Use iCal to Auto Open Files

Jeff Gamet of TMO offers a great tip for additional use of the iCal program in Apple’s iLife Suite of applications. Of course, iCal’s event alarms be set to remind you of Important events and activities. But Gamet points out that it can also perform other tasks, specifically, opening documents at set times. He writes,

“To automatically open a document at a specific time, do this:
First create a new event in iCal.
Now choose “Open file” from the “alarm” pop-up menu.

Select “other” from the iCal pop-up menu and select the file you want to open.
Don’t forget to set how far before your event the file should open.”

This allows you to have everything preset so that during a meeting, your documents will open automatically. It saves you the time, in that moment, of having to search out the document and open it. You have it available immediately when you need it.

iCal is only one of the programs in the iLife Suite, which includes iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, iWeb.

Thanks, Jeff, for this tip.

Apple Releases Final Cut Server 1.1

Final Cut Server is the media asset management and workflow automation software which is designed to meet the needs of film and video professionals. Final Cut Server will automatically execute dozens of your routine production tasks, manage thousands of assets, and allow each and every member of your project team to be in sync at all times.

The update, which Apple released late on Thursday, addresses issues with the check in/checkout process for Final Cut Pro projects. It also fixes issues with double-byte character sets and improves overall reliability of the software. It is recommended for all Final Cut Server 1.0 users, and can be downloaded free at the Apple Support Website.
To learn more about ways in which Final Cut Server can support and enhance your own projects, see http://www.apple.com/finalcutserver/

Apple Suppliers Report Much Larger Orders for iPhones, iPods and Macs

FBR Research analyst Craig Berger has touched base with Apple’s suppliers and reports that Apple has revised their orders to “significantly higher” numbers — he estimates more than 15 million 3G iPhones, plus 2 million of the older iPhones for 2008. Those numbers are much higher than the 10 million iPhones Apple expressed hope it would sell in 2008.

iPods orders are up 15%, including more iPod nanos, iPod classics and iPod Touch.

Apple’s order for Macs has also increased: There’s a 10% increase in Laptop orders and a whopping 20% increase in desktop orders.

In this market, with the economy in a sorry state, this is certainly good news, not only for Apple but for its suppliers.

University of Oxford Uses Mac and Leads Cystic Fibrosis Research

The University of Oxford is using Apple technology and accomplishing groundbreaking Research in the field of cystic fibrosis, an incurable hereditary disease of the mucus glands of the lungs, liver, pancreas and intestines. The disease, so far, is incurable, and causes progressive disability owing to multisystem failure.

The Oxford researchers are working towards improving understanding of both the causes and the potential treatments for the disease. The team is using the high performance Apple computing power provided by the Apple Research and Technology Support programme (ARTS), that supports leading research all across Europe.

“Apple is the perfect partner for biomolecular simulation, which is a great tool for understanding the basis of diseases and for developing drug treatments”, says Dr Ben Hall, Structural Bioinformatics & Computational Biochemistry Unit, University of Oxford. “We believe that Apple is the only company to offer the tight and seamless integration of web development, automation, high performance computing and UNIX tools on a single platform”.

Oxford’s Structural Bioinformatics & Computational Biochemistry Unit is performing pioneering work. When the University called for project proposals in response to Apple’s ARTS programme, Dr Hall and his partner, Dr Fowler. found an opportunity to build the research on their Apple platform of choice. They saw Apple technology would offer them a comprehensive technology solution. For more details about their work, and how Apple technology plays an important role, see: http://www.apple.com/uk/education/hed/arts/oxford/

The New Enhancements in Snow Leopard

Apple has stated officially that there will be “no new features” in Snow Leopard. But Roughly Drafted and AppleInsider have taken a look at the so-called “under the hood improvements” and agree that they will “translate into a slew of new enhancements” which will make a big impact when Snow Leopard arrives next spring. Some of these have already been reported: SproutCore, the LLVM Compiler, the CUPS printing engine,
native exchange support in Mail, iCal and Address Book, and self-contained Web apps.

Other additions haven’t received much attention: file size reductions, text-processing features, the new multi-touch framework, auto activation of fonts, and full ZFS support.

All Apple notebook systems are due to ship with multi-touch enabled trackpads after this summer’s MacBook and MacBook Pro re-design. So it makes sense that Apple will be offering completely multi-touch framework which will ship as part of Snow Leopard.

The reduction of the overall footprint of Mac OS X is another goal. So Snow Leopard applications have been reduced so that the standard Mac OS X Utility folder drops from 468 MC to 111.6 MB. Mail will also be shaved by two-thirds, from 287 MB to 91 MB. iChat will reduce from 111 MB to 52 MB, iCal from 89 MB to 48 MB.

An extensively detailed list of these and other improvements and enhancements can be read at http://www.roughlydrafted.com/

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