New Mac User

As of Safari 3.1, double-clicking on a free area in the tab bar opens a new tab. I’ve wanted this feature since it was introduced in Firefox, and now my favorite browser has it, too.

On Monday of this week Adobe released its latest version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6. According to the Adobe website,this version have several improvements over the last version. Some of the improvements are the ability to easily create perfect group shots with new Photomerge® Ggroup Shot, batch apply one or more adjustments to multiple images simultaneously, take advantage of Guided Edit mode for assistance with key steps when editing and making creations, count on flexible layout options to create scrapbook pages, CD/DVD labels, and more, Select objects in your photos more easily than ever with the new Quick Select tool, create and fine-tune rich, dramatic black-and-whites with ease, get the perfect exposure with new tools for fine-tuning color, brightness, and contrast, combine features from different faces for entertaining results, and experience native performance on Intel® and PowerPC® based Macintosh computers. If you order through amazon you will save about 7.00 off the retail price and get free shipping. Order from amazon here.

Huckleberry is a small set of 2 mirrors that change the view of the built-in iSight camera by 180 degrees. You take this small device and set it onto you your portable mac and it will record what is on the other side. This could be used to iChat with family or hold meetings or even shoot a video podcast. I am sure that there are many more uses for this product. How would you use it?

I recently started using iChat more and more to communicate with my extended family. I have also used it to help my Grandfather when he has questions, I just fire up iChat and share his screen and I am able to help him with his issues. The other day I was messing around with the preferences in iChat and noticed something I have never been told about or heard of. I am sure that most of you know this but for my newer users who want to use iChat but don’t want to have the window open all the time you can check a box in the Preferences of iChat that will put the status icon on the Menu Bar. From there all you need to do is keep your status updated and ichat will function as it would if the full application was open and taking up space on the screen.

Next time you are looking for a new application check out iUsethis.com. iUsethis.com uses a digg like system to vote up the best applications.

After Apple updated Time Machine and The Airport Extreme you can now have the same function as Apples Time Capsule. I am going to include this as 1.5 of my backup solution “Mac Backups Made Easy“.

You can get an Apple Airport Extreme from Amazon for 174.99 and that is 5.00 off of Apples price and they toss in Free Shipping.You can also pick up a really nice Western Digital 500 gig My Book for 129.99 and it gets shipped for free as well.

Updated by Matt after some information I had wrong. Sorry

If you are anything like me and my family, you buy all kinds of things online. I use Amazon and eBay as much as I can to save a few bucks. The biggest problem for me is what to do with the receipts? Last month at out Mac User Group meeting we were talking about the “Print Options Menu” and there it was a “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” option, it was sitting right under the .pdf options button on the bottom right. The first thing that I thought was well where is this mysterious “Web Receipts Folder”? It sits in your Documents folder. It is not there by default unless you have used it before. Next time use use an online store try using the “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” option instead of killing yet another tree.

Microsoft has released an update to Office 2008 for the Mac. They are stating that it has many Fixes and that it is a critical up date. Please update as soon as you can to make sure that Microsoft does not mess up your Mac.

Via Mac Rumors

Being an Apple lover that lives in the Upstate of South Carolina I am happy and sad all at the same time to hear that the first apple store will be going up on King Street in Charlest

I am happy because that means Apple has really looked at our area. Sad because they picked a location that is 3 and a half hours away. I live in Greenville SC which is at the opposite end of the state. Here is Greenville we only have one place that is selling Macs to us locally and that is a in shop called iPlace on Pelham Road. They are more of a repair shop than a sales store so they have a limited on hand stock. With the closing of CompUSA, I will have to Drive to Charlotte or Atlanta (which has 3 stores) to get the latest and greatest Apple releases.

APPLE IF YOU ARE LISTENING PLEASE COME TO GREENVILLE!!!!!

Over the last year or so of running New Mac User the question I am most often asked is “What is the best way to backup my system?” I have tried to give just about everyone who asked advice on what will work for them. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. I firmly believe that until you lose some very important data backing up is not a priority for you. This was the case for me. Right after my wife and I had our second child, Maddie, we were in the waiting room for her one month check-up, and something happened to my macbook. It would not come out of sleep mode and it would not restart. The drive just would not mount at all. Needless to say I had not backed up my computer since we had made it home from the hospital and the only copy of all the pictures we had taken were on that hard drive. I tried everything, but nothing worked on the drive because there was something physically wrong with the drive and it would not spin up. Not to fear I was able to recover the pictures from the camera card, but everything else was gone, and for the week in between losing the drive and figuring out I was able to get them back from the SD card I was really sweating it. If I just had a backup procedure I would not have spent the hours I should have been sleeping trying to figure out how to get my pictures back.

Normally when someone asks me “Do I need to back up my computer?” my first response to them is also a question, “Can you afford to lose all of your data and for how long can you be without a computer?” Most of the time the answer to the question is the same: I can’t live without “insert your most valuable thing here” and then they tell me that they really can’t be without the computer for one reason or another.

If that answer is close to how you would answer than you really need to make sure that you have a redundant back up solution. Most people say that it would cost way too much. I tell them that I could them a redundant system for under $175.00. They say that sounds good to them.

To get started on this system you will first need a drive that is big enough. The bare minimum for my solution is two times the size of your internal hard drive. For example, if you have a 160 gig internal then you will need a 320 gig external. I have found a great drive from Western digital on Amazon for 132.00 (get it here Western Digital 500 gig My Book)

After you have the hard drive, you will need to fire up Disk Utility from your utilities folder inside Applications. Make sure the new external drive is plugged in and turned on. If you use a dual format drive like the Western Digital 500 gig My Book, which supports FireWire,USB, and e-SATA, then you will want to use the FireWire feature on your Mac. Select the Drive from the menu on the left and click on the partition tab in the middle of the main section. Here you will want to create 2 partitions (more if you want to use the drive for more than just this backup application). The first partition you will want to make about 1 gig more than your internal hard drive. So for the 160 gig internal hard drive we talked about above you would make the first partition 161 gig and the second would be the rest of the space on the drive. If you are good at labeling the drive I would name the first partition Super-Duper and the second Time Machine.

We are now done with the Hardware setup. In the next part we will discuss what you will be doing with the first partition.