Signing Electronic Documents with Preview (Lion only)

Scenario: You need to sign and send a contract quickly so your client could start processing your payment soon. Your client has told you it's okay for now to just scan the signed contract and email it to them, to further facilitate the processing. Now you could facilitate this even further through Preview and your built-in webcam (iSight).

Before proceeding, you'll need the following:

• A digital file of the contract, converted to PDF. 
• Your signature on a clean sheet of paper. 

The steps:

1. In Preview, click Preview > Preferences > Signatures > Create Signature. Your iSight web camera will activate.
   
2. Hold your signature up against the camera and position it along the blue line. 
3. Click Accept if you're satisfied with the capture. Preview will even drop out the background, so you get a signature with a transparent background. You could paste this on your contract without worrying about covering the other text embedded in the PDF file.
4. Open your PDF contract and click Annotate (ie, pencil icon) > Signature (ie, the italicized and underlined "S").  Choose the signature you just captured. 



The Annotate and Signature icons

5. Your cursor changes to crosshairs. Click at the point where you wish to insert your signature. Resize the signature to suit your taste, and that's it. 
6. As a final step, I usually "flatten" this PDF to make sure that the signature is embedded into the document. Just click File > Print > PDF > Save as PDF. This will flatten the file and ensures that your signature is no longer just an annotation that could be deleted.

Lion: Finally Available as USB Thumb Drive

We've been betting on whether Apple would make Lion available outside of the App Store and if so, on what media. I bet on USB thumb drive and I was right.

Here's the link for Apple Store (Philippines) and for Apple Store (US).

'via Blog this'

Sync problems between Nokia, Lion, iCloud and Google Calendar

This is just a list of sync problems I get when I try to sync between my iCloud-based Calendars on a Macbook (Lion) and with my Nokia E51 phone. So far, I have not really found a good solution, so for now, I'm just making notes of my observations.

Problems with iCloud:

• Let's say I create an event called "Yoga" under my "Personal" calendar that is under iCloud in my Macbook Calendar. I can sync (push) this event to my Nokia E51 calendar. But the "Yoga" entry is marked as a "read-only" event in my Nokia calendar.
• That means that although I can edit the "Yoga" entry to something like "Yoga revised" in my Nokia phone, the Mac will refuse to accept the edited entry and will issue a warning saying "Changing events in a read only calendar on the phone is not allowed...". 
• In the next sync, iCloud will then overwrite the "Yoga revised" event in my phone with the original "Yoga" event from my iCloud calendar. Essentially, it ignored the edits I made on the Nokia phone and then overwrites my phone event with the old event -- frustrating. 

This is a major annoyance for me because I often edit event entries in my Nokia calendar and sync these changes with my Calendar on the Macbook. If these edits keep getting ignored and overwritten by iCloud, then I'll be wasting time.

My temporary solution has been to migrate all these iCloud calendars into local calendars. That is, I followed these steps:

1. Export my iCloud calendars to a backup file (done one by one, unfortunately).
2. Create new local calendars under the "On My Mac" category of Calendar.
3. Import the calendars one by one. 
4. Turn off the iCloud calendars and use the new local calendars.

I need to sync with Nokia and iCloud due to two factors. First, for iCloud, because this allows me to share my calendars with my wife, who's using iCloud on an iPad. Second, with my Nokia phone, because I carry this around most of the time and use it as my mobile calendar. 

Problems with Google Calendar (aka gCal):

Another approach I've explored is to create a Google Calendar, import my Mac Calendar there and then share it back to my Mac via a weblink. This experiment resulted to almost the same results. That is, the event created in gCal is marked as a read-only event when it gets pushed to my Nokia calendar. The only difference I've noted so far is that on the next sync, gCal does not overwrite the event I edited (unlike in iCloud).

If you have a free, alternative solution, please post a comment. I used Plaxo before, but I'm trying to avoid that. GCaldaemon is not really easy to use and I haven't revisited Calgoo (which used to be buggy and slow).