Kibbles & Bytes Blog

In an article published earlier this week, MarketWatch awarded the prestigious title of ‘CEO of the Decade’ to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Supplementing the almost identical award Jobs garnered from Fortune last year, the report cites the numerous attributes leading to the resurgence of Apple at the turn of the new Millennium.

Noting the company’s successes in both the portable device and computer industries, Apple’s achievements from the debut of the iPod in 2001, to the release of the iPad are highlighted. Additionally, the article goes into detail describing Apple’s financial achievements over the years, and how these accomplishments have merited both investors and customers.

The article in its entirety can be found “*here.*”:http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-jobs-rock-star-of-corporate-america-2010-12-08

It’s great to go paperless to lessen your footprint on the environment, but sometimes, an actual physical card can’t be beat. For me, the annual holiday card is one such time.

In iPhoto ’11, you can create über sophisticated letterpress cards using your photos, their templates and printing service. The process works a lot like the Stationery feature in Mail–you begin by dropping your photo into a template and then customizing from there. The steps are as follows:

# Choose your desired photo in your library and click Create.
# In the online gallery, pick your favorite design.
# From there, you can change the text, colors and other details.
# Buy your cards!

Letterpress cards are $3 per card, which is not the cheapest you’ll ever find, but the results are professional, personalized, and well worth the effort and cost. Dazzle your friends and family this holiday season!

*Enjoy 10% off iLife ’11 until 12/31!* “Buy it here for $44.99.”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag20379/at_kb

This past Wednesday, Apple began deploying extended song samples in iTunes. As indicated by a letter sent to various music labels last month, this marks a storewide transition for all songs over two minutes and 30 seconds. Previously 30 seconds long, the newly extended previews will allow buyers to get a better sense of the song or album they are buying–especially if it’s new. Any song shorter than the aforementioned length will retain its original 30 second preview.

Though much of the music in the iTunes store has already transitioned to the new sample length, some artists and albums are still awaiting the change. As these new terms are mandated by Apple, any label seeking to keep their music for sale in the store will have to comply eventually. With lengths up threefold, these samples are better than the ones at Trader Joes!

This is a useful tip that I recently picked up from the Apple Pro site. It often happens that you have a file open in a program such as Photoshop or Word, but don’t know where that file is saved on your hard drive. For example, you may have double-clicked on a file inside your email client and found yourself editing an image in Photoshop or an RTF document in Word.

But what if you now want to import that image or text file into Adobe InDesign? No problem: After you save any edits in your document, move your cursor over the little icon to the left of the file’s name in the title bar. Now hold down the mouse button and begin to drag the icon. You can drag that “proxy” icon into any other open window, including an InDesign document.

If you can’t see the window you’re aiming for, keep the mouse button held down and press Command-Tab (the Mac OS X application switcher) to switch applications or use Expose to find the window you want. This drag-and-drop technique is only available on Mac OS X, and only after you have saved a file.

_Dear Friends,_

The Green Mountains are white once again as we have had light but steady snow fall for the past few days. Some areas have received over a foot of snow but at my house, which is known a snow heavy micro-climate, we have only gotten a couple of inches. It is enough to send cars without snow tires off the sides of the roads and to get the plows out. I’ll have to start making trails for the dogs in my yard or the deck will become their bathroom. I got up early this morning and there was a flock of wild turkeys pecking away in the lower garden. When I opened the door to let Hammerhead out, they all flew into the trees. That’s a big bird to take flight!

We lost power in our S. Burlington store last Saturday for most of the morning. Apparently a squirrel decided to commit suicide at a substation on Dorset Street and took down the power to the busiest commercial district in the state for 4 hours including our store and the mall, too. To try to make up for that outage, Small Dog Electronics’ South Burlington store on Dorset street will open at 6AM this Saturday with some special values on Macs, iPads, iPods and accessories.

We have good stock on most of the latest Apple products including iPads, iPods and the new amazing Apple TV. The Apple TV has been a big seller at the stores. I love mine and find that I am using it much more that the original Apple TV. We also have some used Macs that have made it to our price list and our website, including G4 Mac minis for $299 and closeout 27-inch iMacs. Find them at “Smalldog.com!”:http://www.smalldog.com