I recently needed to scan and email a 5 page document to a friend. Unfortunately, the scanned document weighed in at over 30 MB, and I couldn’t find a good way to compress it. I tried SmallImage, which doesn’t take PDF documents as an input file. After fiddling around with Preview, and Googling around to solve the issue, I finally found this Automator workflow written by Paul Scott. Works like a charm!
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/compresspdfworkflow.html
Enjoy!
I just got word from O’Reilly that Speed Charades was mentioned as one of the best iPhone Parlor games. Thanks, guys!
When I upgraded my wife’s iMac to Snow Leopard, we were sad to find out that her HP PSC 2110 couldn’t scan anymore. However, Apple recently released updated drivers that fix scanning in Mac OS X 10.6.
Restart, and presto! You’re scanning like a champ. I prefer to use Preview to do my scanning. This is simple. Open Preview, choose File > Import From Scanner.
Good luck!
Since Mac OS X Leopard, I have become hooked on using Spotlight to look up word definitions and find related words using the thesarus. However, with Snow Leopard, the default behavior of the Dictionary App is to open up a new window for each word query. Some people love this functionality but it doesn’t fit my workflow. Thankfully, a friend turned me on to this Apple default that you can use to make Apple Dictionary use a single window whenever you open it.
For the fix, simply open Terminal (in Applications/Utilities), and enter the following command:
defaults write com.apple.Dictionary ProhibitNewWindowForRequest -bool TRUE
Enjoy!
PROVO, Utah – Jun 24, 2009 – Brigham Young University information systems students reeled in eight awards this spring with their problem-solving strategies and technological expertise at the National Collegiate Conference for the Association for Information Technology Professionals in Oklahoma City.
From left to right: Reed Olsen, Dave Wilson, Robert Mount, Devin Collier, Landon Cope and Bryce Clark stand with the awards they won at the competition.
Competing against 61 other universities, some with more than 20 student entrants, the six BYU seniors held their own, leaving with more awards than any other school. The two-man teams won: first and second place in the business intelligence competition; second place in the office solutions competition; third place and honorable mention in the system analysis and design competition; third place and honorable mention in the java competition; and third place in the application development competition.
“Our core experience really preps BYU students for high-pressure, quick-turn-around competitions,” says Craig Lindstrom, assistant professor of information systems and adviser for the competition. “The depth of the subject material taught in information systems courses helped them do well.”
Students who competed were Bryce Clark, from Calgary, Alberta; Landon Cope, from Tucson, Ariz.; Devin Collier, from Provo; Robert Mount, from Provo; Reed Olsen, from Weston, Mass.; and Dave Wilson, from Highland, Utah.
While most teams only registered for two to three competitions, BYU’s teams signed up for all six time slots. This schedule made the competition even more rigorous with some students spending as many as 13 hours competing in a single day.
“The entire competition was a test of mental endurance,” says Olsen. “After eight hours of competing, I could hardly think straight. However, we just pushed through for the remaining five hours of the contests and it paid off.”
The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, public management, information systems and entrepreneurship. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,000 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.
(From http://marriottschool.byu.edu/news/release.cfm?article=462)
One of my favorite new features in Leopard is the ability to search all of the menus in a given application. This is extremely helpful when you don’t want to dig through a whole much of nested menus to find the item you’re looking for.
If you’ve read my other posts, you know that I’m big into keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys. Here’s how to open up the help-menu without using your mouse 
Command + Shift + /
Or you can think of it as
Command + ?
Note that this doesn’t work in some applications (e.g. FireFox, which is just one more reason for me to switch over to Safari…)
Devin, Dave and I working on our submission for the App Dev contest.
This year, I was selected to travel with six other ISYS students to represent BYU at the AITP National Collegiate Conference in scenic Oklahoma City. We flew out on Thursday, and competed in 6 different competitions for three days straight:
The trip was awesome, and we competed well in many of the events. Here are some photo highlights. (Thanks to Landon Cope for being the VP of trip documentation.)
Bryce, Landon and Robbi (not pictured) made us proud and brought home a lot of awards.
At the Awards Banquet with our spoils. 9 awards for 6 students in 6 contests!
I know, I know. Enough with the Speed Charades already! But someone asked me to post this presentation that I did, entitled “Speed Charades: From Start to Finish”. It’s a really brief overview of some of the challenges that I faced while writing it, and the resources that I turned to to get help.
The meat of the presentations isn’t really in the slides, but here they are for reference!
You heard it here first – Speed Charades is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Check it out at the App Store!
I’ve recently added a new section to my site to feature my iPhone App(s). Speed Charades is the only one in there right now – check it out here
Reed | 
12 24th, 2009| 
