If you have any plans to buy Christmas gifts from Apple this year, make sure you take a look at the Apple online store for Ireland or the UK this Friday. Traditionally in the US, there is a Black Friday sale after the Thanksgiving festival, and this is an opportunity to pick up a Mac or iPod at a special discount.

Apple are not known for their sale prices, but this is the one exception in the year, when the special shopping event is adopted by many US retailers. However to be fair to all customers, Apple offer the similar discounts to all of its international online and retail stores. The following teaser has been placed on the Apple online store for Ireland:



Click here for details.

Be sure to check out the site on Friday to see what offers are available.
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Tags: Apple Store

Given that so many of our clients are switchers from the world of Windows, here are a few tips which people may find useful.


1/ Gather your usernames and passwords- especially your internet logins, such as email settings. You will need to type your usernames and passwords into your new email application, such as Mail or Entourage

2/ To transfer contacts, use the “forward as vCard” feature on your PC to email these from your PC to Mac. This is a simple and easy method to attach contact vCards to an email and then send them to your new Mac. Then drag and drop these vCards into your Apple Address Book (or into Entourage). Microsoft have a few steps on this page. However, only send about 30 at one time as trying to email too many does not work, and some cards will go missing.

3/ For calendars, export your PC calendar as a “vCal” file, which can then be opened in iCal.

4/ If you use a USB stick to transfer .doc files from your PC to your new Mac, these will open in TextEdit in Mac OS X. You can also download and buy iWork ’09 or Office 2008 to open and edit these files, but TextEdit is a free and simple way to open, view and edit Word files.

5/ Check out Mac 101 and Switch 101 on Apple’s website..

Tags: Windows switchers | Address Book | iCal | Backups

We contacted NIB this week to confirm that their new Access ID card system for internet banking would be compatible with Snow Leopard and Safari 4. Readers may remember that we covered the debacle over the NIB's internet banking switch in 2007, when they cut off all Mac users for a number of weeks during the changeover. .

Tags: Online banking

With the education season about to start up again, here are a few tips on purchasing a Mac as a student or teacher.

Firstly, anyone connected to education should purchase through Apple's Education Store (Ireland or UK). This is not open to the general public, but is instead a way for students and teachers to buy Apple products at a discounted price.

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Tags: Education | Mac | iPod

One App Store application we really like is Quickoffice Files, which allows you to download or place files on your iDisk, and email them to colleagues. You can also connect your Mac to the iPhone to drop files between the devices..

Tags: iPhone

Amazon have started to ship electronic goods to Ireland again after an absence of about 3 years. Amazon had stopped shipments to Ireland when the WEEE recycling fee was introduced, but have now returned to selling goods with new shipping rates..

Tags: Amazon | Apple

The new iPhone operating system, based on Mac OS X, was previewed this week at a special Apple event held in Cupertino. Version 3.0 promises many new features, 100 according to Apple. Some of these are very welcome and fill gaps which we had hoped would be filled soon.

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Tags: iPhone | Apple

With the advent of the iPhone, many of the people we work with are beginning to turn to MobileMe, Apple’s online email and sync service. However there is one very important lesson which many have learnt over the last few years, with .Mac and the new MobileMe: backup regularly..

Tags: Tips

Face recognition or new tagging



After one day playing with Apple’s iLife ’09 package, one thing has become clear to us- the new iPhoto face recognition feature should be called “face tagging”..

Tags: iPhoto | iLife | Apple