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Nathan Kay is our newest technician to join the growing Mac Aid team. The avid gamer comes to us with over 8 years of Mac retail experience and an attitude for success. We are thrilled to have him and hope him all the best in the technician field.
We’d also like to mention that on April 1st, Mac Aid celebrated trading for 9 years. We’re going to start planning our ’10 year anniversary’ party, so any ideas are more than welcome.
Additionally, we would like to run an article regarding people’s workstations and their resulting workflow. We would like to discuss and show the layout, gear and perhaps surrounding area of peoples workstations, be it at a business or home.
To give you an idea of what we mean by ‘workstation’, we’ve attached a photo of our technician Nathan J’s workstation.
Nathan is not Batman btw
As you can see, he has an external display hooked up to his MacBook Air. So he’s got the best of both worlds; portability and a large desktop/space when he’s at his desk.
An external and wireless keyboard and mouse allows him to control both screens and type on whatever project he has going at the time.
Additionally, his iPad mini serves as a calendar and planner for his onsite jobs and reminders as well as the quick go to for notes and documentation.
If you yourself have what you think is a ‘neat’ workstation set up, we would love to hear from you – please share!
Apple updates the Retina MacBook Pro specifications and pricing:
The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display now starts at A$1,649 inc. GST for 128GB of flash, or an alternative A$1,849 inc. GST, for a new 2.6 GHz processor and 256GB of flash.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display now features a faster 2.4 GHz quad-core processor, and the topnotch 15-inch notebook comes with a new 2.7 GHz quad-core processor and 16GB of memory.
It pays to note that all of these machines are able to configured in regards to CPU, storage and RAM meaning you can specify the machine to perfectly meet your needs.
Apple has also announced that the 13-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of flash now has a new lower price of A$1,549 inc. GST.
The MacBook Pro with Retina display features the world’s highest resolution notebook display. No matter what you’re doing, everything appears vibrant, detailed and sharp, delivering an unrivalled viewing experience. The MacBook Pro with Retina display features flash storage that is up to four times faster than traditional notebook hard drives. It also delivers improved reliability, instant-on responsiveness and up to 30 days of standby time.
Pricing & Availability
The updated MacBook Pro with Retina display and MacBook Air models are available now
Pricing details, technical specifications, configure-to-order options and accessories are available online at www.apple.com/au/macbook-pro and www.apple.com/au/macbookair.
Or alternatively, why not give us a call or email?
One of ours gets married.
This month we wanted to say a huge congratulations to our youngest technician, Nathan, and his new wife, Natalie, on their recent wedding.
We wish you all the best guys!!
Finder is OSX’s tool and starting place for organising your files on your Mac OSX system.
While we could write pages on the various ways to use it and tips and tricks to help you along the way (don’t worry, we will cover everything eventually), this article focuses on the Icon view, and getting the most from it.
The Icon view provides a visual way of working, offering less info than the detailed mode, but a workable preview of images, documents etc. Icon mode is also the Desktop’s only file and folder view mode, and so can become quite important to some peoples workflow and can change the look and feel of the Desktop entirely.
Icon view is the first option of four, located near the top left of Finder, click it as below:
This gives you the few options that are available for customisation including the arrangement options usually available via the right-click menu. Observe the little Show Item Info check box under the text options – click that checkbox so your icons will indeed display more info, like the size of a file, dimensions of an image, the amount of items in a folder.
Changing the Icon Size, Grid Spacing and text size and orientation will greatly change the view and feel you have: we’ve seen everything from enormous icons with larger text for media machines on projectors or TVs and smaller icons for those with smaller displays. Super sized icons:
More sleek look with text on the right:
You can assign these options per folder individually or assign them as defaults with use of the ‘Use as Defaults” button on the bottom of the option box.
Changing the Icon image:
In order to personalise the Desktop or Finder you’re working on/in, you can always make use of custom Icon’s to bring it alive.
While Lion and Mountain Lion may have lost the colour and custom icon functionilaty from the Finder side bar, a different and interesting icon will still stand out clearly on the Desktop or Finder in Icon mode.
To change the icon from the standard Folder icon, right-click on the desired folder and select Get Info (CMD + I).
Be sure to click on the Folder top left of the Info panel so that it’s highlighted as below:
Either one of these methods will work from here:
Using Get Info:
Right-click on the intended icon image, Get Info and highlight as above. Hit CMD+C to copy into clipboard. Then, highlighting the desired target, as above, press CMD+V to paste the icon image on to the target folder.
Using Preview:
If the above doesn’t work, open the desired file with Preview (I was working with a PNG this time around). Within Preview, click Edit -> Select All (CMD+A) then Edit -> Copy (CMD+C) to cop[y the image into clipboard. Then as above, highlight the desired target folder within Get Info, press CMD+V to paste the icon image on to the target folder.
The result is a personalised icon that stands out…
…very much so on the desktop:
Finally – Happy Easter from all of us at Mac Aid. Have a great long weekend!!
These days, we all spend an increased amount of time typing an ever increasing amount of emails and documents. There’s no way that we’d get through it all without a couple of tips, hints and useful apps to speed up workflow.
One of the things we come up against is formatting, especially when posting in information (specifications etc).
People have been known to put everything in and finally correct all the font style, size and colour issues. Hitting CMD + T will bring up the Fonts box, a simple but powerful portal to the available font library. At Mac Aid we have our corporate identity on hand within the Favorites: you can “Add to (your) Favorite” list by clicking on the cog button bottom left of the Font box (CMD+T) once you have chosen your appropriate combination of style and size.
Alternatively you can copy and paste text styles with Apple Mail (and other Apple applications)
To copy and paste text styles in Mac OS X Mail:
Finally you can paste and match the text style of the surrounding text with the following command: Command-Shift-Option-V (Paste and Match Style)
Furthermore if you find yourself often typing out the same thing, consider using a text expander.
We’ve covered this before in our March edition. Click here to read
New to Mac?
We have had a new staff member join us a couple months back in the accounts department and like (shudder) some people she hadn’t used a Mac very often.
To help speed up workflow one of the things we did was present a list of shortcuts to refer to. Simple commands such as save (and save often) close a window or switch applications are easily overlooked early on.
This practice can be applied to specific software as well as operating systems: it’s not uncommon to have a ‘cheat sheet’ for shortcuts for video or music editing software synch as Final Cut Pro and Logic, photo editing software such as Photoshop or Lightroom, or even MYOB and Moneyworks.
As such, find a couple of suggested lists to refer to, and the fantastic Cheatsheet app, which overlays a list of shortcuts and command for the currently selected application when the Command key is held.
View the Cheatsheet app on the App Store here
Cheat Sheets
