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Macintosh

Customizing your iPhone home screen – Video Tip

This is a pretty specific tip for a relatively new device, but with WalMart now carrying iPhones more and more people will want and need to learn how to take advantage of their investment. The iPhone is a wonderful little tool…IF you learn how to use it and make it work for you.

One of the first things you can do with any piece of technology is customize it to fit your needs. With the iPhone, learning to customize the interface makes the unit more usable for you. This week, I show iPhone users how to customize the location of their icons on the iPhone launch screen or home screen.

  1. Touch and hold your finger on any icon
  2. When the icons start to jiggle, take your finger off the icon.
  3. Now you can drag any icon to any position by touching and dragging it to a new location or even a new screen by dragging it to the left or right edge of the screen.
  4. You can also drag the default icons off the toolbar at the bottom and drag the ones you use most often to the toolbar
  5. When you are finished moving your icons to positions that work best for you, push the button at the bottom of your iPhone.

As always, these tips make more sense by watching the video! And even if you aren’t an iPhone user, I think you will find it interesting to see the kind of tech that can be found in a phone today.

Using the Macintosh Dashboard – Video Tip

This week’s tip is for those of you who have taken my advice and moved over to the Macintosh world. The Mac has a nice feature that remains unused for many new Mac users. It’s called the Dashboard. The Mac Dashboard consists of literally hundreds of helpful or just plain fun, customizable widgets that can be instantly viewed or instantly pushed out of view. Mac computers ship with a couple of dozen widgets ranging from calculators, conversion programs, translation programs, weather gadgets, post-it type notes, and much more.

If you don’t find any Dashboard widgets that work for you, I explain how you can search Apple’s vast library of downloadable widgets…most of which are free.

Watch my how-to video below to learn how to make the most of your Mac Dashboard!

Pandora Internet Radio – Video Tip

Pandora.com qualifies for yet another Web 2.0 application. Pandora started as a project to find the similarities in music and why we like certain music and why we don’t. The Pandora folks eventually made all their study of music into an amazingly customizable and accurate music service. To sign up is free although I recommend paying for the service if you use it a lot. Once you sign up, you start by building your own radio stations based on your favorite songs or artists. After you build your first station, Pandora starts to play songs related to the song or artist you started with when you built the radio station (which entails that you simply type the name of a musical artist or a song name and click Create).

As the songs play, if you tell Pandora whether you like the selection or not (via a click on a thumbs up or thumbs down icon), it will continue to more accurately pick music for you. You must see the short video below to see how it works, and better yet, give it a try to see why it is such an exciting and useful Web 2.0 application!

Backup your digital photos with iPhoto – Video Tip

Macintosh users take digital photos too. And they also need to make sure their photos are backed up safely. Thankfully, the bright men and women at Apple computers have built in a great picture management software called iPhoto. Within iPhoto, you will find a straight forward method of backing up your photos.

Here’s how:

1. Start iPhoto
2. Hold down the Command key on your keyboard and select which folders, albums, or events you want to backup
3. Click Share from the menus
4. Click Burn button on the menu that appears
5. Once the burn is finished, the disk will eject.

I am still partial to Picasa for picture management, but Google still hasn’t released a version for the Mac yet. However, as you can see, the iPhoto makes pretty easy work of backing up your photos.

How to get music off of your iPod

The iPod has set the standard for media players. It’s ease of use and intuitive interface make it a device that media lovers of all ages and expertise can easily pickup and use.

However, the iPod has one disadvantage when compared with almost every other media player on the market. Once your music is stored on the system, there is no simple way of getting it back off again. If you switch computers or simply want to make a backup of your tunes, you must find a way around this system Apple has put in place to prevent you from pirating the music that has been purchased from iTunes.

Microsoft Office function without the MS price – on a Mac! – Video Tip

This is the first of what we hope to be many Macintosh video tips here at HelpMeRick.com. We posted a similar tip to this one a few months back for Windows and Ubuntu users, but this one applies to Mac users only.

In this tip, I describe to you how you can use the free NeoOffice product from neooffice.org to seamlessly create Microsoft Office compatible documents. Of course, the software also allows Mac users to open any Office document as well. NeoOffice gives Mac users complete abilities to share documents with any Windows user or fellow Mac user.

This short video demonstrates how to set your copy of NeoOffice so that it automatically saves your documents in the Microsoft Office format: