Kibbles & Bytes Blog

With recent reports of record Mac sales (and strong sales of computers in general, click here to read about this), you wouldn’t think we’d expend energy on bringing Macs to your attention. However, to us, it seems that people are only talking about it the iPhone and the rumored, so-called iSlate.

This week, we’re back to focusing on Macs. In my measured opinion, Apple’s never offered a more incredible line of computers before now. To help promote them, we’re offering simple, streamlined bundles that will make it easy to choose the right Mac. We’re offering upgraded RAM for a discount, and also offering AppleCare bundled in for less than buying it separately. You’ll save anywhere from $35 – $600 by buying a bundle from us than Apple. Plus, we don’t charge tax on orders that ship out of Vermont (saving you even more), and we don’t change shipping on any computers.

Not only that, we are glad to help you choose the right Mac for your needs in person on the phone (800-511-6227) or via email (sales@smalldog.com). Let us know if you have any questions—we’ll be glad to help!

You can see some selected Mac bundles below, or click here to view them all. Look for the green “specials” link to view bundles and offers.

Yesterday, Apple announced the release of the MobileMe Gallery app for iPhone/iPod touch. I have been in the process of auditing (read: deleting and reorganizing) my iPhone apps (again),* so when I saw this, I downloaded it immediately.

Apple explains:

bq. “The new MobileMe Gallery app is a great way to view the photos and movies in your MobileMe gallery right on your iPhone or iPod touch. You can browse your photos with simple tap, flick, and pinch gestures, and even view your friends’ albums, no matter where you are. And the MobileMe Gallery app automatically stores photos after you view them so you can quickly access them again, even without a network connection.”

The bottom line is that the app is a nice Apple-esque way to view your MobileMe Galleries, but it’s not designed for much more than that. That’s fine by me–the best features by far are the ease-of-use and that I can bring in friends’ Galleries as well (below).

The MobileMe Gallery app for iPhone and iPod touch requires a “MobileMe account”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/74171/apple-mobileme-individual-retail-package-1yr-subscription-renewal (duh) and is “available free through the App Store here.”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mobileme-gallery/id350223710?mt=8

__*Every other month or so, I try to streamline my apps–you know, get rid of redundant ones or ones I don’t need and add bigger and better ones. One could say I’m slightly obsessed. I’ll have a whole new lot of apps that have made the cut for review in coming issues!__

Several times I’ve mentioned that Onyx is my primary OS X maintenance program. It’s free and easy to use. Click here to visit the developers web site or click here to read about the app on Apple’s website.

A few people have inquired about the best way to use Onyx. It actually has a great help file that explains all of its different functions, scripts, and utilities. TO view this help file without making any changes to your Mac, simply launch the app, then click Cancel when the Checking S.M.A.R.T status menu pops up, then click Cancel again when the Verifying startup volume menu pops up. Enter your password at the prompt, then click “Help” in the menu bar.

Onyx is a great app for basic maintenance. What apps do you use to maintain your Mac? Let us know and we will post the results in next week’s Kibbles.

There are dozens of time/task/project management applications for the Mac, iPhone, and iPod touch. I really like Things for powerful task management. It’s expensive, but performs beautifully. However, I tend to use Things for home or personal tasks, not so much for work-related time management.

To manage my list of to do items at work, I depend on iCal. I use traditional events and daily appointments in the main calendar to do this, but I also use iCal’s “To Do Items” pane. Many people don’t know about this feature, so I thought I’d describe it here.

To use To Do Items, open iCal and click the thumbtack icon in the lower right corner of the iCal pane. A sidebar will open; this is where to-do items are arranged in a list. There are several not-necessarily obvious ways to make a new to-do item. I simply hold down the Command-K keys at the same time (the Command key is to the immediate right or left of the space bar). If you’ve right-click enabled on your Mac, can also right-click inside the to-do pane to create a new item. Finally, you can create a new to-do item in iCal’s menu bar under File > New To Do.

Here’s a cool tip: you can drag text from Mail, Safari, or most other documents directly into the To Do Pane, where it will become a new to-do item.

Also, in Snow Leopard, new to-dos created in iCal will automatically show up in Mail’s list of to-do items. Likewise, to-do items created in Mail will show up in iCal. And when you highlight text in the body of an email, that text can be turned into a to-do in iCal. Very cool and useful for creating instant to-dos.

Note that even if you have multiple calendars, all to-do items are displayed in a single list in the To Do Items pane.

Once you’ve created a new to-do item, there are several ways to manage it. You can click the bars to the right of the item to give the items low, medium or high priority. You can assign to-do items to individual calendars by dragging them from the To Do Pane and dropping them onto the iCal calendar of your choice. You can also Right-click or Control-click on to-do items and assign it to a calendar from the contextual menu that opens.

To-do items can be sorted by a number of criteria, which can be found in a menu at the top of the To Do Items pane. From this menu, you can also set preferences for when to-do items are displayed.

Note that a to-do item is different from an appointment in iCal. Appointments don’t show up in the to-do list, and by default, to-do items don’t show up on the main iCal. However, you can easily turn a to-do into an appointment, or assign a date to a to-do item. Simply drag the to-do item from the To Do Items pane and drop it onto the day of your choice in iCal. From there you can manage the to-do just like a regular iCal event—turn it into a repeating event, invite people to it, create alarms, etc.

You can read an iCal 101 Article on Apple.com by clicking here.

_Dear Friends,_

There is nothing more important to talk about than the devastating earthquake in Haiti. As I watched the news on Wednesday with my wife, I was overcome with sadness for the horrific misery that befell the proud people of Haiti. This poor country has not gotten many breaks and this earthquake is one of the world’s most severe disasters in terms of human suffering.

At Small Dog, we responded yesterday by making Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontiéres), already one of our “pet” charities, much more visible on our website and announcing that we are matching donations in our customer donation matching program. We posted on Facebook, Twitter and on our blog. The word spread, and as of this writing, we have raised about $19,000 for this group.

Our matching program has gone viral. I just got a call from a woman in Phoenix that is posting it on her popular blog and is matching our matching! As you know, we limit our match to $200 but we have received as much as a $1,000 donation and they are still coming in. We also cap the match at the extent of our annual charitable giving budget and hope to match each donation; however, if we hit our cap, we will continue to collect money to forward on to Doctors without Borders.

Our eWaste team, Kali, Kerry, Katie, Cindy and I, has pledged to increase our fundraising for the 2010 event so that we can move some of that money to this effort to further leverage our customers’ generosity. It feels good to do this and is completely consistent with Small Dog Electronics’ commitment to people, planet and profit. I want to thank YOU, our customers, for the donations and for allowing us the opportunity to make them even more effective!

I was out with the Chill Pill Audio team at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. If we measure economic recovery by attendance at the annual CES show, we are in for a banner year. The 2009 show was very poorly attended and there seemed to be a sense of doom surrounding the show, little innovation or excitement. 2010 was a totally different story with record attendance, a lot of new products and new companies exhibiting and a sense of excitement for the industry.

I really liked the 3D televisions, but have some high degree of skepticism as to whether they will find much of a market. I also was able to see the new Chevy Volt with the built-in iPhone control. It looked much nicer than I expected. Chill Pill Audio exhibited for the first time, and we had a crowded booth for the entire show. Rob and Kerry did an awesome job with the booth and both were hoarse and tired by the time we headed back to Vermont.