Sorry, kids: no “true” video iPod, no Macbook, no tablet. But…

An iPod Hi-Fi, with “room-filling power without distortion.” It’s portable, mains or battery powered, has built-in carry handles, and connects to every iPod. You can control it with an Apple Remote, or via a Software Update for your iPod. Price: $349, available now.

Also, as we noted earlier, a new Mac mini: in all but name, it’s the media center that a lot of people have been begging for. Same size, same shape, but Intel powered. There are two models, 1.5GHz Core Solo and 1.66GHz Core Duo, priced at $599 and $799 (which means prices have gone up a little with this update). The new machines are available now. They come with Front Row and Apple Remote, gigabit ethernet, four USB ports, analogue and SPDIF audio outs. They are, says Apple, between 2.5 and 5.5 times faster than previous models, depending on the processor.

Included with them is the new Front Row software. It can stream TV shows in iTunes across your network and show them on your TV. It can tune into shared iTunes and iPhoto libraries. Streaming over Bonjour is important here: “Media from any other Mac or Windows computer running iTunes will be piped over to the Mac mini hooked up to your television set.” Bonjour is coming into its own with this release.

OK folks, here’s what we got so far:

New Mac mini - same size, same shape, but Intel powered. With Front Row and Apple Remote. Core Solo CPU and Core Duo models to choose from. Gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, analogue and SPDIF audio outs. Between 2.5 and 5.5 times faster than previous models, depending on the processor. But! Prices have gone up - $599 and $799. Available now.

Front Row - new feature: it can tune into shared iTunes libraries, and shared iPhoto pictures & videos. Streaming: “Media from any other Mac or Windows computer running iTunes will be piped over to the Mac mini hooked up to your television set.” Really making use of Bonjour now.

More to come.

Much of the hallway talk around PMA has drifted to archiving, the permanence of prints from today’s home printers, and what shape our images will be in 100 years from now. The growing distrust of optical media’s archival ability combined with its lack of storage capacity for today’s huge files has people wondering, “what should I use?”

Hard drives seem OK for temporary storage, as long as there’s plenty of redundancy. But are they really practical over decades? Suddenly photographers are thinking about archiving to paper and film again — printing on stable stock with long lasting dyes and migrating their most cherished digital images to back to film. When stored properly, this return to paper and celluloid makes a certain amount of sense… I think. Or does it?

Looking for a Mac OS X focused Ruby on Rails tutorial? Head over to Apple’s developer web area for a nice little tutorial on the subject.

For the last five days, I’ve been near-obsessively refreshing the FedEx website, hoping for news of the whereabouts of my new computer. I’m transitioning away from a work-owned PowerBook G4 1.5Ghz, and into a MacBook Pro 1.83Ghz of my very own. This morning, when the knocking came at 8am, I was convinced it was anyone but the FedEx guy delivering my computer, as we all know that FedEx’s modus operandi is something on the order of overpromise and underdeliver, but there he was, dropping off the tiny box that I couldn’t believe actually held my computer.

To my shock and awe, there it was. The box itself is half as thin, and only slightly taller than the PowerBook boxes I’ve come so used to unpacking. Nestled within its polysterene innards was my computer, its monumental power adapter, a few discs, a remote and a display adapter. These are my first thoughts, from unpack to working system, are contained within.

Adobe released Photoshop Elements 4 for the Mac today at PMA. I had a chance to meet with an Adobe engineer last night in Orlando to talk about Elements 4 and some of its notable features. Adobe has packed quite a bit of power in this affordable package.

First, and a bit of a surprise, Elements 4 now has a streamlined version of Bridge. So there’s a fully capable file browser built right into the app. The biggest “wow” feature however, is the new “Adjust Color for Skin Tones” control that lets you click on a spot of skin, then Photoshop analyzes it and corrects the color. I saw it tested on a variety of subjects, and it worked remarkably well. Speaking of our people shots, the new red eye correction tool is the model of simplicity. You just enable it and Photoshop finds all the instances of red eye in the image and fixes them for you. The Mac version isn’t able to correct red eye on import as in the Windows release, but this approach works quite well.

Adobe has included some very helpful selection tools too. The Magic Select Brush and the Magic Extractor tools speed up the tedious task of selecting an element within your picture to adjust or copy and place elsewhere. They don’t achieve perfection automatically, but they do get you close enough so that with a little clean-up you’re in business.

The price for Elements 4 is still $89. This a great value for a powerful image editor. Considering that it includes Bridge and the latest version of Camera Raw, this application is all most hobbyist photographers would ever need.

What is Microsoft up to?

Look at the Origami Project and you don’t get very much information, but what little you do get implies that Origami is going to be something mobile-ish, something tablet-ish, something multimedia-ish.

An iPod competitor? Perhaps, in the sense that it will almost certainly include file storage and music playing features. But just because something can store music files and play them, that doesn’t make it a serious iPod competitor.

Related link: https://www.edwardtufte.com/

On Friday Brian Jepson sent email to the O’Reilly Editor’s list about a new book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte.

I’m interested in anything published by Graphics Press, so I visited the web site right away to find out more. It sounds intriguing:

“More than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries….Fresh examples from fiction and nonfiction bring new insights into the ways syntactic patterns work. Because the examples are such a pleasure, readers may be tempted to skip anything else, but the comments are inviting also, calling attention to techniques that are useful to writers of almost any type of fiction or nonfiction.”

Indeed I ordered “Artful Sentences”…but there was another big treat waiting for me at the site. Beautiful Evidence, the fourth volume in Edward Tufte’s wonderful series on information design, is at the printer and available for pre-order!

I took Tufte’s one-day class almost five years ago, and it’s influenced me more than any other class or conference I’ve attended (and in over six years as an O’Reilly employee, I’ve attended some pretty amazing stuff!). I still enjoy refering to the three books (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative) and to my notes from that day. I’ve been waiting for the fourth book ever since. Intriguing previews have been posted to the Ask ET forums, but I’m delighted that “Beautiful Evidence” is almost here, and “Artful Sentences” sounds like it will sweeten the wait.

There’s nothing more powerful on this planet than simple economic theory: the logical outworkings of supply and demand. You have a need? Someone will always fill it — well, for the right price. There’s money to be made? Someone will make it — even if it fills your inbox with all sorts of great deals on Valentine’s Day “meds.” Well, that’s unless big brother steps in. Such is the case with China. Sort of.

Apple recently sent out media invites for a gathering at the Cupertino Town Hall building on Feb. 28. I’ll be covering PMA in Orlando that day, and many of my cohorts will be at Flash Forward. I guess we’ll have to hear the news like everyone else… on our mobile RSS readers.

That doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy the delicious rumors that have been circulating. Some of my favorites are:

• Intel iBook - which most likely with be dubbed the “MacBook” without the “Pro.”
• Intel Mac mini - will it get a new name too?
• Full screen video iPod for movie watching. Looks something like an Apple version of a Palm LifeDrive with a virtual touch screen scroll wheel.
• iTunes Movie Store - If you’re going to have new hardware, you need content to put on it.

Pretty good stuff… how much of it do you think we’ll actually see next Tuesday?

As best I can tell, the 1 billionth song was purchased on iTunes around 0600Z (10PM PST). Somewhere, someone has won a bunch of cool products from Apple. And, boy, am I envious :-)

Over at OWC, they not only received their 15″ MacBook Pro, they took photos of its immediate disassembly. The photos reveal some interesting design changes that are worthy of note. Anyone who’s ever disassembled their 12″ or 15″ PowerBook know what it’s like to keep the screws straight. They also know what it’s like to curse Apple, Jonathan Ive, their own mothers for giving birth to them, and any manner of other inanimate objects nearby. Because taking apart a PowerBook to replace a cooked HD is Painful. I know, I bear a cut on my right index finger from doing one last week.

Looking at the MacBook, though, they seem to have simplified the design a bit. Three screws on either side, that’s the same, but that’s about all that’s the same. Beneath the battery are three screws that hold in the RAM access coverplate, which in turn reveals two torx screws that secure the top cover in place. Take out those, the four screws on the bottom, and the three on either side, and we’re looking at 15 screws instead of 20 to get inside. Except, wait, it gets better. The whole lid just appears to unlock and swivel upward, instead of needing to remove the keyboard (and the 12 screws that requires) to unlock the top plate, the whole lid come off. Now, this may well be the case with the Aluminum PowerBooks with the lit keyboards, but I’m not real sure.

More to follow

If you’re serious about your digital photography, then you may be wondering if Apple’s Aperture is software you should consider. That was on the minds of many people who attended the Aperture Power Tools workshop at the recent Macworld in San Francisco.

If you missed that training, Scott Bourne and I are teaming up again for an Introduction to Aperture 2-Day Lecture/Demo Course at Pixel Corps in San Francisco on March 17 and 18. This two full days of immersion into Aperture is only $249. And the facilities at Pixel Corps are terrific.

Plus… March is a great time to be in the Bay area for photographers!

My friend John is a hardware tech for MacUpgrades in Bethesda, Maryland. From time to time, we have long chats about the state of older Mac hardware, and after seeing what he can do with a Grey and White tower, I would consider him to be one of the last die-hard Mac Hardware Guys. He dropped me a line yesterday to let me know that Apple had marked the venerable old Blue & White machines as “Vintage”, which means that they no longer will issue repair parts, no longer support the units’ hardware and essentially means that repairing them will become near impossible.

The Blue and White tower was such a radical departure for Apple Machines, both aesthetically and design-wise. The Blue and White was the first Mac to take advantage of the hinged drop down door that made them so easy to work with, so easy to fix, so wonderful to live with. And now, like many machines before it, it has been relegated to Vintage status.

We come today, not to mourn Blue & White, but to celebrate it. Give us your best Blue and White Story in the comments.

Related link: https://www.oreillynet.com/future

A couple of Distributing the Futures ago, Chris Adamson produced a piece on Java Podcasts. I always like Chris’ work but I was also struck by how much richer the show sounded with pieces produced by other voices.

I’ve been wary of there being too much of my voice in the show so I’ve tended to edit my voice out of the interviews I do. Listeners have asked that I not do that and so in the most recent program you may notice that the interview with James Duncan Davidson sounds a bit different because you can hear the questions being asked. In the same show, I had already cut myself out of the interview with Bruno Souza - I think we will continue to play with a mix.

We get many suggestions for stories that people would like to hear on the show so I wanted to invite you to consider pitching a story that you might be interested in producing. I’m not sure how this will work, but it’s an experiment worth trying. If you have a segment you would like to produce for Distributing the Future please email us at future at oreilly.com.

Camino and Safari both have a very different view on what “Reset” means. Two very interesting approaches with very different effects for their users indeed.

A new security issue has apparently been found in Safari. What does it mean? That some features should not exist, regardless of how secure an application is.

Does anyone actually know someone whose Mac has been infected by Leap.A? There haven’t been very many sightings of it in the wild.

The media coverage for this event has been out of all proportion to the hazard posed by the malware itself; reports in the daily newspapers, on the TV news. But look closely, and there are two different stories being reported.

The iPod video has replaced the PowerBook as my airline travel companion. There are a couple reasons for this. First, in cramped coach seating, there just isn’t enough room for me and my 17″ laptop. One of us had to go into the overhead storage bin, and it wasn’t going to be me. Second, I have a tendency to work when I have the PowerBook open. And these days, I seem to be working all the time. Yes, I could watch a movie on the laptop, but for some reason I don’t when flying. (I never could sleep on the plane either.)

I bought an iPod video (30GB) the day they were announced. Sometimes you can tell right away that a device is right for you. The 5th Gen iPod is darn close. Among other things, it is my new companion during air flight (along with a good magazine for takeoffs and landings). With the iPod, I switch among podcasts (have you listened to the Ricky Gervais Show?), music, and TV shows. The podcasts and music are easier on the battery, but the video is what has really changed things for me.

I’ve had people ask me: “how enjoyable can video be on a 2.5 inch screen?” Well, quite enjoyable actually. And the key is the piped-in sound through the earphones (btw: I recommend in-ear phones such as the Griffin EarThumps or XtremeMac FS1 earphones with foam inserts). The great audio seems to create a state of immersion. I got my hands on the Belkin Kickstand case and set the iPod on my snack tray. If you don’t like the Belkin case, Andy Ihnatko recommended to me using a CD Jewel case as an iPod stand. I haven’t tried it, but it seems like it would work.

My favorite iPod TV shows are The Office and the standup routines on Comedy Central. There’s also a great deal on Jack Johnson videos on iTMS - you can get a whole album’s worth for $10. I never had time to watch The Office on TV (that darn always working thing), but have been able to catch up while flying.

Thanks to the iPod video, flying is actually slightly fun again. I no longer work on the plane. It’s much easier to carry an iPod in my pocket rather than hassle with a laptop. And I get a kick out of people glancing at me out of the corner of their eyes, wondering: “what the heck is he smiling about?”

Campfire is 37Signals’ latest release. A most fascinating product indeed and one that raises a very interesting question: is it better to keep things centralized or not? Come on in and bring the marshmallows.

Apple and Microsoft clearly have two different visions of what, exactly, security is all about. And the winner is not who I expected.

Should Apple bundle ClamAV with Mac OS X? I have a yes, a no and plenty of maybes in store for you.

We Mac users may not be in the habit of checking security mailing lists and announcements but we certainly have all the tools to do so. Between Mail and Safari RSS, even those of us who do not wish to invest in any additional software of any kind can stay up to date. Here are a few favorites of mine.

I pretty much agreed with Matthew Russell’s disagreement with John Dvorak’s prediction that Apple would dump OS X for Windows until this evening…

Or perhaps I should say, “Hell No!”

I normally don’t comment on articles that are already running rampant on Slashdot, but I can’t help myself here. Windows is my nemesis, and there’s an article running on PC Magazine that suggests that Apple may actually switch its OS to Windows.

Is it April Fool’s day today? No. Is Dvorak insane? Maybe. Will Apple switch to Windows? Not a chance. Let’s take a look at a few blurbs and attempt to at least provide a cursory disarmament.

Leap.A (or Oompa-Loompa) is not a virus. Depending what you read, it’s either a worm or a trojan. You could call it a little bit of both.

And while a lot of Mac news sites have spent much of the day playing down its significance and pointing out that user action is required to run it and therefore infect each machine, I think it ought to make a lot of people stop and think for a minute.

A summary of Leap.A’s activities has been posted by the professional computer security team at F-Secure. I’m inclined to trust what F-Secure say about viruses, worms and other malware, because they have been conducting autopsies on harmful code for years now and they know what they are talking about.

iTunes 6 has a feature that enables you to convert your existing QuickTime videos to iPod-compatible movies. This is a great feature that a lot of folks don’t know about. Previously, you either had to buy third party software or upgrade to QuickTime Pro to easily rip to this custom .m4v format.

The process in iTunes couldn’t be simpler. Use the “Add to Library…” command to bring your movie into iTunes. Then click once on the movie to highlight it, now choose “Advanced > Convert Selection for iPod.” iTunes with rip your move to the appropriate iPod configuration, then save it as a copy in your Library, leaving the original untouched.

Another lesser known tool in iTunes is the “Get Info” command that allows you to change the ID3 tags without having to resave the movie or export it. Go to “File > Get Info > Info” and fill out the appropriate fields. When you click OK, the data is saved to the movie file.

I use this method for adding the metadata to my The Digital Story podcasts. Once I add the data, I go to my Music folder, open the iTunes folder, find the file I just adjusted, and drag a copy out to the Desktop (Option/drag). I can then upload the podcast to my server for publishing with the correct tags.

I’ve uploaded a sample clip of Tim O’Reilly speaking at WWDC ‘05 using iTunes to rip it. The original 1:47 movie (320 x 240) was encoded with Sorenson Video 3 and Qualcomm PureVoice Mono codecs. The file size was 18 MBs. The re-ripped iTunes version uses H.264 for the video and AAC Stereo for the audio. Its file size is 9.4 MBs. The audio for both movies sounds identical, and the video quality is comparable (slight nod to the original Sorenson). This is amazing considering that the H.264 version was ripped from the Sorenson version, not from the master file.

If you have an iPod video, using iTunes 6 is by far the easiest way to prepare your movies for portable viewing.

Related link: https://forums.makezine.com/

Forums can be surprisingly difficult. It was clear that we wanted forums on Makezine.com, but we weren’t happy with what we could do with our existing publishing system. Luckily, we found Vanilla, by Lussumo (from the Lussumo Swell Blog, Lussumo rhymes with “bus-you-toe” means “love you more”.)

What we immediately loved about Lussumo was its clean interface, and its getting real approach. RSS is built right into the application, making it easy to do interesting things like feed new discussions out via the MAKEBot.

There are endless features that one could ask for or imagine in a forums system. We pretty much had to pick two…we chose to limit scope and abandoned some of the features we had previously considered “must haves”. And you know, it’s been ok. It’s been great, in fact. After seeing some of the amazing and useful discussions there, my only real regret is not getting forums on the site sooner.

By the way, it was a great experience working with a Vanilla’s creator, Mark O’Sullivan, who we hired to help integrate the forums into our site and user account system. We could tell immediately that Mark was asking the right questions about the project at the start, and he really helped us make the right decisions about various details. Our in-house technical lead, Jay Laney, did an amazing job of the integration on our side of things; it was a notable rollout in that there was nothing particularly, uh, “memorable” about it.

We’re thrilled with the the forums on makezine.com. If you’re looking for an extensible, open source web forum, Vanilla might just be your solution.

The good folks at the Omni Group must be happy. Apple has just promoted their browser to be part of the iLife suite of applications. Well, almost.

Just over a week or so ago, the 17″ iMac G5s vanished from the Apple Store.

In case you were wondering what had happened to all the old stock, it’s pretty clear that Apple is working hard to dispose of it as quickly as possible. Here in the UK, a bunch of 17″ G5s have turned up at Morgan Computers, a famous retailer of “surplus, overstock and closeout computer stocks” (their own words) just yards from London’s center of technology shopping, Tottenham Court Road.

And at £705 including VAT (that’s what we call sales tax over here), they’re a pretty good deal - the current price for a brand new Intel-powered 17″ iMac is £929.

You don’t see Apple kit at Morgan very often; in fact, I don’t recall seeing any Apple stuff on sale there before (I don’t live in London, but I’m a loyal reader of the Morgan Flyer). Morgan sells good kit at low prices, but it’s always stuff that the manufacturers or retailers don’t want to have hanging around in their warehouses. Apple is clearly in a big hurry to get these PowerPC machines out of the way, and fast.

Access Co. Ltd., who bought Palm OS last year, changed the Palm OS name to Access Linux Platform (ALP).

By trade, I’m a technologist, meaning, I evaluate technologies for their usefulness, and when they are useful, I recommend them to people who need them, they’re just unaware they exist. This makes me, effectively, a consultant, something that many businesses see and run screaming from, or screaming to in certain situations. Technologists often see themselves as arcana, which essentially translates to people who have skills that are not common, or detail-orientation that means their skills and knowledge are opaque to common people. This is both good and bad, but more often than not it leads to misunderstanding and serious miscommunication.

Good technologists are capable of framing the metaphor that users can see, get a handle on, and adapt to without having to work incredibly hard. Finding that metaphor, and doing the legwork to make it palatable to the user, is what they pay you for most of the time. It’s in making users smarter and more literate that the job satisfaction of the technologist goes up. Sure, some users will never, ever want to know why their email isn’t working, but knowing the ones who are open to knowledge is crucial.

This brings me to my point, and to the link I’m about to share. Good technologists don’t just know things, they know how to use them well, and the author of that manifesto is quick to draw the lines that make this division very, very clear. Mac technologists should take this list to heart and begin to understand that making yourself transparent is not useful, nor is making yourself opaque, but become translucent: an intermediary for technology and sociology, with knowledge on both sides and conversationality and understanding between them.

Camino is out of beta and if you don’t use it already, it’s high time you did.

For those of you who haven’t discovered the joys of Camino already, allow me to spell them out.

Camino is rock-solid, dependable like no other browser I have used (and I’ve used a lot of browsers). It feels right, it’s Cocoa, and it was built from the outset to be a native OS X application. Many of the internals share roots with Firefox, but the external wrappings and the interface are Mac and nothing but Mac; Camino is not a port of Firefox, it’s an entirely separate beast.

I woke this morning thanking my lucky stars. Not just because it was Valentine’s Day and my sweetie is wonderful, but because tomorrow was the Estimated Shipping Day for my new MacBook Pro. How sweet the anticipation has been, waiting for the new laptop to arrive. My two year old work laptop is nearing the end of its useful life, and soon must go to the hands of another tech. But then, this morning, there was news out of Apple: The MacBooks are Shipping!

Wait, what is that paragraph toward the top? “The $1,999 model now includes a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, up from the previously announced 1.67 GHz, and will begin shipping next week.” Oh my, oh my. What a valentine from Apple! The 1.67GHz MacBook I ordered will now be a 1.83 GHz MacBook! Hot damn! Now That’s a Valentine’s Day present I can really live with! Even if it means waiting two more weeks…

I did call Apple, and the woman I spoke with confirmed the automatic upgrade, and the delay, with shipping promised by the end of the month. Not shabby, Apple, and thanks for the boost, but can you please, please, get it to me soon? I’m jonesin’ here. And hard.

Since the introduction of Safari, Mac users have favored the browser for its rendering speed, clean interface and fast launch times. Those who relied on Firefox were all about extensibility, configurability and IE compatibility. Or so I thought.

You ever have one of those days where both of the major open-source package management systems fail on you for the same package?

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I was gone last week. Gone gone. I was on a Holland America ship sailing back and forth to Mexico. This was my first stint on the staff of a Geek Cruise. And as a cruisin’ newbie, I learned a lot of things.

For starters, the Geek Cruise concept solves what was previously my biggest concern about this type of excursion: what to do during the days at sea. We had full-blown conference tracks that ran half day sessions from 8:30 in the morning to 5:00 in the afternoon. That was followed by a group activity, such as the “Woz Hour,” then off to dress for dinner and head to the dining room. In other words, no need to wander aimlessly about the ship looking for something to do. More like fall into bed around midnight with your head full of ideas.

On the non-conference days, we were in port. I had the entire day (8 am to 5:30 pm) to explore Cabo San Lucas (Monday) and Mazatlan (Tuesday). On Wednesday I was able to stay out until 10 pm in Puerto Vallarta. Some people chose to participate in the excursions that were available. I may do that in the future, but this time I wanted to explore the cities and the villages. The upshot was I got some great pictures and experienced many wonderful interactions.

The juxtaposition of teaching in geek conferences at one moment then suddenly finding myself on the streets of Cabo the next was invigorating. I think Neil Bauman, head geek who assembles these events, is on to something here. It’s also a clever way to attend a conference and bring your partner — claiming it’s a true vacation.

Macworld Magazine is the primary sponsor for these events. I posted photo galleries for them on Tuesday and Friday. There, you can see images from both the conference side and while in port. You might also want to check out the blog posts from the Macworld editors. Lots of insightful info there.

My view of cruise vacations has certainly changed as a result of this experience. I think this is a creative, mind stimulating approach. The next two Macmania excursions are scheduled for July and the end of October. Something to think about…

Related link: https://conferences.oreillynet.com/oscon

Want to know why people think there’s nothing interesting going on in Java? It’s marketing pieces like this from the Sun Java System Identity Manager page:

“Today’s enterprise faces unprecedented challenges in protecting sensitive data, increasing business process efficiencies, and keeping the cost of identity management under control — all at the same time. These challenges are exacerbated by an enterprise environment in which information security is critical, the amount of change is ever-increasing, and the pressure to comply with legislative mandates is on the rise. Enterprises can meet these challenges with Sun Java System Identity Manager, the industry’s only complete user provisioning and meta-directory solution that enhances enterprise security — while simultaneously delivering a significant ROI.”

Is that really supposed to interest or intrigue anyone?

It is the endless list of announcements like this one that convince most of my colleagues that Java is dull. Off the top of my head I can name dozens of really interesting projects and initiatives in Java right now and many of them are open source in some way or another. We’ve been looking for people involved in cool Java open source projects to submit session proposals for O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention, OSCON, held in Portland, OR July 24-28.

Tonight at midnight pacific time the OSCON Call for Participation closes. Is there an open source Java project you are passionate about? Write it up in a proposal and click the submit button.

There’s been a number of rumors that Apple will buy Palm (the hardware manufacturer, not the OS licensor owned by Japan’s Access). But, here’s a wild alternative idea: Apple should buy Nintendo instead…

Startup Ask For Cents is holding a free public alpha test of their new Google Answers-like service. Just send an e-mail to q@askforcents.com with a blank subject and your question in the body and a few minutes later you’ll receive a couple of answers to your question. For fun I sent in a rather large number of questions on everything from Mactel to Dashboard to the humiliating demise of England’s Edward II. Answers ranged from the useless to humorous to thoughtful.

AskForCents is built around Amazon’s new Mechanical Turk web service. During the alpha test, they’re paying 3 cents per answer, and providing at least 2 answers per question. One question I asked was about how much the answerers were netting. Their response? About 40cents to a dollar per hour.

If you give it a try, either as a questioner (free) or an answerer (you net 3 cents per question), let me know how it went. Send an email to erica@mindspring.com or leave a comment.

Whilst poking around in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist, making PreferPlainText equal “Yes”, I came across a property I don’t remember seeing before: “TornOffToolbarIsHidden”, set to Yes. Changing it to No and relaunching Mail doesn’t appear to change anything.

Googling “TornOffToolbarIsHidden” and “TornOffToolbar” don’t produce any hits. Has anybody seen this before?

I am envisioning nonexistent control palettes floating around.

I’ve spent the past week blogging about life at political conferences as I watched the Conservative Political Action Conference here in Washington DC. What I was amazed by, however, wasn’t any of the politics, or any of the crazy things that came out of speakers’ mouths. I was amazed by how the platform wars haven’t played out in the political realm anywhere near the way they’ve played out in the tech realm.

Was I surprised to see ugly, clunky laptop after ugly, clunky laptop? Well, yes, actually. With all the inroads that Apple has made over the past few years, I’d expected to see at least a few of the laptop-toting politicos to whip out an iBook or a PowerBook, but it didn’t happen all week. There were just two of us Mac folks there, both of us writers by trade and not politicians, or involved in Political Life.

Most of the places that I hang out in DC, at least lately, have been 50/50, coffee shops, bookstores, hotel lobbies, airport concourses, there’s a good chance there’s going to be at least as many Macs as PCs, but why hasn’t that become true on The Hill? You’d think that resource-spare politicians would want to save their money on IT expenditures by purchasing computers with fewer security holes, lower virus exposure and better uptime, but apparently, the desire to conform is too strong amongst the politicians…

David Hyatt is sharing the love today with regard to Open Source and WebKit development. Over the last seven months, many major contributions to the WebKit API have been made by the Open Source community and today Apple was sharing the love. They gave their top 12 contributors MacBooks and invited 5 to WWDC this summer. Nice move, Apple, that’s good PR waiting to happen.

Let’s just assume, for the time being, that the Think Secret story about a forthcoming “true” video iPod is correct.

People have been busy making mock-ups which certainly make it look like an attractive, shiny little device. But wait a second - remember a certain problem with scratches on the first wave of iPod nanos?

If such a widescreen iPod does appear (iPod Pro, perhaps?), Apple needs to be paying extra attention to the surface, making it resistant to scratches and providing some way for owners to keep it clean. When the machine is sitting in a bag or pocket, playing music and not videos, it would have to be kept in a sleeve or protective case. I’ve no doubt that a simple sleeve would come in the box, but you’d be, uh, encouraged to splash out 20 or 30 more dollars on something a bit nicer.

As lots of folks have already pointed out, watching video content through a haze of sticky fingerprints and smudges won’t be anyone’s idea of fun.

So wouldn’t it be nice if the video iPod included something else, some other way to keep your mucky little paws away from that pristine display? Something like an Apple Remote, perhaps?

Next time you get a song stuck in your head, and worse still you can’t for the life of you remember what it’s called, you could do worse than try a neat little app I discovered today, called Tunatic.

Just like online services such as Shazam, it listens to any music you throw at it (except classical), and after a few seconds of listening will tell you the title and artist behind the song. All you need is a mic and an internet connection.

Tunatic is freeware and is available for OS X and Windows.

With many people looking at their bottom lines this year looking to trim the fat from their budgets, it should come as no surprise that many eyes are on .Mac, a nominally good service without significant applications for many Mac users. The problem is that it’s more expensive than many of its counterparts in the webhosting space, and that’s something that’s been discussed here in the past.

What about using the WebDAV capabilities in Tiger Server, to broadcast your calendar?

Now, this makes a few assumptions: You have a Tiger Server handy or know a kind sysadmin who wouldn’t mind prodding around under the hood. You understand some of the basics of WebDAV and calendaring. I realize this solution isn’t for everyone, but every small business that’s trying to do calendaring well ought to use this free alternative to expensive syncing services to make their own calendars. Here’s how…

I’ve written previously about my happiness at finally being able to use INSTEON home automation equipment with the Mac, and today the folks at Perceptive Automation have promoted their support in Indigo 1.8 from beta to GM.

INSTEON is the next generation of automation protocols; it allows you to control lighting in your home similar to X10, but with updated technology and better reliability. For example, it uses a dual-mesh network (both wireless and powerline-based) to link devices together, and it offers “2-way” communication that ensures your commands are received and acted upon.

The number of INSTEON devices keeps growing, including the new lower-cost ICON modules from Smarthome, so now is as good as time as any to give it a look. And as far as I can tell, when it comes to using these new gadgets with your Mac, Indigo is going to be the software of choice for quite some time.

This week on Apple’s X11-Users mailing list, a question was raised about the company’s plans for updates and bug fixes for X11, their X Window system based on XFree86. A user brought up that it would be spiffy to move to the recently released X.org 6.9/7.0, the popular, open-source alternative.

Apple’s “official” response is understandably vague on future plans, but they are “evaluating” it. In a post to the list, Ernie Prabhakar (Product Manager for UNIX and Open Source) reiterated that the updated X.org “doesn’t quite build,” but also pointed to his message from December on the Darwin-Dev mailing list: Request For Help with X.org port. If anybody has the skills, inclination, and time, that project could definitely use some help.

Playing with iPhoto printing is one of my favorite past times. This time, I went ahead with Apple’s postcard offerings, hoping to finally find a reasonably priced, acceptable quality post card provider. I found it - but there are some things to keep in mind.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT will be available sometime this fall. It is the next generation of LEGO’s robotics kit product line. What’s cool about it for a Mac user? How about controlling your own LEGO robot via USB or Bluetooth from your Mac?

Whenever I read an article about Google and their services, I am reminded of a very wise paper I once read about Nutella, a hazelnut spread with a chocolaty taste on which most European kids survive until they’re old enough to switch to hard liquors. In other words, it’s all about the brand.

Since its introduction, and despite its wild commercial success, the iPod Shuffle has been criticized, mocked even by some computer cognoscenti. People who knew best said it lacked a screen, an FM tuner, was too expensive, that its shape was uninspired or its battery life too short. Yet, to me, the iPod Shuffle still is the best iPod ever.

I loves me some keyboard shortcuts! I’m sure you do too. Here’s how I set up my machine.

We’re blessed with at least 12 function keys on most Mac keyboards, and I like to try and get the most out of them. I haven’t found a use for every single key yet, but I’m working on it!

Exposé

F1-F4 are reserved for Exposé and Dashboard. I like to use Exposé to uncover windows while dragging, so I moved these functions to Function keys which are easier to reach with my left hand as I use the mouse.

F1 - All Applications
F2 - Application Windows
F3 - Desktop
F4 - Dashboard

Quicksilver Triggers

I recently started using Quicksilver triggers to directly open certain applications. The following unmodified Function keys open these applications:

F5 - Safari
F6 - Mail.app
F7 - NetNewsWire
F8 - Yojimbo
F9 - iTunes
F10 - iCal

Yojimbo

Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software is one of my latest must-run-24×7 applications. I have F8 bound to a Quicksilver trigger to open the app, but Yojimbo can also use hot keys to perform various functions. I use F8 as my “Yojimbo Key” and add different combinations of modifiers to make different things happen.

As mentioned, F8 will open Yojimbo
Cmd-F8 will open Yojimbo’s Quick Input Panel
Cmd-Opt-F8 opens Yojimbo with the search field focused (this is the “Find in Library” option in Preferences).
Cmd-Shift-F8 opens and closes Yojimbo’s Drop Dock

Synergy

I love Synergy for controlling iTunes with hot keys. Quicksilver can also do this. I have these keys set up for iTunes:

Cmd-F9 - Play/Pause iTunes
Cmd-F10 - Show Synegy’s floating Window
Cmd-F11 - Previous Track
Cmd-F12 - Next Track
Cmd-Ctrl-F{1-5} - Set current song’s rating to 1-5.

In addition to all of this, since I’m using a PowerBook, I also have the “fn” key to give me access to the brightness, volume, screen mode and keyboard functions that are added to F Keys on Apple portables.

So, I’m curious - what functions do you find so useful that you bind them to keyboard shortcuts?

ActiveState, the firm known for developer tools like ActivePerl and ActivePython, is being spun off from Sophos and has some interesting developments for Mac OS X developers.

Apple releases a new iPod nano today - and it would seem that rumors of the iPod shuffle’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

The new machine is a black or white 1GB iPod nano, with a retail price of $149 and room for 240 songs or 15,000 photos. Compare this with the $99 you pay for a 1GB iPod shuffle, which of course has the same capacity but no screen.

So now you can make a conscious decision - pay 50 bucks more for the color screen and the interface extras that come with it, or save a little and stick with the shufflicious simplicity.

And for the time being, the shuffle still has a place in the official iPod line-up, suggesting that there’s still some life in it yet.

The first thing you need to know is that iPhoto Keyword Assistant has been updated, and the new 1.9 release supports iPhoto 6 (but not on Intel-powered machines).

I’ve been looking forward to this, because it means I can finally put some effort into tagging my huge photo keywords backlog.

Thanks to iPhoto 6’s improved performance, I’m much more willing to invest time in my digital photography collection. While I like the idea of tagging data generally, I’ve not used iPhoto’s keywords feature to date, simply because the interface for doing so was so difficult and time-consuming to use.

Recently, Novell released some pretty amazing preview videos of their upcoming desktop, Novell Linux Desktop 10. They’re pretty durn slick, and you should take a look. Among the list of cool features include: translucent windows, wobbly windows (when you drag the window it wobbles), enhanced accessibility via zoom, an exposé clone, and a user switch with a cube transition. Any of this sound familiar?

A couple of novel(l) features not borrowed from OS X, however, include command-Tab application switching where you get a preview of the entire application window instead of just the application icon, and desktop switching with the same amazing cube-like transition but in both horizontal and vertical directions. It sure would be nice to see those two features make their way into the next update of Tiger; I’ve been waiting on multiple desktops for a long time, and Novell has definitely done them up right.

A good place to start if you’re interested in the technical details behind the development of all this goodness might be with XGL (X over OpenGL) and The State of Linux Graphics. Naturally, a Google search reveals more interesting content than Novell’s site itself, so I’d recommend digging around there as well.

And since you’ll probably want to make a comparison to the current state of affairs with how OS X draws to the screen and leverages OpenGL, check out What is Quartz (or Why Can’t Windows Do That) out to get a handle on the concepts behind Quartz Compositor and how it breaks away from the traditional X paradigm.

Without further ado, here’s the link to the original OSNews article with a lot of good user discussion that links to the 4 videos on Linux Edge that you can watch to see this stuff in action for yourself. I don’t know about you, but this seems to be a breath of fresh air that’s been long overdue for the Linux community. I’m not upset that Novell copied – I’m actually kind of glad for them. Competition is healthy.

But for the real question: what do you think Steve’s got to say about all of this?

Or riddle me this: what if this were to beat Vista to the scene and came alongside droves of clever marketing?

Since doing an “unclean” install of Tiger back in April, I’ve noticed that I have intermittent troubles with my PowerBook coming out of sleep. Often times, my machine just appears completely unresponsive, gives me a solemn black screen, and I have to hold down the power button to force a shut down, and then boot back up — not fun.

A colleague’s solution to the problem was to do a clean install, and come to think of it, I’ve received that same advice from a lot of folks involving a variety of problems. It appears that a clean install is standard practice for many folks in the Mac community — but not me. Although it may be pragmatic and I should probably just go with it, I just can’t; it seems so inadequate to me. I don’t want to back all of my stuff up, I don’t want to degunk my Mac by zapping everything and starting all over, and I don’t want to think that the health of my machine depends upon doing one of the things that I disliked so much about Windows. Call me stubborn (or stupid), but my plan is to do complete backups regularly to my external drive, and not ever do a clean install unless absolutely forced into it by some sort of unresolvable failure.

But getting back to the magic key combination — it turns out that my power problems have resolved now that I reset my PowerBook G4’s Power Management Unit (PMU). I just followed these instructions, which directed me to hold down shift-ctrl-option-power for 5 seconds while my machine was off, wait five seconds, and then do a normal start up. After some extensive testing, I have concluded that my power problems have indeed been vanquished, and I now have one less reason to do a clean install! (And since we’re at it, I also resolved a weird issue with XCode last night that was threatening me into making a clean image or a clean install. As indicated in the comments, the fix was to switch to the Universal SDK instead of the default setting even though my intention was not to build a universal binary. I still don’t understand it, but it works. Hooray!)

For your edification, the following links may be of use to you if you’re interested in escaping a clean install or want to demystify some of the “magic” that happens when you call Apple Care:

• Magical Macintosh Key Sequences
• Resetting PowerBook and iBook Power Management Unit (PMU)
• Startup Key Combinations for Intel-based Macs

Am I the only one who refuses to do a clean install?

Sometimes, the little things make all the difference. Here’s two little things I’ve been playing around with recently.

Every once in a while, TextEdit turns out to be the best tool for the job. There are some customers who insist that their copy is delivered in .doc format, but I just can’t get used to using Word for writing in. It just feels wrong.

So in situations like that I’ll turn to TextEdit, because it saves in .doc format without any fuss, because it’s incredibly simple and swift, and because it has everything I need for almost every job I do.

Except word count. No word count. That can be a problem, when you’re dealing with words and you have to reach a certain number before you get paid.

Getting hold of a copy of Google Earth for OS X, for browsing planet Earth, is one thing; but getting hold of an app that lets you browse the night sky is quite another.

Stellarium is the inverse of Google Earth. Instead of floating above the ground looking down, Stellarium is for looking up.

I’m trying to track down a few beta testers for a Dashboard widget I’ve been developing. If you use Safari and Pandora music service, and you’re willing to give it a try, to send me feedback and to not distribute it any further, please drop me a note at erica@mindspring.com. Thanks in advance.

Update: Thank you. I have enough testers now.

Flickr Hacks is on its way back from the printer, just in time to make the perfect party favor for Flickr’s second anniversary party.

If you missed the Rough Cuts version (and time is running out on this option, if you’re still interested, since it will come down when the final, printed book is released), you still have a chance to see all the glorious full-color images in the book in this Flickr set.

There’s an inevitable consequence of being a professional reviewer and tester of software: your computer gets jammed up with a lot of gunk.

I’m constantly checking my Applications folder in an attempt to keep it as clean as possible. I’m not short of disk space - just over half full - but I want to keep things clean. So unless an app is something I use, I ditch it.

But keeping things clean means going slightly further than that, doesn’t it? Most apps leave behind some detritus, bits of data lurking in dark corners of your hard disk. There’s little chance of these will actually do any harm. The only inconvenience is the (usually small) bit of disk space they occupy, which for most people will never be any problem.

I could, if I could be bothered, manually hunt down the detritus files and delete them myself. I’ve done it before.

But you know what? Life’s too short. Unlike John Gruber (see his comments about Mac uninstallers about half-way down) I’d much rather pay 10 bucks for Appzapper and have it do all the hunting for me. A few days ago, that’s exactly what I did; and I’ve been happily zapping unwanted software ever since. Zip! Zap! Pow! Foof!

For quite some time now, I’ve held out hope for an Apple-branded Home Theater PC (HTPC). I’m certainly not alone, with many others also contributing to the dialog. A popular feature of the mythical Mac mini HTPC is Apple’s “TiVo-killer” DVR application. Surely Apple’s excellence in making complicated technology simple would allow them to make an app that could crush the popular DVR service.

While Apple probably could create such a piece of software — which would be quite an accomplishment given how well TiVo has done theirs — I think the biggest barrier that’d keep an Apple DVR program from coming to market is Apple itself. Given the recent addition of TV shows to the iTunes Music Store, it makes better business sense to promote and drive sale of that content. It’s more profitable for Apple to sell four or five episodes per month (plus backlog!) of a user’s favorite shows than it is to brand their own DVR service and try to compete with TiVo (as well as the numerous cable companies that now have DVR offerings).

Perhaps Apple could create a superior solution, but the DVR market isn’t the MP3 player business. It’s hardly the type of nascent environment that allowed the iPod to flourish. The products that are in place are mature and established. It’d take a very compelling offering and a decent amount of time for Apple to break into the business. However, downloading television shows (legally) is the “bleeding edge” of content delivery. So, Apple can either position itself as “the next TiVo” or it can have others line up to be “the next iTunes Store.”

Keeping Jobs’s taste for the limelight and Apple’s ambitions to be pioneers of the industry in mind, I think they’re going to lean toward the latter. At least they don’t have it as bad as Sony. Besides, now I get to relive all of those old Beavis and Butt-Head episodes, courtesy of the iTunes Store. And if you’re still jonesing for DVR capabilities on your Mac, don’t forget about Elgato.

Whenever applications are dusted or updated, it is common practice to give their interface a facial lift as well: even when no widgets are fundamentally moved around, buttons are updated, made more colorful, sometimes even unified in an effort to get rid of a chaotic past. Yet, one service escapes that rule: .Mac! Join me for some interface archeology!

So my copy of iLife 6 arrived in the mail this morning and I spent a few happy hours hacking around the new version, playing particularly with the new Themes feature. Updating the themes proved very easy, particularly with the delicious Quartz Composer.

I played around with “Reflection - White”, converting it easily into “Reflection - Peach”, but was unable with the time given to figure out how to add new Themes or to create additional options for a given theme.

The secret? Descending into /Library/Application Support/iMovie/Themes/ReflectionWhite.bundle/Contents/Resources and gussying up the Open.qtz file. Had to import one background image (in this case, a basic peach backdrop, although I originally used a Google Earth image of our old house) and set three colors for the fades.

Here’s what it looked like when all was said and done.

Looking for some retro fun? Head over to sc2.sourceforge.net and download yourself the reincarnated classic Star Control 2, now known as The Ur-Quan Masters. The source code for the original early-90s game was opened, which has allowed it to be ported to various current operating systems — including OS X.

If you have the bandwidth and patience, be sure to download the music and voice packs too, so you get the full game experience. What are you waiting for? Help free the Earth and destroy the thrall forces of Ur-Quan for good! ;)

There are moments in every Mac users life that are common across our experience. We all have that moment of abject horror when we install an upgrade to an application and the result has us screaming like we just saw a new set of scars on our face. “Oh God,” we shout, “What have you done to my beautiful application?!”

Today’s unfortunate victim of a poorly-thought-out interface “upgrade” was FirstClass, which upgraded to 8.1 today. FirstClass is a great piece of groupware, but the development of the Mac client has always lagged behind its PC counterpart. Today, it received some much needed upgrades including anti-aliased text, better voicemail handling and a few improvements to the admin interface. But, in the midst of those changes came some unwelcome additions and slowdowns in the application, and now I’m faced with a client that doesn’t even work at all.

Sure, it’s easy to back up to an earlier version, but there’s nothing more disappointing than a failed update.