FOLLOW UP: iPhones Go Academic

_Dear Friends,_

I’m back in the beautiful (but soaked) Green Mountains. We had a wonderful trip through the south and had great visits to three extraordinary Apple Specialists: Springboard Media in Philadelphia, PA, PeachMac in Athens, GA and MacAuthority in Nashville, TN.

In between, we had some extraordinary motorcycle riding and a lot of fun. One unique thing in our industry is the level of cooperation and collaboration between Apple Specialists. There is a lot of sharing of ideas and best practices and I have always found my colleagues in this industry to be willing partners in making our businesses better.

Both MacAuthority and PeachMac were gearing up for their tax-free holidays and we are starting to stock up for our August 22nd tax holiday here in Vermont. On that day only, Vermonters will not have to pay tax on their purchases up to $2,000. We are stocking up with products and even if you are not in Vermont to save the tax, we will have some great bargains and bundles for that day. See our “Tax Holiday FAQ here.”:http://www.smalldog.com/taxholiday

I had an experience of extraordinary customer service on my way into Philly. My motorcycle lost its clutch. I’d pull on the lever and nothing would happen. This is not a problem when you are moving, but try getting a motorcycle going once it has stopped! I thought I had broken a cable, but when I realized that I had a hydraulic clutch, I knew it was more serious. Using my GPS, I located the nearest Victory dealer who just happened to be open on a Sunday afternoon and who volunteered to pull a slave cylinder off of a new motorcycle so that we would be able to get on our way. Paws up to “Rollin’ Fast Cycle”:http://www.rollinfast.com/index.htm in Lebanon, NJ–they get it!

I missed a few new product announcements while I was on the road–Final Cut Studio, Logic and the 2TB Time Capsule–and learned that “deflagrates” is a financial term as referenced in Ed’s coverage of Apple’s spectacular quarterly financials results.

Recently, I created a Pages document that grew to be unusually large in file size due to the images that I was using. The Pages file was roughly 140MB, so even exported to a PDF, it only shrunk to about 50MB–still too big for an email.

Rather than resize the images that I put in the document itself, there’s an easier way.

In Pages, select *File > Reduce File Size.* This will resize the images according to how large they actually appear in the document itself.

*140MB > 1.2MB?* Success!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about “Growl, a notification system for OS X.”:http://blog.smalldog.com/kibbles/?c=kb629 While some of you may have mixed feelings about Growl (I hear you, Mac!), there’s a growing number of people who want to get more out of the push notification technology on their mobile devices.

“Prowl”:http://prowl.weks.net/ is a companion to Growl for the iPhone or iPod touch. Arguably, Prowl is more useful than Growl because people who really care about these notifications want them on the go!

An overview of Prowl’s features:

*Infinitely extensible*
Prowl is as expandable as Growl is.

*Push notifications*
As soon as a Growl notification pops up on your computer, Prowl will forward it to your iPhone or iPod touch over the push notification service found in iPhone OS 3.0.

*Simple, elegant list*
Prowl provides a clean list of all the Growl notifications sent to it from your computer.

*Easily send links to your iPhone*
Whether you need to call a phone number or visit a website, Prowl will link the notifications it displays inside the Growl notifications.

*Customized display of notifications*
Prowl’s Growl plugin can be configured to only send the most important notifications to your iPhone, or any level which you want.

To make everything work, you’ll need to register on the Prowl server. Then, you’ll need to allow push notifications on your iPhone (if you haven’t already).

Some of the best things about Prowl are the preference settings. You have a lot of control over what messages you’ll see popping up on your phone, and one of the most useful features is that you’re able to set a priority for your notifications.

That way, you can avoid seeing messages any less important than “emergency” if you so choose (Prowl will only send notifications that have “at minimum the priority you’ve chosen”).

Prowl is free and works with Growl-compatible operating systems: Mac OS X (10.4+) and Windows (using Growl for Windows or Snarl).

“Read more about Prowl.”:http://prowl.weks.net/faq.php
“Install Prowl.”:http://prowl.weks.net/installation.php
“Download Growl.”:http://growl.info/index.php

*Next week: Fluid, a way to bring your web apps to your desktop.*

Time is running out! Our friends at “EpikOne”:http://www.epikone.com/summit will be hosting their third annual Seminar for Success Summit (formerly OM Boot Camp) next week in Burlington, Vermont from August 11 to August 14.

The first day, Advertising (8/11), is sold out, but slots for Days 2-4 as well as the Green/Social Marketing Workshop are still available! (Day 1 is not a prerequisite for the following workshops.)

The Seminar for Success Summit includes in-depth training on Google’s online marketing suite of tools (Analytics, AdWords, Optimizer and more) from highly acclaimed Google experts.

Request information “here.”:http://www.epikone.com/summit/request_info
Ready to go? Register online “here.”:http://s4s-summit-vt.eventbrite.com/

*Get 25% off any day(s) or full summit by typing “smalldog” into the online discount field when registering!*

*Start Soapbox*

This week marks the 64th anniversary of the first use of an atomic weapon. The US atomic bombing of Hiroshima marked the start of the atomic age and also killed 260,000 people with a single bomb, marking a new height in man’s inhumanity to man. While I do not want to debate the wisdom or morality of that most difficult decision of Harry Truman to end the war, I do think the words of the pilot, Captain Robert Lewis, of “My God, what have we done?” ring true 64 years later as they did at the time.

With trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth spent and being spent now on maintenance of nuclear arsenals that have the power to destroy our planet, it is time once and for all to eliminate nuclear weapons from our planet. While we continue to pay lip service to eliminating useless nuclear weapons, little has been done to stop their production and we have a serious issue now with more nations seeking to join the nuclear club.

Nuclear weapons remain the most serious threat to humanity. Humanity’s capacity to use those weapons makes that a threat to take seriously. Even though the tensions that caused the cold war and the nuclear arms race have subsided, the nuclear arsenals continue to be produced, older weapons are being replaced by new weapons and unstable governments around the world seek nuclear arms in a sick sort of weapons-envy power trip.

I marched in my first anti-war rally on Hiroshima Day in 1964. I told my parents I was going to the library and ended up on the front page of the Chicago Sun Times. Yeah, I got grounded. But, I do remember the fear of the nuclear arms race. My parents even had a nuclear shelter in our home when we lived in Kansas. It was sort of silly–it didn’t even have a door, no sanitation facilities and would do almost nothing to protect you from that kind of explosion. I remember the ‘duck and cover’ exercises in school that were just as silly.

The use of nuclear weapons is no longer an option in our world and they should be forever banned.

*End Soapbox*

---

“Tell us what you think!”:http://blog.smalldog.com/article/total-nuclear-disarmament-now/#comment