[mcmacguy]

The alum. keyboard sucks. It looks nicer than it feels. It reminds of those cheezy "chiclet" keyboards from the 80's. Apple needs to remember that looks aren't more important than function, esp. in an input device!

[dougoftheabaci]

Dylstra, is there a reason you don't just export a PDF? Normally when I'm passing off documents to people I only pass them PDFs unless I specifically want it to be editable, in which case I usually just use an rich-text document since when I'm looking for them to edit I'm expecting to get it back.

Besides, DOC isn't as well supported as it once was and the new Office format (OOXML) isn't even properly supported by Microsoft. So until ODF gets iWork support and finds its way into Office I'll just send PDFs. The vast majority of computers (all Macs and any computer that has some version of Adobe Reader, which is almost all of them) can read PDFs in some form and if you're just passing it to someone to read there's nothing better I find.

Always works with clients anyway.

[Brettcamp]

and (re the above), with Preview's new editing capabilities recently documented here in Macworld, you can even mark up and comment on those pdf files when you're sending them back and forth with collaborators.
Uh, what does this have to do with alu keyboards, again?

[Dylstra]

You are right, dougoftheabaci, PDFs are a great way to preserve the formatting of a document no matter how the reader chooses to view it. I forgot to mention that I did export it as a PDF once I had finished the formatting in Pages. I needed to export it as a .doc back to my PC solely because I needed to format it with Endnote (a bibliography program), which at that point did not play nicely with Neo Office (something to do with old and new style RTF). Problem was, once Word and Endnote had finished with it, Neo Office could not handle the formatting, so it was into Pages it went. That was Endnote 7, but Endnote X1 has added ODF compatibility, so I'll be sticking with Neo Office. And typing it on an aluminium keyboard. ;)

As for PDFs, Preview has just added the ability to add mark-up - a functionality that the free-ware program Skim has had for some time.

[FredTheOldGuy]

Well, Spinoza, I am sorely impressed. What a splendid site! It couldn't be more aptly designed given the content. Plus, the guy whose prose appears there writes incredibly well. I love stuff like that. Then again, I'm partial to folks who can rub nouns and verbs and other random syntactical pieces together and come out with a well-constructed sentences. What knd of work do you do that you get to work in such an environment?

So .mac is an html-authoring and design package? Does it require that its files be published on Mac-hosted site or can they be published to any server? That is bound to be a dense question, but I'm having hard time fwrapping my mind around exactly what .mac is. I think I saw a 30-day free trial of it and iWord on the Apple site, though, so once I return from the weekend I'll download it and give it a spin. It's probably like so many other tools in that what it can do depends entirely upon who is using it. Some guys use a hatchet to chop wood, and that's all they can imagine doing with it; others will use the hatchet to create an intricate ice sculpture.

[FredTheOldGuy]

I hate to say this, but it sounds like you used two different applications, one a word processor and the other one something made specifically for footnotes and/or end notes. If you had created your thesis in MS Word or WordPerfect, wouldn't those programs have managed your footnotes and end notes for you?

[gballey]

{quote:title=FredTheOldGuy wrote:}
...So .mac is an html-authoring and design package?... {quote}

No. iWeb, which is included at no extra charge on new Macs as part of the iLife package, is the web-authoring application.

.mac is an Apple server-hosted collection of services, including e-mail, web-hosting, remote virtual disk (iDisk), and other stuff. You can subscribe to .mac for a fee.

iWeb and most of the iLife apps are integrated with .mac. Many other apps are set up to synchronize between multiple Macs by way of .mac. .mac's iDisk appears as a normal disk on your desktop, and can be used for storing and backing up files offsite, or as a way to exchange data with other people.

Read all about .mac here:
http://www.apple.com/dotmac/.

[folklore]

FredTheOldGuy said:

I hate to say this, but it sounds like you used two different applications, one a word processor and the other one something made specifically for footnotes and/or end notes. If you had created your thesis in MS Word or WordPerfect, wouldn't those programs have managed your footnotes and end notes for you?

Sort of but not really. Depends on what you mean by footnotes and endnotes.

Word processors alone can handle simple footnotes and endnotes - that is, notes in the footer of the page or end of the document. However, academic users typically need to format citations in a very specific way. Most word processors standing alone cannot handle APA style citations (for example) in an automated way, which are typically parenthetical (author, year) with a reference page at the end. One maddening thing about academia is that many journals have their own peculiar details to the exact format of the citations and the reference page. This makes manual writing of reference pages tedious and error-prone.

There are a handful of citation management software packages on the market today. Citation managers basically make it much easier to organize and use vast amounts of scientific literature without having to fuss with details. They're usually purpose-built databases that have some method of inserting records corresponding to articles, books, etc, from the database into a document. These software packages all work one way or another with various word processors, using scripts and whatnot to insert citations and automatically generate reference pages. Endnote is the most well-known and is cross platform. Sente is a Mac-only competitor. Bookends is another Mac-only citation manager. All use style sheets so that if I need to change the citation style of my manuscript, I can do so with a few simple clicks without having to retype everything.

All three of the software packages listed above also allow for managing the massive amount of metadata that we academicians tend to pile up, allowing us easy access to notes, keywords, abstracts, even a PDF of the source itself. I can never find a paper copy of an article when I need it. But I can always find the PDF in my Bookends library. And it's all searchable, so I can find everything fast.

[dfs]

The thing that made me stick my aluminum keyboard up on a closet shelf is that I'm an f-key freak, ever since OS9 I've depended on them for a lot of navigation and launching. Sure, the aluminum keyboard has 19 f-keys, but Apple has preempted so darned many of them (do you really need to devote two f-keys to screen dimming and brightening, especially when the controls on the monitor itself are right at hand?) that there aren't very many left over for user-defined purposes. Sorry, Steve, but I have a better idea of what I use my Mac for than you do.

[gballey]

dfs said:

The thing that made me stick my aluminum keyboard up on a closet shelf is that I'm an f-key freak, ever since OS9 I've depended on them for a lot of navigation and launching. Sure, the aluminum keyboard has 19 f-keys, but Apple has preempted so darned many of them (do you really need to devote two f-keys to screen dimming and brightening, especially when the controls on the monitor itself are right at hand?) that there aren't very many left over for user-defined purposes. Sorry, Steve, but I have a better idea of what I use my Mac for than you do.

Did you check the Keyboard preferences? There's a checkbox there, with this description:
?Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys.
When this option is selected, press the Fn key to use the special features printed on each key.?

When that checkbox option isn't selected, you can press the Fn modifier key to use all the F keys as standard function keys.

And on iMacs and MacBooks, you have to go to the Display preferences to change the brightness if you don't use the Fn-F1 or Fn-F2 keys.

[spinoza2]

Thanks Fred. I mentioned my Website only because a lot of Mac users tend to forget .mac's value as a Web hosting service. As gballey points out, .mac can do a lot more than just Web hosting, it's really an integrated support platform for all of the iLife apps. In addition to hundreds of Web pages with text and images, my Website also includes a number of slideshows with audio, Web galleries, recordings of my music, audiobooks, QuickTime videos, etc., etc., all created with iLife. I admit that I'm using my Website as a platform to showcase what all one can do to with a Mac and iLife as a suite of tools to express oneself creatively. You can't even come close to building such a complex multimedia Website in so short a time in a Windows computing environment; it would take five times as long and you would have to be a Web design expert to accomplish the same thing. I own a number of high-end Web design tools such as Adobe CS3, and they aren't near as flexible and easy to use as iWeb and the rest of the iLife apps.

As gballey says, you can use other Web hosting services with iWeb, but it's not as 'one-click' simple as with .mac, and the others are of course less well-integrated into the iLife applications. I have a Network Solutions Web hosting package as well, and it's actually more expensive to get a similar level of service support. In the end, I consider .mac an excellent deal.

And... all this with my Bluetooth aluminum keyboard (to keep us on topic!).

[FredTheOldGuy]

Folklore, I’m almost embarrassed by the ignorance I revealed, but truthfully the last time I created a footnote I did it on a manual typewriter. We just simply didn’t have computers and word processors in the 70’s. A couple of friends of mine who were working on advanced degrees in psychology did have to make their footnotes/end notes conform to APA style, but it was by manual input. To achieve it, we used the fanciest 3-by-5 index cards money could buy.

[FredTheOldGuy]

So if you create a Web site with .mac and incorporate items created with the programs in iLife, you will then publish the site to an Apple-owned server, and the fee for that is $100 a year?

Unfortunately I’m away from my new iMac this weekend, but do any of the programs contained in iLife or .mac support the creation of Flashlike animated text? I have visions of a website in which various words in white letters on a black background suddenly materialize out of the blackness, first as small, semitransparent words.They will then grow in size and opacity as they float to a fixed place on the screen, and this animation would occur with multiple words at the same time but with slightly different timing. Each word would find its fixed size and place on the screen, one after the other. That would be an introductory page, and within a second or two of the completion of the animation the main page of the Web site would appear.

Clearly you are the creative sort for whom the Mac was built from ground up. I’ve rued my lack of artistic talents my entire life, as I tend to be entirely a left-hemispheric sort of person. I have no choice but to live with the constraints Mother Nature gave me, so live with them I do.

How about posting a link toyour Web site? I’d like to see it and see some of what you have done with iMac and iLife.

Oh, and need I say it? Okay, then: aluminum keyboard.

[spinoza2]

Yes, $99 is what .mac normally retails for, unless you get it through amazon or other outlets for $69:
http://www.amazon.co...00BX7GAI/ref=pdbbssr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1212851240&sr=8-1
That brings the cost down to less than $6 a month, which is even a better deal considering that it's a full hosting service.

You can use Flash, Javascript and other DHTML tools with iWeb/.mac, but it does require a bit of tweaking and if you are new to Website building I wouldn't bother with these more intermediate features right now. As you can see on my main homepage, animated text is readily possible with iWeb and .mac, but this is more advanced and needs to be used with discretion to avoid distracting from your Web design.

My www.blumenbach.info Website has hundreds of pages, so you'll just need to surf around to find pages with various multimedia elements. Once you've learned to master that aluminum keyboard (wink, wink), the Mac will help you'll get those right-hemisphere synapses activated in no time.