Stan's List

Enhancements in this release include:

* Tables with calculations, enabling you to perform spreadsheet operations right in your presentation
* Three-dimensional charts with realistic textures for displaying your data
* Advanced image editing for perfecting your photos
* Freeform BÈzier curves and curved shapes that greatly expand drawing capabilities
* New shapes, including customizable stars and polygons
* Image masking using a standard or custom shape to create unique photo cutouts
* Comments to use as notes or reminders when creating presentations
* New HD themes for presentations and portfolios, and themes for kiosks and storyboards
* New cinematic transitions, including blinds, doorway, fall, reflection, revolving door, swoosh, shutter, and fade through color
* Light Table View for displaying all your slides simultaneously so you can easily reorganize them
* Multiple columns in body text
* Export to iPhoto for use in photocasts, webpages, and book printing
* Export to iDVD to burn a DVD of your presentation with chapter breaks between slides and builds
* More animation control, enabling you to set unique timing and sequence of each bullet, table row, or chart series
* Interleaved builds to mix builds of bullets, table rows, or chart series with other object builds

39MB

This release requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later and offers the following enhancements:

* Tables with calculations, enabling you to perform spreadsheet operations right in your document
* Three-dimensional charts with realistic textures for displaying your data
* Advanced image editing for perfecting your photos
* Freeform BÈzier curves and curved shapes that greatly expand drawing capabilities
* New shapes, including customizable stars and polygons
* Image masking using a standard or custom shape to create unique photo cutouts
* Comments to use as notes or reminders when creating documents
* New Apple-designed templates, including newsletters, posters, flyers, technical reports, invoices, project proposals, and storyboards
* Mail merge using Address Book contacts or groups to quickly and easily personalize documents
* Enhanced page navigation using page thumbnails to reorganize the pages in your document
* New Search view for listing all the occurrences of a word or phrase in a document and jumping to any one

21MB

Here is a terminal command to hunt down corrupt .plist files. After it is done, select all in the terminal window and copy to TextEdit so to more easily find corrupt .plist files, if any.

plutil-1.txt

*UPDATE*

Joel Siegel, suggests the following command.(it works!!!)

As he explains, “For non-Unix-heads, that last little but after the ‘;’ sends the output to a text file in the Documents folder in your home directory called plutil-1.txt. You can of course name that file whatever you wish, and place it in any directory you wish, by altering the path and the filename. Beware: If a file named plutil-1.txt already exists in the destination folder, this command will overwrite the old file with the new one, without warning. You can *append* the output to an existing text file by using >> instead of >”.

John Dvorak declaring IE the biggest mistake Microsoft has ever made.

All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised [...] If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column–billions. More …

Single of the Week

Is there more to Wolfmother outside of the lead singer’s famous Afro and his rare ability to wear a very small vest and actually look cool? Normally, this would be enough, but in the case of this Australian power trio, it’s just the beginning of their effortless chic. Dimension offers all the blazing riffage of Sabbath and Ozzy-esque vocal phrasing your need—but without the pure evil.

Discovery Download

This track from Willie & Lobo’s tenth release puts a Middle Eastern spin on their full-bodied, tasteful Latin jazz and funk. Heavy on the violins and flamenco-guitar accents, Willie & Lobo imagine a world where gypsies can still celebrate until dawn. Zambra is the “free” Discovery Download.

Audiobook preview

Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick—”Free” preview of the preface and chapter 1 of the tome which poignantly asks “How did America begin?” This is the simple question that launches acclaimed author Nathaniel Philbrick on an extraordinary journey to understand the truth behind our most sacred national myth: the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth Colony.

According to AppleInsider, “The record industry may be on the verge of surrendering to Apple boss Steve Jobs and abandoning its demand for iTunes to charge different prices for different songs.” More …

GarageBand 3.0.2 addresses issues with video handling, podcast exporting, and importing QuickTime markers. It also addresses a number of other minor issues.

Continuing on a theme from his previous two columns, Robert X. Cringely is still predicting that Apple will replace the Mach kernel in Mac OS X 10.5 because it’s slower than the kernels in Linux and FreeBSD. more …

Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Release 4 delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 on Mac OS X v10.4.5 and later.

This release includes J2SE version 1.5.0_06. With this update J2SE 5.0 becomes the preferred Java version, superseding Java 1.4.2. Java 1.4.2 is still installed on your machine, but applications will run with J2SE 5.0 unless they specifically request Java 1.4.2.

PPC version

Intel Mac version

Rep. Rick Nelson, announced Wednesday that Bell, Pineville Independent and Middlesboro Independent school districts will each receive as many as 100 state-of-the-art Apple computers over the next year through the Kentucky Dataseam Initiative.

The computers will be used for more advanced computer design and math and science applications, and will be fueled by new software and high-speed Internet connections,” said Nelson. “When the students aren’t using the computers, they won’t actually be idle. Their processing power will be harnessed through a network linking more than 4,000 computers to the University of Louisville Brown Cancer Center, where the excess capacity will be used to run new cancer drug experiments. More …