For the average Mac user, we get our new computer out of it’s box and from that day forward whenever we plug in a camera we use iPhoto. Now iPhoto is a very good piece of photo management software, which makes it easy to import, organise, make simple edits and be creative with your photos. However sometimes there is just a lack of something in this program, what am I referring to? Well read on to see what I mean!

iPhoto does a great job at keeping all your pics in one place and organising them for you, however there are a few things that kind of bug me when it comes to iPhoto. Due to the fact that iPhoto automatically bundles your photos into a giant blob of data under a folder called iPhoto Library. When you navigate to this folder in your Finder and click on it it doesn’t display files like you would expect it to if the photos were stored in a normal folder. Instead what happens is you click the folder and iPhoto opens up, this is no help when you’re trying to select photos to upload to Facebook for example!

Picasa 3 – the latest version – turns out to be a great program! If you want you can switch all of your photos over to this program and let it handle everything. This solves the above mentioned problem because Picasa will save the files in the sensible and ‘logical’ way of doing it. However if you still prefer to continue using iPhoto thats ok too. Picasa will reference the files in your iPhoto library for you to use within the Picasa program, using the program this way doesnt solve the annoying folder problem. However it does allow you to take advantage of a few really neat features.

The Features

File Management

If you choose to use both programs simultaneously that is fine! In fact great because Picasa simply reads your iPhoto library, if you end up making changes to the photo in Picasa the program will prompt you to create a copy. This saves the original in iPhoto and copies it so you don’t loose the precious original copy.

Like the latest verson of iPhoto does with Faces & Places, Picasa does this as well. I have found the face recognition in iPhoto to be easier to use and more effective at how it recognises the faces. Picasa makes you go through and actually type in the name for everyone in every photo even if you have already tagged them. Never the less if you don’t use iPhoto 09 then you get the faces and places capability for free.

Creative Tools

My favourite feature in Picasa is the Collage tool. Basically to use this you select the desired photos and press the collage button, the program will randomly ’scatter’ these onto a virtual table for you. You can then alter each individual photo by resizing, rotating and moving it. Once you create the collage it is saved under the projects tab for you.

This program is also good at extending photo editing beyond the standard red-eye removal too. Select a photo you want and you can actually put in text overlay using different fonts and colours, retouch the photo, straighten and crop, automatically and manually adjust exposure and color. Very very cool!

This program also allows you to create a movie slideshow of you photos as well, simply select the photos you want  to appear in the slideshow and press the slideshow button. Once you have made the appropriate changes its all ready to rock and role.

If you are a blogger using Blogger, there’s also a quick button here as well which allows you to quickly and easily send a photo to your blog.

This is just a brief overview of some of the cool things that this program can do for you, I think I will be using it mainly in conjunction with iPhoto. But it really is a great piece of software to have and why not – its a free download for Macs and you can also get the Windows version for free as well.

Grab the download from the Picasa website: picasa.google.com

As we all know it is important for us to keep our computers in good clean condition, not only for aesthetic reasons but also to maintain good functionality of your equipment and possibly most important of all for health reasons. When it comes to keeping electrical and computer equipment clean it is important to follow a few basic rules.

Cleaning Agents

When it comes to cleaning your computer, you want something that can both clean the computer screen to remove fingerprints and dust without leaving streaks, and you also want something that get all that built up grime off that thing you type on all day, the keyboard. These are the only things you need:

1. Rubbing Alcohol
2. Water
3. Microfiber (or lint free) cloth
4. Squirter bottle
5. Towel

Preparation

The mixture of the alcohol and water makes up the cleaning agent – this mixture is important as the alcohol helps to readily dry the liquid mix which is great for computer screens and the alcohol has good anti-bacterial properties.

You will need to mix these two liquids in your squirty bottle in a ratio of 1:1, that is equal parts of each, so for every 100 mls of rubbing alcohol you would add 100 mls of water.

Cleaning your Computer

The first thing to do here is to ensure that all of your equipment has been turned off and preferably disconnected from the power. Once you have done this it is important to remember that the cleaning solution should never be directly squirted onto any of your equipment as this can work its way into the electrical systems and in turn leave you with a faulty machine.

You will want to spray an adequate amount of liquid onto your lint free cloth to moisten it, you can then wipe over all external surfaces of your computer equipment. This mixture will remove greasy fingerprints and also that dirty grime that tends to build up on your keyboard. You may find that to adequately clean stubborn stains that a little extra elbow grease is required.

Laptops

Laptops here do require a little bit of different attention to a standard desktop PC. Given that the screens on a laptop are on a hinge it is important to take care when cleaning them. This is where the towel comes into play, you will need to lay the towel on a flat surface. Open up your laptop and place the computer on the towel with the back of the screen laying flat and support the computer by holding the main body. This is important because if you attempt to clean the screen while it is in it’s normal position you have the change of doing damage to the hinge.

Once it is laid down you are free to wipe over the screen as you would with any other flat surface, and apply the same technique to clean the other flat surfaces on your laptop.

Final Note:

There are computer cleaning sprays available to purhchase, if you choose to use one of these then there is nothing wrong with that. However I feel that the solution described above is probably a much more cost effective way rather than purchasing the commercial cleaning agents.  Further to this if you are really serious about keyboard cleanliness for hygiene reasons, a good way to get out all the dirt, dust and crumbs that build up under the keys is to purchase a can of compressed air. This is pressurised air and can be squirted in and around the keys to blow all of that grime away.

I think that the concept of Apple’s Mobile Me is just genius, allowing you to automatically sync all of your emails, contacts, calendar and numerous other settings and preferences with very little work from yourself. However as I already have my email address set up – everyone knows it – I’m not really keen on changing that, nor am I very keen on spending the $120 a year for this subscription when I can get by with my own solutions to the problem for free. In this post I’m going to look at a few things that I have done to create my own ‘kind-of’ mobile me solution.

Email

First and easiest is syncing your email. To do this you’re email provider needs to support what is called IMAP, generally they will tell you to set up your email programs with POP3. The difference here is that POP3 is a system which downloads what is on your email server and stores a copy on your local system – this is excellent if you only use one computer. But throw in your mobile phone and your laptop on top of your desktop computer and you will be getting the same email showing as unread multiple times, and if you delete it on one computer it will still be on the other devices same with your sent emails – frustrating!!.

The beauty of using IMAP based email is that every-time your computer or mobile phone is told to check your mail it will only show you what is currently on the email systems server, so think of it this way: somebody sends you an email > it goes to your email providers central computer > your computer or phone checks to see if there is any mail > it pulls down a copy of this and shows you your mail > all the time keeping a message on the emails providers computers. If you make a change such as delete or move it to another folder the action is mimicked on the email systems server. Therefore the next time one of your other devices checks for new mail it will see exactly what is on the email server and refresh all of your devices.

Setting up an IMAP email is hard to document because every internet/email service provider is set up a different way therefore there isn’t one set way to do this, generally speaking by navigating through your suppliers support pages and by using google to search you will generally be able to find a way to set this up. If your primary email is done through a service like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc this makes it easier because by nature these are already an IMAP way of managing your email just navigate to their websites and they will give you details on how to set this up for your email program.

Files

Mobile Me provides a service called iDisk, which is like your own portion of disk space on Apples servers. This means it appears as a local disk on your computers however it can be accessed by any computer you give access to or via the web. The nice thing about this is that if you work between multiple computers you know just what it is like to go out one day and have forgotten to copy the file across. My solution to this was to use a service called Dropbox. I have blogged about this previously so won’t go into too much depth, but for free with this service you get 2GB worth of space which I find is adequate for files and some pictures. You can pay for a larger disk space if you want to. This service provides the same function that I mentioned earlier about providing an online central place to store files, but the beauty of dropbox is that whatever you put in your dropbox folder on one computer is automatically synced up to the dropbox server and back down to any other computer that you have installed dropbox on!

Calendar

Another great feature of Mobile Me is the ability to synchronize your calendars across different machines and you’re iPhones, Mobile Me does a really great job of this by pushing any changes made up to their servers and back down to your other devices to be updated. There is one great way to achieve this for free and this is with Google Calendar.

Once you have a google account you have full access to this feature for free, the process is fairly simple however I won’t discuss it here for the fact that it is so in-depth, however if this interests you check out the links posted below to find out how to set this up. Below are the links to platforms and programs it is available with:

• Click here for links to set up Calendar
• Works with Mozilla Sunbird
• Apple iCal & iPhone
• Microsoft Outlook
• Windows Mobile
• Blackberry

Contacts

Google really provides so many great services at no charge and due to the nature of how your contacts with Google are managed – that is in the ‘cloud’, it allows them to offer this free synchronizing services for contacts as well. So like with the Calendar when you add or update a contact on your computer or phone, it will update this on every device enabled to do so. Again the explanation of how to do this is to in depth for me to cover here but if you would like to enable this as well check out the link here > Google Sync Services

I couldn’t help but post this! Hilarious!!!

This really is cool!

Your Fonts
I came across this cool website a little while ago and found it a pretty cool little thing to do if bored one day! Basically it allows you to make a computer font out of your own handwriting, neat hey?

Keep in mind that you will need a printer and a scanner to do this!

I found this really quite simple to do, first you have to download and print the PDF file which has the sheets that you will enter your font onto. Print these out and then fill It the squares with the corresponding characters, there’s even a square enabling you to put your signature in!

When you have filled out the sheets with the characters that you want scan the sheets back into a file on your computer. The website then gets you to upload these files back to them, wait a few minutes and then they give you a font file that you can download and put into the font folder on your computer. It may depend on what operating system you use as to how you need to install your font but the website has very clear instructions explaining how to install your new font, if your not familiar with the process to follow.

So if you are lookingfor a bit of a boredom buster or like to make your own personalized stationary give this a go!!