Our friend and fellow reader John, writes:

So, I bought my iMac *maybe* 4 months ago. The day after I got it, the SuperDrive crapped out on me. I bought it refurbished, but they guaranteed it to be like new. Anyways, my question is this: I fixed it about 4 times after a disc kept getting stuck in there. It was a DVD. Brand new each time. I cannot afford to be without my Mac and cannot send it in. I have an external CD/DVD drive that was originally built for PC but it’s runs on my Mac. I would like to know what would be an affordable Mac friendly external drive that would play DVDs too. I don’t want to buy a SuperDrive for fear it will do the same thing again. Any help would be fantastic!

This one’s out of my league so I thought I’d throw it up the greater minds out on the tubes. Anyone out there got some advice for our pal John? I’m sure he as well as I and most likely many others will be eternally grateful. As always, I thank you in advance.

Brent

Sarah asks:

Hi! I just bought an Imac and am having difficulty transferring my itunes
library from my pc to my mac. I am transferring from Itunes to an external
hard drive using the add to library link in itunes and dragging to
applications. I am copying the library using the export function from the
pc. I seem to only be copying empty folders so no music is being transferred
although the process takes a long time. HELP!!
Also can I use yahoo as the server for mail on my mac. I seem to be having
trouble with the outgoing mail server.

Thank you, Sarah

[Continued]

One of the questions I get a lot is: “I just bought a Mac and how do I…???? I have found the solution for all the mac noobs out there. It is a site from the guys that bring you Lab Rats, Andy Walker and Sean Carruthers, these guys have both done time on Call for Help with Leo Laporte. They have created a site called Butterscotch.com, and have put a tutorial site up, that is predominately for Switchers. The site is here.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Sam Asks:

I’ve been getting used to iPhoto as I’m used to just browsing for pictures in Windows Explorer. Anyway, I let iPhoto copy my images to the iPhoto library. But unlike the iTunes library function which very logically puts music in Artist – Album folders. But the iPhoto library seems to hide my photos so I can’t access them through Finder. I’m just curious what the “Mac” way would be to for example, open a photo to edit in photoshop.

There’s two ways of approaching this problem, one of which is if you just want to edit photos using an external photo editor. The other way is to access the actual photo files in the Finder. The explanations for each are below.

[Continued]

The iBAM crew received an e-mail from Carolyn asking:

“Do you guys know if a Mac user with an iPhone can access their iDisk?
Of is that just from a Mac computer?”

This is  a really great question, but it also falls into the “yes and no” category of answers.  You can access your iDisk through Safari (http://idisk.mac.com/username) on the iPhone, but all you can do from there is see the list of files that are there.  You can’t download or do anything else with them. 

However, I did come across one solution which was just released and that is the A.I. Disk application for the iPhone.  From the developers site:

A.I.Disk is an elegant solution to access files on your MobileMe iDisk, save them to the iPhone or iPod Touch, read on the go and even email to friends. Besides MobileMe iDisk the application can connect to any WebDAV enabled online file storage like Box.Net or MyDisk.se.

A.I.Disk has built-in file viever that supports number of formats including MS Office and iWork documents, PDF, TXT, HTML and others. Just tap on a file to copy it to your iPhone or iPod Touch file storage device and enjoy reading it anywhere!

The app is $7.99 and can be found in the App Store in iTunes.  Although I haven’t had a chance to personally try it out, it sounds like the only solution thus far.