If you use a new MacBook, or an iPhone/iPad/touch, you know how cool the new touch gestures are. Now you can add a trackpad to your iMac or Mac Pro. The new, wireless, Apple Magic Trackpad is designed to fit perfectly with the Apple wireless keyboard. Multi touch technology lets you click, scroll (360 degrees), pinch, flip, navigate your Mac like no mouse ever could. The entire surface of Magic Trackpad is one large button, so you can click and double-click anywhere. Magic Trackpad also supports a full set of gestures, including two-finger scrolling, pinching to zoom, rotating with your fingertips, three-finger swiping, and activating Exposé or switching between applications with four fingers. My order is in! $69
Trackpad for your desktop Mac?
July 29th, 2010
Super Efficient Battery Charger – Apple? – $29
July 28th, 2010
When I first looked at this new Apple product, I wondered why Apple would build and sell something as mundane as a battery charger. When I mentioned it to our service manager, Patrick told me to take a closer look and showed me why. This little device is over 10 times more efficient than the average charger. When the batteries are full, it goes into a sleep mode that only consumes 30 milliwatts. (average charger is 310mw) Then consider that the NIMH (Nickel Metal Hydride ) batteries have a life of up to 10 years. With 2 AA’s for your keyboard and 2 for your mouse (plus 2 spares ready and waiting) this little charger will keep a bushel basket of batteries out of the landfill! Plus, keep a little more green in your pocket.
Apple Battery Charger – $29
comes with charger, wall plug and 6 NiMH AA batteries.
You’ve Got Options!
July 1st, 2010
Ever wonder what that Option key was for, tucked between your Command key* and the Control key**? It has several hidden tricks up its sleeve!
1. Diacritical marks. As I discussed in last month’s Tip and Trick, hold down the Option key, type a vowel to get a diacritical mark, let go, then type the letter you want that mark above. For example, “Option – e – let go – a” gives you an “á”.
2. iPhoto’s Rotate. By default, the Rotate button turns your picture 90° counter-clockwise. Hold down the Option key and it will change to clockwise.
3. Degrees and other special characters. Notice that degree symbol in #2 above? I held down the Option key when typing the asterisk. “Option-Shift-8” gave me an “°”. This will work on several keyboard combinations. ¡E??e®îmeñ†! (Experiment!)
4. Switch your speakers or microphone. Hold down your Option key and click on the Speaker icon in the upper right corner of your screen. If you have speakers, a microphone, or headphones plugged in, you’ll be able to choose them off a list. So if you want to switch back to your computer’s internal speakers, you can do so in a flash.
5. Open System Preferences. Hold down your Option key and tap on any of your F keys, the top row on your keyboard. You can immediately open up System Preferences directly to Brightness, Expose, Keyboard, or Sound.
6. Jump down a page. Right now, if you click in your scrollbar above or below the blue bubble, it will either jump you up/down a page, or to that place in the document. Hold down the Option key and it will reverse the setting. Find a long page in Safari or Word and give it a try! Very handy!
7. Open up new Inspectors. This trick works in Keynote or Pages. Open your Inspector, the panel that contains all the commands. Option-click on one of the buttons across its top, and you can have your Text pane open at the same time as your Object pane!
*for keyboard commands
**for right-click shortcut menus
iPad Rentals Now Available
June 30th, 2010
The MacPac is happy to to offer the Apple iPad for rental. If you would like to try this amazing device for yourself please call for details and availability right away as a limited number of iPads are currently available.
Reservations can be made at 503-256-5210 See blog for details… Read the rest of this entry »
How to type accented characters
June 7th, 2010
If you want to spell café correctly, how do you get that accent over the e? Or get that tilde over the n when you write niño in Spanish? There are a few ways to do it.
First, holding down the Option key (on the bottom row of your keyboard) gives you common diacritical marks: e=´, i=ˆ, u=¨, n=˜, ~=`. To accent a letter, hold down the Option key, type the character representing that accent mark, then type the letter you want underneath it. For example, Option-i then e makes ê.
If you go to System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources and put a checkmark in front of “Keyboard & Character Viewer,” it puts up a little box at the top right of your screen. Click on that new icon in the upper right corner of your screen, and choose “Show Keyboard Viewer,” and a little keyboard will appear.
Hold down the Option key, and you can see all the special characters you get when using that key as a modifier. Try holding down the Shift key, and Shift-Option as well. You’ll see all kinds of characters you can type. The ones highlighted in orange are the ones that follow the tip above.
You have another option as well. In that same System Preferences window, scroll down and put a checkmark in front of US International – PC. Click the keyboard icon in the upper right corner of your screen again, and make sure it’s set to this new keyboard configuration. Now, just like in Windows, you can use these keyboard combos:
For á, é, í, ó, ú: press ‘ and directly after that, the vowel.
For à, è, ì, ò, ù: press ` and directly after that, the vowel. (Note that ` is slightly different slightly different from ‘ … on my keyboard, it is located right of the left-side Shift key.)
For ä, ë, ï, ö, ü: press ” and directly after that, the vowel.
For ã, ñ, õ: press ˜ and directly after that, the letter.
Great Deal for your Graduate!
June 4th, 2010
Save $100 and get an iPod touch for FREE! Perfect for your graduate, this 13″ MacBook Pro has 4GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive for tons of storage, iLife ’09, Wi-Fi, web camera, USB, Firewire, Bluetooth – it’s loaded!! MSRP $1,499.
Graduate special – $1,399 + FREE iPod Touch
Stop in and check out this great deal. (while supplies last)
Creating PDFs from almost any application
April 28th, 2010
PDF stands for “Portable Document Format”, and what makes a PDF document practical is that it is universal – anyone on any computer, Mac or PC, can open it, without having the software originally used to create it. It can’t be modified by anyone; it’s essentially a picture of the page.
That means you can save a Pages document in a format your friend on a PC can read. It also means you can send a contract created in Word, and the recipient can’t change it and claim that’s how it was originally.
PDFs are saved like any other file, and can also be organized in iPhoto or Aperture.
To convert a document to PDF format, simply go to the Print dialog box.* In the lower right-hand corner, there will be a PDF button. Click on it, and you’ll have a variety of options, not just for the conversion, but for the action you want to do with it as well.
Choose “Save as PDF…” to convert to PDF and save it on your hard drive for archiving, or future use.
“Open in Preview” will immediately let you see what it looks like.
“Mail PDF” will open up Apple Mail and instantly attach the file, so all you have to do is address it and send it!
“Save as Adobe PDF” gets it ready to be modified in Adobe Acrobat, if you’ll be using it as the basis for an interactive form.
“Save PDF to Aperture” and “Save PDF to iPhoto” will instantly add the file to your photo library. You can then assign it keywords, ratings, and move it into albums. These choices are a great way of creating an archive of important records.
“Save PDF to folder as JPG (or TIFF)” turns the document into a graphic image.
“Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” from either Mail or Safari allows to create digital receipts to track online purchases.
Once your document is saved as a PDF, its universal file format will allow you to use it in any way you’d like!
*If your print dialog box is very small, click the blue arrow to the right of the printer name to expand it out.
iPad Wi-Fi + 3G Models Available in US on April 30
April 21st, 2010
The first shipments of the iPad Wi-Fi + 3g will be arriving at The MacPac April 30th. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available for the suggested retail price of
$629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB.
Get your orders in early as supplies are limited.
The fastest, most powerful MacBook Pro ever. Times three.
April 21st, 2010
The new MacBook Pro, available in 13-, 15-, and 17-inch models, sets all-new benchmarks for Mac notebooks. The 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro feature Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors, which boost performance up to 50 percent and reach Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.33GHz. Next-generation NVIDIA graphics bring high performance to everything from 3D games to photos and videos. And the built-in battery lasts up to 10 hours (8 to 9 hours on the 15- and 17-inch models). Starting at $1199.
The MacPac authorized to sell iPad!
April 5th, 2010
The MacPac is thrilled to announce it is authorized to sell the iPad. You can now order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G. (Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available late April) We have demo models in the showroom for you to try out. Starting at $499.
