macbook air arrives with buggy trackpad

Arrived home from my week of travels to find my shiny new Macbook Air had been delivered two days ahead of schedule. Joy! I was planning to hold off on a review until I had some significant time with it, but that plan has vanished behind a red haze of frustration and anger .

The bloody trackpad has an intermittent problem. After working for a while, the mouse will start jumping around, randomly clicking, and generally being completely unusable.

(*@&^$#!

Actually, let me be clearer.

(*@&#)^$%$^#!!!!

There are some rumors of faulty trackpads and grounding problems on the web, but clearly not enough Macbook Airs are in the field for trends to have emerged.

We'll see how the Apple Store handles this after I get done with my 130pm meeting. Stay tuned.

how to compress keynote presentations

When I give talks, I tend to use tons of pictures and screenshots combined with very little text. It works well with my style but has the downside of generating humongous Mac Keynote and pdf files. Sharing 100MB files is a pain.

Fortunately, thanks to the Unofficial Apple Weblog, I now have a simple solution.

1. Export the Keynote presentation as a pdf.
2. Open in Mac's Preview application.
3. Choose "Save As..." and select "Reduce File Size" from the Quartz filter.
4. There is no step 4!
   

There is a noticeable drop in image quality -- and shame on Apple for not allowing the user to control the amount of compression -- but it dropped my project from 70MB to 3MB, so I'm happy!