Tips and Tricks

I got a good question today via Twitter that I have some expertise in: 

What would you consider the "best" monitor for Macs...for a [good] price?

I've been buying monitors for small to mid-size companies for awhile and have one each of a Sharp, Dell, Samsung, Apple and HP monitor in my house so I feel like I have a bit of experience in the area.

Disclaimer: If you are a pro/artist, you are going to want something else.  This recommendation isn't for you…maybe your parents.

Dell has the best value in monitors and has for the last few years.  They aren't built like Apple displays but they are very solid and look good. 

If every penny counts, you can find the Dell 1600x900 20" display out there every once in awhile for $89.  But really, for $40 more you can step up to 1080P resolution.

I say this cold: No one should have anything less than a 1080P 1920x1080 screen on their desktops.  You can buy a 22" 1080P display for $129 with free shipping on sale at Dell every once in awhile (currently $149).  If it isn't on sale, you can usually find it refurbished for that price or less.   Here's a Samsung equivalent (same hardware+$50) as a mediacenter display which works great for Blu-Ray movies at about 4-8 feet away.  This is basically the same display (size/pixels/aspect ratio) as the $1000+iMac 22" without LED lighting.  The viewing angles aren't what you'll get in a more expensive display and the color takes a little calibration (2 minutes, very easy) but you have a 1080P display on your desk for less than the price of a parking ticket in most cities. 

But that's not the best inexpensive monitor you can buy right now.  Dell makes the SP2309W, 23" "better than HD" 2048x1152 display with HDMI, VGA and DVI inputs, 4 port USB Hub, cable management, Webcam, mic and analog audio I/O.  It also looks great with a "not as glossy as Apple's" 23-inch display.  It doesn't have internal audio, but I'd rather use external speakers (for another day's review) for sound.  They have a $10 sound bar you could get but I wouldn't reccomend it. 

The SP2309W hits every sweet spot for me and you can currently get it for $229+Free shipping at Dell.  Compare that to Apple's $900 Cinema Display with fewer pixels and ports. (yes it is lovely and has power for MacBooks, etc.)

The viewing angles are great but it also has an adjustable arm in the back for both angle and height (Apple's are angle only).  I've had this monitor as my main display since Apple botched its Mini DisplayPort to dual DVI adapter part over a year ago.

The Apple Youth movement is in full effect according to a new post by the Loop.  Apple has set up three new programs for kids: For Families (workshops show kids how to improve their skills using all of the iLife and iWork applications); For Teachers and Schools (Field Trips from school to work on projects) and For Kids (“Apple Camp.” Bring your kid to an Apple Store and they'll learn how to use iLife and iWork and bring home a DVD with their creations.)

Registration begins in May.

If you are designing apps for the iPad or just want to find out what goes into the design of iPad apps, check out Matt Legend Gemmell's fascinating guide/tutorial.  

Apple likes to schedule its events in secret.  The last few WWDCs were marked in Mosone's corporate calendars as generic "Corporate Events".  The same with Apple's events at the adjacent Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  Luckily, not too many huge conventions are scheduled in secret, so it makes finding Apple's events a little easier.

We, like many other sites, saw the saw the late June, early July corporate event as being a likely time place for WWDC.  But, with a recent change to the calendar (and the removal of Sun's JavaOne conference - wow!) it looks like WWDC might have changed dates...or even *gasp* changed venues.

Old Moscone Schedule circa January

Rob Griffiths, the founder of our favorite Mac tips website, MacOShints.com is leaving  to join a company called Many Tricks.  Before he leaves, he drops his top ten favorite tips of all time, which we've pasted below.  Good luck to Rob and here's to hoping Macworld can find a worthy successor. 

1. Run a screensaver as your desktop background: This one is still my all-time-favorite hint for showing off the power of OS X. It lets you run a screensaver as your desktop “image,” complete with full motion. When I first wrote about this, this trick took 50% of the CPU power of a G4/733MHz machine. Now it takes around 1% to 3% of my 2.66GHz MacBook Pro’s CPU. Very fun!

We have compiled a bunch of new iPad tidbits with screenshots for your viewing pleasure below:

Lots of settings pop up if you know where to look:

YouTube Videos can play in HTML5 (this looks really good btw, not sure if a dedicated Youtube App is necessary):

Those lovely people at Panic software have put together a utility to batch shrink vector-based PDF files, such as those produced by Illustrator, on the fly.  They use Apple's own Preview.app engine to pull all of the extra "crud" out of files that Adobe builds into PDFs made with their software:

What was all this extra crud? Will started digging into the files and brother, you won’t believe what he found. Swatches, patterns, preview bitmaps, all sort of metadata; even though we’d specifically turned off all the extra options when saving from Illustrator: Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities, Embed Page Thumbnails, etc.

You can download the app here free (181K) from Panic.  Ironically via Adobe's John Nack.

Kara Swisher got Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch to talk about all things Flash and Apple.  Among other things he does mention that Flash will run faster and more reliably on the Mac in the future.  Check out the Flash video below:

We're new to this one, but according to DaringFireball, it appears that Adobe has been trying to slow down the HTML5 ratification process by sending in objections whenever they can.   Could there be a reasonable explanation for Adobe objecting to HTML5 ratification?  Adobe's man in question, Larry Masinter, has a pretty distinguished career both with Adobe and also the W3C consortium so we wouldn't want to judge this hastily without all of the facts.  

Anybody out there with more information on the subject?

Update: Masinter posts this in the comments:

 No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, "blocked" in the W3C HTML Working Group -- not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video -- not by me, not by Adobe.

Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5.

Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?

There are some things that are wrong with the spec I'd like to see fixed. There are some things that are really, really, wrong with the process that I'd like to improve.

I've been working on web standards since the beginning of the web in the early 90s, and standards for even longer; long before I joined Adobe. My opinions don't come from Adobe, and I don't get approval or direction. I hate to see decades of work on web architecture messed up in the short-term interest of grabbing control of the web platform for a few vendors to own. If you think that position doesn't match what you imagine Adobe's position is, well, I'm glad Adobe's planning to support HTML5 in its products.

As for the HTML standards process: I've worked in scores of standards groups in IETF and W3C, as well as a few others here and there, and I've never seen anything as bad as this one, with people abusing their official positions to grandstand and promote proprietary advantage. I've blogged some about this, but I'd rather fix things along.

I think progress of HTML5 in W3C could be faster if the subsections on graphics and metadata could (if not now, then eventually) be moved to separate subgroups focused on those topics. The organization of work in W3C is determined by the "charters" of working group and the "scope" of he charters, so saying work is "out of scope" even if you are marking a snapshot of the (already published) documents as "Working Draft", means you might rewrite the "Status of This Document" section to say that it might move. That's what I was asking for, in the somewhat stilted language of "objection".

If you want to know who is sending in technical objections, you can see the working group mailing list at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/. And if you want to see more of my opinions, I'm also on the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and post there a lot, seehttp://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/; the TAG often discusses HTML5.

Any more questions about my opinion? My email address should be easy to find.

Also John Dowdell Post this:

There’s as many ways to use your Mac as there are Mac users using the Mac - there’s no one true path in a user-centric OS - this isn’t the Windows way. All the same, there’s always a few essentials that can boost productivity, secure data, generally improve your Mac experience in every way.

We’ve been considering this for a while, and what follows is a short collection of ideas we think most Mac users should consider if they want to improve their experience, starting with that often over-looked but perhaps most critical investment any Mac user should make before crashing the cash on a new computer - more memory.

1/ Upgrade your Memory

Sluggish performance? Beachball of death each and every time you open up one too many Safari web pages? Mail.app behaving sluggishly? Inexplicable hangs when you have all the windows you need open? iMovie or Final Cut or Photoshop transitions sapping your will to live when you try to enable them?