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We're at Macworld Expo 2009 in San Francisco with the latest news about the show. Check back often this week for updates!
- Phil Schiller Delivers Lackluster Keynote
- iPhoto '09 Adds Faces and Places
- iMovie '09 Seems to Fix Everything from iMovie '08
- GarageBand '09 Adds Music Lessons
- iWork Turns '09
- Apple Moves to Unprotected Music, Tiered Prices
- Apple Pioneers New Battery Tech with 17-inch MacBook Pro
- Jobs Clears the Air on Health Issue
- Welcome to Macintosh Movie to Screen at Macworld Expo
- MacHEADS Movie to Premiere at Macworld Expo
- TidBITS Events at Macworld SF 2009
Mac OS X Zip Expanding Utility
Firefox (and possibly other applications) may ask you what you want to do with .zip archives that you download from the Internet. If you want to expand them with Mac OS X (rather than StuffIt Expander), you may be unsure of which application actually does the job. You're looking for Archive Utility (in Leopard) or BOMArchiveHelper (in Tiger). In either case, the application is stored in Hard Drive/System/Library/Core Services/. Don't move it from there, though, or you'll confuse matters.
Written by Adam C. Engst
Recent TidBITS Talk Discussions
- iWork.com and MobileMe? (1 message)
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- A contrarian view of Macworld Expo's utility (3 messages)
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Published in TidBITS 914. Subscribe today to receive TidBITS in email every Monday.
- 16 GB iPhone and 32 GB iPod touch Released
- QuickTime 7.4.1 Fixes Zero-Day Vulnerability
- iPhoto 7.1.2 Blocks Security Vulnerability
- iPhoto Print Products Available in Australia and New Zealand
- O2 Tweaks UK Monthly iPhone Plans
- Scan Mac News Headlines at Alltop
- Please Welcome Eliana Wren Carlson
- DealBITS Discount: Save 20% on Sound Studio 3
- More Mileposts Along Road to 3G iPhone
- Apple Punished for iTunes Success
- My First Macworld Expo
- Get Bit Literate, with a Buggy Whip
- Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/11-Feb-08
Tips for Better iPhoto Cards
While working on our holiday card this year, I became annoyed by the fact that the body text in the Year In Review theme was centered, making it ugly and hard to read. I spent a few minutes searching and found an iPhoto Hot Tips page from Apple that gave me the answer.
If you format text in TextEdit (or presumably many other word processors), you can paste that fully formatted text into the card's text field in iPhoto and have the card retain all your original formatting. This is true even of fancier formatting options like line spacing and text alignment, and you can also set and use tab stops. So for my card, I simply copied the text out of iPhoto, pasted it into TextEdit, changed it to left alignment, copied it again, and pasted back into iPhoto.
The same trick works for text in iPhoto books, so there's no need to be frustrated by text formatting options there either.
The iPhoto Hot Tips told me something else I didn't know, which is that you can Option-choose a background color from the Background pop-up menu to set the color of the inside of a card to be different from the outside. I don't see myself needing this often, but it could come in handy.
The rest of the tips on that page, save one, are pretty much obvious from looking at iPhoto's interface. The one remaining non-obvious tip is that Apple recommends using the Sharpness slider in the Adjust panel as the last thing you do, in order to end up with the best image quality. No explanation is given for why this is the case; my only caveat is that you want to use the Reduce Noise slider as nearly the last thing because it's so CPU-intensive that further edits can become sluggish.
Fetch Softworks: Fetch 5.3 has WebView, the easy wayto view files in a browser and copy Web addresses from Fetch.
Also a new look for Leopard, droplet shortcuts, and more.
Download your free trial version! <http://fetchsoftworks.com/>