I’ve been curious about the Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array and how it might perform on my AirPort Extreme network. if this combination turned out to be practical, I could have 2 Terabytes of hard disk backup storage available to any computer on the 802.11n network. The big question would be speed. How would Drobo’s USB 2.0 connector fare when deluged with the onslaught of RAW photos that I accumulate on a weekly basis?

The good news is that Drobo and AirPort Extreme play nice together. I can easily mount the disk array from both my Tiger and Leopard machines. It is the height of convenience. The bad news is, yes, the read/write times are slow. For my various tests, it took 90 minutes to transfer a 14 GB Aperture archive from a FireWire drive (connected to a MacBook Pro) to the Drobo.

There’s a nice little discussion about this happening on the Inside Aperture site titled, Alas, No Aperture on my Drobo. And I’ve featured the Drobo in this week’s Digital Story podcast.

My bottom line? Despite the lethargic write speed, I’m really happy to have the Drobo on my network. I have a gigantic image library stored on it that I can browse via Microsoft Expression Media. And I’m currently looking at Port Map and basic Leopard tools for remote access to the drives. i must admit, it’s been a fun project.

A few years ago, I peeked over the shoulder of a very dear friend as he was using his computer. “R” is a computing guru through and through, spending his days between WebObjects applications, Aperture, countless browsers and utilities. He is the kind of user who cannot work with less than four partitions and three huge disks attached to his machine. And work he does, brilliantly. In fact, I have rarely seen anyone squeeze so much computing power out of his machine. Imagine my surprise when I noticed how close to the defaults R’s installation was…

I’m a Windows Mobile fan (sorry ’bout that) but that doesn’t mean I’m a Windows Mobile fan-boy. I go off on mini-rants now and then and thought I would share a side-by-side comparison of what the Weather.com sites formatted for generic mobile devices (like Windows Mobile) and the version formatted for the iPhone looks like. FYI: The little rant on one of my personal site-blogs was about getting Microsoft to fix broken components like the Windows Mobile web browser. MacDevCenter readers can just look at the generic-mobile vs. iPhone formatting to appreciate what an impact the iPhone is having on web design for mobile devices.

Am I the only one who wonders how they got this headline past Steve?

Have you ever seen the default wallpaper of a Windows 95 installation? That horrendous, disgusting, depressing shade of gray-green that, for years, went mocked and scorned by many? It turns out it may just be what the doctor ordered for long term computer use. Have we missed something all along?

Since the introduction of the iPhone, Apple has been the focus of criticism from many a member of the computing community: keeping the platform closed is an outrage, a Microsoftian move, living proof of the evil that lurks underneath the company’s cheerful facade. Whether you agree with these points or not, one cannot deny Apple has pulled all the strings to indeed keep people out of the iPhone and send a firm message to those who had dared trespass - and I am not even talking about “bricked” iPhones here since knowing whether the side effect of the upgrade was intentional or coincidental is still everyone’s guess. Surprisingly, however, keeping the iPhone closed may be a good thing.

I read a number of Apple rumor sites speculating about Apple replacing the Mac mini (a moment of silence for mine that passed on last week) with a Mac nano. Some of the rumor items speculate that Apple might dump the optical drive (DVD) from the unit to save space.

Here’s the thought that prompted this posting though… When Apple introduced the iPod nano, they dumped the hard drive from the mini line and went to flash storage. I think Apple needs to keep an optical drive for at least playing CD music and DVD video without having an ugly cable attached device on a Mac nano. But, what about dumping the hard drive from the Mac and going all flash storage (say 30GB) with the option of adding a 80 to 320GB hard drive in a small enclosure either beneath or above the Mac nano with a seamless bus plug (like a notebook in a docking station) instead of a cable?

I just hope they have it ready for sale soon. I need to replace my Mac mini and am waiting for Leopard and whatever new Mac emerges before doing so.

My 2.5 year old 1st generation G4 1.42GHz Mac mini (and the first Mac I ever bought) bit the dust. I’m pretty sure it is either a system board or power supply problem (betting on the power supply being the problem). Although I thought about it at the time of purchase, I decided not to get AppleCare for a desktop Mac mini even though I told myself it is really a notebook without a battery. So, now what to do with it? Everything is backed to to an external hard drive. So, data loss is not a major issue. ifixit.com has how-to guides for everything but the power supply. So, I’m guessing it may be a difficult part to find. If it is just a power supply issue, I’m tempted to try to stick it in a bigger case of some kind and use whatever power supply will work with it (regardless of size). Any leads on that idea?

The next decision is what to replace it with. The new iMacs look great. But, I really really hate the idea of all-in-one computers (with the exception of notebooks of course). The Mac Pro is way too expensive. And, the Mac mini? Well, that first one went bye-bye in under three years and appears difficult for my less than nimble fingers to repair (compared to regular ol’ non-Apple large PCs which are easy to open up and replace components). The various Mac rumor sites have been talking about a sub-notebook sized device being introduced in October. That sounds pretty interesting. But, all I really need is a small iTunes box with a browser and email client (the Mac mini is perfect for that). I just took a look a the 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini. But, do I really want another hard to repair box? Actually yes, but… :-)

Well, time to look around the house for a putty knife I guess. Might have a little project for it this weekend.

So, now it is time to decide on whether to get another Mac mini (most likely at this point), get a low-end iMac (not likely), or wait a couple of weeks to see if Apple announces a new sub-notebook form factor MacBook (very tempting).

Perhaps having learned from the Amazon Unbox fiasco, the new Amazon MP3 Downloads Store fails to suck. Frankly, there is a lot to like here, and it might be the first viable iTunes competitor.

If you look at the Google Docs pulldown New menu, you’ll see a new option labeled Presentation. I’ve been waiting for Google’s presentation tool since hearing Google CEO Eric Schmidt announce it at the Web 2.0 Expo this past April. While it doesn’t match the features available in Apple’s Keynote or Microsoft’s PowerPoint, its strength lies in its barebones simplicity. It looks great for creating 3 to 10 simple slides for a quick presentation. It can import PowerPoint PPT files (but not the newer 2007 PPTX files). However, it does not export out to PowerPoint PPT files. Instead, it has the option for you to download a ZIP file containing an HTML presentation pack for local computer use. So, you only need a browser for local presentation and can do so even without an Internet connection.

I’m hoping for to see at least three more features added in the near future. First, Google please Gear-ify Documents, Spreadsheet, and Presentation so documents can be developed and used offline. Second, allow using images from Picasaweb instead of requiring image uploads. Third, let us embed video from YouTube into Presentations.

Is Google Presentation a threat to Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, or even OpenOffice.org Impress? Not… quite… yet. But, Google Presentations has a lot to offer right now. Hey, can someone try it out on an iPhone and iPod touch to see how it looks/works there and report back here?

I’ve been reading a bunch of statements from various analysts/pundits about the significance of the iPod touch with a combination of amusement and puzzlement. Some of the puzzlement comes from the statements directly and some indirectly. For example, here’s one of many quotes from an article over on PlaylistMag.com: “It’s the Web in your pocket,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research. “For $300, you get a mobile Web browser with touch-screen input.”. Uh, so what are the dozens of devices from Palm, Nokia (770 or 800), and bunch of Windows Mobile WiFi enabled PDAs? They vary in price. But, a bunch are in the $200 to 400 range. And, they’ve been around for years. So, what is the real difference? The real difference is the capability of the Safari browser (so I’m told since I haven’t tried it for more than a few seconds). Most of the mobile browsers that have been used for the past few years are basically toy browsers that require specially formatted web pages to avoid scrolling continuously just to read some text. The exception in the non-iPhone/iPod touch world is the Operamini browser currently in beta release.

Here’s another quote: In fact, Gottheil said that the iPod touch’s selling potential is actually increased precisely because it is decoupled from a two-year phone contract with AT&T, something required with the iPhone. This is an interesting observation because the exact opposite is going on in the non-Apple phone-PDA world. The phone-less PDA type devices like the Palm OS based Palm boxes and Windows Mobile based Pocket PCs were the norm for years. Then, the Palm Treo (original Palm OS version) and Microsoft Windows Mobile touch-screen (Pocket PC Phone Edition — AKA Professional Edition) and non-touch screen (Smartphone AKA Standard Edition) took over leaving manufacturers like Dell to completely abandon the phone-less Pocket PCs (their great Axim line with WiFi and Bluetooth but no phone radio). I’m really hoping that the iPod touch redefines and reinvigorates the phone-less PDA market the same way the original iPod redefined the PDA market. And, yes, I didn’t get an iPhone because I didn’t want to switch to AT&T Wireless and be locked into their contract.

Here’s a third quote from the article: Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner, said in an e-mail interview that having both an iPod touch plus a cell phone would be a “great set for many of us to use.” But he discounted the iPod as a business tool that IT shops would support. Unfortunately and unhappily, I agree with this statement. But, that is only because IT shops don’t seem to support mobile devices of any type including Microsoft’s Windows Mobile which is actually designed for integration with Enterprise infrastructure.

A fourth quote: “A usable portable Web browser will appeal to both personal and business users, and Web sites and applications oriented to the mobile browser will proliferate,” Gottheil and Byrne wrote in a TBR statement on the iPod touch Wednesday. Hack, hack, cough, cough. There’s a couple of weird things about this general idea. I noticed that a number of iPhone specific pages from major sites like Digg and Facebook appeared. But, this puzzled me since the big deal about iPhone’s (and touch’s) Safari browser is that you don’t need specially formatted pages. That said, there are a lot (though not enough) pretty well done pages formatted for WAP and other mobile browsers already. If the iPhone and iPod touch take off, we may see more. But, umm, I though they didn’t need it :-)

But, putting aside my hopefully not too snarky comments above, I think the general sentiment coming from the experts is right. I’ve long lamented the loss of choices of non-phone Windows Mobile products. I hate having to tie a Pocket PC purchase to phone service contracts or pay a premium for an unlocked phone. I think the iPhone’s impact, large as it is, will be dwarfed by the iPod touch which allows anyone to buy it without a phone contract. I also think that lines of people should be outside of Apple’s campus in Cupertino with placard demanding an SDK so we can see apps developed for it without resorting to hacks.

My pre-order for the iPod touch went out the day it was announced and I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival in a couple of weeks. And, in a effort not to monopolize the MacDevCenter blog with my iPod touch mutterings, I’ll mutter away on my personal blog which currently focuses on Windows Mobile (and will still focus on that since I enjoy using that platform). If anyone wants to talk touch, drop me a line at editor(AT-SIGN)mobileviews.com. Perhaps we can set up a TalkCast at TalkShoe with other new iPod touch owners.

OK, geek boys and girls, pop quiz: How do you use Safari’s built-in RSS reader as a feed aggregator? Go ahead, take a minute to figure it out. Take 5. Whatever you need. I’ve got time.

I’ve long said that I just want an “i” (iPhone without the Phone). So, today the “i” (iPod touch) arrived. Ok, it is missing a camera, mic/speaker, Bluetooth (ouch), email client (ouch ouch), and couple of other things. But, it still has enough to appeal to me. I decided to pre-order one for me and one for my daughter as a surprise gift (no one in my home reads anything I write, so, yes, this will be a surprise). Now, part of the rationale is that she can use the Safari browser instead of firing up a Mac for research and homework. Can some of you current iPhone owners let me know how well reference sites like Yahoo! Reference, MSN Encarta, Wikipedia, and Merriam-Webster Online (as well as other middle-school friendly reference sites) renders on your iPhone?

Or is it truly the case that anything that looks ok in Safari on the Mac looks ok in Safari on the iPhone/touch? Any browser gotchas would be appreciated too :-)

Thanks!

A few notable things weren’t announced alongside new iPods today. Yeah, aside from the Beatles (let it go, old media, let it go)…

I love my Apple TV. At first I thought it was pointless technology that didn’t fill a niche. Then I got my iPhone and made two realizations. First, the iPhone has a drop-dead gorgeous screen that begs for video. Second? If I’m going to download the entire third season of House, chances are I won’t want to watch the whole thing on my iPhone. Ah ha! The Apple TV finds purpose!

But even as much as I now care for the little set-top box and the function it performs, I can’t help but wonder as I lie awake some cold, lonely nights how it could have been. It could have been a DVD-ripper. A DVR for the rest of us. A TiVo killer. But Steve made it pretty clear at D that DVR functionality isn’t on the road map for the Apple TV. And far from being a DVD player or ripper, Apple sees the tiny TV appliance as the successor to DVDs.

Of course, that was before NBC’s announcement that they’re pulling out of iTunes.

You know something is up when the story goes from anonymous sources say NBC to end iTunes contract to Apple press release saying “see ya NBC” in the course of a few hours.

We are all, I think, used to Paul Thurrott rolling out some ludicrous mac-bashing post any time he finds he can’t retain readership. This week he picks on the iPhone’s calculator. Yup. That’s right. The calculator.

Now I’ve used the calculator on my iPhone. I punched in numbers. I punched in operators. I hit the “equals” button. Not only did the calculator respond with a sum, it responded with the correct sum, so I’m not really sure what fault one could find with it.

But I’m not Paul Thurrott. He says, “The iPhone calculator should look like an iPhone application at the very least and ideally offer a number of skins. Obviously.”

Obviously. Geeze. Thurrott’s gotten so formulaic, it’s getting hard to distinguish him from Fake Paul. But in this case I think Real Paul has a point. Well, not really. But I think that looking at the ways in which he is wrong will illuminate some interesting principles of design.

Pummeled by palettes, I’ve been thinking of connecting the extra DVI output* on my G5 tower to a second monitor. That daydream got a boost when my terrific eye doctor raved about his multi-monitor home setup recently.

Multiple monitor photo collage by c2k2e.

So…what advice do you have for setting up and using multiple monitors? Do you like them side by side? Over/under? Same size/brand? How do you arrange programs, windows, palettes, and the Dock?

I really like the iPhone but hate the shape of the earbuds that are bundled with it. What keeps me from tossing them is they have some cool functionality. The microphone not only works well as a hands-free device when on the phone in the car, but is also a handy control for the iPod function of the iPhone. Click it once and you can pause the music, twice and it jumps to the next song. So I didn’t want to trash the earbuds even though they don’t fit well.

My solution… a $12 investment (at CompUSA) in Griffin EarJams. They convert Apple’s earbuds into more comfortable inner earphones. This combination is not the ultimate in sound quality, but it sure is an improvement over the stock earbuds.

Next, I keep my iPhone protected by passcode. This is a nice feature, but have you noticed that the welcome screen has no personal information on it? Just the time and date. What happens if you misplace your iPhone?

I’m using the Incase Molded Rubber Case to protect the edges of the iPhone. As an added measure of protection, I’ve slipped a business card between the case and the phone that has my contact information on it. That way, if I misplace my device, I have half a chance or recovering it. (Just don’t use your iPhone number for the contact info… doh!)

Finally, I’m keeping the phone charged in the car with the XtremeMac InCharge Auto. It’s a great looking device with an intelligent self-resetting fuse. For $19.95, it’s done a great job of keeping me juiced up on the go.

I have Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac on my MacBook. It doesn’t read or write Microsoft Office 2007’s native OOXML files. Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac won’t be out until January 2008. It won’t support Office macros. I don’t use Entourage. So, that means all I really use is Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Apple iWork ‘08 is available now and can read/write Office 2007 files. It has a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app. It costs $79. I don’t think Office for Mac 2008 for Mac will be $79 (will it come in a bazillion versions like Office for Windows?). I’ve never used iWork but will guess it doesn’t support macros (big deal since Office won’t either).

Seems like a good time for me to switch to iWorks. What about other current Office 2004 users? Will you wait until January to upgrade to 2008 or switch to iWorks ‘08 now?

I imagine I’m not the only one holding on to an old, balky iPod while waiting to see how Apple refreshes the iPod line ahead of the holiday season.

After hearing and reading so many good things about VMware Fusion, I was really eager to try it out. So I pre-ordered it last week to get the discounted price and then installed the production version (Build 51348) this evening.

I also decided to try out the VMware Converter and was a little annoyed to discover it only runs under Windows. So, I installed it on a PC running Windows Vista Business Edition and tried to convert Microsoft Virtual PC CentOS 4.4 Linux VHD file. No luck. It claimed the file is corrupted (it is not). Then, I tried to convert a Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition VHD file. This time it said it could not identify the OS. I moved over to a PC running Windows XP SP2. Same problem with the CentOS 4.4 Linux VHD file. But, it recognized the Windows Server VHD file this time.

I took the Windows Server vmx/vmdk files over to the MacBook running Fusion and started it up. It seemed to be running very sluggishly. So, I installed VMware Tools thinking its graphics and other enhancements would fix this. Unfortunately, Windows Server lost its mouse cursor after installing VMware Tools and rebooting.

I’ve got a bunch of projects due by the end of August. So, I won’t get to test Fusion again until September. But, if anyone can point out what I may have done wrong (e.g., don’t use VMs built by VMware Converter), let me know. I’ll build some Guests OSes from scratch in September to see if that route provide better results.

We’ve done a lot of grousing about Apple’s .Mac service here over the past couple of years, so I was happy to hear yesterday that it’s getting a long-deserved update. The new .Mac service now includes a fairly slick web photo gallery, which integrates nicely with the iTunes and the iPhone, an increase in the storage limit to 10 GB, and finally offers server-side spam filtering on .Mac email accounts. And the price didn’t change, it’s still $99.95/year.

It sounds much improved and the Web Gallery stuff does look cool, but I still find myself not rushing back to .Mac. I’m curious, what do others think about the .Mac update? Has it got you signing up for the service or feeling better about your ongoing investment? Or were you hoping for more? (I know this wasn’t what Chris was hoping for, sorry buddy!)

I spent some time this morning analyzing the Adjust palette in iPhoto ‘08, and Apple has done some nice work here.

At the top of my happy list are real Levels controls complete with a gamma slider — very similar to what you see in Photoshop, and now residing at the top of the Adjust palette. We also have Shadow and Highlight recovery, which is so important when you’re editing images captured in contrasty light. There’s also noise reduction, and the ability to copy and paste corrections to other images.

These improvements will make iPhoto more valuable to serious amateur photographers who can now stay within the application for the bulk of their corrections. I’ve already plunked down my $79 for iLife ‘08.

I was somewhat surprised when I saw the following sidebar in my GMail earlier today:

Yep, that’s a UPS tracking number. Perhaps this is one of those great little features that they’ve had all along, and I just haven’t noticed it — or maybe it’s new? At any rate, I couldn’t help but be strangely mesmerized by the sheer convenience of it all when I first saw it.

An e-mail provider identifying simple things like tracking numbers in my data and giving me those little extras seems dirt simple, doesn’t it? But it also makes me wonder just how many other things in my data Google can (and does) index and track about me.

Call me apathetic, but these little niceties are exactly the kinds of things that drew me to GMail in the first place, and despite the fact that I *know* Google is harvesting the heck out of my information, I seem to be strangely okay with it.

I’m feeling a bit of cognitive dissonance over here: they’re harvesting my data to the point that it’s starting to make me feel a little bit weird, but I don’t want to leave, because I just don’t know of a better free e-mail provider. (And heck, even when I was willing to pay good money for .Mac e-mail, it was mediocre at best.)

A question to GMail lovers: what would it take for GMail to lose you as a customer?

That is, just how much of their uncanny ability would they have to expose to spook you away for good? There has to be a tipping point somewhere…I wonder just how carefully they’re factoring this type of calculus into what they actually expose about their magic…

From MacJournals, Let’s make it “Understand the Dock Day” instead:

Yet from the first public descriptions of “Mac OS X” from Apple, the company has made it clear that the Dock is not optional and not replaceable. It’s a poor amalgamation of a program launcher, status center, and application menu/switcher–but Apple has affirmatively acted at every revision to make sure that you can’t do away with it without losing access to exclusive features like badges, notifications, and Dock menus.

I read this piece and nodded my head in agreement with every point, but there’s one point I’d differ with: the Dock is optional, and you can live without it. There’s a minority of people who do, including me.

The gist of the MacJournals argument is that you need the Dock visible to make use of its unique ability to display changing icons. Third-party Dock alternatives like Dragthing often do the Dock’s job better than the Dock does, but they cannot display dynamic icons - those icons that act as status indicators in the Dock.

Personally, I think the Menu Bar is a much better place for anything that displays any kind of small-scale, constantly changing information. That’s where I want my status indicators to live. I don’t want them in the Dock. The Menu Bar takes up less space than the Dock, and is always present without being intrusive.

Furthermore, a little searching uncovers third-party Menu Bar status displays for many commonly used Apple apps. What to keep an eye on the unread message count in Mail? Try Mail Unread Menu. Need access to iCal? MenuCalendarClock or High Priority might do the trick.

I’ve been living without the Dock for a while now, probably 18 months or so. I didn’t bother to kill the process - as the MacJournals article points out, that would also kill Dashboard, which I occasionally make use of - I just kept it hidden out of sight. It’s no big deal. And on the rare occasion when I need to drag something to a Dock icon (this happens about once a month), it’s right there.

Using a combination of Quicksilver for launching apps and finding files, the Menu Bar for keeping me informed about what the system is doing, and my frequent use of Command+Tab to remind me what’s running, I managed to go Dockless without any problems.

Craig Hockenberry makes some excellent points about the possibilities and pitfalls of using multi-touch technology on a desktop computer:

The iPhone’s multi-touch UI works similarly: if you watch people use it, I think you’ll see a lot more people working at waist level than at chest level. The only time you need the interface close to your head is when you’re enjoying those 3 pt fonts in MobileSafari :-)

He’s not the first person to point out that no-one will want to spend hours reaching up to touch a notebook computer’s screen, but his reminder is useful nonetheless. If multi-touch is indeed coming to our computers, it will have to come via a different route.

There are delicious avenues for exploration, though. Bigger, wider touchpads. Or perhaps, using iPhones and future iPods as wireless touchpads, complete with interactive display elements that marry up with on-screen controls. Or just giving into geek demand and creating a Mac tablet - think iPhone, but stretched until the screen’s about 13 inches big.

Over at iPhoneWebDev at Google Groups, Blake Burris has posted that iPhoneCamp will next stop in Dallas, after the success of last week’s event in San Francisco. The specific barcamp wiki site is here. Dallas-area iPhone enthusiasts and developers may want to check this out. For sponsorship ideas, space available or questions, Blake requests you ping him at his AIM account, which can be found in the first paragraph on the about page.

Just an observation… I read an item over in TUAW the other day noting that Apple’s stock (AAPL) hit a record high and that its market cap was over $100 billion ($114.51B as of July 11). I wondered where Dell (DELL) and Sun (SUNW) were since both had been sometimes (jokingly sometimes not) mentioned as possible acquierers of Apple in the pre-iPod pre-iMac days. Looking them up, I found their caps at $63.38B and $19.21B, respectively. So, Apple’s market cap is now greater than Dell and Sun combined..

Question: Why did Apple not make iCal todos synch with the iPhone?

My first reaction on hearing about this problem was astonishment. I couldn’t understand it - if they went to all the trouble to make sure the event data was used, why not go that final step further to get the todo data synched as well? It just seemed like a bizarre omission, especially given the iPhone’s role as a PDA.

But since then I’ve started to think. Perhaps the iCal todos were ignored because in Leopard, the focus of todos has shifted from iCal to Mail. The official Leopard iCal page doesn’t even mention todo items (but the official Leopard Mail page does). I say the focus has shifted, because there will be some way of viewing your todo items in iCal. They will still be there. But Apple’s pre-Leopard publicity only talks about todos in reference to Mail, not iCal.

Now consider the Leopard launch delay. In April, Apple released a statement saying:

We had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.

So here’s my theory: todos are coming to your iPhone, but they’re coming in the Mail application, after Leopard has been released. If Leopard hadn’t been delayed, todo items (and possibly a few other things that are missing, like synching of notes) would have been present on iPhone from the start.

Just in case you’re worried about the glass screen, don’t. The iPhone is designed for the road. I slipped mine into an InCase sleeve that provides protection on the corners (which is where my devices always land when I drop them) and hit the road yesterday. I had a great day, and the iPhone helped facilitate that.

First of all, I’m not a fan boy here. Over on The Digital Story, I published a post yesterday titled, Lots of Reasons to Buy an iPhone: The Camera Isn’t One of Them. I think the iPhone camera suffers from too much simplicity. But then again, I’m a photographer.

Where I am thrilled is with email, web, and maps. I’ve been waiting for years to have a mobile email experience like this. The “Mail” app on the iPhone is stunning. I’m testing it with both my IMAP O’Reilly account and a personal POP account. It is fast, beautiful, easy to use, and did I mention beautiful? I have the iPhone set to check mail every 30 minutes. While I was on the go yesterday, I was easily able to keep a few plates spinning with work-related issues using this device, and I had fun doing so. In my opinion, the iPhone is worth the purchase just for the email client.

Another big joy was Safari RSS. On my Mac, I have an RSS Feeds folder set up on my Bookmarks bar. The iPhone grabs all of this stuff on its first sync. When I had a few moments to kill, such as waiting in line, etc., I’d hit the “Safari” button on the iPhone, then check out the news from my RSS sites. It’s fast and easy to read. And the EDGE network is performing much better than I had anticipated. I’m guessing there is some network optimization in the iPhone.

I then needed directions. I hit the “Maps” button, entered my starting and ending points, and was treated to written directions, street map, and satellite view — easy to read, easy to use, and once again (I know), beautiful. I arrived to my destination with time to spare.

I’m having good luck with most of the other features too. The battery life is great (I’m on the second full day of use and still have half a battery to go). And this thing is a joy to use. I know we like to pick apart highly-hyped devices when they hit market. It’s human nature. But I have to tell you, the iPhone is worth the investment. And thanks to Software Update, it’s only going to get better.

At the top of my wish list: iChat for the iPhone.

David Pogue got an iPhone before almost anybody, and he’s already written a 304-page book of tips, iPhone: The Missing Manual. O’Reilly will offer a downloadable version within the next three weeks and the printed version later this summer, but you can see a sneak preview right now.

I especially like this shrewd tip for prolonging battery life:

By covering the [ambient-light] sensor as you unlock the phone, you force it to a low-power, dim screen-brightness setting [and bypass] all the taps and navigation it would have taken you to find the manual brightness slider.

I wonder how much ability developers will have to exploit the phone’s other sensors in new ways. It would be cool to control widgets with the accelerometer and proximity sensor.

Anyone else getting cognitive dissonance? On the one hand, the iPhone requires an EDGE-based data plan that takes several minutes to load up many web pages. On the other hand, the iPhone commercials expound upon the fact that the iPhone offers full-leaded iPhone, avoiding those “watered down” versions of the Internet. So what’s a web designer to do? Should you design your site for WiFi iPhone access or water the site down for EDGE? I say you should probably forget EDGE and just assume your site will be viewed with WiFi.

After doing some calculations today, I stared at a minimum $2000-plus price tag for a mandatory 2-year iPhone contract commitment. There are no discounts for AT&T employees or Students or Academics or State employees, etc. Full price for everyone. 2 year contract for everyone. And about $500 of that price tag is EDGE data for the multi-minute-per-page unwatered-down Internet.

As for me, I’d far rather get an iPhone without a data plan and with the cheapest and most limited voice plan, preferably prepaid. Seems to me that unless you’re in a WiFi hot zone, that the iPhone Internet capabilities are pretty awful. Sure, you get push-email, but if I really cared about push-email I’d have bought a Blackberry years ago. (I love the visual voice mail feature that isn’t really worth $20/month.) No, it’s the WiFi smart-phone features that make the Internet. Design for that.

Peter “Annoying Audio” Drescher knows ringtones, which is why his iPhone ringtone prediction is especially brilliant:

Let’s say you wanted to corner the ringtone market in the brave new world of broadband. You’d need to produce a database of ringtones for sale in the standard format. You’d want it to cover a wide range of musical styles, since your target audience is “anybody with a cell phone.” You’d want to keep it constantly updated with the latest sounds from the coolest kids. You’d want ringtones cataloged by various attributes, with an elegantly searchable interface.

Gee, I wonder where I might find a prodigious database of high-resolution 30-second AAC files, usually containing the characteristic section of a song? Possibly already being used to preview longer files before purchase? Ready, willing, and legal to be downloaded to a cool new device? Hey, I know!

Ringtone designer Peter Drescher created a music phone by duct-taping an iPod Nano to the back of his T-Mobile Sidekick. But integration between the devices could be better.

What do you think? When iPhones ring, will they be playing random clips from the iTunes store?

I owe Ethan Schoonover a thank you.

It was his Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop that got me thinking about ways I could streamline my working life and bring a little more clarity to my hard disk.

Although I’m not a GTD addict and manage perfectly well with a plain vanilla todo text file, my hard disk has been in a disorganized and unruly state for quite a while. Watching Ethan’s screencasts gave me some ideas for tidying things up.

As a result I’ve separated my ongoing work projects from the dull admin that goes with running a business. I’ve created an inbox where new stuff gets dumped, and told all my internet apps to download stuff to it. Everything feels a bit cleaner and easy to navigate as a result.

I recommend Ethan’s series of screencasts to everyone, not just the Kinkless faithful who already recite the GTD prayer every night. They’re helpful to any computer user who feels as if they need to re-take control of their files.

Well, the TV update is out, the one so heavily hyped to include YouTube content on your TV. I had expected it, like so many other Apple device updates, to be done from the iTunes control panel, but it’s actually buried in Settings in the main menu of the TV itself. The update itself is fairly painless, but at the end, you’ve got an TV that can pull down H.264 video directly from YouTube and display on your HDTV.

The quality? Well, it’s pretty good. In a lot of cases, it’s as good as the network videos that you get from the iTunes Store. Of course, much depends on how it was shot to begin with, but what began life as choppy crappy flash video has turned into something really watchable on my 30″ Samsung.

The one big issue, though, is getting everything re-encoded. A couple videos that I could find on the YouTube site hadn’t made it out to the TV just yet. That’s going to be the chokepoint for the coming weeks and the adoption of YouTube on the Television set.

Over the last week, a number of web developers have announced Web 2.0-style applications for the iPhone. There’s even a site dedicated to these (although it seems to be down now after all the recent Digg activity.) The idea goes like this: if you’ve got to connect to the Internet with your iPhone, why not publish your Dashboard-style widgets as actual web pages? After all, you can use them on your Mac, on your iPhone and now in Windows. With a bit of low-cost hosting and some decent “lickable” design, congratulations, you’ve become an iPhone developer.

The problem for me about this kind of approach is that moving applications off your phone and onto the web means that you’ve got buy into both a huge paradigm shift as well as an actual data shift. After all, your data is there on the web, while you’re standing here with your iPhone. Does that work for you?

Do you trust the web? How many stories have you heard about Gmail accounts suddenly losing their data? And do you really trust Google and Yahoo enough to entrust all your calendar, word processing and spreadsheet data to them?

What about your things to do list? Do you trust a third-party developer to hold onto that data? And connecting means a data plan, which costs money possibly lots of money. As one comment on my recent post here at O’Reilly noted, are you willing to pay every time you want to check a to-do list? What about if you only use WiFi? Are you willing to wait until a hotspot shows up before you can see what items are on your shopping list? Or before you can add butter, paper towels, and lettuce to that list?

Of course, if you can log into your home computer with the new Leopard Mac-to-go features announced at the WWDC keynote, a lot of these problems become less of an issue. You don’t have to worry as much about trusting your data if you are hosting your own data on your home computer. But you’re still left with the connection issue. Has Apple figured out how to make a data plan so cheap that ubiquitous computing becomes the real killer iPhone app?

Do you like side-scrolling?

Hmm. Me neither.

I don’t expect we’re going to make much use of CoverFlow in the new Leopard Finder, then.

I agree with Bruce that Jobs did a pretty bad job today selling the Web-only development for the iPhone. Since January, we’ve all been saying “Well, if there’s no third party development, we can always get around it with clever Web design.” I never thought that the “getting around it” strategy was an appealing solution.

I personally expected that we’d see at least Dashcode today but I hoped for full iPhone third party development. That baby is running OS X under its hood. But if you have to crack or hack to get ssh tunneling going, a la Apple TV, then you haven’t created a real solution, even if I’m running Joost on my personal iPhone in a few weeks.

I also think Jobs could have done a lot more showing how the iPhone could or will work with those web pages. We know the iPhone can dial any phone or email any address on a Safari webpage. But if all that the iPhone provides is integration along the lines of a mailto: link, I can’t see that as a major step forward.

Let’s get this out in the open shall we: I think the semi-transparent Menu Bar looks alarmingly similar to Windows Vista. Anyone else think so?

…we start to draw at straws. Let me begin by saying that Erica’s a top-notch blogger, and this certainly isn’t a swipe at her, but really, would we be obsessing over the names in the iPhone commercials if we actually knew anything at all about the iPhone? We know the iPhone does EDGE and WiFi. We know the iPhone has email and internet applications. We know that there’s a neato Maps application.

But that’s it. The iPhone could be summed up more by what we don’t know than what we do know.

When was the last time we knew so little about an upcoming product? It’s been six months since the Apple site was first graced with the presence of the iPhone section, and since that date, absolutely nothing else has come out of Apple’s lips. Steve even refused to say word one about it at D5, where he gushed about pretty much everything else. Granted, the FCC application process is certainly a part of that, as it makes public what is largely taken care of inside Apple’s secret Northern California laboratories by myriad test engineers in white coats with Apple logos embroidered on their breast. But is that it entirely? Or is there more to Apple’s identity than just alluring products? Perhaps, too, Apple’s identity is tied up in security that would make most intelligence agencies weep with joy.

It’s become a bit of tradition in the Mac press to make public your guesses, predictions, and desires for what news will come out of every major Mac conference. Since WWDC is right around the corner, we rounded up some of our MacDevCenter bloggers and asked them what they’d like to see Steve unveil at next week’s keynote.

Our curmudgeonly java.net editor Chris Adamson, started things off by simply offering up a repeat of his last MacWorld wish:

An end to .Mac. It’s overpriced, it sucks, and it makes iLife suck.

Mary Norbury

I’d like to see a 12-inch laptop replacement - probably too soon for a tablet, though. Give iPhone some time then maybe. I agree that a complete overhaul of .mac would be nice. Couldn’t possibly be worse.

Daniel Steinberg

I think we’ll see a tower and new displays next week, and the more I look at the iPhone, the more I’m convinced that a tablet will appear at some point. The soft keyboard in the screen that could be there in landscape or portrait, the multitouch…

Todd Ogasawara

1. Instead of an end to .Mac (which I dropped last year)… A “good” .Mac service at a more reasonable price (say $5/month).

2. A 12″ MacBook with a Flash drive (no hard drive), LED screen, and just as “cool” (temperature wise) as my old 12″ iBook (which runs very cool).

3. A 6th generation full screen iPod (same size as current iPod but with a horizontal screen). I’d love to get an iPhone. But, I shudder at switching to AT&T Wireless with its higher data fees (I pay $29.95/month to T-Mobile for unlimited (slow) EDGE and unlimited T-Mobile HotSpot WiFi)

4. iLife ‘07

5. Leopard :-)

Tom Bridge

1. Details about the iPhone. Seriously. We’re three weeks from launch, and we know very little about the details behind the iPhone. How’s email work? Can it do IMAP(SSL)? Over the air syncing with SyncML servers for wireless contact syncing? How’s it handle WiFi? Too many questions.

2. .Mac fixup. Overdue. We need a partnership with an online storage company for better data backups, something to keep those of us locked into a $100/year email address from rising up in the night and storming the barricades.

3. Leopard “hidden” features. Last summer we were promised that some features of Leopard were kept hidden because they were Sekrit. Now’s the time to pull back the veil and show us the whole Macgillicuddy.

4. Server. We need to see what the new OSXS does, even if no one in the public really cares :D

5. A promise to move Multitouch to the Mac in a meaningful way.

Erica Sadun

I’m suffering from prediction burnout, honestly.

.Mac should die. Mac Minis should not. iTunes needs High Def video and a rental model. The iPhone needs games that take advantage of multitouch. Developers should be able to design widgets for the iPhone. The DVD is dead media walking–will we keep seeing iDVD? What about new High Def recordable media drives? Will iLife/iWork become part of Leopard–or is it time for an ‘07 or ‘08 refresh? What about that iSpreadsheet we’ve all heard about? And what about an iMac hardware refresh now that the laptop line has had its refresh? Oh yeah, and where’s my iNewton?

David Battino

Two improvements for schools (I just ran into these yesterday in the classroom):

1. Native QuickTime MPEG-2 support — One student brought in a home movie to incorporate into her class project. Her dad, a reported Mac-hater, had saved it in a .MPG format iMovie couldn’t read. I had to take it home and use MPEG Streamclip (and Apple’s $20 QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component) to convert it to a usable format.

2. A Fair Use exemption for classroom use of copy-protected media — Another student used her iTunes account to buy a song to run under the credits in her group’s movie. But the students became confused because iMovie wouldn’t load the file. Instead of explaining why, iMovie said, “This computer is not authorized to play this file.” After three rounds of showing the student how to authorize the file in iTunes and still being unable to import it, I finally realized that the error should have said, “This file is copy-protected and may not be used in iMovie.”

Annoyingly, this usage is exactly the kind of educational situation Fair Use was designed to cover. So I downloaded Wiretap, played the song in iTunes, and recorded the first 90 seconds as an AIFF file. Then we dragged it into the movie soundtrack. I showed the students how to display the waveform so they could line up the beginning precisely, and they got excited to be back on track.

Oh, and like Todd said, a lightweight, flash-based MacBook to wean me off my AlphaSmart Dana. Anyone remember the name of the WiFi laptop Amazon is supposedly making?

Todd Ogasawara

After reading Tom’s wishlist, I partially retract my “wish” for the 12″ MacBook with flash drive. I now want a 12″ MacBook TABLET with multi-touch display. I basically want a Star Trek: The Next Generation PADD. And, wasn’t those ST:TNG consoles basically multi-touch displays? :-)

What’s on your WWDC wish list? Let us know in the comments section.

Playing with Boinx FotoMagico recently, I came across this unusually helpful error message. Not only does it explain the potential problem, it shows you as well:

Admittedly, I didn’t grasp the significance of the image at first; it would have been clearer if the photo had come from my own project. But I can’t recall seeing this type of integrated error before. Have you?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were so friendly to one another on stage at the D5 event.

These two men have been working together for decades. In the early days, as both of them acknowledged during their joint interview, they were dependent on one another for their continued growth. Where some Mac and Windows users have divided themselves into warring camps, Jobs and Gates actually have quite a lot in common, and a long history in the business together.

And the best thing to see is that both of them have retained a sense of humor, despite their years as business rivals.

Gates: “First, I’d like to clarify, I am not Fake Steve Jobs.”

Jobs: “We’ve kept our marriage secret for over a decade now.”

And they can still appreciate each other’s strengths:

Gates: “I admire Steve’s taste. And that’s not a joke.”

Jobs: “If Apple could have had a bit of Microsoft’s knack for partnerships early on, we would have been better for it.”

Humor, and with it some humility.

So here it is, my first DRM-free purchase from the iTunes Store. A copy of “Life on Mars?” by David Bowie, from his fantastic album “Hunky Dory”.

Why did I buy it? I already own this album, but I bought it in the mid-80s, so my copy is on an old cassette. It still plays just fine on my tape deck, but I just don’t have the time or the inclination to go through the hassle of digitizing all my tapes (I have a lot of tapes). I’m happy to buy things again on CD, and I’m also happy to buy them online - just so long as I don’t have to be tied to DRM.

And along comes iTunes Plus and takes the DRM away. I bought this digital version so I can have it on my computer and my iPod, and I don’t have to worry about Authorizing various computers. I have a digital copy of the song that I own, and I can do whatever I like with it (within the limits of the law, of course). I much prefer this to the old DRM-laden way of doing things. I shall be purchasing some more, I think. Next stop: “Dark Side of the Moon”.

But for me, the most interesting thing I’ve noticed since the iTunes Plus announcement is the songs I’ve not purchased. I heard two songs on the radio this morning (“The World is Outside” by Ghosts, and “Beautiful Liar (Freemasons Radio Mix)” by Beyonce & Shakira) that I would have purchased immediately had they been available via iTunes Plus. But neither of them are.

Not yet.

My friend, David Niemeijer of AssistiveWare, sent me a link to an amazing video.

It is a video of an American game reviewer playing Unreal Tournament. I am sure you’d be surprised by it even if you are not into gaming.

One Thumb to Rule Them All

Wondering what’s so special about it? See the video, and I am sure you will agree.

In my previous post. I talked about how James Thomson of TLA Systems succeeded by internationalizing his software early on.

Actually, James is up to another interesting experiment: shareware sidegrades, which he offers not in a competitive way but in a very friendly manner.

Recently, the people at Sig Software stopped updating Drop Drawers. They have such a strong sense of responsibility, however, that they couldn’t leave
their users hanging in the air.
Instead, they have decided to team up with James and provide a sidegrade to DragThing:

Drop Drawers Upgrade to DragThing!

Isn’t it kind of pointless to include a link for people who can’t read? :)

(I know, I know. They are referring to CAPTCHAs that are too difficult to parse visually. Still, this is a great example for any of you teaching or attending UI design classes.)

When Electronic Musician magazine asked me to write a tips article about the Frontier Design AlphaTrack, I was intrigued by the challenge. What could I possibly say about a $200 USB volume slider? I composed the first line in my head before the box even arrived: A controller with just one fader? Isn’t that like a piano with just one key?

The Frontier AlphaTrack adds a motorized fader, transport controls, knobs, buttons, and a ribbon controller to your computer. It’s powered by USB.

The magazine cut that line, but I quickly answered my own question by plugging the AlphaTrack in to my Mac and sniffing its output with Snoize MIDI Monitor. Lots of possibilities there!

MacDailyNew reports that Forrester Research is betting that video downloads don’t have a future. Although they suggest that paid video downloads will increase this year, generating about a third of a billion dollars in revenue, they’re predicting that this market will evaporate. Currently Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart all offer paid video download services. The problem is apparently that sites like NBC and CBS offer free streaming media, where they receive ad support and they control the content and the audience.

Steve Jobs has gone on the record saying “no music subscriptions” on iTunes. So what about TV and Movies instead? iTunes has so much content these days that I’d probably be willing to ditch cable and go entirely to an AppleTV lifestyle with an all-you-can-eat video subscription. Sure there are downsides but there’s a lot of upsides as well.

These days, iTunes has as many “channels” as I get over cable and more that I do not. Between iTunes and my free-to-air ATSC, my family would have access to all the shows we currently watch plus a huge repository of back episodes and new shows, all available on demand. That’s very attractive.

What would have to change is our notion of “appointment television”. Yes, we could still watch Heroes live because it’s an NBC show but Project Runway and Battlestar would have to wait until they showed up at the store. Sometimes this can take several days or up to a week after episodes air. We couldn’t watch them live and then run over to Television Without Pity to chat. An iTunes subscription model has a built-in “watch it when we have it, not when it’s live or convenient” limitation.

Adding movies into the mix makes it even more attractive. It would make family movie night a lot easier if we could just decide on the spur of the moment what we wanted to see (taking into account the download time) rather than having to pop out to the library a few days in advance to pick up a DVD from it’s already picked-over collection.

Yes, we could do this all now. We could ditch cable today and do an a la carte iTunes replacement. But buying item-by-item gets expensive quickly. For a recent car trip, I let my kids download 10 TV episodes. And once we bought those 10 episodes, they were ours forever. They got stale pretty fast.

For just our standard cable reception (channels 2-99, no premium channels, mostly public access for channels larger than 60), we are currently paying about $60-odd dollars a month. We’d happily ditch that for a less expensive iTunes video subscription at $39.99 a month even with giving up live TV if that money bought us lots of fresh content on-demand.

Here I’m presenting kamishibai stories at FOO Camp, Tim O’Reilly’s annual gathering of technology provocateurs. I cracked up when I saw the photographer’s caption: “It’s not just geeks.”

How do you present multimedia at conferences? For my workshops on Japanese kamishibai storytelling, I use a PowerPoint slide show with about 70 slides. Only the first, second, and last slides contain text, because the point of the kamishibai format is to look at your audience, not turn your back on them to read bullet points. (At FOO Camp last year, I wryly called the technique “PowerPoint for People.“)

Later this month, though, I’ll be delivering a lecture about my book and DVD, The Art of Digital Music, at a tricked-out auditorium. The bulk of the DVD is 60-second movies of the artists I interviewed for the book. For each interview, I extracted sound bites with Ambrosia WireTap, added original music with Ableton Live to move the stories along, and then synced the audio with photos I animated in LQ Graphics Photo To Movie.

My concept for the presentation is to intersperse video clips from the disc with photos and behind-the-scenes stories, such as why producer Don Was recorded the Rolling Stones on his iBook instead of in his million-dollar Hollywood studio, how I got a stealth interview with Brian Eno, and more.

Tool Time

My dilemma is one we often face with today’s cornucopia of creative software: Which program(s) would be best for pulling all those media together and presenting them smoothly? My first inclination was to rerender the movies and embed them in PowerPoint slides, but I won’t have my computer with me, so I was worried that the host computer might not be able to keep up. Ditto if I simply built an HTML page and linked to the media files. Perhaps Keynote would perform better, but I haven’t bought it yet. (Should I? Please leave a comment.)

I’m definitely planning to upgrade my MacBook to Leopard when it becomes available. And knowledgeable Mac users tell me that my G4 based Mac mini (1st generation model) and iBook G4 should be able to be upgraded too. The question is: Does it make sense to upgrade a G4 to Leopard? Both G4 boxes are still in frequent use. But, I wonder if it is worth the effort and slightly higher cost (family pack vs. single upgrade). The G4s can’t, for example, seem to be able to smoothly display 720p movie trailers in Quicktime. iTunes is fine but with only 512MB RAM (and I don’t intend to upgrade RAM on these boxes) Garageband balks on even some of my little experiments brought over from the MacBook.

So, what are you other G4 owners planning to do? Upgrade to Leopard? Or stay with Tiger (or maybe even Panther)?

I just spent the better part of my evening retrieving my 2005 tax return from TurboTax. Earlier in the month, I realized that I’d misplaced my soft copy and decided that I’d better retrieve it to make sure and stay on top of my game just in case the IRS auditors ever come knocking. But then there was a problem…

PETA folk look away. Charlie Sorrel at Wired has posted about a new kind of mouse mod to accessorize your MacBook. It’s a mouse mouse.

Shudder.

What were they thinking? I mean Taxidermy is icky at the best of times. But to turn a dead animal into a productivity aid? Ewwwwwww. You’d have to touch the thing all day long.

And Sorrel suggests this idea could be taken further, to produce an iPod case.

Excuse me while I run to the bathroom to vomit.

At last month’s Musikmesse, there was good news and not so good news from Apple.

The good news is that this year saw Apple’s most eye-catching Messe booth, yet. Following Apple’s signature black/silver/white design, the booth was bigger than in previous years, featured a larger demo theater, and also boasted a more prominent location on the show floor. A welcome sign that Apple is serious about this industry.

The not so good news: Apple made no announcements whatsoever.

There are some applications that I just can’t live without.

A week or so ago, I performed a complete re-install of my main working computer. Part of the process included going through my Applications folder and trashing every app that I just didn’t need, cutting it down to the bare minimum. As it turned out, I only ended up keeping half of all my existing apps in the new set-up.

The recent release of Coda has been splashed all over the Internet over the past few days. As usual, the Panic team has done an outstanding job and delivered an application that is both visually innovative and quintessentially Mac-like. Coda, unfortunately, does not fit into my already Panic-powered workflow, except for one little gem, that I already cannot live without.

I just noticed that Tim O’Reilly blogged about the Better GMail Firefox extension. As a GMail user, I think that this extension is a great addition, but it makes me wonder — how long before Google absorbs it into the core GMail application and renders it obsolete? And if that should occur, does it conflict with Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra?

Perhaps I’m speculating a bit to assume that Google would even consider incorporating all of the Better GMail features and render it useless — but why wouldn’t they? After all, they have an incentive to make GMail the best possible application that it can be so that they can continue harvesting data, targeting advertisements, making a profit, etc. Besides, there are all of those IE users who will probably want those extra features too, right?

So…would Google stealing someone else’s GMail hacks constitute any form of evilness at all, or is it fair game? When would they be crossing the line? Could Google could avoid these predicaments by handing out spot bonuses for ideas that are good enough to “steal”?

Shortly after completing my article about Google Desktop for Mac, I decided to remove the application from my system. Why? Because:

• Although the indexing went fairly smoothly, it seemed that there were ongoing performance issues. Things just felt slower almost everywhere. There was a noticeable increase in disk grinding and fan noise; Activity Monitor showed the various processes associated with GDesktop were busy - no single one of them to any great degree, but the combined effect was noticeable. True, this is on a G4 machine with only 768MB RAM, and better-equipped computers would surely run more smoothly.
• I didn’t find the central feature of GDesktop - the combining of search results from the web and from your local disk(s) - a very compelling one for me. I tend to know when something I need is on the web or on my computer, and would prefer to use appropriate tools in each case.
• Following on from that - I said in my article, and I still maintain, that GDesktop is about searching and Quicksilver is about doing. I don’t consider GDesktop’s features to be worth the demands it made on my system, because I tend to perform doing functions much more than I perform searching functions.

Which is a long-winded way of saying: it didn’t feel right for me. But that’s just a personal view. If you have either warmed to Google Desktop, or similarly removed it from your computer, I’d love to hear why.

Looking for an iSight replacement? iChat supports some USB cams in 10.4.9, but it’s not easy to find the right ones.

I was away on vacation last week, so I missed all the fuss about Apple’s announcement postponing any release of Leopard until October.

But now, catching up on the news and reading a week’s worth of email (and at the risk of finding myself tagged as “hoi-polloi”), it doesn’t sound like much of a big deal. I’m certainly not bothered about it. In some respects, I’m pleased.

First, it means I don’t have as much pressure on me to upgrade my hardware. I was seriously thinking of buying new kit, and have been for some time, but my existing Macs run 10.4.9 very happily and there’s no need for me to spend money replacing them until Leopard is released, or even some time after that. This delay gives me some extra time to save up some cash.

Second, I’d rather whatever got released is good stuff, and if that takes a few more months, so be it.

And third, the rapid development of earlier versions of OS X is not necessarily the pace that all versions should be developed at. As a community, we were treated to an incredibly swift path from 10.1 to 10.4, and now that 10.4 has matured I see no reason not to work happily for it for a while. There’s no need to change just for change’s sake.

BusinessWeek argues that the Apple/EMI DRM-free tunes deal is a huge boost for AAC as a standard. Is it that simple?

The Beach Boys. The Beastie Boys. Blur. David Bowie. Kate Bush. And that’s just some of the ‘B’s.

All of them signed to EMI, or EMI-owned labels, and all likely to have their music appear on the iTunes Store in DRM-free format within a couple of months.

Perhaps the most famous key combination in computing is the notorious "three-finger-salute" that lets you break out of crashed programs. On the Mac, you press Command-Option-Escape; in DOS and Windows, the three keys are Ctrl-Alt-Del.

A few years ago, someone tracked down David Bradley, the IBM engineer who devised the Ctrl-Alt-Del combo, and asked him why he had picked those specific keys. He said that he’d wanted keys that were far enough apart that they couldn’t be pressed accidentally.

Of course, he didn’t realize how often that ejector seat would be used. In later years, Bradley started joking that although he had invented the combination, it was Microsoft that made it popular. (Here’s a funny video of Bill Gates’s reaction.)

I thought about that today after reading about the FlipStart, a new palmtop PC with a tiny keyboard designed to be operated with your thumbs. It was so awkward to press Ctrl-Alt-Del on prototypes that the company combined the three keys into a single button—sorta defeating the purpose.

The FlipStart merges three keys into one Ctrl-Alt-Del button. Reviewers called it an ergonomic nightmare.

Coincidentally, we just published an unusual article about user interface design over at O’Reilly Digital Media. It’s called “Singing With Your Thumbs.”

What are some of your favorite three-finger salutes?

My brother recently switched back to Mac after about 15 years, and left a frustrated voicemail asking for help getting set up. Good thing I called back via Skype: the return call lasted about 90 minutes. After getting nowhere trying to transfer his Windows documents via Ethernet, he had bought some kind of kit listed on the Apple site that does the shuttling over USB.

Three days later (!) his photos, iTunes library, and Microsoft Office documents were on the Mac, but he couldn’t figure out how to open them. I walked him through the “Import to Library” process in iTunes, and he immediately grasped that the importation process worked similarly in iPhoto. He then felt confident enough to set up Address Book and Mail on his own.

With that out of the way, I started thinking it would be great to set up videoconferencing in Skype or iChat. My brother’s new iMac has a webcam built in, but my G5 tower didn’t come with one. Any recommendations? I’d prefer a FireWire cam (maybe a used iSight?) because I have some free FireWire ports, but the USB Ecamm iMage and some Logitech models look interesting.

I just read Louis Gray’s post How Smart Are Your Playlists? over on the The Apple Blog, where he describes the Smart Playlists he uses in iTunes. I have a large music library in iTunes and have recently been playing around with Smart Playlists myself, and find they can really enhance one’s listening experience. I especially liked Louis’s idea of creating a “neglected” Smart Playlist to help him hear music that he would otherwise be missing.

In “The Neglected”, I feature songs where “Last played is not in the last 6 months”, with Live updating checked. Sometimes, this playlist can fill to the point where I have 12 hours or more to go through before it is empty. But if I make “The Neglected” my starting point, I’m sure not to be repeating songs I heard recently.

I’m going to go create a playlist of my own neglected tunes, which sounds like a much more effective way of getting to listen to all of the music I add to iTunes than my previous method (which was to try and regularly visit my “Added in the last 3 months” Smart Playlist.) I should probably also consider implementing something like Louis’s “Bad ROI” playlist, which tracks tunes with a low number of play counts for possible weeding out.

What are your favorite Smart Playlists?

One of the brilliant things about a TiVo is that it watches all that TV for me that I intended to watch but never got around to sitting down to view. (Some people call this the “TiNo” phenomenon.) It’s very comforting to know that my PVR took the time to record those shows because it demonstrates what excellent intentions I had as a person. I have a season pass to Friday Night Lights that I consistently fail to watch–but my TiVo does. Somehow this makes me feel like a better, more cultured person.

And when my TiVo runs out of space, it kindly deletes all those back episodes for me and I have the satisfaction that the shows aren’t cluttering up my unit’s hard drive forever.

iTunes is another matter entirely. I’ve downloaded all sorts of crap shows–from that Danny Bonaduce one to “My Bare Lady” (thought it would be a giggle) to “Learn with Sesame”–thinking that I or my husband or my kids would eventually get around to watching them. And we don’t. We live in a BSG-Heroes-Spongebob-Mythbusters world, and there never really seems to be any time to catch up with the “maybe I’ll try out an episode” shows that iTunes offers for free every Tuesday.

So on Sunday, I was backing up my computer and I really took note of all those gigabytes of iTunes unwatched freebies, as well as several shows that I downloaded and paid for because I’d missed them on TV and wanted to catch up on, but didn’t really feel like watching again.

I have no problem tossing magazines. If I pick up a magazine to read at lunch or on an Airplane or while waiting at a Doctor’s office, I don’t mind throwing away the $2.00 or $3.50 I’ve invested after finishing reading it. Sometimes I let it age on the coffee table or in the bathroom for a few weeks, but it still gets tossed or occasionally bundled up and donated to the local pediatrician’s office.

So why did I feel like a murderer on Sunday when I trashed that episode of Bones where Brennan gets blown up after dancing in Bones’ apartment? And all those free, unwatched garbage shows that I deleted? (And yes, I’m looking at you, Real Housewives of Orange County.) Why did I feel I was doing something wrong and irrevocable.

Somehow it seems to be an iTunes thing. When I buy music at the Zune store, I know that my license extends to 3 or 4 more downloads of the same item. I don’t need to keep copies on my computer unless I want to. But Apple’s somewhat draconian “download it once and then it’s all your responsibility” approach to digital purchases makes me want to hang onto certain items with more vigor than they’re really worth.

Sure, Apple will replace your entire library in the event of a catastrophic loss. Once. And should such a day happen, my Housewives of Orange County, and my Danny Bonaduce, and my “My Bare Ladies” will be there, ready to come back to life in the worst zombie fashion, ready for me to stake them through the heart once again. But are these items and even more worthy items like “Bones” worth keeping around on recordable DVDs or hard drive storage? Probably not.

My problem is that I have to start thinking about these digital assets like like my TiVo. My TiVo knows when to trash those old episodes of Friday Night Lights. It doesn’t hang onto them saying, “I’ll get around to watching them eventually because the show is really, really well made.” I’ve got to learn that lesson. Certain digital assets–family photos, movies, recordings over the baby monitor of my kids singing their ABCs in bed–are forever. The pilot of that awful Vampire series “Blade” is not.

Before Christmas, my mind was very nearly made up. Shortly after the Macworld Expo, I would buy myself a new Mac, my first Intel machine.

I haven’t bought it, though. And the longer I wait, the more I think I’ve made the right decision. Because some really meaty Mac news is long overdue from Apple, and I won’t want to be in the position of buying the an “old” machine just before a newer one is announced. And I’m certain that I’m not the only one feeling this way.

My inclination is towards a MacBook Pro, as recommended by many friends. But I have a feeling that an update for this machine is coming soon, perhaps something radical like a new case design.

So I’m holding on for a bit longer before I buy. And besides, this old G4 PowerBook has a lot of life in it yet…

“How the vi editor would seem if it has been made by Microsoft”

It’s not exactly safe for work, but I found this animated GIF hilarious.

Steve Borsch’s tale of how he swapped his father’s malware-ridden PC for a Mac mini, to make his own life easier, exactly mirrors my own experience.

I made the icons huge so he can see everything, it’s easier to navigate, and the spyware and adware are now a complete non-issue. There’s nothing that he cannot do on this computer and I rarely have to do any remote logging in to fix something.

Some years ago, my mom was given a cheap eMachines PC as a gift. As time went by she got very interested in digital photography, and became a keen web user. But every time I went to visit and sat down in front of the computer, it got slower and slower.

A few days ago, Apple has released iTunes 7.1. There’s no doubt that the most important addition is support for AppleTV, but there is also a new full-screen mode for Cover Flow. Album artwork has never looked this good on a computer screen.

An idea that immediately springs to mind: why not let the user flip the cover around to discover what’s on the back? Playlists’s Chris Breen came up with this idea, too:

Now that I can see the front cover in such detail naturally I’d love to turn the cover around and see what’s on the back—or at least flip it around so I can view the tracks on the album and choose the one I want to play while in full-screen Cover Flow view.

Then again, why stop there? You see, the one thing I’ve been missing the most when buying music from the iTunes Store is the album booklet. When listening to a CD, reading up on the record’s background story, the musicians involved, and what went on during the recording session adds a lot to the listening experience. Wouldn’t it be great if you could browse a digitized version of the full CD booklet by flipping through its pages right there in iTunes? Let’s take this one step further and add album navigation via clickable track list entries inside the on-screen booklet, and maybe include some links to websites with more information on the artist, etc., as well. Say hello to your full-featured virtual jewel case shelf!

We will probably see some implementation of this in an upcoming update to iTunes, and I’m very curious to find out just which feature set the Apple engineers will add, and what the UI will look like.

What’s your take on such a feature, and what other things are on your wish list for iTunes’s user interface?

I know they’ve been out for a while now, but this weekend I got my first face-to-face encounter with one of the 24-inch iMacs.

Wow. I hadn’t appreciated quite how huge these things are. It was displayed alongside its smaller brethren, and made them look like pathetic toys. The scale of the screen made me stop and think hard about my ongoing (and unresolved) plans to buy a new Mac this year.

Wow! It’s been exactly three years since I purchased my PowerBook. This metal beauty is my first Mac ever, and has forever changed my life for the better. OS X, Cocoa, Mac DevCenter, the Apple Store, and the overall Mac community have been nothing less than incredible. What a great investment!

I tend to go through phases when it comes to the programs I do my writing in. Everything from bloated word processors to the geekiest of text editors will at one point or another have me in its throes.

What I’ve found recently is that as my writing life is fragmenting into a myriad of different projects, my writing toolbox has grown to encompass several different programs at the same time. Unconsciously at first, now on purpose, I’ve begun using several individual applications as distinct writing “areas,” where before I would likely have been using only one or two apps.

For example, I’ve contracted my use of favorite journaling program Journler by Philip Dow from being a catch-all repository for blogging, fiction, research, and personal journal to “just” the personal journal.

Journler has blog-editing capabilities in its current version 2.0.2, but I had some difficulties getting some of my more specialized site configurations to work (Drupal, especially); I eventually got the blog authoring app MarsEdit to work.

As I mentioned here recently, MarsEdit was handed over from Brent Simmons at Ranchero to Daniel Jalkut at Red Sweater. I’m looking forward to seeing what advancements Daniel makes, but for the time being MarsEdit has become my blogging environment, from which I post to ten different sites. Version 2.5 of Journler is in beta, tentatively scheduled to be released mid-March and promising a host of great improvements, so I might revisit this arrangement soon.

Simple writing isn’t the only necessity for me — research and “knowledgebase building” is another activity where a specialized application like Gus Mueller’s VoodooPad becomes invaluable. The ease with which a wiki can enable accumulating and cross-relating of info is awesome, whether it’s for administrative procedures at work or as a mini-encyclopedia for my latest fictional world. Powerful stuff.

The super-popular TextMate by Allan Odgaard has become my great all-around coding environment, for everything from HTML to Python. And thanks to the “Edit in TextMate” addition, I can pull text from just about any Cocoa app and edit it in TextMate.

Mere outlines in OmniOutliner is the least I can create — organizing and brainstorming is what I love doing in this program. And I can’t wait to check out the upcoming productivity app OmniFocus.

I haven’t purchased one yet, but there are a couple of apps I’m trying out for writing fiction — so far, I’m enjoying Scrivener more, but Avenir is still making my decision difficult.

GUI Phase

This is definitely a GUI phase I’m going through. I’ve spent time in CLI phases, with pretty much everything going through Vim.

What I’m finding rather amusing about all these programs is a tendency for at least some of them to move toward a common set of features and technologies. Wiki-like links. Smart folders. Full screen modes. Tabs sprouting everywhere, even in Vim!

But given this, why shouldn’t I keep it all in one application? Wouldn’t that be more efficient?

Efficiency

Well, efficiency isn’t always the most important thing, especially with all this computing power at my fingertips. Taking that old-school limitation away, why not run six apps instead of one?

The way I’m operating now is almost like the Contexts from Getting Things Done — having discrete repositories for different kinds of writing helps me to focus.

What I won’t say is that this is the best way to operate for me, forever and ever. I’m sure in six months or a year, I’ll be in some new phase, maybe doing all my “writing” via podcast. ;)

With all this podcasting I’ve been doing (iTunes link), my G5 tower’s 250GB hard drive is almost full. Perhaps not coincidentally, this ol’ Mac has been rather cranky lately. I remember reading that once the free space on your system drive dips below ten percent of its capacity, OS X starts to exact revenge, crashing randomly and forgetting things. That sure sounds familiar.

Be that as it may, I just ordered a 500GB internal drive to start offloading some of the detritus like audio sample libraries and disk images for DVDs I hope to watch someday.

The last time I installed a secondary drive, I was so awed by its relative size (20 times bigger than my stock Mac drive!) that I partitioned it into five slices. After a while, that just became a hassle.

So this time, I’m wondering: What would you recommend? One partition for a basic system backup and the rest for files? One big partition? Seven little partitions named after short men with pointy hats? Leave a comment and let us know what works for you.

UPDATE, 2007-03-03: The drive arrived today and, keeping all of your comments in mind, I set it up with just one big partition. Using Grand Perspective, I found that the biggest space-sucker on the old drive was ripped DVDs, so I transferred all of them to the new drive—regaining 95GB in the process! Kinda embarrassing to realize I’m that far behind in my movie-watching.

Last year I wrote a short ebook for O’Reilly called Your Life in Webapps. It covered some basics about the shape of webapps and how feasible it was for people to switch completely to a webapp lifestyle.

My conclusion at the time was that though it was technically feasible, it was not necessarily advisable.

Our esteemed colleagues at TUAW have suggested that UK-based Mac users might want to sign a petition calling on Tony Blair to:

prevent the BBC from making its iPlayer on-demand television service available to Windows users only, and instruct the corporation to provide its service for other operating systems also.

If only it were that easy. While the BBC is funded by public subscription, it is no more under the Prime Minister’s control than any of the commercial TV stations in the UK. Indeed, it has a history of winding governments and Prime Ministers up the wrong way, and there’s not a great deal they can do about it.

The cause is a worthy one, and any attempt to tie up content in MS-favourable DRM would probably be met with outcry. But this petition isn’t the way to deal with it.

So my advice to British Mac users with an opinion on this is not to sign the petition at pm.gov.uk, but rather to read, and respond to, the BBC’s own consultation document. Comments made there will have far more impact.

I upgraded BIAS Peak to version 5.2.1 today prior to doing a bunch of AIFF-to-MP3 conversions — and kept getting this wacky warning:

Apparently not all MP3s are equal.

Peak’s Save dialog has a checkbox called Auto File Type Extensions, which seems to be what’s causing the problem, but shouldn’t the program be smart enough to figure out that x = x?

Noted on Daring Fireball: Apple has posted a set of developer interviews from MWSF 2007 on its website.

My G5 tower crashed today, so I thought I’d reboot it from the Disk Warrior CD and clean out the demons. But first I had to get sneaky.

Holding down the mouse button so the CD tray would open on reboot, I hit the Mac’s power button. I heard the glorious startup sound, then…nothing. So I powered off again, slid the CD drive cover down with my finger, and poked a straightened paper clip in the tiny hole under the drive to open it. (It sounds ridiculous just reading this back.)

Plopping in the CD, I started up again while holding down the C key so the Mac would boot from the CD drive. And…nothing. Hmm. Had I damaged the drive by forcing it open?

So last night on “Heroes”, a blue iPod nano was featured prominently as part of the ongoing story. Take it as a given that much of Heroes requires a suspension of disbelief: people flying, villains eating brains to acquire superpowers[1], etc. Last night, though, stretched the credulity of some viewers to the limit.

Upon returning to the scene of a crime that had taken place the previous evening, an iPod nano was still blasting away its music the next morning. Either the reality of Heroes must operate in an alternate universe from the one we live in or that nano must have genetically-altered super batteries. You tell me. Was that nano “on the list”?

[1] Magically delicious!

When I first switched from Windows to Mac OS, I was an obstinate and arrogant young man who thought he knew all the answers.

Having spent the previous years working extremely hard to keep Windows stable and usable, I mistakenly took the same approach with Mac OS X. On starting to use it, I decided that I was the boss, and I would make the system work my way.

Wow. If you work with audio on a Mac, check this out. Audio Ease’s upcoming Soundabout displays a waveform preview when you highlight an audio file in the Finder or iTunes. With simple clicks and drags, you can then extract just the part you want, convert the file to an MP3, e-mail it, insert it at the cursor position in Pro Tools, and more. Just watch the demo movie; I bet you’ll be as dazzled as I was.

(The iSight commentary is clever, too, eh?)

Yeah, yeah. The Zune may be a miserable failure according to some, but there are definitely some positive points about the Zune that Apple should take note of and consider emulating. Here is my list of six lessons Apple might consider learning from the Zune and implementing in their iPod line.

1. Be fingerprint resistant. The soft feel of the scratch-resistant Zune casing is far more comfortable to hold texture-wise than the iPod. Also, it doesn’t make your hands sweat. It doesn’t show fingerprints. It doesn’t show scratches. It might not look as shiny, but it’s really nice to use. A soft-textured iPod would totally rock.

2. Offer menus with video out. The iPod does not export its menus out when you set it for TV display. The Zune does. This actually makes it easier to Zunecast over iChat than to iPodcast (you lose the video connection with iChat AV whenever you switch out of a playing video), and provides a far better experience when selecting and displaying videos while connected to a TV, which is the more obvious and typical task for video output display.

3. Consider two-dimensional browsing a la Twist menus. The Zune’s “twist menus” allow you to scroll up and down between individual items and scroll left-right to select categories. Sure, the Apple designers would make it look a lot better, and isn’t it nice to be able to get to where you want to be quickly without having to go up and down and up and down through menu trees?

4. Add context menus. I don’t know about you, but I kind of get annoyed with the whole “set the volume”/Click OK/”set the playhead”/Click OK/”set the song rating” sequence of mid-play interaction. I rather like the Zune’s overlay menu that offers context-sensitive operations, depending on whether you’re listening to music, watching video, playing the radio, and so forth. Apple should definitely take a navigation hint from this presentation.

5. Think about a built-in FM radio. The built-in FM radio is actually kind of cool, especially to a person who hasn’t listened to much FM radio for years. The display of the station, song, and artist (for stations that broadcast that information) is particularly nice for a included/free feature. No, Apple shouldn’t add a tuner if it would jack up the price, but for a low-cost no-brainer add-in? Very nice. (Update: Yes, I do use the FM tuner on the Zune a lot, and no, I never expected to!)

6. Give us a bigger screen. No, the Zune doesn’t have more pixels. (It’s still 320×240.) And yes, the overall form factor of the iPod is hand-friendlier. But the screen is big which is pleasant for watching, particularly on planes. Now, we just have to wait for Apple to introduce a pixelicious widescreen iPod without all that iPhone stuff cluttering up the device. A Superbowl or early-February special event announcement of this would be acceptable.

When WriteRoom 2.0 was released some weeks ago, I wrote:

The one change I’m less keen on is the way files are managed. In 1.0, all your files were saved automatically until you explicitly deleted them. On opening WriteRoom, every currently active file was opened, ready to use. WriteRoom 2.0 changes this behavior, and you now need to save files in a specific location and with a suitable filename before you can quit the app.

Now, having been using it for several weeks, I can see that Jesse Grosjean’s decision to change the way the app worked was the right one. Now, WriteRoom works more like every other application, and can open and save documents created elsewhere and in other apps. My head was stuck in a particular mode of working, and I couldn’t see the benefits of changing.

Since then, though, I’ve found the new method hugely useful. Normally, I’ll create a new piece of writing using my Idea Automator Workflow, and save it as a text file for later editing in TextMate. That still works fine.

But now I’ve also got a Workflow, saved as a Finder Plug-in, that opens any selected file in WriteRoom. The files I’ve previously created as text files can be opened up for full screen editing in a snap. Stuff which needs to worked on in a window still can be; stuff that needs some creative thought or imagination can be sent to WriteRoom for distraction-free concentration.

If you are humor-impaired, please skip the rest of this blog entry.

I stumbled upon what seems to me to be real first Apple Phone with a date patent listed as December 10, 1985 (more than a quarter of a century old) and filed in 1982. You’ll note in the diagram reproduced below that unlike the Apple iPhone introduced in 2007, the 1985 version was a flip-phone :-)

If you look at the patent, you’ll see that the Representation of an apple with a bite cut out is correctly noted as an Apple Computer, Inc. trademark.

Patent No.: Des. 281,686

A Nokia N800, yesterday

Years ago, I liked to think of myself as something of a cutting-edge journalist, armed as I was with a Palm III, a first-generation GoType keyboard, and an Ericsson SH888 phone handset.

I was able to cruise around London for press events and interviews, typing stuff up as I went along and filing it to my employers by email. It might sound trivially ordinary now, but at the time very few people were doing this; certainly not many of my colleagues in journalism.

Eventually I changed jobs and didn’t need to file copy from anywhere or anytime anymore. The Ericsson got upgraded for something less like an industrial stapler, and the Palm got archived away in a drawer.

But I miss that portable set up to this day. Now, I carry around a 15 inch PowerBook, a great machine in its own right; but I wish I had something a little smaller, and a little lighter, to carry around instead.

In recent years I’ve considered various options. Perhaps another, more up-to-date Palm device. Maybe an Alphasmart Neo, or a Dana. But nothing has yet been so appealing that I seriously considered buying it.

Not until this week, when I stopped to have a really close look at the Nokia N800.

I’m back from America’s largest musical instrument and software trade show, where the big software surprise was…the Pause button.

There were no major updates from Apple (Logic/GarageBand) or MOTU (Digital Performer). Ableton (Live), Digidesign (Pro Tools), Steinberg (Cubase), and Sony (Acid) were showing revs they released last year. Cycling ’74 had an unmanned kiosk. And Spectrasonics, a NAMM fixture for its powerful demos, stayed home.

No new Reason, but Propellerheads did play sounds from its upcoming Thor “polysonic synth.”

Of course, there were still acres of cool new music gear to fondle, and I’ll be sharing my favorites over on the O’Reilly Digital Media blog. But when I asked several developers privately about the dearth of new DAW software, they all said they’d been struggling with porting their code to Intel Macs. (The Windows developers, of course, have their own challenges with Vista, although Cakewalk did score a hit by announcing Sonar would be Vista-compatible this month.)

By all accounts, music software performance on Intel Macs is much improved; several musicians said their MacBook Pros outran even quad G5s. But as one programmer told me, “Everyone used a lot of workarounds to make things run in OS X, and those don’t work anymore on the Intel chips.” He predicted that within the next year or two, we’d see some major advancements.

Personally, I hope those advancements are in usability. At the annual Grammy Soundtable, it was striking how many of the top producers on the panel used multiple parallel DAWs to make their music. More than a decade after Opcode merged MIDI and digital audio in a single program, we’re still searching for the best flow.

I greatly respect Mark Pilgrim and have followed his writing for some years, but I take issue with his outburst on full screen editors over the weekend.

With these words:

Here’s the basic problem: you’re writing a text editor. Stop doing that. It’s 2007. Saying to yourself “I’m gonna build my own text editor” is as silly as saying “I’m gonna build my own build system” or “I’m gonna build my own amusement park.” Blackjack and hookers and all that. Writing a great text editor is insanely difficult. There is a certain class of software that sounds easy but is actually insanely difficult. I call it “garden path software.”

… Mark seems to argue that writing a text editor in 2007 is essentially a waste of time, because it’s been done many times before and there are plenty of excellent editors around already.

Um - try telling that to Allan Odgaard, creator of TextMate. Does Mark think Allan’s been wasting his time? Many purchasers of TextMate would say otherwise.

It’s been really interesting to watch all the discussion around the iPhone in both of the topic areas I cover for O’Reilly (Emerging Telephony and Mac Development). There was a very pronounced dip in enthusiasm among the blogs I read in both of these spaces, that started just about 24 hours after the announcement, when you could almost tangibly feel the glow starting to fade. I was at the Macworld keynote where Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, and there is certainly no disputing that he is one heck of a charismatic speaker and can do a great demo, but I don’t think we should discount that fact that a big part of the “wow” factor that spread so fast across the Internet was in large part due to the advances it looks like Apple has achieved with this product. And I’m mostly talking about interface advances.

The Mac developer crowd pretty quickly started realizing and anguishing over the closed nature of the device, which Apple has said we should think of more like an iPod than a computer. They have made it clear they want to completely control the interface, and are not particularly interested in third-party development. You’re probably not going to be seeing much iPhone coverage here on Mac DevCenter.

The telecom development folks are also upset that the device will not be open to customization and third-party apps, but they are also pretty upset about the Cingular lock-in and are let down by the apparently completely non-revolutionary aspects on the carrier side of things. Steve talks a big talk and he likes to use words like “revolutionary”, but I have to agree that what we know so far sounds like business as usual from the telecom/network side. And while that is disappointing, I think it was pretty unrealistic to expect Apple to chart new ground there, at least right out of the gate. They’ve got their hands full just getting into this ultra-competitive market, and the tides of telecom carriers are not something easily changed.

But what I remain excited about is the interface. Ted Wallingford sums up many of my opinions well in this post (which is a response to Ken Camp’s less-than-enthusiastic take on the iPhone).

I agree that the iPhone is NOT categorically revolutionary. But it does represent a number of firsts. The UI with multi-touch is obscenely cool, no question. And the graphical feedback on the phone I saw demonstrated by Jobs makes Nokia’s gear look antiquated. These may not be revolutionary, but I’ll take positive steps. The worst part of a cell phone has always, always, always been the UI. So I welcome these evolutions.

We like open things here at O’Reilly, and I doubt they’ll be any reason to be using the words “open” and “iPhone” in the same sentence any time soon. But I’m with Ted in welcoming significant interface improvements, and I couldn’t agree more that the worst part of cell phones is their UI. I’ve never owned a cell phone that had an interface I didn’t hate (I’m right there with you, Nat), and I’m ready for a device that improves upon that. Om Malik agrees that it is the interface improvements here that are important, and has some interesting thoughts on Apple’s use of fluid interfaces in general.

When Steve Jobs previewed AppleTV last September, I was hooked: this box had (and has) the potential to be “The One UI To Rule Them All:” a user interface both elegantly simple as well as sufficiently powerful to manage just about any type of media from the comfort of your living room sofa. I was pretty sure I’d get one as soon as it was released. But now that the actual specs of the AppleTV are out, I’ll skip on this revision of the device for three reasons.

I’m in decompression mode after a very busy Macworld conference and I thought I’d take this time to share a few of my most notable impressions from the show. The iPhone announcement, and resulting legal action by Cisco over the name, have been extensively covered here and all over the net, so I’ll skip over that, except to say that even with the apparently closed nature of the iPhone to outside development, the Cingular lock-in, and the hefty price tag, I’ll still buy one when it comes out. It was that cool. OK, moving on and in no particular order:

-Parallels is also cool, and getting cooler. They released the “Update Release Candidate for the Parallels Desktop for Mac” (how’s that for a mouthful?), which promptly won a “Best of Show” award. The new version includes improved USB 2.0 support and better drag and drop functionality between Windows and Mac OS X. Parallels enjoys widespread support in the Mac developer community, but things will get interesting as VMWare enters the market with a competing product. (A public beta is available now.) VMWare has been doing virtualization for years, will support many more OS options than Parallels, and may give Parallels a serious challenge in this space. Its interesting to note though that the two main things that the VMWare rep was bragging about in their upcoming product were the exact features that Parallels just added in their newest version.

-MemoryMiner looks really compelling, and was the most interesting software I saw at the show that I wasn’t already familiar with. It’s a digital story-telling app that allows for private and secure group annotating of photos and other media. Really nicely done, with a slick Google Maps integration for location info. If like me, you long to have better info and organization around the digital media that reflect your life’s experiences, definitely check this one out. It’s one of those programs that’s difficult to describe well, but you know what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words…

-Mac Office 2008 looked promising in the demo I saw. They are not just cloning the Windows version (the new Ribbon won’t be in it) but rather attempting to really make it more of a Mac app in look and feel. Thankfully, Microsoft isn’t really adding yet more features (and bloat) to Office with this upgrade, but rather making interface changes to make the existing extensive feature set more accessible. IMO, this is exactly what’s needed, and I especially liked the new Publishing Layout View, which looks like it will vastly improve the Word experience when dealing with columns, text wrapping around images, and other desktop-publishing sorts of uses.

-There are a LOT of vendors making iPod covers, boomboxes, and add-ons. I had no idea this particular cottage industry had so many players, but I guess with the rampant success the iPod has seen, this shouldn’t be surprising. Really, a lot. Seemed like every other booth was showing an iPod doodad of one sort or another. The strangest one I saw was the combo iPod external speaker unit/toliet paper dispenser. For the person who has to have their iPod with them at all times.

-Not much info for developers. As others have noted, Steve didn’t even utter the word “Leopard” once during his keynote. No new macs, no new versions of iWork or iLife, no updates on the next OS. This was pretty surprising, and disappointing to me. They were showing off some of the new Leopard features during the scheduled demos at the Apple booth, but nothing we hadn’t already seen from last year’s WWDC. (Check out Oliver Breidenbach’s take on this, he thinks we may have seen more of Leopard than we realized).

-Digital media was huge. The whole North Moscone section was devoted to digital media, and it was booming. This isn’t new I realize, designers and artists have long been heavy Mac users, but it was encouraging to see so much action in both the areas of digital photography and audio. O’Reilly has embraced this in a big way too, with a great line-up of new digital media titles. Check out our Digital Media site for more details and coverage on that angle of Macworld.

-Not much swag. These people don’t come to Macworld for free pens, mints, and frisbees.

Those are a few of my top-of-mind impressions from this year’s Macworld. For a much more detailed report of the keynote, check out Daniel Steinberg’s new Mac DevCenter article, Macworld 2007: 1984 All Over Again.

There’s been a lot of discussion in recent months about the likelihood (or not) of Apple releasing some sort of tablet computer. Some people think Apple should; others are convinced that Apple never will. After Tuesday’s keynote, I think we will see a Mac tablet of some sort or another. Let me explain why.

The key is Multi-touch. This technology is simply too good to simply be a UI trick for cell phones. Imagine being able to shift your files around in the Finder by touching and “flicking” them to different locations. Think how you could edit photos if you could use your fingertips to zoom in, touch up, move sliders around.

After a long day at Macworld and unwinding at dinner, I’ve come to the conclusion that we might have seen more of Mac OS X Leopard today than we realise.

I think we caught a glimpse of what Leopard is really going to be like with the new iPhone UI. It surely was a showcase for Core Animation and screen resolution independence if I ever saw one. Was it also a showcase for Mac OS X’s new look?

Oh, and one more thing: Wanna bet that when PC returns from his “major surgery”, he’ll be running Mac OS X instead of Vista?

I’ve been trying not to get too sucked into all of the latest hype about an Apple phone, I’ve been there before. But nothing can get the rumor vines really cranking like a highly-anticipated Steve Jobs Macworld keynote, and now on the eve of Steve’s big show we’ve even got the Wall St. Journal reporting an imminent Apple/Cingular phone announcement.

Russell Shaw wonders if the new device will cannibalize iPod sales, which I think it could if it’s good. As CNN Money rightly points out, if this new phone device is a real iPod, people will love it, but if it’s not, well we’ve been there before too. I’m pretty sure Apple isn’t going to throw another ROKR at us this time, so I’m betting that they get it right. I know I like the interface on my iPod far better than the interface on any cell phone I’ve ever owned, so I must confess that even though it didn’t make it onto my Macworld wishlist, I’m secretly hoping all that hype does pan out and we see a new take on a portable music player and phone device tomorrow that has me reaching for my credit card.

So much for not getting sucked in.

Not surprisingly, our great crew of bloggers here on Mac DevCenter have plenty of thoughts and opinions on what they’d like to see unveiled at Macworld next week. Here’s our rundown, and we’d love to hear your wishes too — just add them in the comments section at the end. And if you’re going to be at the show next week, check out all of the O’Reilly activities and make sure to stop by the O’Reilly booth and say “hi”.

The Year in Mac Development. Yeah, pretty exciting. What a ride, Dude.

Ah, and Apple says it was just the beginning…

I had an interesting (ok, that may not be the right word) opportunity to compare Apple and Dell support handling recently. The results may surprise you (I know I was surprised). My Dell Lattitude D600 notebook (about 2.5 years old at the time) had a sudden hard drive failure about 2 months ago. Last night, my 8 month old MacBook hard drive died just as suddenly. But, let’s see what happened after that.

Phone call delay: Both Apple and Dell kept me on hold for between 5 to 10 minutes. Not too bad.
Tech Rep: Both tech reps were male and based in the US. Ok, still similar.
Tech Rep Cordialness: Have any of you run into reps that are reading from some bad decision tree script? Fortunately, neither the Apple nor the Dell reps were among this group. Both let me tell them what diagnostics I had already performed and skipped the useless questions in the decision tree.

This is where the similarity ends.

Dell: The tech rep agreed with my assessment that the drive was dead and I had a new hard drive in 48 hours. They provided a label and box for me to ship my dead drive back in. I was up and running before heading home on Friday.
Apple: The Apple tech rep said the drive was probably dead but would not ship a drive to me. Instead, he insisted I go to the Genius Bar at a local Apple Store. Oh boy, I get to fight the crowds just a few days after Christmas. Just what I wanted to do after work (actually I had to leave the office early). He set up an appointment for me at 4:40pm.

Apple Store: The shopping center was packed. Fortunately, I found parking at the top level of the parking structure. The Apple Store was even more packed with a line to the cashier about 12 deep. The Genius Bar had just one iPod Genius and one Mac Genius. The appointment list displayed above them was packed. The harried Mac Genius had three dead or dying Mac notebooks of various types in front of him with a couple of small Firewire external drives. One guy came in after his appointed time and pushed the already delayed Genius’ schedule back even further. This fellow had a dying hard drive in his 5 year old PowerBook and a flight to Australia 6am Saturday morning. He ended up pairing up with a sales person and buying a new MacBook (good decision IMHO). The Mac Genius agreed that my hard drive was dead. Unfortunately, the Apple Store didn’t have any spare drives. So, I’m faced with a 7 to 10 day wait now.

I asked the Mac Genius if he could have Apple just ship me a drive directly and let me replace the drive (as I did with the Dell notebook). Unfortunately, there is a complete disconnect between the Apple Store Genius Bar and Apple Care. So, no, he could not help with do that.

I must commend Mac Genius Jason at the Ala Moana Apple Store, btw. He was a picture of patience and diagnostic efficiency in the face (literally) of a bunch of annoyed/depressed/anxious customers with Macs in various states of distress. The iPod Genius to my right was a similar picture with the distressed iPod owners he faced. Kudos to those Geniuses for really keeping their cool in a noisy environment with clearly distressed customers in front of them.

I left my MacBook at the Apple Store but am calling Apple Care when they re-open Friday morning to see if they can’t speed up this repair process. Surely, Apple’s fabled customer service should at least be able to match Dell’s? And, no I don’t have Pro Care, just the 3 year Apple Care extension. But, I don’t have a special Dell support contract either, just their 3 year extension.

One more thing (to borrow Steve J.’s line): The Dell Latitude only requires a single screw to be removed to remove the hard drive. The MacBook requires removing the battery, unscrewing three screws, and removing a metal strip before you can remove the hard drive.

So, is the PS CS3 icon a placeholder or not? My guess was that it was a placeholder. I was wrong. Scott McNulty of TUAW found out otherwise via John Nack’s blog. Veerle Pieters’ weblog has a full description of the two-letter mnemonic development along with interview questions about the choice with Adobe designer Ryan Hicks.

The debate that has risen up around iconography and the merits of what we’ve done taken in a broader context is impressive. The new direction is a bigger change than I think anyone in the public would have expected from us, change on that scale is going to be hard and of course there are those who will rise up and scream heresy. Honestly, we have been living with the icon system internally on our own machines for so long now that it’s a bit hard to remember what the big deal is. We’re as varied and hardcore a user group as will be found anywhere, we’ve found the stuff just works. Done.

Love ‘em? Hate ‘em? Me? I hate ‘em.

Since January of this long, very long year, Microsoft has been the target of all laughs and criticism. Vista is late, the Zune is a disaster, the company does not innovate… The list of all they do not do, in the eyes of the public, seems to grow daily. Yet, we seem to have forgotten to ask ourselves what we, in the Mac world, have done.

Congratulations to Phillip Ryu and John Casasanta for the runaway success of MacHeist. In just seven days, they sold more than 16,000 of their shareware app bundles with a gross revenue of almost $750,000 (estimate based on published $185,000 donated to charity representing 25% of the revenue). It surely exceeded everyone’s expectations and probably Phillip’s and John’s wildest dreams.

It is frankly astonishing to learn that Mac users are prepared to spend this kind of money on shareware apps if they are presented in an interesting way. It also shows that Mac shareware app developers could make a lot more money if they would band together. After all, this is about $75,000 per app in a single week and I am sure that not very many (if any at all) of the participating developers ever sold as much in a single week. In addition to that it seems that the regular revenue at least for us was not less than usual. So this really is on top. Those $75,000 would be a nice boost to our yearly revenue.

So what do we learn from it?

• Bundles of say 5 to 10 apps priced at slightly more than the most expensive app (a slight adjustment I would make to the current setup) are really appealing to customers and make it much more likely that they actually buy the product, even if they only imagine a marginal usefullness of the other apps in the bundle.
• Getting exposure is much easier for the bundle than for the individual app. If we can avoid building factions and get more developers to support this, the exposure could even be bigger.
• Advertising for such bundles would also be much more cost effective.

There are also a couple of points to give thought about:

• Although I got emails from many people claiming that they never bought “shareware” apps before and a very small number of the 18,000 people had previously been in our database, I think that MacHeist still did mostly reach the same kind of customers that we had before. Apple sells about 1.8 million Macs a quarter, so the 16,000 represent a bit less than 1% of the Mac sales of the Quarter. Or 0.2% of the year.
• 16,000 customers in just 7 days require a lot of handling and not everything on our side went smoothly, mostly because we expected much less. In addition, the increasing spamfileritis creates many problems in actually delivering the licenses to the customers.

So, how to move on?

I think a Mac Shareware Store is called for. A place where customers find interesting bundles, that has an affiliate system to reward developers who drive traffic to the platform, a system where people earn mileage points towards future purchases, accepts all kinds of payments and puts gift-card-like displays into the Apple Retail Stores. Add to that a MacUpdate/Versiontracker/Mac Products Guide like functionality and the talent of a Phillip Ryu and John Casasanta for marketing. Something like the Windows Marketplace.*

The economics of a place like that would have to be a bit different than that of the MacHeist, but instead of a one off pot luck shot it would probably be a solid business with a good revenue stream. To make it fair, the company could sell stock to the developers who list their products. 40%-50% of revenue could go to the developers, 20%-30% into marketing and advertising, 20% into operations and 10% into profit for the owners.

In fact it should be much like iTunes. An app pre-installed on all 1.8 million Macs sold in a quarter, with an editorial content, built-in download system and copy protection. You know, I always wondered what the “Mac OS X Software…” menu entry in the Apple menu is about.

* Before you fire up your flamethrowers: Yes, it does not have Phillip or John working for it; Yes, Vista is a Mac OS X rippoff; I just mention it because it is a basically good idea and has many of the attributes I would like to see in a Mac Market Place. Apple,… do …something!

Remember Mac OS X’s first high-profile security vulnerability? A very long time ago, when most of the Mac community still thought of UNIX as a promised land of security, stability and compatibility, when Apples were still blue and glossy, when the Dock was still wearing its stripy baby costume, it was discovered Software Update could be lured into downloading rogue updates from a malicious server. Panic ensued, as well as an update, that Apple promptly and dutifully issued. The Mac world was hurt but not defeated. Yet, that very issue that prompted so much frantic updating persists in a great many applications to date. Somehow, nobody seems to care.

Over the past few weeks, lacking anything of real interest to munch on, the Mac world has become ablaze with developer compensation. It started with TextMate, continued with Disco and reached an all-time height on Tuesday with MacHeist. A lot of people who all can claim to develop some piece of code or other publish lengthy articles detailing how, in their opinion, some individual company or person is ripping them or their friends off. There are, indeed, a great many interesting points surrounding the issue of developer compensation. What is an application worth? Is it fair that one guy who merely distributes a few lines of code in a zipped bundle gets more than someone who sweat blood writing the actual thing?

In the interest of fair and equitable reporting, I quickly wanted to note two other ideas I find very worthwhile:

• Child’s Play Day where a bunch of Mac ISPs donated a day’s earnings to a charity and raised $10,000 for Child’s Play. I wish I had paid attention to that when it came through the mac-sb list so that we could have contributed.
• The Real Week Of Inependent Mac Developers. Although it needs more than Mac developers buying each other’s apps to keep this industry going, it is worthwhile to consider that if you want other people to buy your stuff, you should be positive about buying other people’s stuff and paying them tribute.

Something is going on in Mac Developer Land. Factions position themselves, Flamethrowers at the ready. It’s about the Heist. Things are said and replied to and then the tone gets rougher. Is this becoming one of those religious wars that the Mac community is so famous for? Only this time it is good guys against good guys since Apple has taken away the bad guys to boot camp?

People need to calm down.

Here is how I see it: A couple of people got together to find out how to make money on the Mac software market. For themselves, of course. They are trying out ideas. Some are good, some are bad. Some work, some won’t.

Why do they do it? Nobody is exactly sure how to make money on the Mac market. Certainly, good products, good service, a positive attitude, adherence to the “standards” get you a solid business. But nothing spectacular. I mean nothing like a Google or Flikr or YouTube. When was the last time a Mac developer crossed the 50 employees threshold without being bought by Apple or someone else with already more than 49 employees?

I think this is because the group of customers a small developer can reach across the internet is a small proportion of the total Mac users and with the growing number of Mac users, it is also shrinking. Not many people are like you and me online all day surfing the Mac news sites and blogs on the lookout for cool new stuff to put on their Macs. Many more people occasionally go to a mall and enter one of the Apple Stores to spend a nice afternoon and being wooed into buying an iPod or an iMac with iLife. And that proportion of Mac users is growing. People who can help you to get to these people take a huge margin off of your profits. Reaching out to these unsung masses (Apple claims around 25 Million Mac users) is very tough for a small company.

So, new ideas are needed to draw attention. Many of those are not going to work, but we will only know when someone actually tries them.

Now, there is one point very prominent in this discussion: the money. Who makes what and why. You see, I don’t care how much money the MacHeist guys make, I care about how much my company makes and how the Heist brings us forward towards our goals.

Let’s see, if we sold 2,000 copies of FotoMagico in one day, we would have made $160,000. That would have been really cool. But usually we don’t sell as many. In fact, I think most of the 2,000 people who bought the MacHeist bundle on this first day did not buy it for FotoMagico and would never have bought FotoMagico separately. Many of them probably will never use it. Let’s base our assumptions on experience from direct marketing: According to that my gut feeling is that maybe 2% of the people are “real” customers and would buy FotoMagico from us instead of from MacHeist. So that is 40 today. And maybe up to a 100 until the Heist ends.

If you assume that we got $5k for our participation as was reported elsewhere, that is $50 for each license that we may have been able to sell in the same period on our own to the crowd of people buying MacHeist bundles. Not too bad. In fact it is a pretty good deal if you look at what we usually have to spend on advertising to sell a copy. And it gets better: our usual sales have not dropped off significantly and we got 2,000 additional customers who we can maybe convince later to buy other apps or updates from us.

It would be a different story if 5,000 people would buy the MacHeist bundle because of FotoMagico and become “lost” customers. And it would be quite a different story if we wouldn’t get some cash for the licenses.

And for the MacHeist makers: I don’t think they will get terribly rich. They may make some serious money on the Heist, but certainly not nearly as much as to make us jealous or feel ripped off. And you can’t say that they did not work hard to get their share. I know people who worked much less for a lot more profit.

The MacHeist crew has to be applauded for developing and testing new ways to market Mac applications. If they succeed, it may well be that this becomes a good revenue stream for Mac developers. Because if they succeed, the next time, the amount of money that we will demand will increase dramatically. And if it turns out that it was all not worth our while, we simply will have to mark it down as another way not to get rich.

Apple’s iPod is going to be immune to the Zune simply because Microsoft has not built an experience, just a beautiful, hobbled media player. Microsoft does not only need to play catch-up, they also need to build a complete experience and ecosystem that work together. That is not something they are good at.

This is what Paul Mison calls the “MacBook upgrade dilemma”. I’m in a position to buy myself a new portable Mac now, and I’m having a hard time deciding which one to get.

As many of you already know, CNET editor, James Kim, was found deceased yesterday, after being missing for 11 days. I didn’t know James personally, but as a writer working in the tech sector and living in San Francisco, it was hard not to feel his presence…especially if you are a lover of digital music. What I personally loved about his writing was that he was not only thorough but extremely passionate…and while we never met, you always seem to get a feeling for a person from their writing, and the personal touch they bring to their work.

If you want a great example of this, read his November 10th piece entitled Music Has the Right to Children.

A couple of excerpts:

“A few days ago, my four-year-old daughter asked me about “that gray thing” sitting atop an unreachable shelf. The gray thing turned out to be an old-school Sony dictation-style cassette recorder–the TCM-313 to be exact. For a (lucky) kid who’s handled everything from Disney’s Mix Max PVP to a PSP and who refers to little shiny gadgets as “iPods,” she had a surprising curiosity about this “mundane” analog device–and the antiquated removable media that went with it.

It required digging through dusty and forgotten artifacts to find an assortment of store-bought cassettes (The Cars!) and home-brewed mix tapes–some of which were created amidst the mid-’90s “rave” scene, others simply recordings, samples of voices, pretty sounds, and “things.” Predictably, she was much more excited by the latter.”

and

“New parents (and parents to be), if you own an MP3 player armed with a voice recorder, do yourself a favor: record your baby’s first sounds. Record your children’s voices, talking, singing, laughing, and being plain silly. Interview your kids. You’ll be astonished when you listen to these files later. I recently encountered a series of MP3s in iTunes generically ID’ed as “VOICE_040102, “VOICE_040125″ and so on, and after listening to my child’s voice from a couple years back, I value these files more than any other tracks in my bloated library.”

———

One of the things that saddens me most, is that while I knew James from his work, I never did get a chance to met him in person, which considering our geography, is an absolute shame. It would have been an honor to have known him. He was also a true hero who put his family first…always.

If you want to read a wonderful rememberance of James, Eliot Van Buskirk has a lovely tribute.

And if you want to give some type of donation to the family, you can do so here. I’d love to see O’Reilly readers step up and give something.

Also, if you are coming to tonight’s SFWIN event, we’ll be donating our proceeds to the family and are also happy to take any donations at the event.

The hoo-ha over Microsoft’s new Office 2007 default file format in Office 2007 seems to have calmed down a little, which is a great relief.

Of course people were going to get upset by headlines like “The lock-out begins for Office Mac users”, but in reality that was never on the cards in the first place. Microsoft is doing things the way it has always done; Mac users are not its first priority.

With the advent of the DMCA, content producers like record companies and movie studios are encroaching on the rights of ordinary citizens. How about us taking some of those rights back? There already is a digital consumer’s bill of rights out there that is reasonable, take a look at digitalconsumer.org’s example. It seems pretty straightforward.

Google loves me,
This I know:
Into bad sites
I shall not go.
In Safari, I may surf
But Google keeps me from bad turf.
Mac were made for fools like me
But Google keeps them malware free.

Click image for full-sized error message

My husband walks into my office. Bragging. “With any luck, my new 4.0 GHz machine will be installed in my office today. Probably before noon.” He practically swaggers with pride at this announcement.

I am staggeringly unimpressed by the news. “I don’t see what you’re so excited about. After all is said and done, you’re still stuck using a Windows machine.” I look meaningfully at my Mac.

The husband thinks for a while, grasping for reasons that this is a good thing. Finally, he replies, “Well, I can still do e-mail and web surfing on it!”

There was a fun thread at Ask Metafilter last week, prompted by a post from user aberrant who wanted to know: “How can I better enjoy my new Mac?”

Aside from the usual list of tips that you’d expect to see in a thread for Mac newbies (learn to use Apple+Q; there is no Registry, and you don’t need to defrag; Quicksilver rocks; etc), I spotted a few choice snippets of advice and opinion that I thought deserved a wider audience…

I love that I no longer even have to THINK about IE except when I’m developing web applications … I like TextMate. I absolutely adore not having to worry that the next patch tuesday is going to bork some system driver, and avoiding driver version hell is nice. — SpecialK

After using a Mac for awhile, going back to work on a Windows machine is pure, RSI-inducing hell, because you end up comfortably using your thumb to invoke the Command key on the Mac, whereas on Windows, the most frequently used keyboard shortcuts are invoked with totally un-naturally located Control key. — melorama

Take your time. the situation was good for me cause i had a windows box i used when i needed to get things done, and a Mac to play on. and after i certain amount of time i realized the Mac was where stuff got done. — [@I][:+:][@I]

What’s the one thing you always say to Mac newbies, or wannabe newbies?

A reader writes, “I have a 30GB iPod with video. I have eight televisions in my vehicle. I was wondering is there a way I can link my iPod up with my TVs so the movies on the iPod would play through the screens.”

Seems to me he’ll just need a video distribution amp, though he may need to cascade a few to get that many outputs. Any recommendations?

Sounds like a good cause: World Usability Day by the Usability Professionals Association. Pointing out and complaining about usability problems and the lack of focus on usability in most industries is fine but I sure hope they can also provide good examples and most of all: solutions.

I’ve got a relatively new MacBook Pro, and like many others I’m pretty amazed at how hot this laptop can get. I’ve been using Mac laptops for a long time, and I’m used to their warmth. Heck on a cold evening I’ve been known to practically cuddle up to mine on the couch.

But this one seems hotter than the others. I work from a variety of places (including my couch) and actually do fairly regularly use my laptop when it’s actually on my lap. And with the MacBook Pro I always need additional protection. (Does anyone else keep an especially flat pillow on hand in the living room for a personal laptop heat sink?)

So I was pretty interested to hear how people have taken the MBP fan controls into their own hands to combat the extreme heat problem. After reading an overview of the available fan control programs and installing a copy of CoreDuoTemp to easily monitor my system’s temperature, I was ready to start playing with my fan settings.

There are several programs to choose from, but a couple of positive reviews steered me toward FanControl 1.1, and there will be no turning back for me now. I like that it’s a System Preference pane — this seems like the logical place for this kind of program — and it offers the ability to set both upper and lower temperature thresholds. I’ll admit to initially being a little concerned about going down this road, as I’m pretty sensitive to system and fan noises and realized that I was likely looking at a tradeoff between heat and noise. But as soon as I started tweaking the settings and significantly cooling down my Mac, I realized just how hot and bothersome it had been. My laptop’s CPU temperature is now hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 30-40 degrees cooler than it was running before I took over the control of my fans.

I’m still playing around trying to find my ideal setting, and I do hear my MacBook Pro’s fans kick in a little more than I used to, but I’m finding the tradeoff well worth it. I’m going to get rid of that old flat pillow, and start cuddling up to my wife again for warmth.

.

This must be the best bug ever.

Back in 1999, we were hosting the Focus Online crew (one of Germany’s largest Online News sites) to stream the total eclipse happening over souther Germany. We are just starting to stream the video, when the webmaster’s mobile phone suddenly starts to get a flood of SMS messages. One after the other, their servers are collapsing from the enourmous traffic and hits they get. The webmaster looks at his mobile phone, smiles and says: “A job well done.”

The outstanding Hawk Wings blog on all things Apple Mail has a story about a sobering experience with Apple’s .Mac support. In a nutshell, a lawyer lost all of his Address Book entries after syncing with his .Mac account. He turned to .Mac support for help with restoring his data as, in his own words, “this is a very, very serious problem, with heavy consequences for me.” When the reply email from Apple pointed out that the data cannot be restored on the .Mac servers and that, generally, he should make back ups of his data, he threatened to sue Apple: “Should this happen again, not only would I lose any confidence in Apple’s .Mac service — I would also probably consider seeking reparation.”

Yes, dear computer-savvy reader who knows about the meaning of the two simple words “back up,” here’s yet another instance of that all-too-familiar story: “I never cared about backing up my business-critical data. And now that your product has caused the loss of that data, I’ll blame it all on you”.

Of course, the Address Book data shouldn’t have been lost during the synchronization process. Of course, those support emails should have sounded a bit more “human.” With a back up in place, however, there wouldn’t have been any need to ask for support in the first place. (Except, that is, for sending Apple a bug report to make them aware of the problem, which report is always a Good Thing™.)

Basically, all computer-related media — every website, every support forum, every podcast, every book, etc., etc., — restate over and over and over again that you must make backups of your data, because it’s a question of “when you will lose data,” not “if.” If there are still people out there who think they can get away without backing up, they must either be highly ignorant or highly irresponsible.

Then again, I recently heard from a developer — their product is a software solution for health care providers — that a survey had shown that a mere 4, yes four, percent of their users regularly back up their data. Important data. Sensitive data. In health care. Oh. My. Goodness.

It’s very difficult to think of the right words to state just how ridiculously obvious it is that losing important data is a disaster, and I am sure that there isn’t a single person among our knowledgeable readers here at Mac DevCenter who does not back up their machines. *hohum* Then again, if there is: shhhhhh, don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone. But, please, do learn about backing up your data, and then do make back ups. And regularly, too!

Dedicated back up software solutions like Retrospect or more affordable tools like SuperDuper offer automated, hassle-free, and reliable back ups, but even manually copying your personal user folder over to an external hard drive via the Finder is a major improvement over not backing up at all. All it takes is an external hard drive that currently should cost less than a Dollar per Gigabyte. That’s peanuts for the peace of mind that the photos of your kids, your vacation movies, your customers’ address information, the book that you’re writing, and all the other irreplaceably data on your Mac are safe.

Whatever approach you choose, back ups can — and will! — make all the difference between a major personal catastrophe and a fifteen-minute inconvenience.

If you have any tips to share about your own “best practices” for backing up your Mac, please share them in the comments. Thanks!

Apple apparently does not use the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) in its Intel chips. This is by and large good news since it means greater freedom for users. Apple could use this module to lock out music for example that was not bought on iTunes, or is not in a specific format, rendering a lot of illegally downloaded music unusable. While there are many in the music industry that might applaud the use of Trusted Computing, and while it is not illegal for Apple to do so, Apple has wisely chosen not to lock out its users.

An interesting post by Amit Singh here further describes how the TPM module is being used by Apple as well as an Open Source (Free Software) driver which allows users to take advantage of the encryption capabilities within the TPM.

Below are some salient points from the Executive Summary of the article:

Those of you who attended the WWDC in past years may know that James Dempsey singlehandedly holds up the fun that used to be part of WWDC before it got all business like and serious in 1998.

The past couple of years he wrote cool songs about technology which he performed at some random WWDC session. (There is a post including a recording of his 2003 hit “MVC” over at the ONJava Blog.) I discovered his latest song and cool music video through ADC on iTunes in the recording of Session 300 - Development Tools State of the Union which I have not been able to attend while in SF. If you have the Leopard Early Starter Kit (which means you are either ADC Select or Premier member) check it out!

I think Dempsey’s songs should be available for the general audience, they are just so hilarious and it sort of illustrates that making Mac software is this fun thing that even might make you some decent money. Apple should bring Dempsey and his “Breakpoints” into a studio, make a proper recording, have his visuals turned into a nice music video and post it to iTunes free for all ADC members including the free online membership.

Apple is promoting the new .Mac webmail. But, I don’t think it is enough to convince me to spend $100 (or $80 through Amazon) to renew my subscription. So, like others in this blog and elsewhere, I think I will vote with my wallet and leave.. .Mac is a great bundling idea and has some interesting features (including the Backup 3.0 software and Garageband Packs) that I made use of. But, with web hosts offering far more than 1GB storage, IMAP4 email, one-click web application installations, and (sometimes) Webdav for $5 to $10/month ($60 to $120/year), I don’t feel spending another $80 or so for services I rarely use or get more of already from my website hosting services. My other IMAP email services work fine and have webmail interfaces too. I hope Apple rethinks their .Mac offering and comes back with a compelling bundle. I’ll be happy return with credit card in hand if and when that happens.

It could be a stroke of genius: As you can see from the ATI web page, ATI and AMD are now called “The new AMD”.

If they pull this through as far as it can go, there will soon be Macs with both Intel and AMD inside. (In fact there already are, but you know what I mean - it may even be on the spec sheets or the package.)

In the end, did AMD buy ATI maybe just to get into Macs?

Over at MyDreamApp, the contest winners have been announced. First place was taken by an application called Atmosphere, a “near real time weather simulation,” conceived by Cameron Westlake.

Somehow, Atmosphere reminds me of SerenceScreen’s Marine Aquarium: while it has no productivity value whatsoever, it is so plain cool, and its graphics so stunning, that you just got to have it on your Mac, and I’m sure that, if the finished product looks anywhere near as beautiful as the mock-ups, it will be a major success.

As for the contest itself, I wasn’t really sure what to think when it was launched. Bringing together talented programmers looking for The Next Cool Software Idea and people with great ideas, but without sufficient time and/or skills to actually implement the ideas, makes a lot of sense. In the form of a contest, however, it has that feel of a one-off event.

Maybe the fact that this is a one-off event enabled the organizers to garner support from Mac luminaries like David Pogue, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Wozniak, and others, who may not have the time or motivation to support an ongoing exchange of ideas and coding skill. Also, those stunning mock-ups that you can find at the site may only have been possible because there was a limited number of ideas to be “mocked up.”

Still, I would love to see this concept be taken one step further: once Cameron’s Atmosphere app has been implemented, why not maintain as an ongoing process what was now a one-off contest? It would be great to see the MyDreamApp folks morph their website into an online community hub where average Mac users could put their ideas out into the open, and talented graphics/UI designers and Cocoa developers could pick those ideas that — as Eric S. Raymond has put it — “scratch a personal itch,” and turn them into software.

Until that happens, though: congratulations to Cameron and all the other finalists. Can’t wait to create some great Atmosphere on my Mac’s desktop soon!

Now, this is something very cool: ADC on iTunes. Apple finally decided to do something about the lame ADC TV, a service for ADC members to watch training videos. They moved it to iTunes where you can download the movies and watch them at your convenience. The first ADC on iTunes movies (Leopard Sessions from WWDC) are part of the new Leopard Early Start Kit.

Homes and other buildings shake violently not once but twice minutes apart on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. Electricity is cut off 10 minutes later. The cell phone shows it has a signal from the cell tower but can’t dial out for a voice call or get an EDGE data connection. The apparently lone surviving radio station plays a pre-recorded political panel discussion. No live human is on the air. The wireline phone still works but terminates to an all circuits busy message. Overhead, gray clouds roll over the valley.

An episode CBS’ Jericho TV show? No, this was Hawaii between 7:07am and 8am on October 15. Since my part of the world was safe and sound after the rocking and rolling, it seemed like a good time to take stock of the tech available to me, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and use what works to get by until things returned to normal (more or less). Here’s what I found… I use a familiar A to F grading system.

Law marketing consultant Larry Bodine had some problems with his new Mac. Now, some of his complaints sound pretty serious and I don’t blame him for wanting to deal with them.

But Larry, there’s a few things you mention that I thought maybe I could help you with.

Word files transferred from the Mac were missing pictures. PowerPoint files transferred from the Mac would lose their formatting. PCs and Macs are not compatible, regardless of what they say.

I don’t think that’s -

Doing a simple screen capture was an immense chore. On a PC you just press Alt and tap PrtScr. With the Mac I had to download and launch special programs to accomplish this simple task.

Ah, no, see there’s a useful little -

I didn’t even bother with the Mac’s iCal or Mail, which required me to buy an @mac.com address.

Um, Larry -

Instead, I went straight to Outlook for Mac. A lot of the software for Mac — such as AOL for Mac OS X — was dumbed down and missing may features of the current PC versions.

Larry?

For me the killer was the Web browser. Safari simply cannot read Flash. It is, quite simply, a second-rate browser.

Larry? Hello?

I don’t think he can hear me.

On the suggestions of friends, I downloaded Netscape and Firefox, which were no better.

Larrrrry??

I run several Web sites, all optimized for IE 5.5 or higher. I couldn’t operate my own Web sites with the Mac.

You know what? Never mind.

Wish me luck on selling the Mac.

That’s probably an excellent idea. Good luck, Larry.

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Thomas Friedman’s book The World Is Flat, I highly recommend you take a look at it. I personally consider it to be in the top 10-15 books I’ve ever read, and it has really changed the way I think and my perceptions about the world around me.

The World Is Flat is essentially a look at how various “flatteners” such as supply chain management, electronic commerce, open source software, the internet, and various other technological advances in the past 20 or so years have really flattened the global economic playing field and drastically altered the dynamics of how business and life get done these days. Even more exciting are the insights about the “untouchable” jobs in the future, commentary on topics that are still in the pipeline, and the opportunities that lie ahead. If you have concerns about a book laden with more politics than you want to read (perhaps like The Lexus and the Olive Tree), I think you’ll find this one to be much more enjoyable and easy to digest.

I’m currently attending the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Here are my thoughts so far…

—-

First, in case you are wondering what is Office 2.0, I’ll borrow a bit from their website:

“Imagine a computer that never crashes, or gets infected by a virus. Imagine a computer onto which you never have to install any application. Imagine a computer that follows you wherever you go, be it at school, at work, abroad, or back home. This computer does not exist today, but it will in the future, and this future might be much closer than you think.”

You can likely trace the original idea of this back to Larry Ellison’s 1996 pitch for the Network Computer. In case you weren’t working in tech then, the idea was that all data, whether documents or applications, resided on a server, and all computers were mainly gateways to that data. Terminals had minimal hardware and no actual software. There was a definite cost advantage to this and from an IT standpoint, a brilliant way to manage upgrades. Seems like a pretty good idea, but it failed to catch on.

And really, whoever thought that you’d store applications and files anywhere else than on your local hard drive?

That’s absurd.

—-

Flash Forward

We’re doing just that.

Data doesn’t care where it is stored and applications no longer need to be PC-centric. The tubes of the Internets have made it possible to literally run applications in browser windows, and we’re seeing a whole new emergence of online services built out to mimic software, with true drag and drop support and even links to external hardware.

The browser is no longer just for browsing.

So a slight correction I’ll make to the Office 2.0 intro above is that you should NOT imagine a computer that doesn’t crash…imagining a computer misses the point of Office 2.0 which is more about synchronization, collaboration, and managing workflow. In Office 2.0, what it means to be “online” is the new challenge we face. I think a lot of Office 2.0 companies are missing this point. They are rapidly creating online applications that without “connectivity” are useless. There is all this talk about web apps…but without the network (which still feels like it was slapped together with twine and duct tape), what’s the point? I’m not hearing enough here about connectivity…which makes me wonder…why aren’t there more telecom people here as speakers or on panels?

—-

The Online Office Suite

In one of Wednesdays sessions entitled, “One Day in the Life of an Office 2.0 Worker,” we were treated to a variety of demonstrations on how to bring your current desktop-based office suite of applications to a web-based suite of applications. To me this fundamentally misses many of the issues that I and others like me have with online applications. There are currently too many solutions and a lack of cohesion between them. Everyone seems to piecemeal twelve different online solutions to make one thing work. It is maddening.

In addition to this it seems that everyone is trying to recreate every single desktop app into an online app, and quite frankly, that simply doesn’t make sense. Certain tasks will never run better over the web than locally on a computer.

If there is a bubble to the Web 2.0 economy, it is this. It reminds me of the last internet boom when just because some companies were seeing success selling products online, companies all of a sudden decided they could sell 50lbs. bags of dog food online at a loss. Let’s not go overboard here.

We’re creating more and more applications that require more and more CPU cycles, more RAM, more storage. What we haven’t done enough of is creating seamless connectivity. We’re easily behind almost every Asian country…I can’t even get a decent cell phone signal in my neighborhood and I live in the bastion of high tech, San Francisco.

Can you hear me now?

It is all about the network, stupid!

—-

What Office 2.0 Needs

The challenge with Office 2.0 in my mind really comes down to several things.

1. Whether cell phones, wi-fi devices, or computers, easy access to the same data is a major milestone we need to fix. My cell phone cannot view the same data as my Pocket PC, and my Pocket PC cannot view the same data as my laptop. How we get to our data is every bit as important as the data itself.

2. Why can’t I get a seamless link between my business/personal contacts and my cell phone/Computer/web service? Synching should never be a decision. Changes should occur across all my devices and services as they happen, and not require human interaction. Why do we have Caller ID, but our phones don’t utilize it to create automatic Address Books? I want my gear to program itself. All I want to do is approve what goes in and what gets deleted.

3. Online storage is silly. A whole gigabyte of free storage. WaHooooo! I’ve got 1Terabyte at home and 2GB of files I regularly access on my laptop. The idea of paying monthly fees for online storage I can get for less in a physical drive, doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think this issue is not one of value-added storage as a business model (which I still find crazy), but one of connectivity. Online storage is less important to me than access to the storage I already have. Solve the connection issue and not the storage issue.

4. Speed is certainly a problem. We’ve grown accustom to clicking a button and an instant action occurs. There is often a delay between what you want a web app to do and when it actually happens. There are currently too many variables that affect this, including who makes the device, who provides the connection, and so on.

5. Reliability. My laptop is certainly more reliable in many respects to a web service. Getting to your data is reliant on your device manufacturer, the network you are on, numerous providers along the way, the company holding the data, and their providers. If any aspect of that link fails, you are without your mission critical data. As we saw in a demo today (Gmail was temporarily down), that result can be a big fat goose egg. If you are doing a presentation on the benefits of Office 2.0, rather embarrassing.

6. Who do you trust with your data? I’m sorry but having my entire business and personal life one subpoena away from whoever wants to look at it is a bit scary. These companies and my data are also privy to disgruntled employees and hackers.

7. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. I think there are a lot of companies recreating applications that simply work better as a local application than as a web app. Look to the past to see when a “good idea” is not necessarily a good idea.

8. Migration. If I trust a service and put my data on it and I’m not happy with it, it is often very difficult to migrate that data to a new service.

—–

If Wishes Were Horses…

My hope for Office 2.0 really comes down more to collaboration/connectivity and less reinventing applications for the web. Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian had a good comment during the Managing Blogs & Wikis in the Enterprise session yesterday. He mentioned that we will not likely see people using online office suites to work in Office 2.0 (contrary to what most online office suites will have you believe), but instead our existing localized applications, like Word, will simply become the gateway to Office 2.0. I think he’s right.

People want to work on what they are comfortable using. Some people use Word, some text editors, me…I use an email client. The key is not building a web app to replace what I love…but enabling what I love to connect to Office 2.0.

Rafe Needleman shares my pain:

“Me, although I write about Web-based applications all the time, I confess that I’m probably at Office 1.25. I still use Microsoft Word and Outlook, and I store all my files on my local hard disk. I use Web tools for collaboration, and I am eager to move to Office 2.0 apps, but it’s hard to break my old habits.”

Again…I think Office 2.0 is more about connectivity/collaboration/synchronization than online “applications.”

—-

Finally

One of the most astute observations came from Esther Dyson during her keynote. She referred to wikis (and I feel it applies to the world of Office 2.0) as there were a lot of nouns but no verbs…essentially that while a great knowledge base (or cloud) exits, there is not a lot of automated action occurring based on that information. What good is information if it just sits there?

I’d like to amend what she said a bit to the whole Office 2.0 environment and state that there are an awful lot of words, but not enough language. We’ve got a lot of tools, but we need to tie them together.

Office 2.0 has a lot of promise, and many of the ideas here at this conference are wonderful. However, until we work out the entire connectivity and collaborative aspect, like the Network Computer, it seems like a good idea going nowhere.

Writing Getting into your head for the Chicago Tribune, Jon Van says that IBM is working on technology that will allow your cell phone to know where you are and for other technology to respond intelligently according to your location. He writes:

“The system will combine knowledge about where someone’s phone is with his calendar schedule, sending incoming calls to voice mail when he’s in a conference. Eventually, the system may turn up his home heating system 10 minutes before he arrives.”

If you’d like to dabble with this idea now, albeit in a form that’s “limited” to your own home, it’s easily accomplished with a Mac and some home automation software.

In Smart Home Hacks, Hack #54 and #57 describe two ways of having your home lights turned up. and your home stereo switched on, before you arrive home from work. The first one is written by Michael Furguson, author of XTension, and describes how to use driveway sensors that are a lot simpler than you’d think. In the second hack I describe how I integrated the HomeLink transmitter in my Nissan with both my garage door and home automation setup.

Hack #35 tells you how to have your computer automatically forward your home phone to a different number based upon your schedule. In the book it’s written for PC users by Jon Welfringer, but the concept of using a little scripting and dialing numbers with a modem, in order to set your phone company’s forwarding options, is easily portable to a Mac.

And starting on page 257 (Hack #70) is a technique for knowing who is at home, and having your house respond accordingly. I use this one myself; my alarm clock doesn’t go off on holiday or weekends–or at all if I’m traveling–thanks to my home automation system knowing whether or not I’m present.

Finally, don’t forget about the Salling Clicker. If you’ve got a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone, not only can you remotely control your computer, your computer can know when you’re within 30 feet and automatically get busy before you sit down.

All these projects are great fun, and you’ll be ready for the future that the Trib article describes, whenever it finally gets here.

When I first heard the news that Eudora as we know it was going to be replaced by a free, open source version based on Mozilla Thunderbird, I felt a twinge of sadness.

Although I don’t use it anymore, I spent many years using Eudora on Windows and Mac operating systems, and always considered it one of the finest email tools around. And that was until very recently.

Yes, the OS X version of Eudora looked like something fossilized from a previous era. But it worked. And it worked so much faster than almost anything else around. Nothing was as good at searching through huge mailboxes. Nothing offered the same degree of tweak-tastic flexibility.

The thing is, Qualcomm was working on a Cocoa version of Eudora. At least, that’s what they told me. In May this year I got in touch to ask them about it outright - I’d heard the rumors and I wanted to see if they were true.

This was the reply I got back:

Due to a variety of factors, the Cocoa version is taking far longer
than we’d planned.

We do not yet have a date for the Cocoa release but the plan will
incorporate the new features of SpotLight, WebKit HTML
display/authoring and the Universal binary. We just can’t say
anything more about it right now.

I hope you can hang in there while we reconstruct Eudora for today’s Macs.

My trusty laser printer, an Apple LaserWriter 12/640, has been out of commission for more than a week. Every time I tried to print the paper would get jammed up, accordion-like, between the toner cartridge and the fuser. Oh, dismay! I’ve had the printer more than 10 years, it’s the second-to-last laser printer model produced by Apple and its a major workhorse. It has reliably produced over 10,000 pages from its Genuine PostScript, 600DPI, 64MB RAM-equipped innards.

I’m handy with software, but laser printers are mechanical, messy, and mysterious to me. So I called all over Chicago loo