Here is a great tip if you are having problems with regular hangs/pauses in Entourage — especially with hangs that slow down your Mac with extended periods of heavy unexplained disk activity. Particularly noticeable for people with large 1GB+ mail databases. You can reduce disk churning by using a somewhat hidden option to turn off […]

About a month ago, Digg announced new “Smart” Digg buttons on the Digg blog. You’ve seen them before — the familiar Digg badges that appear next to some blog entries showing how many Diggs a particular post has received. There is an example with a skimpy number of Diggs shown at the left for this […]

In 2007, several countries change the dates on which they observe Daylight Saving Time (DST). In the United States, all states except Arizona and Hawaii will begin observing Daylight Saving Time on March 11.

Your computer may need to be updated to adjust for these changes. Apple has released updates to fix this problem. If you’re running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.3 (Panther) use your Mac’s Software Update feature (Apple Menu> Software Update…) to automatically download the new DST update.

We appreciate a good cheat sheet. So when we came across this handy collection of Mac web browser shortcuts over at The Apple Blog, we added it to our collection. browser-cheat-sheet.pdf Here you’ll find a fairly comprehensive list of shortcuts for two of the most popular Mac web browsers — Safari and FireFox. There are […]

In Office 2007 Microsoft introduced a new file format called the Microsoft Open Office XML Format (.docx). This format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word. The Mac version (Office 2008) isn’t expected to ship until the second half of 2007.

So far this month, several clients have called to ask how to open, convert, or place Word 2007’s new .docx file format on a Mac. For the next couple months, this issue will be a problem for many Mac-based studios.

Here are some conversion options for now:

You’ve recieve a Stuffit archive (.sit) that contains crucial files for your project. But when you expand that archive, Stuffit Expander ends up giving you an apparently empty folder, or only shows a couple of your needed files.

This is one of those problems we get a lot of calls about from frustrated designers. Certainly more designers suffer in silence.

In this tip we’ll not only explain what’s going on, we’ll give you three easy ways to fix the problem for good!

RCDefaultApp is a free utility that Creativetechs has started adding to our recommended Mac OS X installs. It adds a special preference pane that allows you to quickly change the default application for many common situations:

• Open all your .pdf files in Acrobat instead of Preview.
• Pick a different default mail client or web browser.
• Control what opens when digital cameras or webcams are plugged in.
• Close security holes with how certain weblinks are handled.

Of course you can change these settings other ways. But RCDefaultApp makes it much easier by putting the most requested controls into one location — a new “Default Apps” option at the bottom of your Mac OS X System Preferences.

Last week we reprised our annual Fonts & Mac OS X talk at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts. This year included some significant updates for designers managing their fonts in 2007.

Here is a link to the PDF of the presentation, which includes specifics on some of the details covered:

SVC Font Class 2007.pdf

In addition to this PDF, we have a variety of links and resources that were mentioned during the presentation.

Many of our tips come directly from the annoyances Seattle designers call us about. This is one of those issues. We hear from many frustrated designers who complain that Extensis Suitcase is constantly deactivating fonts in Adobe InDesign while they work. Seemingly at random. The short answer is to turn off the “On document close” […]

At the beginning of each year we like to take a moment to discuss the topic of studio backup. Use this checklist as a comparision for your own studio’s backup strategy.

Happy New Year! May all your data be safe in 2007.