In an interesting move (well, interesting if you sell software) Adobe have announced that you can now rent CS 3 Design Premium:
Creative Suite 3 Design Premium Subscription Edition
Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium Subscription Edition is available to customers in Australia. The box price of AU$129 includes your first month of subscription service. Subscription pricing is AU$129 per month for a 12-month contract, and AU$199 a month on an ad hoc basis.

You get full CS3 versions of InDesign, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver and Acrobat 8 Professional. All future updates are included as long as you are still subscribed. Coretech is taking preorders if you’re interested.

Be warned that the 12 month subscription can not be cancelled and automatically renews unless you turn off the “auto-renew-subscription” option.
At this stage this is the only product that you can get via subscription. I’m sure there’ll be more.

Good news from the rumour mill.
It’s old news that Vodafone will be selling iPhones in Australia (and lots of other countries) and now it appears that Optus will be as well.
With the US and UK running down stock and end-of-lining the first generation iPhones, it looks like we’ll be getting the second generation 3G iPhones! Yay.
Seems that none of these deals are “exclusive” so expect every telco and it’s dog to be selling these in the next few months. There is a vicious rumour that even Apple Resellers like Coretech will be able to sell them. We’ll have to hold our breath until June 9th for the low-down.

Some clients like to remove their MacBook or MacBook Pro battery when they are using their power adapter for a long time. The theory is that this will conserve their battery life.
Apple don’t like this idea:

If the battery is removed from a MacBook or MacBook Pro, the computer will automatically reduce the processor speed. This prevents the computer from shutting down if it demands more power than the A/C adaptor alone can provide.

Of course, if you bump the power adapter and unplug your laptop, you will lose all unsaved work. Not to mention that if dirt and dust collects on the battery connectors you may have problems later.

There’s an Apple article here explaining how to calibrate your battery – this should be done every couple of months.

Sounds kinda annoying to me, so I’m going to buy a second battery and one of Newertech’s battery charger and reconditioner units – gotta keep the MacBook Pro on 24/7….

I’ll let you know how I go.

If an application is playing up, it may be due to a corrupted preference file.
You can use the built-in command ‘plutil’ to verify any preference file – for example:

$ plutil -lint ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iChat.plist
/Users/waffleblog/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iChat.plist: OK

Please note that this utility will only check the syntax of the file, not the deeper meaning as understood by the owning application.

To check all preferences in your Library folder:

$ find ~/Library/Preferences -name “*.plist” -print0 | xargs -n1 -0 plutil -lint

(This uses -print0 and -0 to cope with spaces in filenames.)

I recently moved my 10+ years of Eudora email to Apple Mail.
The import worked well but I noticed that Apple Mail was really slow.
Thanks to Tim Gaden of Hawk Wings, it is now running much faster.
Essentially the following simple steps optimise the SQLite database (the “envelope index”) that Apple Mail uses to store indexes and subject lines of emails.

Here are the steps:
1. Quit Mail. Please BACKUP if you haven’t already.
2. Open Terminal (in Applications/Utilities).
3. Check your current ‘envelope archive’ size by entering this in the terminal:
ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index
4. Then enter the following:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;

On my 2.75GB worth of email (not including attachments) this command took about 4 minutes on my MacBook Pro – don’t worry if it takes longer.

Then check your envelope size by running the first command again. My Envelope Index went from 155MB to 134MB and the performance improvement was surprisingly good.