I’m totally jazzed that MOO has offered us such a fantastic prize for one lucky MacMerc.com reader in an exclusive giveaway!

Who’s MOO?

If you’ve never heard of MOO before, they are a web-based company that sprang up out of a passion for beautiful, high-quality print and design. I first remember seeing their stuff at MacWorld 2009 where I saw many fellow Mac geeks passing out interestingly cropped business cards with their own photography on the back—each card was a special and unique snowflake with a different photo. Since launching on the scene with business cards, MOO have expanded into Postcards, unique MiniCards, StickerBooks, Greeting Cards, and a whole lot more!

It’s simple to order your own MOO creations, too. Just upload your images or artwork to create truly creative cards, or you can choose a designer business card template to personalize with your own details.

So what’s up with the contest?

One lucky MacMerc reader can enter to win 1 set of 100 MOO Luxe Cards — almost a $70 value! MOO Luxe are the coolest, most awesome cards MOO has ever offered for sale. As far as I’m concerned, they are the top of the MOO line. Super beefy 32pt. (3 times thick than most cards—any thicker and these would be coasters!) Mohawk Superfine with a fine color “sandwich” effect you can see on the edge of every card. Check out the image on the left. That blue edge is on each and every card. That could be your card.

How To Enter

For a chance to win the MOO Luxe prize, all you will have to do is post a comment below and tell us which of MOO’s products you think is the best and why? You don’t have to say it’s MOO Luxe if you think the MiniCards are better.

We’ll close the contest on July 31, 2012 and a lucky winner will be chosen at random from the comments below! We reserve the right to reject or disqualify entries or entrants at our discretion (but obviously we’d really rather not have to do that). Oh, and please enter a valid email address so we are able to contact you.

That’s it!

Good luck!

Since I got my iPad 1, I’ve been looking for an effective way to screencast tutorials for it.

Jailbreaking

The easiest way was Jailbreaking it, but that meant changing my iPad in ways that was going to bite me in the ass on the next iOS update.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hardware

Another way was using the 30-pin dock connector port and attaching some video hardware to capture the screen. Many of the affordable solutions there, looked horrible and the rest were out of my financial reach.

Shoot the glass!

The last option was cheaper still—point a camera at the iPad and record. It works well and I like that the viewer of the video gets to see my hang-nailed fingers tapping and swiping across the touchscreen. But the backlit screen makes for some lighting difficulties and the shiny screen is no friend of my either. Glare-galore.

Upon Reflection…

Then yesterday an article on TUAW caught my eye. It spoke of Reflection, an app that allowed you to mirror the screen of an iPad 2 or an iPhone 4GS on a Mac running Mac OS X 10.6. I downloaded the trial and, once I remembered how to activate Airplay on the iPad, my iPad screen was being being faithfully matched swipe for swipe, pinch for pinch on my Mac.

Awesomeness!!!

So now with the addition of ScreenFlow (or even just Quicktime), I can record the screen on my Mac and, thus, whatever is on the screen of my iPad.

Reflection sells for US$14.99 for a single user license and US$49.99 for a 5-user license.

Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion showing iMessages

This morning Apple issued a press release announcing the developer preview of it’s upcoming upgrade to Mac OS X, code named… drum roll… Mountain Lion!¹ What’s the big deal with Mountain Lion? Apple says it has over 100 new features but, as we all know, not all features are created equal and some will go entirely unnoticed. So what is going to make Mountain Lion so special when it finally makes the scene in the late summer of 2012? Let me break it down for you…

Mac App Store Release Party

Mountain Lion will be released within the next 7 months or so and will be made available on the Mac App Store just as Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is today. While the fact that Lion is already available that way means that it’s not really new to Mountain Lion, the fact that only about 30% of Mac users are actually running Lion indicates it’s going to continue to be a new concept for the majority of us.

iPad and iPhone features come to the desktop

With the advent of iOS 5.0, iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users have been enjoying Reminders, Notification Center, Twitter integration and AirPlay Mirroring. Well, now Mac users get to play with those things too. They’ll also get Share Sheets, Messages, Notes, and Game Center as new features in Mountain Lion.

• Reminders and Notes will give Mac users handy apps for all their to-dos that will sync with the same apps on their iDevices.
• Notification Center will try to put all your Macs alerts (from Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, system updates and third party apps) in one easy to access location.
• Twitter integration will likely allow you to manage your Twitter account within the Mac’s System Preferences so that you can tweet out to your legions of followers directly from Safari, Quick Look, Photo Booth, Preview and other apps.
• AirPlay Mirroring will allow you to easily and wirelessly send a 720p video stream of what’s on your Mac to an HDTV using Apple TV.
• Share Sheets are a system-wide feature that will make it dead-easy to share links, photos and videos directly from Apple’s apps and any third party ones that get on the Share Sheet bandwagon.
• Game Center has been on iOS for over year now and lets you claim your gaming bragging rights with your friends across the world. It can even hook you up to play head to head. And soon, with Mountain Lion, you’ll be able to play those games—multiplayer games—with friends on Macs, iPhones, iPads or iPod touches.

What about Messages?

Messages should have been in the previous list but it actually warrants more attention that just a bullet point. Messages is going to be the “iChat killer”. Why? Because iChat is dead and Messages is taking its place. No choice offered. It’s the Circle of Life, Simba.

The new Messages app beta is available today.

This new upstart app will let you send unlimited messages, high-quality photos and videos right from your Mac to another Mac or iDevice. iChat lovers, quit crying, Messages will still supports AIM. It also plays nice with Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. Go download the beta app from the link above and take a look at the future.

Gatekeeper keeps the nasties out

I’m less excited about Gatekeeper than I’d like to be. I’d love for Apple to create a system-wide security feature that would prevent users from falling for phishing attacks or from clicking malicious links on web pages, and while Gatekeeper will basically do that, it does it in a typically Apple way.

Apple is the Gatekeeper.

Basically Gatekeeper is a feature in Mountain Lion that let’s you choose where you can install apps from. You can set it to allow you to install apps from anywhere, but the default setting is to allow the installation of apps from the Mac App Store² along with apps from developers that have a unique Developer ID from Apple³. There’s even a “maximum security” setting that will only allow apps from the Mac App Store to be downloaded and installed. Which means, if Apple can scare you enough about malware out in the wild, you’ll only buy from their App Store. You will be fearful of the extremely talented and trustworthy developers that have an Apple Developer ID but have, for whatever reason, chosen not to share their revenue with Apple by joining the App Store.

Built for iCloud

iCloud in Mountain Lion promises to make document sharing across all your devices a smooth operation. Mountain Lion uses the same Apple ID you set up for iTunes to automatically set up Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime and Find My Mac and the new iCloud Documents automatically syncs any changes you make to any document to all your devices so everything is always up to date. Apple has also given developers the tools to use this magic syncing awesomeness in their own apps, so the syncing of Apple app info is just the start.

Just the start…

Those are the main features that Apple announced today but their are obviously more. I’ll let you know if anything awesome crops up.

1. Yes, Apple really has run out of great cat names. A mountain lion, as you may be aware, is a cougar which is a puma (Mac OS X 10.1) which is a kind of panther (Mac OS X 10.3) which is like a leopard (Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6) with black on black spots.
2. which is in Apple’s control
3. Apple’s Developer Community

Click here to view the embedded video.

In Canada, due to our earlier harvest, we celebrate Thanksgiving in October. So, just as soon as we’ve stopped remarking, “Can you believe the summer is over already?” we start into marveling at the fact that it’s time to think turkey and stuffing.

In this visit to Urban Rush, I demonstrate five iPad apps that will help you get into the Thanksgiving spirit (does every holiday have a spirit?). I’ve got something to help you work your gratitude muscle, another to help you find the perfect Thanksgiving side dish, an app to help you pair the meal with the right wine, one to help you make sure you don’t burn the turkey and finally one to keep you from getting sick eating leftovers that are way past their prime.

Gratitude Journal Plus ($2.99) It is a widely held belief that those who are more thankful are also happy. It makes sense—you can hardly imagine bringing yourself down by thinking of all the things you have going for you in your life. Gratitude Journal helps you get into the daily habit of counting your blessings.

Epicurious (FREE – ad supported) This is a beautiful app that’s full of recipes. Tell it what you have to work with—the food in your pantry and the dietary concerns of your dinner guests—and Epicurious will offer you a selection of recipes to fit the occasion. It even has an entire section called “I Can Barely Cook”!

WineStein Pro (FREE) This app helps people like me, who don’t know a thing about wine, more intelligently pair the right wine with the meal. You simply tell the app what’s for dinner—EVERYTHING—the main course, the kind of sauce, the all the side dishes. WineStein will spin for a little while and return with some great recommendations that you probably wouldn’t have had the guts to try without its guidance. (my only beefs with this app is that it only runs in portrait orientation, it looks like a blown up iPhone app and does nothing to take advantage of the iPad’s screen real estate and it only shows wine prices in € Euros.

iGrill (FREE – requires iGrill Bluetooth Probe Thermometer (approx. $90)) Wouldn’t it be great if you could put the turkey and a roast ham in the oven and have your iPad let you know when they’re done? Of course it would. That and more is offered by the iGrill Bluetooth Probe Thermometer and accompanying FREE app. The device functions as a dual-probe thermometer with or without the iApp, but when you pair it with your iPad, it let’s you keep an eye on the temperature of two dishes at once after first letting you know the optimal temperature for the meal you’re attempting to prepare. It will even estimate how much time is left before a dish is ready, so you know just the right time to boil the potatoes!

Leftovers aka The 4 Day Throw Away (FREE) This app was actually made for the iPhone, but it warrants a look. What Leftovers does is tell you how long a given food item may be left at room temperature, refrigerated or frozen before microbial nasties start moving in and turning it into a gastronomical biohazard. As if the time limits weren’t enough, Leftovers actually give you a list of the usual suspects in case you do get sick from your left-out leftovers; complete with incubation periods and symptoms of infection.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The iPad App Store is a vast confusing marketplace. So many apps! No way to really test them before buying them! You need someone to seek out the great apps and advise you. I am that someone.

The following iPad apps are the ones I chose to present on Urban Rush on September 16, 2011. They represent apps that help students in high school as well as college and university, but they could also come in handy in many other stages of life.

iStudiez Pro

iStudiez Pro ($2.99) — This app is the unanimous choice of the organized academic iPad operator. It provides not only a calendar to plot your class schedule, but also your assignments and tests. The app sync with your personal account online to allow you to also access your data from your iPhone or Mac if you have one (for that matter, you parents could keep track of your studies on their iDevice)

You’ll know which class you should be racing to now, which one is next and which papers and exams are on the horizon.

Evernote + Evernote Peek

Evernote (Free) + Evernote Peek (Free) — Evernote just by itself is a great app to use to keep all kinds of information (web sites, photos of things you want to remember, audio notes, lists, etc.), but when coupled with Evernote Peek it becomes a powerful study tool.

Using a special online Evernote notebook that you set up in your account, you can create quizzes for yourself. You access these quizzes through Evernote Peek and it uses the iPad 2′s Smart Cover to ask yourself the question by lifting up one panel, peek at the answer under the next panel and keep score by lifting the entire cover.

Progressive Alarm Clock

Progressive Alarm Clock + Dream Journal ($1.99) — The hardest part of school sometimes is just getting yourself out of bed. Progressive alarm does this by using soothing bells that gradually increase in volume. This method gently wakes you from sleep rather that shocking your out of bed like the buzzer setting on most alarm clocks.

The app also includes a dream journal so that you can jot down that awesome dream you were having before it escapes you.

This is a great app for anyone who is looking for a way to wake up on the right side of the bed.

CalcBot

Calcbot — The Intelligent Calculator ($1.99) — This is a simple but useful calculator app that fills the void left in the app roster on the iPad—why doesn’t it have a calculator?

Wolfram Alpha

WolframAlpha ($1.99) — Need more that a simple calculator? Sometimes I suspect that Wolfram Alpha was downloaded from the spacecraft that allegedly crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico. It always seems to know the answer even when I ask it something rediculous—it’s almost like it’s reading my mind.

Wolfram Alpha, like the computer aboard the starship Enterprise, holds an enourmous library of knowledge, facts and computations. Test it for yourself.

Cut the Rope HD

Cut the Rope HD ($1.99) — Yes, it’s a game. Yes, it’s cute. But it is also going to teach you simple physics. No, it won’t help you with the by-rote fact spewing necessary to pass your Physics exam and getting 3 stars on every level will not help you get into college, but it is physics all the same. And thus it finds its way on this list.

The game is simple: Om-nom, an adorable little creature is dropped on your doorstep with a note instructing you to feed him candy. How you feed him is where it gets complicated. Each level is an intricate puzzle where the confection dangles from a rope or series or ropes that you must cut in such a way that the little edible goodie makes its way to Om-nom’s waiting mouth. Addictive and fun.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In my first of hopefully many appearances on Urban Rush, I am dubbed “The App Man” and demonstrate a few cool apps for your iPad. As with any live tech demo, not everything goes according to plan. But I must admit, not everything that went wrong was entirely unplanned.

Apps demo’d:

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 $4.99

Flipboard FREE

Star Walk $2.99

Discovr Music $1.99

Magic Fiddle $2.99

You actually can play beautiful music with Magic Fiddle:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hosts: @michaeleckford and @fionaforbes

This post, originally called “How to do a Hashtag on a Mac… or anything else for that matter”, has been updated due to the help of a few readers who pointed out my mistake: not everyone who uses a Mac uses a US or Canadian keyboard and, outside North America, the keyboard mapping between PC and Mac is occasionally quite different. I have adjusted the article to take this into account but only for Mac users this time.

I make a habit of checking in to Twitter and doing a search for people who have Mac questions. By far the number one question is “How do you do a print screen on a Mac?” but a close second is “How do you do a hashtag on a Mac?”

The question perplexes me because you do a hashtag on a Mac the same way you do a hashtag on any other platform. The situation gets even more confusing when I see some people answering the question with a link to a blog post telling people that the # symbol was hiding behind Alt-3 (no self-respecting Mac person recognizes any key on a Mac keyboard by the name “Alt” so that’s a dead giveaway that you’re being conned—you get £ when you type Alt-3).

Okay, so, to actually do a hashtag… on a Mac… or anything else… hold down the Shift key and type a 3 to get the # symbol and then, without any spaces, type your tag word(s). If your tag contains more than one word, omit the spaces between the words—we want one unbroken string of characters attached to that #.

That’s it. It’s not hard at all. And, it’s not platform-specific at all.

To do a hashtag, you must first figure out how to type the # symbol. On a US or Canadian keyboard, that is dead easy… hold down the Shift key and type the number 3 on the main keyboard. Where it gets dicey is on other keyboard mappings in countries and cultures where the # symbol is not used as often and, thus, is hidden to allow more useful symbols to be easier to type. Here’s what you do if you find yourself in that situation:

• First open your System Preferences and go under Hardware and choose Keyboard
• Once there make sure “Show Keyboard & Character Viewer” is checked.

• You will now see a squarish box with a * in it near the clock in the menu bar—that’s the Keyboard & Character Viewer

• Go up to the menu at the Keyboard & Character Viewer and pull down to choose “Show Keyboard Viewer“
• The Keyboard Viewer will open and show you the mapping of the keyboard based on the keyboard map you have chosen in the Language & Text preferences in your System Preferences.
• Here’s where we experiment and observe:
• if you look at the Keyboard Viewer, it shows you the keys of your keyboard and what will be typed if you press on any of the keys.
• if you hold down a modifier key like Shift, Option or Shift + Option together, they characters on the keys will change accordingly showing what character will be typed when you press that key with the specific modifier key(s) you are holding down
• look over the keys as you try Shift, Option and Shift + Option until you find out which key and which modifier key must be combined to type the # symbol.

Once you know which key and which modifier key must be combined to type the # symbol, you can close the Keyboard Viewer and go back to the Keyboard preferences and uncheck “Show Keyboard & Character Viewer”. It’s a bit of convoluted process, but it’s not hard and once you learn how to do this you’ll be able to find any character you need to type that is mapped to your particular keyboard.

The hard part is more the question “What is a hashtag?” or “Why would want to use one?”

The use of hashtags on Twitter is a great way to quickly join your post to a greater conversational subject. You’ll often see charitable causes using slogany hashtags to raise awareness of their message. If you see a hashtag, you can click on it and you’ll be taken to a search result showing all the recent posts that use that hashtag.

Hashtags are also used one Twitter to associate posts with ongoing “games” or Twitter memes like #replaceawordinafamousquotewithduck where participants did just that, they took a famous phrase and replaced a word in it with the word duck to humorous effect. Clicking on the hashtag in one of these posts brought up all of the crazy submissions on one page.

Very handy.

I hope you found this post handy too. In fact, if you have a Mac question and would like to test out your hashtagging skills, post a question to Twitter with the hashtag #askrickmacmerc and I’ll do my best to answer it and I may even use it in a post like this one…you could also post a comment below.

If you were watching the “Back to the Mac” presentation by Steve Jobs¹last week, you heard about the upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and the announcement of a Mac Apps Store. Jobs suggested that people like the iPhone Apps Store and how it’s so easy to find new software and buy it all from one place. And he’s right.

But what people don’t like is Apple restricting their access to the applications with the functions they want and refusing developers who don’t create applications that are in keeping with what Apple wants for its hardware.

People might want an application store for Macs, but they may not like Apple being the go-between in their search.

The funny thing is, we’ve had an Macintosh applications store available to us for some time. It’s called Bodega and it has been brought to you by Fresh Code. Bodega offers a great selection of applications and, when you choose to make your purchase, you’re directed right back to the developer who created it. All of your application (all of them, not just the ones purchased through Bodega) are listed in the Applications section of Bodega from which you can see if you have any updates to apply—you can even revisit your receipts and serial numbers there.

This free application serves to fill the need for a Mac Apps Store and it’s available for free right now for Snow Leopard.

1. if you missed it, here is it really fast

Scott Gawlik from Crazy Cow Productions submitted this cinematic curiosity.

The guys picked up a couple of M-1000 explosives in Chinatown and decided to send their now-outdated-but-not-quite-obsolete MacBook Air to a higher place.

It puts me in mind of Jonathan Coulton’s “A Laptop Like You” where he sings…

In a year or two
You will seem big and heavy and slow
I will carry you
To wherever it is laptops go to die

Evidently, that place might be the messy spot behind the shed where you’ve got a firing range target taped to a heavy bag and American flag boxing gloves at the ready.

Sad… but in a cool explodie way.

The Incident might sound like Jersey Shore‘s “The Situation‘s” little brother, but it is really an addictive retro-style game for your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. In the Big Bucket Software game you play Frank Solway, our hero, as the world comes crashing down all around him. We’re not really sure why, but a multifarious array of clutter starts to fall from the sky and you must work quickly to stay on top of the ever growing pile.

You can’t run away, you can only tilt to dodge, tap to jump and avoid the falling evidence of man’s existence on earth and try to collect power-ups and bonuses along the way. Not everything you can collect will help you, though—there are a few power-downs as well.

The Incident hit the iTunes Apps Store earlier this year and I liked it then, but I really like it now that the recent update has allowed me to use my iPhone as a controller while I watch the action on the iPad. Big Bucket also added a new mode called “Endless Nightfall” that I have yet to check out.¹ They also added Game Center functionality for you competitive types.

Like most great and fun games, it’s quite simple in concept but rich in fun factor. And at $1.99 US, it’s a great value.

1. I’m too busy trying to get out of the Mountains in “The Rise & Fall of Frank Solway”