A long time ago, far far away...

It was after a day at MacWorld. We'd had a busy time in the booth, but this evening was to be far more special. I'd been invited to an Apple VIP party. It was to be held in a hotel somewhere near Moscone, in downtown San Francisco.

I remember walking around the room and looking at name badges. For whatever reason, I remember seeing and meeting Jonathan Ivy [sic], design guru.

Steve Jobs walked into the room, as all oxygen in the room exited simultaneously.

We were seven feet apart.

He said: "We don't like it when you introduce accelerator cards which are faster than our computers." (At that time, I was the CEO of Newer Technology, which ultimately sold somewhere around 150K+ CPU accelerator cards for Macs.)

Well, that was a nice Howdy Do......

One of our readers from a certified Apple Repair Center sent us a report concerning a problem affecting the internal power connector of some MacBooks.

.....there is a short circuit between the internal connector and the motherboard. It burns tracks, and the entire board has to be exchanged.

The problem does not affect many units (yet?), but we can confirm from our disassembling experiments, that the internal connector seems lousy, while it is a critical component.

They say timing is everything.

Timing seems to be working against VMware's August 6th release of its Fusion virtualization software for Mac. Fusion's release might have gotten more attention - except that the next day Steve Jobs brought the press in to show off new versions of Apple's iMac computer and iLife and iWork software.

And if Fusion had been released, say, a year earlier, it would have been before Parallels Desktop had a chance to become synonymous with virtualization in most Mac users' minds.

VMware has a long history of developing virtualization products; the company has a strong product line of Windows and Linux software aimed at software developers and network managers. Fusion is both the company's first Mac product and its first product aimed at consumers. (US$79, before a US$20 rebate until the end of the year for US customers only.)

In many ways, they've done a good job with it. Fusion offers a native Mac interface with a user-customizable toolbar similar to Apple's Safari browser.....

While typing this article, I've got Microsoft Word 2004, Preview, and Safari running. I opened Parallels, loading my Boot Camp installation. After closing it, I opened the same Boot Camp installation in Fusion. While Windows XP was starting up, I continued working in Word. While Windows-in-Parallels was loading, Word became noticeably more sluggish than doing the same thing in Fusion. From this unscientific test, I would conclude that Fusion is less of a resource hog, at least while starting up Windows.

I downloaded the trial of iWork '08 last week. I would really like to stop using MS Office on my MacBook. I had a new IBM article I needed to start working on, so I figured one good way to see if I could switch to iWork would be to use Pages to write the article. It's an easy test really, since I don't do anything too complex.

I was working on the article on the plane this morning. When we were about to land in Dallas, I saved my work and closed iWork. I'm going to be in Florida for the next week, so I decided to switch over my time to central, as Dallas is also in the central time zone. So I did that.

Now I'm sitting at my gate with a two hour layover. I decided to do so more week after I ate lunch. I put together a nice graphic in Pages, where I overlayed a screenshot and drew on it to highlight important parts of the screen. This is something I usually use a separate program for because it's awkward in Word. I was able to do it easily in Pages. The thought went through my head "Word, your days are done."

I was so happy with this accomplishment that I hit CMD-S to save my work. I got some cryptic message about not being able to save unless I either entered a serial or began a trial. I clicked trial, and it told me that my 30 day trial had ended. Thus I could not save my work.....

I'm assuming that it did this because I had tinkered with my date (changing the time zone) earlier. This indicates several layers of stupidity......

PAGES as part of iWork '08 is aptly and smartly named.

Because it's not just another word processor - it's really a collected series of classy looking templates that you can just use as is - or customize by keeping the formatting and page layout but dropping in your own photo or illustration and have it look like you had it professional done.

From the plain & straightforward business letter to envelopes, forms, résumés, to a great collection of pages for small businesses - brochures, flyers, business cards & posters …

Simply click and you are ready to go.

Unlike MS OFFICE WORD which still after all this time has trouble 'digesting' graphics whether they are a template or your own … see if you can guess which is from Apple's PAGES template and which is MS WORD's templates?

If you're a small business and you're interested in knocking out something quick and classy, PAGES is great. It's typical Apple. Everything is set and ready to go. PAGES is really a small, fast version of PAGEMAKER with great templates.

It is a really a PAGE LAYOUT application that can also do some word processing … MS WORD on the other hand is definitely a word processing application that has page layout features shoe-horned in.

Today, I learned that VMware has arrived for the Mac. Great, so now we have VMware entering a space that Parallels and Cross Over Office has long since dominated in! Who cares, seriously? If VMware, or any other virtualization option, wanted to really make some worthwhile headlines, it would need to close a deal with Apple allowing users to use OS X on a Windows desktop without violating Apple's EULA.

OS X On PC: It's Not Really That New of a Concept. In reality, people who are willing to take on such a task have installed a variety of OS X releases onto typical home PCs......

Now, for the ten thousand dollar question: is installing OS X on non-Apple hardware against the law? While I'm not a lawyer, I would say the chances of this breaking the law are quite high....

Mirror, mirror on the wall; who is the greenest vendor of them all? Toshiba has had five of its notebooks rated gold by EPEAT, the environmental agencies top green rating. And claims that this is more gold-rated notebooks than any other supplier can boast.

Apple can only claim 5 silver-rated laptops to its name.

EPEAT is a US PC environmental rating organization. The US government has mandated that federal PC purchases must be of EPEAT-rated PCs, encompassing desktops, notebooks and monitors. The agency has a searchable database of products rated gold, silver or bronze in terms of their environmental friendliness.

Fujitsu has taken the use of biodegradable plastic beyond picnic ware and household items, and designed a notebook with a biodegradable chassis.

The Fujitsu LifeBook sports a chassis made from a plastic made from cornstarch, rather than petroleum. When it is disposed of, the chassis will decompose in a matter of months, as opposed to decades for standard plastic.

With all of the wonderful work that Apple has done with Mac OS X to make navigating the computer simple, it's time to make the Finder work harder for you. You've customized the dock, gotten accustomed to the column view, and are finding you work faster with Spotlight. Now, tweak those Finder windows to speed up your workflow even more.

Like many applications in Mac OS X, you can customize the Finder's toolbar by control + clicking (right-clicking) the toolbar to show a contextual menu. Select Customize Toolbar to open the available tools that can be added (or removed) from the toolbar.

There's a lot of buzz, as there is every year at this time, about component prices, and how they'll fluctuate heading into the holidays. This is the time of year when companies like Apple are placing their orders for parts that will be used in products that will be on the shelves in fourth quarter. Prices on commodity parts like DRAM, flash memory and LCD screens have been pretty good for the most part, but they can't stay so favorable forever. During Apple's quarterly earnings call on July 25, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimern and COO Tim Cook sought to tighten the reigns on profit guidance in part because of prices on those components that were starting increase.

Some of Opera's long-term bets are beginning to pay off. The Norwegian web pioneer has invested in TV and mobile for years, and now Nintendo's hit Wii console has put Opera into more than eight million living rooms. Mini has made the web usable on millions more phones. And the most recent major release of FireFox has been met with pushback on its performance, usability, and security.

This week we caught up with Opera founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner to discuss this, and some of the thornier challenges facing the company.

Macsimum runs a semi-regular series of interviews with Mac specialists, dealers and companies worldwide. This week we're talking with Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann, president of DEVONtechnologies. DEVONtechnologies is the company behind such products as DEVONAgent, DEVONthink and DEVONthink Pro.

Among all of the upcoming fall season's iPod rumors lurks the iPod nano, which has not seen a significant refresh in some time. And while we have heard that both a fullsize iPod revamp and possibly an iPhone nano are scheduled to be released in September, we haven't heard much about the little guy. 9to5mac, however, published a report late last week claiming that sources in China have confirmed a nano redesign, along with new colors.

You've bought your first Mac, but you are not ready yet to kick your PC to the curb? But how do you use both side by side and share files between them? The simplest way is to network them together and share files from one computer, but you can set them up so you can use shared folders on each of them at the same time.

Both Macs and PCs have built in networking to accomplish this. Connecting them together takes a bit of work but is not very difficult. Follow along as we set both of them up for file sharing.

I have a 500 gigabyte hard disk on my Mac and it's not large enough. Where do all those files come from? Who put them there? What do they do?

Should I buy a bigger hard disk or clean house? I decided to clean house first. Here's what I found. Plenty of files I didn't know I had.

Wil, my significant, and reasonable, other (or, is it "reasonably significant?") convinced me to put all our video clips on the Mac. I did. And promptly ran out of space.

Ran out? How is that possible on a 500 gigabyte hard disk? I mean, I have thousands of songs in iTunes, thousands of photos in iPhoto, and some video clips.

Is my Mac so packed with files that 500 gigabytes is not enough? Apparently so.

The choices are basic. Either get rid of some files, apparently a lot of files, or buy a bigger hard disk. I chose the former before the latter.

When entering college in 1995, I purchased my first computer that was all mine - a Performa 631CD, with screaming 33 MHz performance and a 68040LC processor. Sporting 8 MB of RAM and 500 MB of hard drive space, I was good to go. But unsurprisingly, I was immediately lapped, not just by the next Mac upgrades, but by an entire processor family, as Apple moved from 68k Macs to PowerPC. In short time, I found many titles were written for PowerPC processors only, and my Mac was too out of date to participate.

More than a decade later, my go-to Mac is a PowerBook G4. Though the specs are much stronger than my first Macs, and the machine is tremendous, I'm seeing a similar gap between where I am and where the leading Mac developers are focused - as they code for Intel-based Macs, and some applications run only on Intel Macs, leveraging the power of Apple's new chip partner.

Noted Mac disassembler Mitsunobu Tanaka, Ph.D. (a.k.a. Kodawarisan), who most recently dissected the 2007 iMac, has a theory about the origins of the aluminum for the new Apple keyboard.

After taking apart said iMac, he concludes that Apple is using the extra aluminum from the knockout area where the display is to fabricate the new keyboard.

Email has overtaken telephony as the communication tool of choice in the workplace, new research claimed today.

A Datamonitor poll conducted for Dimension Data revealed that people would rather use email than speak to each other on the telephone.

The study found that 100 per cent of the end user respondents use email, followed by fixed-line telephony (80 per cent), mobile telephony (76 per cent) and instant messaging (66 per cent).

So you have penty of people who use Firefox because they can block ads, and it seems some site owners are retaliating by blocking Firefox. (I've not found one myself.) The Why Firefox is Blocked site says:

"While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Ad Block Plus's unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking FireFox is the only alternative. Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.".

Next Article: Paintbrush 1.0 Bitmap Graphics Program Mini-Review - OS X Odyssey 884

Previous Article: Apple Certified Refurbished iPhones Now Available

	Print this page is sponsored by www.MyMacStore.com For all your iPod, iPhone and Mac Gear