MacGetIT

As an entrepreneur and start-up business I watch how others use their Macs in their business.

I recently received an email that had a company’s signature and Apple’s data detectors picked it up, but because of the way this person wrote their email signature the data detectors did not pick it all up and thus caused me time and energy to get things right. Here’s their signature:

John Doe

My Company, LLC – My Consulting

E-Mail:       mycompany@mycompany.com

The problem with this is Mail’s data detectors is that because of the spacing it saw the address and ONLY the “My Consulting” and not the rest of the line “My Company, LLC”. If this person had not added the “My Consulting” tag line for below their address then the data detectors would have picked up the whole business name and address. The correct way for the data detectors to work is to have the address as such:

This way ALL of the company address data is picked up. Adding other information before and after the address

The previous method left me having to work with many more mouse clicks that I was willing to endure, but a simpler solution is adding a vCard to his email signature which takes up far less of my time, and my perception of their view of my time, and thus improves my view of their business.

Or, do both. This allows one to cut and paste and address into something else such as another email or into a document and drag and drop the vCard onto Address Book with no typing needed.

Your thoughts?

As an entrepreneur and business start-up we all begin somewhere.

I am finishing up my first book and am in the editing stages now and I am starting to consider how my book will look to others, and in this case, how my fonts will look in the book’s interior. A readability issue. How does my text look to the reader.

I found a quick link to a quick article that as a novice to fonts it broke fonts down so even I can choose between a few choices. The article 19 top fonts in 19 top combinations is a first start for those that need to buy a clue from their local graphic artist. But better yet, I’m a better informed customer to a future graphic artist now.

Here’s his list with headline first and text being second and I have indicated which ones are default loaded on the Mac (bold is a Y/Y, italic has at least one loaded font, so you can figure out which extra ones you need to buy):

1. Helvetica / Garamond   Y/Y
2. Caslon / Univers  N/N
3. Frutiger / Minion   N/N
4. Futura / Bodoni   Y/Y
5. Garamond / Futura   Y/Y
6. Gill Sans / Caslon   Y/N
7. Minion / Gill Sans   N/Y
8. Univers / Caslon   N/N
9. Bodoni / Futura   Y/Y
10. Myriad / Minion   N/N
11. Avenir / Warnock   N/N
12. Caslon / Franklin Gothic   N/N
13. FF Din / Baskerville   N/Y
14. Trade Gothic / Clarendon   N/N
15. Baskerville / Univers   Y/N
16. Akzidenz Grotesk / Garamond   N/Y
17. Clarendon / Trade Gothic   N/N
18. Franklin Gothic / Baskerville   N/Y
19. Warnock / Univers   N/N

As I was going over my book I actually chose #1 above without realizing it, but I see what he means now.

But the one thing that would be helpful is if Doug actually took his comment “I could have picked Baskerville, Caslon, Garamond, or Minion, etc. (all serif typefaces) to go with Futura (a sans serif typeface)” and for us newbies he could have expanded upon this some more. Note to Doug, we just don’t have the “eye” for this stuff! If you do add to this, I’ll put your name in my upcoming book as helping me out.

Looking at my Snow Leopard fonts loaded on my Mac I see that I have 203 fonts in Font Book, where do we buy a clue how to use these?

Anyone with any different ideas or comments?

Update 3/10/2010: Here are some sites to find fonts:

• Fontshop
• MyFonts
• dafont.com
• Fonts.com
• Linotype

Here’s a great tip to use Apple’s iChat for Facebook’s chat. Like it much better.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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?

1. 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.
2. No USB or display port to hook up larger screens or an external keyboard to do heavy workloads.
3. 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?

1. 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.

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:

1. Change a style.
2. Select “Redefine style from selection” and wait as Pages changes all occurrences of that style.
3. 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.
4. Now click on the down arrow and watch as each place the changed style occurs will pop into the window.
5. 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.
6. 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.

While writing my upcoming book “How To Start A Business: Mac Version” 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, 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 like 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.

Take a look here for just under seven minutes. TechRepublic takes you through how to keep things private. Their video “Delete Flash cookies to protect online privacy” will walk you through it.

Never knew it, now I know.

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.

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.

There is a recent discussion about why iWork Pages were not getting through Windows servers for clients with their proposals and HR for job applicants. So why is this?

Well, seems like there are a number of reason:

• You’re sending the files as a Pages document to someone that has MS Word and they can’t read Pages documents.
• You’re sending the files through Apple’s Mail program and not selected the Edit > Attachments > Always send Windows friendly attachments.
• Their using Windows servers “virus” software is turned up WAY to high to allow any of them to get through.

Solutions?

1. File > Export or Print > Print to PDF any Pages document to send it to the intend client.
2. Check the Always send Windows friendly attachments.
3. Tell the client to to talk with their IT department or System Administrator  to ratchet down or lighten up the virus protection software to allow “false positives” to get through.
4. Export your file into a Word document and open and save that document in Word format.

Why this last step? Because of this comment from another person that has gone through the headache of this issue

I believe Alex might have solved the issue with the metadata comment. Firewalls that are screwed down too tight see the MAC PDF as a virus and stop the file at the wall with no bounce back. Chatted with an IT friend of mine at a large corporation and they have recently discovered the same issue and narrowed it down to the metadata issue. No simple resolution for them either other than adjust the firewall “rules” or advise staff to work with Word or know that recipient can receive a iWork ‘09 PDF.

PS On Wednesday night I tried the Pages PDF conversion on my wife’s MACBook Pro running Snow Leopard with Pages 09 and same thing – no show at destination of municipal government office so I know problem wasn’t specific to my unit.

Hope this helps someone if you’re using iWork Pages