Tell Us What You Want to Read!

We have lots of ideas for new Take Control titles, but we're writing for you, so here's your chance to vote for titles you'd like to buy, and suggest other topics.

Vote on Suggested Titles! (General Macintosh)

Our survey is a bit different from your average Web popularity contest. Vote for titles you would buy today if they existed, not topics that just sound good. Feel free to encourage others to cast sincere votes too (our system records only a single vote per person per title). If a particular title earns a strong response, we'll try hard to publish it - we'd be nuts not to.

To vote, select one or more titles below, enter an email address at which we can contact you if and when we publish such a book, and then click Vote.

You've made so many suggestions that we had to create multiple pages, so please don't miss voting on all the interesting suggestions about:

  Take Control of FileMaker (11)
FileMaker is the premier database program on the Mac, but users often fall into 2 categories: (1) "Don't fiddle with the thing" end users and (2) Professional DB jockeys. This title would begin to bridge the gap by introducing the differences between flat and relational databases including strengths, weaknesses, and typical situations where each is most appropriate. This book will also give hands on examples of creating and modifying databases for common uses such as maintaining complex contact data, project management, and club membership and event participation. In addition, this book will orient the reader to FileMaker's built-in data types, functions, and reporting features.
  Take Control of Pages 2 (34)
Few people realize how powerful Apple's iWork suite of applications is. This ebook would discuss all the features and functionalities of Pages 2, iWork's word processing application, and help you take full advantage of its capabilities. This ebook would show you how to use the program's 60-plus templates to create anything from letters to screenplays, and how to incorporate charts, tables, and media, as well as jazz up your documents with customized shapes.
  Take Control of Keynote 3 (28)
The second half of iWork's application suite is Keynote 3. This ebook would cover creating professional-looking slideshows, animated storyboards, and more, as well as show you how to create cinema-quality animation effects. It would also discuss how to import presentations from other applications, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, as well as export presentations to PowerPoint, iDVD, or iPhoto.
  Take Control of Being a Mac User in a Windows World (20)
It's not easy being a Mac user in a Windows world - no one understands you or your computer, and all you want is for you and your Mac to be accepted, literally. This ebook would tell you all you need to know about how you and your Mac can communicate, network, and interact with servers and computers that speak that "other language."
  Take Control of Spotlight (87)
Although it's been highly toughted as the most amazing feature of Tiger, many people find that Spotlight is possibly the worst of Apple's "Find File" implementations. This ebook would help you tame this seemingly unruly part of Tiger. Learn how to get find exactly what you want without having to reconfigure the controls every time you perform a search; how to use Spotlight to its best advantage on a G4 or older computer; how to bring back some of the functionality of the older "Find File" implementations that you miss so much; in short, get Spotlight to work the way you expect it to.
  Take Control of Printing on the Mac (105)
Printing shouldn't have to be hard, but more often than not it is. This ebook would attempt to cover the full gamut, describing the basic printer technologies to help you choose the right one, helping you set it up to print from your Mac, and walking you through turning on printer sharing for both Macs and Windows-based PCs on your network. A troubleshooting section would help you work through common virtual and physical printing problems.
  Take Control of Internet Telephony (138)
Long distance phone calls used to be expensive, but these days, you can make them for little or no money at all thanks to voice-over-IP services like Vonage and VoicePulse. But why stop there when you can use Skype for free, and when iChat AV comes with every Mac and provides not just text and audio chat, but multi-person video chat? This ebook would look at all the ways you can communicate in real time over the Internet, the hardware and software that's necessary, and how to bridge the gap between Macs and PCs. It might also have an appendix on Internet faxing.
  Take Control of the Finder (147)
With this concise ebook, you'd learn how to make the most of the Finder, which all Mac users rely on more than any other application. The ebook will explain all of the Finder's special folders, provide techniques for organizing your data, offer suggestions about the best ways to access your files and folders, and more. Appendixes would cover how to throw things away and how to decorate your Desktop.
  Take Control of Upgrading Your Mac (51)
This ebook would discuss the pros and cons of upgrading your Mac versus buying a new computer and explain what benefits can be expected from various upgrades. It would include a section on identifying your exact model of Macintosh, specifying what upgrades are possible for each model and telling you exactly what to look for when upgrading memory, hard drive, and other components to assure compatibility and optimal results.
  Take Control of the Mac OS X Command Line (209)
Look under the hood in Mac OS X and you'll find the raw power of Unix. Apple hides it awfully well, but it turns out that some things really are easier if you know the appropriate programs to run from the command line. This book would provide a basic overview of using the command line and then delve into tasks that are difficult or impossible to complete in Mac OS X using the Finder or other graphical programs.
  Take Control of Your Mac-compatible Scanner (100)
Although digital photography has largely taken over from film, there is still a vast amount of information on paper that would be nice to have in digital format, and for that, a scanner is essential. But it's not always easy to find a Mac-compatible scanner and get it working properly, so this book would look at the available scanners and the software necessary to run them, before moving on to more general topics of the best settings to use, techniques for efficient scanning of lots of documents, and so on. A section of the ebook would cover OCR.
  Take Control of Getting Things Done with a Mac (139)
David Allen's Getting Things Done model is a powerful method of, well, getting things done. But the model doesn't make many specific recommendations about what software to use and how to use it, and in particular, it makes few recommendations for the Mac. This ebook would explore programs that can be used successfully with the GTD model, along with detailed suggestions for how to implement the diffrent aspects of the GTD model. The ebook would also look at using the built-in applications on a Palm OS handheld device to supplement the Mac software.
  Take Control of Quicken for Macintosh (96)
Quicken is by far the leading personal financial management program for the Macintosh, but it's far from being trivially easy to use. This ebook would provide an overview of the basics of using Quicken while also explaining some of the more complex topics. If we decide to publish this ebook, we may contact people who vote for it to find out what aspects of Quicken they're particularly interested in exploring in more detail.
  Take Control of Protecting Your Mac with a Firewall (159)
A key aspect of protecting your Mac is proper use of a firewall. This ebook would look at the different firewalls available, including the built-in one, and explain how they work, how best to configure them for different situations. It would explain ports and port mapping in detail, and provide information about commonly used ports.
  Take Control of Mac OS X's Personal Information Management Tools (119)
Mail, iCal, and Address Book, which are included in Mac OS X, provide a powerful personal information management solution akin to the tools Microsoft built into Entourage. Many plug-ins and add-ons exist to make Apple's programs an even more powerful combination. This ebook would show you how to integrate Mac OS X's bundled applications to handle your personal information management needs.
  Take Control of Quieting Your Computer (42)
We're constantly assulted by noise from our computers, and with more computers in the home and office, and more of them on all the time, the noise levels we endure are rising ever higher. This ebook would look at all the ways to reduce noise from computers, including selecting quiet models, positioning your computer properly, installing sound-dampening material around it, and even replacing noisy fans with quieter units. It would also suggest techniques for using your computers in ways that will keep them as quiet as possible (automatic sleep, etc).
  Take Control of Information Gathering (150)
One of our most popular sets of articles is Matt Neuburg's informal series of reviews of "snippet keepers". The snippet keepers all work in roughly the same way, but they differ widely in how they expect you to use them. This ebook would take a more philosophical view of information gathering and management to start (perhaps with a side trip to the Getting Things Done model), and would then look at the various snippet keepers and how they can be used for different sorts of information gathering and management tasks.
  Take Control of VoiceOver in Mac OS X (48)
The VoiceOver feature of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger significantly improves the accessibility of Mac OS X to people with vision disabilities. It offers a screen reader, works with both the keyboard and mouse, provides enhanced screen magnification, and describes aloud user interface elements on the screen. This ebook will go beyond Apple's documentation in explaining VoiceOver and how to make the most of it, with special attention paid to people who want to switch to the Mac from using Windows with expensive screen-reader applications.
  Take Control of Configuring Retrospect (108)
EMC Dantz's Retrospect is one of the most widely used and powerful backup programs for the Mac and Windows. But all that power comes at a price, and if you don't have a long-term relationship with the software, it can be complex and confusing. This ebook wouldn't attempt to compete with Retrospect's documentation, but would instead focus on a number of common home and small business setups, with details about exactly how to set up Retrospect for each, along with an explanation of each decision.

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Suggest New Titles

If the topic you want to read about is not listed above, use this form to make specific suggestions to us via email. Be sure to describe the content you'd like to see (the more like the descriptions above, the easier it is for us to add), and if you know someone who would be an ideal author or editor, we'd appreciate contact information. We'll evaluate all suggestions and add them to the list above unless a topic is illegal, unethical, or just downright icky. If your organization would like to commission a particular book or purchase a site license, we'll see what we can work out.

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