I’m a huge fan of Moshi’s Apple-centric line of products and accessories. In fact, my entire collection of Apple products has now been complimented by Moshi. For example, I use the iLynx USB/Firewire hub and Celesta keyboard with my iMac; my iPhone is protected by the iGlaze 3G; and recently, my Macbook Pro experienced a thorough makeover.

Over the years I have owned a variety of Apple laptops, and each one inevitably ends up with scratches on the screen, discoloration on the wrist area, disgusting keys, and other forms of wear and tear. I decided to not endure this experience with my new aluminum MacBook Pro. My goal is to maintain a pristine look for as long as possible, and I intend to achieve this goal by combining Moshi’s products into the ultimate protection solution.

Clearguard MB: $25

The Clearguard MB is a thin cover for your MacBook or MacBook Pro keyboard. Installation is simple: lay it across the keyboard. After a few minutes of typing, it’s barely noticeable. It’s virtually transparent so your backlit keys are still visible in dark rooms. I have been using it for a couple of months, and you can clearly see how my keyboard still looks like I just slid the computer out of the box. Cleaning the Clearguard is a simple process involving dish soap and water.

The best part about the Clearguard MB is I no longer see key indentations on the screen (a problem MacBooks and PowerBooks have experienced for a long time). Below is a picture of the Clearguard after a couple months. See the keys on the right side? I’m impressed.

Palmguard: $20-$28

The Palmguard is used to protect the area where your wrists sit on the computer. For me, that’s the part that receives the most damage over time. I’m always amazed at how powerful skin oil is. Again, installation is simple: Line up the Palmguard carefully in the corners and then firmly slide your hand across. If you aren’t satisfied, it’s easy to take the Palmguard off and try again without leaving any residue.

In the past, I used a competitor’s product to protect the wrist area. One thing missing was something to place onto the trackpad area. The Palmguard comes with a separate piece just for that. The accuracy and clickability (I just made up that word) of the trackpad are not affected.

Moshi sells a variety of Palmguard products to match the color and size of your Apple laptop. Below is a picture of the Palmguard after a couple months. Again, I’m impressed.

iVisor AG: $35-38

iVisor AG is the flagship laptop protection product by Moshi. Not only does it protect the screen from scratches, dust and fingerprints, but it also eliminates glare. Remember when we had a choice between matte and glossy screens for our MacBook Pros? Well, this is as close as you can get to owning an aluminum MBP with a matte finish without swapping the screen.

Installation is shockingly easy. You just line up the corners, press down, and firmly slide your hand across the screen. The air bubbles you see while applying a protective layer on your iPhone are not a problem. I was nervous about this, but fortunately Moshi delivered on its promise. There’s a hole at the top for your iSight, and a transparent part in the black border so the “Macbook Pro” text on the bottom is still visible.

Below is the iVisor after a few weeks. No reflection, no scratches.

Conclusion

A MacBook Pro is an investment. It deserves to remain in perfect condition. What I love about Moshi’s products is that they can be installed in minutes and they perform to my standards: no air bubbles, no scratches, and no damage.

I purposefully did not include outer cases because I dislike adding bulk to the laptop. Also, a simple and artistic way to protect the top from scratches is to add a Gelaskin.

Moshi products are available for purchase at Dr. Bott and nuCourse.

Apple’s iTunes application is perhaps the most popular app ever installed on the Mac. It’s also one of the least flexible, in terms of customization. There’s little you can do to “make it your own,” so to speak. However, all is not lost for habitual tweakers like myself; the iTunes Visualizer can satisfy your need to not leave well-enough alone.

If you display your iTunes window on a second monitor, or just like to look at the iTunes Visualizer full screen on your 30″ LCD, you should know that you have some really nice options available for customizing the appearance of the Visualizer.

iTunes default Visualizer

Invoking the Visualizer by hitting Command + T (hit Command + F to make it full screen if you wish) then hitting the ? key brings up an overlay on the Visualizer screen containing a few keyboard shortcuts to control various aspects of whichever Visualizer you’re running at the time. But these customizations only go so far. To move beyond minor tweaks to Apple’s built-in Visualizers, you can install a number of truly cool third-party Visualizers which really enhance the iTunes experience.

Download More Visualizers

I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite Visualizers to get you started. This is by no means a complete list, so if you’re looking for even more, I suggest a quick Google search to quench your thirst.

All the Visualizers listed below work perfectly with OS X Leopard, iTunes 8.2, and are free to download and use. Click the preview image to go directly to the download page of each Visualizer.

Punkt Visualizer

Punkt is a Quartz Composer Visualizer that is much cooler than it appears in this screenshot. Colors burst to the beat of your music.

Circle Visualizer

Circle places the track name, artist and album in a circular format, and floats in a 3D space.

Fountain Music Visualizer

Fountain Music is probably one of my favorite Visualizers. It reminds me of the drummers in The Blue Man Group, where water is blasting upwards from the drums, highlighted by bright neon lights as they play. Fountain Music also has a decent amount of customization options, such as particle size and color.

Dragon Visualizer

Dragon features a squishy, squirmy dragon dancing to your music. I almost feel like this one borders on being somewhat icky — but it’s truly awesome.

WhiteCap Visualizer

WhiteCap places dynamic wireframe mesh visuals on your screen, cycling through colors and traveling through space.

Figure Visualizer

Figure places the track title, album, artist and album art on a virtual wall, swiveling around in 3D space.

Bugaboo Visualizer

Bugaboo places colorful dancing lightning bugs on screen. This is another one of those that you have to see to appreciate.

Cubism Visualizer

Cubism brings a Tetris-like appearance to your Visualizer, bouncing blocks to the beat of your music. A 3D cube with the album art mingles among the blocks as well.

Gaslight Visualizer

Gaslight is a customizable frequency spectrum analyzer — kind of old-school, but still quite nice!

Snow Visualizer

Snow, another offering from WowLab, displays colorful snow blowing across your screen. This one is really nice for soothing music after a rough day at the office.

LED Flow Visualizer

LED Flow uses Apple’s Quartz technology to place a colorful level meter in 3D space.

G-Force Visualizer

G-Force, the original awesome third-party Visualizer for iTunes, still going strong with its fractal goodness!

Sing Visualizer

Sing places a friendly little creature in your iTunes window and sings. Sort of. Well, it’s cool to look at anyway.

Jumping Steve Visualizer

Jumping Steve pays homage to Steve Jobs with a cutout jumping jack that dances to the beat. Hit the P key for a special iPod commercial-like silhouette feature.

Don’t forget that different Visualizers will offer disparate customization options, the level of which (if any) varies between minor, and fairly major stuff — it just depends on the developer, and how much time they bothered to put in. Don’t forget to hit the ? key to find out what options are available to you.

If you’ve never installed a plugin or other add-on to iTunes, Visualizers are a great place to start. They’re simple, require little effort to get up and running, and typically they either work or they don’t, with no ill side-effects.

This is the third installment of our Dig Into Unix series, an ongoing look into the deep, geeky insides of the core of OS X. In the first part, we got to fire up the Terminal and take a look around the filesystem as the OS sees it, which is slightly different from how the rest of us see it through the Finder. In the second installment, we took a look at vi, the ancient text editor fit for kings.

Today, I’d like to cover a very basic, but very powerful, aspect of Unix, the three standard streams: standard in, standard out, and standard error. These three are normally abbreviated as stdin, stdout and stderr.

When interacting with an application on the command line, it’s good to imagine that application with three pipes. One is a big funnel, right on top — this is stdin, accepting input from the keyboard. The second pipe is on the bottom, stdout, sending text to the Terminal. The third, stderr, sticks out the side, and normally also sends its output to the Terminal. I say “normally” because the standard streams can be redirected by certain key characters. For example, if you use “cat” to display a document, you are sending stdout to the Terminal. However, if you use “cat” like this, you actually send the output of the cat command to another file, redirecting stdout to a new text file.

cat someFile 1> someCopy.txt

The number one in the command above represents stdout. The right arrow is telling the shell that you’d like to redirect stdout to a new file. If that file already exists, this command will replace that file with the contents of “someFile”. If you’d like to append the text to someCopy.txt, you could do this as well:

cat someOtherFile 1>> someCopy.txt

You’ll notice that I used two right arrows that time. Using the double right arrows tells the shell to append the text to the end of the file. This works great for keeping a running log of regularly scheduled tasks.

Sometimes you’ll want to either keep error messages out of the way, or you’ll like to keep a log of error messages. In this case, you can redirect stderr to a file like this:

grep something somewhere 2> grep_error_log

The grep command is another Unix power tool that we’ll touch on later in the series. For now, just know that grep searches for strings of text in files. In the command above, I told grep to search for the string “something” in the file “somewhere” and then redirect stderr “2” to a file named “grep_error_log.” Run this command without the redirect on it, then add the redirect and run it again. You can compare the contents of the error log to what you saw on the terminal and see that they are the same.

Being able to redirect output is handy, but not really a “power tool.” The real power is in the pipe, the key on the far right above the return key, that looks like this: “|”, and it’s probably a key that you may have looked at and wondered…“why is that there?” The pipe takes the stdout from one command and feeds it to the stdin of another command. Think about the picture above; now imagine plugging lots of different commands into each other in a long string. The nature of Unix is that it is continually used in ways that its creators never imagined. It is truly a system limited only by your creativity and curiosity.

During one of my early classes on Unix, after we had entered in a command very similar to the one below, the instructor stood up and said, “Congratulations, you are all programmers!” We weren’t, not by a long shot, but the idea was that by entering commands and stringing them together in the Terminal, we were programming the computer to perform a specific task. We were not using a traditional “programming” language like C or even Java, but we were programming directly to the shell.

To put this idea into action, consider this command:

cat someFile | grep someText 1> foundText

First of all, yes, I’m aware that this is a useless use of cat. That’s not the point. The point is that the above command connects cat’s stdout, which normally points to the Terminal, to stdin of grep, which then searches what it has been handed for the string “someText,” and then, just for good measure, redirect the output of grep to a file named “foundText.”

The simple illustrations I’ve given here work in all kinds of situations. Personally, I use the pipe and stream redirection to parse the results of commands that search logs, retrieve information from the Internet, and reformat data into comma separated values for importing into Numbers, Excel or OpenOffice. There are very few limitations to what you can do with plain text and the tools lurking under the hood of your Mac.

We’ve posted Power User tips focusing on OS X as a whole (look for an update post for the not-far-off Snow Leopard) and the System Preferences. Today we’ll cast our gaze on iTunes. Listening to music on your Mac is like peanut butter and bananas — they just go together. iTunes is a fairly straightforward application, but it does offer some simple features, which may not be totally obvious to the casual user. So here are a few tips that should help to improve the iTunes experience.

Playlist Stuff

Chances are that you’ve got some playlists setup in iTunes already. I have many static and smart playlists set up, and it makes for a lot of scrolling, depending on my listening mood. iTunes helps here, and allows you to create folders in which you can organize all of those lists. As a starting point, I use some high-level folders named “Genius,” “Smart” and “Stupid.” Within those folders, I’ve created more nested folders to further organize my playlists. It certainly helps to cut down on the clutter.

There are some great radio stations available through iTunes as well. In fact, there are somewhere between 3.5 and 4 metric crap-tons of Internet radio stations available, to be exact. So finding what you like can take some time — especially if you want to come back to it. So create yourself a “Radio” folder, too, and drag those radio stations you like into the folder for easy listening later on.

Smart playlists would seem like an obvious topic here, but we’ve covered them several times.

Those Arrows

Have you noticed that when you highlight a song in iTunes, little arrows appear next to the song, artist and album name? Clicking on those arrows tends to lead to spending money in the iTunes Store, as they’re links to similar music that you can purchase. Apple puts lots of “help” in there for you to spend more of your money (I’m looking at you, Genius sidebar), and while I don’t know about you, I certainly don’t need any more help giving Apple my money! So here’s a tip that you can use to make those arrows point inward to your own iTunes Library. Once you execute this tip, the arrows next to the song and the album will bring up all songs from that album. Clicking the arrow next to the artist, brings up all songs by that artist. This is much more useful!

So go ahead and launch Terminal.app, which is found in Applications → Utilities. Once it’s open, type (or copy & paste) the following line into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

Hit Enter. You’re finished.

Now your arrows work for you, rather than against you. If you ever want to switch it back, change the ‘YES’ to ‘NO.’

Visualizer

Sometimes listening to music isn’t enough to zone you out all by itself. The Visualizer (found under the View menu at the top of the screen) gives you some cool stuff to look at while you listen. In Leopard (10.5) there are five built-in Visualizer options:

• iTunes Visualizer
• iTunes Classic Visualizer
• Jelly
• Lathe
• Stix

Once you select the Visualizer you want to see, you can press the hotkey Command+T to see it in action (usually while your music is playing). Pressing Command+F puts it in full-screen mode, rather than limiting it to the iTunes window size. Bonus: In both of the iTunes Visualizers, you can hit the “?” at any time and you will see a list of keys you can press to alter the Visualizer’s properties. There are some very cool results to be found with tinkering!

Find Duplicates

As your music library gets bigger and bigger, it can grow out of control. I’ve been known to re-rip old CDs without realizing it. Or sometimes I’ve duplicated a track as a different file format. Before long, I’ve compiled a great deal of duplicate tracks in iTunes. Apple was nice enough to give us a “Show Duplicates” menu item. It’s right up there under the File menu. The only problem with this feature is its keying off of song title — so as I’ve got Dave Matthews Band tracks that are both studio recorded and live, they show as duplicates, even though they’re different song files. But it’s a good place to start. Once you’re done with that view, you can press the button at the bottom of the iTunes window to “Show all” again.

The Mini Mini Player

You’ve likely noticed that when you click the green + button (next to the – ‘minimize’ and X ‘close window’ buttons) it doesn’t actually expand the size of the iTunes window as you might expect. Instead, it makes it into somewhat of a mini iTunes player window. That’s obvious enough. But if you click the lower-right corner and size the window down further, you’ll get rid of the text feedback portion that tells the song title, leaving only the Last Track, Play and Next Track buttons. This small configuration is ideal for stashing in a corner of the screen if you like to have access to the control buttons at all times (and haven’t installed one of the many great third-party plugins to solve such a problem).

There you have it, folks. Some quick and simple ways to get a few extra drops of goodness from iTunes. So next time you listen to your music, you might as well fire up “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” because you’re an iTunes Power User!

We’ve posted Power User tips focusing on OS X as a whole (look for an update post for the not-far-off Snow Leopard) and the System Preferences. Today we’ll cast our gaze on iTunes. Listening to music on your Mac is like peanut butter and bananas — they just go together. iTunes is a fairly straightforward application, but it does offer some simple features, which may not be totally obvious to the casual user. So here are a few tips that should help to improve the iTunes experience.

Playlist Stuff

Chances are that you’ve got some playlists setup in iTunes already. I have many static and smart playlists set up, and it makes for a lot of scrolling, depending on my listening mood. iTunes helps here, and allows you to create folders in which you can organize all of those lists. As a starting point, I use some high-level folders named “Genius,” “Smart” and “Stupid.” Within those folders, I’ve created more nested folders to further organize my playlists. It certainly helps to cut down on the clutter.

There are some great radio stations available through iTunes as well. In fact, there are somewhere between 3.5 and 4 metric crap-tons of Internet radio stations available, to be exact. So finding what you like can take some time — especially if you want to come back to it. So create yourself a “Radio” folder, too, and drag those radio stations you like into the folder for easy listening later on.

Smart playlists would seem like an obvious topic here, but we’ve covered them several times.

Those Arrows

Have you noticed that when you highlight a song in iTunes, little arrows appear next to the song, artist and album name? Clicking on those arrows tends to lead to spending money in the iTunes Store, as they’re links to similar music that you can purchase. Apple puts lots of “help” in there for you to spend more of your money (I’m looking at you, Genius sidebar), and while I don’t know about you, I certainly don’t need any more help giving Apple my money! So here’s a tip that you can use to make those arrows point inward to your own iTunes Library. Once you execute this tip, the arrows next to the song and the album will bring up all songs from that album. Clicking the arrow next to the artist, brings up all songs by that artist. This is much more useful!

So go ahead and launch Terminal.app, which is found in Applications → Utilities. Once it’s open, type (or copy & paste) the following line into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

Hit Enter. You’re finished.

Now your arrows work for you, rather than against you. If you ever want to switch it back, change the ‘YES’ to ‘NO.’

Visualizer

Sometimes listening to music isn’t enough to zone you out all by itself. The Visualizer (found under the View menu at the top of the screen) gives you some cool stuff to look at while you listen. In Leopard (10.5) there are five built-in Visualizer options:

• iTunes Visualizer
• iTunes Classic Visualizer
• Jelly
• Lathe
• Stix

Once you select the Visualizer you want to see, you can press the hotkey Command+T to see it in action (usually while your music is playing). Pressing Command+F puts it in full-screen mode, rather than limiting it to the iTunes window size. Bonus: In both of the iTunes Visualizers, you can hit the “?” at any time and you will see a list of keys you can press to alter the Visualizer’s properties. There are some very cool results to be found with tinkering!

Find Duplicates

As your music library gets bigger and bigger, it can grow out of control. I’ve been known to re-rip old CDs without realizing it. Or sometimes I’ve duplicated a track as a different file format. Before long, I’ve compiled a great deal of duplicate tracks in iTunes. Apple was nice enough to give us a “Show Duplicates” menu item. It’s right up there under the File menu. The only problem with this feature is its keying off of song title — so as I’ve got Dave Matthews Band tracks that are both studio recorded and live, they show as duplicates, even though they’re different song files. But it’s a good place to start. Once you’re done with that view, you can press the button at the bottom of the iTunes window to “Show all” again.

The Mini Mini Player

You’ve likely noticed that when you click the green + button (next to the – ‘minimize’ and X ‘close window’ buttons) it doesn’t actually expand the size of the iTunes window as you might expect. Instead, it makes it into somewhat of a mini iTunes player window. That’s obvious enough. But if you click the lower-right corner and size the window down further, you’ll get rid of the text feedback portion that tells the song title, leaving only the Last Track, Play and Next Track buttons. This small configuration is ideal for stashing in a corner of the screen if you like to have access to the control buttons at all times (and haven’t installed one of the many great third-party plugins to solve such a problem).

There you have it, folks. Some quick and simple ways to get a few extra drops of goodness from iTunes. So next time you listen to your music, you might as well fire up “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” because you’re an iTunes Power User!

All the goodness of iPhone OS 3.0 aside, the one thing you’ve probably noticed after updating your iPhone or iPod touch is how quickly its battery is draining.

I certainly did, along with many other users. The battery life of my iPhone 3G is now barely six hours, a huge departure from the 12+ hours or so I would get with 2.2.1. And even though I’d experienced a decrease in battery life with the beta builds of 3.0 back in May, the battery never drained at a rate as alarming as this. Now, it depletes 10 percent every hour even while the phone is left doing absolutely nothing.

My first thought was that push notification must be the cause of this. But even after turning off push notification, the battery continued to drain at an alarming rate. After some investigation, it would seem that the culprit is, instead, iPhone’s push mail setting.

To turn off push for all mail accounts, follow these steps:

1. On the Home screen, tap the “Settings” icon.
   
2. Tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars.”
   
3. Tap “Fetch New Data.”
   
4. Turn off “Push.” This turns off push, in one step, for all email accounts that are enabled for it, while preserving the “Fetch” settings you may have already set for every account.
   
5. Reboot your iPhone. To do that, hold down the Sleep/Wake button (the one at the top) until you see the red slider appear, then drag the slider.
   

After your iPhone has restarted, you should see an improvement in its battery life. Leave a comment, and tell us if this works for you!

One of the big, new features of the iPhone is its ability to tether. BlackBerrys have had this ability for a while, so below I have outlined how to tether your BlackBerry with your Mac to use your Internet connection to browse the web with your computer.

Some Things to Note

• This tutorial is for Leopard.
• I have successfully tested this with a BlackBerry Bold and a BlackBerry Curve 8900 using the 8800 modem drivers, but it should also work with the BlackBerry 8100, 8700 and 8800.
• Some service providers have a special tethering plan that you may need to add to your cell phone. (It will work without the tethering packing, but you might get slammed with overage charges if they catch you.)

Configure Your BlackBerry

1. Open “Manage Connections.”
2. Click the checkbox next to “Bluetooth” to turn Bluetooth on.
3. Scroll down to “Set up Bluetooth.”
4. A pop-up will come up to name your device; name it.
5. An “Add Device” pop up will come up; click “Cancel.”
6. Click the BlackBerry menu; select “Options.”
7. Set Discoverable to “Yes.”
8. Save changes.

Configure Your Mac

1. Download & Install BlackBerry modem scripts for OS X.
2. Go to System Preferences → Bluetooth.
3. Check “Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar.”
4. Click on the menu bar item and select “Set up Bluetooth Device.”
   
5. A pop-up will appear; click “Continue.”
6. Select “Mobile phone” as the type of device.
7. When the computer finds your phone, select it and click “Continue.”
8. You’ll be given a passkey. Enter the passkey into your BlackBerry.
9. After successfully pairing your computer with your BlackBerry, you will get a pop-up that asks, “Accept connection request from (your computer)?” Click the checkbox “Don’t ask again” and select “Yes.”
10. Your computer will now ask, “Access the Internet with your phone’s data connection?” Click the check box, and select “Continue.”
    
11. Enter the following information into the appropriate boxes. (This is for AT&T. Do a Google search for other vendors.):
    • Username: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
    • Password: CINGULAR1
    • Phone Number: wap.cingular
12. Save and close.
13. Now open up network preferences: Applications → System preferences → Network
14. Click the Plus Button.
    • Interface: Bluetooth
    • Service Name: Whatever you want, I named it “Tethered BB”
      
15. Enter in all the information again:
    • Username: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
    • Password: CINGULAR1
    • Phone Number: wap.cingular

    

16. Click “Advanced:”
    • Vendor: Research In Motion
    • Model: BlackBerry 8800
    • Dial mode: Ignore dial tone when dialing

    

17. Save Settings.

Connect to the Internet

Make sure Bluetooth is enabled on both you phone and your computer!

1. Click the Dialer icon in your menu bar.
2. Select Connect Tethered BB (or whatever you named your connection in step 14 of setting up your computer) from the drop-down menu.
3. After a few seconds you should be connected!

All the goodness of iPhone OS 3.0 aside, the one thing you’ve probably noticed after updating your iPhone or iPod touch is how quickly its battery is draining.

I certainly did, along with many other users. The battery life of my iPhone 3G is now barely six hours, a huge departure from the 12+ hours or so I would get with 2.2.1. And even though I’d experienced a decrease in battery life with the beta builds of 3.0 back in May, the battery never drained at a rate as alarming as this. Now, it depletes 10 percent every hour even while the phone is left doing absolutely nothing.

My first thought was that push notification must be the cause of this. But even after turning off push notification, the battery continued to drain at an alarming rate. After some investigation, it would seem that the culprit is, instead, iPhone’s push mail setting.

To turn off push for all mail accounts, follow these steps:

1. On the Home screen, tap the “Settings” icon.
   
2. Tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars.”
   
3. Tap “Fetch New Data.”
   
4. Turn off “Push.” This turns off push, in one step, for all email accounts that are enabled for it, while preserving the “Fetch” settings you may have already set for every account.
   
5. Reboot your iPhone. To do that, hold down the Sleep/Wake button (the one at the top) until you see the red slider appear, then drag the slider.
   

After your iPhone has restarted, you should see an improvement in its battery life. Leave a comment, and tell us if this works for you!

One of the big, new features of the iPhone is its ability to tether. BlackBerrys have had this ability for a while, so below I have outlined how to tether your BlackBerry with your Mac to use your Internet connection to browse the web with your computer.

Some Things to Note

• This tutorial is for Leopard.
• I have successfully tested this with a BlackBerry Bold and a BlackBerry Curve 8900 using the 8800 modem drivers, but it should also work with the BlackBerry 8100, 8700 and 8800.
• Some service providers have a special tethering plan that you may need to add to your cell phone. (It will work without the tethering packing, but you might get slammed with overage charges if they catch you.)

Configure Your BlackBerry

1. Open “Manage Connections.”
2. Click the checkbox next to “Bluetooth” to turn Bluetooth on.
3. Scroll down to “Set up Bluetooth.”
4. A pop-up will come up to name your device; name it.
5. An “Add Device” pop up will come up; click “Cancel.”
6. Click the BlackBerry menu; select “Options.”
7. Set Discoverable to “Yes.”
8. Save changes.

Configure Your Mac

1. Download & Install BlackBerry modem scripts for OS X.
2. Go to System Preferences → Bluetooth.
3. Check “Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar.”
4. Click on the menu bar item and select “Set up Bluetooth Device.”
   
5. A pop-up will appear; click “Continue.”
6. Select “Mobile phone” as the type of device.
7. When the computer finds your phone, select it and click “Continue.”
8. You’ll be given a passkey. Enter the passkey into your BlackBerry.
9. After successfully pairing your computer with your BlackBerry, you will get a pop-up that asks, “Accept connection request from (your computer)?” Click the checkbox “Don’t ask again” and select “Yes.”
10. Your computer will now ask, “Access the Internet with your phone’s data connection?” Click the check box, and select “Continue.”
    
11. Enter the following information into the appropriate boxes. (This is for AT&T. Do a Google search for other vendors.):
    • Username: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
    • Password: CINGULAR1
    • Phone Number: wap.cingular
12. Save and close.
13. Now open up network preferences: Applications → System preferences → Network
14. Click the Plus Button.
    • Interface: Bluetooth
    • Service Name: Whatever you want, I named it “Tethered BB”
      
15. Enter in all the information again:
    • Username: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
    • Password: CINGULAR1
    • Phone Number: wap.cingular

    

16. Click “Advanced:”
    • Vendor: Research In Motion
    • Model: BlackBerry 8800
    • Dial mode: Ignore dial tone when dialing

    

17. Save Settings.

Connect to the Internet

Make sure Bluetooth is enabled on both you phone and your computer!

1. Click the Dialer icon in your menu bar.
2. Select Connect Tethered BB (or whatever you named your connection in step 14 of setting up your computer) from the drop-down menu.
3. After a few seconds you should be connected!

Having used Microsoft Office for many years, despite my utter disdain for it, nobody was happier than me when Apple launched the iWork applications. For my light office application needs, Pages, Keynote and Numbers are just perfect. Here are a few tips I use to make my time in the iWork apps a little easier.

Multiple Inspector Palettes

If you use any of the iWork ‘09 apps on a daily basis, you’ve no doubt been frustrated by the fact that you’re forever clicking different Inspector tabs to get to various features. Wouldn’t it be handy if you could have more than one Inspector palette open at a time, with different tabs displayed? Thankfully, Apple offers a way to do just that in all the iWork applications.

Multiple Inspector palettes in iWork apps

Hold down the Option key while clicking any of the tab icons at the top of the Inspector palette to have a new palette open with that group of settings showing. This works in Pages, Keynote and Numbers.

Saving Palette Locations

Open and arrange multiple iWork Inspector palettes in all three iWork apps and they’ll be “saved” for the next time you launch an app, opening in the same location as you last left them. As obvious as it may seem, many users never even notice this feature.

Using Document File Info

The Document tab of the Document Inspector palette in Pages contains some great features. Here you can view raw stats of your document, such as word and character count, enter author, title, and keyword info, and file comments.

At the bottom of the palette, just below where Pages indicates how many times the document has been printed, you’ll find a Show File Info button. Clicking this button opens the File Info box of your document in the Finder. From there, you can adjust permissions, hide the file extension, view more data about your file, and enter Spotlight comments for easy searching.

Saving Spotlight comments in Pages '09

The one thing that I’m left wondering is why Apple didn’t have Pages automatically place the Comments from within the Document Info palette into the Spotlight Comments area in the Get Info box, instead of forcing you to copy/paste.

Keynote and Numbers offer the same feature in their Document Inspector palette.

Protecting your files

Password Protecting Files

In iWork ’09, Apple added the ability to password protect your documents. Microsoft Office apps have had this feature for quite a long time, so it’s nice to finally see it in iWork’s applications.

In the same Document tab of the Document Inspector at the bottom, you’ll find a checkbox, which when clicked will pop open a dialog box where you can enter a password and hint for your file. This is a great addition to the iWork suite, especially if you work in a server/multi-user environment.

M.I.A.: Drag & Drop

Much of the Mac OS offers the ability to drag and drop files, text, and images from one app to another. For some inexplicable reason, iWork apps are different. Though you can drag text from one app to another, you can’t do the same with objects and images. For this reason, you should keep the Media Browser palette open to make it easy to drag images into your documents from iPhoto, or folders located on your hard drive.

Adding More Shadow

You probably know you can add a shadow to your text simply by selecting the text container and clicking the Shadow button in the main toolbar. If you’re looking for a bit more from your shadow, try adding a second one.

Adding a second drop shadow to text in Pages

Once you’ve customized the appearance of your shadow using the Graphic Inspector, select the text itself (rather than the text container) and apply a second shadow using the Fonts palette Shadow button. A second shadow will appear beneath your text, which is completely customizable separate from the original shadow.

While these tips are certainly not Earth-shattering, I hope I’ve been able to share at least one tip you didn’t know about. How about you, do you have any handy tips for using any of the iWork applications?