Posts Tagged ‘mac’

Did you know that Mail, the default e-mail client in Mac OS X, now supports RSS feeds? It’s been in there for about a year, actually. I don’t use it myself because I already had an RSS client I really like, but if you’ve yet to get into RSS and need a gateway, this is worth a look (especially if you’re already using Mail for your e-mail).

Apple has a nice, brief tutorial video on how to use RSS in Mail. Unfortunately, they’ve disabled embedding their video clips from YouTube, so you’ll have to click to view this video tutorial. Totally worth it, though.

Now that you know how to use RSS in Apple Mail, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog! feeds.stratepedia.org has other feeds that may be of interest.

I updated my laptop to 10.5.1 this morning and am happy to report that, finally, synching my calendar between my two computers (home and work) via .Mac and iCal works. My iPhone’s calendar survived the update as well. I’m happy.

10.5.1 fixes a number of other issues as well, but this was the biggie for me. Next week I’ll update our Leopard Server we’ve been playing around with–there were some problems I had with it as well I hope to see addressed.

I installed Leopard on my laptop this morning. Pretty smooth sailing–I did a fresh backup of my hard drive and an erase-and-install of the new OS. This does mean I have to reinstall all my programs and files, but it reduces the chances of something going on. I have a lot of junk to dump from my computer, anyway. The only real problem I’ve had is getting my calendars from iCal to copy over to my laptop, but this is a problem with .Mac and not Leopard.

My new favorite thing in Leopard is Quick Look. It’s liable to become your new favorite thing, too. Now you can peek at a Word file, PowerPoint presentation, or video clip just by hitting the space bar–no double-click or slow startup time required! It works with many other file formats as well, and even works with e-mail attachments.

As far as the exciting things I mentioned yesterday, I’ve only had much time to experiment with RSS in Mail. Verdict: Should be a good introduction to RSS for first-timers, but people with more experience using RSS will probably want to stick with their favorite reader. In doing fresh installations of all my software, I grabbed the latest version of my reader of choice, NetNewsWire, and have fallen in love all over again. OK, maybe that’s going overboard–but version 3.0 is excellent.

Apple’s new Mac operating system, version 10.5 (Leopard), was released to much fanfare last Friday. You can read all about it. There’s been lots of talk over the weekend about the souped-up interface and the built-in backup software, but here are three things I’m most interested in:

1. Updates to iChat: You can now present slides, photos, and video clips via iChat. (For you Windows folks, iChat is Apple’s client for AIM and other conferencing protocols.) Think of what this means for professional development and coaching! Say I’m a teacher in Kansas, and you’re a coach in California. Instead of flying out here to observe me, you can have me record my class and then we can meet later, online, and watch the video together. I can pause, fast forward, and rewind as we talk about the clip. We tinkered around with this feature in a beta release of Leopard and came away impressed.
2. Teams Server: Teams is a feature on the Server version of the new Mac OS. Imagine five or six of us are on a project together and need a place to collaborate online. With Teams, I can quickly set up a shared calendar, mailing list, blog, wiki, and file storage. It’s all web-based, so even team members using Windows can use the shared space. I think this will be much better than what we’re been working with in Moodle.
3. RSS in Mail: Apple’s built-in e-mail client, conveniently called Mail, now includes an RSS reader. People who’ve read this blog before know that I’m a big proponent of RSS, and anything that makes it easier to adopt this wonderful technology is aces in my book.

As I mentioned, we’ve been playing with a beta release for several weeks and I plan to install the official release on my laptop sometime this week. In the meantime if you have any questions about the new Mac operating system, feel free to ask them in comments below.