Release Notes

• Improved Mac Performance
• Support for Crop Format engine selection. Can now select “Auto” crop or “Fit to Screen” formats

Download

* Download Album Manager 1.4697 for Windows
5.31 MB - Released March 15, 2010

* Download Album Manager 1.4697 for Mac
16.45 MB - Released March 15, 2010

* Note: You must have a valid registration number to use Album Manager.

Administering an Apple lab for the most part is pretty simple. Modern Apple computers tend to work without a lot of hassle and using tools such as Apple’s Remote Desktop and System Image Utility combined with a Netboot server has typically been enough to deal with network imaging and administration.

Yet recently Augustine Christian Academy purchased 15 new silver iMacs for their computer lab and decided to refashion the older iMacs into faculty desktops for the elementary teachers. Since the total number of Apple computers in the school has been regularly increasing, administration has become more complex. While System Image Utility could have still worked for imaging tasks, it was very slow, bulky, and did not allow for easy deployment of various types of machine images. I needed to find something better.

During my search I looked at many different tools including InstaDMG, JAMF Casper Suite, and DeployStudio.

InstaDMG was quite nice. It is free, extremely simple and fun to use. Unfortunately, I found it did not yet support Snow Leopard very well nor did it create a netboot image for easy deployment. JAMF Casper Suite looked quite nice but it was frankly too expensive for a small private school.

DeployStudio on the other hand was fast, agile, and free. It created a netboot image that can perform a number of tasks including imaging, installing packages, and deploying images. New machines can be added to various lists, by MAC address, and instructed to perform various functions by default on netboot.

Thus I was able to create a base image of Snow Leopard and various package sets to differentiate between faculty computers and student computers. When a faculty computer netboots it is instructed to reformat itself into the most up to date faculty image. When a student computer netboots it reformats into a student image.

Even more if a faculty member, for example, brings their laptop in and needs administration software installed, they can simply netboot and install the admin software packages without reformatting and all by using a simply gui.

As you can see DeployStudio is extremely flexible and easy to configure. Combined with Apple Remote Desktop, my life as an admin has become easy.

While there is very little helpful documentation for DeployStudio, or for that matter InstaDMG, DeployStudio is very easy to setup and figure out. If you need the ability to deploy software to many computers in your organization quickly and efficiently, I highly recommend trying out DeployStudio.

www.deploystudio.com

Release Notes

• Support for sizing images without re-paging them. Will greatly shrink download size for CASA PM installations which support images that have not been re-paged.

• Album Manager will no longer crash when clicking the “Upload Album” button without a local album selected.

Download

* Download Album Manager 1.4695 for Windows
5.31 MB - Released September 30, 2009

* Download Album Manager 1.4695 for Mac
16.45 MB - Released September 30, 2009

* Note: You must have a valid registration number to use Album Manager.

Lately I have had many customers ask me about the best way to share files (with me) that are too large to send via email. While there are many ways to do this (ftp, sftp, box.net, etc…), I have begun to prefer the free service DropBox. DropBox is more than just a file sharing tool. It can keep files and folders synchronized between multiple computers, their own secure internet website, and multiple DropBox users. It is also fairly multi-platform in that it is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Thus using DropBox will not only make it easy to share files between people, it can become an extremely valuable tool for one’s daily routine.

Simple Tutorial

To facilitate sharing files between myself and my customers I have created a very simple tutorial to get started with DropBox and file sharing. This tutorial is very simplified and the easy to follow DropBox help system should be consulted for more information.

Using DropBox to Synchronize Files between multiple computers

Keeping files and folders synchronized between multiple computers is extremely easy. You need only to sign up for a free DropBox account (here) and install DropBox on all the computers you wish to sync too. Then simply drag files and folders into your “DropBox folder” and your files will automatically be synchronized.

Using DropBox to File Share

Using DropBox to share files is a bit complex to set up, but once set up it will become an extremely easy way to share files in the future. For example, to create a file share, simply instruct the other person to sign up to a free DropBox account (here), install the software, and alert you. Then sign into the DropBox website and choose the “Sharing” tab.

Next click the “Share a folder” button:

Then simply instruct DropBox to create a new folder (or user an existing DropBox folder):

Finally, type the email addresses of the persons you wish to share with and click “Share Folder.”

Once the other people have elected to accept the file share, you may simply drag files and folders into the newly created Shared Folder inside of your DropBox folder and those files will be automatically sent to all the shared persons. It’s that easy.

Conclusion

DropBox is an easy to use tool which facilitates securely synchronizing files and folders between multiple computers, people, and the internet. I highly recommend trying out the free service.

To sign up for a free DropBox account please follow this link.

Periodically I want to clean my mac’s system cache, repair permissions, run the maintenance cron jobs, and toggle hidden files in Finder. In the past I would always use Titanium Software’s Onyx to accomplish this feat easily and all in one program.

Yet a few days ago I stumbled upon Dare to be Creative’s MainMenu. While I think that this software has a horribly unspecific name, MainMenu consolidates many of the features contained in Onyx into a simple, beautiful, and elegant menu bar UI. In fact all of MainMenu’s features are only 2 clicks away.

While MainMenu does lack in the depth of Onyx, it contains all of the features I would want to use on a day to day basis. Thus while I still love and will continue to use Onyx, MainMenu is a wonderfully polished and ellegant replacement for much of its functionality.

Check it out at santasw.com!