Our gaze wanders far and wide this week, with Jeff Carlson offering a review of Ovolab’s Geophoto, a tool for giving your photos location tags and then browsing through them via a cartographic interface. Jeff also alerts us to the latest security update from Apple, passes on tips for making multiple-page documents in Adobe Illustrator, and points to a useful shopping list for HD video editing gear. Not to be outdone in the tip department, Adam collects oodles of scroll wheel-related tips, notes that MacLink Plus 16 can read Word and Excel 2007 for Windows documents, and expresses both amusement and alarm about the latest news from the copyright front.
Apple has released its fifth Mac OS X security update of 2007 to patch a number of potential vulnerabilities. Security Update 2007-005 makes changes to CoreGraphics, iChat, VPN, BIND, crontabs, PPP, and other components, in most cases correcting problems that require either local user access or access to the Mac via a local network
In the fun category, Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University has created a video review of copyright principles. You're probably thinking, "How could anyone make a video about a legal concept even mildly entertaining?" But Faden's truly inspired video works on many levels because it consists entirely of extremely short clips (often no more than one word) from a wide variety of animated Disney movies
Thanks to Jim Dewitt, who alerted me that DataViz's venerable MacLinkPlus Deluxe, now at version 16, also includes read-only support for the file formats used by Word 2007 and Excel 2007 under Windows
Congratulations to Paul Michaelis of pmds-search.com, Gerry Swislow of certif.com, and Scott Gay of mcleodusa.net, whose entries were chosen randomly in last week's DealBITS drawing and who received a copy of SmileOnMyMac's PageSender, worth $40
When writing about the end of FreeHand last week (see "Farewell FreeHand," 2007-05-21), I mentioned one of the features that Adobe Illustrator still lacks, the capability to create multiple pages within a document
Thanks to our buddy Bill Rabel in Seattle for the impetus to write this article. After Mark Anbinder wrote in "Call Me 'Two Finger' Mark" (2007-05-21) about how he was surprised to find himself addicted to two-finger scrolling on his MacBook (which is equivalent to using a scroll wheel or Mighty Mouse scroll ball), Bill went spelunking and found a trick I hadn't previously known, causing me to look for other scroll wheel tips
When friends and family need to buy a new computer or accessories, they often turn to me for advice. I've learned over the years that they're usually not looking for one of my "history of computing" answers that explains not only how much RAM the computer should have, but how RAM works and why more is better - they just want to know how much to get, and where to get it inexpensively
Photography is a visual medium, and yet our tools for locating digital photos are mostly textual and temporal. When you open iPhoto, you can visually scan through the pictures, but that becomes a problem in large libraries when hundreds of thumbnails streak by as you drag the scroller
Backwards from DVD to iMovie? Is it possible to extract the video from a DVD without requiring an intermediate conversion application? (1 message)
Other scrolling utilities -- Mark's article on two-fingered scrolling brings up a suggestion for a utility that works on older Macs
One Day Left in Take Control Sale -- Here's a quick reminder that, because of the Memorial Day holiday in the United States, our 50 percent-off sale on all Take Control ebooks continues through 29-May-07