog rised to #89,758.

Thanks to the blogs and feeds that linked back to the Mac Book Pro post:
http://www.mi3dot.org/news/comments/3196/
http://www.macsurfer.com/
http://tradermike.net/2007/02/links_for_2007-02-10/
http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/02/five_hundred_ma.html
http://www.sdjl.co.uk/2007/02/09/one-million/
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/02/09/a-million-bucks-of-macbooks/
http://www.iphonebitz.com/a-million-bucks-of-macbook-pros/
http://www.iphones4u.info/a-million-bucks-of-macbook-pros/
http://doggdot.us/?page=3
http://www.dwblog.net/
http://corejam.com/
http://apple.feedcollection.org/

Thanks too to all those who paid a visit to this blog in the past few hours.

I am honestly humbled and I thank Danilo for sharing the opportunity of getting so much traffic that, otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten. Indeed the “cult of the Mac” can be a powerful attraction… much more than what I would have ever imagined.

$1 million of MacBook Pros in One Room

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My friend Danilo also works with me at Full Sail. He’s a big Apple fan, so it didn’t surprise me when he disappeared for a few hours to go make this video:

He says:

The school where I work (fullsail.com) started this thing where most new students order their own MacBook Pro for their classes. Apparently this truck is just the first shipment. I wish there was an extra one for me.

(version en español, cortesia de Luis)