You may not know it, but OS X’s Mail.app has the ability to utilize plugins. Installing a plugin is not an overly difficult task. After the first install, the subsequent plugins become easier to get running. A lot of the plugins you download claim that installation is as easy as double clicking on the .mailbundle file, but my experience shows that it just wasn’t that simple! Thankfully, the work-around is simple and straightforward.

Install a .mailbundle file
The first step is to navigate to your Home folder (command-shift-h) in the Finder. Open the Library folder and then open the Mail folder. Look for a “Bundles” folder. If it doesn’t exist, you should create it (command-shift-n). Now place a .mailbundle file in the directory. For an example, I suggest using letterbox. Letterbox will allow you to view your mail in a three column view.

Enable the use of mailbundles
After you have everything in place, we need to tell Mail to look for and use .mailbundle files. Open the Terminal and type the following command:
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
If you were using letterbox, the next time you fire up the Mail application you should see your inbox presented to you using three columns. Very cool.

Here’s an amusing comic breaking down web browsers. Thanks to Joseph B. for the submission.

Is this pretty accurate? Out of all the browsers I think Firefox is really too slow to be usable anymore, and I find myself in Safari and Chrome almost exclusively now. I haven’t touched Opera in ages, and the description as a tiny smart car cracks me up… but the dead horse for Internet Explorer for Mac is absolutely hilarious to me and takes the cake!

MacBook Pro’s are great machines, the only thing that makes them better is when you add an external display, and what better external monitor to drive than a 30″ Apple Cinema?

[ from Flickr ]

Updated: 2/13/2012 – You have by now seen that Apple sells an official iPad dock that includes a handy keyboard. If you read this site you have likely also seen that you can attach the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard to your iPad as well. Believe it or not there is a third option if you would like to use your Apple USB Keyboard in conjunction with your Apple iPad; using a wired USB keyboard. The method is a minor “hack” of sorts, but it does work as evidence shown in the video below. The hack involves obtaining the power necessary for the keyboard to operate from a powered usb hub. You can find a powered USB hub at all major (and minor) electronic stores, including Amazon.

Requirements
USB Powered Hub
iPad Camera Attachment (this is where you will get a USB input from)
Apple USB keyboard

Using a USB Keyboard with an iPad

Getting a USB keyboard to work with an iPad is surprisingly easy:
1) Plug the Camera Connector into the iPad.
2) Connect a USB cable into your powered hub and the iPad Camera Connector
3) Plug the USB Keyboard into your Hub

It really is that simple if you meet the hardware requirements, and soon your typing experience on the iPad will be greatly improved without having to buy the iPad keyboard dock to just have yet another keyboard laying around when it’s not in use.

If you have any troubles, see the video below for a walkthrough:

Happy iPading!

Earlier today apple unveiled its HTML 5 showcase. The showcase covers Video, Typography, Gallery, Transitions, Audio, 360 views and Virtual Reality examples. This marks a continued campaign against the current provider of most of these types of content, Adobe’s Flash. If you haven’t read Steve Jobs’ open letter to the community on the topic of Flash, check it out. It makes some interesting points.

Personally, it is my opinion that Flash is a dying commodity and that open standards are always going to prevail over closed technologies when it comes to the web. So it’s time to give a quick run down of HTML 5. I also threw in a good deal of opinion, as after all, this is a blog. Read on for more.

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So you just downloaded the awesome Xcode code completion plugin (or any other) and you need to get it working… easy. You can install any Xcode plugin by dropping the .pbplugin file into the following directory:

~/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Plug-ins
If you haven’t used plugins yet, the Plug-ins directory does not exist. In this case, all you need to do is create the directory. After you have dropped the plugin file into the folder, relaunch Xcode and the plugin will be loaded automatically. Uninstalling a plugin is just a matter of removing it from the Plug-ins folder.

The Mac OS X Application Switcher is a handy way to quickly cycle through open applications, but did you know you can quickly quit programs you aren’t using with the Application Switcher as well?

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One the gripes I’ve had with the Apple “App” store is that it can be hard to search such a large index of applications to find what you’re looking for. Looks like it’s Google to the rescue as they seem to be adding (it’s still not perfect!) the ability to search the iPhone/iPad store as well as the Android store. Great news for both platforms. Not only does this addition benefit the consumer, this will make life easier for developers as well. Now there is a bit of method to the madness and the chances are higher of connecting developers and consumers together in app purchasing harmony!

Google is rolling out a feature that allows you to change the background picture of Google.com to a user defined image. Here’s how to customize your Google.com landing page background image.

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Whether you are a new Apple developer or an experienced Cocoa engineer with roots in NeXTStep, you will understand the need to back up your hard work. Integrating Xcode with subversion not only allows you to back up your code, but it also enables you to keep a history of changes that you can revert back to or compare your code against. This is called version control. This article assumes that you already have your own subversion repository that you have read and write access to. If you want to setup a subversion server of your own, I suggest consulting the almighty google for a wide range of articles on how to accomplish this task. Read on for screenshots, details and lots of fun.
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As the release of iPhone OS 4 nears I thought it would be an opportune time to talk about why I’m personally excited for iPhone OS 4. As an amateur (up and coming!) developer and an avid user of the platform, I am more than ready for the unveiling of the latest incarnation of iPhone/iPad platform. Unfortunately iPad users will have to wait until this Fall before they can leverage a lot of the enhancements. It sounds like the wait will be well worth it!

Update: iPhone OS 4 has been announced, and it’s called iOS 4.

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Want to use an external Bluetooth keyboard with the iPad? You don’t have to use Apple’s official iPad keyboards, instead if you already own a Bluetooth keyboard the chances are good that it will be compatible with the iPad. If you’re looking to do a lot of typing on the iPad then it’s hard to beat a real external keyboard, as the touchscreen is generally just slower and less accurate for many iPad users. To get a Bluetooth keyboard connected to iPad, all you need to do is pair the device to the iPad and adjust a few iOS settings, we’ll walk through exactly how to do just that.

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Every once in a while you’ll come across a video that has audio syncing problems. Sometimes it’s minor where the sound track and dialogue is off by a few milliseconds and it’s barely noticeable, other times it can be off by as much as a few seconds and this makes watching the video almost impossible. Rather than ditch the video, you simply need to fix the audio track so that it syncs with the video track, and that’s what we’re going to cover here.

We’re going to use VLC to easily re-sync audio tracks to a video, by either offsetting the audio forwards or backwards. It sounds more crazy than it is, and it’s actually really easy to do with VLC on Mac, Windows, and Linux, here’s how….

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You can quickly compare any two images side-by-side by using Mac OS X’s QuickLook feature.

* Select the two pictures within the Finder that you want to see side-by-side
* Hit the Spacebar to enter into QuickLook mode
* Click on “Index Sheet” at the bottom of the Quick Look window (it’s the icon with four tiled windows)
* The Escape key exits side-by-side view, and hitting Spacebar again or clicking away from the window exits QuickLook mode

Assuming you have the screen resolution to support it, there’s no reason you can’t compare four or even twenty images side-by-side with this method. This is a really handy tip for photographers and graphic artists.

[ via Abstrukt ]

You might be asking yourself, what’s mouse acceleration? Essentially mouse acceleration is an algorithm that is deployed in an attempt to make mouse movements feel “natural”.

For many PC users, when you first use a Mac, it becomes quite obvious that the mouse is behaving very differently. It will feel sluggish, unpredictable and unresponsive (to varying degrees depending on the user).  This type of acceleration “curve” (as they call it) is useful when using a trackpad device, but very problematic when using a “high performance” mouse such as a logitech gaming mouse.  I was recently reminded of how problematic the OS X acceleration curve can be while playing the recently released (for the mac) Half-Life 2.  Trying to navigate a first person shooter while mouse acceleration is enabled is a nightmare!

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You can now check your iPhone’s data usage on the AT&T network, but the ability to do so is aimed at helping users select a reduced data consumption plan rather than just providing an interesting service to subscribers.

Checking your iPhone or iPad data usage

To quickly check iPhone data use, dial *3282# (translates to *DATA#) and you will get a free text message with information about current data consumption. This works fine on the iPhone but won’t work on the iPad because it doesn’t have the phone capabilities, so you’ll want to use the method below instead.

To check your iPhone or iPad wireless data usage:
* Go to the AT&T wireless site
* Login with your wireless info
* From the Account Summary page click on ‘View Past Data Usage’
* You’ll be able to see a graph of data usage, select dates or go with the 6 month default

The usage graph is intended to make it easier to determine which of the new data plans you’ll need for your iPhone.

New wireless data plans from AT&T

Here are the new AT&T iPhone Data plans, they start on June 7th (iPhone 4 availability starts June 24):

* Data Plus – 200MB of data for $15/month. Additional 200MB costs another $15
* DataPro – 2GB of data for $25/month. Additional 1 GB of data is $10
* Tethering – Requires DataPro, plus an additional $20/month

It looks like the $30/month unlimited data plan is a thing of the past, and I imagine once the existing iPhone contracts are up users will be pushed into one of the set data plans. Those who bought the 3G iPad aren’t immune from the changes either, the unlimited iPad data plan looks to be going extinct as well. Directly from AT&T:

For new iPad customers, the $25 per month 2 GB plan will replace the existing $29.99 unlimited plan. iPad customers will continue to pre-pay for their wireless data plan and no contract is required. Existing iPad customers who have the $29.99 per month unlimited plan can keep that plan or switch to the new $25 per month plan with 2 GB of data.

You can see the full press release from AT&T that has more info on each new data plan.

If you have an existing unlimited data plan with AT&T you can likely renew the contract and get a new phone, but be sure to look at your contract and check iPhone 4 upgrade eligibility.

Did you know you can broadcast IRC-style notification commands in Messages for Mac? Indeed you can, even with Messages in modern MacOS releases.

This fun trick was originally discovered with iChat (back when Messages was known as iChat, remember that?) and it’s fair to say that many people never knew about the uses of an IRC like command to broadcast a notification type of message…

Here’s how it works:

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Spyware is generally something you don’t have to worry about on the Mac, but TheLoop is reporting that a company named ‘7art-screensavers’ is releasing malware on the Mac platform with a series of free screensaver downloads. Apparently the screensavers themselves do not include the spyware, but they attempt to download and install the “OSX/OpinionSpy” app during the screensaver installation process. TheLoop describes the spyware behavior as follows:
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