So the new replacement HDTV set arrived yesterday, and all seems to be well. It’s so many lightyears of wonderfulness beyond anything we had with our old Quasar–and it’s very, very flat. My husband, about whom I shall shortly say more, kept pointing out to my youngest guy how if you look at the TV set sidewise that it’s so thin that it practically disappears.

More after the jump…

In addition to the “Mac OS X State of the Union” video (as noted a week ago), Apple has made another video from WWDC 2006 available to ADC subscribers with just the free ADC Online Membership.

Where last week’s OS X video was mainly targeted at developers as it focused on highly technical details of Apple’s operating system, the new video titled “IT State of the Union” gives a higher-level view on Apple’s offerings for IT users in corporate and education environments.

To download the video, go to ADC on iTunes and log in to have iTunes show you the way to the the ADC section of the iTunes Store. You will find the new video and the accompanying slides under the left-most tab.

Notice, by the way, that there was an interesting change of names: that left-most tab has been renamed from “Mac OS X State of the Union” to “Online Member Videos.” Let’s hope that this means more ADC videos that do not require a paid ADC subscription will be added to that section in the future.

The BBC, our beloved public service broadcaster, has been leading the pack in terms of web content for years. It has been offering a free “Listen again” service over the web for all its radio output for some time now, and everyone’s been wondering when it would do the same for TV.

That time has now come. The BBC Trust today gave a green light to the initial plans for BBC iPlayer, opening a consultation period during which those with an opinion are asked to offer their views. They can do so by downloading the proposals document and answering a questionnaire - both of which can be found at the Trust web site. Responses have to be in by March 28.

The important part of the document, as far as British Mac users are concerned, is on the second-to-last page:

The seven-day catch-up over the internet proposal requires users to have a up-to-date Microsoft operating system for full functionality. Review the provision of this service on a platform-agnostic basis (or across major platforms) within a reasonable timeframe and subject to value for money considerations and as technology allows.

Nice to see an update to Notae, bringing a bunch of welcome new features to this notes- and snippets-storage app. It now supports web archives and PDFs, better tag navigation, and a Quick Note feature. In this new form, it competes more directly with Yojimbo. By way of a super-quick test, I important imported (ahem) all my Yojimbo notes into Notae 2 and did some messing around; Notae’s search is noticeably faster, in my opinion.

There’s also an update for SubEthaEdit, which is pretty much all about tabs. For those of you who’ve been crying out for more tabs everywhere you look, this is good news indeed. Funny; for years I craved more tabs in all the apps that didn’t have them, but when they appeared (in editors, mail clients and the like) I found I never used them. TextMate remains a strictly one-document-per-windows experience for me. Anyone else out there not fussed about tabbiness?

Finally, and spotted via FreeMacWare.com, there’s PagePacker, a desktop app that produces a neat design-your-own fold-up Hipster PDA that you can clip into your new shiny orange iPod shuffle. Remind me: how did we survive before iPods?

You know, when your nose is buried in shell scripts and webserver config files, it still sometimes takes you by surprise how ingrained in the culture the iPod — and by extension, Apple — has become.

Take this Jayson Stark article on ESPN.com, “Greatest hits, in the palm of your hand”. I enjoy reading the bullet points in the voice of Fred Armisen doing Steve Jobs. ;)

It’s hard to say exactly which moment it was that we realized the iPod had taken over our entire civilization. But it might have been this one:

The day we first heard, last summer, that baseball players were using their iPods to do their pregame video studies — as opposed to, say, their pregame Shakira video studies.

What we have here, friends, is one of history’s most amazing gizmos ever. Name any other invention of all time that you can use to:

• Listen to every song ever recorded by Green Day.
• Watch the last 77 episodes of “24.”
• Show off pictures of your kids.
• Hear actual ESPN.com employees yelling at each other through the miracle of one of our inimitable (thankfully) ESPN podcasts.
• Play Sudoku.
• And sort through every at-bat Todd Helton has ever had against Armando Benitez.

So last night I recorded Heroes in High Def, without incident. It seems as though my EyeTV Hybrid likes certain channels (like NBC) and hates others (like CBS). I live inside the city, very close to most of the transmission towers, which are all compass-wise in the same direction, so I cannot guess why some channels beat others for receptions.

The recording occupied about 7 gigabytes of MPEG-2 transport stream data. I attempted to load it into MPEG Streamclip, but Streamclip could not handle the 7 gigabytes on my 1 GB 1.66 GHz Intel core duo mini. It coughed, it gagged, it wheezed, it gave up the ghost. So I decided to edit the show in EyeTV instead.

This turns out to have been a horrible decision.

(More after the jump…)

Reader J.H. asks: When you use Visio on the Parallels Desktop, is operation of Visio as good, smooth and fast as using it on Windows XP? I tried Visio once on Virtual PC and found it unsatisfactory. Visio is the main reason my office
is not a Mac office.

J.H., out of courtesy, asked for a simple yes/no answer. Unforunately, I wanted to provide a bit more detail :-).

Virtual PC for the Mac was slow for a couple of reasons. First, it is an emulation solution. It actually had to emulate an Intel CPU to run the Windows code and application code installed on top of it. Second, it is pretty clear that the PowerPC G4/G5 processors were definitely slower than the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo commonly found in most Intel Macs out in the wild today.

Parallels has the advantage of being a true virtualization option that works directly on an x86 architecture. Moreover, the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo (and Xeon Woodcrest) have the Intel-VT virtualziation assistance built into the hardware. Basically, virtualized OSes including Windows XP and Linux fly on it an Intel Mac running Parallels Desktop for Mac.

The, BUT…, comes into play if you bought an Intel Mac early in the release cycle and didn’t bump RAM up to 1GB or more. I would hesitate to run Windows as a Guest OS on a 512MB MacBook, for example. However, if you have 1GB or more of RAM, set Windows XP SP2 with at least 512MB RAM for its virtual machine and Visio and other apps seem to run pretty fast to me. Combine that with Parallels Coherence mode that lets you run Windows applications in what looks like its own window under Mac OS X, and the experience feels nearly seamless (Windows apps menus always are Windows-like vs. Mac-like, of course).

So, if you have at least 1GB RAM on a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo (not so sure about a Core Solo in the original low-end Intel Mac mini), you should be able to run Visio and other Windows applications comfortably using Parallels Desktop for Mac.

The much-linked UK Get a Mac adverts are a work of genius. Not because of the scriptwriting, but the casting. Those two guys are David Mitchell (PC) and Robert Webb (Mac), a comedy double-act with a cult following here in the UK. Their Peepshow series, about two self-obsessed flatmates called Jeremy and Mark, who have very similar characters to PC and Mac, is one of the funniest things that’s been on telly in recent years. They’ve also done sketch shows on TV and radio.

From the Peepshow series notes:

On the surface, Jeremy and Mark are quite horrible people; underneath they’re even worse.

See? Even their old characters are just like computers. Excellent.

A host of European countries are concerned about iTunes music downloads and how they only play on the iPod. The latest to speak up is Holland where the Dutch authorities have said;

“What we want from Apple is that they remove the limitations that prevent you from playing a song you download from iTunes on any player other than an iPod. When you buy a music CD it doesn’t play only on players made by Panasonic. People who download a song from iTunes shouldn’t be bound to an iPod for the rest of their lives.”

So I’m still working on figuring out how to streamline the process of exporting from EyeTV into iTunes. Yes, in theory, you should only have to click iPod or Export let EyeTV do all the work. A few problems though: (1) I’m running EyeTV under a nonstandard version of the operating system (of which, I cannot say more without the Apple death squad visiting) and the Export/iPod functions simply do not work; and (2) EyeTV exports H.264/AVC 320×240, MPEG-4, which is not nearly the resolution I want to display on my upcoming AppleTV. So that leaves me working with things in a much more roundabout fashion.

So I thought, well, I’ll just use MPEG Streamclip to export my video. Normally I use QuickTime Pro to create my iTunes video. So I opened up a video I’d recently converted, made sure I matched all the settings between the Streamclip output and the QuickTime output–same bitrates, audio, frame size, etc. I dove into the EyeTV bundles, created an alias for the raw MPEG-2 transport stream data, loaded it into Streamclip, converted it, and loaded it into iTunes, where it played fine.

And then I tried to sync my iPod. Bzzzzzzzzzt. No go. No luck. No how. Even though I kept every setting the same, even though everything seems to play identically in QuickTime, I apparently created a file that wasn’t “blessed” enough to sync to my iPod. So I googled a lot. And I found out it wasn’t just me. QuickTime just seems to be able to exceed the 768 kbps, 320×240 official specs, but Streamclip can’t. See this video info? It syncs perfectly to my 30GB video iPod. And that’s 1655.78 kbits/sec. By my reckoning (checks on fingers a few times) 1655 is bigger than 768. But when I try to sync a non-QuickTime file on iTunes, I get the dreaded “Your video cannot be played on this iPod” message. Grrrr!

So I decided to try converting with QuickTime instead. And this is a good example of barrelling forth with things about which you know better, but you get into a wrong thinking groove and then have a simpsonesque D’oh moment after. I decided to use Streamclip to convert the transport stream into a normal MPEG-2 file. It’s fast and it’s easy, even though it takes up extra disk space. I loaded it into QuickTime, I exported to “iPod”. And there was no sound. D’oh! Damned multiplexed audio. I should have known better.

Now, it’s not as if I can’t export directly from Streamclip, keeping the settings to 320×240 and under 768 kbps and it will (in fact it did during my tests) sync to the iPod, but what’s the point of playing 320×240 video on a 720p display–which is the intended endpoint of this exercise? So here’s what I ended up doing for now:

Standard Def video: Open the EyeTV transport stream file in MPEG Streamclip and export to standard 320×240 iPod video.

High Def video: Open the EyeTV transport stream in MPEG Streamclip, export to a reasonably sized 16:9 format like 720×405 or 640×360. Open the converted video in QuickTime Pro and export using iPod settings.

Clearly, I’ve still got a ways to go here. I’m really hoping that the upcoming versions of QuickTime and iTunes hinted at in the AppleTV specs offer better video conversion and syncing capabilities to take better advantage of homebrew video resolution.

I’m also looking forward to some real highdef content over at the iTunes Store, but that’s a whole ‘nother matter.

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.

Welcome to another week’s edition of Friday Napster Freebies. These free downloads are in un-DRM’3d MP3 format and can be accessed from around the globe. So load ‘em up on your iPod or other portable music player and enjoy!

“Weekend Warriors” by A Change of Pace
These Peoria, Arizona high-school buddies share a love for pop-edged alternative rock that has led them to the Warped Tour and touring stints with groups like Senses Fail. This track is from their recently released sophomore album, Prepare the Masses.

“Senorita Mia” by Louie Cruz Beltran
“I was born to play congas. I am a rumbero,” declares this Bakersfield, California percussionist. His love for Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican rhythms has led him to perform with heavyweights such as Santana and Coke Escovedo, his mentor. Today’s free download is from his album It’s My Time.

“Elephant Gun” by Beirut
Led by high-school dropout/musical prodigy Zach Condon, Beirut combines musical styles ranging from indie-folk and lo-fi rock to Eastern Euro gypsy. This track from their new EP, Lon Gisland, offers more of what made them one of 2006’s surprise success stories.

“If You Could Read Your Mind” by Clinic
This quartet from Liverpool has been winning over shoegazers and critics alike since 1997, creatively flavoring their indie rock with a strange, sour beauty (they’ve even toured with Radiohead). This track is from their latest effort, Visitations.

“Keep on Lovin’ Me” by Bleu Collar
This Los Angeles-based hip-hop group comprises MCs Reese One and Basik, and as their collective name suggests, they’re not afraid of working hard to build a following. When not rocking sold-out shows, they’re recording tracks like this one from their forthcoming EP.

“Kiss Your Soul” by Jon Quesnel
Jon Quesnel (pronounced Ka-Nell), a 22-year-old from suburban Minnesota, has a passion for soulful melodies and plies them with a disarmingly powerful voice. Today’s download is from his debut album, Packin’ Up My Bags.

“Told You So” by The Guggenheim Grotto
Already a hit in Ireland, this track from the Grotto’s critically acclaimed debut album, …Waltzing Alone, demonstrates their deft blending of contemporary folk and pop styles.

I’m beginning to see all kinds of innovative uses of Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) pop up around the net, and here’s a neat one that I’m going to try myself. The problems that Matt Thommes is trying to solve around his iTunes music are the same problems I’ve been grappling with myself.

There are three things I wish to accomplish:

1. Eliminate the limit on my music storage capacity.

2. Access my music from anywhere in the world.

3. Access my music directly from iTunes on my laptop - not with an iPod or external digital music device.

I’m a big fan of iTunes, and when I made the leap (and the significant effort) of ripping my music library and beginning to use iTunes as my primary interface for finding, selecting, and listening to my music, I’ve never looked back. It’s just such a more powerful and flexible method for accessing and enjoying a large library of music than dealing with hundreds or thousands of individual pieces of media. (I’m not however an equally big fan of the iTunes Music Store and the associated DRM, but I’ll save that rant for another post).

Matt describes a method for storing your iTunes library on Amazon’s S3 service, effectively solving all three of the stated problems. It looks easy to set up, though the cost is not insignificant. At Amazon’s plan of 100 GB of storage plus 1 TB of transfer for $6.29/month (on a 1 year contract), I’ll spend around $75/year for this service See Updates below. But it may very well be worth it. I’ll report back on my experiences.

Update: As Chris points out in the comments, I grabbed the wrong pricing info for S3 from a hastily read comment to Matt’s original post, that pricing was actually for a cheaper online storage alternative from GoDaddy. Amazon’s S3 pricing structure is a pay-as-you-go scheme costing $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred. This makes it tough to predict what the actual costs of hosting my iTunes library would be there, since it’s dependent on how much I listen to it. But clearly, it would end up being a lot more than $75/year for a 100GB library that gets used regularly. Thanks, Chris!

Update 2: After reflecting on the comments here and having a couple of conversations with people much smarter than myself on these matters, I’ve come to the conclusion that this really isn’t a practical idea for two important reasons. First, the chances seem very slim that the performance would be acceptable, and several people who have tried managing large iTunes libraries over the internet have reported to me that iTunes hasn’t performed well in this scenario. Second, S3’s pay-as-you-go data transfer plan, while very attractive for some types of applications, isn’t really a good option for using S3 as a remote hard drive that you’d be accessing quite regularly. I’d be willing to consider a reasonable flat fee for this kind of convenience (assuming it worked well), but the idea of having to think about how much it is costing me to listen to my music, and having that cost be variable and dependent on how much I listen to, has dampened my enthusiasm for this idea. So I guess I’m blushingly reneging on my promise to set this up and report back.

Here’s a summary of Mac Freeware & Free & Open Source Software (F/FOSS) discussed last week in my personal blog.

Renamer4Mac
This Mac OS X freeware lets you use pattern matching to quickly rename a large number of files.

Renamer4Mac

It lets you preview the effects of the pattern search and change before executing it.

Dia - Open Source Diagramming Tool for Windows & Linux
I have to admit that I like Microsoft Visio and prefer to use it when a licensed copy is availble. However, if one is not available for you, you might want to take a look at the Open Source diagramming tool…

Dia

It is available for Linux and Windows (no Mac OS X version from what I can tell). Has anyone ported this to Mac OS X? Or is there something similar in the Open Source/Freeware realm for the Mac?

Mozilla SeaMonkey 1.1
The SeaMonkey community at Mozilla.org announced the release of…

SeaMonkey 1.1

SeaMonkey is the offshoot of the all-in-one Mozilla Suite that included a browser, email client, HTML editor, and IRC client in a single unit.

I prefer using Mozilla’s Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client myself. But, I’ve recommended SeaMonkey to a few people who liked the old Mozilla all-in-one format.

Here’s a link to the SeaMonkey What’s New page.

OpenOffice.org 2.1
OpenOffice.org version 2.1 was released a few days ago. You can find the Release Notes here. This Open Source office suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, database, and drawing program.

It uses the OpenDocument XML file format as its default file format. However, it can read and write Office 2003 or older Microsoft Office files. I’m guessing that it cannot (yet) read the new Office 2007 file format.

Note that if you plan to run it under Mac OS X, you…

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.

Download copies from https://www.apple.com/support/manuals/. There are two manuals: a general users’ guide and a more involved “Designing Airport Extreme 802.11n Networks”.

I immediately jumped to the bits about setting up a remote USB disk, which seems like the feature I’d like to use the most. Didn’t see much about port forwarding.

Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to really go through anything in detail and it’s late and I need to go to bed. I just wanted to get the news out tonight so you eurofolk and eastcoasterian types could enjoy reading through the docs.

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

So the new HDTV arrived yesterday afternoon and was back at Costco before the day was out. The LCD display was corrupted. Phone calls and internet seraches suggested it wasn’t fixable. A Costco rep told me to return it to a store and reorder online, which I did. Curiously enough, Costco can not credit purchases back to a credit card. You must take cash or a Costco Cash Card in exchange. Which brings up nefarious opportunities for anyone looking to earn frequent flier miles on their credit card. (I use a normal card, with no special deals on it.) On the bright side, even the standard definition TiVo output looked marvelous on the thing and having composite-in looks like it was a very good choice. I never got a chance to hook up the Mac Mini though during all the trouble-shooting.

In the meantime, I’m still struggling to create a workflow for EyeTV to MPEG Streamclip to iTunes. I need to design a way (probably through AppleScript, but I’m open to other suggestions) to search through all my EyeTV recordings to see which ones are new, and to convert them into MPEG-4 overnight and get them into iTunes. The “see which ones are new” is the easiest part. Since all EyeTV recordings are bundles, I just have to “touch” a file in each bundle after converting to MPEG-4. What I’d really like to do is edit out all the commercials from a bunch of recordings at once and then schedule the conversion as a queue of jobs. It’s not yet happening.

I continue to have problems recording ATSC shows in their entirety using the EyeTV. Shows, which I know are entirely free-to-air, keep breaking in the middle with a warning about being “Encrypted”. Very frustrating, especially since I want to be able to use the Mini/EyeTV as the TiFaux for AppleTV and the HDTV set. My HDTV antenna is a couple of years old, but I can’t imagine that technology has changed all that much in this time. Is there something I’m missing here?

There’s a cool Mac educational contest just kicking off over on Macinstruct. The Tutorama contest invites individuals to submit educational tutorials on anything related to Apple hardware and software products. They’re looking to find the most innovative and creative step-by-step tutorials, video podcasts, Flash movies, and computer-based trainings on Mac-related topics. There’s over $4,000 of prizes including iPods, books personally-signed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and a Mac Mini. Judges include No Starch Press publisher Bill Pollock, Macworld Senior Editor Dan Frakes, former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, and award-winning author Robin Williams.

These kind of contests can be a win for everybody. The general public gets to find out about great tutorials they might not have otherwise found or heard of, and the tutorial developers can get some nice goodies as well as greater exposure for the best work. I’ll keep my eye on this one and report back here on the winners.

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.

The Apple Xserve RAID now ships with 750GB drive modules, which increases the maximum capacity of each RAID unit now to 10.5TB. While that’s certainly great news, there’s one other part of the update that might not be as pleasing to fans of the fibre channel storage devices.

As part of the update, Apple also released Xserve RAID Admin Tools 1.5.1, which includes a new RAID Admin utility and the new firmware needed by current units to recognize the newer drive modules. The surprising change is in RAID Admin, which no longer has a LUN Masking configuration option.

I spoke with Apple Enterprise support and heard that LUN Masking is no longer a feature of the Xserve RAID, but that any LUN masks already present would be preserved even after using the new RAID Admin utility. However, I didn’t confirm if this is still the case once new firmware is applied.

The Apple support tech I spoke with couldn’t provide a reason for the change, but confirmed that the remaining option for assigning storage to hosts, zoning on the fibre channel switch, is what Apple now recommends.

Most users who’ve been using their Macs for a goodly amount of time know about the ability to “print” pages to PDF files, whether for simple preview, storage, or whatever else. There are a few other options available, though, that can be quite handy.

Like this morning, when I came across this recipe for Cherry tomato soup with basil, which looks simple enough to make and sounds quite tasty, especially on these frigid Southern California winter days where the temperature is plunging into the low 70s and the blue skies are kind of hard to look at due to the gorgeous mountains distracting you in the distance. Ahem.

Anyhow, like many newspaper sites, the San Jose Mercury News has an option to view a “print this” page, as well as “email this.” The recipe sounded like something a couple of different friends of mine would enjoy. Rather than submit my buddies’ email addresses to unknown processing potential, I clicked on “print this,” since it’s often nicer to email that link, or even copy and paste from the simpler layouts.

It occurred to me looking at the print-this page (since ingredient lists often get screwy in copy-paste) that I could probably email small PDF files just as easily. So I hit Command-P. As I did, I thought — hey, it would be nicer to email a PDF automagically rather than finding a saved file somewhere in the filesystem.

Sure enough, clicking on the “PDF” popup menu revealed this spiffy list,

including “Mail PDF” — score! Selecting the command results in a Workflow Action being called, then a new mail opens with the PDF attached.

And dig all those other PDF options! Looking back at that menu, though, check out the last command. “Edit Menu…” brings up this palette,

The + button summons a navigation dialog box to choose your own scripts.

This suggests to me all kinds of possibilities, from automatically sending PDFs to your blogging software, to creating a web clipping service, to faxing online account statements to your tax people, to writing shell scripts that could do just about anything else you can think to do with PDFs.

And all that from cherry tomato soup with basil.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to close the window blinds — the sunshine is getting kind of bright in here. ;)

Last October, Apple published session videos of the 2006 World Wide Developers Conference on iTunes. Unfortunately, access to these videos requires the Leopard Early Start Kit, which, in turn, requires a paid subscription to the Apple Developer Connection. The 90-minute “Mac OS X State of the Union” feature, however, has now also been made available to those ADC members who have signed up for the free-of-charge Online Membership. Even if you’re not developing software on the Mac, this video is well worth watching if you are interested in an up-to-date (as of August 2006) overview of the technical foundations of the Mac’s OS.

If you don’t have an ADC account yet (if you do, you will have seen the related email announcement already, anyway), go to the Apple Developer Connection website and sign up for the free ADC Online Membership. Then head over to the ADC on iTunes page and log in to bring up the ADC section in iTunes. You will find the video and a PDF with the presentation slides under the “Mac OS X State of the Union” tab.

Have a few cups (or pots, depending on your connection speed…) of tea while downloading the 500MB movie — which is then placed in its own playlist in iTunes for convenient access —, and enjoy the show!

From the opening chime to the login window, there is quite a bit of activity going on behind the scenes during the Mac OS X boot process. Nowadays with newer versions of the OS, that process takes hardly any time at all. Old timers will remember the slow march of system extension icons in the paleolithic age, pre-OS X.

This page at kernelthread.com, “Mac OS X System Startup” uncovers the after-hitting-the-power stuff. A sample from the beginning:

• Power is turned on.
• Open Firmware code is executed.
• Hardware information is collected and hardware is initialized.
• Something (usually the OS, but also things like the Apple Hardware Test, etc.) is selected to boot. The user may be prompted to select what to boot.
• Control passes to /System/Library/CoreServices/BootX, the boot loader. BootX loads the kernel and also draws the OS badges, if any.
• …

(via rootprompt.org)

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 reviewed the Miglia TV Mini HD unit this summer and liked it. So when it came time to lay out my own money for a TV tuner, I decided to take advantage of the $99 EyeTV Hybrid Macworld special. I’d been waiting to buy one for a few months because I was uncertain whether Apples iTV/AppleTV would contain an onboard tuner. It did not.

I chose the Hybrid because (a) it was affordable (unlike a Series 3 TiVo); (b) it did both Analog Cable and ATSC tuning (the Mini doesn’t do analog cable); and (c) it was shipping now rather than at the end of February (like the new plus version of the TVMini, which will do analog cable). Yes, it’s a bit of a pain to have to switch cables to access both cable channels and my HDTV antenna. And yes, I would have liked onboard ClearQAM tuning, a la the TV Mini HD, but when I tested the QAM capabilities this summer they were…iffy. So while they might have been a nice plus, they weren’t an essential part of my decision. Since I live in a big city with excellent free-to-air local HDTV signals, I chose to forgo the QAM.

I learned the hard way that my Intel Mini hates the latest software update of EyeTV. (Version 2.3.1 works fine.) And I can’t seem to export to the iPod at all. (I can on my 733 G4, but it’s so slow that it’s not worth it.) Every time I try on the Intel Mac, EyeTV rolls its eyes backwards and gives up the ghost. (Which is better than version 2.3.2 which will not run at all without crashing.)

The MPEG-2 files, which play back fine in VLC do not open properly in QuickTime Pro (even with the MPEG-2 plug-in). I suspect something in the raw nature of the data. And when I try to transcode in VLC to MPEG-4, the aspect ratio of the recorded video keeps getting mucked up. On the other hand, the video plays back fine in the EyeTV software and the goal is (in theory) to act as a TiFaux PVR to play back on TV. But if I can’t get the videos transcoded into some form that iTunes will accept, I’m going to be out of luck in the AppleTV department. Any hints or tips from the reading public will be greatly appreciated.

Scheduling recordings work great–even if I’m sucking up two gigabytes per hour of standard TV. (I’m doing my first scheduled HDTV recording of Idol later tonight, which will give me an idea of the actual space and quality of HDTV recording beyond the 5-minute test-runs earlier today.) The EyeTV software is easy to use and integrates well with TitanTV. And the playback of recorded shows is also friendly. However, I have yet to find a way to extend the EyeTV library to add folders from an external disk and my main Mini disk is rapidly running out of space due to the quickly increasing number of SpongeBob episodes demanded by my 4-year-old.

More as this all develops.

Update: I’ve just downloaded and started using the most recent version of MPEG Streamclip which is fabulous for editing and exporting the EyeTV video. The edit features are much easier to use than the built-in EyeTV editor, it’s way way faster, and it works brilliantly on my Intel Mini. Forget about VLC. This is way better. Thanks Randy Stewart!

“For the major recording companies selling in the MP3 format would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their control over the worldwide distribution of music.”

- New York Times

Even Apple cannot prop up the record industry despite the success of the iPod. So now the backlash has come and DRM will most likely go to its grave.

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.