If you received a new Mac for Christmas, or have been using a Mac for a while now, MacLife Magazine has a feature entitled Setting Up Your New Mac: The First 25 Things You Need To Do. It offers some good advice and seasoned users may wish to visit it as well to check out iPhoto Library Manager and AppTrap.

As well, is anyone using Yoono to simplify their online social life? (Thanks Shane M)

Finally there is also PunyPNG where you can compress image files.

Oh yeah, and all are free.

Did you know Quicktime X (with Snow Leopard) now lets you do screencasts and trim video?

Open Quicktime and go to File > New Screen Recording and use the pulldown menu (the little arrow) to select your settings and save destination.

You may also send your screencast to YouTube by going to Share > YouTube…

Start making those tutorials by recording what happens on your video screen! Don’t have Quicktime X? Try these other options for screen recording and capturing.

Kind of a boring post but at school, we had some problems with our printers. Actually, the printers were fine. Teachers and students were simply printing large photo files which blocked up the printer queue. We use wireless Pharos printing, and the photo files that were usually inserted into a text document were rather large.

Photos should be resized and then inserted into a document. This may be easily done within iPhoto itself. Using Jing, our tech director created a video tutorial demonstrating how to do this. You may view this quick PD session here.

In related news, check out Go2Convert.

Go2Convert is a set of free web based tools that allow you to convert and resize a picture without having to install any software on your computer. It supports over 100 major image formats. Once you convert or resize an image, you can choose to copy the image’s URL or download it directly to your computer. (via SmashingApps)

Scroll half way down the page here to view other resources for Photo Imaging.

What are some of your favourite widgets? I haven’t rummaged through newer widgets in a while now and probably should. My…uh…widgets, are pictured below.

I labeled a few that may not be so clear. Some are self-explanatory and come equipped with a Mac. Yes, I use two clocks. One for Japan and the other for Canada. Some of the others I use are:

• Adobe Creative Studio Help – provides a collection of hints and tips for Adobe’s Creative Suite.
• BPM Counter – count the beats per minute for songs to enter them into iTunes
• Guitar Chords – Just pick a note and type of chord. Then watch as the widget displays how to fret that chord on the guitar. Scroll up the neck and see alternate ways of playing that same chord.
• Hula Girl – Dancing Hula Girl, Boy, Jesus or Homer to sit atop your Dashboard and provide literally decades of hilarity…seriously. Jiggles to your iTunes as well.
• Leopard Tricks – The Leopard Tricks widget displays an RSS feed of the popular leopardtricks.com website. Leopard Tricks prives tips, tricks and news on Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard.
• Oblique -
• Pianochords 2.1 – shows and plays all the musical chords you can think of. Just press a key on the keyboard to set the root of the chord and click the display to select the derived chord. It’s as simple as that!
• Plasmatube – The PlasmaTube dashboard widget leaves your Dad’s old Motion Light in the 60′s where it belongs!
• Sphere – Helps you design your website, redecorate your home, or perhaps even choose your outfit in the morning. It can even simulates various forms of color blindness! Sphere uses basic color theory in order to automatically provide you with visually appealing colors.
• Tabit – Tabit Widget searches Ultimate-Guitar.com for guitar tabs and chords based on song title.
• Youpi – helps calculate your body mass index. I couldn’t seem to find this widget when I did a search. But, try this one instead. It’s more attractive. Or this one too.
• Not pictured, but I also use Catalyst TuneUp for GarageBand. They offer over 150 helpful and sometimes quirky ideas to solve that creative block. If the first idea doesn’t help, spin the widget again.

It is also worth checking subject specific widgets. I have used some before and installed them onto our class computer where students could simply go and check the item for themselves. Browse through available widgets here. Any other recommendations from readers?

25 Free Mac Apps That Will Boost Your Productivity from Smashing Magazine.

“There are many applications that can help you work faster and efficiently. Though, not many applications come cheap. For this post we tried to digg deep to find the best selection of free and/or open source Mac applications that will help you be a more efficient designer. We’re covering from application launchers, GTD (Getting Things Done) to design utilities that can help you focus on what’s important: create.”

30 Must-Have Tweaks For Your Mac from Smashing Magazine. Have you switched to a Mac?

We will take a look at some must-have software, configurations and hacks that can make your life easier as you switch and that can get you up to full productivity (and maybe beyond) in no time at all.

I am making a presentation tomorrow on Creativity, Authentic Assessments and Web 2.0 tools for Japan ASCD (more on that in a future post). Before I get into those web tools, I often encounter teachers and students who are still unfamiliar with some Mac tricks and shortcuts.

MacLife‘s April issue published this article. Not everything listed here may be of relevance to you but if you are “so-so” at using your Mac, you should check out numbers 3 (keyboard shortcuts), 7 (check and repair permissions), 10 (file info) and 14 (how to install more ram on your mac). Numer 3 is almost a must.

The new iLife ’09 bundle looks great. (79USD)

iPhoto will have ‘faces’ and ‘places.’ Basically it groups photos by facial recognition and it will allow you to share them onto Facebook with a simple click. It also has a new thematic slideshow option.

iMovie will FINALLY have maps! Also, video stabilization and new transitions and effects.

GarageBand not only allows you to make music but will teach you basic piano and guitar (great idea!).

For more details with video, go here.