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For a while I was getting a maddening “The iPhone cannot be synced. An unknown error occurred (13213)” error every time I would try and sync my iPhone. No amount of iphone resetting or iTunes restarting would solve my problem. Finally this apple disccusion solved my problem - I had to turn off iTunes Genius and then it worked fine.
But that sucks, I liked Genius, and iTunes stupidly got rid of the mini store so now I can’t see any reviews or album information of the tracks I’m listening to. (Genius isn’t much better actually, it shows you artists’ top albums by default instead of information on the one you’re listening to. Bring back the mini store!)
Anyway, the solution was to upgrade quicktime, which I had been avoiding because it requires a reboot. Actually my 10.5.5 update crashed and almost hosed my machine so I had to use the 10.5.5 Combo Update (which I highly recommend, as you still have Finder and activity monitor control as it works) to upgrade and then upgrade quicktime.
Anyway, after I installed the quicktime update and reinstalled Genius, my iPhone sync worked fine.

I’ve used parallels for years and never noticed the “Use Multiple Displays” option of Coherence mode. It’s accessible via the Edit > Virtual Machine settings when you shut down your VM, but it’s also hidden away in View > Customize… which you can access during runtime.

Now I can finally drag that word requirements doc or release note onto my second monitor while I code in the first. Sweet! It’s something I’ve missed without realizing I was missing it.

There are some bugs though. My second monitor is taller than the first because I have it rotated 90 degrees; that means the task bar mounts to the bottom of the second monitor and doesn’t display on the first, so I can’t see the start menu. I can click on the parallels icon in the dock to see the start menu, but I still can’t see quick launch. I can turn on “Exclude Dock” for usable work area, but then the task bar floats across the middle of my second monitor and applications cannot be resized past it. My solution in the mean time is to relocate my task bar and start menu to the top of the screen, where it more or less runs along the top of both of my monitors. This is a strange new workflow but I think I like it!

I have my iTunes music library, samples, video files, and more on an external drive, and the 5 second delay of my drive spinning up is annoying at best and prevents me from working at worst. I finally just found the menu that disables the external drive from spinning down. I don’t know how this affects the drive life but it’s worth it for me.

System Preferences > Energy Saver > uncheck Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible

As neat as the accelerometers on the iPhone are for switching between portrait and landscape modes, it gets to be annoying as hell trying to read when you’re lying down. You naturally hold the phone sideways when you’re lying down, and then the screen rotates, turning the text 90° away from you in landscape mode. You rotate it back and it rotates the screen 90° away again. The makers of the eReader application have already noticed this was a big issue and corrected it with a lock orientation setting. Safari, however, still does not have this.

I just figured out a workaround: lie down and turn the phone horizontally so that it goes into landscape mode. Then, continue rotating the phone upside down. Unlike the photo application which will display photos upside down, Safari will only rotate 270° and will remain in landscape mode, so you can comfortably read google reader in bed.

I have too many calendars. I’ve managed to consolidate most of them though:

First, I synced my work Outlook calendar (on my PC) to my gcal with the fantastic app Google Calendar Sync. I gave it my info and told it to sync both ways every hour.

Then, I subscribed to my google calendar in iCal: First, in google calendar, click on Settings, Calendar Settings, Calendars, [your calendar], Calendar Address: and click on ICAL. Copy this URL, and then in iCal, paste it into Calendar: Subscribe… and have it update every hour.

And you’re done! My iPhone will only sync when I connect it to the computer, which is fine with me, but you can either subscribe to mobileme for push calendar notifications, set up text messaging alerts with google calendar, or use the web-based iphone version of google calendar in Safari.

-edit-
Edit: The events show up as separate calendars on your iPhone.

It looks like this currently does not work with mobileMe. You can convert the items to your personal calendar in iCal by exporting them and then importing them. See macosxhints workaround here.

There seem to be a variety of ways to import your contacts from your windows mobile phone to your iphone. This is how I did it. You will need: Activesync and Outlook on Windows, and Address Book and iTunes 7.7 on OS X.

1) Sync your windows mobile phone with outlook with activesync.

2) Launch Outlook (I have v. 2006) and click on contacts. Your contacts should be listed.

3) To avoid syncing all 1000+ contacts I had, I scrolled right, and clicked on the ‘Mobile Phone’ column to sort by contacts with a mobile phone number. I then selected only contacts with a mobile phone number and right clicked and chose ‘Send as Business Card’. This step might take a while because it’s creating potentially hundreds of attachments as vCards to a new email.

4) I tried emailing this to my email account on my mac. My server basically said ‘Are you crazy?’ and blocked the entire message - one for having hundreds of attachments and two because .vcf is normally a hostile file format for email attachments (lots of exploit potential in ‘em).

5) However, I still had a copy of my message in my Outlook outbox, and was able to right click on the attachments and choose ‘Save all’. Then I transferred the folder I saved them in to my mac.

6) Simply double clicking on one attachment opened address book and asked me ‘do you want to import 1 contact?’ I clicked yes. Then I selected the rest and dragged them to address book, and it asked me if I wanted to import the rest and I clicked yes.

7) Plug your iphone in, click sync in iTunes and you’re done!

Other options I can think of:

• Take your sim card and put it in the iphone with the sim card ejection tool and go to Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars > Import SIM Contacts. I’m not sure if it will let you get this far if the card is from another network.

• This link says you can click on the ‘MessageSave’ outlook toolbar button and select ‘Save all messages in folder Contacts’ and choose vCard in the format field, but this didn’t work for me (I don’t have that icon).

This weekend I freed up 30 GB of mp3 duplicates using a handy program called iDupe. I’d tried several programs before, including an early version of Corral all Duplicates without much luck, but iDupe was able to process songs via ID3 tags, file size, date modified, and some fuzzy logic I don’t totally understand. I don’t know how it works, but it did.

iDupe is $8 and has a simple 3 step process - selecting, analyzing and deleting. It will optionally remove items from your library and delete them, letting you review them first. Warning - it is only for OS X and windows users who accidentally buy it will not be refunded. My only complaint would be that it can only handle a maximum of 2000 files at a time, meaning even when I subselected iTunes’ ’show duplicates’ view, I still had to manually process chunks of my library at a time. It would be nice if it selected 2000 songs for you at a time, or even automated the processing in 2000 song chunks. But I trust the decisions it made and it worked great. Oh, and it removed all my dead tracks too.

For competition’s sake, Doug’s Scripts has evolved Corral All Duplicates into Dupin, but I haven’t tried it.

I have iTunes organize my library automatically, and also copy all imported items to its own music folder on my external drive.

I drag music into iTunes all the time, and then delete the original source, to keep my music organized.

If any of the folders you drag into iTunes are .m3u playlist files, which are common, iTunes will also copy any file they point to into its library. Often, you may have an m3u file in a folder with the same music; selecting all and dragging or dragging the enclosing folder will copy the same music twice. If you have an m3u file in your folder of music, either drag it in, or only drag in the music.

I find this to be a pain when dragging multiple folders worth of music, so I usually search for m3u files first and delete them before dragging them in.

iTunes, you’re on version 7! You should be smarter than this.

I’m surprised that this is still an issue. This is just a reminder that you will drastically slow down your machine if you have a lot of icons on your desktop. I’m running a 2.4 GHZ machine with 4 GB of RAM installed, and applications like Safari 3.1 and Firefox beta 5 would still beachball on almost no CPU load. (I use the wonderful tool MenuMeters to constantly monitor my CPU usage.) This is the latest operating system and some of the newest hardware, and yet it still sometimes feels slower than my old G5.

I had to remind myself that Apple still hasn’t fixed this bug yet, in fact they might have only made it worse with quick look (though I love quick look otherwise). Anyway, drag all of your icons except your hard drive to your documents folder, or at least a new folder on the desktop, and everything will become zippy again.

You’d think with plenty of CPU cycles to spare and memory to use that WindowServer would behave better. I think in the era of multi-core, multithreaded computing, applications that halt the entire system (beachballing) is the number one problem. OS X is rock solid in terms of crashing, but I think it should have better halting management, I guess you would call it.

Software Update showed me the iMac EFI Firmware Update version 1.3 ready to install, so I would check it and download and install the update. The instructions said that System Profiler would say I had a Boot ROM Version of IM71.007A.B03, but it kept saying I still had IM71.007A.B00. I tried rebooting, running software update again, installing again, rebooting, but nothing changed.

Well, it turns out for some reason this installer just puts ‘iMac EFI Firmware Update.app’ in your Utilities folder and you have to manually run it yourself. This is different than every other update I’ve run from apple and there was no indication that this was a manual firmware update. Thanks to khorton and mirgilwin1 on version tracker for the heads up.