Macgasm

In this week’s Mac OS X Tip, I’m going to show you how to move your iTunes library to an external hard drive.  If your iTunes library is like mine you know that your iMac or MacBook Pro’s hard drive will fill up quickly.  An external hard drive will be your best friend to help you let your library grow.  Two weeks ago I explained how to backup your library to an external hard drive.  In this week’s tip I’m going to expand on this method.

The first step is very important.  You will want to choose an external hard drive that will grow with your library.  I recommend getting a 1TB to 2TB hard drive.  I am currently using a 1TB hard drive for my library. I would recommend using the Western Digital My Book. I have been using the My Book
drives, and they have been the most reliable. With this step out of the way, let’s now delve into moving your library, and pointing iTunes to the new hard drive. Let’s begin.

• Open up two Finder windows.
• Navigate to your iTunes folder. It is located under your Home Directory in the Music folder.
• Now that you are in the correct location right click on the iTunes folder and select Copy “iTunes”.
• Now navigate to your external hard drive.  Once there select Paste Item.
• This process can take some time depending on how large your library is.
• Now that the copying process has completed you can now open iTunes to start the process of pointing iTunes to your new library
• Click on the iTunes drop down menu and select Preferences
• Click on Advanced.  In here you will see the current location of your iTunes Library.
• Click on Change.  You will see your Media Folder Location window.  In here you will select your external hard drive.  Now you will click on the iTunes folder, and finally you will click on the iTunes Music folder and click Choose.
• Now Click Ok.

You have now successfully set up iTunes to use an external hard drive for your library.  When your current external hard drive fills up, just repeat the steps listed above to move your library to an even larger hard drive.  Now sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor, and your iTunes library too.

Photo Credit: external hard drive

By the end of 2010 Seagate will be shipping 3TB drives, and up until recently many were worried that OS X would be unable to support the drives. Usually when this happens an operating system would only let users access the storage limits defined by operating systems and BIOSes. For instance, Windows XP machines may only be able to see a portion of the available disk space.

A Seagate representative confirmed that Macs, through the utilization of the EFI firmware, will be will be able to fully access the 3TB drives.

This is great news for those of us who edit video. The more hard drive space the better.

Article Via Electronista

Photo Credit VanjaMk1

It’s been a long time coming, and finally Nike is getting around to shipping the Nike+ heart rate monitor that it announced back in September. Nine months after the device was mentioned on the Apple Store, it’s finally becoming a reality—just in time for WWDC announcements. Go Figure.

We’re not sure how the device is going to work, or just how expensive it may be, but I’d be willing to bet that we’ll get some news at WWDC. A heart rate monitor for iPods and iPhones is kind of a big deal.

An except from the Nike Plus iPod guide:

Linking a Nike + iPod Compatible Remote or Heart Rate Monitor

Nike + iPod compatible devices are sold separately from the Nike + iPod
Sport Kit and the Nike + iPod Sensor.

You can use a compatible remote to control Nike + iPod wirelessly while
you work out.

iPod nano (5th generation only) also supports Nike + iPod compatible heart rate monitors.

Before using one of these devices for the first time, you must link it to your iPod nano receiver, iPhone 3GS, or iPod touch.

To link to a Nike+ compatible remote (sold separately):

• Pod nano: Connect your Nike + iPod receiver to your iPod nano, choose Nike + iPod > Settings > Remote > Link, then follow the onscreen instructions.
• iPhone 3GS and iPod touch: Choose Settings > Nike + iPod > Remote, then follow the onscreen instructions.

To link to a Nike+ compatible heart rate monitor (sold separately):

• iPod nano (5th generation only): Connect your Nike + iPod receiver to your iPod nano, choose Nike + iPod > Settings > Heart Rate Monitor > Link, then follow the onscreen instructions.

If you’re interested in picking up Nike+ for your iPod you can get it on Amazon for 39.95.

Article Via Apple Insider

It seems to be the month for gaming on the Mac. Valve released Steam, iPad games are climbing the charts, and now PopCap has decided to release all 13 of their games in a bundle. Your work week seems to have just got a little bit more sidetracked.

Included in the bundle are classics such as Feeding Frenzy, Bejeweled 2, Plants Vs. Zombies, and Peggle, along with the rest of their lineup.

It’s available for a limited time, so if you’re even remotely interested in picking up any of these games you’re going to want to check them out.

PuzzleManiak HD was brought to my attention by listening to TWiT.tv’s Security Now, so I figured I would give it a try.

PuzzleManiak is a set of 20 games that make you think. Each of the games has their own set of challenges and difficulties. I’ll highlight a few of my favorite games: Light Up, Untangle, Rectangles, Bridges, and Net.

Light Up is a game where you are presented a grid containing black squares, white squares and black numbered squares. You must place dots next to each numbered square, but the number of dots cannot exceed the numbered square. For instance, if you have a squared numbered ’3′ you must place 3 dots next to it. Each dot illuminates the row horizontally and vertically. Additionally, no two dots can be in the same row unless separated by a numbered square or a black square. There are six different size boards, ranging from a 7×7 grid to a 17×17 grid. Along with the six board sizes you also have three difficulty levels so you can mix and match to your liking.

Untangle is a game where you must untangle a mess of wires. The key is that no wire may be crossing another. All of the wires are connected via dots that must be manipulated in order to untangle the mess. There are six different difficulty levels, meaning number of dots that must be moved. This ranges from six to 26. Believe me, be prepared to spend a bit of time with the 26 dots to untangle them all.

Rectangles is a game where you are presented a grid with numbers. Each rectangle must contain that number of squares. Each square must be within a rectangle otherwise the game doesn’t end. The numbers range from 2 to 36 depending on difficulty. The difficulty levels are based on size of the board. The board sizes range from 7×7 to 15×15. This can make for an interesting time trying to determine how all of the pieces fit together.

Bridges is an interesting game where you must connect dots together. Sounds easy, right? Well, not always. You can only go horizontally and vertically and each dot has a number and that dot has to have that number of bridges connected to it. Think of it as an interstate road system. You can double up on bridges leading from each dot. So a dot with a ’5′ can have two bridges left, two bridges towards the bottom and one to the right. Like Light Up, there are six different grid sizes along with three difficulty levels. The board sizes are from 7×7 to 17×17.

The final game I’ll discuss is called Net. The idea is to adjust each of the squares so that they are all illuminated. Not every one has to lead somewhere, but they all must be illuminated. The tricky part comes in the number of leads coming out of the middle square. Sometimes you get two, sometimes you get four, depending on the game. There are five grid sizes from 5×5 to 13×13 and two difficulties, with walls and without walls. Without walls means that the flow can pass from the left edge to the right edge, much like PacMan could travel from the left side of the screen to the right side.

Overall for a $1.99 you can’t beat PuzzleManiak . High scores are maintained for each game as well as difficulty level so you can see how well you’re doing. It will get you to think about how things work and is really good to get kids thinking outside the box. There is also an iPhone Version of the game. You can get your copy from the App Store today. Be prepared to spend hours playing the game. And don’t ask me where your time went.

Image sources are from PuzzleManiakHD.

Gruml is a Google Reader for Mac.  It is currently in beta, so all the bugs aren’t completely worked out.  But Gruml is a very capable feed reader with lots of great integrated social features.

Gruml is easy to set up.  As soon as you open the app you are prompted to enter your Google Reader log in details.  The app then loads up your feeds super fast with folders and everything else intact.  Your feeds are constantly synchronized with your Google Reader account.

You can link Gruml with a whole host of social sites including Digg, Diigo, Delicious, Evernote, Facebook, Instapaper, MySpace, ping.fm, Posterous, ReadItLater, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Tumblr.  Plus, you can instantly tweet any article and the URL is automatically shortened for you.

The interface is made up of three panes:  the sidebar with all of your feeds, folders, and tags; the article list pane, which lists all of your unread feeds in bold along with author, date, feed source, etc.; and the preview pane which shows a preview of the active feed. You can choose between two layouts. The first arranges the three panels in vertical columns.  

The second places the preview panel underneath the feed panel.  I prefer the latter because it allows you to see all of the columns in the article list view whereas the vertical style obscures them.To see the entire article, simply double click on a feed title.  A tab opens above the article list pane which you can then click to view the article.  I found this a little cumbersome since it requires an extra click—usually when you double click on something, a window opens immediately for your viewing pleasure.  Gruml does open a window but it’s not immediately obvious that you have to click on the tab in order to see it.  The nice thing about this is that you can go through your entire list of feeds, double click on the ones you’d like to view in full, and then come back to read them later.

The coolest thing about Gruml is its social interface.  You can send any item to any social network with the click of a button—just drag the network icons you want into your toolbar and click away. Also, if you use Blog Thing, ecto, MarsEdit, or XJournal, you can post items directly to your blog. Gruml also supports posting notes to Google Reader.

Another great feature of Gruml is that when you click the menubar icon, a drop down window appears listing your most recent feeds.  This makes all your feeds instantly accessible, even when you’re not in Gruml proper.

Initially, I was a little put off by Gruml’s tiny fonts, especially in the feed pane.  However, you can enlarge the font in the preview pain using Command-+, and in Preferences you can choose the font and font size for the feed management pane and the current feeds pane.  My middle-aged eyes were much happier when I increased the font size!

If you’re looking for a dedicated Google Reader for your Mac, take a look at Gruml.  The download is free while the app is in beta, and the developers are obviously open to feedback and bug reports.

Apple patent highlights Facebook

Apple has been attempting to gain traction in the mobile space since the iPod’s inception back in 2001. Obviously, they have made some great strides in this domain and the latest is this new patent, which effectively is syncing of ‘social network items’ between differing devices.

Some of the examples that they give are ‘contact information, calendar appointments, and to-do lists’. These seem like some reasonable items to want to sync between two different iPhone OS devices. I know I would love to have all of my pictures and application data synced between my iPhone and my iPad, however this is not the main intent of the patent. The main intent is “Apple’s Goal is to Simplify Social Networking Exchanges”.

To me this means Apple is looking to create an App (no doubt they are already working on this) that would allow for such synchronization. The basic idea is not much different than the current syncing model used for your iPhone OS devices and iTunes. You have the initiator (iTunes) and the target device (iPhone OS device). With this model you would replace iTunes with a ‘primary’ iPhone OS device (iPhone) with the target device being another iPhone OS device (iPad).

Now you may be asking yourself where could this be useful. There are a couple of examples; one being a household where it would transfer a shopping list between a housekeeper and employer (seems a bit of a stretch given the economy, but ok). The second, and more plausible example, is at a school where a student could turn in their homework, sync a schedule or add a contact. The second example seems more likely as to what is to be expected and a potential use case.

I can see classrooms from elementary school all the way through college where this could easily become a viable mechanism to turn in assignments. Couple this app with the ability for teachers to customize where the documents go (say a network shared folder), and then throw in some custom programming (or maybe just some AppleScript) for these files to automatically be sent to a service that checks for plagiarism. In the event of a hit, an email or even a push notification could be automatically sent to the teacher with the finalized report. Automation at its finest. This is how technology should work for everybody, not just those who are able to piece it all together.

We may never see this come to fruition, but it is rather interesting to see what Apple may possibly have in-store for a future OS release.

Images and article via Patently Apple

With only a few weeks left before WWDC reports are coming out that Apple will unveil the new 4G iPhone on June 7th.  Before I go any further, I just would like to point out that I feel most of the excitement of this event has been taking away by Gizmodo’s video of the prototype iPhone.  It’s like finding out what you are getting for Christmas before Christmas day.  With that said and out of the way let’s continue.

Willie Teng of DIGITIMES is reporting on hardware that will be out for the new iPhone:

“The new device will adopt IPS (in-plane switching) panels with FFS (fringe-field switching) technology and a 960×640 resolution”, Kuo said, noting that LG Display and Prime View International are the panel suppliers.

“The iPhone 4G will run on the Arm Cortex A8 processor and a 512MB memory module from Samsung Electronics, doubling the memory capacity seen in the iPhone 3GS to take advantage of the multi-tasking capability of the iPhone 4.0 platform”, Kuo revealed.

I had a feeling that Apple was going to go with the IPS screens, since this is what they are using on the iPads.  It’s only logical that they are going this route.  I’m also happy to see that Apple is increasing the resolution to 960×640.  This will put it close to the iPad’s resolution of 1024×768.  I wonder if Apple will release their current video library in the new resolution.  They had done this before when they went from 320×240 to 640×480.  Time will tell; we’ll just have to wait and see.

Moreover, I’m excited to see that Apple will once again double the memory on the iPhone from 256MB to a whopping 512MB of RAM.  The one thing that puzzles me is: why did they not do this with the iPad?  The iPad comes with only 256MB of memory.  One would think that Apple would place 512MB of memory in the iPad since they will be putting it in the new iPhone.  The only reason I can think that they did not do this is for cost reasons.

Teng also talks about how the battery life will be improved upon on the new iPhone.  Apple will not achieve this by adding an additional battery like they did on the iPad. Teng explains how:

“To solve battery life issues, the new iPhone’s panel is 33% thinner than in previous iPhone versions to permit more space for larger battery modules supplied by Simplo Technology and Dynapack International Technology”, Kuo said.

So, instead of two batteries like on the iPad, you’ll get a bigger battery.  I don’t know about you, but the more juice I can squeeze out of the iPhone’s battery the better.  I have the iPhone 3G, and I usually have to charge it by lunch time because my battery is almost drained.  This is why I like Apple.  They continuously improve upon their products.  They are never satisfied with just good; they want exceptional.

The hardware looks to be very impressive for the new iPhone.  We already know the software that’s behind the hardware, as we got a glimpse of it back in April.  Now we wait till WWDC to see what is announced.  I’d like to hear from you: what do you think about the leaked iPhone video?  What are your thoughts about the new hardware?  Leave a comment below in the comment section, and let us hear your thoughts on these topics.

Photo Credit: iphone

Article Via DIGITIMES