Kibbles & Bytes Blog

This week we wanted to bring some attention to the MiLi Power Pack Extended Battery for iPhone. This is one of the most cost-effective battery/case combos on the market for the iPhone.

As anyone with an iPhone knows, battery life isn’t one of the iPhone’s best features. It’s easy to run out of battery power in the course of a single busy day.

The MiLi provides an additional 6.5 hours of talk time on the iPhone 3G and 13.5 hours of talk time on iPhone 2G. When the iPhone is idle, the MiLi provides 390 hours of additional standby time. The MiLi Power Pack enables you to talk and surf twice as long. We have a blue version and a while version on sale for just $49.99.

There were a couple of notable mentions of the reliability and lifetime low cost of administering Apple computers this week.

First, Consumer Reports published the latest results of its tech support survey. Apple came out on top of the charts for both desktops and laptops (er, notebooks). The report was based on feedback from over 7,000 subscribers about their satisfaction with problem solving, hold time, phone staff and online support.

In notebooks, Apple scored 86 points while the #2 company, Lenovo, had only 63 points. That’s an impressive margin of 23 points. Apple’s desktops rating was 87 total points, far exceeding second-place Dell with just 55 points.

Second, CIO (a magazine for chief information officers) reported that “Macs in the enterprise aren’t just cheaper to manage—they’re a lot cheaper.” That comes from a survey of 260 IT administrators in large U.S. companies with both Macs and PCs who are involved in some degree with IT cost calculations.

Enterprise Desktop Alliance members include Centrify, Absolute Software, Group Logic, Web Help Desk, and most recently IBM.
Released by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance.

The report went on to say that 65 percent of respondents said it costs less to troubleshoot Macs than PCs, 19 percent said they spent the same on both computers, and only 16 percent said they spent less to manage PCs than Macs.

With Macs dominating in almost every cost category, why would 16 percent claim they spent less troubleshooting PCs? “It might be an [issue] of expertise of the IT staff,” says Tom Cromlin, spokesperson for the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. “They’re probably more comfortable troubleshooting PCs.”

Click here to read the entire report from CIO. At Small Dog, we’ve long said that Macs are less expensive to administer than PCs. Glad to see yet another report confirming this.

Pages is one of those apps that really filled a void in my world. Word was slow and cumbersome (and pre-version 2008 for Mac, not very pretty) and AppleWorks never transitioned into the vibrant OS X “Cocoa”:http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/cocoa.html world.

While I know the application pretty darn well by this point, I’m always excited when I learn something new. *Case in point: the automatically-populating Table of Contents feature.*

If you’re writing a paper that needs a Table of Contents, there’s no reason to do it manually. When done correctly, the TOC will display your Heading styles and apply a page number to them, and then update on the fly while you’re making changes. If you haven’t used it before, you should–but there are some initially perplexing things about the formatting, so here are some tips:

* Heading styles are found in the *Styles Drawer,* the window that appears to the right or left of the document you’re working on. (Note: if you don’t see it, click the View icon at the top of your document and select Show Styles Drawer.)

* Each page of your document should be its own Section; select *Section Break* in the Insert menu to break out each page.

* Once you have broken out your pages into Sections, your TOC should show each *Heading* (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) with an assigned page.

* To edit what is shown in the TOC, click on the *Documents section* of the Inspector, and select TOC. There, you can check or uncheck any number of options to show.

* The individual Section preferences are found in the *Layout section* of the Inspector. This is where you can designate your pagination.

* You can control your pagination by selecting either *”Continue from previous section”* or *”Start at: [put your page number here]”* under Section in the Layout part of the Inspector.

* *Important:* If you want to have your document start at ‘1’ __after__ the TOC, you need to select “Continue…” on both the cover page (if you have one) and the TOC and select “Start at: 1” on the first actual page of your document.

* The font, font size, line spacing, etc. are all editable in the TOC using the *Text section* of the Inspector. And even though they are linked, you can make your page numbers a different size than the rest of the text in the TOC.

Anyone else out there a Pages fangirl or fanboy? “Send us your comments!”:mailto:kali@smalldog.com

_Dear Friends,_

The snow is melting and we are seeing some signs of spring besides the maple sugaring going on around us. I’ve seen a few motorcycles on the road, the birds are singing in the morning and people seem to be ready for the changes in the seasons. I’m seeing short pants and sandals even though the temps are still in the 30s and 40s.

Our tax-free day was an amazing success with sales exceeding the back-to-school tax free day in August. We had happy customers, happy employees and one very long day. I worked all day Friday, went home got some dinner and then headed up to S. Burlington with Hammer for the all night 24 hour event. We had a rush of customers at midnight, but by 1:30 AM it slowed down and we had 2-3 sets of customers per hour throughout the night with a lot of nurses and doctors and ambulance drivers stopping in.

I kicked Kali and Katie’s butts in a marathon game of Crazy Eights and consumed my weight in coffee. Hammerhead seemed to enjoy himself during the night time hours playing ball with the staff but he was really in his element as the store “greeter” as the customers started pouring in first thing in the morning.

Early afternoon, I came down to Waitsfield and the store there was going strong and phone traffic was busy. I stayed around for a bit but hit the wall and headed home around 3. Now, that was a lot of hours for me, going about 32 hours straight but Katie was there for almost the entire time and I think she was well over 40 hours. The whole Small Dog team was on their A game and we had fun and sold a lot of Macs, too!

I have some exciting news that I can now pass along. Small Dog Electronics retail stores in Waitsfield and S. Burlington have been selected by Apple as two of the locations that will be authorized to sell both the Wi-Fi and 3G versions of the iPad. We are so excited about this opportunity and hope to have the products soon after they are released from Apple. I am very pleased that we will be carrying this next awesome product from Apple and cannot wait to get my hands on one! The iPad will be exclusively available at Small Dog Electronics retail stores and not online. We will start taking pre-orders for the iPad on Monday!