Cody Fink

1547 posts on MacStories since January 2010

Former MacStories contributor.

[email protected]

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Amazon Student Price Checks Textbooks, Helps you Sell Old Ones

I’m currently in the process of getting rid of old textbooks and stocking up on required reading materials for a new college semester, and Amazon’s timing couldn’t have been anymore perfect. As you’re textbook shopping in your college bookstore or elsewhere, Amazon Student let’s you scan the barcode (which is super fast) to compare prices online. Alternatively, you scan the barcodes of books you already have so you can attempt to trade-in books for Amazon gift-cards (for future purchases on whatever you’re looking to buy). Amazon Student does try to get students hooked into the Aamzon Student program (Amazon Prime) with a 6-month free membership, costing $39/year soon after.

The app integrates with other areas of Amazon as well: keep your Wish List handy (useful for all those Amazon gift-cards you’ll be getting back), view Amazon Gold Box deals, and check out purchases right from the Amazon Student app. You can download it for free in the App Store.

[TechCrunch via Gizmodo]

Add a Second Hard Drive to Your New 2011 Mac Mini with iFixit’s Dual Hard Drive Kit

Don’t want to spend an extra $400 for the server model just for the ability to add a second hard drive? No problem! iFixit is offering a sweet kit that adds a second hard drive to the base model — it includes the the mounting screws, drive ribbon, and all of the tools you need to upgrade your Mac Mini. The kit is only $69.95 on iFixit, and gives you the ability to install any aftermarket SSD or HDD you want to the machine with an easy modification (if you’re going SSD, I recommend OWC). They’ve got all of the instructions you need to make the change, and have provided all the details in a recent blog post.

[via iFixit]

Mozilla Aims to Lessen Memory Issues With Release of Firefox 7

Like Matthew Humphries over at Geek.com, I was a big Firefox user back in the day. Before I had any care in the world about what a Mac was and before Google Chrome was in the pipeline, your three options were Opera, Firefox, and I.E. Firefox was great — I used it at home, loaded a portable version on a thumb drive so I could bypass the firewall at my high-school (yay proxy settings), and found it much more stable than Internet Explorer at the time. While I’ll occasionally return to Firefox, Chrome and Safari have dominated my work life, and unfortunately I’ve move on after slow browsing sessions and not wanting to deal with the memory hog Firefox has been (even after the quick turnaround in updates). Mozilla wants to change this perception however, and have started a project called MemShrink to deal with the runaway memory issues present in Firefox. According to Humphries,

Mozilla knows this problem exists and aims to fix it. By the time we see Firefox 7 available for download it will use as much as 50% less memory than any version that has gone before, as well as having those problematic memory leaks fixed.

Posting on his personal blog, Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote has stated that Firefox 7 will be noticeably faster. You will be able to leave it running overnight without issue, and closing tabs will free up memory.

Mozilla wants to do three things: improve speed, stability, and perception. Perception is important — while you don’t want to mask problem areas, making the user feel more engaged (instead of stalling) would be a terrific boon in usability. My problem with Firefox is that it feels like I’m always waiting for a webpage to load or for something to happen — maybe it’s slight and not as significant as I’m making it sound, but compared to Chrome (where everything loads as soon as I start typing), the difference is noticeable. Firefox 7 is slated for a 2011 release, so it shouldn’t be too long before we have a solid build in our hands. I’m looking forward to a faster and leaner Firefox.

[Mozilla Blog: Nicholas Nethercote via Geek.com]

GAget Puts Beautiful Google Analytics on Your Dashboard

What comes in linen and shows off really pretty graphs for your website? We’re talking about Zoltan Hosszu’s GAget of course, a Dashboard widget you might actually be interested in downloading. Not only is the website beautiful, but the widget is super handy as well. Right on your Dashboard, you can get analytics that feels like it was designed by Apple themselves with the fit and finish of OS X Lion while presenting lots of useful information like the day’s page views, your unique visitors compared to total visitors, new visitors to the site, your bounce rate, and a handy graph which can show you how well you’re doing today compared to the last two weeks. We need more Dashboard widgets like this — GAget is terrific in design, and the developer put in a lot of love for an area of OS X that many don’t pay enough attention to. If you’re a web developer or a website owner and want to be able to glance at your website statistics, I totally recommend installing this (it supports multiple profiles too). And as always, you can donate to the developer if you find this free extension to your Dashboard super useful (there’s a PayPal button at the bottom of the page).

You can download the GAget at http://www.zoltanhosszu.com/gaget/, and you can follow the developer on Twitter at @zoltanhosszu.

QuickShot 1.6 Overview & Giveaway

You’re already familiar with QuickShot as the photo app that integrates with your Dropbox, and now it does video too. That’s right: shoot video,  have it appear in your Dropbox via upload video from your photo library (WiFi only is an option for 3G users), and navigate more quickly through the app thanks to some shortcuts utilizing the the settings button (just tap and hold to quickly access your photo library). The Photo Library itself has a hot new update for the iPad, which makes navigation even more finger friendly. For those who like to leave their orientation lock on but would prefer that their camera remain free, QuickShot is now independent of the device so you can still browse email in portrait but take pictures in landscape. QuickShot also has some new abilities under the hood for sharing your media with friends — you can upload photos, email, and copy them from the library (to paste in OmniOutliner for the iPad for example).

QuickShot is a $1.99 universal application available on the App Store, and we’re giving away ten copies to lucky readers who follow the rules after the break.

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101 ways to save Apple, revisited→

101 ways to save Apple, revisited

Some of my favorites:

22. Create a new kids’ computer, an upgradable Wintel-compatible machine. Bad advice. Really, really bad advice.

60. Abandon the Mach operating system you just acquired and run Windows NT kernel instead. Bad advice. Really, really bad advice.

88. Acknowledge that there are people with repetitive stress injuries. Good advice. Apple didn’t follow it, though.

There are lots of gems in this great finding by Shawn Blanc, who points to the weblog of Rafe Colburn, reminiscing on an 1997 article by Wired’s James Daly titled, “101 ways to save Apple”. I got a laugh out of number 88, and you can read the full list (with commentary) at RC3.org.

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Apple’s Andromeda Galaxy is Missing A Few Stars

Boing Boing’s Maggie Koerth-Baker made a great comparison today between the actual Andromeda Galaxy (which is 2.5 million years away from Earth), and the Andromeda Galaxy representation that ships as the default wallpaper in OS X Lion. Thanks to a reader of the site (David Kaplan, assistant professor of physics at the University of Milwaukee), a GIF shows a comparison between what’s actually in the sky and what Apple shows you — Apple’s representation has of course been photoshopped. With the removal of stars and galaxies, the professor points out that one of Andromeda’s big satellites (M110 for those keeping track) is completely missing.

Apple has once again altered the Universe according to their whim. They moved/removed many stars, and got rid of a whole galaxy. This is M110, which is one of M31’s [Andromeda’s] satellites. The other big satellite, M32, is still there.

Okay, it is purposely done for the sake of art and keeping things pretty, but what I like about Boing Boing’s piece is that it actually gets people to see and learn about one of our galaxies. And normally I wouldn’t plug apps in a post like this, but this would be a good time to check out the Andromeda Galaxy via Qwiki (it’s an audio link). Cool right? See the side by side by comparison at Boing Boing.

Toshl Review: Your Personal Mobile Expense Tracker

Call me old fashioned: I like to track my spending habits by writing down (with a pen and paper — more recently OmniOutliner) my purchases. The purpose in tracking your expenses by hand is so you can better verify your purchases against paper or digital statements you get in the middle or at the end of each month, and it also has the side-effect of making you better aware of the money you’re actually spending. If you’re buying a Starbucks coffee everyday, you’re running upwards of $150 a month, minus the lunch you eat out (an additional $400+ if we take $15 meals into account) and evenings spent out at the bar. Money adds up, and that’s not realized when you’re letting a computer do a lot of that work for you. Maybe you can afford it, but imagine how much money you could save to spend on all the awesome iOS apps we review? See.

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Forget fancy formatting: Why plain text is best→

Forget fancy formatting: Why plain text is best

Although modern word processing programs can do some amazing things—adding charts, tables, and images, applying sophisticated formatting—there’s one thing they can’t do: Guarantee that the words I write today will be readable ten years from now. That’s just one of the reasons I prefer to work in plain text: It’s timeless. My grandchildren will be able to read a text file I create today, long after anybody can remember what the heck a .dotx file is.

David Sparks from the wonderful MacSparky blog and Mac Power Users has made a debut post on Macworld with a great discussion on working with plain text files (I also believe Patrick Rhone talks about this and information silos in his Minimal Mac podcast, Enough).

I’ve been increasingly using TextEdit with Marked for writing everything that shows up on the website, and I know Federico recently put Byword (in combination with OmniOutliner) to the test with his great MacBook Air review. No matter what tools I use, whether it be TextMate, iA Writer, or another app, I’m always writing in Markdown and writing in text files. These text files are saved in Dropbox or some temporary workspace (which I consider to be my alternate directory to the Desktop).

Honestly, the best way to get started with plain text before you invest in another app is to simply open up TextEdit, hit ⇧⌘T, and start typing. David makes a strong case for nvALT, which you might like better since you can have the best of both worlds: accessible plain text files in the file system in a big container that makes it easy to search through everything you’ve written (as a bonus, these files can be tagged and synced to your iPad and iPhone via Simplenote).

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