Archive for the ‘Macintosh Tips & Help’ Category

Increase your iPhone’s Battery life

Posted on 26 July 2008 in Macintosh Tips & Help, iPhone & iPhone 3G | No Comments »

These advises apply to iPhone users, especially iPhone 3G users (since the battery life is weaker for the 2nd iPhone).

  1. First thing to do of course, is to turn off “bluetooth”. Apple didn’t make of it a very interesting feature after all since you can’t send/receive anything from a computer or other device. No regrets then.
  2. Second thing to do is to turn off the auto-brightness and be sure you didn’t set the brightness to the max (a bit more than 50% is ok).
  3. Turn off push and sync your iPhone from iTunes like you used to before.
    If you really want to keep “push” for emails, you can at least turn it off for calendars, bookmarks and contacts.
    It’s also better to set “fetch” to manually.
  4. Don’t hesitate to restart your iPhone from time to time to give it some “air” to breathe.
  5. I remind you, you can also force quit applications from your iPhone just like in a Mac, by pressing and holding the Home button until the crashing application quits.
  6. Turn off Wi-Fi when you’re not using it, free hotspots are rare in most of the countries after all.
  7. You can also just turn off the phone when you don’t need it (theater, club or else) or just turn on Airplane mode.
  8. When you charge your iPhone, be sure you make full cycles, it’s better to charge it when you have 20% and less battery remaining (not before).

8 Steps to make your iPhone sync your data Over the Air

Posted on 23 July 2008 in Macintosh Tips & Help, dotmac & MobileMe, iPhone & iPhone 3G | No Comments »

A lot of people are complaining about the fact their iPhone isn’t receiving anything from the MobileMe cloud; and I was one of them; but I finally managed and it is now up and working!
Here are the steps I followed to make my iPhone sync my data “over the air“:

  1. Sync the iPhone and uncheck the email sync (in iTunes)
  2. Open mail.app and deleted my .mac account
  3. Setup a “brand new” mobileme account
  4. Sync from system preferences the datas (contacts, ical etc)
  5. Sync the iPhone and check the MobileMe account (in iTunes)
  6. Went to the iPhone and set it up (pref>general>mail, contacts…) to sync these datas over the air
  7. (I saw) the contacts names appearing instead of their phone numbers in the recent/missed calls and on the SMS received and sent but still nothing in my address book
  8. Restart the iPhone: everything is there!

I still don’t know which of these steps made the “thing” work though…

Custom Stacks Icons

Posted on 16 July 2008 in Leopard, Mac OS X, Macintosh Tips & Help, Mods and Hacks | No Comments »

This free application, Stacks In Da Place, is the easiest way to make your Stacks lokk cool.

All you have to do is to drag and drop a Stack Icon, like one of the great creations available here, and it will create a real box with a stack of files in it!

Customizing Leopard’s Dock

Posted on 12 July 2008 in Macintosh Tips & Help, Mods and Hacks | 3 Comments »

I just discovered a free application which simply relooks Leopard’s Dock.

You can get LeopardDocks App here, and download Docks here.

Once your Dock is re-designed, no need to keep the app running.

This is my favorite Dock right now :


How do You update the .Mac service in System Preferences to MobileMe

Posted on 11 July 2008 in Macintosh Tips & Help, dotmac & MobileMe | 3 Comments »

The Leopard Version of the MobileMe updater was posted by Apple a few hours ago, it wasn’t and it is still not available from your Software Updater.
But a strange thing happened… While it was possible to download the package from here, the link now, is dead.
I have no idea on why this is happening…
Anyway, one thing is now sure, Leopard won’t turn to iTunes OS!
A possible solution is to get it from a Torrents website, for example, this link takes you to a downloadable MobileMe updater.

The file is small: 25 Mb, once installed, you’ll have the updated MobileMe icon in System Preferences instead of the ancien .Mac icon (I’m still looking for the updater for Tiger).

If you check your Software Update after installing the file I linked you to, you’ll see the version 1.1 of MobileMe Updater!

I was expecting to see a small cloud in the menu bar instead of the old double arrows circle, but all I had was… nothing.

Dock Application Launchers

Posted on 6 July 2008 in 3rd Party Software, Macintosh Tips & Help | No Comments »

How many icons will you need on your dock for the Microsoft Office Suite? 5.
For iLife? 6 icons.
For iWork? 3 icons!
The aim of these Dock applications launchers is to reduce clutters in your dock.
Each of them is less than 100 kb and they use 0% of your CPU active or idle.
Intuitive to use: right click on them and you’ll see the entire series Applications:

Download:

Last.fm & Leopard

Posted on 26 June 2008 in 3rd Party Software, Macintosh Tips & Help, iTunes | 3 Comments »

Why doesn’t the Last.fm client work for most (or all) Leopard users?
The explanation must be too technical or inexistent. I’ve tried all that a normal user can do to make it work: deleting preferences of the application, delete and re-install it, changed my last.fm password.. but in vain.
Before Leopard got released I wasn’t using the Last.fm client anyways, I had a crush for CoverSutra when it became compatible with Last.fm.
But even CoverSutra isn’t working for me on Leopard (I’m not the only one having this problem it seems), add to that the fact the application became too heavy with its new spotlight like feature.

Today a friend gave me the solution; downgrade to CoverSutra version 1.1.4 and it works!!!


I took the little heart (in the menu bar) that comes with CoverSutra version 2 and here I am scrobbling again the songs I’m listening!

My Last.fm account: this way.