free

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More About FREE E-books

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        Since our posting of April 6 here Jim Hamm has found another site, offering free e-books.  He tells us, "If you enjoy reading e-books, here is an article describing various methods of getting free e-books. Also, the Calibre program discussed in the article is useful in converting a document into a format your device can use."
        This just in:  the last of April Amazon released a program for Mac, "Send to Kindle for Mac" that allows users to easily send personal documents and DR-free ebooks to Kindle ereaders and apps and the Kindle cloud archive from Mac computers.  See more here.

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Want Lots More FREE Storage?

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        Jim Hamm immediately gets our attention with, "Would you like 7GB of free storage?"  There's that word FREE.  He goes on to suggest, "Take a look at Microsoft's SkyDrive, which is explained in the following article. I just set it up, and it functions just like Dropbox, only with a lot more storage:
         "Or, you could consider the new Google Drive, which offers 5GB of free storage.  See here.
         "Or, set them both up. Coupled with Apple's iCloud free storage of 5GB, you now have 17GB of free 'Cloud' storage available. What's not to like about this? Of course, it might be a bit confusing remembering what you've got stored where....(grin)...." Jim

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FREE E-Books

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        He does know how to get our attention:  "Free!"  Jim Hamm goes on to say, "Here is an article about free eBooks for your iPad or Kindle. For the iPad you might want to install the free app: eBook Search. Then you can really get started looking for eBooks."  That's 38,000 FREE eBooks.  (He closes the email with "sent from my iPad" so you know he's grinning, too.)

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MIT Offers Online Course

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        Of course, the word FREE catches our attention.  Jim Hamm knows that.  He sends this article and writes, "Here's an interesting concept being offered by MIT: a free online course. MIT acknowledges it can only accept and teach a very small amount of people that would like to attend there. This is a way to broaden MIT's exposure and expertise to the world. Will be interesting to see how this concept works out."
        Massachusetts Institute of Technology announces its first FREE course which begins March 5 and runs through June 8; see the interesting details.

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iBook Author Controversy

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        Apple is getting some bad publicity over the iBook Author program.  Jim Hamm sends this article from Ed Bott of ZDNet, who details some questionable conditions and calls it "greedy and evil license agreement."  Jim comments, "I usually support Apple in its closed-loop system, but not this time. I think authors will just bypass this program. If I'm missing something in this scenario, let me know if you would."  Stay tuned for more on this hot topic.
        This just in from Allen Laudenslager, "What I've read is that Apple is giving away the software to create iBooks BUT if you use it for commercial purposes (i.e. write a book and the sell copies) you have to pay Apple. If you give away the book then you don't have to pay.  Not a bad marketing tool when their goal is cheaper and better textbooks written by the teachers themselves."
        Entering into the discussion now is John Carter.  Here's his view.  "The new app called iBooks Author is available FREE in the App Store.
        "If Apple wants a piece of the pie for books created and published with this app regardless of where the book is published, I think that’s a good tradeoff for providing such a fabulous app.
        "Apple is making available thousands of free educational material through iTunes U. Most of that material is provided solely by the creator without any regard to providing a consistent experience to readers regardless of the source or topic, and most of it is entirely video in nature.
        "The whole purpose of iBooks Author is allow educators to create interactive textbooks intended to be viewed on an iPad, although it can be used to create an iBook for any purpose for any audience. This is a new educational outreach for Apple. In order to sustain this effort, funding must come from somewhere. If Apple were to depend on corporate, public, or private contributions in order to allow the creator to publish outside the Apple domain without some kind of remuneration then they would also have to make sure that iBooks Author would work on any platform. Keeping it in-house is a way to ensure that conformance with Apple standards are maintained so that the quality and experience that comes out of the iBook is consistent.
        John closes with this observation, "A consistent user experience of all apps across all Apple products is almost a trademark of Apple."

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Clean Your Mac

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        Ward Stanke shares this info about a FREE disk cleaning app.  The press release claims, "CleanGenius Pro is an award-winning and all-in-one Mac solution for Mac OS X 10.6 or later, featuring the options to fast scan and clean up Mac junk files, completely uninstall unwanted applications, show disk space available, warn when the disk space is running low, and eject mounted drives with a brand-new look, positioning itself as a must-have utility to speed up your Mac."
        The Free version is available on Mac App Store here; the Pro version is free here.  Both are available for only a limited time.  A Mac consultant,  Ilene Hoffman includes a link to her blog. 

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Are You Thirsty for Knowledge ....and a Degree!

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         Have you ever considered getting an education from M.I.T.? No? Why not? Too expensive? Too far away?
         At this point John Carter gets our attention. He explains, "Well, here’s an opportunity you really should look into.
        "M.I.T. is offering over 2000 courses FREE and ONLINE, and to make your time worthwhile for taking these online courses, you can apply for certificates of completion (at an affordable rate)! So now after completing all the free, online Khan Academy courses, you can “graduate’ with an M.I.T. education!
        "Read about it here."
        What do you think John is going to do?  He exclaims, "Aha! Astrophysics, here I come!"

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Editing a Plist

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"Apple provides a set of developer tools with every Mac. It’s called Xcode. It is an optional install in the OS X install DVD. Xcode provides three similar tools to edit a plist file in a way that is so common-sense (to me, anyway) that I find it hard to imagine anyone using any other tool for editing a plist, especially paying money for something that is already free. These tools are Xcode, Property List Editor, and Dashcode. I find it difficult to imagine that any other tool for editing a plist can make it any easier to use than what Apple has done."Notice in the image below how many different applications are compatible with editing a plist file when I right-click on a plist file:

"Not everyone will see all those applications. Notice that Property List Editor is the default. That makes sense to me. In that list, only Coda and TextWrangler are not part of the Developer’s Xcode tool kit. My preference would be to use Xcode, as it offers far more features than any of the others, but Property List Editor offers simplified methods for quick edits that would require no special handling. "For those who didn’t choose to optionally install the Xcode package from their install DVD, they can download the latest version from Apple. And if anyone is wondering if they need to download Xcode, the answer is no. It is something that simply adds to a Mac developer’s toolbox of goodies." Now John adds, "In Lion, the Property List Editor has been dropped as a standalone application. It is now fully integrated in XCode. If you click 'open with...' on a .plist-file and select XCode.app, XCode will bring up the Property List Editor, but it's no standalone app anymore."

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Free . . . You Just Have To . . .

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        There's that word "free" and so we pay attention when David Passell suggests we look at this article from ZDNet.  One sentence in the article says:  "All you have to do is donate 150 GB of your unused disk space on your computer." That gets you 100 GB of Cloud Storage for free.
         David comments, "Here is a link to a story that I don't think I would touch, especially after reading some of the comments. Reminds me of the people who drive 50 miles to save 10 cents a gallon on gas. If I want more storage I will roll my own."

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FREE Video Tutorials

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        "Are you hungry for more video tutorials for your Mac, iPhone, and iPad?" John Carter asks.  Read on, and note that wonderful word FREE.
        Here's what John wants us to know:  "ScreenCastsOnline posts a new video tutorial every week. Don McAllister is the host and founder of ScreenCastsOnline.
        "You can get three FREE tutorials just for the asking — and no obligation. To become a member and be able to download and keep as many tutorials as your hard disc and brain can hold will cost you $57 for a 3-month membership (marked down from $249) and renew for 12 months for just $45. The tutorials are DRM FREE and yours to keep.
        "Don has already published over 300 tutorials covering 60 topics since 2005, and I imagine you can download every one of them well within that 3-month period.
        "Don also has a blog that you can follow, and his most recent blog expresses his disappointment over the latest release of Final Cut Pro X. This particular blog is a 10-minute video that he recorded, probably with his iPhone, as he drives home from a training session on FCP X. Remarkable!"
        John closes with this:  "I viewed one of his videos on ForkLift2, and I am impressed both with ForkLift2 and Don’s professional presentation."

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Speed Up Your Mac

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        A free system maintenance and cleaning utility for Intel Mac OS X 10.6 or later is brought to our attention by John Carter.  He asks, "Does it take a long time to launch an application? Tired of waiting for 20 seconds or more for iPhoto to come up? Would 4 seconds be better? Is Mail launching almost instantly?
        "You can vastly improve the performance of your Mac by running a third party application called Maintenance.  If it doesn't automatically install in Applications > Utilities, I suggest moving it there."

John suggests, "When you run Maintenance, I recommend selecting all the options at least the first time. Otherwise, the defaults are probably good enough unless you don’t see a major improvement in the time to launch your favorite application.
        "Be aware that after running Maintenance, the first time you launch any application it will take much longer. Also, if you use Spotlight to find and launch an application it won’t be found the first time you attempt to find an application after running Maintenance, so you have to launch the application from Finder the first time. In addition, it will take longer the first time you are able to launch an application from Spotlight after running Maintenance, but subsequent launches are much quicker.
        "To confirm that running Maintenance actually improves the launch time, I opened Gimp before running Maintenance. The time was 22 seconds. Then I ran Maintenance. The first time I opened Gimp it took 28 seconds. I closed Gimp and X11 (which is required for Gimp) and reopened Gimp. It took 8 seconds. A similar performance improvement was noticed with iPhoto and NeoOffice. Mail now launches almost instantly (after the first time)."
        John concludes,  "Actually, Maintenance is provided by the same developer that provides Onyx, a similar, free application.  And the download page for Titanium shows different versions of the apps for different versions of Mac. (I've got to look deeper into Deeper.  Pun Intended)  I have used Onyx, but never got the performance improvement from it like I did by using Maintenance. Each application has its own benefits and has different features."