Tutorials
How to Transfer Music from an iPod to your Mac
Matt Cone March 13, 2007
The iPod is probably the best portable music player the world has ever seen. It’s simple to use, easy to operate, and instantly updatable. Never before has it been so easy to purchase, store, and transport thousands of songs. It’s easy to take this beautiful and reliable device for granted! But the iPod isn’t perfect. One of our pet peeves is the inability to transfer an iPod’s music to a computer.
How to Resize the Dock
Matt Cone March 13, 2007
The Dock is an application launcher that normally resides at the bottom of your desktop. Most of us know and love this integral part of Mac OS X, but sometimes the Dock gets in the way. Fortunately, resizing or hiding the Dock is easy. We’ll show you how to do it. This is the Dock. A black triangle under an icon indicates that the program is running: The Dock contains shortcuts to programs - you can even add your favorite applications and remove the ones you don’t use.
Roll Your Own Mac App
Matt Cone March 12, 2007
Have you ever wondered how Mac applications are made? Then you’ve come to the right place! This article was written for anyone wanting to get into Mac programming or interface design. We’ll be discussing Cocoa, Apple’s native object-oriented application programming environment for Mac OS X, which is (for the true nerds out there) one of the five major APIs available for Mac OS X. We’ll be using Xcode for all of this.
How to Create a Desktop Slideshow
Matt Cone March 8, 2007
If you’re like us, you love browsing and collecting nice desktop pictures. There are literally thousands of websites that provide free desktop pictures. Anybody can download one of these works of art and set it as their desktop. And, if you have a digital camera and use iPhoto, you can set one of your own photos as your desktop picture. The problem is that you only have one desktop, and having one desktop means you can only display one desktop picture at a time.
Software Piracy: Black Beard & Captain Kidd!
Joe Wilkins March 7, 2007
In keeping with a recent article about piracy in the Runtime Revolution Newsletter, I’ve chosen to reprint an article I wrote in 2000 for the original Macinstruct website. It is still quite relevant and on target. Last week’s Code Mojo article presented me with significant issues - more than I had originally thought - but I will be back next week reviewing some of the scripting that was done in the Coloring Book application.
How to Write Your First AppleScript
Matt Cone March 7, 2007
Apple describes AppleScript as “an English-like language used to write script files that automate the actions of the computer and the applications that run on it.” I’d add that AppleScript is the easiest scripting language to learn, because it’s so similar to English and it’s very easy to understand. Script Editor - The Scripting Application To write AppleScripts, you need Script Editor, an application included with Mac OS X (located in /Applications/AppleScript/).
How to Use Comic Life in the Classroom
Charles Thacker March 7, 2007
There’s a long history of comics in the classroom, and the list of references at the end of this article is a great starting point for learning about this concept. While there’s still resistance to this medium being used in education - whether by staff or students - there is also a growing movement to use every valuable tool available. Comics have some great uses in the classroom and in a variety of curricula.
Mac Backup Basics
Ric Getter March 5, 2007
It was years ago, but I still remember it. It started out as one of those odd little crashes. A completely empty dialog box appears and then everything freezes. Okay. It happens. The keyboard is frozen as well, so I reach down and cycle the power button on the CPU. The friendly thrum of the startup chime comes from the speakers and a few moments later, the flashing question mark of the mystery disk icon appears at the center of the otherwise empty screen.
TextWrangler: The Best Free Text Editor
Matt Cone March 1, 2007
I don’t care what Justin Long and John Hodgman say in the Get a Mac commercials. The best thing about Macs is all of the quality freeware and shareware software. Sure, Mac users often take this software for granted, but if you really use PCs - and I mean really use them, not just play around with them at BestBuy - you’ll quickly find yourself missing the third-party Mac applications.
How to Use RSS
Matt Cone February 28, 2007
Just as the internet revolutionized communications in the early ’90s, RSS is fundamentally changing the way we receive information. Years ago, before RSS came into its own, we visited websites that published news, posted links, and provided information. We bookmarked our favorite websites and checked them frequently, because there wasn’t any other way to tell when they were updated. No longer. Thanks to RSS - which stands for Really Simple Syndication - we can receive everything from news and blogs to podcasts and iPhoto pictures without even opening our web browser.