Mac Junkie

I have been using Apples new Office Suite iWork 09. Almost immediately I was amazed at how easy it was to use, signifiant improvements over the 08 suite and now a serious competitor to Mac Office 2008. I primarily use the spreadsheet and word processing applications Pages 09 and Numbers 09. Numbers allows me to quickly organize my data and to make beautiful charts on the fly. I love pages because of it page layout style functionality. It creates beautiful documents easily. I used to have to wrestle with MS Word to get documents to look and print the way I wanted them to.. If your not sold yet you can download a free trial: http://www.apple.com/iwork/download-trial/

Saft is a Safari plugin to add features like draggable tabs, full-screen browsing, searchable bookmarks and history, URL shortcuts, kiosk mode and more. I’ve been using Saft for over a year and have come to depend on it for my browsing experience. The features I’ve come to rely on the most are remembering the windows that were last open when you quit safari, it also features undo for the times you accidently close a browser window with a bunch of open tabs. It also features blocking of adds… for a complete feature list check out Saft for Safari

Screenwriting software is rather self explanatory, basically it is a glorified word processor that allows writers to easily format their writing in a script fashion. I won’t focus on Pros of Final Draft because there aren’t many. It formats your screen play so you don’t have to. There are however so many cons with this particular application I could rant forever, but I keep to a short list.

1) It costs $229! common its a word processor and not a good one at that…

2) It has a strict and very limited license, you have to activate the software on your computer, not only is it a pain in the ass you are only allowed to install it on 2 computers. That may be fine for some writers but I personally have two laptops and a desktop that I work on. for $229 I expect more flexibility.

3) The Program itself is not intuitive, if I’m writing dialog between a few characters it should be-capable of guessing the correct auto complete information when selecting character names and scene headings. It guesses wrong about 20% of the time.

4) The spell check is the worst. It has trouble guessing the correct word and it doesn’t even have built in definitions for common camera direction or set lingo. i.e. if I write CU for close up it thinks the word is misspelled.

5) There is no easy way to store snippets or notes in the program, yes there is a script-note feature but it is more complex than it should be.

6) Updates are nonexistent, this isn’t a complex program, it takes forever for basic updates to come out and when a new version comes out there is a list of lackluster features for your $70 upgrade..

If this software didn’t have a strangle hold on the industry as a standard it would wither and die.. I know I won’t attend the funeral when it does…

Mac Lenders is a community of Macintosh Enthusiasts who have gathered together to collectively lend funds to existing and new Mac users. We use a P2P money-lending system run by Prosper, whose business model is similar to eBay, but for helping borrowers get low rate loans.

I have been a happy iPod Video 5th gen owner for quite some time. I recently got the new iPod Shuffle because I liked that it was so small and I could easily use it while riding a bike. I am amazed how at much I love it. It is so much smaller than I expected, it is actually smaller than a box of matches. It is extremely light and is easy to clip on to your shirt pocket or sleeve. I love how I can easily adjust volume or skip tracks, something I hated about trying to ride with the iPod Video. I often had to pull over to change playlists or readjust the volume. At its $79 price point it is a great addition even if you already have a full sized iPod.

I have been running this website MacJunkie.com for a few years now on Mac OS X Server. I was excited when Apple introduced SpamAssassin and Clam AV to filter Spam and Malware. I found that it did a ok job of ridding the worst of the spam about 50% but that still left over 300 messages a day getting by. We also instituted SpamCop as a blacklist that removes another 100 spammers a day. I have always been a fan of Apples Mail and use it exclusively. It was great when it first cam out -it reduced 90% of incoming spam. Lately spammers have switched their tactics to sending image spam and spoofing the header information, thus tricking Mails’ junk mail filter and letting almost 200 messages slip by daily. Enter SpamSieve a amazing plug-in that works for most 3rd party email clients including Apple Mail, Emailer, Entourage and Eudora. It has been wonderful at filtering with a better than 99.9% success of identifying all types of spam. It only lets on average 1 message a day slip by, and it had in its life time only had 3 false positives after running for 30 days. It is well worth the purchase price for the increased productivity you will see. I just really hope they make SpamSieve work server side so I can have it filter all incoming mail.