Word

Aug 26 2010

NetFlix instant streaming movies to your iPhone …awesomeness?

17200v1 max 450x4501 NetFlix instant streaming movies to your iPhone …awesomeness?The Mac web, or more specifically, the iPhone web is buzzing about Netflix for iPhone today. This is huge for NetFlix subscribers who find themselves in need of on-demand entertainment as it allows them to instantly watch movies and TV shows from the service’s vast selection of titles streamed from their servers directly to the iPhone’s screen.

Since I’m in Canada and still awaiting the arrival of the promised NetFlix service, I have to go by second-hand accounts. Mel Martin from TUAW says…

The new iPhone version has excellent image quality, supports fast forwarding and rewinding of the video stream, and like other incarnations of Netflix, allows you to pick up where you left off if you stop a movie and restart it. As Netflix members will appreciate, you can pause a movie you are watching on a Netflix device at home, and start the movie on the iPhone app and it will resume at the same place.

GeekSugar has a very helpful word of warning: make sure you use the app when you’re connected to wifi or expect a huge cell phone bill.

Like I said, I can’t try the app—I wish I could. Just based on the buzz and the strong potential for a service like this in the marketplace, I have to assume this is awesomeness.

By RickMacMerc • apps, iPhone, News • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

At Your Service– Third Party Services for Mac OS X

One of the most unique and unused new features of OS X is support for “services”.
While OS X comes with it’s own set of services, today we’ll look into several free third-party system additions.

The same architecture that brings a system wide spell checking feature opens the door for a slew of enhancement for your Cocoa applications.

First, a note on “services”. These handy little applications live in their own little Services folder. Where that folder is located determines who gets to use the service. If you want all the users on your system to have use of the service, place it in the (hard drive)/Library/Services folder. To limit a services use to one user, place it in the /users/(username)/Library/Services folder.

cocoAspell

As mentioned, OS X comes complete with a spell check. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ve found the spell check useful, but not always as capable of supplying useful alternatives. This is a weakness cocoAspell addresses. This alternative to the built-in spell check comes with a preference panel that lets you set a slew of options.

SearchGoogle

This handy service takes highlighted text from any Cocoa application and opens a Google search results window for it. Nothing complicated here. The service will use your default browser defined in your Internet pane of System Preferences. You can access this command from the application/services menu or with it’s keyboard shortcut shift-command-G.

OpenService

As simple as the previous, this service takes a highlighted URL and sends it to your browser. The keyboard shortcut got this service is command-/. A note for OmniWeb users: you don’t need this as OmniWeb comes with its own “open with OmniWeb” service.

AntiWordService

A very useful service for anyone, well, anti-Word. This service enables a text editing Cocoa application to open Word documents. Now, before you get too excited, realize that the service only handles text, and throws out formating and images. In truth, AntiWordService only strips out the formating and Word specific file data. Good for recovering text from Word documents, but not much more.

Thanks for joining me for a fresh load for freeware. Come back next week for more.

Brian

By admin • Articles, Freeloader Friday Download of the Week • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

The best parts of Panther

By: Jon Gales

Now that a good bit of the Mac population has Panther, I thought it would be a good time to go over what I like most about the new OS. If you have a differing opinion, let me know.

TextEdit
Apple didn’t make a new ad campaign centered around TextEdit, but they could have. This little, “application that could”, can now read and write .docs! It also sports cool things like styles. This makes my rare grab for Word, a lot more rare.

Preview
Another one of those little upgrades. Preview can now crop, which is really handy when you just need a quick change and don’t want to fire up Photoshop. It also sports a search function for PDFs. Both very cool. Not really Preview, but the sheer speed of PDF rendering in Panther is great

Application switcher
Yes, I know it wasn’t original, but I like it. Quite handy.

Activity monitor
Again, one of these quite updates. One of the things that bugged me about X was that you could never really tell how much RAM applications were taking up without some weird Terminal tricks or freeware. Is it some sort of secret? Come on Apple.

With the new activity monitor (changed from process viewer), you can not only see RAM usage, but CPU, disk and network usage as well. It really kicks butt, and has some neat graphs that make it look like you’re doing a lot of work when your boss comes in for the 4th time in an hour.

So, do you have some favorites that I didn’t mention? Let me know!

By admin • Articles, Power User Monday Tip of the Week • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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