Blog

Today I received the "Certificate of Organization" for Midwestern Mac, LLC, a Corporation that provides Mac support, web design and consultation, graphic design and photography to people in the Saint Louis area, but also on a broader scale through its website, www.midwesternmac.com.

The idea of forming an LLC came to me a few months ago, after leaving the Seminary, for two reasons: 1) so I could perform consulting services with some sort of legal protection (operating as a sole proprietorship = bad!), and 2) because I would like to build up a brand so I can possibly work more in the fields that I love most: web design and Mac support!

In the past year, I have seen more and more mobile visitors to some of the websites I maintain, and the lion's share of those mobile visitors are using Safari on the iPhone or iPod Touch. A few of the sites receive more than 5% of their visits from such devices. For those sites, I thought it would be fitting to give them a little better mobile treatment, optimizing the layout for the iPhone.

This week the new CYC (Catholic Youth Council) Website will be is live! (As of today, January 11, 2009, the old website is still active). The site is the culmination of almost three months of work, learning boatloads of information about the open-source CMS software, Drupal. I think I've stretched my resources pretty far for this project, as it uses a boatload of the features that Drupal's best suited for, and the site has plenty of room for future expansion and development!

While browsing a local Church parish website recently, I noticed they had a link to their parish bulletin, in PDF format. I was perplexed, however, by the fact that there was more screen real estate taken up by text and a button that informed me I needed Adobe Acrobat to read the PDF than there was by the link to the bulletin itself!

How is Acrobat Reader as important as the links to the PDFs themselves? That's the message you send to the reader when he sees equal space given to Acrobat Reader instructions as the link(s) to the PDF(s) themselves.

Earlier today, Apple announced they were starting a beta service of iWork applications online, free for anyone (with a licensed copy of iWork '09) to try, called iWork.com. The premise is this: You make a document in, say, Pages, and then click a button to put it online. You let your editor/friend know the document is online, and then he or she can login to the iWork website, view the document as you created it, and put sticky notes on it. This way, the editor/friend doesn't have to have a certain application (like Word) on his or her computer to view or make notes on your document.

Apple's not the first to have a product like this—Google has had its 'Docs' suite of online writing/sharing applications for a couple years already (it's free and it also lets everyone work on the document together)—but they have the opportunity to win the Online Office Suite battle, which has barely begun.

Mac OS X's Mail program has a very handy feature called 'Previous Recipients' that does a very nice thing: It saves a list of every person and email address you've ever sent an email to. Then, it automatically fills in that person's email address when you type it or the person's name in the 'To' field in a new message. This is usually a good thing, because it saves you time (you don't have to look up the address again!).

However, there are times when you want to send an email to a specific email address for that person, and the email address that Mail automatically inserts is—gasp!—the wrong address. For example, I want to send an email to my friend John, so I type in "John" in the To field. Mail fills in the address I usually send emails to: [email protected]. But I want to send the mail to John's alternate address, [email protected]... and I want to start sending emails to that address rather than to his first email address all the time. There are two easy solutions to this problem: