OS X Software

There are quite a few ways to achieve DVD Duplication.

The first is the easiest method, which is to use Apples built in DVD Burning facilities. You can take the contents of any DVD and store them to your Hard drive and then create a new DVD template, copying across the data.

Obviously this doesn’t help if you are duplicating DVDs which aren’t strictly data based. For this you will need 3rd party software and I recommend a program like Toast.

Toast has easy wizards for you to follow. It will allow you to create new DVDs, duplicate DVDs using 2 DVD burners or using 1 burner and your hard drive.

It’s not free, but it is generally regarded as the best solution for any general burning task and can also carry out the more advanced and complication burning such as video encoding.

You can also contact other businesses which specialize in duplicating and replicating your CDs and DVDs. For large duplications such as music band releases and software releases, using a company to sort out the problem will most likely be less hassle and will acheive a more professional result. There is a lot of competition in this market so keep your eyes open for the good deals and you will find yourself inundated with duplicated DVDs!

If you didn’t know this existed then you are living well in the past.

SMS messaging has been incredibly popular for a number of years now and still continues to grow each year.
Networks are flooded with text messages per hour and we have often seen big events such as the world cup and other such things clog up networks with texts, so much so infact, that sometimes it bring the network to a halt causing long delays in sending and receiving messages.

If you are the sort of person that isn’t so good at typing on your mobile phone on text speak, so you can quite easily find services free and payed for that allow you to send text messages to other peoples Mobile phones from your PC.

Something like SMS from PC will do the trick to allow you to keep in contact with friends and family without using your phone.

You may also find that your network provided gives you a certain number of free online texts to send, for example, O2 has an online feature to send text messages from your existing plan for free to other Phone users.

Give it a try if you haven’t, it’s a lot quicker than using your phone!

With the release of the Safari 4 public beta recently Apple seems to be really pushing it to grab more of the browser market share.

With previous articles mentioning the significant speed increases much like with chromes release it’s obvious to see Apple really want us to use their flagship browser.

If you go visit apple.com/safari/welcome you will be presented with a webpage that you probably can’t view. It is actually a simple HTML 5 and CSS3 to illustrate what is to come in the web world. Since Safari 4 now supports these new revisions they haven’t waited in showing them off to the public user.

Unfortently the likely case is we might be waiting a while yet before people start converting their sites to include the new mark ups due to the majority user using IE7!

The new build of OS X is soon to come out according to the internet buzz.

Testers have already been sent a late build for final testing indicating a public release will be very soon.

10.5.7 Improves on general performence as well as security holes plugged and supposive new support for the later hardware being released at the moment, such as the new i7 intel chips and latest ATI GFX.

If you were hoping for lots of new software additions including more shiny bells and whistles then you maybe a bit disappointed, you will just have to wait for the next major patch!

When it comes to photography you have hundreds and thousands of cameras to choose from, big, small, round, square. DSLR or a camera the size of your fingernail, theres everything.

When it comes to the software, generally the companies do a semi good job of providing what you need and mostly cameras are decent enough to work plug and play, to hook into programs such as photoshop without needing any drivers.

I’ve been working with scanners recently and let me tell you they generally aren’t anywhere as easy as cameras.

The first problem you have is, do they even work on Mac OS,  because like printers you might sometimes find yourself with no support at all, or the worst drivers known to man that barely work.

The only solution was to try and find some reviews of scanners from the 2008-2009 ranges and see if they were reviewed on Mac OS at all, which most won’t. I found reviews to focus on the performence and skipping the OS’s use of the scanner in terms of drivers and software. Which is fair enough, it just didn’t help me solve my issues.
In the end I gave up and got my document scanning done there, which saved me the hassle.
I probably could find a suitable scanner if I looked hard enough, but by that time I probably wouldn’t even need one anymore.

If anyone knows any decent articles / blog posts on scanners and their software let me know!

Apples cloud computing solution, MobileMe has yet again been further improved and this time it has been documented.

There are a number of changes, the major one being, the niggle where newly added contacts don’t appear in the compose window without having to login and out again to see them.

Other updates including faster performence in the Gallery and Calendar, tweaked contact search for more accurate results and an improved HTML email display.

The last update involves the login screen being brand new with a mobileme specific news section.

The full list can be found at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3409

The service has been automatically udpated so there is no need to go hunting for a service update patch, so stop looking for one already!

Twitter, the growing micro snippet service has been granted support by the Mac RSS program Newsfire.
The 1.6 beta update now allows users to check, update and add their twitter posts inside the program without the need of using their usual method.

Read something cool in your hundreds of RSS feeds? Well Twitter about it without leaving newsfire! Huzzah!

As far as I know this is newsfires first proper update since sometime in May last year so Twitter must be doing well for it self.

Another addition is support for sparkle, which allows the program to update itself to keep you upto date with the RSS feeds you have set up.

If you want to try this out you’ll find it here, leopard is required for installation.

One of the main announcements so far at Macworld 09 has been the usual yearly increment of software packages.

The main ones being iWork and iLife.

The new 09 editions have the usual visual tweaks and extra eye candy to draw you in and a list of new features such as:

• New and improved features and additions to keynote including advanced object transitions and chart animations. iPhone and iPod integration has also been added with the introduction of Keynote Remote, which allows you to preview the slides and navigate through the presentation.
• Pages has added better mail merge support with the integration of Address book and allowing you to mail merge using a spreadsheet in Numbers.
• Numbers has had many new additions and tweaks to mention here but its fair to say it’s growing features are making it a good choice over alternatives.

iLife has updated its suite aswell with the majority of additions coming in the form of Garageband 09 and iMovie 09 allowing you to be more creative and upto date than ever.

Another overhaul in iPhoto 09 also means that the recently awaited Picasa for Mac may of just been for nothing.

Full details of the new releases can be found at the usual spots of:

http://www.apple.com/iwork/ and http://www.apple.com/ilife

For those that are not familiar with Picasa, it’s a photo management system from Google.

It allows you to upload, manage and edit your photos much like flickr but with a few extras involved.

Google have recently announced that it’s software has now become available as a public beta to the Mac crowd.

The minimum requirements are: