The 7 best Mac back up applications

You would be surprised how few mac users back up their macs, according to Apple its only 4% of mac users, perhaps thats why they introduced time machine of Leopard. We know of SMEs that don't do it or don't do it properly.Please back up and try to back up regularly

There are different ways of doing this but if you don't back up think about doing it NOW.

Try one of the cloning utilities that will back up the whole of your mac to an external disk and make that disk bootable, our best of are:

1. CARBON COPY CLONER: (its FREE) Download version 3 now! (Tiger and Leopard) Clone, synchronize, backup. Schedule and forget it. Try it 'til you trust it. The key to a successful backup plan is to actually do the backups regularly. When left to a human, the task often gets tacked on to the end of a very long list of other things to do. When you eventually have a catastrophe, the data is simply gone. You know that feeling -- you just lost six years of family photos. Your kids being born, their first birthdays, their first everything. The answer to this is consistent and regular backups, placed on a schedule and handled automatically by your computer.



2.SUPERDUPER: (about £11) is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper'sbuilt-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. And it runs beautifully on both Intel and Power PC Macs!SuperDuper's interface confirms all your actions in simple, clear language to ensure that the end result is exactly what you intended.

Then there are the seemingly more professional back up tools that have a degree of sophistication, reflected in the price.

3. RETROSPECT DESKTOP: (current version 6.1, also comes in workstation and server version for enterprise users)
Retrospect is specifically designed for use in small and midsize businesses, workgroups in large enterprises, and home and small offices. Retrospect provides complete protection for files, folders, and application settings on servers, desktops, and notebooks. Retrospect is easy to install and use, and it performs fast backups with 100% percent accurate restores. It utilizes automated technology to provide easy administration that allows small businesses and home users to protect their data without requiring extensive IT resources or unnecessary expenditures to train employees in complicated backup and restore procedures. Retrospect can be seen as complicated but our opinion has an efficent user interface, so beginners may struggle with having to write scripts for scheduled backups.

INTEGO PERSONAL BACKUP: Personal Backup's multiple backups protect all your files from unexpected problems. To keep all your files safe, you need different kinds of backups. Back up files to external disks or optical media, create bootable backups of your entire Mac, and synchronize files from one folder or volume to another.Back up to hard disks, CDs, DVDs, network volumes, iPods, iDisks...Fast and reliable restorationsCreate bootable backups of your startup volumeSynchronize folders and volumesCreate encrypted archivesSchedule automatic backupsCreate custom backup scripts

"Personal Backup X4 (Mac)" (Intego)

PROSOFT DATA BACKUP: From the people who bought you Data Rescue and the excellent Drive Genius (as used on Apples Guru desk instore) Data Backup 3 is a powerful utility that allows you to backup, restore and synchronize your valuable data with minimal effort. Whether you are a new computer user or a seasoned professional, Data Backup 3 offers you just the right amount of power, flexibility and ease-of-use to help you protect your files fast.



"Data Backup 3.0 (Mac)" (ProSoft Engineering)

Tri-BACKUP 4: Offers standard backup, restore and synchronization features, with a wide range of back-up options and flexible scheduling. However, Tri-Backup is let down by a confusing interface and offers only limited support for optical media- like CD and DVD. Costs around £25 and a trial mode for 30 days is also available.

BOUNCEBACK PRO: BounceBack is easy to use. It is the perfect solution for home users who do not want to waste time dealing with complicated, hard to use software. It's also perfect for business users who don't want to waste IT resources deploying a large, complicated backup solution. Although we found its interface a bit clunky and confusing at times, CMS who make this product have produced some great autobackup disks in their time.

Font Problems in OSX Leopard

Have you got font problems since you installed leopard? Do websites display in an odd font?



Try running the Font Book application, highlight all the fonts and then go to the menu bar and



File > Validate Fonts.



This may reveal a number of warnings both minor and serious but I would imagine mainly for for duplicate fonts I had nearly 70. Many of them seem to be fonts installed by MS Office, and may have been migrated when I upgraded or perhaps when I got my new macbook pro.



Tick and all the font boxes for your problem or duplicate fonts and then click on remove



After removing the duplicate fonts see if its made a difference?!



Fonts are something we take for granted but I think are worth knowing more about.


"Type Idea Index: The Ultimate Designer's Tool for Choosing and Using Fonts Creatively" (Jim Krause)

Selling your mac on ebay

How to sell your mac on eBay



ask questions here : http://www.macmend.com/forum



Of course first you must register your details at www.ebay.com or the ebay site in your country (for me its www.ebay.co.uk) The choose an eBay User ID and password so you’ve got a trading identity on the site. If its just mac stuff you intend to sell its a good idea to make it a mac style identity. MacSeller or Mac bargain, like mine is macmend because I run the troubleshooting site at www.macmend.com.
Once you’ve found a good name and checked its available, you complete the sign on process and confirm your registration by clicking on the link ebay emails to you. Done all that? Well now you’ll now be signed in. Click on "Sell" at the top right of of your screen, enter your debit or credit card details and click "Continue." Its definitely worth registering with PayPal,( a basic personal account will do) as you get secure payments.
Go to My eBay and click "Related Links"> PayPal. Now you are ready to begin selling your mac Click on the Sell tab, choose a relevant category and sub-category for your item, usually something like Computing>Apple/Macintosh>(your type of mac here) then click Save and Continue. Enter details of your item on the ’Create your listing’ page. Include words likely to be used by buyers searching eBay for macs such as emac, G4, imac, mac mini, iPod etc.
The next step is to add a photo. You can include one image per sale item for free, and further images for a fee. Use an image editor to crop the pic to eBay’s standard 300x400 pixels, dont let eBay automatically resize it. Note you should save it as a Jpeg or GIF, then click Add Pictures to upload your photo.
State really clearly what the items condition is and enter a detailed description in the given field.
Now proceed to the Selling Format box and enter a Starting Price for bids. You can also set a Reserve price –very useful when selling decent kit you dont want to go to a low bid.
If the reserve price option isn’t visible, click Show/Hide Options at the top of the page. Specify the item’s condition and enter a detailed description in the appropriate field. Now proceed to the Selling Format box and enter a Starting Price for bids. You can also set a Reserve price – a useful fallback if bidding is slow. If the reserve price option isn’t visible, click Show/Hide Options at the top of the page.

Of course if all this is a bit complex and you want to sell your mac in an intuitive mac way i recommend two pieces of software:

"Garage Sale (Mac)" and "iSale 4.0 Personal Pro (Mac)" (Equinux)

They do it all for you. Dont let that old mac sit in a cupboard, sell it on ebay.

NB before selling any storage media or mac including internal storage media ensure you do not leave data on which you would not want others to see....initialise your disk and zero all data or secure erase. Good luck

The Mac Vs PC thing

I have found a number of interesting articles on the net about Mac use and PC use that are worth reading

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=874257&ign=1

and

http://sikanrong.com/blog_entries/view/12

but this one I have commented on:

http://openswitch.org/2008/01/08/why-i-like-my-ubuntu-box-more-than-my-imac/#comment-544

because there are some interesting points here about free software and open source software that Linux users prefer

see what you think.

Web apps - Fluid

You want to know why Mac is on the rise, its because the PC wars are over, the internet is where all the action is. From Facebook to Googles version of the office applications, it doesn't matter which computer you have. So people are free to choose the computer they like the look of and like the feel of and invariably its been a mac. As a recent Open University response to why they don't use mac software, they said it didn't matter anymore as their new software was developed for the web and was not platform specific. Before users might have thought they would be limited by available software or price or compatibility. Now the latest Macs and Mac OSX can run Windows Vista and Linux as well as the Mac OS, they are good value and online and offline software is plentiful.

So here's a recommendation



Give your favorite webapps a home on your Mac OS X Leopard Desktop.
OS X Leopard Dock with an icon for Facebook.app right along normal apps like Dashboard, Mail, and TextMate.

Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or (Insert Your Favorite Webapp Here) fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site or Flash ad crashing your browser and causing you to lose your (say) Google Spreadsheets data in another tab?

If so, Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your webapp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite webapps as a separate desktop application. Fluid gives any webapp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, and logical separation from your other web browsing activity.

Download it here

Word, Excel, ...Office for the mac...get NeoOffice it costs less

I often hear...I can't afford Microsoft Office, its too much, even the student version is too much. Well these days you dont have to worry, you don't have to pirate and you dont have to use microsoft.

NeoOffice is where its at

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

Try it out and tell us what you think, its better than MS bloatware.

PDF edit and alter - Freeware

I wanted to try and do some more articles on mac freeware so i thought I'd start with Skim as someone was asking me about editing PDFs

Skim is a free PDF editor (adobe acrobat is the main one you would pay for) and note taking application for Mac OS X that is designed to make reading and editing PDF files much easier.



FEATURES

* Search, Scan & Zoom PDF Files
* Add Circles & Boxes
* Strike Thru & Underline Text
* Add Or Edit Notes
* Highlight Important Text
* Make Snapshots For Easy Reference
* Read In Full Screen Mode
* Give Presentations
* Hide All Notes & Highlights
* Remember Last Exported Type
* Keyboard shortcut for Export.
* Saves The File Type & Creator Code
* Reading Bar Is Shown On The Thumbnails
* New Preferences For Line Styles & Interior Colors
* New Color Swatch Toolbar Control
try it out and tell us what you think we would like to know how you got on.

http://skim-app.sourceforge.net

Keep your mac applications up to date

Auto Update

AppFresh

Keeps all of your Mac applications up-to-date, automatically. Still in beta, but if you use alot of apps its the essential app.


Download Page

Are Macs more expensive than PCs

For years i have heard this bandied about, that PCs were cheaper than Macs, however recent research shows the opposite.

Want to know the arguments, wonder why your business continues with PCs and their expense, especially their upkeep then read this:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/06/08/mac-vs-pc-prices

Getting Things Done

Have you ever heard of GTD? GTD® is the popular shorthand for "Getting Things Done®", the groundbreaking work-life management system and book by David Allen that transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity.


iGTD is a fantastic piece of software. iGTD takes some concepts from Getting Things Done methodology and makes them easy to understand and use in your every day life. But it's definitely not limited to the GTD concept - you can really use it the way you want.

ITS FREE...and it syncs with iCal and .Mac, Quicksilver and Journler often giving integration on the press of an F key.

iGTD

Mac services - the services menu

So do you ever use the services menu, or perhaps you dont know what it is anyhow.

Services are a technology for Mac OS X that allow applications to communicate data easily between one another, via the 'Services' submenu in the application menu, thats the one to the right of the Apple menu, so if you are browsing this with Safari and you look at the menu bar, you will find the services menu by Clicking on the word "Safari".

For most of us perhaps we dont use it because its cluttered up with stuff we have no idea what it is or what it will do, perhaps if it was simpler it would be clearer to us if there were items we might use given the chance.

Along comes SERVICE SCRUBBER.

With Service Scrubber, you can:

• restructure the services menu

• change service keyboard shortcuts

• disable services

You will find it here:

http://www.manytricks.com/servicescrubber/

Technorati

There are so many competing search engines and directories now for your blog or website, technorati is always worth a try.

Technorati Profile

Compression and compressed files on mac

I get a bit fed up with things I download or are sent that are zipped, as i can't see them before I unzip them. Stuffit deluxe allows you some of this but its expensive then I found

ZIPEG

This is an app that allows the creation of complex zip files but more especially a preview before the the decompression of files so you can decompress the bits you want where you want.

If your mac is stolen

This is a superb article for a script that deletes data from your mac, by remote control, if your mac gets stolen

You do have to trust in terminal and a bit of PERL but it looks a treat.

find the article HERE

The Apple Remote- Whats it for

So the apple remote its great fro getting itunes to gether from your armchair if not at your mac, but other than that whats it for?

These apps are all FREE and extend the use and abilities of your apple remote:

1. iRed Lite - your Apple Remote for power users...
http://www.filewell.com/iRedLite/

2. iTheater - this is like front row, but opensource
http://www.itheaterproject.com/

3. iAlertU - great...it uses the sudden motion sensor in your laptop to be a macbook burglar alarm.
http://tinyurl.com/ysk7y3

4. Aurora - turns your mac into an alarm clock with remote support.
http://metaquark.de/aurora/

5. Pandora Boy - Pandora.com with apple remote support
http://www.frozensilicon.net/


There are more and more uses and expansions for that little remote that comes with a new mac, go search em out and tell us about them.

Mac software

Books for mac users

Like stickies but better for notes - sidenote

Sidenote ...go on try it...its what stickes could have been if someone had more proaction and forethought

Check it out here

http://www.chatelp.org/?page_id=5

Sidenote tries to catch the “Stickies” spirit but in the form of a multi-document drawer that will hide in the corner of your screen (left or right). You can use it to take all your daily notes, include images and easily modify text color and font. Sidenote will automatically expand so that you will be able to drag into it any picture, text clipping or pdf file from the finder or your favorite application. Sporting notes auto-saving, you’ll never have to save your notes. Sidenote will handle that for you. You can also print them or export them to rtf.

iTunes...do you give your songs a rating...autorater

I like the idea of this autorater for iTunes based on how many times you play a track. The iTunes rating is one of the things I forget to use, so i thought this would help...see what you think

http://michael.tyson.id.au/software/autorate

Applejack for mac OSX

AppleJack is a user friendly troubleshooting assistant for Mac OS X. With AppleJack you can troubleshoot a computer even if you can't load the GUI, or don't have a startup CD handy. AppleJack runs in Single User Mode and is menu-based for ease of use.
Using AppleJack, you can repair your disk, repair permissions, validate the system's preference files, and get rid of possibly corrupted cache files. In most cases, these operations can help get your machine back on track. The important thing is that you don't need another startup disk with you.

Once installed, if you press Cmd-S at start up and go into single user mode, you just type "applejack" att he prompt and the "a" at the next prompt and applejack automatically runs maintenance on your mac including the fsck file check.

get it here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/applejack

it works with Tiger but is not yet compatible with Leopard

2 Recommended mac disk repair tools

I no longer like to use norton, and beside applejack and mainmenu (http://www.santasw.com/) I think the following two apps are indispensable, by all means use the disk utility on your install disk but it leaves much to be desired.

The first app I like to use is one that been around for a while in different forms and it is techtool pro

“MicroMat Techtool Pro 4 Universal (Mac)” (MicroMat)

and the second is diskwarrior:

“Diskwarrior 4.0 (Intel Mac)” (Alsoft)

both of these are tried and tested and have rescued me many a time from a mac disaster....always have at least one of them around.  Main menu also mentioned above is now my cron and maintenace tool of choice (for deleting prefs and fixing permissions, getting rid of old cache etc).

Technorati Tags: mac, tech, tools

Rapidweaver

This is my recommendation for rapidweaver, its a superb piece of creative software for building websites, it has a simple blogging tool and with the addition of a range of excellent (low cost) plugins it is the best in its class for web creation.  If only iWeb was like this.  I have found it easy to use and the support is good too.

“RapidWeaver (Mac)” (Realmac Software)

Why not give it a try and see what you think.

Technorati Tags: Blog, mac, software, web