Here’s a link to charting Apple’s growth in sales and number of Macs, iPhones, and iPods sold. MacObserver has the numbers to show where Apple is heading.
Jan 25
After hearing tons of speculation about Apple’s Wednesday’s event I’ve come to the early conclusion that I won’t be getting an iPad/iSlate/iTablet from Apple. Why? Here are my reasons.
- It’s another thing to carry around besides my MacBook Pro and my iPhone. While I MIGHT be able to substitute my MacBook Pro for the iPad thingy, I do too much work that the iPad would be more of a bother adding it to my repertoire of Macs.
- An iPad might replace my MacBook Pro, but it only becomes a smaller MacBook Air and I don’t own one of those and don’t need or want one of them. I want something with a little more power.
- I can only see that an iPad might cannibalize from the MacBook Air or MacBook sales for those that do light computing work, such as doctors that need to enter data into a hospital system or writers that travel more than most of us.
- While the iPhone’s swipping and pinching motion makes it’s use fairly useful, for those of us that are keyboard “attached” such as UNIX geeks that don’t like the mouse are most productive with keyboard shortcuts and the pinching movements will limit productivity.
However, if Apple “limits” the features to the iPad it’ll upset the rest of the Apple customers. How?
- If the “publishers” that Apple is “courting” for the game changing technology of the publishing industry does not port or translate the technology to the rest of the Mac platform then it’ll “force” Mac users to move or purchase the iPad.
- No USB or display port to hook up larger screens or an external keyboard to do heavy workloads.
- An Apple iTunes focus on the publishing industry whereas you can only get ebooks and may or may not be able to get a physical book for those that want both. If the same “experience” of getting an iPad book is not the same as getting a real one it’ll detract from the reader’s experience of both.
But want WOULD make me consider getting one?
- The data “cloud” that everything on the iPad syncs up with my other systems seamlessly and I never have to bother about where my data/books/contact information resides. If I can read on an iPad and then bring it up on my or my wife’s MacBook Pro then that’s a consideration.
But that’s about the extent of my reasons. For me an iPad is just another smaller laptop with added functionality that Apple has been stair stepping in that direction with it’s trackpads. It’ll be adopted by early adopters for sure, but the masses won’t change as the “back end” may not be there for the average users.
But by far the worse part of this potential publishing “arm” of Apple is: will Apple control the publishing content like it controls the iPhone apps? How much of your rights will Apple control for indie publishers?
But we can only wait until the 27th to see what Apple does.
Jan 25
One of the more interesting aspects of iWork Pages ’09 is figuring out all of the little hidden gems that it holds. When you open up a Pages document you have on the bottom of the window a “menu” bar button that has an up and down arrow. This allows you to select the type of information you want to “track” in your window.
This can be especially helpful when you are double checking any changes in your various styles so that you can see how each change affects throughout your document. Here’s how it works:
- Change a style.
- Select “Redefine style from selection” and wait as Pages changes all occurrences of that style.
- In the menu bar button mouse of the “pin wheel” icon and it’ll say “Choose how to navigate” and select the type of style you have just changed.
- Now click on the down arrow and watch as each place the changed style occurs will pop into the window.
- If you’re done with checking your style changes make sure you reselect “Page” so that you can go back to viewing each page of your document.
- If you have a problem with a style, mouse over the style and select “Revert to defined style.”
Nice little touch here when details and tracking style details, especially during your final edits, and you need to see how a change affects the look of your document.
Jan 19
While writing my upcoming book “How To Start A Business: Mac Version” (Available now, click on the link to buy it) I am now at the point that while editing I need to take a look at typesetting my book, i.e. seeing how the look of the font and spacing of my text is on the pages of my book. Walton Mendelson, at 12on14.com, has done a great job of putting together his “Build Your Book” PDF of what it takes to make your book look great.
Leading (see in Wikibooks), which rhymes with heading, is the spacing between the lines of type and while most of us know about single and double (adding another complete blank line) spacing for school papers, in page layout in the publishing industry the spacing is measured in points, i.e. the size of font type is measured in points and so is line spacing. The lack of white space between lines makes it difficult for the eye to track from one line to the next, and hampers readability. Hence, adding small space between the lines.
While learning about line spacing nearly all industry lingo sometimes gets lost in application menus. However, after some digging the answer can be found.
In iWork Pages, you need to go to Inspector > Text > Line and under the space where a number is placed you’ll see a small drop down menu starting with “Single” and there you’ll begin playing with leading. You’ll need to select “Exactly” and measured in points you add a few points above your selected font size. If you select 12 sized font for your type select 14 as the line spacing or point size or 14 font size with a 16 point line spacing. Basically you’re adding two points above your font size as about average line spacing. Leading is stated as “12 on 14″ or 12/14 to describe the line spacing in font points.
After printing out a few pages of my book with single line spacing and then switching to “12 on 14″ using Garamond font for my book my wife liked the “12 on 14″ much better than the single line spacing.
There you have it, publishing layout details in Pages. One less thing to worry about, now on to more editing.
P.S. When it comes to leading, you also need to consider heading and subheads and the spacing that keeps facing pages “even” to the eye. See Basic Book Design/Headings and Subheads for more details about the “total look” of your book.
Jan 09
When it comes to dealing with your contact information there are a lot of programs that you have to share information with, but often sharing information, especially contact information, is not so straight forward when it comes to a Mac’s Address Book. While Address Book’s vCard is an industry standard, sometimes you need to do a little bit of tweaking to get the Address Book info just right into another program such as a database or spreadsheet.
I have found an answer to this problem, Export Address Book 1.5.1. These scripts programmed using Apple’s technologies allows you to export anything and everything from your Address Book and to customize the output fields just the way you like it. The developer has done a great job with this solution and up to this date, is the best solution for getting the data out of Address Book and into a file that anyone and any program can read and import into the program of choice.
While some entrepreneurs may be “overwhelmed” with the options if you “Select All” with everything it is pretty straight forward to get the data to the person that needs the info.
Jan 06
Ok, here’s the most complete line of marketing copywriting blogs and web sites that you’ll ever see.
“2009’s Hundred Best Tweets and Links for Marketing Copywriters” gives a good list to learn from and by http://marketcopywriterblog.com/
Enjoy the link to 100 links.
Jan 04
Here’s the Apple answers to this question. Here are the indicators:
- Your Apple notebook’s display has no picture after you turn it on.
- You don’t hear any fan or hard disk activity sounds after you turn the computer on, and the sleep light doesn’t turn on.
- The computer doesn’t seem to have any power when you try to turn it on.
