NNWInstaPost – iPhone offline reading heaven

nnwinstapost

Instapaper is a free service that allows you to save web pages and read it later at their site or on your iPhone with their app.

Previously you can use a Safari Bookmarklet to save any page you are reading in Safari. So if you are reading via NetNewsWire, you’ll need to open the article in Safari before saving it.

Now with NNWInstaPost, you can easily add any articles you want to read later to Instapaper with just a click of the button.

NNWInstaPost asks you politely for your username and password for Instapaper the first time you run it and it works out all the other technical things, leaving you free to do more RSS reading. NNWInstaPost can then be run from the applescript menu (or via keyboard shortcut) whenever you have a news article or tab selected within NetNewsWire. When NNWInstaPost is finished, it will fire off a trendy little Growl alert for you too.

Do make sure you get the latest version for the script to work. (Ben has updated the NNWInstaPost page with the new download link)

Also look forward to a built-in save command to Instapaper from Netnewswire in the coming builds for both the desktop and iPhone app.

Learning, News Shortlink

Watching videos on your Mac

One of the first thing most new switchers ask when they get their first Mac is how do they watch movie files that they downloaded online, some of the most popular ones are like avi and wmv files. By default, the only media player in your Mac is the QuickTime player, which does not support many formats out of the box. So here are three solutions that you need, to allow your Mac to view the files you need.

Three Video Tools

First thing to do is to download the VLC media player from VideoLAN. This app can play almost all formats available online, including DVDs and VCDs and best of all, it is FREE!

However, if you are looking to play the various video formats straight from your Finder with Quick Look or QuickTime, there are two products that will complete the threesome.

The first one is Perian – the swiss-army knife of QuickTime® components. This covers most formats available except Windows Media.

When you install Perian, it appears as a Preference Pane in your System Preference and allows QuickTime to decode all the various file formats and watch those files.

Here’s the list of supported media:

  • File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
  • Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture
  • Audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), and MPEG Layer I & II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO
  • AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
  • Subtitle support for SSA/ASS and SRT

Download it here

And if you need to watch anything that is in Windows Media format, you will need Flip4Mac, that was acquired by Microsoft a while back.

Both the Perian and Flip4Mac makes it possible to watch these files right from your Desktop using Quick Look (press SPACEBAR when you select the file in Finder) or preview it when you choose Get Info (Cmd+I).

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About that “one minute” sync update

Mobile Me Sync setting

It does work. From my iMac to me.com to my iPod Touch, the changes on my Address Book are reflected within one minute online and my iPod Touch.

However, you would need to set your MobileMe Sync setting in System Preference to sync “Automatically” for that to happen (see image above).

More details about the changes in the syncing behavior with this update can be found at this Knowledge Base article (via The Apple Blog).

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SingTel iPhone Support resources

Apple has in one of their knowledge base articles, a page that has links to many SingTel-related information an iPhone user might find useful.

From information about Billings, to Rate plans and even Red Rewards, the links are all there in one useful page for SingTel iPhone users to refer to when necessary.

Do bookmark this page as it might come in useful.

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Resetting the SMC on mobile

TUAW brought to attention this knowledge base article on how to reset the SMC chip on your Intel-based MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

The System Management Controller is an integrated circuit (computer chip) that is on the logic board of the computer. As the name implies, it is responsible for power management of the computer. It controls backlighting, hard disk spin down, sleep and wake, some charging aspects, trackpad control, and some input/output as it relates to the computer sleeping.

So some possible symptoms when the SMC becomes unstable are your machine not turning on, waking from sleep, not charging or like the article from TUAW, the battery not showing the correct run time even though it was freshly charged.

But do note that resetting the SMC should be your last resort after restarting the machine to clear the problems. It did solved the problem posted in TUAW, hopefully it will solved yours next time.

(via TUAW)

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useful iPhone tips & tricks

Tap tap tap posted a list of useful iPhone tips and tricks that we might not know. For example how when you hold on to a punctuation key, there will be an expanded window with variations you can key in. Or holding onto the Home button for at least six seconds force quit any opened application.

Some other tips that I know of and not included there:

Magnifying Glass

  • pressing and holding onto the text you typed, will pop a magnifying glass that allows you to scroll to any characters for easy corrections. Works the same in Safari’s URL bar
  • applications that are not compatible on the iPod Touch, will not show up in the App Store when you search for the app even though the search results will show the app’s name

Do share if you have found some deep-dark secret tips and tricks for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

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Disk space hoarder – iPhoto

If you are a heavy iPhoto user and suddenly find that your once huge hard disk is straining for space for no apparent reason, do check the Trash within iPhoto. As posted in this Mac User article by Scott McNulty, iPhoto has a knack for keeping your photos safely stored on your hard disk, even if you had trash them away.

Image from Mac User siteDeleted pictures are…well…deleted, aren’t they? Aha! Not in iPhoto: You see, iPhoto is a paranoid application. It knows (or at least the programming team behind iPhoto knows) that digital pictures are very important pieces of data. Mistakenly deleting that once-in-a-lifetime shot isn’t something iPhoto wants to take the blame for. That’s why when you hit delete in iPhoto the offending picture isn’t actually deleted. Instead, it is whisked away to the iPhoto Trash (pictured to the right). This digital waste bin will hold your cast-off pictures until you go to the effort of emptying iPhoto’s Trash.

The good thing about this is that you can always look through your Trash one more time before you finally delete those photos for good. Personally, I will keep all photos taken, unless they are really bad – no focus, no subject, totally over or under exposed. But that’s just me.

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Uploading photos from your iPhone or iPod Touch straight to me.com

Apple’s MobileMe News blog has sort of become a tip and knowledge site on using your MobileMe account as compared to being a MobileMe uptime status site when it started in August. The latest is on how easily you can upload photos from your iPhone or iPod Touch straight to a MobileMe gallery with just a few taps on buttons.

Before you can send photos from your iPhone to the web, you need to set up an album in the Gallery web application at me.com. In Gallery, select (or create) an album, click the Adjust Settings button and then check the box to allow adding of photos via email or iPhone.

With that option set, when viewing a photo from the iPhone camera roll you need only touch the Send Photos icon in the lower-left corner, then Send to MobileMe, where you can choose among the MobileMe albums you allow this for. Enter any text you want to appear with the photo in the subject line, and send it. It will then appear on your Gallery album on the web.

Plus they have a video to show you how

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URLs for iPhone-optimized Google sites

Here are some URLs for your fav Google sites and Google Apps that you can access which are optimized for your iPhone or iPod Touch, as compiled by Alex Chitu from http://googlesystem.blogspot.com

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Getting into the US iTunes Store with iTunes Gift Card

Want to populate your iPod Touch or iPhone with Apps but find that some are not available in the Singapore Store or can’t wait to download Music, Movies or TV Shows from iTunes? Fret not, there is a way!

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How to prepare a Mac for sale – tips from Dan Benjamin

Dan Benjamin gives a few simple steps on preparing your Macs when you decided to sell it off. Besides ensuring that your data are properly backed up and removed, these steps will also ensure a better experience for your buyer when they receive the Mac.

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3-fingers swipes on Safari

There’s more to just navigating with three fingers for Multi-Touch users

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