Category Archives: OS X

Apple’s OS X operating system.

Getting Out of The Way

Posted on by David
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I made a short screencast on Friday showing how Panic does a great job with the shopping cart for their products. In We Have Always Done It That Way, I write about getting out of the way when someone is ready to invest in your product or service:

When a member has made the decision to invest more money in the association by purchasing a product or paying dues online, get out of their way and make it as easy as possible for them to complete the transaction.

Panic does a great job of this with their site. They collect the bare minimum of information for completing the transaction. They don’t even ask for you to subscribe to a newsletter! Watch the video below to see a demo with my commentary.

Steve is a Showman

Posted on by David
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So, yesterday Steve Jobs announced that Apple will be switching to using Intel processors in their computers (abandoning the PPC chip). What I loved about how Steve announced it was that after showing several product demos and announcing the switch, he said that all the software he had shown were running on an Intel chip. I’m sure that built some confidence about how far along they are on the conversion. Nicely done!

Keynote's APXL

Posted on by David

Just came across an Apple developer connection article on how Apple’s Keynote presentation software stores all presentation data in an xml document:

At the heart of the Keynote presentation file is the presentation.apxl file, which specifies every detail of the presentation’s appearance and behavior—from the appearance of the master slide and each individual slide to the transitions used between slides and the state of the presentation when the customer first opens it.

The article goes on to talk about some of the nifty possibilities of integrating your databases and applications with Keynote. My own idea is that with a little (ok, maybe a lot) of hacking, you could provide a Keynote presentation feed for your weblog.

I love XML.

Switch

Posted on by David

I’ve been really interested in Apple’s OS X operating system for quite a while. Unix with a world-class GUI! I’ve also been craving a laptop to use at home and on the road. The moons finally aligned and I picked up a new iBook a couple weeks ago. I’m starting to get around the system a bit more confidently after much experimentation. The iBook also came in quite handy on a trip to Boston for my Dad’s wedding.

iBook + Baby Einstein DVD = Calm Flight.

Baby Einstein + iBook = Calm Flight

Now Ella wants to look at pictures and movies on the iBook all the time. 🙂 My toy!

I’m keeping a wiki page of links to useful OS X software, tips and resources I come across as I get up to speed on the system.