LAUG 2.0 News

A podcast from the November 2007 meeting of the Lawrence Apple Users Group. This month’s topic included a presentation by Brian Best.

The meeting opened up with introductions, recent Apple news, followed by an introduction to Mac OS 10.5 Leopard by Brian Best of Best Macs.

The meeting concluded with questions from group members and our monthly door prize, which included a couple Leopard t-shirts from Best Macs and “Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard” by Robin Williams courtesy of PeachPit.

Check us out on the web and subscribe to the podcast at http://www.laugks.org/news/.

 

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Robin Williams seems to have a uncanny clairvoyance that not only helps her figure out that William Shakespeare’s works were possibly written by Mary Sidney, but also helped her get a Leopard guide in
the Apple stores the same day Leopard came out. Ok, she had some help from Apple by getting an advance copy. Maybe she used the Time Machine feature to go back to the days of Romeo and Juliet. It’s a pretty powerful feature of Leopard.

Obviously Apple trusted her enough to provide her with a pre-release copy of Leopard as well as make her the featured Leopard book in the store. In the Mac publishing world, she’s about as well known and well respected as ol’ Bill Shakespeare himself–and written almost as many works. Unlike Bill, reading her books are easy and straightforward arming non-technical users with the skills and understanding to attack Leopard head on.
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Dockstar

Oftentimes, a software product comes along that is so simple, yet so powerful, you simultaneously congratulate the software writer and curse Apple for not including this feature to begin with.

Granted, Dockstar’s paltry price of $9.95 is well worth it and then some. Don’t you hate it when software developers charge too much for the product! This product is definitely right-priced.

So what does Dockstar do? It changes to the Mail icon scheme to allow for specialty “badges”to let you know which email accounts have new messages. So instead of the red seal indicating how many new messages Mail has retrieved, you can have a purple star for one account, and pink heart for another. Instantly you can see which account has a new message. I think if they added green clovers, then they’d have to name the product Lucky Charms –and that pot of gold will be suppled by the Nigerian prince who died and needs to transfer money to your account. Oh, then they’d get sued for copyright violation, so Dockstar might be a good name after all.

Short review for a simple product that does one thing and does it very well

Pros: Use the Mail app icon to instantly determine which accounts have new messages
Cons: No Blue Moons or Purple Horseshoes.

Five out of Five dogcows

This article used with permission by the Lawrence Apple Users’ Group. The original article written by David Greenbaum aka DoctorDave™ or incorrectly Dr. Dave can be found here. RSS Feed for Dave’s writings