Tag archive for ‘osx’ at bioneural.net

Tag archive for 'osx'

Add a geo field to iPhone and Address Book

Published by Bruce on February 9, 2009 in Mobile. 5 responses

Both the Mac OSX Address Book and Contacts/ Phone apps on the Apple iPhone support a custom "geo" field. You can use this field to store GPS coordinates that will open a Google Map when right-clicked on Mac or tapped on iPhone. The reverse geocoding in Google Maps isn't always perfect; this gives you the option to store a more accurate location alongside a human-readable address.
Continue reading 'Add a geo field to iPhone and Address Book'

Tooling up to read, write and cite

Published by Bruce on October 7, 2008 in Musings. 6 responses

It's not taken me long to rediscover that a major facet of the student experience is the reading of lecture notes, journal articles, reports, book chapters, and other material. When much of this material is available in electronic form (notably Office documents and PDF) you need software that lets you work with and manage those formats effectively and efficiently. Sometimes this necessitates ditching your preferred tools in favour of de facto standards for the sake of compatibility: function must take precedence over form. And don't forget to shop around.
Continue reading 'Tooling up to read, write and cite'

Get your GPS fix with RouteBuddy 2.2

Published by Bruce on August 14, 2008 in Mac. 2 responses

RouteBuddy is an application for Mac marketed as "iTunes for your GPS" in reflection of some interface similarities. It works with most GPS receivers to plot your live position on high-quality street maps, but can also import and export saved data to/ from some devices, applications, and online services. With full-featured and highly portable personal navigation devices increasingly affordable (e.g. TomTom, Garmin) and free tools available for direction-finding and location-sharing (e.g. Google Maps, Google Earth), you may be forgiven for wondering what gap in the market RouteBuddy aims to fill. This question set the brief for my review as I determined to assess its strengths and weakness against the tools you may use already.
Continue reading 'Get your GPS fix with RouteBuddy 2.2'

Address Book to Google Maps to RouteBuddy

Published by Bruce on July 17, 2008 in Mac. 3 responses

A while back it was necessary to use an Address Book plugin to look up contacts using Google Maps, but Apple changed to make plotting addresses using Google Maps the default behaviour. It turns out with a bit of JavaScript you can grab the coordinates via the Google Maps API and include these in a special URL that will create a waypoint in RouteBuddy. No Address Book plugins or custom AppleScripts required.
Continue reading 'Address Book to Google Maps to RouteBuddy'

Home-made DVDs won't mount or copy on Mac

Published by Bruce on July 9, 2008 in Mac. 1 response

Home-made DVDs of our travels and family events were backed up as disk images (.dmg) onto an external hard drive as they were made. When these were inadvertently deleted I attempted to re-create the backup using Disk Utility to create new disk images. I was very concerned to find that about a third of my collection would either fail to mount on the OS X desktop or, if so, caused Disk Utility to report an input/ output error resulting in failure to copy. So what gives Apple? Why can my Mac not mount, copy, or play back Mac-made DVDs—when my consumer player handles them fine?
Continue reading 'Home-made DVDs won't mount or copy on Mac'

Access Bluetooth devices in Windows on Mac

Published by Bruce on June 29, 2008 in Windows. 0 responses

Users of Parallels Desktop for Mac find a number of advantages apply to booting Windows in a virtualized environment that is integrated with OS X. The shared access to hard drives, keyboards, networking, displays etc. does not unfortunately extend to your Mac's built-in Bluetooth. When I reviewed a Bluetooth-based GPS data logger recently I wanted to compare the Mac tools to their Windows equivalents. A small investment in a Bluetooth USB adapter was all that was required to make this possible.
Continue reading 'Access Bluetooth devices in Windows on Mac'