Ok. So I spent my Friday night standing in line at an AT&T store and I come home and realize the iPhone WON’T EVEN WORK without being activated. So, I attempt to activate it and get a message “Your activation requires additional time to complete.” I then activate my wife’s phone and it just works. It has been almost a full 24 hours and my phone still isn’t working.

Anyone else in iPhone activation hell?
Here are some wired rants:
wired rants

NG

I suspect over the next several days, there will be a slew of iPhone reviews from the masses, and that this one will disappear into the tide of the web over the next few days, but I have to say: So far, the iPhone has both met and surpassed my expectations.

I arrived at the Clarendon Apple Store around 2pm today to begin my wait, and I was surprised to see that there were only 60 or so folks who’d shown up before me. The first arrived last night around 9pm, and seemed to spent a night in the rain, somewhat worse for the wear. The rest of the crowd was animated, showing off MacBooks and MacBooks Pro, as well as taking video, shooting stills, all manner of other fairly-Mac-like things to do. iPods were out, playing their swan songs before the debut of their successors, and the same was true for various phones.

As the wait came to a close and the store flooded with eager buyers, I wondered, what must supply be like? We crowded into the storefront in Arlington, snaking through the lines of software, glimpsing the counter at the genius bar, and the piles of boxes behind. Two in hand, I left the store, crowding past the obnoxious camera crews and packs of roaming reporters. I dropped the second off in the hands of its intended recipient and headed for my favorite coffeeshop (complete with open Wireless) for the unveiling of the phone.

Ok. So I got the iPhone…wow that crazy…just made it…was the with the last 4 people to get one…

Pictures Here
NG

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

I especially like this shrewd tip for prolonging battery life:

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

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

Given its timezone (GMT -10), Hawaii will be the last geographic area for the US iPhone launch. My friend Ryan Ozawa is lifecasting (streaming live) from the Ala Moana Apple Store in Honolulu. You can find it at:

HawaiiGeek.tv

I’m heading over to other Apple store a few miles away this afternoon.

Journalist and Mac geek Scott Walker had a great idea for an old Mac mini, a newspaper vending machine, and some Applescript: a home-made digital newsstand.

Here’s the gist of how it works:

The Mac Mini connects to the Internet and to my iTunes library through my home wireless network. Each morning the computer launches a script triggered by an iCal alarm. While cueing up a music playlist, the script automatically gathers images, crops them in half with GraphicConverter and launches a slideshow with PhotoPresenter, a nifty little $8 shareware program with lots of snazzy transitions.

It’s a lovely combination of hardware hack and smart software thinking, and the idea of putting the whole thing inside an old news rack bought from eBay is just genius. Needless to say, it makes me think that perhaps I shouldn’t sell that old redundant Mac mini of mine - I should think of a useful hack for it instead…

Via Technology Guardian

Today’s Finger Tips video from Apple is mostly reiterating stuff we already knew, but hidden inside are some useful new things.

My favorites are the magnifier:

and the iPhone reset instructions:

In the reset instructions, iPhone guy says: “If an application is not responding…”, a phrase that serves as an important reminder that this machine is still running a version of OS X, and has the potential to crash just as a computer does. The video makes resetting look pretty straightforward … let’s hope people don’t have to use that function very often.

Read about Hotspotr.com in the July issue of MacWorld magazine. It is WiFi hotspot finder that uses Google Maps as its mapping display. One of the interesting features of the site are the off-the-cuff reviews of the hotspots listed on the site.

The folks at Tumblr have another equally simple and equally useful (IMHO) web application.

senduit.com

Here’s what it does… It lets you share files privately without having to go through a lot of setup magic. You upload a file of up to 100MB to their site, set an expiration period (e.g., good for the next 30 minutes), and then give the web link to the upload file to whoever you want to get it. That’s it. Simple and useful.

Haven’t tried this one yet. But, it is always good to see a multi-platform Open Source app written in Python (I used to write a lot of small utilities in Python before I switched to Ruby). KeyJnote 0.10.0 isn’t a PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org presentation creation replacement. It takes the output from presentations in PDF format (they recommend Xpdf) and adds features such as highlight boxes and spotlights to the presentation.

Sure, Mac OS X has a sticky notes type app already, but…

Stick ‘Em Up

…is a Mac OS X freeware application has a bunch of additional features including the ability to use formatted text and graphics in a sticky note.

Must be free game list week or something. Here’s Yahoo! Games’ list of 7 free online multiplayer games…

Don’t Pay to Play

Found it on digg.com which has been having an interesting (to say the list) upgrade experience according to Kevin Rose’s digg blog entry.

YouTube and Adobe (Premiere Express) released the beta site…

YouTube Remixer

read more

The digg.com entry says: A List of 100 legal full version games available to download online from all over the web. The list includes free indie games, free to play mmos, once commercial games that are now free to play, hobbyist games, and many more.

100 of the Best Legal Full Version Games You Can Download Online

read more

I really hate to admit it, but I am going to wait in line at the Apple Store in Atlanta, GA tomorrow and wait for an iPhone. My wife and I are actually going to meet at the mall around 5PM so that we can be there a bit early, but I hope it isn’t too crazy.

What is funny, is that I am probably the LAST person on planet earth that would wait in line for anything, including Star Wars, Amusement Park Rides, Grocery Stores Lines, or concert tickets. Why iPhone, why do you have this power over me. Well, I admit a big part of the attraction will be trying to write a killer Web 2.0 application for the iPhone.

Am I the only guy waiting in line with his wife for an iPhone on Friday……?

NG

Seth Dillingham needs just a handful more applications to reach his target of 100 great Mac apps, the reward for participants in his charity fundraising event in aid of cancer research and treatment.

The premise is simple: Mac developers donate at least five licenses for their applications, and Seth assembles them into glorious packages of software goodness. You then get to bid for one of these amazing packages in an auction. The retail value of each package is already topping the $24,000 mark; but the winning auction bid will be a fraction of that.

So if you’re a developer who’s not yet contributed, now’s the time to get in touch. And if you’re a mere punter like me, keep an eye on Seth’s site for details of how to place your bids when the auction starts.

The official Apple iPhone keyboard video is here. Things that the keyboard does include intelligent type-ahead with word guessing, algorithms to correct for misaligned fingers, predictive resizing of a button’s press zones, intelligent capitalization correction, and more. Yes, there’s still not tactile feedback and I’m not sure if there’s much auditory feedback, and I’m not 100% buying into the punctuation and numbers separation, but it is surely a thing of beauty in and of itself. Go watch the video to see design ideas in action. I can’t wait to try this out.

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

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

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

Apple just posted a new Final Cut Pro 6 “Working with High Definition and Broadcast Formats” manual (PDF). This accompanies a bunch of updates to Final Cut Studio including Final Cut Pro 6.0.1, Motion 3.0.1, Color 1.0.1, Compressor 3.0.1, Soundtrack Pro 2.0.1, A combo Pro Applications Update that includes most of the previous items, and a semingly unrelated SuperDrive Firmware Update 2.1.

My O’Reilly colleague Paul Weinstein has put together a very neat Mac hardware hack: he’s using an old Apple II machine as a terminal connected to a Mac mini. It’s a great way to recycle a chunk of old tech that a lot of other people would just throw away.

From Paul’s detailed write-up:

So virtual desktops is workable, but not perfect. What I need is the ability to off-load some of windows, ones that need to be visible even for a quick glance, as needed, an IRC conversation or the output of a running web process, for example. Taking a looking at the applications I depend on I see the beginnings of an idea. Terminal is an interesting application, a piece of software that’s mimicking what use to be a hardware function. Why can’t it be a hardware function again or at least why can’t it be running on a dedicated piece of cheap, reliable hardware?

To re-create his hack you’ll need a spare old-school Mac (hands up who’s got one or more of those lying around gathering dust), and a handful of easily-obtained cables and connectors.

Reading the published reviews, most reaction is very positive. The consensus seems to be that the iPhone’s minor problems and missing features are more than outweighed - to an extraordinary degree - by the quality of what’s offered and the delightful simplicity of the interface. In other words: it doesn’t matter that it can’t cut, copy and paste - it’s still miles in front of any other cellphone on the market.

David Pogue:

The glass gets smudgy — a sleeve wipes it clean — but it doesn’t scratch easily. I’ve walked around with an iPhone in my pocket for two weeks, naked and unprotected (the iPhone, that is, not me), and there’s not a mark on it … Call quality is only average, and depends on the strength of your AT&T signal … The Web browser, though, is the real dazzler.

Steven Levy:

Web-browsing is where the iPhone leaves competitors in the dust. It does the best job yet of compressing the World Wide Web on a palm-size device … Web pages you wouldn’t dare go to on other phones are suddenly accessible, though those that require Flash, Windows Media or Real Media formats won’t work … I found that unless I did a lot of video watching or Web browsing, I could generally last the day, and then charge it overnight.

Edward Baig:

Lots of people (me included) eschew iPod earbuds in favor of their own headphones. Now the bad news: They may not work. Because of how the connector is designed on the Shure headphones I use, I could not fit them into the iPhone headphone jack … Battery life didn’t prove to be a big problem in my unscientific tests — a mix of calling, surfing, listening and watching. Still, it’s a good idea to charge it overnight.

Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret:

In general, we found this interface, called “multi-touch,” to be effective, practical and fun. But there’s no overall search on the iPhone (except Web searching), and no quick way to move to the top or bottom of pages (except in the Web browser). The only aid is an alphabetical scale on the right in tiny type. There’s also no way to cut, copy, or paste text … Its otherwise excellent Web browser can’t fully utilize some Web sites, because it doesn’t yet support Adobe’s Flash technology. Although the phone contains a complete iPod, you can’t use your songs as ringtones. There aren’t any games, nor is there any way to directly access Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

Thank goodness Apple made the right choice on this one. In all price plans available for a new iPhone, the data usage is unlimited. The data price for the iPhone was crucial; a device so dependent on data had to offer a data price plan that was reasonable. There’d have been outcry if restrictive data plans forced users to keep a constant eye on how much they were downloading.

You can also activate your iPhone from home, using functionality built into iTunes; annoying iPhone guy tells you how in this video. You’ll need OS X 10.4.10; and you have to sign small print agreements with both Apple and AT&T. Quite what’s in those agreements, we can’t tell you just yet. Be interesting to find out, though.

The iPhone launch hype is gathering momentum, and with the hype comes a frenzy of excess, hyperbole and silliness.

Is Apple guilty of raising expectations beyond the norm? Some say it is:

Even for a company that’s mastered the art of product-launch hype, Apple Inc. has propelled iPhone hysteria into the stratosphere.

But don’t forget, knowing in advance when a new Apple product is going to go on sale is something of a novelty. Usually they are simply announced, “shipping today”, and the hype is restricted to just uninformed speculation prior to a keynote speech by Steve Jobs.

This time, though, we know exactly what’s coming. Apple’s been more forthcoming about the iPhone than any other product. It needs to be, because the iPhone has to be seen to be doing well. Apple wants people queuing up to buy; it wants stores to run out of stock over the weekend. It wants demand to be so great that the clamour for iPhones continues long after launch.

Anyway, if you’re too lazy, or not sufficiently fanboy enough to do your own queuing, there’s plenty of other people who’ll do it for you - for a 1000 bucks.

And once you’ve got your paws on an iPhone, there’s another queue of people ready to sell you add-ons, cases, and related doodads. You know, just in case you had some more money to spend.

John Dvorak says he’s fed up with it all:

I am sick of it. It’s all anyone talks about. It dominates the news. It dominates the podcasts and videocasts and magazines. Hitler got less coverage when he invaded Poland.

But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

As promised, here’s some more detail about the acquisition of Mori and Clockwork by Alfonso Guerra of Apokalypse Software. I sent Alfonso a bunch of questions by email, and these are his replies.

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

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

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

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

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

I owe Ethan Schoonover a thank you.

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

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

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

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

About 2 weeks ago, my DSL modem started dying a slow, protracted, and painful death. Rather than fork over $80 to Earthlink, I went out to CompUSA and bought a noname modem for quite a bit less. Thanks go to BroadbandReport’s Earthlink DSL FAQ which revealed that I didn’t have to buy direct from Earthlink and pointed out the 0/35 VPI/VCI settings for whichever modem I bought.

Embattled Yahoo! (is everyone else as surprised as I am that Semel retained the CEO position?) released a new web version of Yahoo! Messenger…

Yahoo! Messenger for the Web (Beta)

It doesn’t have any of the extra features available in the client software version. However, it has the advantage of not needing any download or installation and the usual side effects that result. Since it web based, it may work in some enterprises where IM clients are blocked.

read more

Google first announced a slide web app in April 2007 at the CMP/O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo. A limited number of Gmail accounts gained the ability to view PowerPoint slide decks from inside a Gmail a few weeks later. And, now, this feature is generally available to all accounts.

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Bean: A Word Processor for OS X… That is pretty self-descriptive. Need I say more? Ok, a little more. It is an Open Source application for OS X Tiger. Its author clearly states that Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. However, it can read and write the Word 97 DOC file format (which was more or less the standard format all the way up to Word 2003).

Looks like Apple has posted a new success story over at the developer connection. Checkout offers a Point of Sale system built in Cocoa and Python.

In a kind of strange synergistic occurance, both Evan DiBiase over at 32584.com and I have been sleuthing (Evan’s “Nancy Drew” reference!) for new Yahoo!Sync references in OS X applications, specifically Address Book. My strings search (strings */Contents/MacOS/* | grep -i yahoo) found a good number of new Yahoo references, which you can examine after the jump. What’s more, Evan also found what completely escaped my notice: a Yahoo end-user licensing agreement in Address Book. (It’s in Contents/Resources/English.lproj/YEULA.html) Pop over to 32584.com to keep up to date on his discoveries.

Yesterday, the Surfin’ Safari blog introduced the newly updated completely redesigned Webkit Web Inspector, compatible with both Windows and Mac. Today, I fired up NightShift, installed the latest nightly build and gave it a go.

The new inspector has a completely different look from the old, translucent gray version. It gives you a lot more space to see things, the elements are all laid out more logically, and there’s far more control and overall usability than previous inspector.

Instead of the old-style red rectangles, the new version highlights items on the webpage using the new Safari-find style gray-overlay. You can see that in the picture here, with the selected item in the Inspector highlighted on the webpage behind it.

To be fair, the old style is in many ways “prettier” than the new one, but the new version fairly kicks the old style’s rear in terms of functionality. Nice work, Webkit dudes!

As a final note, for reasons I do not begin to understand, both the old and the new inspector seem to be in my current Webkit installation. Sometimes the new one loads when I inspect an element, sometimes the old one. Be persistent.

Update: The reason I ended up with both inspectors is that I had both the Webkit nightly build *and* the normal build of Safari running at the same time. I didn’t figure this out until the Window menu showed too few open windows that were clearly open.

A shot of the old-style inspector follows after the jump…

Over at TUAW, I posted about the new Yahoo!Sync framework that gets installed with the 10.4.10 update. I decided to do a little more technical snooping to see what goodies were inside this update and found quite a few phone-specific strings. These follow after the jump. Of particular interest may be the SIM references, the Conduit messages, and the kinds of data that can be synced (address book, calendar, tasks).

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

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

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

Chris Holland has penned an interesting post over on the Internet Brands Developer Blog, suggesting that Apple may have its sights set on integrating VoIP into the iPhone, making it a truly converged communications device. At first glance, it seems unlikely that Apple would be thinking this away about VoIP (and we KNOW AT&T isn’t thinking this way), but Chris makes some excellent points and his predictions are really some food for thought.

I’ve grumbled about .Mac along with others and don’t think Apple’s online service offers much bang for the buck today, but if it became the integrated SIP provider that Chris envisions that could change everything.

A SIP Address looks just like an E-Mail address. A Person’s SIP Address could easily be stored in the iPhone’s Address Book. Apple could build SIP-capability right into the operating system, pre-configured with a number of existing SIP Providers for one-click setup, while still allowing for custom configuration, following a model very similar to E-Mail.

There are a few SIP Providers out there. But Apple could easily roll out its own SIP infrastructure as part of the .Mac framework, increasing their chances of providing a superior out-of-the-box experience, while promoting the .Mac brand to … competitive usefulness. From here, the sky’s the limit as to what Apple can do, leveraging iPhone’s brand and near ubiquitous and still increasing WiFi penetration. Forget about fighting over 3G vs GSM. WiFi and IP are universal WorldWide.

What do you think? Has Chris been SIPping the VoIP kool-aid, or he is on to something?

Hog Bay Software owner Jesse Grosjean has sold notebook application Mori and timer app Clockwork to a new owner, Alfonso Guerra of Apokalypse Software.

The change is effective immediately and the new owner already has a new alpha version available for download (although when I downloaded it a few hours ago, there were few changes other than names and ownership notices).

Right now, work is continuing on getting the Apokalypse web site updated with information about Mori’s future. The one question on the lips of most existing Mori users will be: what about us and our opinions? At Hog Bay, Jesse Grosjean famously adopted a system where users collectively decided the future direction of the product. It remains to be seen whether this system will be continued at Apokalypse.

There’s also the question of what Jesse Grosjean will work on next. It might be the productivity assistant he’d mused about in the past, or perhaps he has other plans. Hopefully we’ll be able to bring you some answers to these questions during the next few days.

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

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

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

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

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

Windows users, freshly arrived on Mac OS X, always ask the same questions. One of those is “How do I create a new file in this folder?”

It’s understandable they ask this, because they’re accustomed to right-clicking in any Windows Explorer view, and seeing a list of contextual options which include creating a new file (text or otherwise) at that point.

Whether or not you’re a switcher from Windows, if you’ve been looking for a way of re-creating that behavior on Mac OS X, there are various options available to you.

Document Palette is a freeware application that uses empty template files and a system-wide shortcut to let you pick from a list of new files to add.

NuFile is another choice, which again uses templates you can edit.

On My Command can be used to achieve the same effect, but it’s a geekier solution (and a far more powerful tool as a result).

But my chosen solution is Yellow Camp Software’s New File, because it lets you choose the file type simply by typing in the full filename with extension; then, having created the new file, it opens it for you in the default editor for that filetype. Quick and easy and very convenient.

What’s more, if you open it in Automator and re-save as an Application, rather than as a Finder plug-in, you can then drag that application into the Finder’s toolbar, and it becomes a very handy one-click route to new file goodness.

According to German news magazine “Focus,” Apple is working on an in-car navigation system. Here’s what it says in the article:

After computers, MP3-players, and mobile phones, [Apple] will also offer navigation and stereo systems for cars shortly, starting with Mercedes.

According to information available to “Focus,” the device currently being developed by the US computer maker will combine entertainment, communications, and navigation in one unit.

The new Apple device will be offered exclusively by Mercedes for [the first] six months. Market introduction should be expected for 2009. It is still unclear whether Apple will — similarly to the iPhone — rely on Google Maps as navigation aid.

Although it may seem odd at first for Apple to get into the market of embedded devices, it does make sense product-wise: in essence, the iPhone already combines entertainment, communications, and navigation-like features in one unit. Just add a state-of-the-art GPS receiver and a radio, wrap in a sturdy, industrial-grade case, shake well, and serve!

However, all of the premium car makers already offer sophisticated, highly integrated in-car systems, including Mercedes’s COMAND system, so while it would make sense for Apple to build such a device based on their experience with the iPhone, it remains to be seen how this device would tie in with the car makers’ product offerings.

Recently I had an Apache access log file on a remote server that I wanted to archive. However, it was 3GB, and /usr/bin/zip refused to even admit the behemoth’s existence.

First idea that came to mind was splitting the file into smaller chunks that zip could deal with. For some reason, the prospect of an arduous manual process that would take me through Flag Day didn’t appeal, so I poked around via apropos to see what was available:

$ apropos split

Lo and behold, at the end of a bunch of other stuff,

split(1) - split a file into pieces

(The server was running OS X 10.3, which as far as I can tell does not include the more direct zipsplit utility found on 10.4. Same basic idea, though.)

I copied the behemoth to a secondary drive (took a while) and then navigated to its directory.

$ ls -l

which let me know:

-rw------- 1 robert staff 4239286441 10 Jun 04:55 behemoth_log

That’s a lot of bytes. Since I want to get the largest file down to a svelte 500MB, I’ll need to use this:

$ split -b 500m behemoth_log

Which, after a long period of splitting, produces these:

$ ls -lh

-rw-------   1 robert  staff          3G 10 Jun 04:55 behemoth_log
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:18 xaa
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:19 xab
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:20 xac
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:20 xad
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:21 xae
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:22 xaf
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:22 xag
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:23 xah
-rw-------   1 robert  staff         42M 10 Jun 05:23 xai

Alternatively I could have split it by kilobytes, or by number of lines using the -l line_count flag. There is also the ability to customize the output file names — read up on man split for more info. By the way, I’m guessing you want to limit your splitting to text files, so leave those binaries alone. See comments regarding using split on binaries as well.

Cross-platform OpenOffice Worm
Fri, 08 Jun 2007 20:35:11
ZDNet Australia (why is that ZDNet in the US never reports anything interesting these days?) reports that an…

OpenOffice worm hits Mac, Linux and Windows

The article links to this Symantec page that describes the…

OpenOffice Worm
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Democracy 0.9.6

…is out. This multiplatform Open Source application plays all kind of video file formats on your local drive and can download and play videos from various sources on the net. The video you see in the image is downloaded from YouTube (my current favorite video: The Zimmers performing the Who’s My Generation).
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HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment)

…site managed by the Department of Planetary Sciences Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Last month, ADC introduced Featured Articles to the ADC Reference Library. These articles provide essays on new tools and APIs as well as getting started tutorials. Today, Apple’s developer feed featured these new articles and provided this link to take you directly to the featured articles index.

Rory Prior, developer at Think Mac and latterly a participant in our Indie developers in the UK article, has created a new user interface for the Inspector in his Instant Gallery application.

With more and more functionality being embedded in the Inspector, it was getting overburdened with tabs. So Rory took inspiration from what he’d seen of the iPhone interface, and created a menu-based system with smooth side-scrolling to the right for more detail, and to the left to go up the menu list.

Rory has posted a short explanatory screencast that shows the animated interface in action.

About a year ago I started a series of articles for O’Reilly on Artificial Intelligence topics with Python. The first of these articles was on decision trees and their uses in data mining and was rather well received. However, after getting off to a great start, my real life took over and my hobbies took a back seat and as a result this series stalled right out of the gate. Well, now that things have calmed down a bit I’m hoping to tack a few more articles onto this series and to start off I thought I might go over an email I recently received concerning the decision trees article, discuss a problem that was found in my implementation, go over a solution to the problem, and just try to give you all a better overall view of how this powerful technique works and maybe even give a little insight into its limitations as well.

To first sum up the email, the question within dealt with what happens in a situation where the decision tree built by the algorithm encounters a record that contains a value never before seen for one of its attributes. The example that was given in the email is described below.

given the following training dataset:

0, 0, LOW
0, 0, MEDIUM
0, 0, MEDIUM
1, 0, MEDIUM
1, 0, MEDIUM

classify the following record:

0, 1, LOW

The reason I wanted to share this question with everyone is that its a really good one for pointing out how a decision tree works and how the algorithm that builds one goes about its business. Look at the record we are tying to classify and see if you notice something about it that differs from the records in the training set. Do you see it? It’s in the second field of the record. Notice that, to date, there have only been zeroes in that field. Because of this, the decision tree has no idea how to classify the record, because it has no idea, from looking at the training set, that the value 1 could ever show up in the second attribute. This really brings to the surface two properties of decision trees that everyone should understand. First, its easy to see from this example that it is absolutely necessary to have a very large training set. Keep in mind that the decision tree algorithm uses probabilities to determine how well each attribute classifies data, and just like anything else in statistics, the larger the data set, the better the accuracy of the algorithm in determining these attributes. So, moral of the story, while small datasets are great for toy problems and examples, in the real world this technique is only trustworthy if there is a sufficiently large set of training data.

The second concept I wanted to point out was the general idea behind decision trees. Decision trees are classifiers and that’s it. The basic idea behind the algorithm is to take a look at a bunch of data and try to figure out which attributes of the data best classify each record in that data. That means if one attribute divides the data into two large groups and another divides the data into twenty small groups, the first is the better classifier since it does a better job of classifying large numbers of data points for each attribute value. So, what does this mean for our question? Well, what that means, essentially, is that the decision tree is no crystal ball. It can’t predict the classification of a record if it comes across one that has a value it’s never before seen and, therefore, has no idea of its existence. Makes since right? If our algorithm has never seen the value, how can it even know of the value’s existence?

So, where is all this talk leading us with respect to the question at hand? Well, there is actually a very simple answer to our problem of classifying a record with previously unseen attribute values–take a best guess. There are many different ways for doing this, some of which can be seen at the Missing Attributes section of this link (https://decisiontrees.net/node/34?PHPSESSID=b6335a10234cac9a895c31c6f139b8cc), however, the solution we are going to use is a very simple one. What we are going to do in our decision tree program is take a guess on the record’s classification based on the most frequently seen outcome from our training dataset (in the case of our sample data above, the default outcome would of course be MEDIUM). How do we go about altering our code to make this guess? Well that part is really easy. Take a look at line 150 of the dtree.py file. If you look at the original code from the article, you should see the following line:


tree = {best:{}}


This code creates a new node in the tree, which is a simple empty dict object. This means that when we search the tree, if we have a record that has no classification, meaning that we reach an empty node in our tree, we will get an error when we try to pass a key to this empty dict object. What we want our tree to do is return the default outcome whenever this situation is encountered. This can be easily accomplished by adding that default value to all of the empty nodes in our tree. Take a look at the following replacement code:


tree = {best:collections.defaultdict(lambda: default)}


What does this code do exactly? Well, essentially this code does exactly the same thing as before (i.e., creates an empty dict object as the next node in the tree), but it does so using the defaultdict method of the collections module. What does that do? It allows us to specify a function that can be ran whenever a key is passed to the dict object that does not already exist. In our code we simply create a lambda function that always returns the default CHOICE (i.e., most frequent outcome for our training dataset). This will ensure that whenever you try to classify a record that has no matching branch in the tree, you will get the tree’s best guess back as to how
it should be classified.

So that’s it, simple, eh? What we’ve done here is hopefully get a little better feel for how d-trees work and at the same time we’ve altered our original algorithm a bit to make it a bit more robust. I’ve attached to this post a new version of the original d-tree code from the article (get it here: Download file). In the tarball you’ll find the same files as in the original code, however, the dtree.py file will have the change we just discussed and the test.py file has also been altered to make a bit more usable. Now you can run the test and pass in a training dataset and a test dataset for classification, whereas it used to load these automatically and you needed to change the test.py file by hand if you wanted to run your own datasets. If you want to test out the new algorithm, just use the following line of code at the command prompt:


$ python test.py training-data test-data


where training-data and test-data are the names of the datasets you wish to use with the algorithm. One more thing, I used the ‘with’ statement in the new test.py file, so if you’re using a version of Python before 2.5, you’ll either have to alter the new test code or use the test.py file from the original code.

Well, I think that’s it for this session. Hopefully everyone got a little bit out of this post and everyone reading this now has a little better overall understanding of this very important data mining technique. If you’re interested in learning some more artificial intelligence/machine learning techniques, keep your eyes peeled for a few more articles in the series and also keep an eye on this weblog, since I am planning on also posting some information here on these topics from time to time as well. I hope to see you all here again very soon.

The makers of Bean don’t make any grand claims about it - it’s a rich text editor, not an alternative to Word, they say. And they’re right. But what they modestly neglect to mention is that it’s a excellent rich text editor, and just what you might be looking for if you’ve always wished that TextEdit had a little bit more oomph.

I like Bean because it offers one vitally important feature that TextEdit lacks: a live word count. It also has alternate color schemes that you can switch between with one click, support for all the Cocoa goodness you’d expect in a Cocoa writing app, and a nice toolbar control for quick access to the built-in Dictionary application.

Bean is never going to compete with Word or Abiword, but Bean’s developers are perfectly upfront: that’s not the intention. Rather, they’ve spotted a small niche for something like TextEdit but with a few extras. That’s Bean, and it fills that niche very well.

Apple has posted the results of the 2007 WWDC Apple Design Awards at the Developer Connection. Delicious Monster has taken the prize for best Leopard app, taking advantage of Core Animation, Core Data, Calendar Store, Scripting Bridge, and several other new (and fabulous) technologies. Panic’s Coda 1.0 snagged the best User Experience trophy. CSSEdit 2.5 from MacRabbit won best OS X Developer Tool. WOW: Burning Crusade 2.0 won for best game. This year’s best Scientific Computing solution went to Papers, which helps researchers organize scientific articles. The Dashboard Widget winner was the BART widget, showing the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Finally, Picturesque 1.0 by Zac Cohen, a batch image enhancer, won best student product. Pop over to the Apple site to read more about each of the winners and discover the runner ups for each category.

Meanwhile, in other news…

The OmniPeople have re-made their web site, and it’s looking very nice indeed.

Aquamacs has reached 1.0. This version includes new icons, more keyboard shortcuts and a whole lot more.

Nokia released Nokia Media Transfer 1.0 beta for transferring photos and files from your Mac to selected Nokia handsets.

Apple does a deal with Bebo? Why Bebo? I’ll believe this when I see it.

Phil Dow on WWDC:

Instead of announcing an SDK Jobs announced that developers would be able to write AJAX Web 2.0 applications that could be run directly in Safari on the iPhone. This was even billed as an advantage — developers wouldn’t need an SDK, how great is that? But the phone has a standards compliant browser. Of course it can run web apps based on dhtml, css and javascript. Nothing new here.

And Fraser Speirs:

I thought the ridiculous sight of senior Apple people trying to convince this highly technical crowd that the 3rd party development platform is a web site (albeit with some custom URL scheme handlers built into the iPhone apps) was just embarrassing. We know that’s not what we’re asking for in an SDK. They know that’s not what we’re asking for in an SDK, and the spin was just toe-curling.

Is Safari for Windows a threat to Windows itself?

The number one reason Windows users don’t switch is because they are used to the platform and don’t want to learn something new. Apple is bridging that gap by allowing those people to make the switch by familiarizing them with applications they already know.

Lifehacker’s list of 10 apps that should have been in Leopard.

With the exception of the keynote address, everything presented at Apple’s WWDC is considered Apple confidential information (and all attendees have an NDA in place for this as part of their ADC agreement), so unfortunately I can’t write about any of the information from the Mac IT sessions here in San Francisco. But I can’t help but be impressed by the huge crowds and high level of interest in the IT track here, and I don’t think I’ll be upsetting anyone at the mothership by reporting that yesterday’s IT State of the Union session was one of most popular, with standing room only. The Directory Services session today was also packed, and it’s clear there are a LOT of people here at this “developer” conference who are looking to learn more about what Apple’s doing in the IT realm.

In yesterday’s keynote, Steve made his (admittedly funny) jab at Microsoft about there being many different versions of Leopard, but all costing $129, and ending the joke with the clarification that, of course, there will only be one version of Leopard. His point is a good one, but I know I wasn’t the only person in the room who heard that and instantly thought, “But what about Leopard server?” Clearly Jobs was talking about the client version of Leopard, but it made me wonder if IT folks are really being served well by being lumped in with Mac developers at this conference (as did the huge lines to get into the various IT sessions). I know that developers and sys admins like to rub shoulders and see what each other is up to, that in some cases they have to work extremely closely together, and in smaller shops the same person may even be responsible for both, but as Apple continues to improve and grow their IT offerings is it perhaps time to consider a separate event just for the IT folks?

Of course, the exact same argument could be made about MacDevCenter. We’ve been expanding our own IT coverage lately, and intend to do even more IT-related articles when Leopard Server hits the streets. Let us know in the comments if you think there’s enough interest in Apple IT to support a separate annual technical conference, and if you want to see more (or less) coverage of IT issues here on MacDevCenter in the future.

Do you like side-scrolling?

Hmm. Me neither.

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

Like many people, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the motivations behind yesterday’s release of Safari for Windows. With iTunes for Windows, it was a slam dunk - you can’t sell iPods and tracks to people who can’t reach your platform. But with Safari, it’s not quite as clear cut. What exactly is Apple selling? Ostensibly, it’s about giving Windows developers access to Webkit, the browser engine that will be running on the iPhone. But I don’t buy that that’s the whole reason. Developers are just too small an audience to warrant the work it must have taken to do the port, and to support it going forward (after all, they could have given developers Webkit without porting the whole browser).

Then there’s the old “gateway drug” argument - give Windows users enough tastes of Mac elegance - and in this case a faster browser than anything available on Windows right now (Apple claims Safari 3 is twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7 on Windows, and 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2) - and eventually they’ll wander over to take a closer look at the whole enchilada. But how many Windows users are going to care? Those who care enough about security and extensibility to try another browser are already using FireFox, and Safari doesn’t have FF’s thriving plugin landscape going for it. Speed alone isn’t going to cut it.

So… Apple is going to end up with a tiny percentage of developers and geeks running Safari on Windows. And this benefits Apple how? I was thinking there must be another shoe ready to drop, lurking stage left. Then I read John Gruber’s notes on the keynote, and it all started to make sense.

“It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. … The same goes for Mozilla (and, I presume, just about every other mainstream browser.) … For example, the Mozilla Foundation earned over $50 million in search engine ad revenue in 2005, mostly from Google. … Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more. “

So there’s the other shoe. Obviously, Webkit for Windows is essential to iPhone developers, and there’s certainly the possibility of Safari turning a few Windows users onto the Mac. But Safari/Win actually is selling something to the public - eyeballs for Google. And that’s the secret sauce that makes it all worthwhile.

So is Apple saying “the network is the computer?” It sure seems so. WebKit, the guts of Safari, is open to developers, it lives on the iPhone and now on Windows. Apple is welcoming nearly anyone to hack it and make cool apps with the idea that with more applications more people will buy the hardware. This has been a successful strategy in the past.

What is interesting though is that Apple seems to be placing a lot of development energy on the group of protocols that are decidedly network-centric. Implicit in this is the idea that an operating system is irrelevant; no matter what type of device and what type of operating system, the browser will execute the application the same way on each.

This raises some questions. Is Apple changing its focus? Will it be less closely integrating applications with its operating system? After all, if all the functionality one needs is online, why work at optimizing desktop applications since network latency will mask any performance gains?

Clearly Safari on Windows is a strategic decision, especially considering that Jobs said that iTunes might be the last application written for Windows. The strategy looks to be develop applications that run over the network usable by any device to connect to Apple content. Revenue would be generated by selling content (iTunes), selling hardware to access the content (Mac, iPhone) and leveraging the ecosystem of software developers to create innovative applications which would essentially be the glue between content and hardware.

Will it be successful? Is the network-centric model ready as Apple seems to imply?

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

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

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

Apple has just posted today’s WWDC keynote address on the newly designed apple.com. If you couldn’t make it out to San Francisco this year for WWDC, here’s your chance to watch Steve go over 10 of the coolest new features in Leopard. There wasn’t a lot of new ground covered in today’s keynote, and I heard more than one developer grumble in disappointment at the lack of new announcements or information. We did a get a glimpse at the new Leopard finder and desktop, which while not earth-shattering are certainly improvements. And Safari for Windows is at least interesting.

But was it just me, or can you sense the awkward dissatisfied silence from the whole audience when Steve said that they were going to allow third party development on the iPhone after all, but by this he means only browser-based web apps. I think for once in his life Steve didn’t do a great job of presenting his material to this audience. It is after all a very good thing that Apple has decided to provide URL-based access to the iPhone’s telephony, email, and other services, but that point really got lost on the crowd I think, who were expecting an SDK to access these things. We’ve known all along that web apps would be one possibility for third-party iPhone development, and Steve’s “there’s no SDK, just use Safari and standard Web 2.0 technologies like Ajax to develop iPhone apps” message didn’t highlight the power of what they are actually allowing here. (As one colleague commented, “just try getting your web app to make an actual phone call on a J2ME-based phone.”) Personally, I think that there are a lot of interesting possibilities for third-party development with this kind of access to the iPhone’s main features, and I’m not surprised that Apple isn’t letting us get at the OS or place buttons on the home screen, but his message clearly didn’t go over well with the developer audience here in San Francisco.

Let us know in the comments section if you were satisfied or disappointed with what Steve revealed about Leopard, Safari for Windows, and iPhone development opportunities.

So it appears that the iPhone SDK has been under our noses all along.

If you can write apps for the web, you can write them for the iPhone. But that’s the point - can you write apps for the web?

Some people aren’t happy. With honey-thick sarcasm, Rogue Amoeba says Web apps are not applications:

We know that making SDKs is not easy, and so it boggles the mind that you were able to create a complete iPhone SDK so quickly! So much access, provided so seamlessly - it is really quite amazing.

Read the comments following that post for a very quick overview of both sides of the argument. Some consider this announcement an insult to application developers; others say it’s the encouragement they need to start making more use of this web thing.

So let’s do a quick rough-and-ready survey, right here and now: how many OS X developers reading this have ever built any kind of web-based application? Raise your hands. What are your thoughts on Steve’s iPhone plans? Are you distressed or delighted about the prospect of building webapps (and perhaps integrating them, somehow, with desktop apps)?

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

Jesse Grosjean, creator of notebook app Mori, is working on a new GTD product called TaskPaper.

In a revealing thread on his own forum that begins with Jesse’s thoughts on selling Mori to a third party (indeed, in a more recent thread Jesse says directly: “Also it’s very likely now that Mori and Clockwork’s development will be taken over by another developer,”), he reveals that his efforts have recently been focused on a task and project management tool.

It’s not a replacement for Mori, it’s a much much smaller app, but I think it will be good at managing your project and task list, while you still use Mori as a reference database. It takes a different approach then all the other GTD apps that I’m aware off and so even if you don’t decide to use it in the end I think it should be interesting to play with.

I’ve been using Mori for storage of ideas (and actually for writing of articles, too, something I previously considered a separate task but now I’m not so sure) since my post about idea management last week. I’m enjoying Mori’s simplicity and ease of use. The thought of there being a similarly simple and easy GTD app is quite appealing. Then again, OmniFocus is getting ever-nearer to release, so the competition in the Mac productivity sector is going to be fierce for a while yet.

Math-Blog Recommends 3 Open Source Math Programs
Looking for Open Source math apps? Head over to the Math-Blogs.com blog entry titled…

3 awesome free Math programs

Maxima, SciLib, and R (the only one that has been mentioned here) are discussed in some detail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Norbury

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

Daniel Steinberg

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

Todd Ogasawara

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

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

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

4. iLife ‘07

5. Leopard :-)

Tom Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

Erica Sadun

I’m suffering from prediction burnout, honestly.

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

David Battino

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

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

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

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

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

Todd Ogasawara

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

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

I may have discovered where all those names from the iPhone commercials are coming from: the class lists of a small Australian High School. The names database from Tumut High School, New South Wales contains a John Appleseed, Class of 1981 and a Shaun David Taylor, Class of 1989. For a while, I was stymied by the lack of an Anna Haro–until I discovered Sharon Anne Diversi (Mclerie), Class of 1991. Maybe it’s a little stretch but the “haro” part of Sharon and the Anne/Anna names do seem to match. Images after the jump.

Well, just when you thought you knew all the Mac writing apps, along comes something new and radically different.

Diamond is that thing. It’s a rich text editor with much the same capabilities as TextEdit, but with oh so much more style.

More on iTunes Plus data and possible privacy issues: EFF has found two fields (”a 1024 bit variant field labeled sign and a 630 byte variant field labeled chtb”) that seem be unique for each combination of user and track. Beyond that, the data difference between files may be due to cover art duplication (two copies rather than one copy). Read all about it here.

Just a quick note to let you know that Apple just posted about a dozen new and upgraded sample code items over at their developer site.

I love sample code and shall report back after I’ve had a chance to browse through them.

We’ve long believed around here that the role of Apple products in IT is poised for significant growth, and this recent item in DigiTimes confirms some serious progress in the server realm. DigiTimes cites IDG numbers that show Apple has shipped 8700 servers in the first quarter of 2007, which represents a very impressive 73% growth in server shipments over the previous quarter and places Apple in the top ten list of server hardware providers.

As Mat Lu points out over on TUAW, that’s a strong report demonstrating that Apple is really “moving some iron.” Mat also asks an interesting question:

Since the Xserve are now able to run Linux on a par with other machines, it would be interesting to know how many of these machines are running Linux instead of OS X Server.

I’m curious too. How many of you out there are using Xserve boxes, and if you are, do you run Linux or OS X on it?

I need to upgrade to Vista. So early this morning, I started googling around for system requirements and to find out what would be involved in the upgrade. I stumbled across Microsoft’s page about its Window Vista Advisor and downloaded a copy. While attempting to install it, it alerted me that it “Requires .Net Framework”. I stopped the installation, downloaded a copy of the framework and began to install that.

After agreeing to endless end user licensing terms, the installation began. Nearly an hour later, I had to leave and drop the kids off at school while it was still installing. As I left, I noticed it rewriting my system registry and installing hundreds of megabytes of updates. Upon returning from my errands, the installation was finally complete.

I then launched the Advisor installer, agreed to its terms, and waited another 10 minutes for that to finish installing before I could launch it.

Once launched, it took another 15 minutes to tell me what I already knew–I needed another 256 MB of memory installed on my inherited laptop–and what I didn’t know–that other than memory, the laptop was Vista compatible.

So I started doing some math. To upgrade the laptop’s memory would cost me about $50-$100 depending on how much memory I added plus the cost of Vista itself, say another $100-$150 for Vista Home Basic. Alternatively, I could go to Walmart and buy a cheap-o desktop unit without monitor but with Vista Home already pre-installed for about $400 or less.

I’m really hesitant to go the bootcamp or Parallels route with this because (1) my Mini already has 2 partitions on it, neither of which I can get rid of at this time; and (2) I need native peripheral support.

So what advice do you have for me? Should I go the add-memory-and-upgrade-the-laptop? Should I shell out for the low-end desktop? All of this is for a 3-month project, after which I will no longer need much of this technology.

Camino 1.5 is one of those updates people have been looking forward to, and with good reason.

A lot of regular Camino users (myself included) have supported it over the years precisely because it has retained a sense of simple single purpose - it browses, very well.

But the fact that most other browsers boast many additional features has been a stick the unbelievers have beaten the Camino faithful with. “Why should I use Camino? It doesn’t even save sessions,” they said. And to an extent, they had a point.

When do you hire someone to write manuals for a piece of software that hasn’t seen much change in quite a while? Most probable answer: when a new release is in the works. That’s why seeing this job ad in the June ‘07 issue of German “Sound & Recording” magazine gave me new hope that we will see a not-so-minor overhaul of Apple’s music production suite, Logic, in the none-too-distant future.

The job opening for “Technical Writer/Instructional Designer in Germany m/f” is for Apple’s offices in Rellingen near Hamburg, aka “the former home of the late Emagic,” and the key task for this position is to create “accurate and concise technical documentation for our professional audio production software Logic.” That’s great news for the Logic user community.

But there remains the question of when exactly Logic 8 will see the light of day, as the most natural-fit events during which to let Logic 8 out of the bag — the Anaheim NAMM show in January and Frankfurt Musikmesse in March — are still more than half a year away. That would be an awfully long wait…

Two of what might be termed “venerable” (in computer years) Mac OS X applications have been updated today, apparently coincidentally. ;)

Brent Simmons and NewsGator released a major 3.0 update to the popular NetNewsWire with crazy amounts of spiffy new features.

And a former Simmons app, MarsEdit (now handled admirably by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater) has been updated to 1.2, bringing support for Growl, Picasa image handling for Blogger blogs, and social networking site Vox.

As widely expected, there are new MacBook Pro machines available as of today.

All three models come with 2GB RAM, and can support up to 4GB. They all come with a Superdrive. The upper two have a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB SDRAM graphics card; the lower model makes do with 128MB. The 17-incher offers an optional 1920×1200 resolution.

And, best of all - LED backlit displays on the 15-inch models, and the Core 2 Duo processor is (according to Engadget - I’ve not seen anything official from Apple about this yet) using the Santa Rosa chipset.

Tempting. Very tempting.

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

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

My post last Friday began life in a moment of uncertainty. I have a system in place for managing my ideas - of which more follows in a moment - but I was suddenly struck by the thought: “Is there a better way to do this?”

This has got to be the most honest spam I have ever received. And polite to boot. It certainly made me laugh:

Hello, i am here to propose you a deal. I want to be fair, I have stealed Canadian Bank accounts, and credit cards. I spam evry day for credit cards and Bank accounts. Can you accept to send to you the money from these stealed accounts and you to cashout? After that you will send me via Western Union 50% of what i send to you. I can send up to 5k per day.. We can make nice profit… Please reply me —@yahoo.com if you are interested. Thank you very much.

This one is for Randy, who would like to sync his shuffle with a playlist. I went ahead and chose audio-only unplayed podcasts, but feel free to modify as needed. The script includes some oddball uses that work but look ugly. Like the conversion of “none” to string and the use of the floc local variable. Got a better way? See some obviously bad coding here? Let me know in the comments. Thanks go to Mark Hunte for several improvements.

tell application "iTunes"
	-- Create playlist if it does not already exist
	set podString to "Podcast Playlist"
	if not (exists playlist podString) then
		make new playlist with properties {name:podString}
	else
		-- Remove all existing podcasts in playlist
		delete every file track of playlist podString
	end if
	-- Collect every track that has downloaded
	set tracklist to every file track of playlist "Podcasts"
	-- Add audio-only items that are still unplayed
	repeat with eachItem in tracklist
		if ((video kind of eachItem) as string is "none") and ((played count of eachItem) is 0) then
			set floc to location of eachItem
			add floc to playlist podString
		end if
	end repeat
end tell

After much hand-wringing and whinging about Apple’s apparent stance of “no third party apps on the iPhone”, news is coming out today based on a New York Times article that Apple may release a SDK for the iPhone at this month’s World Wide Developer Conference. Rumors around the iPhone have reached a fever pitch the past few weeks, and even the Times has been known to get things like this wrong before, but this is one rumor I’m really hoping pans out. Say it’s so, Steve!

On the off chance that this might prove useful to someone, I thought I’d share. Here’s an AppleScript snippet that moves all the files from a playlist into a single folder you specify.

-- MoveItems:
--   Move all files associated with a playlist to a folder you specify
--
-- Erica Sadun, May 2007
--
tell application "iTunes"
	-- Playlist to use
	set myPlaylist to some playlist whose name is "tmp"
	-- Location to move to. Assumes folder already exists
	set newLocation to ("Data:tmp:" as alias)
	-- Move each track file in this playlist
	set tracklist to every track of myPlaylist
	repeat with eachItem in tracklist
		set nth to item ((location of eachItem) as string) of application "Finder"
		move nth to newLocation
	end repeat
end tell

For your weekend homework, I’d like you to think about how you manage ideas on your Mac.

Ideas might start off as all kinds of input: a chunk of text, a URL, a document, a song. How do you store ideas? Sort them? Keep a close eye on those that change rapidly, whilst not forgetting the ones that lie dormant for a long time?

What software do you recommend for managing ideas? Are there any clever Finder techniques that can be used to manage them?

Any and all ideas about idea management are welcomed; please share your thoughts in the comments.

A nice home-made alternative to expensive sleek stands for MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Thanks to lazymonster for letting us re-publish the pic here.

Audacity 1.3.3 Beta
Audacity 1.3.3 Beta was released recently (May 18). This premiere multi-platform Open Source audio editor/recorder adds a surprising number of new features for a minor-point beta-update (1.3.2 beta to 1.3.3 beta). Mac OS X users will be happy to find that they can now import Quicktime files. There’s a new AutoDuck features that I’m guessing podcasters will find useful. But, there really are too many new features to list here. Check out the Beta release notes to see the descriptions for the many new features.

Let me start this story at the punchline with a quick abstract: After removing all atomic meta information from my iTunes plus purchases, the music files still retain distinguishable trace differences that could be used to track the data if loaded illegally to peer-to-peer networks. Now that you’ve heard the punchline, let’s rewind to the beginning and see how I ended up at this conclusion.

Looks like MacRumors has discovered that the enema is not as thorough as I thought it was. Read this.

More after the jump…