Mac Favourite Notepad Widget

To date my favourite and most used widget has been Notepad as it stores all the bits of info I need to access regularly.

Unfortunately, it became corrupt and new versions are no longer available. But it did save all the text in separate text files.

The good news is that I found a couple of new notepad widgets. Both have their good and bad points.

The best one for me is SecretNotePadPlus. It allows for extensive editing and has a large window if needed. It can also lock the notepad with a password as shown in the bottom screen shot below.



The other one has a fixed window which is much smaller. Although it doesn't have the same edit capabilities, it does have the facility to enter a category if you use multiple windows and also a page title. Both of these are lacking in SecretNotePadPlus.

Below are a couple of other screen shots.

Clean Apple Mac PDF with Graphic Converter

I was faced with a task today that taught me something new that is well worth passing on to any Mac users of Acrobat.

I had a number of old scanned journals that had a series of articles on a particular subject that I wanted to combine as a single PDF file. That part was easy—just a matter of extracting the relevant pages and recombining them as a single PDF document. However, about a third of the pages had other material on them such as parts of other articles, advertising, etc. that I didn't need. But Acrobat had no way of removing the unwanted material. It wold only let me remove whole pages.

The solution was to open the PDF file in that great Mac application "Graphic Converter". It was an easy matter to drag the cursor over anything on the page to be deleted and press the "delete" key. To move to the next page it asked me to save, which I did, and so on through the file. At the finish, saved it back as a PDF and then opened it in Acrobat, set the page size (in this case to Letter Size), added footer page numbers and then used OCR to convert it to searchable text.

A very simple solution that is also useful for removing unwanted marks and blotches in the scanned document.

Using the OCR function has a side benefit—it also correctly orients the page so that the text isn't skewed.

Boinx FotoMagico a great Macintosh Application

I've just installed and started using Boinx FotoMagico on the Mac.
What a great application! We'll be using it to create video training courses with presentations out of Apple Keynote with a recorded commentary. I can highly recommend it.

Apple iPhone

Bought my first 3G iPhone recently and I have to say its a vast improvement over any other phone I've ever had.

Only problem with the phone itself is the occasional Safari drop-out.

Main problem is that I'm on the Vodafone network and can't get a 3G connection at home. The Australian government makes a lot of getting broadband to the country, but I can't even get Vodafone 3G in the national capital.

Fortunately, Internet access is available on the computer, although, even then, its hit and miss using Telstra's NextG network. Again, it often drops out or just isn't available.

However, none of this is Apple's fault and I just love what it does.