Wayne Priestley

If like me you experienced the double Contacts and Calendar entries after upgrading to the iPhone 3.0 software update don’t worry there is a easy fix available courtesy of TUAW.

Double Contacts and Calendar Entries
After setting up Mobileme and syncing my phone the first time, I found that all my contacts and calendar entries had been duplicated so that there were two identical entries of everything. Our own Chris Rawson set me straight on fixing this. If you disable calendar and contact syncing from the iPhone, all the information brought in from Mobileme will vanish. Next, re-enable them and you will be asked if you want to merge the contact and calendar information of what’s on the iPhone which was brought in by iTunes. You do. And in doing so, the problem will vanish. This tip is not just for iPhone 3G S owners, it’s also happened to previous iPhone users who updated to system 3.0.

It’s a easy fix and sorted the problem for me straight away, but typically I had tried a few other things including a full restore before this fix popped up in my RSS feed.

There are a few other tips and tricks included in the article so click away and read the full story from TUAW.

Found some nice FREE Wallpaper for my Mac from Minimamente.

They’ve got all the most common resolutions available:

1280 × 1042
1600 × 1200
2560 × 1600

There are 8 color variations in total so finding one you like shouldn’t be difficult.
Mine is set to change the Wallpaper every 15 minutes.

Here is the direct download link from the Apple website.

Pipette is a handy utility for digital artists and web designers.
It allows you to quickly and easily grab the colour of any pixel on the screen and copy it in hex format, as used in CSS files, or in paint programs, such as Adobe Photoshop.

Pipette is a very easy to use, lightweight application – in keeping with Unix philosophy it does one thing and does it well.

And best of all, Pipette is completely FREE!

I’ve been using this app for a couple of days now and finding it very handy, if your doing any sort of design download, it and give it a try.

After a thread started by Western on the ScreenCastsOnline forum listing the app’s he had installed on his Mac and asking others what they had installed, I thought I’d share the contents of my application folder with you.

Full Size image Here

Out of this list there are a few app’s that I used every day and couldn’t do without:

• 1Password This is the ultimate password manager application.

• Aperture 2 Apples premier Photo management application.

• DropBox Free online storage and sync application.

• iTunes Music player and orginizer.

• iWork 09 Apples office applications, Pages, Numbers, Keynote.

• iLife 09 Apples Photo, Movie, DVD creation and web design tools.

• LaunchBar Indespensible application launcher packed with features.

• Liquid CD CD and DVD burning made easy.

• Mail Apples Mail application.

• Picturesque Add shadows, reflections and more to images.

• Scribblet Menu bar note taking application.

• ShoveBox Another menu bar note taking application.

• Skitch Screen capture application.

• Speed Download Download manager.

• Spotify Online music application.

• TextExpander Use shortcut keys to save typing those repetitive words.

• Things Organize your life.

• Twitterrific Twitter Mac client.

• You Control iTunes Control iTunes from your menu bar.

Most of the other apps I would use weekly and the rest are used only when whatever I’m doing requires them to be open.

Here is the second AppleScript I’ve created.

It’s an image manipulation script that will resize an image to 200 pixels in length, keeping the hight in proportion.

How it works:

This file has been saved as a Application bundle Droplet.
You place this application on your desktop or within easy reach of where you work with your images.

The reason for this is that you must drag the image or images (this script has been written to process multiple images) onto the icon and the script will process the images and resize them for you all at once.

WARNING! This script WILL overwrite the images dropped onto it.

Best practice if you want to keep the original image’s would be to duplicate the them and place those duplicates onto the script droplet.

Please feel free to download the script.

You may change it, if you’re not comfortable doing that then mail me and I can modify it to convert images to a different size for you.

Resize to 200.zip

Spotify…

Well what is it?

I can only describe it as the best music service I had had the pleasure of using so far.

I’m using an invite so at present it’s free for me, so I could also describe it as iTunes without the need for a credit or debit card.

It is a streaming service so you’ll need to have a Internet connection to use it.
There is a option to purchase tracks from the various retailers from within Sportify but as of yet I haven’t tried this so have no idea of the cost or DRM etc.
The invite allows you to get the advertised based service, these ad’s are so un-intrusive I have yet to actually see one.

The ad free service is £9.99 a month.

The UI is not unlike iTunes with playlists on the left and a large pane on the right displaying the contents.

You enter your search into the top left search bar and Sportify goes away and finds all it can related to your chosen search.

Within the pane on the right hand side is displayed your results, with Track, Artist, Time and Album categories at the top.

You can create a playlist on the left and drag individual tracks into it or name the playlist with the artist and album then select the album on the right and drag the entire album into your playlist.

If you’d like an invite so that you can use Spotify for free,just leave a comment or mail me and I’ll sort you one out.

Please just check first to make sure you can use it in whatever country you are in.

Over the weekend my Logitech VX Revolution mouse arrived.
I’m impressed with the feel of the mouse in my hand, It’s way more comfortable than the ordinary shaped mice I have used in the past.

The scroll wheel feels a little cheap and plastic when scrolling with the ratchet type feel scroll enabled.

Being able to store the dongle into the mouse for safe keeping is a nice little feature, as is the way the mouse switches on when you eject the dongle from within the body of the mouse to start using it.

I haven’t installed the Logitech software I was supplied with the mouse yet as a few people recommended SteerMouse as the best 3rd party application to use.

I’ve installed SteerMouse and have been customizing some of the Logitech buttons to my applications, one of the reasons I installed SteerMouse was to be able to assign specific buttons on the mouse to do different things depending on which application I was using.

So on the whole I am pleased with, and enjoying the combination of VX Revolution and SteerMouse…

APART… from the fact that I only found out after a couple of uninstalls and reinstalls of SteerMouse, that if you have TextExpander installed on your Mac the Application Switching feature does not work.

After raising the issue with SteerMouse Support I received a e-mail confirming that they have been trying to resolve this issue alongside the makers of TextExpander but have yet to come up with a solution.

Hopefully this is a issue that will be sorted in the future, but it’s something I can live with for now.

The first AppleScript I wrote was a script to open two finder windows at the same time on my Desktop.

I’ve called it Twin Finder and made a nice Icon for it.

I have one Finder window open my Home folder and the other open my Downloads folder.

The reason I am telling you this is that I’m putting the script I wrote here for you to download if you want it.

If you want to modify it in any way feel free, changing the size or position isn’t hard, just open in Script editor and do as you with.
You may want to change the folders that Finder opens….

If you’re not comfortable doing it yourself drop me a line and I will modify it for you and upload it to the site.

I would suggest that once you’ve run it and decide if you want to keep it or not to open finder, go to Your_name/Library/scripts/applications/finder and drag the icon to the top of your finder window, if you hold it there for a moment it will add its self so you can just click it and the script will run opening two Finder windows.

Please download the application.Twin_Finder.zip

Or get the Script to edit hereUsers_Documents_Finder copy.zip

Here’s a PDF for download of Apple symbols you may not know about on your Mac.
If you haven’t got the keyboard viewer in the menu bar they can be hard to find.

Feel free to download the PDF.Keyboard symbols.pdf