iTunes 101: Using iTunes 7+iPod to Transfer All of Your Media

With iTunes 7, Apple has given users the ability to sync the songs in their “Purchased” category between multiple machines. The biggest complaint about this feature is that it only lets you transfer songs that are from the iTunes Store, however much like the “Analog Hole” Apple has also given us a work around.

If you're the kind of person that likes having a playlist of all your purchased music, the default purchases playlist will no longer fit your needs. So before we get going, you may want to make a smart playlist with “Kind Contains Protected” as the rule. This playlist is handy to have even if you don't use it on a daily basis, so I highly suggest you make one eventually. Now that you've done that, just follow these instructions:

Step 1: Select all files in the category you choose (Music, TV Shows, Movies, Podcasts, or Audiobooks are compatible with this method).

Step 2: Drag and drop those files onto the “Purchased” category.

Step 3: To keep it up to date just periodically drag your “Recently Added” playlist to “Purchased” or do so manually. Keeping up with your music is the most tedious part of this method.

Once you do this you will be able to transfer your media to multiple machines. This will work with Automatic or Manual Syncing. If you would like your iPod to transfer files between PC and MAC iTunes, you are going to have to format your iPod with Windows, and then do this method. A Windows formated iPod will sync with a Mac for it's main machine. The only drawback with this is that Windows formatted iPod are in FAT32, meaning the name of the iPod will show up as all capital letters in OS X even after renaming it.

At The Movies: Rocky Balboa

Thirty years ago Sylvester Stallone wrote and starred in “Rocky” which became one of the best sports films of all time. Unfortunately the four sequels lacked consistency in quality and heart, ironically mirroring not only the character “Rocky” but arguably Stallone's career as well. Even Stallone himself has publicly expressed his disappointment in “Rocky V” as a finished product, as it did not end the series on the high note he was hoping for. So it's no surprise that over a decade later he has resurrected the franchise with what is meant to be the last movie in the “Rocky” series.

The majority of the movie as the title “Rocky Balboa” suggests is about “Rocky” as a person. We get to see what has become of his life since losing all of his money in “Rocky V” and how he is dealing with the loss of his wife. A surprising amount of characters return to the sequel, giving us a sense of closure on all the stories the franchise has to tell. This movie is about “Rocky” and does not offer the in depth focus on the opponent that was usually offered in the other films. In that sense “Rocky Balboa” showcases Stallone's ability to make an excellent film driven by characters as opposed to action.

Pacing is all the more vital in a movie that picks up many years after it's predecessor. This is the only area I felt this movie fell short to the point of it being annoying. Great epic dialogues between close characters are fine, but hearing so many crafted lines in a short period of time pulls the human element out of the story despite the excellent acting from main characters. It does not ruin the experience, but it does start to feel awkward about twenty minutes into the movie. As usual the dialogue between subsequent characters is less than stellar and often annoying. That said, “Rocky Balboa” is able to portray variety in the humorous and dramatic tones as well as the original film did.

All of the music is enjoyable and succeeds in bringing you into the moment as all the other “Rocky” films. The parts involving the simulated computer fight and the real fight thereafter feel like mere compliments to the story as opposed to something we are supposed to care about. The movie could have used an extra twenty minutes to flesh out the main story a bit more and fix the aforementioned pacing issues. But it is safe to say that at this point most fans are satisfied with 102 good minutes of film to honor the series.

“Rocky Balboa” calls heavily on brief flashback sequences and references to the previous films, however if you only saw the original there is still much to enjoy about this movie. Fans who were disappointed in the last film will be happy that Stallone learned from the mistakes made the last time around. The concept may be sound ridiculous, but if you can overlook the unrealistic ideas presented you will more than likely have a great time.

“Rocky Balboa” serves as a great mirror to the original and excellent conclusion to the franchise.

“Rocky Balboa” being possibly the best sequel in the franchise gets a 9 out of 10.

Now on DVD: “Invincible” stars Mark Wahlberg as Eagle's legend Vince Papale. M Night Shyamalan turns the bedtime story he invented for his kids into a riveting mystery movie. Sean Penn stars in another film adaptation of the novel “All The King's Men” alongside Jude Law and Anthony Hopkins.

Originally published in The Hammonton News

Software Review: Disco

Disco (USD $14.95 (intro price) USD $21.95 (regular price))

Website: discoapp.com

by Andrew Philip Lardi

When I decided to switch to a Mac for my main machine, I knew that there would be a few applications I might have a hard time finding a good equivalent to. My main PC recently had a hard drive crash and there was no data back up. The incident made good burning software the foremost on the list. I spent some time on VersionTracker and Google looking for a solid freeware alternative to Nero’s Burning Suite for Windows. In the process I found some great applications like Burn that combined the burning features of OS X into a nice little program, but they lacked the feature I wanted the most: automatically splitting up large folders across multiple CDs. This may sound like a lazy man’s feature, but when you get to a certain point with your data it can become quite tedious to split the folders up manually.

I took a look at Toast and the only thing holding me back was the $99.99 (USD) price tag and lack of a free trial. Of course there is a $20 (USD) rebate at the moment, but it still wasn’t worth stopping my search there. I then remembered seeing a story on Digg a few weeks back about a new burning application for OS X. The attention it was receiving was about it’s beautiful interface that produces interactive smoke as your burn your CD. It is of course only a gimmick, but an incredibly beautiful demonstration of what your machine can do. The fact that Disco boasts all the basic features of most burning applications along with the good looks and it’s current $14.95 (USD) made it impossible to pass up the free trial.

Unfortunately the GUI is stripped of all it’s glory on my Mac Mini, as per the Intel GMA950’s lack of floating point texture support. However it split up the files perfectly and after double checking the data verification on the three DVDs I found no errors in the data. I purchased it immediately and have since burned several CDs and DVDs of data without one bad burn. The process is simple: drag the folder or folders into the application, get however many CD’s or DVD’s Disco tells you to have ready and click burn. Disco also has the capability of making images of your data or existing CDs in CDR, ISO, and DMG formats. You may want to note that developers have stated they are working on a non-interactive smoke interface for the GMA950 machines, so that’s something to look forward too.

Disco however lacks the features of a full burning suite like Toast, such as disc mounting, iLife integration, and the ability to make custom video DVDs. Keeping in mind that the application is in beta and is only a fraction of the price of it’s competition makes it difficult to criticize. It’s pretty clear from Disco’s website that they plan on making this a more capable program over the next few years, support for HD-DVD and Blu-ray are already on the list as soon as Apple supports them. All those things combined make Disco real competition for Toast users who don’t take advantage the more complex features.

I like to judge simplicity and usability by how easy it is for people like my parents to use the program. Disco seems tailored for this as it walks you through every step without talking to you like a you’re a geek, or talking down to you. Because of that my mother was able to back up her photo library with ease, and that’s saying a lot considering her very basic knowledge of computers. People like me will want to spend the money and upgrade to Toast eventually for the more advanced features. But if you’re a basic user or someone who just wants an easy way to back up your files periodically Disco does the job flawlessly.

Originally Published on MacCast

Software Review: MarinerPak

MarinerPak (USD $79.00)
Website: Mariner Software

MarinerPak is an affordable alternative to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel for Mac OS 9 and 10. Currently priced at USD$79.95 for the download edition, it offers pretty much everything you would expect from a word processing and spreadsheet suite. However, with competition from the Open Source community, I’m sure most would agree that spending money on an office suite would require some truly compelling features.

Anyone familiar with Microsoft Word should feel right at home in Mariner Write. After about two hours of use, as far as features and usability go, there are not many noticeable differences to disadvantage Mariner Write. Unfortunately, both counterparts of MarinerPak only have partial read/write support for Microsoft Excel and Word documents. This fact does greatly crippling it’s compatibility. How much you will suffer from the partial compatibility depends on the complexity of your documents, but chances are this will be the factor that holds you back from purchasing it.

While lack of full compatibility with Microsoft’s standard is a turn-off, I will not base my review on that factor alone. Unlike it’s free competition MarinerPak software is extremely fast and matches the look and feel of the Mac perfectly. It launches instantaneously on my Mac Mini Core Duo and has not choked on any large Microsoft Word documents I’ve thrown at it. MarinerPak will also barely leave a footprint on your RAM and CPU usage, which is greatly appreciated in any application.

Compatibility with Excel documents is not on par with that of Word documents. Some of my personal files were not fully functional in MarinerCalc, and the application didn’t feel fast in handling large Excel spreadsheets. I am not an Excel master, but I did feel slightly lost using the MarinerCalc interface at times. I have the feeling a more experienced Excel user may be able to adjust to the UI better than someone like myself. However for basic uses, starting a fresh spreadsheet with MarinerCalc is as smooth of a procedure as a text document with MarinerWrite.

MarinerPak is an overall solidly developed software suite that earns it’s $80 dollar price tag in terms of speed and features. But with OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, and AbiWord available for free it is hard to recommend the suite to most people. Even more so if they wouldn’t mind waiting a few extra seconds for those applications to launch. The best way to describe my feelings towards MarinerPak as a whole would be comparing it to a movie that you really want to love, but the acting or script is so bad you just keep turning it off. Because MarinerPak has such a great foundation I can only hope they continue to fine tune it or make it an addition to the Open Source community.

Originally Published on MacCast

Watchtower Library 2005 English Edition on an Intel Mac (OS X Tiger)

This tutorial is for running Watchtower Library 2005 English Edition on an Intel Mac using CrossOver.

Current Bugs:
1) Asterisk symbols shows up as squares.
2) Tooltips show up as blank.
3) See the Good Land images do not show.
4) The first time the application is launch, all of the sizable toolbars are sized all the way down. (Once resized they stay fixed.)
6) You are unable to sort search results by anything other than "Count"

I have no idea how to fix these problems, but without these features it is still very much usable and worth the sacrifice if you don't want to pay for Parallels and a copy of Windows XP.

Steps:
1) After application is installed and launched go to Configure>>Manage Bottles.
2) Click the "+" button to add a new bottle and set the bottle type to "winxp".
3) In that same window click the "Control Panel" tab and double click "wincfg".
4) In the new window click the "Graphics" tab and make sure "Emulate a virtual desktop" is checked and set the resolution to your preference.
5) Insert Watchtower Library CD and when the installation screen appears via CrossOver choose "Microsoft Visio" as the software package.
6) In the next screen click the bubble for "other existing bottle" and and choose your newly created "winxp" bottle.
7) Go through Watchtower install and choose full hard drive install.

Once you are done, you can launch WTLB via CrossOver to give it it's own icon in the dock. The EXE is located in Users/USERNAME/Applications/CrossOver/Watchtower Libray 2005 - English Edtion/. You can launch the application like any other OS X app, even through Quicksilver or Spotlight.

For more information check out this page. I plan on updating this information with the next version of WTLB, which includes the traditional exe and the new "Watchtower Reader" program that will replace the traditional version in 2007. Enjoy.