Side-to-side or top and bottom?

What’s your layout?

How to Clean Your Canon i960 printer

When your i960 print heads are clogged and don’t respond to cleaning/deep cleaning.

LCD Displays for Designers

How to avoid the 6-bit trap.

New Apple Laptops

Tomorrow Apple hosts one of its 3X yearly product announcements, and for this one its all laptop, top to bottom.

Check back here at the official AppleSwitcher forums thread for minute-by-minute analysis on the announcements. Here’s the rumor summary:

MacBook

aluminum cases, no Firewire, still integrated graphics (but better), large trackpad, DriveCache: uses Flash storage to speed up boot times

MacBook Pro

still aluminum, MacBooks style chiclet keyboard, latchless lid like MacBook, easy RAM and drive access (THANK YOU), large trackpad

From MacRumors:

- The optical drive appears to be on the right side (when facing the laptop)
- All the ports are on the left side (when facing the laptop)
- Case does not appear to be tapered like the MacBook Air
- Power button is in the far top right corner
- Large trackpad like the MacBook Air
- Appears to be “latchless”
- No Firewire port on MacBook?

From Wired:

Both the MacBook and the MacBook Pro will be aluminum. The aluminum MacBook has been rumored since forever, and if we take the leaked shots as real, Apple is finally going all-metal in its Mac lineup.

We can also be pretty certain that the MacBook Pro will gain the chiclet-style keyboard of the Air and the stock MacBook, most likely in backlit black. Ditto the magnetic latch which holds the MacBook Pro closed that little button is so 2001. The other advantage the current MacBook has over the MBP is the easy-to-swap hard drive. Along with the RAM, the HDD is a simple five-minute slot-in replacement. Expect to see this in the Pro.

Internally we can expect some more changes. Mac Cultist Leander Kahney hopes for 4GB RAM as standard in the MBP, and two in the MacBook. He also lists integrated NVIDIA graphics in the MacBook, something that rumor site Apple Insider corroborates, claiming to have confirmed the inclusion of NVIDIAs MCP79. While this still shares the system memory, it is apparently faster and probably more important for Apple smaller than the Intel GMA950 which is currently used.

Thanks to a very helpful Apple representative, we were able to determine that the problem for my situation was with an export plug-in.

This drove me nuts until I found this thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1715124

User/Library/Application Support/Aperture/Plug-Ins/Export <- move contents of that to another location, and try creating a Vault. It worked for me. Now my Aperture library can be excluded from the dumber Time Machine backup, saving lots of time. Aperture Vault backups take only the new stuff, not my whole library.

[Apple] announced that it would no longer enforce its non-disclosure agreement for software it has released:

The NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success.

Software that hasn’t been released is still covered by the agreement.

That certainly sounds like a sensible distinction: Companies have a right to keep things that are secret a secret, but once the cat is out of the bag, it can’t be a secret any more.

There have been an increasing number developers complaining that Apple is making it too hard for developers, such as in this blog post on Ars Technica.

Despite its Soviet style of communication, Apple is certainly signaling that it understands that needs to keep its developers’some of its most fervent advocates’from becoming so angry they will switch their efforts to Google’s Android or other projects.

Earlier this week, Apple tweaked a few policies that had made some developers feel that the marketplace in the iTunes App store was unfair. Now you have to have bought the application to be able to review it. And a developer can’t simply make a minor modification in a program to jump to the top of the list of new applications.

See story.