Month: March 2005

Mac’s Secret Screen Capture Shortcut

This from Apple Pro: Tip of the Week:

Okay, you probably already know the ol’ Shift-Command-3 shortcut for taking a screen capture of your entire screen, and you may even know about Shift-Command-4, which gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture. But perhaps the coolest, most-secret hidden capture shortcut is Shift-Control-Command-3 (or 4), which, instead of creating a file on your desktop, copies the capture into your Clipboard memory, so you can paste it where you want. (I use this to paste screen captures right into Photoshop.)

Apple Could See Near Doubling of Market Share

Macs are on the rise:

Rebecca Runkle and Kathryn Huberty, the authors of the report, said Apple Computer Inc., based in Cupertino, Calif., could see its global PC market share increase in 2005 from about 3 percent to 5 percent. Market share represents the number of units sold in a period; this is distinct from the idea of installed base, which is how many total people own the product.

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Mozilla Firefox Market Share Exceeds 6 Percent

Several organisations have released browser usage share figures recently and for once WebSideStory and OneStat.com are not among them. Jatin B. sent us a link to an InformationWeek article that says Mozilla Firefox now has a market share of over six percent. The figures come from Net Applications, who put Firefox's share at 6.17 percent in February, up from 5.59 percent in January. The firm says that Microsoft Internet Explorer lost share in the same period, falling from 90.31 percent in December to 89.04 percent last month. According to Net Applications CEO Dan Shapero, "Firefox is currently the only browser that is increasing market share on a monthly basis, and it is growing at the direct expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer."

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KDE 3.3 Makes Linux More Collaborative

KDE 3.3 Makes Linux More Collaborative:
The open source KDE Project has upped the stakes for desktop Linux with the latest version of its desktop platform KDE 3.3, which was released Thursday.

New features include text-to-speech and other nice improvements.

The new version of KDE comes on the heals of recent IDC report that shows the Linux desktop has now surpassed the Apple Mac desktop to become the number 2 desktop behind dominant Microsoft Windows.

According to IDC, Linux now represents 6 percent of the desktop market in 2003. The research firm partially attributed Linux's desktop growth to "the perception that it can be obtained at zero cost, or at least at very low cost."

A Page Per Day Novel for Busy Readers With No Time to Read

To garner interest and anticipation for her latest novel, author Susan M. Brooks is revealing one page per day on her author blog.

Most authors or publishing houses wouldn't dream of putting their works online for no charge, but Small Dogs Press and author Susan M. Brooks are trying a different approach to building interest and anticipation for Brooks' second novel, "Collecting Candace." Brooks is posting one page of the novel per day on her author blog, at http://www.susanmbrooks.blogspot.com.

Susan Sabo, publisher at Small Dogs Press, says:

"We don't see this as a way of giving away the books. The book is 200 pages long, so this will go on till the end of the year. If someone is really bent on not paying for the book, I suppose they could visit the blog everyday and print it out, but I seriously doubt anyone would want to read a book that way."

By visiting the blog, readers can read each entry (named by the page number) in sequence or out, depending on their need for continuity and linear action. But the main idea, says Brooks, is not to get people to visit everyday and read the entire book, but to be enticed by the few pages they might read into buying the book.

"Unknown authors have a really tough time of selling books," says Brooks. "So free content, like teasers, are essential to building an audience." Although there are dozens of ways an author can blog a novel, Brooks likes the idea of the slow tease of one page per day. "It can really build a lot of interest and anticipation," she says, "when you're in the middle of some really exciting scene, and you're cut off by a hyphenated word!"

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