Wow me.

I won't give a rundown on ALL of the cool things I saw at the Macworld Expo last Thursday, just a few that I am still excited about.

The first thing that caught my attention was Dolly Drive, the first online storage solution that allows you to use Time Machine.

This means that you can do a full Time Machine backup to cloud based storage. This is great news for travelers, who count on being able to access their files on the road. The other great thing about Dolly Drive is the ability to do a bootable backup with the same application. So you can have your Time Machine backed up online, and a bootable backup on an external drive in your office. This negates the need for two separate applications to provide a complete backup solution. For example, in my case, I use ShirtPocket's SuperDuper to make a bootable clone on one external drive, do a Time Machine backup on another, and use JungleDisk for online back up. You can find out more details for each of the products I just listed by clicking the links.

The second bit o' bling that I already have on my machine is Boom for Mac, which was one of the winners of Best in Show, by  a company I have never before this week heard of called Global Delight. I know it sounds like a mail order bride service but no. It is not. It is actually a very simple volume enhancer for your mac. It is inexpensive, and yes, it really does work.

I deeply coveted the LiveScribe smartpen, and if I was a student I would whine for one.

And I am still trying to convince myself that i don't need the Zaggmate case for my iPad, a keyboard and case in one. The $99 price tag on that one is a bit steep for me, and I am thinking that money can be put to better use at Zappos.

Of course, some of my favorite vendors were there, like OWC, where I shop when I need memory and hard drives and the Omni group which makes my favorite task manager and outline program of all time, OmniFocus and OmniOutliner.

Macmama at the Macworld Expo

I was the one in the Stroud's Kansas City Hat wandering around with my pal and FileMaker guru Dan "Moe" Peck, and Adobe Illustrator goddess Sharon Steuer. Some thoughts about what I saw and what I bought tomorrow. I will say that there were an awful lot of booth babes at this expo. I kept thinking I was back home in KC at the monster truck show. More tomorrow!

OMG! I can't believe I just did that!

Have you ever thrown away photos that you needed in iPhoto? Today, I received a call from a client who was in a panic because after importing photos from his camera into iPhoto, he accidentally deleted them from the import window. And unfortunately, after the import, he selected the "Delete Photos on Your Camera" so they were erased from his camera's SD card. Of course, he could use one of the SD card data restore software programs like " Card Rescue".

But I figured that even though he had "trashed" the photos, most likely he had not emptied his iPhoto trash. So if this happens to you, don't fret.Open iPhoto, make sure Recent is uncollapsed (is that a word?) by clicking on the gray triangle to the left of the word:

And click on the Trash can.

Then, if you have not emptied your iPhoto Trash, your photos will be there. But you must move them out of the trash and back into the library to edit them. So click on one, then press Command-A (not the hyphen, just the Command button and the letter "a") to select all of them, and drag them back into your Library, onto the icon near the top that says Photos.

Then you will be back in business. NOW, it IS a good idea to keep your iPhoto trash emptied, since photos in the trash take up as much room as the ones in your library. To empty the trash, go to iPhoto on the menu bar, and select empty trash (or you can use the keyboard shortcut, Shift-Command-Delete):

Or, if you have iPhoto 11,  with Trash open, just hit the Empty Trash button. When you empty the trash in any of these ways, you will free up the space the discarded photos are taking up.

No longer at this address.

Is Mac mail is remembering email addresses you haven't used in weeks, months, years (you start to type an address in the To: field, and outdated versions of your contact's email address pops up)? Here's how to get rid of them.

On the menu bar, click Window>Previous Recipients.

Then you can sort them by Name, Email Address, or Last Used. If you select Last Used, you can get rid of the ones you have not used in a year by selecting one, then holding the SHIFT key, and selecting the last one in the pile you want to remove, then click Remove From List.

Send a New Year's Kiss, Judy Jetson style

Do you ever get the urge to send a quick video message?  If you have a mac that has a built in webcam (intel iMac, Macbook Pro and Macbook), you can send a video message to your pals. Of course, you can do that from your iPhone, or FLIP or any other video camera. But what if you are sitting in front of your mac, and have a sudden urge to sing a verse of "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart" to your significant other(s)? Easy as making a list of resolutions.

Open the application Photo Booth, and make sure the video mode is selected. Yes, that's you in the little window.

Think about what you want to say, sing, yell, and make sure you are centered in the preview window of Photo Booth. Then click on the red center button. You will get a 3-2-1 countdown, and then your machine will start recording. When you are finished, press the same button, which is now a square. You can see the timer on the left. Try to keep these videos short for emailing, a 5-6 second video is a bit under 1 MB.

If it takes a few tries to get the one you like, no worries. They all go into a bin below.

Choose the one you like, click on the email icon.

The movie will be automatically attached to an email as a Quicktime file and will be ready to sent.

Happy New Year!