Ask TUAW: USB for iPhone, clean installs, MP3 tagging and more
This week on Ask TUAW: We're a (holi)day late and a blogger short, so I'm filling in this week while Mat's on vacation; next week Chris Ullrich takes the hot seat. We welcome all your questions, even though we can't respond to all of them directly... but the good news is that the submission process offers an opportunity for help from the community: just submit questions for next week as comments to this week's post, and perhaps one of your fellow readers will help solve your problem in short order.
This week, we're talking iPhones and USB, clean OS installs, tab shortcuts for dialog boxes, and more. Click ahead for the Qs and the As.Brian asks:
I have a Mac powerbook G4 12" 800mhz. It has Firewire and USB 1.0. How can I sync a iPhone to this computer?
Apparently you can sync it just fine, albeit more slowly than you might like. iTunes will throw a warning to tell you that the iPhone sync will go faster on a USB 2.0 port, but everything should get there eventually. I believe this behavior has been mentioned on a TUAW comment thread but I can't track it down at the moment. Check out this AppleInsider thread for more details. In your case, since the official specs for the iPhone do require a USB 2.0 port, I'd strongly suggest hauling your laptop down to the Apple or AT&T store and verifying that you can sync with a demo unit before shelling out your $500. Also, don't forget to update to 10.4.10 and iTunes 7.3 first.
Alan wonders:
When I buy my new copy of Leopard, will I have to do a clean install? Or will the disk be able to do an upgrade on my existing Leopard install? I'd hate to have to backup all of my stuff (and most likely lose something).
If you're currently running a Leopard beta, that means you're a registered developer, right? And as a registered developer, you would certainly know better than to run beta software on your production system, right? And if you were living dangerously, you'd have a solid backup solution in place, right? RIGHT?
For anyone running a prerelease Leopard build, I would at least consider doing a clean installation when the golden master version is available in October, to clean out any unmanaged beta cruft and stray bits. If you meant to say "my existing Tiger install" then you should be fine installing Leopard over Tiger; however, we always recommend backing up your machine before you do major OS replacement surgery. As a workaround to a backup and restore, you can also try Apple's Migration Assistant tool to move from you old configuration to your new.
Travis wants to know:
I have a bad habit from the years I was a Windows user. [Isn't Windows use, itself, a bad habit? -Ed.] I assume programs like Mail will automatically capitalize the begining of sentences and the word "i" as well. Is there a way to get Mail to do this automatically?
Travis, I'll confess that I'm an Entourage user and that Mail.app has languished on my machine — and, for all its drawbacks, Entourage does have pretty flexible autocomplete tools. For your purposes in Mail, the functionality would probably be best achieved by a third-party text munging tool such as Textexpander, Typeit4Me or Spellcatcher. If you try any of these let us know if they work out for you.
Matt is curious:
When you save or close a document and that dialog box comes up asking if you want to Save, Don't Save, or Cancel...Is there a way to tab over to Don't Save or Cancel so that you can hit enter on those...or does enter only work on Save?
There surely is a way to hit those non-default buttons, but it doesn't involve using Enter or Return. To switch between the buttons, hit the Tab key (you'll see which button is highlighted via a light blue halo like the one around "Don't Save" on the right) and then hit the Space bar to select the button. Don't feel bad for not realizing that Space triggers the button, I had to look it up myself. If you want to directly choose Don't Save or Cancel, you can also use the handy one-step commands: ⌘-D for Don't Save, and ⌘-C (or ⌘-.) for Cancel.
Aaron wonders:
I have a long ongoing quest I've had trying to find a good mp3 (id3 really) tagging program. I used The Godfather back on windows and it was *really* powerful with a somewhat steep learning curve. I played around with MusicBrainz on OS X but it didn't really do it for me. And forget about tagging stuff in iTunes; That's not where I keep my library so import/tag/export is just a pain. What tagging programs do people here in Macland use?
Back in the day, I was a big fan of MP3 Rage for tagging music files; it could straighten out my artist mismatches and funky tags with ease. The product has since evolved into Media Rage, which is available for $30 and can tackle most tag editing challenges. There are plenty of other tools you could check out as well.
That's it for this holiday edition of Ask TUAW! Keep those questions coming and we'll see you in seven. Well, in six.
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