It is always fun when Bob LeVitus comes to Washington DC. This year he will be doing two days of seminars for my user group, Washington Apple Pi.

These seminars will be much like attending his seminars at Macworld Expo, except the price is MUCH cheaper!

If you would like to learn more about this event, be sure to check out the information page. To sign up, click here. I have linked to a copy of the pdf that we are sending out. To view or download a pdf file of the seminar information, click here -->levitus_seminars

The day I installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was a bittersweet one for me. I had come to rely on a little tool, Mail.appetizer, to make sure that I immediately saw any messages coming into my Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus Consulting email mailbox. Unfortunately, the old version broke in Leopard.

Because Mail.appetizer was a beta application and it had not been updated since July 2005, I held out little hope of seeing a new version coming soon.

This morning I received a message from Stefan Schüßler of Bronson Beta, the developer of Mail.appetizer. He has just released a new version that works with Leopard Mail! It is still a beta, but it seems to be very stable.

So what, exactly, is Mail.appetizer and what does it do?

Mail.appetizer is a plugin for Apple's Mail program. It is installed in Mail preferences and it is accessed through the Notification item.

I get lots of email ever day and while much of it is important, I need to see any messages that come into my Dr. Mac mailbox IMMEDIATELY!

Since I need to see just those, I click the Mailboxes: Custom button and configure it like this:

Now each time I receive an email, a translucent gray box appears on top of whatever is open on my desktop and I can scan the message to decide if I need to deal with it immediately.

I can control the length of time that it is displayed, how transparent it is, the font and size in which it is displayed and even more in the Notification setup panel in Mail Preferences.

If you need to keep on top of your email, I heartily recommend Mail.appetizer. Stefan Schüßler of Bronson Beta, the developer has released Mail.appetizer as donationware. If you like his product, please consider sending him a few dollars to encourage him to continue developing Mail.appetizer.

While I know that many of my readers are experienced in downloading and installing software such as Mail.appetizer, I know that some of you have never tried downloading and installing new software. Questions such as this can be handled in a troubleshooting session. Downloading, installing and configuring most applications takes less than 15 minutes. The charge would be $30.00 at Bob LeVitus Consulting.

If you would like to learn more about how to install software and what to do when faced with the many different ways new software is presented, then consider booking a tutorial session. The cost of a one-hour tutorial is only $60.00. We will use our special software that allows me to see your screen and even control your mouse and keyboard so that I can help you learn whatever you need to do on your Macintosh.

For all of those sons and daughters who need someone to give Dad or Mom a hand, consider the gift of a tutoring session or two for Mother's Day or Father's Day. Send us a message at UrgentRequest@boblevitus.com and we will help you arrange your gift.

-- Pat

Eventually, in the life of every Mac user, that "something" disappears. In the case of Terry, a recent potential Bob LeVitus Consulting customer, it was the loss of the Quick Look Button in the toolbar of each window.

Now, while we are in the business of making money by fixing people's computers, answering question and giving tutoring sessions, there are many questions that are so easy to answer that we simply cannot charge for them.

Bob answered this one, using a great new program, Skitch, to take a screen shot and annotate it. These were his instructions:
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We get questions – lots and lots of questions over at Bob LeVitus Consulting. While many people really need help (and that's why we exist), there are some questions for which the answer is so simple, that I put up an entry here on my MacMousecalls blog.

In the case of SUID warnings, just what they are and how to fix them would require a LOOOONNNNGGGG explanation, but Apple Inc. provides an easy answer in its Technical Information Library article #306935 – just ignore them!
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Back in elementary school, we learned to write dates by putting the month, then the day, then the year. That date form works just fine for things like letters, and although it was a little inconvenient, it works just fine for hand-sorting things like checks. But it is terrible for sorting things by date on a computer.

While many things can best be sorted by a title, many items that we store on our computer work best by date. For example, each time I buy something on the Internet, pay a bill, or receive a password, I make a pdf of the document and store them is a folder that I call Passwords and Receipts.
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I am so old that back when I was in high school learning to type, a computer took up a whole room. To type a school paper you used a typewriter, a device that many of today's children may never have seen).

Much of a typing class was spent learning how to lay out a document. Students learned the rules for spacing, paragraph format and page layout. Times have changed with the use of computers and word processing software, but many of the old-time rules are still used. Unfortunately those rules help to produce documents that are impossible to correctly format in a modern word processor. I will take a look at some of those old rules over the next few blog entries and show you the current way to handle text in a wide variety of applications.

We will begin with spacing after punctuation marks such as periods, colons and semicolons.

Back in the days of typewriters, most had a "well" of bars that contained the letters. Click here for a picture. Each of these bars were the same width and so all letters produced by the typewriter were the same width. The font produced by using the typewriter is called a monospace font today. Here is a example of what type would have look like along with the same line in a proportional font Read More...

One of the really nice features of Mac OS X is the system-wide dictionary that is available in all applications that are written in Cocoa, Apple Inc.'s programming environment for programming.

For you, the end user it means that when you make a spelling error, the same database is used to check the spelling of a word. This means when you add a word to your user dictionary in an application such as Mail, that same user dictionary is used to check the spelling of the same word in TextEdit, Pages, Keynote and a wide variety of third party applications.

For example, each time I type my last name, Fauquet, it is underlined with red dots as shown in the illustration below. Read More...

After I installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I spent some time learning my way around the new operating system and assessing its features. One thing that really did not impress me is Quick Look. My daily working computer is a 17" MacBook Pro.

I make use of every inch of my screen real estate. I keep several application windows open and position them carefully so that I have instant access to the tools I need. While some users enlarge every window to fill their screen, I keep windows large enough to be useful, but small enough that I can move between applications by simply clicking in their window. Read More...