I went to MacWorld Boston yesterday. It's was my first conference where I wasn't working. One thing I found is the course tracks were designed for musicians, movie makers and graphic designers which I am not. So I went to the Mac OSX Tiger classes. Two were by David Pogue author of The Missing Manual series. He's a very fun speaker, and covered a number of tips. He was at the O'Reilly booth signing books they were selling for 30% off. I picked up the Tiger Edition of Mac OSX: The Missing Manual and also AppleScript The Missing Manual because AppleScript: The Definitive Guide is boring me to death (100 pages in and not up to "Hello World" yet). In the afternoon I heard a similar talk by Dan Frakes
The best tip I learned was that in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard and Mouse Preferences you can add or change keybindings for any menu command in any program. For example, in iPhoto there's no keybinding for "Revert to Original", in this tab, you add one. Another fun one is If you create ~/Library/PDF Services/ you can put aliases in there and they will appear in the PDF drop down of all print dialogs. It's a good place to put a link to your Desktop and in /Library/PDF Services apple includes various Automator workflows to do useful things like mail PDFs or save in a ~/Documents/Web Receipts/ folder. The last good one is I learned that Tiger added a slideshow mode so you don't have to bother with iPhoto. Just select some images in the finder, Control-Click on one and select "Slideshow" from the context menu.
There were fewer exhibitors than I was expecting and nothing all that interesting. Harmon Kardon had a good adaptor to connect the iPod to a car. It had a remote display to mount on the dash or windshield and a click-wheel like remote control. It has a line out and an FM transmitter. It doesn't ship till October and will probably be a whopping $200. On the lower tech fronts cableyoyo is a neat way to avoid tangled cables and Invisible Shield seems like a good iPod protector. While waiting for the exhibition floor to open some kid said to me "Hey man, same notebook" and pointed to the moleskin in my shirt pocket. Someone else was low tech too.
That being said, i didn't go back today. Parking was $29 and I'd seen all the exhibitors. The courses would have been more tips which I can basically find online. Maybe the California one is more interesting.
2 comments:
>Harmon Kardon had a good adaptor to connect the iPod to a car. It had a remote display to mount on the dash or windshield and a click-wheel like remote control. It has a line out and an FM transmitter.<
Don't go the FM modulation route, not very good audio, try one of these line level adaptors:
iPod Car Adaptors
Note these are vehicle specific, ie. Toyota iPod Adaptor
Some of these can even interface directly with the steering wheel volume controls, etc. when used with a disc changer cable.
Yeah I know FM isn't as good. The device has 3 options to get the sound to your car stereo. One is a line out but if your car stereo doesn't have a line in that doesn't help. There's another which I forget, and the third option, as a fall back is FM.
I currently use an iTrip and have been pretty satisfied with it. I don't need great fidelity in general but especially in a car. It's biggest problem is needing to change frequencies if you find some interference but that only seems to be an issue on a long trip.
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