SPECIAL | Better Late Than Never

_Dear Friends,_

We are moving furniture and inventory into our beautiful new store in downtown Rutland, Vermont. The store is really beginning to look like, well, a store. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we are very excited about the progress. One of the most compelling reasons that we decided to open a store in downtown Rutland rather than out by the strip malls was that there is lot of very positive energy in revitalizing the downtown area.

Vermont’s largest utility, Green Mountain Power, is in the process of renovating one of the classic downtown buildings and converting it to the Energy Innovation Center (along with other exciting developments). We are looking forward to being a part of a new Rutland. It is definitely an exciting project.

I was talking this morning with our sales team about the benefits of the current AT&T promotion on iPads. There are two ways to have a data contract for your AT&T cellular-equipped iPad.

The first is to opt for the month-to-month recurring charge of about $30. There is an advantage to that in that you can turn cellular service on and off, but the reality is that most month-to-month data plan subscribers never turn it off, so they are paying $30 a month. The second way is to sign up for a 2-year data plan with AT&T. If you buy an AT&T iPad and sign up for a 2-year data plan, not only is the plan less expensive but the current promotion from AT&T is that we can get you a $100 discount, too!

Additionally, if you have a few people on your cellular plan, you can save even more with a data sharing plan from AT&T. We can hook you up with these plans and the $100 savings at any of our stores.

Well, it is almost spring here in Vermont; I can see buds on the trees, but there is still snow on the garden. I remember a few years ago, Artie was going so stir-crazy with spring and mud season that he called me up to see if he could shovel the snow out of the garden — we told him no. Grace has started seedlings, though, and I can definitely see rototilling in my future.

For the longest time, customers have asked if the Otterbox cases we carried were waterproof, and sadly, we’d have to confirm that they were not. Thankfully, the new Armor series from Otterbox is, and is rated for up to 3 meters of water depth!

We have a limited quantity of the Armor Case for iPhone 5, so grab one for yourself or a water-loving friend this week, and you’ll get *free shipping.*

I like to think of myself as an objective computer user. I try not to take sides in the age old battle of which operating system is better. However, as an employee of Small Dog, I tend to use Macs almost exclusively, and sometimes Apple surprises me with neat features that I didn’t know OS X had.

Did you know that you can share a Keynote presentation with a remote viewer via the Messages app?

I had no idea that this was a feature of Mountain Lion. In fact, I can recall using the 3rd party app GoToMeeting for a few Webinars in the past, but this new feature could, in some cases, eliminate the need for that.

If you want to share a presentation via Messages, there are a few things that need to happen beforehand. First, as the presenter, you need to have Keynote installed on your machine and a Keynote presentation you want to share. After that, you need to make sure that you and your viewers are using the same messaging service like iCloud or AIM.

Once you have the required stuff out of the way, you can start by inviting someone from your Buddy List to a video chat. To do this, select whomever you want to share your presentation with from your Buddy List and choose “Invite to Video Chat” from the “Buddies” menu. This will send an invitation to initiate a video chat and once the recipient accepts, you can move on.

To get the presentation rolling, locate your Keynote presentation file in Finder and drag it into the lower part of the video chat window. (Apple couldn’t have made this part any easier!) This will launch Keynote on your Mac, and you will see some presentation controls pop up.

To navigate through your presentation, simply click in the controller window to advance the slide. Alternatively, you can click on the arrows to step forward or backward. When you want to stop the presentation, just click the “X” in the controller window. After that, the window will go back to the normal video chat screen.

So there you go. Now you can give a remote presentation to anyone, anywhere, provided that they have the basic requirements I mentioned above. Give it a try and wow someone from across the room or across the country!

If you or someone you know is interested in switching to a Mac, but don’t want to drop the big bucks on a new machine just yet (or ever!), then this is the special for you.

This week, we are offering a *$100 savings* on our used 13-inch White MacBook from early 2009. It includes a 4GB RAM upgrade to keep things moving, and a 500GB LaCie Rugged Portable Hard Drive for extra storage space or for use as a trusty backup system.

I am picking up the big U-Haul truck to start moving inventory down to the Rutland store this weekend. We will spend a lot of time getting set up and merchandised and then do unofficial “soft” openings for a few days to work out all the kinks.

We’re looking forward to the big Grand Opening on May 4th, and if you’re in the area, we hope to see you there!

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes.

Your Kibbles & Bytes team,
_Don, Kali, Steph & Mike_

I’ve always wondered what the iPhone data labeled “other” was when I looked at how much storage I had left to use. Recently I learned just what that “other” data on my phone might be: Among other things, it could be attachments from your SMS and iMessages, visual voicemails or even your Safari web cache.

Here are some tips to help free up some space on your device!

The first way to clear up some serious space is to delete old visual voicemails. To do this, simply open Phone (no, not your sweet flip phone — the Phone app on your iPhone). You may see a list of voicemails that you haven’t already deleted under the Voicemail section of the Phone app; in that list there will also be “deleted voicemails.” That is basically the trash can for all of the voicemails you’ve already deleted and that folder will need to be emptied (just like you would need to with the trash on your Mac). Those end up taking up quite a bit of room on your device and can quickly eat away at your storage.

Another way to clear up some space is to delete some of the attachments you receive from friends via text message. Just go into Messages and delete what you don’t want. Another big user of data is the cache in Safari. Every few months, clear out the cache by opening *Settings > Safari > Clear cookies and data*. This will empty out the local cache and webpages you frequently access.

If all else fails, you can restore your device to factory settings to restore all of your storage; just make sure you do a backup first. About 800MB of storage will always be reserved for storing the operating system and the built-in apps, but the rest of it is yours to do with what you please!