You know the old saying: “Don’t buy a Mac right before Macworld.” There’s a similar axiom in the photography world: “Want to buy a new digital camera… better wait for PMA.”

What the heck is PMA (other than a flat-sounding acronym)? It stands for Photo Marketing Association, and they sponsor the must-see photography show in the US. This year’s event is in Orlando, FL, Feb. 20-23. It is an amazing event.

The reason why I suggest you hold off on buying anything before PMA is because the camera manufacturers time their big announcements for this conference. For example, it was at last year’s PMA that we found out about the Canon Digital Rebel XT. And I think there will be some amazing stuff announced in February this year. For example, I think we’ll begin to see the big 2.5-inch LCDs on almost all new DSLRs. This alone is worth waiting for. I have a big screen on my Canon 5D, and it makes my older DSLR screens look awful puny.

I’ll be attending PMA and will post my findings from the gigantic trade show floor (it’s many times bigger than Macworld SF). Most likely the announcements made at the show will be ready to ship right away. So if you’re itching for a new digicam, hold off for a few more weeks. It should be worth the wait.

Traditionally divided, browser authors and development teams have recently come together, trying to outline the basis of common interface and technological principles that would provide users, no matter their browser and platform of choice, with a common set of clues as to which sites they can and cannot trust. Generally speaking that initiative is laudable, as it would make it easier for less experienced Internet users to pick up on potential dangers and on the significance of similar situations across a wide variety of sites.

I’ve tuned in daily to Rocketboom for a while now.* The Rocketboom eBay auction is just a stunt but it’s getting plenty of attention. Also, in the first day the bidding has gotten up to $6100.

The bigger story is that this popular video blog is about to include commercials in its daily cast. Two things to note: first, they are doing this in the most tasteful way possible. The ad will run at the end of the program. Secondly, they are offering a subscriber service at $3/month for an advertising free version with extra content.

We’ve been struggling with the same issues. We want to expand and improve our podcasting offerings, but we need to cover our costs. We recently added an advertisement to the beginning of some of our programs. What else should we try?

* Reminder to self - run the interview with the developer of FireAnt on Distributing the Future.

Last week’s release of Yojimbo by Bare Bones Inc showed that the company is not content to rest on its BBEdit-colored laurels. Lots of people had lots of questions following Yojimbo’s release, and earlier today I had a chance to put some of those questions to Bare Bones boss Rich Siegel.

Siegel denies that the app is part of a diversification effort by the company, which relies on continued sales of BBEdit for a large part of its income. Instead, he says, Yojimbo was a long time in the making, and like BBEdit and Mailsmith, resulted from one of the Bare Bones team feeling the need for a specific function.

I’ve spent the last couple of days messing around with iWork 06, getting to know the new features and writing an article about them at the same time, and I noticed an interesting little something.

One of the nicest new features in iWork is the ability to do the same kind of image editing within Pages and Keynote that you can do in iPhoto, using the Image Adjust panel we’ve grown accustomed to.

But there’s something funny about the Adjust panel in iWork 06. It’s not the same as iPhoto’s.

Soon after my copy of iLife 06 arrived, I settled down to do the install. As large installs go, it was pretty normal and uneventful, and I only made minimal changes to the default install options.

But after the install, I had to do a double-take at my Dock - suddenly it was twice as long as it had been. Huh? While my eyes had been busy watching the installer, iLife had added icons for all the new iLife applications to my Dock, without asking me first.

Now, a user’s Dock is a very personal thing - everyone has their Dock set up in a way that suits them. Me, I don’t have any applications in my Dock; rather than use it as a launcher, I use it to monitor what’s currently running. The addition of these iLife apps annoyed me because it forced me to interrupt my work and re-arrange my Dock the way I like it. Sure, this only took a few seconds, but it’s the principle.

I can understand that Apple wants to give new Mac users a helping hand, and it’s fair to say that some newcomers can feel confused after installing new software and finding nothing on screen to tell them what’s happened. Switchers from Windows, especially, are accustomed to seeing icons added to their Start menus or to the Desktop itself.

So my suggestion would be that the iLife installer should include a checkbox - checked by default would be fine - saying that icons for all the new software would be automatically added to the Dock. Then people like me, who like to keep their Dock under control, would have the chance to uncheck the box and remain untroubled.

My 4GB iPod nano is nearly at capacity. The 5G iPod w/video is nice. But, I’d like a bigger screen. So Apple, could you please build an iPod DS (dual screen) in a clam shell form factor to protect the larger screen?

Next in an occasional series[1] on creating a full-screen writing environment is an article by Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders: Open Thread: Developing for Full Screen Mode? Here’s his summary of what it’s all about:

Essentially, it temporarily hobbles your maddeningly versatile Mac into a machine for doing exactly one thing, being whatever is appearing in your single Full Screen window. And you might be amazed what a nice thing that can be sometimes.

Merlin asks what is involved in giving a Cocoa application the ability to take over the screen. There are some informative technical responses in the comments about how one would do this with a Cocoa app, which you should check out for direction if you’re interested in adding this capability to yours.

In addition to the X11+window manager idea I mentioned in this space previously, there was a pointer to this thread on ArsTechnica regarding the fun GLTerminal, which allows you to create a nifty “Wargames”-style terminal environment. (GLTerminal should not be mistaken for GLTerm, a different beast altogether.)

[1] See Full Screen Text Editing and GUI Schmooey

For about three days now, half of Paris has been unable to place mobile calls through our national cell phone provider, Orange. For about three days now, only a couple managers at the company, when hard pressed, end up admitting there is an issue with “calls that are not SMS” while level one support keeps sending customers back to the booklet that came with their handsets for troubleshooting information. For three days now, nobody has said a word about it.

Now that the Disney-Pixar deal has happened, there’s more than a little idle speculation about Disney being quicker to put their stuff out digitally through iTunes, Steve becoming CEO of Disney, or even the two companies merging.

In short, no, no, and no.

So you thought it was okay to joke about overthrowing the government? You thought your rights were protected by the Constitution, the Parliament, or law of the land.

Well you were wrong, we were all wrong. What should we do about it? Encrypt our email.

The NSA reads your email, the European Union saves your telephone calls for later use, Yahoo hands over your search results to the government if they ask nicely (or not). Everything you do online can easily be stored and recalled to be used as evidence against you.

This is fine of course, if you are terrorist or are communicating with terrorists. But what if you have a legitimate interest in Eugene Debs, John Kerry or healthy dissent? Well you are in luck because you can encrypt your email with GNU Privacy Guard.

GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) encrypts your email with your private key and makes the contents only openable by those to whom you send the email. This is a great way to provide yourself with privacy and ensure that it will be more difficult for those who want to snoop on your private communications. GPG can be used on nearly any operating system and integrates particularly well with Apple’s mail program as well as Thunderbird and Evolution. The government, any government really, has ways to break this encryption, but it will take a while if you use a strong key.

Start using GPG, write to your friends and family, speak your mind freely with Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote in mind - “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

Like Giles, I’ve been playing with Bare Bones’ new app, Yojimbo, and I really like it.

Yojimbo includes a feature that allows you to sync your items between computers via .Mac. .Mac users are used to this kind of convenience with their Safari bookmarks, calendars and keychains, but now it’s open to any developer to use for their own data. Although technically different, it’s effectively IMAP for your data.

This is a really interesting trend to me and it will, I think, start to emerge as a killer feature for both the applications that implement it and for .Mac itself. Apple’s online service really struggles when compared to free mail services like Gmail or low-cost services like Strongspace, but nobody has a sync solution like this.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m wondering what kind of a world .Mac Sync could open for wi-fi enabled handheld devices, but that’s another post for another time.

A project I’m finishing off involves a simple little front end that I’ve decided to implement using some DHTML. As I was reading up on JavaScript’s setTimeout method as part of my DHTML research, an interesting thought crossed my mind: would it be possible to make a strobe light out of that old archaic CRT monitor sitting on my closet floor and such a weak (as in weakly typed) language as JavaScript?

Well, I decided to give it a try and it actually worked out pretty well — although it did give me a mild headache after I had the not so keen idea to stare directly at it for a few seconds. Be warned that if you’re that one other extremely unlucky person, you might just ruin your equipment (or cause someone you know to have a seizure) by running a script as powerful as this one.

Here’s the code you need to make use of that old dust magnet.

<html><head>
<title>Strobe</title>
<script>
<!-- If you're extremely unlucky, you may break your equipment, or worse, have a seizure -->
function toggleBgColor()
{
  document.bgColor = document.bgColor == '#ffffff' ? '#000000' : '#ffffff';
  setTimeout('toggleBgColor()', 75); //in milliseconds
}
</script>
</head>
<body onLoad='toggleBgColor();'>
</body></html>

Just save the code as a webpage (text file that ends in “.html”) and open it up in your favorite semi-modern web browser to let the fun begin. Pretty simple, huh?

Can you think of anything better to do with that old monitor than make a strobe out of it? (Or do you know of any other JavaScript hacks that could potentially be hazardous to your health?)

I’ve been following conversations around Apple software lately. Starting with Aperture, which has had its share of tough press, I often think that many people just don’t understand it. It might be *too* innovative. We just published an article, What the Critics Don’t Get About Apple’s Aperture that sheds a few beams of light on this subject.

But it doesn’t stop with Aperture. Mail.app, Safari, iPhoto, and even recently, iTunes have all taken their fair share of criticism. I’m not saying that any of these apps are perfect. I know darn well they’re not. But I’m wondering about the level of scrutiny that we apply to them. Apple software just seems to attract a lot of attention.

For example, Microsoft Digital Image 2006 Suite doesn’t seem to get nearly the spotlight that iLife ‘06 receives, even though the Windows platform is many times bigger. I just did a Google search on “Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006″ and got 149,000 hits. I then did a search on “Apple iLife ‘06″ and got 284,000 hits. Yes this is just one very arguable data point, but it does reflect my own observations. People love to discuss and write about Apple software.

Now I don’t really have a stunning conclusion for these observations. I’m just fine saying, for whatever reason, we seem to hold Cupertino products to a higher standard. And maybe one of the good things that come from this phenomenon is that Apple receives tons of feedback to help them improve their products. And one thing I do know; they are listening.

I was just reading a column by Ted Landau where he discusses some things to keep in mind before you buy a MacIntel. Ted raises some good points, and the column is worth a read.

I’ve been thinking about this issue myself. At the moment, my driving need is to edit Raw images in Aperture on a laptop, and then have room to store them. My current PowerBook can’t apply the changes as fast as I want to make them. And my 80 GB hard drive… well it’s feeling like one of those miniscule trunks in a two-seater sports car. To tell you the truth, I’m beginning to loath my hard drive.

So even though an Intel processor is tempting, what I really need is a better video card, more RAM, and a bigger hard drive. This is what will drive my decision to buy a laptop. Yes, the CPU is important. But it’s not my sole consideration for buying a new computer. I need the whole package. And that’s when I’ll make the leap.

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

Like many of you, I too am a paid .Mac user, and I have been for a couple of years now. But if it weren’t for all of the pain involved in transitioning from one e-mail address to another, I wouldn’t renew it. Heck, I might just chock up the loss of time and people I may never get back into contact with again and still not renew it — but I’ll just be totally honest here and tell you that I haven’t decided yet.

As a Mac enthusiast who has renewed at least for one term and shelled out about $200, I feel like I have a genuine right to complain about my prestigious $100/yr @.mac address (what most of you all also get for your Benjamin too), and so I’ll go ahead and get to my point: iCal support stinks. It’s plain and simple. No, I’m not the busiest man in the world, but I would like to be able to do more than view my calendar online. Rather, I’d like to be able to edit it too. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, to tell you the truth, I think that for $100/yr, it is a pretty simple request, because Backup, Virex, and my quirky iDisk sure aren’t worth it — at least not to me.

So what’s better? Well, I think we all know of at least one web-based e-mail client that does a pretty darn good job of integrating calendar support. Yep, the notorious Outlook Web Access. Although (thank God) I personally don’t own any MS machines/licenses myself, one of my employers owns plenty of them — more than any other single organization in the world to be exact (any guessers?) — and you know what, I’ll go ahead and tip my hat to them. By gosh, MS doesn’t do many things well by my standard, but they sure do have a snazzy web-based e-mail client with calendar integration. And it even works pretty well in Firefox. Imagine that. I don’t even want all sort of bells and whistles though — I just want a few basic features that allow me to add and edit events on my calendar without having to tote metal around with me all day long. Honestly, what good is a read-only calendar in this day and age for anything except birthdays or football game schedules?

But before going, I’ll leave you with a thought provoking blurb from a quasi-flame war I had the pleasure of partaking in a little while ago with some folks much smarter than I am:

[With the whole Disney/Pixar thing going on] Steve’s calendar is bound to get more complex and, hence, iCal [will] get better…Seriously, though, since nobody at Apple is probably allowed to publish their calendar, I believe nobody there ever feels a need for that feature to work reliably.

Or since they never leave the Cupertino campus (apparently), perhaps they haven’t cared to add in editing either? Hmmm, an interesting thought in any event.

At least I can be thankful that they haven’t adjusted the cost of .Mac for inflation yet.

Should I gamble again this year?

Related link: https://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/

A classmate of mine tonight made an excellent point about the symbology that is inherent in computing. Think about it from an outsider’s perspective, from someone who’s never used a computer seriously, only rarely, casually. The representations that we use to represent things are really quite silly.

In the olden days of the Mac, I remember a specific icon that drove me crazy: the paint bucket. It didn’t look like a paint bucket to me at all, rather some bizarre odd shape that didn’t made any sense at all. Icons that are clear to some folks are far from intuitive to others.

Think about it. If you click on Firefox or Internet Explorer, what are you clicking on? A stylized E? A fox on a planet? What do those mean, really? Look at the icon for Safari. It’s a compass. But how does that represent the web to a new user? I’m not sure it does.

A picture is supposed to speak a thousand words, but are those words the same to all users? Some icons are well designed. Mail.app and Address Book in OS X are absolutely unmistakable in their function. But other icons, including some for my favorite applications have too many permutations.

NetNewsWire is one of my mainstay applications, but the icon could be just about anything. Is it a program for tracking satellites? For tracking satellite TV listings? No, it’s a newsreader, and a kickass one at that.

FirstClass is a server/client mail reader, whose application is people sitting around a table. Is it a program for scheduling meetings? for conference room management? Well, kinda, but it’s primary use is groupware and email.

Apple isn’t entirely guilt free here, icons for QuickTime and Dashboard are far from immediately obvious, which makes for a question: is the language of computing something we have to train people into doing, or is it really as easy as we’d like to believe? The answer’s in the icons, but like all pictures, the interpretation is key.

Are icons really as useful as you’d like?

Writing Webcam offers view of living like a dog for the Chicago Tribune, Alex Goldfayn describes how a couple of installed a home webcam in order keep an eye on their pet dog while they’re away from home.

If you’ve got a broadband Internet connection at home, and a pet that you’d like to keep an eye on (out of concern or curiosity) this really is a great solution. I’ve had a “ScooterCam” for a few years now, which allows my wife and I to check in on Scooter, our dog, and it is also greatly enjoyed by friends and family. Here’s a photo that was captured by my friend Kathy one day when she peeked in our pup.

Like the folks in the article, I use a D-Link DCS-900W camera. It’s wireless, so it’s easy to position and connect to our home WiFi network, plus its built-in web server means that I don’t have to a computer turned on in order to access the image. I’ve also had good success with this camera’s wired hard-to-find sibling, the DCS-1000, which is a fine choice if you happen to have a network connection near where you plan to use it.

Details about my setup are in Smart Home Hacks (see Hack #82 - Monitor Your Home with a Network Camera on page 295). There you’ll find that in addition to connecting to the camera for a live picture, you can use a computer to automatically grab an image from the camera and upload it to another location, or send it to your cell phone, at either regular intervals or on-demand. But that’s a more advanced setup, for the basic camera setup, it’s quite simple, and quite rewarding.

Woof!

Bare Bones, maker of BBEdit, has released Yojimbo, an information manager for OS X that indicates something of a new direction for the software company.

For starters, this app looks like a modern Cocoa application should. It has the kind of toolbar you’d expect to see, with clear, modern icons. Very unlike the old-school, and sometimes criticized, BBEdit document toolbar.

And it costs $39 for a single-user license, a nice, low price point that will appeal to people accustomed to good-value applications from competitors like Omni Group or Macromates.

Yojimbo (hmm, I’m really not convinced about that name) combines many day-to-day functions. It stores notes, bookmarks, and secure information. The layout reminds me a little of DEVONthink, but is much simpler. The essence is is that it stores data, any kind of data - text, images, PDFs, web pages, passwords and serial numbers (and any other kind of Sekrit Stuff) in encrypted notes.

Control-click options on a stored note in Yojimbo

One of Yojimbo’s key features is the ease with which you can get data into it. I dragged a folder full of text files right in; you can also drag stuff to a floating tab called the Drop Dock, or invoke something called the Quick Input Panel. This last device pops open with whatever you last copied to the clipboard already pasted in the correct field; in most cases you just need to add some metadata, if you wish, and click the Create button. Very slick.

If you’ve used apps like DEVONthink and Mori (formerly Hog Bay Notebook), the whole approach will feel very familiar. Indeed, the app itself is incredibly easy to get used to. Bare Bones is right to say “there’s no learning curve”.

It’s been a long time since we saw anything really new from Bare Bones. Yojimbo is a radical new step forward for the BB coders, and I hope the first in a series of smaller, cheaper, more nimble applications from them.

I shall spend some more time with Yojimbo in the coming days and come back with a more detailed review later this week.

Is this the start of a new era at Bare Bones?

I have a friend whose favorite saying is, “Anything worth doing is worth doing fast.” It’s the perfect mantra for online publishing, but not so easy for books. Or is it?

O’Reilly has just introduced Rough Cuts. It’s a service that gives you access to books before they’re published. These early chapters won’t be fully edited or formatted for print. They will, however, be very current.

The first Rough Cuts are Flickr Hacks, Ajax Hacks, the Ruby Cookbook, and Ruby on Rails: Up and Running.

When you buy a book via the Rough Cuts service, you get access to an evolving PDF manuscript. You can download and print it, or read it online. You also have a chance to shape the final product through your suggestions, bug fixes, and comments made directly to the author and editors through Safari’s Notes feature.

There’s a great story behind this product’s evolution. You might want to read Tim O’Reilly’s post on The Long Snout. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a glimpse into the future of book publishing.

I’m getting tired of guys who have done just a little bit of Ruby telling us that Java isn’t cool. I’m ok with Java not being cool but the examples I keep seeing (other than the Rails examples) are how much faster you can write “Hello World” in Ruby than in Java. I’m not here to refute that - Ruby does look cool and it is on my list of languages to learn.

I’m currently having a blast playing with Smalltalk. I should have taken the time to learn it long ago. I’m sure Smalltalk will help me when it’s time to tackle Obj C and Ruby and it is already improving the Java code that I write. Despite those benefits, the real reason I’m finally seriously looking at Smalltalk is because I want to teach my eldest daughter to program with Squeak, Croquet, and Scratch. These are some killer environments - there is a lot of “cool” left in this aging programming language.

It’s not just the Ruby guys who have been picking on Java as not being a cool language - it’s all those Perl guys. There are a lot of things wrong with Java, but having the Perl guys lecture us on what’s cool would be like me telling my wife which shoes to wear with some outfit.

In any case, I think I’m hypersensitive about this right now because I’m trying to recruit cool Java talks for this year’s OSCON in Portland. Now that Java is so commonly seen as an important part of many enterprise applications, that is all that folks see it as. I had breakfast last week with Head First Java authors Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates. They are working on a Java Champions project with Sun and Kathy is also on the program committee for OSCON. The three of us ran through a number of open source cool Java projects we’d like to see present at OSCON.

Sure, we’re going to also look at the Harmony and Eclipse proposals - but give us something to show these Ruby and Perl folks. Give us something to show them that Java is still a compelling language and programming environment. Submit your cool Open Source Java proposals to OSCON today.

One of the questions I’ve been getting a lot lately is what happens when you edit an image that’s stored outside of iPhoto 6? Now that you don’t have to import images stored on your hard drive into iPhoto 6 (you can “point” to them instead), does this mean that when you edit those images they’re stored outside of iPhoto too?

They are not. Once you edit an “outside the library” image, iPhoto 6 makes a copy of it and stores it in its Library. Take a look at this file path for a picture I made adjustments to:

On the left you’ll see the file path inside my iPhoto library (~iPhoto Library Fourteen) that leads me to the copy of the image that iPhoto made when I edited it. What’s nice, however, is that it uses the same folder name (Sebastopol Jan 06) in the iPhoto Library as I used to store the image on my hard drive. It was a cinch to find the edited image.

If I use the “Revert to Original” command in iPhoto, the application removes the altered image from my iPhoto library (and in this case the folder too because it was the only image in it.)

Hope this helps…

A Slashdot blurb from a while back, The Future of Emacs said that “Emacs 22 will have many new features such as support for Mac OS X and Cygwin; mouse wheel support and many new modes and packages.”

Woo hoo! Mac OS X support. This is a big deal, because Emacs has been somewhat notorious in terms of its Mac maintainability. Here’s what I mean: a few laptops ago, I had a Rev/A iBook which didn’t get any hardware acceleration from OS X (we’re talking 10.0 and maybe 10.1 here), so I found myself using X11 and xterm instead of Terminal, since X11 wasn’t bogging my sad little iPurse down with fancy Quartz rendering in software. Given that I was in X11, I wanted a more X-aware Emacs than ships with OS X, so I was glad to see that fink’s emacs build left the X11 stuff in.

But things change. Two computers later, I now prefer the Terminal, since it supports UTF-8 text (i.e., two-byte character sets), and is easier to do copy-and-paste with. But I still wanted to be able to do Emacs in separate windows, since my typical Java development environment is to have one or two terminals and 2-5 editor windows open. Mixing Terminal and X11 didn’t seem like a great idea, so I needed a real Mac OS X app. There are a couple projects to do this listed in Version Tracker, but they seemed a little fragile.

Speaking of fragile, back in the fink world, every time a major version of OS X came out, they’d be broken for a few months, so when I was on X11, I’d be broken. I checked out Darwin Ports, but their emacs port crashed if you tried to build it with X11 support. So I filed a bug in November, 2002. And it defied fixing, because when Darwin Ports’ Landon Fuller looked at how Fink got it to work, he reported “The fink hacks are pretty ugly” and opted to wait for “upstream fixes”.

Long wait, because I started getting mail about this last fall, three years after filing it. It had become one of the longest-open bugs in Darwin Ports.

So, I need my own Emacs .app, which various projects provide in a fairly fragile form, and also want an X11 version, which the major port projects have had problems building (Darwin Ports) or maintaining (Fink). And since I’m rapidly falling out of love with Fink because of what seems to be an abandoned port problem with them, I decided that I’m finally going to just start building my own stuff and give up on package managers.

So, um, how do we build this thing?

Getting emacs22

First, you need the source. When I went googling after reading the Slashdot post, I found a blog on building emacs22 for Tiger (in Japanese). It’s mostly right, but the checkout information has changed.

To check out emacs, drop into the command line and create a temporary folder… mkdir ~/tmp will do nicely. cd into and do:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs

This will create an emacs folder in your current folder. Now we’re ready to build.

The basics of building

You have two choices: building a double-clickable .app, or building the usual command-line-launched binary, presumably with X11 support. These choices are mutually incompatible: you can’t create both with one build. Moreover, I’ve found that installing the Carbon app will deploy pieces that break the X11 support, so if you’re going to do both, do the Carbon app first, then the X11 binary.

The build uses the following basic steps

• configure - prepares make for the build, discovers information about your system needed by compilers and other parts of the build
• make bootstrap - apparently only needed because you’re building from CVS (see INSTALL.CVS).
• make - do stuff
• make install - put the pieces in their appropriate places on the system. You generally need admin privileges to do this, so plan on running sudo make install

Each build tweaks these steps, so read on…

Building the Carbon app

To build the double-clickable app, you pass the flag --enable-carbon-app to configure. In fact, that’s the only thing you need to do special. Here’s the steps:

• ./configure --enable-carbon-app
• make bootstrap
• make
• sudo make install

The last step installs the Emacs.app into the Applciations folder. You’re ready to go — double click it to launch it.

Two interesting things to note: if you want to launch the Emacs.app from the command-line, you can use the path /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs . You can, in fact, set this as your EDITOR, meaning it’ll be used for typing in CVS or Subversion comments. You can edit your .cshrc or .profile (depending on whether your shell is tcsh or bash respectively) to pick this up. For example, I still use tcsh (yeah, on OS X since DP3, back when they didn’t include bash) and I use the following in my .cshrc:

alias emacs "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs"
setenv EDITOR /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

Also, this is interesting: emacs -nw (for “no window”) will keep you in the Terminal, instead of bouncing Emacs into the Dock.

Speaking of the Dock, double-clicking the app icon after an instance is running, or kicking off a second one from the command-line, will cause multiple Emacs applications to appear in the Dock, as pictured below. Not very Mac-like of course: a proper Mac application would open a new window in the already-running instance.

Building for X11

OK, if you want an X11 version (instead | also), do the following.

First, the docs advocate a make distclean so you don’t pick up anything from your earlier build — if you skipped ahead to this point and didn’t build the Carbon version, you can skip this.

Also, you generally need to have installed not only Apple’s X11, but also the X11 SDK (an option in Apple’s installer), to compile X11 stuff on OS X. No, I didn’t try uninstalling mine just to see if it breaks… seriously, folks…

Next, tell configure that you’re building the X11 version and not the Carbon version. The docs also advocate explicitly targeting an install directory other than /usr, since that will get clobbered by future system updates. /usr/local/ is a pretty typical choice for this purpose (obviously, you’ll need to explicitly run /usr/local/bin/emacs to pick up this version, and/or change your .cshrc or .profile as described above.

So here’s the deal:

• ./configure --without-carbon --with-x --prefix=/usr/local
• make bootstrap
• make
• sudo make install

Get X11 running and kick off a /usr/local/bin/emacs and you’re in Happy X11 Emacs Town:

And hey, check out the version number:

So does it work on the Intel Macs?

Good question. I don’t see a -arch argument in the gccs, so I don’t think this is a Universal Binary. Then again, if it’s only to be used on the machine it’s compiled on, it seems to me like it should work — that’s the point of configure after all. If you have a shiny fast Intel iMac, try it and post a comment here.

Your mileage may vary

This has worked for me for a month or so, and I’m really happy with it, and looking forward to Emacs 22 being final someday. Hats off to the development team for making the Mac build so painless.

…and if it doesn’t work for you, I’m not tech support and I’m not your mom. Attempt to deal.

Have you tried emacs22 on OS X? Anything interesting to share?

Take a wifi card, an audio in/out card, sundry other little bits of circuitry and a splash of C code, and what have you got?

Why, Radio Babylon of course, programmer Andy McFarland’s lo-fi but very cool little music device for electronics and software hackers.

This tiny little jumble of wires uses Bonjour to connect to any shared iTunes libraries it can find. Then it picks a song at random and starts playing. Everything else is on the todo list.

Andy began the project to learn more about gumstix, a selection of tiny little boards of Linux-capable goodness, for sale at reasonable prices to hobbyists, geeks and anyone with spare time to hack.

But who knows - maybe Andy’s clever idea might inspire some future official iPod feature. If you’ve been following the Mac rumors recently, you’ll have noticed some interest in an article at The Times that blithely predicts a wireless iPod in the works.

And why not? If the iPod were wireless, it would not always have to be playing music stored on its own hard disk. If it incorporated Andy McFarland’s Babylon idea, or something like it, you could use the iPod to access all your digital music (and video) while you were still within range of your network. The hard disk would only be used while out of range. Perhaps the hard disk could be deactivated altogether by putting the iPod into a ‘Home’ or ‘Network’ mode. Just think of the extra battery life.

Okay, let’s get one thing straight here: I am a paid .Mac member, so I have every right to bitch and complain. In fact, I’ve been a .Mac member so long that I remember when it used to be called iTools. And like most .Mac members (and long-time Mac users), I remember that fateful day in 2002 when Steve Jobs announced at Macworld New York that the iTools service would be renamed .Mac, and that it would no longer be free. But, hey, you’d be getting all this great stuff to go along with it.

That was then, this is now.

According to Macworld magazine, there were roughly 2.4 million iTools users when Apple made the switch to .Mac. Granted, a lot of those 2.4 million “people” were probably like me, folks who registered multiple iTools accounts for various reasons. (I’ll admit, I had three iTools accounts, one each for my wife and I, and another that I used strictly for extra iDisk storage.) And according to Steve Jobs’ keynote address at Macworld San Francisco last week, there are now over 1 million paid .Mac members. (Keep in mind that Apple switched iTools to .Mac back in July 2002, and they’re just now up to 1 million paid .Mac members. Even if half of the iTools members had two accounts, that still means it’s taken Apple 3.5 years to get to the million-member mark.)

So the question of “Why has it taken Apple so long to reach 1 million paid .Mac members?” comes to mind. Well, the first reason would be the cost of the service; $99 per year. When you take a free service and suddenly put a price tag on it, people will jump ship, and in this case, people jumped ship in droves.

Before I wrote Inside .Mac, I asked a lot of paid .Mac members what they were using the service for, and the majority of those people said email and iDisk storage. So, at the time, they were paying $99/year for 15 MB of IMAP email space (with a 3 MB/message maximum size), and 100 MB of iDisk storage space. That’s a lot to cough up annually for just a couple things you would normally get for free with your ISP. One obvious way around the email storage issue was to set your client to use POP instead of IMAP, but that takes away the “email anywhere” feature.

As I tried to point out in my .Mac book, there’s a lot more to .Mac than meets the eye. At the time the book was printed, email and iDisk space were the same, but you also got Virex for virus protection, Apple’s own Backup application for backing up your data, the online HomePage tools, and the iLife applications iMovie and iPhoto just started to have built-in integration with .Mac.

Also, if you looked in the folders on your iDisk, you’d find a folder called FreePlay Music, which included hundreds of music tracks which you could use, for free, in your iMovies. To me, the FreePlay Music tracks alone were worth the price of the .Mac membership. But now they’re gone, and so is Virex. In fact, Virex 7.5 was so brutal on the system that Apple quickly withdrew it as a benefit application, and now when you look at what you get with .Mac, you won’t even see Virex listed anymore.

So, just what am I getting for my hundred-bucks-a-year? According to Apple’s site, this is what you get with a .Mac membership:

• Publishing with iWeb (requires iLife ‘06).
• iDisk storage of up to 1 GB of space that’s shared between your iDisk and .Mac email account.
• Groups (and each .Mac Group you create takes up a minimum of 30 MB of storage space from your iDisk!)
• Sync (built into Mac OS X Tiger’s System Preferences)
• Member Benefits, such as discounts on select software and free samples from the GarageBand Jam Packs.
• Access to Apple’s online Learning Center, some of which is available without a .Mac membership, and some just for members.
• Photocasting (requires iPhoto 6, found in iLife ‘06)
• Backup 3, Apple’s own backup application which you can use to backup data to your iDisk, to your hard drive or an external disk, or to CD or DVD.
• Mail, available as IMAP or POP (default is IMAP), and shares storage space with your iDisk.

---

There’s also a .Mac Family Pack, which lets you set up and manage up to five .Mac accounts, but we won’t cover that here. Instead, I’m choosing to focus on the single-user .Mac membership.

---

When you think about it, .Mac costs you more than just the seemingly $99/year membership fee. Let’s see, I paid $2000 for hardware, $99/year for .Mac, $79/year for “upgrades” to iLife so I can use the .Mac features, and now .Mac has been bound into the OS, so I’m paying, on average, about $129/year for OS upgrades as well. Forgetting the price of the hardware, at the base level, .Mac is costing me — roughly — $300 per year! Now, American Express has a trademarked slogan, “Membership Has Its Privileges,” but so far with my .Mac membership, I’m not really seeing those “privileges.”

When things like the FreePlay Music get unceremoniously dropped, when Virex starts uncontrollably running processes on my system and brings it to its knees, and when the online HomePage tools suck so much that Apple realizes they need to come up with another solution (iWeb), and then charges you for that solution, there’s a problem!

I already have a Google Gmail account that gives me, what, 2.5 GB(!) of email storage space for free, and there are lots of online storage sites that offer way more storage for less or free (if you don’t mind bloated ads being served up in your face).

So what’s the .Mac Advantage?

From what I can tell, the only .Mac Advantage (and granted, this is a big one) is tighter integration with iLife and the OS. And while that integration with Mac OS X is nice to have, it makes me more dependent upon the OS and the iLife applications (iMovie, iPhoto, and now GarageBand and iWeb) than ever before. And at the very base level of just the cost of a .Mac membership and yearly “upgrades” to iLife, I really find myself asking if it’s worth paying $179 a year for.

If .Mac is going to be so tightly bound into the iLife apps and the OS, then a .Mac membership should be bundled in with one of them. Well, at least that’s my opinion. Right now, iLife costs $79 per year with no incremental upgrade cost (which really chaps my hide, but I’ll complain about that one later). Why can’t Apple charge $129/year for a version of iLife that includes a .Mac membership? Or why can’t Apple charge $159 for an OS upgrade (the last two system upgrades for Panther and Tiger were $129 each) that includes a .Mac membership? Doing either one of those would greatly increase member retention and add a bunch of new members to the service.

Granted, I can see where this might be an accounting nightmare for someone at Apple if they have to split hairs to push funds over to the .Mac team, but still, it’s simple enough math that my 9-year-old nephew could figure it out and make it happen.

The way I look at it, I’m being taxed to the tune of $100/year by Apple to have a .Mac account, and that’s not really fair. I’ve been a faithful Mac user for years, and I believe in supporting and evangelizing the platform just as much as many of the other Mac faithful out there, but this to me just seems wrong. .Mac offered more in the way of services and “freebies” to its members in the early days than it does now. If things like “Publishing to the Web” and “Photocasting” are listed as member benefits — and are only available by purchasing the latest copy of iLife — then those really aren’t “benefits”; they’re add-ons that cost me a fee.

Do I feel like I’m getting my $99.95/year out of .Mac? Nope, I don’t. Will I renew again next Fall? Most likely; mainly because all of my friends have been reaching me at my mac.com email address since I registered the account name with my iTools account long ago. I don’t want to give up that address, but I don’t think I should have to pay $100/year for it when I’m already buying a new copy of the OS and iLife annually.

Apple should put an end to the .Mac Tax and just roll it into the OS or iLife. It makes more sense that way. Well, at least that’s my opinion; what say you?

Should Apple roll an annual .Mac membership fee into iLife or future upgrades to the Mac OS X operating system?

I depend on 3rd party apps and plug-ins when using iPhoto. I thought I’d give you a quick rundown on how they’re working with version 6.

• iPhoto Library Manager — I’m still using version 2.0, which I like a lot. It’s been fine in iPhoto 6, allowing me to switch among my libraries and create new ones. Here’s the official word from Brian’s site: “Photo Library Manager 3.1 and earlier are partially compatible with iPhoto 6. You can still use iPhoto Library Manager to create new libraries and switch between them, but the album copying, merging, and importing features are not currently functional. An update for iPhoto Library Manager will be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks to provide full compatibility with iPhoto 6.”
• Photon 1.1.1 — Everything seems fine with this plugin for posting iPhoto images on Movable Type and WordPress blogs.
• BetterHTMLExport 2.1 — This wonderful web page plugin that I also use for creating navigation on CDs works the same as always with iPhoto 6.

If you’re using 3rd party apps with iPhoto 6 that I haven’t covered here, will you post a comment and let us know how they’re working for you?

Related link: https://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/9042

In Have you looked at iTunes?, one of my O’Reilly brethren, François Joseph de Kermadec, got me to thinking about a particular point he made:

[The] full screen video playback, that is handled so smoothly by QuickTime Player, has iTunes stop, jitter, pixellate… It does not feature any controls in full screen mode whatsoever, it does not hide the cursor and, best of all, the screen saver has been known to go ahead and cover it.

Amen; I absolutely agree — pretty poor effort there by the iTunes folks. Especially since any AppleScript amateur can script up an 80% solution to this problem in about 5 minutes. But for this very reason I think we can forgive Apple, at least for the time being, since they’ve made it so darn easy for us to fill the void.

Here’s a quick and dirty first run at things:

tell application "iTunes"
	activate
	set theList to (get selection of front window as list)
	set trackCount to count of theList
	if trackCount is 0 then
		tell application "iTunes" to display dialog "No track selected. Try again" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
	else --assuming only 1 movie selected
		set theTrack to item 1 of theList
		set thePath to the location of theTrack
		tell application "QuickTime Player"
			set show welcome movie automatically to false --remove annoyance
			activate
			try
				open thePath
				present movie 1 scale screen --again, assuming 1 movie. full screen even without Pro
			on error
				tell application "iTunes" to display dialog "Oops. Some error occurred." buttons {"OK"} default button 1
			end try
		end tell
	end if
end tell

Open up Script Editor, paste in the file, make sure it compiles, and then save it in your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder (creating it if necessary.) Now, instead of clicking on a video (part of the missing 20% of our solution), you just run the video from the script menu from up in the menubar. Your video should run at fullscreen in QuickTime (even without Pro) and you’ll also get access to those controls and nice things that come along with QuickTime.

Feel free to polish it up.

My first impression of iPhoto 6 could be summed up in one word: “Wow!” My second and third impressions aren’t bad either.

iPhoto 6 has reached maturity. And Apple has brought this lovely image management tool to this point without destroying its friendliness or charm. I’m going to highlight just a few of my favorite features here today. I’ll be drilling down into more detail in future articles, and of course in, “iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual.”

But for now, I want to start with Apple’s claim that performance is improved. It is. I’m sure mileage will vary, but on my PowerBook 1.5 GHz, everything improved from scrolling through thumbnails to editing Raw files.

Speaking of Raw files, Apple has introduced a new advanced preference called Use Raw files with external editor. This enables me to double-click on a thumbnail for a Raw file and have the image open in Adobe’s Camera Raw. If I prefer to use Apple’s Adjust palette for editing, I can either change the preference, Option double-click on the thumb, or right-click on the thumbnail and make the appropriate editing selection. I have a brief tutorial on iPhoto 6 Raw options that you can read for more detail.

This conversation can’t go any further without mentioning Full Screen mode editing. Just click once on any thumbnail, tap the Full Screen button, and watch your image fill up the screen against a black background. You have all of your editing tools hiding on the bottom and the thumbnails hiding on top. A simple mouse-over reveals them.

CMD-click up to 8 images in thumbnail mode, then tap the Full Screen button and compare them all at once. You can magnify each image using the slider at the bottom of the screen, or by simply pressing the 1 key (100%), 2 key (200%), or the 0 key to return to “fit in screen” size. You can rate your photos using the floating info box (and add comments too). Everything works great in full screen mode. If you have really big Photoshop images, they may take a few seconds to reach full resolution. But for my cameras, including the Canon 5D, the performance was excellent.

While I’m on editing, the new Effects palette is useful. It provides you with one-click enhancements, enabling you to return to the original at any time by clicking on the center tile in the palette. I particularly like the “Edge Blur” effect for portraits. It’s quite professional looking.

And did you notice that you can now have iPhoto point to existing images that you have organized on your hard drive… without actually importing them into the managed library? It’s true, if you uncheck the box labeled “Copy files to iPhoto Library folder when adding to library,” you can have iPhoto point to your original photo files instead of duplicating them in iPhoto’s library — and still make full use of iPhoto’s tools. The option is under Advanced in the preferences dialog box.

While you’re there, you might also notice that you can now use a ColorSync profile for viewing photos. I’m going to be testing this option for sure.

All of this, and I still haven’t touched on Photocasts, 16-bit Tiffs, iWeb compatibility, greeting cards, calendars, or the improved interface. iPhoto 6 is a steal as part of the iLife ‘06 suite for $79. More reporting to come. But for now, I recommend this upgrade, wholeheartedly.

MacDevCenter editor Derrick Story has been doing a podcast on digital photography on his Digital Story site. I’ve learned a lot about photography, but you know that I’m always listening to the audio. In the last couple of episodes Derrick’s voice has come through much more clearly and crisply. He’d had a muddy sound before and I asked him what the change was.

He explained that he’d tried to use a USB mic for a while but he had never gotten the sound he wanted. He’d heard the muddiness and had tried different mic placement etc. Recently he’s been using an MBox and has found that whatever microphone he uses with it, he has better sound than he did before. As he writes:

“I tried and I tried to get the direct USB mics to work - both the Samson and others, and just couldn’t get a good enough recording. As soon as I gave up on those and switched to an M-box that had an XLR connector, I could use any mic that I wanted. Both the box and the mic options improved the initial recordings tremendously. Bottom line, as tempting as the USB mics might be, they just didn’t cut it for me.”

I had fair results with the MBox. I had difficulties with the gain and lack of headroom. I would have to open the pot up almost all the way to get any reasonable levels and then didn’t have much space to play before I was redlining. Also, the interface is a bit confusing. You seem to be able to switch between mic level and line level on the two inputs - but what really happens depends on whether you are using an XLR jack or a 1/4″ jack.

Although the resulting quality was pretty good with the MBox and its form factor was good for portability, I also didn’t use the software that came with it enough. I preferred to capture with Audio Hijack Pro or Soundtrack Pro. I would like a good portable solution and am still looking.

Despite all of this talk about equipment - a good podcast is not dependent on great equipment. Some of my favorites are done on entry level equipment. A great camera helps a good photographer but can’t make someone with my lack of aesthetics into a visual artist. The same is true about audio equipment - start simply and build. A USB mic might be the right way for you to get into podcasting. As you get better, however, Derrick predicts that you are likely to outgrow it.

How do you get voice into your computer?

Starting on Friday, Jan. 20, I’ll begin publishing a series of programming tutorials on Mac DevCenter. The first piece, by Martin Redington, covers adding a new style Preferences window to your application. It’s a two-part tutorial. The second installment will run the following Friday.

The week after that, I’ll publish a piece on PackageMaker by Shelley Weiner. She’s working on additional tutorials covering FileMerge and Property List Editor. In the meantime, Martin will be working on tutorials that will be integrated with Shelley’s pieces.

I hoping to be able to publish a new tutorial from this new developer series every Friday for a couple months. Along the way, I have lots of great stuff that I’ll continue to run on Tuesdays. It’s going to be a fun start to the year on Mac DevCenter.

If you have topics you’d like us to cover in this programming series, going ahead and post them in the talkbacks below. We’ll see what we can do…

Apple and Google operate in very different ways. Apple like to announce things with a bang, preferably with Steve standing in front of a whooping crowd, music thumping, a stage full o’ Macs behind him.

Google, on the other hand, might update its Labs page, or maybe post something on the corporate blog. It has a far more laid-back approach.

And ever since the announcement that it would start to sell video content online, Google has been gradually building on the features of Google Video.

In recent weeks, they’ve added the basic store on the front page:

And made it easy to grab the video files you want, even for use on your iPod:

What they’re doing seems very evolutionary, iterative. Small changes, frequently made. Apple does not tend to work this way. Usually Apple will release something, and aside from minor tweaks via Software Update, the product will remain static until the next keynote opportunity to release it with all the fanfare Apple thinks it deserves.

So why am I making these quibbling comparisons on a Mac-oriented weblog?

Well, because I’m of the opinion that digital video is a wide-open market, and that Google’s rapid progress on improving and updating the Google Video Store is something that Apple should be worried about. Google has an excellent opportunity to beat Apple at its own game, to do to Apple with video what Apple did to the music industry with the iTunes Music Store.

There’s still much work to be done before any company can claim to dominate the digital video space. Watching which one will succeed is going to be an interesting pastime for the next year or so.

Right now, Google has wider reach to more computer users. But Apple need not worry about it gaining ground among Mac users just yet; not with little alerts like this appearing on the Video Store:

Which is weird, to say the least. When did Macs have trouble coping with online payments?

As I’ve mentioned in earlier blog posts, I have the oldest running PowerBook in O’Reilly. At present, I’m using a 667 MHz PowerBook G4 with 768 MB RAM — a TiBook. Aside from a minor problem that came with the PowerBook when it arrived (the wireless antenna wire wasn’t, um, wired), my O’Reilly-issued PowerBook has served me well. And despite the fact that the display cracked (due to no fault of my own, mind you), and that it’s titanium casing shields all WiFi signals (which forced me to get a PCMCIA wireless card), it’s been a faithful little road warrior.

I use this little silver puppy for pretty much everything I do work-wise (I have a Mac mini that I use for personal use, and a G4 tower that I keep handy as a test machine for when it comes to new OS builds), but she’s starting to look her age. The paint on the outter rim is chipping off, the latch doesn’t work 90% of the time, and the batteries are usable as long as I remember which one I need to swap out before it hits 30% life and just forces my machine into a safe sleep mode.

But like I said, the silver puppy’s been a good machine. I use it for everything from testing applications, to writing and editing books in Microsoft Word or BBEdit, to creating graphics with Adobe’s CS2 (using Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, mostly), and on occasion, playing Halo when nighttime falls and the need to de-stress is upon me. So after last week’s Macworld SteveNote, I nudged our Mac sysadmin, Chris Stone, and asked what he thought the chances were of me getting one of the new MacBook Pro’s. He said he’d check, I sent him a wish-list spec for the MBP of my dreams, and I left it at that.

Then yesterday, Chris pops up on iChat to let me know that a PO had been put in for me to get a MacBook Pro. Imagine that! Cool! I was so happy about that that I forgot to look at the specs he sent me, and I guess I could go dig through my iChat logs and see, but really, who cares…I’m getting a new Mac. Well, okay, not right now, but sometime next month, a new box will arrive here at my “home/office” in Portland, Oregon, and I’ll soon be driving one of the new Intel-based Power…er…MacBook Pros.

As such, my plan is to blog my experiences with the new MacBook Pro for the first few weeks. From opening the box and setting up the MBP, to transferring my data and reporting back on how Rosetta performs, since I have a feeling that I’ll be using it quite a bit until my favorite apps are available as Universal Binaries (which could be a while). Of course, the app I’m dying to try out most on the new MacBook Pro is Aperture.

If there’s something you’d like me to report on, or a particular app you’d like me to try out (and if it isn’t in my arsenal of apps, please feel free to send yours along), let me know by posting a comment below. If I have the app, I’ll gladly report on how it performs on the new MBP and/or under Rosetta.

So, stay tuned to this blog in February. I’ll let you all know when delivery is expected, and we’ll let the show run from there.

Ciao for now!
– Chuck

Let me know what you’d like to see tested on the new MacBook Pro once it arrives…

So shortly after a wave of protest, mostly by angry webloggers, Apple has seen fit to change the way the new iTunes MiniStore works.

On being activated today, the MiniStore presented all users with a simple explanation of what it is and what it does, and a promise that “Apple does not keep any information related to the contents of your music Library.”

Which is a nice thing for Apple to tell us, indeed a wise thing for them to do considering the vehemence of the protests.

But what I find most interesting about it is the fact that Apple responded at all. After all, Apple does not usually care to comment on anything, even sensible articles in reputable newspapers; not unless it has initiated the article first. As far as rants and rumors on random weblogs, Apple does not normally indicate that it has even noticed them.

What does this demonstrate? The unequalled connections and impressive audience reach of boingboing? Or is Apple deliberately being more responsive, more open? Perhaps a little bit of both.

Personally, I don’t find the MiniStore terribly intrusive nor compelling. If I want to buy music, I’d much rather have the (in my opinion) more useful UI of the full-blown iTMS. The MiniStore looks to me like yet another bit of cross-selling by Apple, something that was very noticeable during the Macworld presentation last week. Increasingly, Apple wants to maximize the income it can get from every Mac owner, by offering little extras and add-ons. The MiniStore is another one of these.

I’m just pleased that you can switch it off and forget about it. That’s what I’ve done.

Related link: https://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/wa-ajaxintro2/index.html

IBM has posted part 2 of their Mastering Ajax series. The great thing about this tutorial is that it walks you through the basics of Ajax development step by step. Check it out if you are interested in one of today’s biggest buzzwords!

Today, Apple announced it’s Universal Licensing Program for bringing Universal Binary applications to the Intel-based Macs.

So, if you’re a developer, you should check out Apple’s UB Licensing Program to make your app available for all those peeps who ran out and bought the new MacBook Pro’s after last week’s Macworld SteveNote.

Of course, it would’ve helped if ADC members had this little heads-up prior to Macworld, but that would’ve spoiled Apple’s fun of announcing the new systems at the show.

Related link: https://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=zmaAZwkhYeQ

What happens when you put two 20″ iMacs next to each other, one Intel, one G5, and synchronize a boot cycle?

The answer is, the Intel box wins….

Of course, this is viral video, so take it with a nice big grain of salt, the stats of each machine are unknown.

What do you think?

I returned from MacWorld to a computer that wouldn’t boot properly. It sounded as if it was searching a CD that wasn’t there and the video never came on. I’ve been here before so I tried all the usual things. I held down keyboard combinations for different boot options or to reset the system. I held down the mouse to convince it to eject the nonexistent CD. I opened up the tower and pressed the power reset button. Nothing worked.

This has happened before and I’ve taken it to the genius bar at my local Apple store and they’ve brought it back to life. So I went online and made an appointment at the Legacy Village Apple Store using the Concierge web application. The application made it easy to schedule a 2 p.m. appointment. Genius.

Just before 2, I carried my G5 tower into the store. Lance greeted me at the Genius Bar and said they were running a bit behind so I deposited Elena, my six year old daughter, at the kids computers where she was immediately engrossed in a game featuring “The Incredible”. Something for the kids to do while their parents shopped or dealt with repairs. I’d noticed this before but in the past I was waiting for my kids to stop playing the games so I could leave. This time I needed her to be entertained or occupied for a while and she was. Genius.

It wasn’t more than a minute or so until Lance started calling people off of two different lists. I’d never noticed before but there are separate queues for iPod and computer problems. Now it may seem to you and me that the worst thing you can do in a store trying to sell computers is to surround them with people having problems with their computers. We might put the help and repair center somewhere else. But we aren’t geniuses.

iPod users who may or may not be Mac owners come to get a real person to look at a problem they might be having with their iPod in this place where more iPods and shiny new computers live. All machines have problems. But here in the Apple store someone calmly takes their device and either points out what the problem is or tries to fix it. And next to that person with their iPod being fixed is someone getting their Mac fixed. Genius.

I don’t know whether or not Lance is a genius outside of the Apple store, but he was great while working on my machine. I didn’t think things were going to go well at first. My machine initially came up registered to another user. I didn’t pick up on that until Lance referred to me as Hector for a second time. He calmly looked at what was wrong, thought about what the cause could have been, and fixed it. I left happy and the people next to me with their iPods noted that.

Apple has talked about the importance of having retail stores within fifty miles of a high percentage of the population. This is good for those people who buy in person but it also encourages Apple fans to hang out in the stores and look at the new toys. It also means that the Genius bars can serve as the front line for questions and problems in a public setting where other people can see that Mac users get answers.

Not everything in my Apple experience has been great. After all, I wouldn’t have had to bring the machine in the first place if it had been working. But the way in which they treated a customer with a problem was . . . genius.

I’ve been using Apple’s Pages since its release. I particularly like this “word processing / page layout” hybrid for preparing my classroom workbooks when I teach photography. I can write, layout, and add images all at once. As my brain goes, so goes Pages. (If you want to see a sample, I’ve published some of the speaking notes from my recent Aperture workshop. The download is a 30-page, 5.8 MB document created in Pages and exported to PDF.)

During the recent Macworld SF Expo, I stopped by the Apple booth for a Pages 2 demo. This application is evolving wonderfully. One of the things that really stood out was how you can use Pages 2 to manage .doc files. You can create your document in Pages, then save it as .doc. What’s slightly mind blowing is then you can open the document in MS Word and continue to edit it, even the tables you created in Pages.

I’ve done some testing in Pages 1 with this, and it went fairly well. But Pages 2 seems to raise the bar. And as far as I’m concerned, working in Pages is much more enjoyable and intuitive than MS Word. It might be something to consider for your document workflow.

but only A J Craft gets to take home a 30GB iPod Fifth Generation.

O’Reilly had a great week at MacWorld last week. It seemed as if our authors and editors were everywhere. Our booth was a hub of activity with presentations and tons of new books to show (ask the folks manning the booth - it was tons).

While all that was going on we officially launched our Podcasting page and gave away an iPod. You can review the contest rules but basically we scanned badges of MacWorld attendees all week while the expo floor was open. When the smoke had cleared A J Craft was our winner.

So what’s all this you’re all winners stuff. Just empty words to make you feel better? Mostly. But also, now that we’ve officially launched the podcasting page you’ll see more regular content. Maybe you noticed our reports from MacWorld featuring MacDevcenter editor Derrick Story talking about iPhoto or with Senior book editor Chuck Toporek talking about the Intel machines.

The first I saw of this story was when I got an upgrade-nag e-mail from Flip4Mac, which makes a QuickTime component to play, import, and/or encode Windows Media on Mac OS X (your feature set depending on how much you’re willing to pay). What was so interesting was that the basic player was now free (down from $10), and being distributed on Microsoft’s site.

Initial rumors that this represented a wholesale abandonment of Windows Media Player on the Mac seemed like an overreaction until Microsoft confirmed it.

So there are a couple points worth making here.

One: Flip4Mac is pretty good

At least as good as Microsoft’s minimal-effort abandonware player, anyways. I sprung for a “studio” license in the previous version, which allows you to not only play non-DRM WM files, but also to import them into QuickTime, potentially for export into other formats. Here’s an example of a Windows Media video from CNN.com, inside a web page (and thus, in the QuickTime plug-in):

Since I have QuickTime Pro (yeah, I paid for that too), I saved the file off to my hard drive and opened it up in QuickTime Player. Note the codecs in the info window (sorry about the scaling - maximum 450 pixel width on O’Reilly blogs), which say “Windows Media 9 Audio Standard” and “Windows Media 9 Video Standard”:

It’s pretty straightforward to export this out of Windows Media into better-supported standard formats, like MPEG-4. Here’s the same file, following an “export to iPod”:

Since Flip4Mac is a regular QuickTime component, it’s available to other QuickTime apps too. Here’s the original Windows Media file opened up in a sample code application from my book QuickTime for Java: A Developer’s Notebook:

Then again, Flip4Mac giveth, but Flip4Mac taketh away too. Some Windows Media content that worked with the original player and plug-in don’t work with Flip4Mac, including the live stream for KFOG-FM:

There are other things that neither Microsoft’s player nor Flip4Mac can handle, though they’re presumably functional on Windows. I picked up a fansub of the 40-episode anime series The Rose of Versailles (don’t sue me - this series is never coming out in English), and unfortunately, the subbers chose to put many of the episodes in a hideous Frankenstein format: DivX/XviD video with Windows Media audio, in an AVI container. Yuck. VLC can play it, of course, but I’d like to import it into QuickTime in hopes of eventually getting it into a TV-friendly format like DVD.

Two: Thank goodness for QuickTime’s component architecture

It’s hard for people to get past the idea that QuickTime is more than a format, harder still to explain that its format is a container that can handle arbitrary contents (for example, you can have a .mov whose contents are, say, Windows Media video and AAC audio). So it’s almost impossible to get people to understand that QuickTime is a media framework, and a crazy extensible one at that. With appropriate plug-in components, you can play all of the following in any QuickTime app:

• Windows Media - with Flip4Mac WMV, as discussed above
• Ogg - with Xiph QuickTime Components
• DivX/XviD/3ivX video - with 3ivX D4
• MP3 - you get playback for free, of course, encode with the LAME QuickTime MP3 Encoder Component (if this is the same one I have… not sure, sorry… you need to track down a “LAMEFramework” file and throw it in /Libraries/Frameworks)

There are others, including Apple’s $20 playback-only MPEG-2 component and some third-party components listed on an Apple QuickTime Components page. Anyways, my point here is that QuickTime can be your one-stop media shop on the Mac.

Three: Is there hope for real standards?

Microsoft put Windows Media 9 into the standards process, where it was codified as VC-1. Anyone can pay a license fee and implement this standard. But, of course, Microsoft has proceeded onto WM 10, supported only by its OS and blessed devices. Does Microsoft’s apparent inability to succeed with cross-platform Windows Media mean that other platforms don’t matter, or that maybe real standards are going to win out, at least for those who care about getting their content out to the most viewers, and for viewers wanting access to the most content? Apple is heavily committed to MPEG-4 — an “iPod video” is simply an MPEG-4 file with H.264 video and AAC audio — and that’s a format that is well-supported on computers and devices (hello, PSP owners!). On the quicktime-users list, Roger Howard saw the end of Windows Media for Mac as a sign of hope:

The upside for Quicktime is this: With Microsoft out of the way as a cross-platform media solutions vendor, and Real still struggling to get anyone to care, it would seem that Apple has a prime opportunity now to establish Quicktime as *the* cross-platform media delivery system, which will be quite desirable to a lot of content providers at this point. Of course we’re still missing a set of DRM tools; if there was a better, smarter time for Apple to move on that front I can’t imagine one.

Personally, I would take out “Quicktime” and insert “MPEG-4″ above. If MPEG-4 succeeds, QuickTime will do just fine.

What do you think of the end of Windows Media on Mac?

We Camino users can sometimes come across as a little smug about our niche browser, which we think is the best browser on OS X despite the fact that it lacks features widely considered essential on other browsers.

Primary among these is the ability to save a browsing session and return to it later, something I myself have cursed aloud about in the past.

I need curse no more, thanks to the wondrous CamiScript add-on from the same guy who made CamiTools, the prepanes that make using Camino an even nicer experience.

CamiScript default menu

CamiScript includes the session-saver (just hit Option+Command+Q to save the current session and quit) and much more besides, with plenty of scope for more scripts to come. All I can say is: yippee.

Notebook sales and growth have overtaken desktop PC sales.
Cell phone sales are huge (though perhaps getting close to saturation). Gameboy DS and Sony PSP portable gaming consoles are spotted everywhere. I think the message is clear, if you are an application (client side) or web developer, think mobile!

Desktop PCs are cheap these days.
$300 to $400 buys a decent desktop.
And, yet, notebook PCs at twice the price (or more) are larger for the first time and with sales growth higher than the desktops.
And, still there are many web sites formatted for screens far larger than the typical 1024×768 resolution available on low to mid-priced notebook PCs (under $1000).

Cell phone users are found all over walking and looking at, presumably, text messages and web pages.
And still most websites do not detect mobile devices and reformat their information for phones and PDAs.

We’re told
(NPD: Handhelds Drive Record Sales in ‘05)
that the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP (which did not have a market share 18 months ago) and Nintendo Gameboy SP game sales accounted for 13% of all computer game sales in 2005 with a 42% increase over sales in 2004.
And, yet, most of the attention is on the Xbox 360 (and the yet to be released Sony PS3 and Nintendo Revolution) even though console software sales declined 12% (from 2004 to 2005).

Folks, I think the trends are pretty clear.
If you develop applications or websites, please make sure you pay attention to mobile devices ranging from low-priced notebooks (lower screen resolution) to portable games consoles (the Sony PSP has a built-in web browser and WiFi).

You can find my list of Phone, PDA, and Sony PSP friendly websites at:
MobileViews MobileAware Sites

Google also has free service that reformats legacy sites for mobile devices at:

https://www.google.com/gwt/n

Got mobile?

Related link: https://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/mac.html

Although I wasn’t one of the folks who purchased a new iMac G5 right before MWSF last week, I did purchase QuickTime Pro 6 not too long before Tiger came out. To my dismay (a much lesser dismay than someone who may have purchased a new iMac G5), my QT Pro 6 was nowhere to be found on Tiger. It was updated to version 7, that was that, and I was out of $30. Or so I thought; it’s amazing what annoyances will drive people to do.

Earlier today, I was trying to watch a video, but QT 7 wouldn’t put it in full screen without being upgraded to Pro. Right as my wallet almost came out of my pocket, I suddenly remembered something: why not copy QT 6 Pro off of an external drive that I had an old image of Panther on from last spring and see if it would play on Tiger?

It turns out that I was able to rename and copy it right into my Applications folder and get all of the Pro options just like old times. Under the About menu, I get this message: “QuickTime Version 7.0.3, Player Version 6.5.2″. Works for me.

One thing it doesn’t allow me to do, however, is download QuickTime movies (like movie trailers and things) from within a web browser. (I was hoping to grab a local copy of HOT HOT HOT, an amazing little gem I ran across earlier today. I’ll leave it at that.) But in the end I still salvaged $20 or so of my initial $30, and that’s better than nothing. I suppose I could use the external drive as a startup disk for the sole purpose of downloading QT videos, but that would be a bit much. I’d probably shell out another $30 before going to that length.

So until I desperately need something that QT 7 Pro offers that I’m not able to get with my perfectly good copy of QT 6 Pro, I think I’m going to hold off. I’m sure there are lots of great things that QT 7 Pro does that you can’t get done in QT 6 Pro, but as someone who doesn’t do much with video, I couldn’t tell you what they are and haven’t needed them yet. And heck, I wouldn’t want to risk another $30 tonight anyway — I could lose it again you know (but probably not tonight.)

Update: As a reader pointed out, it’s also possible to snag the QT internet plugin (see discussion) to get back the ability to save files locally from within the browser (with one extra step.) So that amounts to salvaging $29 of $30 in my book.

Anyone out there have any particular uses for QT 7 Pro that QT 6 Pro isn’t good enough for?

In the recent issue of Wired Magazine (Jan 2006), you’ll find a great article called How Click Fraud Could Swallow The Internet.

This is not news to many of us in the business. As someone who works at a small search/advertising company, the problems of the larger players, like Google’s Ad Sense, could hurt the entire Web 2.0 industry.

Or then again will it?

I asked a friend who spends millions of dollars in online ads each year if they knew of this problem.

The answer was:

“Yes. We realize it is a problem, but we factor it into our costs. So even if we end up spending several hundred thousand dollars a year on click fraud, if it still falls in our acceptable margins, we just pay it. It all comes down to the cost of doing business.”

Ouch…that’s an amazing amount of money to be pissing away. As a billion dollar company, they can obviously afford to pay the added cost, but that extra money spent on fraud translates into other budgetary issues internally.

Google alone is looking at $6.1 billion in revenue for 2005…99% of which is from Keyword ads (56% of that is from AdWords, 43% from AdSense). So we’re probably looking at companies paying millions of dollars in fraudulent ad payments. This problem is compounded enormously by the proliferation of splogs on the web and currently I see no sign of it slowing.

Another friend recently told me that while working at a search company a couple of years ago, they discovered Russian “click farms” where people were paid to simply sit around and click on ads all day.

—

Winners & Losers

Obviously large destination sites with ad programs like Yahoo! have no doubt earned a considerable amount of money from click fraud. Last April Yahoo! was named as one of the defendants in a lawsuit led by a company called Lane’s Gifts and Collectables who claimed that not only were they improperly charged, but that Yahoo! colluded with other search engines. While I question the issue of collusion (we still haven’t decided on the official handshake at the Search/Ad cabal meetings), this is not the only lawsuit out there and I suspect we’ll see more in 2006.

I’m curious what Yahoo! Search is doing to combat this issue? Google? And how will it eventually affect their bottom line? An admission through court documents of the suspected percentage of fraud, might translate to a correction of stock valuation and some departmental cuts. In the meantime I do wonder how many millions have been spent on ads that served only to get these click fraud crooks rich? And…what can we do about them other than simply play an IP cat and mouse game?

We all know the online ad space is extremely viable, and it works. If it didn’t, we’d know it by now. However, not all companies can afford to bite the fraud bullet and it simply can’t continue to be an enormous cost of doing business.

Another good post: How many AdWords clicks does it take to increase GOOG $10?

So…what are we going to do about this and can anyone talk about their plans to combat this problem?

Google Mobile personalized home page for mobile devices

Google’s personalized home page now has a version formatted for smaller mobile screens.
You can find the announcement on the official blog at:

Your Google homepage, to go

The blog says that you can use this URL to get there…

https://mobile.google.com/personalized/index.html

…but it didn’t work for me (404 error).
Here’s what did though:

1. Go to
   https://www.google.com/pda
   
2. Click on Personalized Home
   

Happy Mobile Googling!

Got other Mobile Google, Yahoo, or MSN portal tips?

Related link: https://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/255716.htm?iid=HMPAGE+HL_06011…

Intel has unveiled beta versions of developer tools for Intel-based Macs. The Development Support for Intel-Based Mac page anounces a set of software development products, including highly-optimized C++ and Fortran (really?!) compilers, plus a math library and a primitives library that is said to make digital signal processing happy. Tools are beta and require you to apply to the testing program (disclosure: I’m on PPC and will be for a while, so I haven’t downloaded them)

As a Mac-only person, I first started paying attention to Intel and their message at their keynote JBoss World 2005. The message of “use our chips, we’ll help you” is certainly a change from the indifference the Mac developer community is used to from the PowerPC crowd (pity too - we probably could have put all those PPC registers to good use, but who knows how optimized gcc was for PPC?).

Anyways, they supposedly integrate with XCode, though there’s an obvious question of how useful they’ll be for Cocoa developers working in Objective-C, which isn’t mentioned on Intel’s page. Also, I wonder if its possible to build a universal binary and pick up the Intel optimizations for the i386 architecture. I don’t think anyone’s ready to build apps that don’t run on PPC. Yet. Give it a year or two.

Got an iMac or MacBook? Tried these? Do they beat gcc?

I was just talking to a developer yesterday in the Speakers Lounge at MWSF, and he was telling me the latest in the Developer Transition Kit (DKT) program. I know there had been some grumbling about developers having to put up a grand to get the kits last year, but then having to return the computers when the program was over. Apple seems to have softened that blow by letting developers exchange their existing computers for a new iMac intels. The exchange program ends March 31.

Our regular podcast Distributing the Future is back with a show we call Emerging Telephony and Podjacking.

In the first half of the program Surj Patel talks about some of the VOIP applications and helped me understand that VOIP is more than just free or inexpensive telephone calls. He gave examples of hospital communication, talking parking meters, and a translation service. Cool stuff. He’s putting the final touches on the program for the upcoming ETel Conference.

The remainder of the program looks at what has been called podjacking. Erik Marcus signed up for a keyword service with George Lambert so that people could more easily find his podcast. Erik claims that George published an unauthorised RSS feed that led to his podcast being podjacked. George claims that he provided a service that did exactly what he advertised it did. We invited each to present their side of the story and you will hear their explanations in their entirety (there are lawyers involved here).

(Thanks to Bruce Stewart for pointing out that this post was initially mistitled)

Seriously… Comic Life is a lot of fun to play with. I hope it appears in all new Macs from now on

In case you didn’t notice yesterday, Apple didn’t say, oh, anything about the expected battery life for the new MacBook Pro, the successor to the PowerBook line. Steve Jobs talked a lot about the new Intel processor, about Performance Per Watt, about the new MagSafe power connector, but didn’t say a word about the expected battery life of the new Macs.

So, being the cheeky monkey that I am, I went over to the Apple booth where they had the MacBook Pro’s all in a line. I patiently waited my turn to play with one, and when I got up there and the gal looked away, I went to the battery indicator in the menubar and changed it so it would show the battery life in time. As it was calculating (you know how long that goes), I unplugged the MagSafe power connector and started looking at it closely, turned the MBP around so I could look at the side, and started asking questions about how it connected, blah, blah, blah.

When I noticed that the battery indicator had numbers next to it, I looked up and saw that it had a little over 4 hours of battery life left. So I asked the gal if that’s all it had, and she said, and I roughly quote, “These are pre-production models, so we’re not commenting on battery life.” So I asked again: “Will the MacBook Pro give me better battery life than my TiBook does?” Again, her response was, “We cannot comment on battery life.”

Realizing that this was a dead issue, I let it go and turned to playing around with iLife ’06’s iWeb for a minute or two, then thanked her for letting me test out the new machine and I walked away.

I really hope Apple can squeeze a couple more hours into those batteries, because at only 4 hours of life with a full charge, it still forces me to carry around a power cable wherever I go, and I really hate having to do that. Can’t we get a laptop that has 6-8 hours of battery life?

Oh, and one more thing on these…

…regardless of what the battery life might be with the pre-production models, I still really want one.

How important is battery life to you, and why?

Is the iTunes Store spying on you? While BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow is ready to head to Cupertino with torches and pitchforks, the usually more level-headed Rob Griffith at MacOSXHints.com reports on the new 6.0.2 iTunes Store — apparently it’s wiretapping your listening habits outside of the store:

As reported on boingboing and other sites, the new iTunes mini store, which appears directly below the song list area in the main iTunes window, spies on your listening habits. You are not told this is happening, but it’s clear that it must be — the store’s selections change each time you listen to a new song. So at a minimum, artist and title information must be being sent to the music store, each and every time you listen to a new song. I don’t know what other data may or may not be collected, but even just title and artist is enough to concern me.

Folks who know what they’re doing grabbed a hold of tcpdump and determined what’s actually being reported, as well as the fact that if you disable the Store, nothing is transmitted.

Whether you believe this is a nefarious thing or not for Apple to do, it does point out the need to pay attention before hitting OK for *any* software upgrades, whether you like the company or not.

As for me, I’ll be disabling the Store until I decide to purchase something. And maybe dusting off a copy of mpg123. ;)

Recent important Apple events in the USA have been transmitted via live satellite to the UK, where British and European journalists can sit and watch and pretend they’re in the same room as Steve Jobs.

I thought perhaps you might like to know what happens at one of these events.

Yesterday, for the Intel Macs announcement, the UK venue was the BBC TV Centre in West London. This was also the venue back in October last year, when the video iPod was announced. Some people thought, before that event, that the BBC’s involvement suggested they had some input with video content.

Actually, the BBC hosts things like this because it has the large spaces needed, and the technical expertise to handle incoming satellite feeds and show them to hundreds of people; few other places in London have that kind of facility.

On arrival at Television Centre, there was a brief registration process where everyone was handed a color-coded badge.

Then we had to find our way to the right room.

If you’ve never visited the BBC’s headquarters, let me try to describe the environment: it’s huge, and it’s a maze. Thanks to unique architecture and decades of expansion to house ever-larger technical facilities, Television Centre is a confusing warren of corridors, open spaces and meeting rooms. The broadcast studios are in the middle of the campus, so the first challenge is to find your way to the right place.

A string of BBC staff stood at every junction or corner, pointing the way. There must have been 30 of them, at least, managing this crocodile of bemused journalists and guests.

We were guided into a large studio. The lighting was low, but colorful - lots of pink and purple splashes on to white walls. It was hot and very crowded with people, and to the frustration of many people there were no seats at all. Tired journalists plopped their laptop bags on the floor, threw their coats on top (it’s cold in London at this time of year), and looked for the bar.

Texting to kill time

It wasn’t hard to find. In the centre of the room was a circular bar, with more colorful highlighting, bedecked with glassware. The drink flowed like bytes over a broadband connection; waitresses in black hovered at every elbow, proffering more drink (alcoholic and otherwise).

To one side was a huge black curtain, hiding at least half of the room from view. We all knew that the exciting stuff was lurking behind it, but a bunch of enormous security staff made sure that no-one got past the curtain. When I merely stood near it, and bent down to get something from my bag, one of the bouncers approached and politely asked me to move further away. His instructions for the day had clearly been: “Don’t allow anyone to get anywhere near that black curtain.”

After a fair amount of standing around and chatting, the weary crowd was asked to leave this room and walk down a series of further corridors to Studio 1. This is a massive broadcast studio, used by the BBC for things like Top of the Pops and General Election coverage. The ceiling is decked out with thousands of lights, the walls draped with more black curtains, and temporary raked seating installed in front of a large stage and video screen.

The ceiling in Studio 1

Before the Stevenote began, Apple’s European boss Pascal Cagni came on stage to welcome everyone and make a short pitch of his own. He revealed that the first Apple Store in mainland Europe would soon be opening in Rome, and that another store would open soon in Brent Cross, on the northern edge of London.

Nice though it was to see Pascal in person, we all knew why we were there - to see Steve Jobs do his stuff.

Despite the unparalleled technical facilities available at the BBC, the satellite feed was not without problems. Three or four times during the keynote, the sound or video (or both) dropped out for a few seconds.

When it was all over, the huge audience (500 people, I’m guessing) had to make its way back to the first room, for the show-and-tell. Only one exit was available, with a narrow funnel leading to it; as a result, we stood for up to 10 minutes by our seats, waiting for the logjam of bodies to clear.

Again, there was a little tour through the belly of Television Centre, then we were back in the purple room, now lined with Intel Macs for us to play with. And play with them we did. Still, the drinks flowed. People crowded round the new iMacs and MacBooks, all of them loaded up with iLife. We cooed. We asked questions. The bar was still fountaining booze.

Goofing around with Photobooth and iPhoto on a new MacBook Pro

Most journalists will tell you that technology product launch events are much the same, no matter which company is involved. Even Apple follows the herd in many respects, especially with the never-ending river of booze on offer. But like its computers, Apple’s events manage to have a certain element of style that you just don’t see elsewhere. There’s a better atmosphere; people tend to chat more.

Little things make a difference. It seems to me that Apple has a relatively relaxed corporate culture; I liked it that Pascal Cagni appeared on stage wearing jeans. Apple staff that I met were not just polite, they were almost bubbling with friendly greetings. During the keynote I sat next to an Apple guy from one of the European offices, whose job was to deal with independent Apple retailers. He was as much in the dark about what was about to happen as I was, and was full of comments and questions afterwards.

Apple certainly knows how to throw a party. But next time, guys, could we have a few more chairs?

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a proposal for your consideration.

I’m not a designer. I don’t profess to have much of an eye for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ design, in print, on the web, or anywhere else.

But in my opinion (that’s just my opinion, folks), the Aqua-style tabs on the top of every single page at apple.com have to go.

Old look

Why? Because they look so outdated, so out-of-place, when placed above some of the latest Apple page designs. Look at all the swish, animated, Quicktime-heavy content produced for the new Intel machines or iLife 06. Notice the strong emphasis on black and white contrast, on a two-dimensional effect, on graphical simplicity.

New look

The navigation tabs at the top look garish by comparison.

The motion is: “Apple should redesign the navigation tabs on its web site.”

All those in favor, say aye.

Sooo, what have we got?

MacBook Pro

Replacing the 15 inch PowerBooks, this Intel-powered machine outwardly resembles its predecessor but for one or two little extras. The iSight camera in the lid (which has a little status lamp next to it), an IR port in the front, next to the latch, for use with Front Row; and the ingenious magnetic power connector.

But in almost every respect it’s just another PowerBook. There’s even still a Firewire port (which a lot of people were predicting would go).

I had some hands-on time the MacBook right after the keynote. The one thing I found most interesting about the case was that there was no sign of any kind of Intel branding, not even a little engraving on the base. Admittedly, I was looking at it in a dark and crowded room with a zillion other people squashing me from behind to get a look, so others might find signs of Intel branding that I didn’t spot. But no “Intel Inside”, no badge by the keyboard, nothing that shouts the Intel name. I think Steve, or perhaps Jonathan Ive, had his way on this one.

The 15.4 inch LCD screen is very nice; sharp and noticeably brighter than before. I didn’t get a chance to try the keyboard. The trackpad is larger than before.

The $2499 model finally includes 1GB of RAM (that’s what I’d consider a ‘pro’ kind of RAM allocation) and a decent hard disk.

There’s only one thing that I think is disappointing about this machine: it still weighs 5.6lbs, much heavier than many Windows-based competitors. I’m keen to find out what the real-world battery life is like; let’s hope it has been improved.

Some people were expecting radical, but this is not radical change, it’s evolutionary. As such, I can’t help feeling the new name is not the machine’s best feature. It sounds ungainly in comparison with “PowerBook”.

That said, it suggests to me the chance of some other new models coming later this year: MacBook Nano to replace the iBook, perhaps?

Intel iMac

As of today, all new iMacs are Intel-powered, with Core Duo 1.83GHz processors. Again, I had a brief look at one and there’s very little to tell it apart from a G5 iMac, except perhaps that the screen looked to me a little brighter and sharper.

Steve says it’s 2-3 times faster than before. He demonstrated it with Photoshop running under Rosetta, iPhoto, and a bunch of other apps. It was decent of him to be honest and say that the Rosetta-dependent version of Photoshop was not going to be fast enough for professionals, “but it runs just fine for the rest of us.”

When Steve Jobs revealed this was the first Intel Mac, there was a slight, but noticeable, surge of disappointment across the crowd. No-one spoke, but it was as if they’d collectively said: “Oh.”

Why? Because no-one had predicted, nor expected, the iMac to be the first Intel machine. Everyone (myself included) was thinking: “Dammit Steve, what about the PowerBooks?” Of course, the Intel laptop was Steve’s “One more thing” moment, so he had the last laugh. But he teased us all along, like he always does.

iLife 06

Widely predicted and unfortunately partially leaked by Apple’s webmasters, iWeb made its debut as the new addition to iLife. It certainly looks like a powerful application, deeply embedded with the rest of the suite to make personal media sharing easy.

But what’s that, Steve? You can only publish to .Mac?

That’s, uh, a bit restrictive. Personally, I think the guys at Karelia who were worried that iWeb would stomp all over their brand-new Sandvox app can relax. Sandvox and iWeb are different creatures, but if you have to spend money on a .Mac account just make use of all the coolness in iWeb, a lot of people will be using Sandvox instead.

Sandvox and iWeb are similar in one important respect: they both use the Pages philosophy, where the user is presented with a mocked-up finished product right from the start, and simply replaces text and photos with their own content.

The new iPhoto has a maximum library size of 250,000 pictures, which is great. And Steve said that it was incredibly fast now - “It just flies. It scrolls like butter.” Remember, though, that he was demonstrating it on an Intel iMac, already 2-3 times faster than G5 machines. Quite how well it will run on older machines is another question entirely. The full-screen edit features look fantastic.

The concept of “photocasting” in iPhoto is an inspired one, and was popular with the audience. Quite simply it allows you to create a photo-filled RSS feed. You have to have a .Mac account to publish it, but the output is standard RSS; anyone can subscribe. This also means that iPhoto is now an RSS reader of sorts. How long before someone hacks something weird with that?

The podcasting demo in GarageBand was another popular section. Nice touches, like automatically lowering the volume of background music during speech (known in the trade as “ducking”), really made it seem like the developers had put a lot of thought into it.

Little things

• New iPod Remote with built-in FM tuner. Very nice. Yet another “little extra” for people to spend 50 bucks on.
• OS X 10.4.4 is out now. All Steve said about it was: “There are more widgets.”
• iWork now allows you to include tables “with calculations”; mini spreadsheets, I guess.
• The software is integrated like never before. Everything meshes with everything else. Apple customers are being urged to spend money on extras (.Mac, iWork) more than ever. It’s all about cross-selling; enticing anyone who buys a Mac or an iPod to just spend 100 dollare here, 50 dollars there, on add-ons.
• Apple has drunk from the blogging fountain, and likes the taste. I lost count of the number of times Jobs referred to blogs, podcasts and RSS.
• I’d like to get my hands on the World Music JamPack for GarageBand.
• iMovie’s new animated themes are well done; let’s hope more of them appear soon. Oh, and now you can open more than one project at once.
• Steve’s sense of humor remains one of the best things about his keynotes. A little dig at Adobe (”Yeah, Photoshop always takes a second to start up”); another dig at the Apple rumor bloggers with his entire podcasting demo; and a picture of the Pope when he said “We consulted a lot of people about this”; I think his jokes are getting better.
• Microsoft promised to keep updating Office for five more years. There will be Office universal binaries, including new sync services and Spotlight support for Entourage (hooray!) in March.
• New cards, calendars and book designs in iPhoto.

Stuff that didn’t appear

• Any Intel branding whatsoever on the new MacBook Pro.
• Any kind of home media center.
• Any new iPod nano-inspired black products (when I saw that black iBook rumor, I so wanted one).

So in the end

This was a pretty conservative set of announcements, nothing like as radical as many people were expecting. The expectations were high because of the switch to Intel, and people (rightly, I think) assumed that with new processors inside, any new Macs would look very different to their predecessors.

There was also much speculation about slimming down the laptops, ditching things like optical drives and Firewire ports in order to make the machines lighter and cooler. These theories were no more solid than any other, but there was a greater likelihood of dramatic change simply because the change of processor gave Apple potential for a fresh start. They’ve not followed that path, not yet; but there’s still plenty of scope for more radical change during the year. Jobs promised that the entire Mac range would be Intel-powered by 2007.

But that name: “MacBook Pro”. It’s going to take me a long time to start liking that one.

It’s great to see Phlink keep getting better with each release. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s what I like to call a “telephony erector set” for the Mac. If you can dream up a phone-based process or automation that you want to create, you can pretty much put it together using Phlink.

In Smart Home Hacks, Matt Bendicksen wrote about how to control your home from any phone in the world, with some simple glue between Indigo and Phlink. And that’s just one example of the tools you can knit together with the product. If you at all enjoy tinkering, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t have a blast.

Phlink 3.0 was just announced, and if you buy the current version now, you’ll get a free upgrade to the latest when it ships in February. The new version lets Phlink automatically record all incoming and outgoing calls, and adds integration with EyeTV so you can call your Mac from the road and schedule a new television recording. A neat idea, to be sure, but I think some of the best Phlink-based solutions come from the user community; I can’t wait to see what people cook up using the new version.

Okay, so now that the SteveNote has sunk into my head a bit, here are some quick thoughts…

• I want to get a new MacBook Pro…ASAP!
• I still don’t like the idea of having a built-in iSight camera on the new MacBook Pro, but maybe that will change?
• I want iLife ‘06 for two reasons:
  • Calendars
  • iWeb
• I have no reason to upgrade to iWork ‘06. Sorry, but 3D charts and new themes aren’t enough for me to pay another $79 right now to upgrade to the latest version. I would have rather seen this as a $29.99 upgrade. Without a spreadsheet application, iWork ‘06 seems lackluster to me.
• Glad to see more stuff working with .Mac, but .Mac is still pricey when you consider that you’re also paying $79 for iLife ‘06 to mesh the two together. Why couldn’t there be a package deal or a discount on iLife ‘06 for existing .Mac members?
• MacBook Pro’s shipping in February…Intel iMacs shipping today…okay, I think I can wait for the MacBook Pro
• Still no home theatre device :^(

So there you go, more stream-of-conscious thoughts for you. I’m heading back to the exhibit hall to play with the new software and hardware, and I’ll have more to report on later.

Ciao!

In the next few weeks you’ll see a lot of changes on the O’Reilly podcasting page. Site producer Justin Watt is putting the finishing touches on a new look that will help highlight the most recently posted podcasts.

Speaking of recently posted, Theresa Pulido and the consumer group at O’Reilly has been busy producing a lot of great audio and we have just posted four of them on our FooCast page.

* Jack Herrington, the author of “Podcasting Hacks”, chats with pioneer podcasters, Doug Kaye and James Polanco in the first part of a series. The first installment is Pioneer Podcasters Share Insider Tips: Techniques & Equipment .

* Derrick Story has launched a series on Digital Cameras. He combines a great deal of knowledge with a great ability to communicate. Check out Compact Digital Cameras–What to Look For.

* Steve Bass and Dan Tynan specialize in Annoyances. That’s solving them not creating them. Check out their post Make Sure Your Emails Make it Through.

* Jack Herrington has a second series in which he Interviews the founder of Fake Science.

There’s plenty more in the hopper. Let us know what you think and what you’d like to see more of or less of.

Your protagonist lights a cigarette, rocks back in his chair, and relaxes, triumphant

Well, here we are, post Keynote. The Mac Book Pro is out, now. iLife ‘06 and iWork ‘06 are out as well. My brand new iMac is already obsolete, less than a month after I bought it. My needs for a laptop are sated in the new Mac Book, and my order for a low-end one is already in. I’m excited by the MagSafe feature in the new Mac Book Pro, as I’ve destroyed a few power adapter in my days. The lack of FireWire 800 is odd, but the addition of SPDIF in and out is quite nice as well. One nice add is the new ExpressCard/34 slot, which is designed to supplant PCMCIA.

What concerns me is a lack of listed Battery Life in the stats. The new Mac Book Pro packs a 60WHr battery, as opposed to the G4’s 50WHr battery, and the new charger is 85W instead of the 65W adapters we currently have. What’s the battery life going to be like, I wonder?

Take a look, though, at the test data. Twice as fast? Sign me up.

iLife ‘06 seems much more .Mac centric than ever before and I’m sure that’ll ruffle some feathers. I’m a subscriber, but I can understand why people might be irked at a purchase price that has a hidden cost in it.

iWork ‘06 seems to be a bit of a sleeper, but we’ll see about that, long term.

Overall, the Keynote’s over and done, and I’m somewhat pleased. Sure, we didn’t get the major things the rumors sites promised us, but what we got is pretty solid. What do you think?

What do you make of this year’s Keynote?

Well kids, today’s the day. Today’s the day that we’re going to learn about all the cool stuff that Apple’s been working on for the last year. Welcome to the Macworld 2006 SteveNote.

In years past, I’ve taken sort of stream-of-consciousness notes during the MW SteveNotes, and this year, Derrick Story asked if I’d be willing to post them online right after the keynote, so here you are. You’re getting my notes as soon as I can post them. And to go along with years’ past, my notes are rough and uncut. You’ll find the occasional typo and you’ll find the occasional side comment about something, but don’t worry, you’re getting the unadulterated, uncensored report.

Props go out to Chris Stone, who’s graciously agreed to snap digital shots of the big screen during the kenote so I can get down all of the stats that Steve puts up. Thanks, Chris; much appreciated.

It’s now 8:57 a.m. on Tuesday morning and I’m sititng toward the back of the room, waiting for the SteveNote to begin. I’m not as intrepid as some of teh other media folk; I’m not willing to snuggle up to the front of the room. Instead, I’m far back, sitting at one of the wide isles, perched in front of one of the massive big screens. As I watch the cameras pan the crowd, I’ve seen some of the VIPs who’ve been invited to the keynote, and some non-VIPs who should be. For example, I’ve seen Al Gore in the crowd, and while waiting out in the hall with the rest of the media, I saw Adam from the Discovery Channel’s Myth Busters show. Very cool. (Okay, maybe with the exception of seeing Al Gore, but we won’t get into political preferences here.)

Time is 9:07 a.m. and they’ve dimmed the lights…on with the show…Steve Jobs takes the stage.

“Good morning and welcome to Macworld.”

Apple Retail

• Starts off with a retail update.
• 135 Apple retail stores now
• Showed the Regent Street store
• Last quarter, there were 26 million visitors in the Apple Stores. This is more people than in any other state than California.
• Retail stores sold $1 billion in revenue during the holiday quarter 2005.
• Overall sales for Apple in the last quarter was $5.7 billion. “This is one for the record books.”

Efforts in Music…

• We went into the holiday quarter with the best music players in the world. The 5th generation iPod.
• Sold 4.5 million iPods during the holiday quarter 2004. For the holiday quarter 2005, Apple sold 14 million iPods. Over three times over last year. Over 100 every minute, 24/7 throughout the quarter.
• Total number of iPods sold is around 42 million. Of the 42 million, 32 million of them were sold in 2005.

Update on iTunes

• 850 million songs have been purchased on iTunes. Well on our way to hitting the 1 billion song-mark in the next few months.
• Over 1 billion songs per year run rate.
• Market share continues to be very strong: 83 percent (according to Soundscan for December 2005).

Jobs: “Yeah, I’m showing off some new Keynote features.” crowd laughs.

• Apple started selling TV shows, and since October 12, 2005, Apple has sold over 8 million videos.
• Partnered with ABC and ESPN to bring videos of the NCAA Football Bowl games. Showed a clip from the Rose Bowl highlight show. The Rose Bowl is the #1 video on iTunes.
• As of today, Apple will start putting up content from Saturday Night Live. (Showed clip of Samari Delicatessen, staring John Belushi, a clip from The Cone Heads, and The Blues Brothers. You can start buying these today.
• A new accessory is a Remote + FM Tuner. Priced at $49, and it goes on sale today. It works with the iPod nano and 4G and 5G iPods.
• Over 3 million Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep models in 2006 will have iPod integration as an option.
• 40% of all cars sold in 2006 will have iPod integration as an option.
• Previewed a new iPod/iTunes ad, which stars Winton Marsalis…(Finally, a jazz iPod commercial…thanks!)

Jobs: “We’re going to spend the rest of the day talking about Mac.”

Mac

Starts off with Aperture. Is an incredible tool for digital photographers that’s as important to digital photographers as Final Cut Pro is for digital videographers. (Showed an ad for Aperture.)

Widgets

Introduced with Tiger. There are now tons of widgets. Ass a matter of fact, there are now over 1500 widgets available for Mac OS X Tiger.

Apple designed a few more that they’re rolling out today. These include:

• Google widget
• New front end to Address Book widget
• New one for Ski conditions
• New calendar
• White pages widget
• ESPN widget for giving scores

Mac OS X 10.4.4 releases today and you can get all of the new Widgets with the system update.

iLife

Showed a picture of the new box for iLife ‘06.

iLife “has been miles ahead of anything you could use on a PC.”

“This is a giant release.”

iLife is comprised of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iTunes.

iPhoto

• Incredible speed
• Up to 250,000 photos
  • That is 1000 a month for 20 years.
  • “Scrolls like butter.”
• Full-screen editing
  • iPhoto is starting to look like “Aperture Lite”, which is something that I was really hoping for.
• One-click effects.
  • You can view eight different effects, view it in full-screen mode
• All-new cards, calendars, and “dramatically better” books
  • New printing and much higher quality.
  • Hard and soft cover books
  • Added calendars so you can add your own photos in them.
  • Includes templates for the calendars as well
  • Added cards; you can make these super-easy and order them online
• Photocasting
  • Podcasting for photos
  • “Now, what is this?”
  • Allows you to publish photos from iPhoto, pick an album to Photocast, and it automatically publishes those photos to .Mac
  • You can even password protect the pages.
  • People can subscribe to your Photocast in their version of iPhoto
  • Whenever changes are made, they can view the changes and use them however they want
  • Photos are downloaded to the other Mac through the Photocasting service
  • Must be a .Mac member to publish, but anyone can subscribe via RSS

Jobs demos the new iPhoto…

• Showed how to create Cards
• The Calendar feature allows you to bring in iCal calendar events, select from national holidays for various countries, you can drop in pictures from your iPhoto Library onto dates.
• Showed how to use the Photocast feature by selecting a few pictures and publishing them up to .Mac.
• Jobs used Fast User Switching to get over to Grandma Taylor’s account, and when he did, you could see two new application icons in the Dock. One next to iCal, and another one next to System Preferences. The one next to iCal looked like a corkboard with things posted to it, and the one next to System Prefs looked like a stage with a red curtain, but with a little strip of images next to it. Hmmm…I wonder what these apps are and when we’re going to see them.

iMovie

Added HD to iMovie last year. HDV cameras are now available for under $1600.

Adding…

• Animated themes for movies
• Real-time effects and titles
• New audio tools and sound effects
• Multiple open projects
• Export to iPod
• Create video Podcasts

Steve demos the Animated Themes…

• This looks similar to some of the basic things you can do in Motion.
• Ran a demo movie of a family on vacation in Italy.
• Quickly ran through some of the new themes
• (Some of these new themes look like stuff they’ve pulled over from FCP…thank you.)

iDVD

Added:

• Widescreen DVDs
• Magic iDVD: you choose a theme, drop the movie and photos in, push a button to create the project, push another button to burn the DVD and that’s it
• New themes
• Vastly improveed slideshows
• Enhanced map view editing
• Support for third-party DVD burners (thank you!)

GarageBand

• Includes Podcast Studio component
  • Podcast artwork track
  • 200+ royalty-free sound effects
  • 100+ royalty-free jingles
  • Automatic “ducking” effect
  • Speech enhancer
  • Use iChat for remote interviews, so you can record them directly into GarageBand.
• Showed the interface for the new version.
• Jobs gives a demo…
  • Lays down an audio track
  • Brought in images
  • Dropped in a music track for the background, which automatically “ducked” behind the voice track.

Introduced the new World Music Jam Pack for GarageBand.

“We’ve got these great five applications that are part of the iLife suite.”

You want to share these things with our friends and families. Often, you want to build a web site to share these things. Introducing a new app that allows us to share our digital photos, movies, music, blogs, and other types of Podcasts with people. This new app is called iWeb.

iWeb

There are many applications that let you build web sites. Some are easy to use but they create an ugly site. And there are others that are hard to use and they create beautiful sites. iWeb is easy to use and it creates beautiful web sites.

• Aple-designed templates
• iLife Media Browser
• One-click publishing to .Mac
• Blogging
• Podcasting
• RSS and subscription stuff is automatically done for you
• Push the Publish button and it automatically publishes up to your .Mac web site
• Photo browser uses AJAX
• One-click publish to .Mac

Steve demos iWeb to build a web site…

• Builds a site
• Drops in an iTunes playlist that shows up on the page, including links from the songs to the iTunes Music Store
• You can add a button to the page so people can subscribe to a Photocast from your web page
• Created a blog page with different entries.
• Created a Podcast page
• Share menu in GarageBand has an option to send the Podcast over to iWeb so you can publish the Podcast up to your blog page.

iWeb now joins the rest of the iLife apps.

iLife will keep its same price of $79. It is available today. There is a $99 Family Pack that lets you install it on up to 5 computers, and is available for free on all new Macs.

With iLife, we’ve talked about .Mac a lot. .Mac is really taking off. We have over 1 million subscribers to .Mac now.

iWork ‘06

• Keynote
• Pages

Features:

• 3D charts
• advanced image editing
• image reflections
• freeform shapes and masks
• tables with calculation
• new themes and templates

Sells for $79, available today. $99 family pack, and a 30-day free trial on all new Macs.

Computer Systems

We’re making some of the best products we ever have. We’ve had a really good year with Macs.

• Started off the year selling over 1 million Macs per quarter.
• Announced that we were going to shift to using Intel processors back at WWDC.
• Announced that by June 2006 half of the Mcs would be using intel processors.
• Intel CEO Paul ontelli came out wearing a cleanroom suit, and said, “Steve, I want to report that Intel is ready.” He handed Steve Jobs a wafer. “Well, I can report to you that Apple is ready, too.”
• Intel had over 1000 people working on the project with Apple

First Mac with Intel Processor: The first of a new generation of Macs…rolls out today.

• It is the iMac
  • Has a built-in iSight camera
  • Apple remote with Front Row
• Showed Walt Mossberg’s WSJ quote about the iMac G5
  • “It is the gold standard of desktop PCs.”
• Intel processor goes inside the new iMac
• Same sizes
  • 17 and 20 inch
  • Same award winning design
  • Same features, same built-in iSight camera, Front Row, etc.
  • Same prices
• What’s different?
  • 2-3x faster than the iMac G5
  • Uses the Intel Core Duo chip
  • Two processors on one die
  • 2 MB Level 2 Cachec
  • Each of these processors is faster than the G5 chip

iMac G5:

• Runs Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.4 runs entirely natively on the Intel Core Duo
• Everything Apple is doing runs on both the PowerPC and the Intel processors
• iLife ‘06 and iWork ‘06 run on both PowerPC and Intel
• Steve was demoing them on the new iMac with the Intel processor
• Pro Apps will be Universal in March
• Can cross-grade for $49 to a Universal Binary
• Quark has announced that the next version of QuarkXpress will be completely Universal, and the beta will be Universal right from the start
• Rosetta ships with every new Intel Mac; suns most PowerPC applications transparently. Microsoft Office will run fine under Rosetta.
• Brings out Roz Ho, the GM of MacBU
• Microsoft is on track to bring Universal Binaries of Office and Messenger for the Mac.
• Has worked with Apple to ensure that Office runs well under Rosetta. MS will ship updates to the Office suite soon so they run well on Intel Macs. Adding sync services, Spotlight services, and an update to Messenger 5. These will be available as a free download from MS’s web site in March. You can get MS Office 2004 at 50% off when you purchase a new Mac.
• Formalizing a commitment to the Mac platform so they’ll continue to ship new versions of MS Office for a minimum of five years.
• “We’re here to stay, and we’re in it for the long term.”

Jobs: “Rosetta will be a great bridge until we can get all our applications Universal.”

Jobs gives a demo of the Intel iMac running Microsoft Word under Rosetta. Then he started Photoshop CS2 so it runs under Rosetta.

Two models of the new iMac:

• 17-inch
• 20-inch

New Intel iMacs ship TODAY.

We are going to be transitioning our entire product line this calendar year. Throughout the months, you will hear announcements about new product releases.

Jobs previews the new ad for the Intel Mac.

One more thing…

PowerBook G4 pops up on the screen…(oh-my-freakin’-God, please let it be)…

Switching to Intel just wasn’t about performance, it was about Performance Per Watt:

• G4: 0.27 performance per watt
• PowerPC G5: only 0.23 / watt
• Intel Core Duo is 1.05 (4.5x)

The MacBook Pro announced today, not a PowerBook.

• Intel Core Duo chip, the same as in the Intel iMac
• Dual processors in every new MacBook Pro
• 4-5X faster than the PowerBook G4

• Fastest Mac Notebook Ever!
• Also the thinnest
• Amazing new features:
• • 15.4-inch widescreen LCD display
  • Ultra-bright display
  • Has a built-in iSight camera
• Jobs demos the new MacBook Pro
• IR sensor and an Apple Remote so you can run Front Row on the new MacBook Pro.
• Another really cool feature: MagSafe.
• • A new power adapter that’s held in magnetically. If the cord gets tripped over, it just pulls right off instead of yanking your laptop off the desk. “Patent Pending”.
• 1-inch thin
• 5.6 pounds
• MagSafe power connector
• Backlit keyboard and light sensor
• iSight camera
• Apple Remote with Front Row
• Scrolling strackpad

Ships in February, orders are being taken as of today

Shows the Intel ad one more time.

At the end of his keynote, Steve Jobs made note of the fact that Apple was founded on April 1, 1976. His quote: “30 years of making the best personal computers in the world.” He said that he wasn’t quite sure what Apple was going to do to celebrate this milestone, but knowing Steve Jobs and Apple, you can bet that they’ll do something really big on April 1st this year, and it won’t be a practical joke.

So everyone, mark your calendars for April 1st. Get ready, because chances are, that’s when we’re going to see the next “One more thing…” from Uncle Steve.

- 30 -

What did you think of the keynote and today’s announcements from Apple?

The new Apple MacBook Pro has premium features at a premium price (compared to WinTel notebooks). The question for those of us on a budget: Pay the price (and skip every other lunch for a long time) or wait for the Intel iBook (note, my iBook G4 in the office still works fine but my HP notebook at home is dying - So, I need to buy something soon).

Gizmodo was the first site I found with full specs for the MacBook Pro:

MacWorld Keynote Live

And except for the relatively small 512MB RAM in the $1999 model, the specs are very impessive.
I was very happy to see that Firewire had not disappeared as some rumor sites had predicted.
The built-in iSight should make for a lot more video-casts starting up this year.
The MagSafe magnetic powerplug sounds like an idea that will be copied by many other manufacturers.
And, of course, the dual-core Intel CPU that is said to make the MacBook Pro 5 times faster than the Powerbook. Wow…

So, those of you not independently wealthy who are heading to the Apple web store right now to order a MacBook Pro, chime in and help me convince myself to go into debt :-)

Are you going to buy a MacBook Pro or wait for the Intel iBook?

Two great apps: Adobe’s Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture. Which one is right for you?

I’ve been using them both and have just aired a podcast with show notes to help you learn more about both.

Here’s a hint… both are terrific, but in different ways.

One of the big announcements yesterday (well, okay, it’s still “today” for me since I haven’t gone to bed yet and it’s obviously past midnight) here at Macworld San Francisco, was Adobe’s announcement for and subsequent public beta release of Lightroom.

For those of you who haven’t been playing along with this game, Apple previewed Aperture last Fall and released it in the first week of December 2005. Aperture and Lightroom are similar in that the applications are intended for use by professional photographers who have a RAW image workflow. So, we’re talking about photogs who have big spendy cameras and have a need for keeping track of their digital RAW images. And since I’m not a professional photographer, I’ll leave my assessment of the two applications at that.

Let’s leave no doubt here folks: people are going to take sides. We saw this happen before with apps like Illustrator or Freehand, Dreamweaver or GoLive, and for you Unix folks out there, vi or Emacs. People will take sides and lines will be drawn in the sand and there will be shouting and name-calling over which app is better.

One thing is for certain, though, is that while I love what I’ve seen in Aperture, I can’t run it on my Mac. I have an aging 667 MHz Titanium PowerBook as my work machine, and a Mac mini that I use for my personal machine at home. Neither Mac can run Aperture. (Insert heavy sigh here.)

That said, I downloaded Lightroom’s public beta this afternoon and installed it on my TiBook later in the day. Um, there’s your first clue: it installed. When I tried to run Aperture’s installer on my TiBook (and on the Mac mini), I was told that my Mac wasn’t capable of running Aperture. Lightroom not only installed on my TiBook, but it also ran on my TiBook. Granted, it was sluggish as hell, but it ran on my 3-year-old TiBook.

So while I can’t consciously compare the two applications on what they do, I can make the following comment: Lightroom installed and ran without a hitch. Aperture did not.

While I like what I’ve seen in Aperture on my friend’s dual G5 Power Mac, I’m not able to run it on my PowerBook. When people say things like “barrier to entry,” this is one perfect example. By choice, Apple enforced some pretty hefty system requirements for you to be able to run Aperture. You needed a spendy Power Mac, preferably with dual processors, buttloads of RAM, a massive graphics card, a big hard drive, and hopefully a wide screen (or two) to use the application effectively. They also set the price of Aperture at $499, clearly out of the range of what your recreational photographer might be willing to spend on an application to manage their digital photographs.

On the other side of the fence we have Lightroom. By its own README file, it clearly states the following for its system requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.4.0 (Tiger) or higher
• G4 or G5 processor (Yes, we will work on a PowerBook)
• 512MB RAM (preferably more)
• 1GB or more free hard drive space

Now, in case you weren’t reading that carefully, please refer back to the second bullet item. Adobe took the first potshot at Apple. Lightroom will run on a PowerBook. Not only will it run on a PowerBook, but it will also run on a 3-year-old Titanium PowerBook with a 667 MHz G4 processor and 768 MB of RAM. Again, its performance was a little sluggish at times, but it ran!

So, while Apple might have been first out the gate with their digital RAW-management application, Adobe volleyed back and didn’t just shoot one over the Mother Ship’s bow, they had a direct hit. Adobe’s public beta release of Lightroom today (er, yesterday) was, in effect, a shot to the heart of Apple, much like Apple’s initial announcement and release of Aperture was a shot to the heart of Adobe.

The difference is that Adobe’s Lightroom will run on pretty much any Mac that runs Tiger. Aperture does not, and that’s a huge problem since Apple makes both the application and the OS it runs upon. Adobe isn’t forcing me to buy a $3000-$5000 system to run a $499 application.

In this case, it really is a matter of dollars and sense. Well, at least to me.

So, who do you think will win this “war”? If you’ve tried both applications, let us know what you think of them; likes, dislikes, things you’d like to see in them, etc.

Related link: https://blogs.tedneward.com/CommentView,guid,771ab347-c3ba-4a0a-b5ed-cd4dd7b73d49…

Ted Neward’s 2006 Tech Predictions are a fun read, starting off with predicting the fading of AJAX hype, and later predicting the almost inevitable letdown as Ruby’s balloon deflates. They’re still good technologies of course, but right now, they’re both at that “Java in 1997″ stage, which means they’re pissing a lot of people off, especially Java developers.

Along with some other nuggets for the Java community about EJB 3.0 and the path to Dolphin (Java SE 7), Neward drops this little nugget.

Java developers will start gaining interest in building rich Java apps again. (Freely admit, this is a long shot, but the work being done by the Swing researchers at Sun, not least of which is Romain Guy, will by the middle of 2006 probably be ready for prime-time consumption, and there’s some seriously interesting sh*t in there.)

Oh, I so want this to be true. I’ve spent most of my career in desktop Java, wrote two books on it (buy me!, no, buy me!), and genuinely find it an interesting, comfortable field to work in.

Problem is, the periodic prognostications of Desktop Java’s resurgence remind me too much of the oft-predicted rise of the Linux Desktop. Both are based on a mix of sound reasoning and wishful thinking, and when they consistently fail to come true, it reminds us that there’s still too much of the latter and not enough of the former.

Why not?

The reasons for Desktop Java’s potential success are still there: even with AJAX, the web experience can only take you so far. With media apps becoming increasingly significant, something that browsers aren’t well suited for, Java has yet another opportunity (pity, then, that the official Java media API’s suck so bad). The story of a single executable providing a rich client across platforms is still compelling, particularly to those on platforms that get left out in the usual “available now for Windows, Mac later maybe, and Lin-what?” announcements.

But those reasons have always been true, and somehow, they’ve apparently never been compelling enough. Well, not in the public realm. All the Desktop Java developers I know work in the enterprise, generally distributing their work only within a single company. This makes it really hard to get a sense of just how big or small the Desktop Java community is. It was certainly surprising, for example, that Swing Hacks was the #2 seller at the JavaOne bookstore last summer. Nobody, authors included, really thought there were still that many people in the Desktop Java realm.

Visibility

The lack of prominent Java end-user apps really hurts when making the case for its viability on new development. Consider this: how much traction would AJAX have if Google hadn’t put two excellent examples of it in our faces with Google Maps and GMail. An exercise to show how important these are is to Google for AJAX and JavaScript (including the second term just to make sure we eliminate the character from the Iliad, as well as the household cleaner), and then to screen out any pages that also mention GMail or google maps:

In other words, take away GMail and Google Maps, and 1/3 of the discussion about AJAX goes away.

A modest proposal

So, imagine this: what if Google started writing Java apps? Imagine if they started with Google Earth, the drool-worthy 3D map interface that all the Mac and Linux zealots have been begging for? What if they started doing some of their other rich clients in Java? As Google has become a (the?) standard-bearer for internet applications, able to legitimize a technology like AJAX by adopting it, this would be huge for Java.

Why, it’s enough to make Sun get together with Google. Except that, um, wait, they already did. And announced that… dramatic pause… Sun would be distributing the Google Toolbar as an optional include with the JRE download.

Pause for the unique combination of incredulous laughter and heartbreak.

I don’t know what Sun could offer Google to get them to sling some Java magic — Google probably already has enough money and Sun probably doesn’t have much left — but just as a technical challenge, it seems like something that would be up the Google engineers’ alley.

Bootstraps

Setting aside what, ultimately, may simply be a pipe-dream of Google as a white knight, riding to Desktop Java’s rescue, there are a couple things I think the Desktop Java advocates could for themselves do to help their cause.

First and foremost: end the insane “pixel accuracy” arms race. Java apps don’t have to look exactly like native apps to succeed. None of these wonderful web apps are particularly Windows-like or Mac-like, and they’re quite successful.

The “doesn’t look native enough” line is about as useful a critique as the famous “too many notes” line in Amadeus. It’s an insincere slap from people who typically either a) would never accept Java for political reasons, or b) don’t know what they’re talking about. (b) is usually your boss — I’ve worked for him too — who doesn’t see the value of your software (or, in some cases, accurately realizes your software doesn’t have any value) but perceives only the surface gloss and not the underlying functionality. There’s a solution for this: sometimes, for the sake of yourself, your company, and your profession, you really need to tell the boss to shut the f**k up.

Pixel-accuracy has led to a miserable fool’s errand for both of the major Java GUI toolkits, Swing and SWT. Being rather coupled to the native Windows API’s, SWT should enjoy a huge advantage here, but its obsessive fidelity to Windows’ GUI shows no signs of ushering in a new era of Java Desktop development… just a lot of very loud evangelists, and complaints about its performance on other platforms. Swing, despite its bulk and sometimes ruefully ornate design, is probably better suited for the long run, because its goals are ultimately based in functionality, not appearance.

The missing pieces

I think there are two desperately needed pieces to the Java Desktop puzzle. We can muddle by without them, but fixing them would get some fresh eyes on this space.

• GUI builders done right And by “right”, I mean “like the Mac’s Interface Builder”. And by that, I mean they persist freeze dried objects and not code, and they foster a specific, best-practices way to develop an app. On point one, anyone who’s written a thousand lines of GridBagLayout will see that generating this code is simply moving the problem — it’s a completely different world when you build the interface first, and the first meaningful moment of your components’ life is not the execution of the constructor and layout code, but a wakeFromNib-type message. I’ve never had anyone give me a good technical reason why this can’t be done with Java, and why we have to resort to generating code instead. On point two, you have to use XCode and Interface Builder to get it, but it’s kind of hard on the Mac not to define and instantiate proper controller objects as brokers between the UI and the model behind it. Swing turns MVC into a compromise called “model-delegate”, and in retrospect, that was probably a bad idea.
• Deployment done right At the end of the day, we’re seriously supposed to launch our apps from a command line, or an obfuscated equivalent thereof? 10 years after Java launched, JAR versioning is still a fiasco, finding the right version of a library utterly miserable (ever had fun with -Djava.ext.dirs?), ResourceBundles are little understood and less used, bundling your images, sounds, etc. is a roll-your-own experience, and you’re probably going to get to do it all differently for each platform. Which probably means you’ll do it for Windows and go home. Mac envy applies again: the OS X bundle is a beautiful thing, and Java would do well to support something like it, at the VM level so developers could count on it, on every platform.

Will fixing these magically usher in a new age of Java Desktop development. No, I doubt they’re a big enough deal unto themselves for that. But they’re so obviously broken now, that they should be the top candidates for new focus and serious development. The first and maybe the second could probably be done with or without Sun’s involvement, by an open source project (or competing projects), given the right mix of inspiration, vision, and effort.

Or maybe this is just more wishful thinking.

Or maybe a bunch of nifty-keen whiz-bang demos at JavaOne will get people magically writing Java Desktop apps again? What do you think?

One of the more interesting, niche applications to come out of MacWorld Expo 2006 is Parliant’s PhoneHerald. It allows your Mac to automatically call someone, deliver a message, and record or otherwise handle their response. For example, if you’re the secretary for a large community service group, you might use it to gather RSVPs for an upcoming party. At the end of the day, you’ll know exactly who has responded, who wasn’t reached, and how many party hats you should buy.

PhoneHerald lets you piece together messages from pre-recorded snippets (voice, music, etc) and text files that are read over the phone using text-to-speech. (I know what you’re thinking, based on the demo video, the quality sounds OK.) It does all of its work in the background, freeing you to use your Mac (but not your phone, of course) for other things.

Having a product like this for the Mac is good news, Parliant’s Phone Valet is reliable and easy to use, and I’m guessing that PhoneHerald will be, too. This type of product seems to be quite popular for some businesses, particularly schools and pharmacies. (Which I know because I get at least one automated, personalized phone call a week from both of these sources. Unfortunately, they’re calling for the previous owner of my phone number, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

The public beta of Adobe’s new photo management application, Lightroom, was released today to general approval.

Having played with the app for a few hours, I’d say it seems to be hovering somewhere around the iPhoto Pro / Aperture Lite area. Certainly the feature set is aimed at advanced users, but the approach is simpler, and I’d say slightly less intimidating than Aperture’s.

As with many other Apple applications, you can see how iPhoto has been influential. Much of the essence of the Lightshow GUI is broadly the same: a library, and list of sources, on the left; image thumbnails or full-size images in the centre; panels and palettes to the right.

It’s a beta, and the production team are very honest on the download page: this is by no means anywhere near finished. Which means there’s a lot of rough edges, of course: many functions are incredibly slow, almost to the point of being unusable.

On the other hand, there’s a lot that’s very impressive about this beta.

Navigating the image library is swift and very intuitive. Much nicer than iPhoto. A great deal of thought has gone into creating sensible, easy-to-learn keyboard shortcuts which make browsing your library a task you can do without using the mouse at all.

But what I think is really interesting are the minimum specs required to run Lightroom.

Aperture, you’ll recall, requires a very recent machine with a high quality graphics card, at least a gig of RAM, and ideally a G5 processor. In other words: an iMac G5, Power Mac, or some PowerBooks. Top of the range kit.

Lightroom, by contrast, needs only a G4 processor, OS X 10.4.3, 512MB of RAM, and a gig of free disk space. In other words: a Mac mini. Bottom of the range kit.

Aperture is all the more a ‘pro’ application because it demands ‘pro’ hardware. Lightroom’s relatively easy-going nature immediately has the potential to make it a better-selling, more popular product, simply because it’ll work on much more of Apple’s installed base of machines.

The release of Lightroom couldn’t come at a better time. Too many people are caught in the empty space between iPhoto and Aperture; they love iPhoto’s ease of use, but get frustrated when it starts to slow down with a few thousand images stored in its library. Lightroom, when it reaches final release, might well be just the thing to plug that gap.

I have a First Look at Lightroom article on Macworld Mag’s site. Here’s how it starts:

The first impulse most photographers will have is to compare Adobe’s just announced Lightroom to Aperture, Apple’s pro level photo app. And well they should. We may have a real clash of the titans on our hands here.

Adobe promotes Lightroom as “the efficient new way for professional photographers to import, select, develop, and showcase large volumes of digital images.” Unlike Photoshop—Adobe’s image-editing application that must serve many masters, including graphic artists and Web designs—Lightroom is aimed squarely at photographers. That said, Photoshop complements Lightroom when there’s a heavy image-editing task to handle. And Lightroom makes it easy to open a picture in Photoshop. Generally speaking, though, the tools in Photoshop that photographers need most of the time exist right within Lightroom.

Even at this early public beta stage, it’s clear that Adobe has done its homework. Lightroom is powerful, intuitive, and tailored specifically for the serious shooter.

I get into the details of this in the rest of the article. But I have to tell you here, this will be a very good app. And it dawns on me that we now have two robust photo editors available for the Mac, and nothing for Windows. My how things have changed…

Related link: https://www.peter-herth.de/ltk/

Well, its been quite a while since my last blog entry (I’ve been enjoying myself a bit too much with my family preceded by a bit of skiing as well), but I’m back now and ready to give you all the next installment in my blog on programming languages for the Macintosh. If you’ve been following my weblog, then you’ll no doubt have noticed that my theme for the past few entries has been Lisp—the functional and dynamic programming language with a strong history in AI research—and this post will not break from that tradition.

In my quest to find ways to use Lisp more and more in my everyday programming, I found myself wondering what I could do with Lisp in the arena of GUI libraries. I looked around for a bit and ‘lo’ and behold I came across Perter Herth’s project for porting the Tk GUI library over to Lisp called Ltk. Now, if you’ve ever done any programming with other dynamic programming languages such as Perl, Python, or Ruby, you’ve probably come across Tk or perhaps you’ve even used it. If not, its definitely time you’ve taken a look at all it can do for you. (On a side note, if you’re interested in learning a bit more about the Tk GUI toolkit, check out my articles on Ruby and Tk programming.)

Just in case you’ve never heard of Tk, its a GUI library that was originally designed to be used with the Tcl scripting language and its moved on since then to nearly every other scripting/glue/dynamic language available. If you’ve ever found yourself in the position of writing lots of small useful scripts, then Tk should definitely be your GUI library of choice. Its easy to use, portable, and tends to fit best with dynamic languages.

So, the point in all of this is that if, like me, you find Lisp to be a worthwhile, powerful, and interesting language and you’ve been wanting to find ways to use it more in your daily programming tasks, then take a look at Ltk. It works on OS X and its extremely easy to install.

Speaking of installation, all you need to get up to speed is an install of the Tk GUI library (this comes with the latest versions of OS X, however, you may wish to download and install a copy of the Tk with batteries binary, since Tiger only comes with a subset of the language), a distribution of Lisp (I’ve found that OpenMCL and SBCL are the easiest to setup, since they already come with ASDF which will be used to automatically load the Ltk library), and a copy of the Ltk library. Once, you’ve gotten everything downloaded, install both the Lisp distribution and the Tk binary and then add the ltk folder to a place where you would like to keep all of your Lisp related libraries. Then you’ll need to tell your Lisp distro where to find all your library files. You’ll do this by setting up your Lisp distro’s ASDF central registry. To do this, add the following to your chosen distro’s initialization file (for OpenMCL this will be openmcl-init.lisp and for SBCL this will be .sbclrc) in your home directory:

(require :asdf)
(setf asdf:*central-registry*
        '(*default-pathname-defaults*
          #p"/Path/to/your/central/registry/"))

Make sure to replace “/Path/to/your/central/registry/” with your own path, and make sure to end the path with a “/” since this is a directory and not a file. Once, you’ve added your distro’s init file, you’ll need to go to the directory you just specified and add a link to the ltk.asd file in ltk folder. The following will add this link:

$ cd /Path/to/your/central/registry/
$ ln -s ./ltk/ltk.asd .

These two lines will add a symbolic link to the ltk.asd file to the central registry, assuming that you’ve also added the ltk folder to this directory as well. If not, then point the link to wherever you decided to keep the folder.

Once you’ve finished all of these tasks, you should be totally setup and ready to try your hand at creating your very first Lisp/Ltk program. Open your favorite editor and create a file named hello.lisp. In this file place the following code:

(require 'ltk)
(defun hello-1()
  (ltk:with-ltk ()
    (let ((b (make-instance 'ltk:button
                            :master nil
                            :text "Press Me"
                            :command (lambda ()
                                       (format t "Hello World!~&")))))
      (ltk:pack b))))
(hello-1)

After you’ve added the above code to your new file and saved it, you should be able to execute your program by entering one of the following lines at the command prompt:

$ openmcl -l hello.lisp
$ sbcl --load hello.lisp

That should do it. If everything went smoothly with your installs, you should see a small window pop up with a single button in it that asks you to “Press Me”. Click on the button and you should see the phrase “Hello World!” pop up in the terminal. If this worked for you, then congratulations, you’ve created your very first Lisp/Ltk-based GUI application. If not, feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll try my best to walk you through any problems you might have had.

So, that’s it, that’s all there is to creating GUI based Lisp applications on OS X. Its my hope that this will get a few of you already interested in using Lisp to look into it even deeper, and any of you who are the fence about learning Lisp, hopefully this will give you one more reason for choosing Lisp as your next language to learn. (On yet another side note, if your interested in learning a bit more about Lisp, and you also feel the need to contribute to a new community of Lisp lovers and newbies, then take a look at volunteering your services to Peter Seibel’s CL Gardeners group.)

Until next time, I wish you all success and fun with all of your programming endeavors.

As predicted, Google today announced an online video retail service that will soon start selling TV and movie material directly over the web.

This is not the kind of news Steve Jobs wanted to hear, but he must surely have been expecting such a thing. Now he needs to activate some kind of plan to fight back.

The problem is this: Apple owns digital music, as near as dammit, thanks to worldwide popularity of iPods and the success of iTunes on Windows as well as OS X. Everyone has been predicting a similar move into video for some time now, but it took longer than some people hoped for the video-enabled iPod to appear. And even now, with a video iPod and video in iTunes, the content selection available is limited. Apple does not, by any stretch of the imagination, own digital video.

And all the major internet companies have been closing in on the same goal. Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google want to own digital video too, and this time they are not nearly as far behind as they were when Apple first introduced the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. This time, they know exactly what to offer. And they have many more users and customers than Apple.

A large part of Apple’s success with music was the iPod, and while the video iPod is a neat little device, my personal view is that for most people, portable video is not what matters. It’s neat, yes, but it’s not the most popular thing people want to do with video content. They’d much rather watch it on a large screen.

So it follows that this time round, the iPod does not represent the kind of trump card that it did in the music battle.

Faced against the might of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, Apple looks like small fry indeed in this looming battle for online video content.

Unless… unless perhaps it can unveil some great new hardware that gives it the same edge that the iPod gave it. Something that screams to consumers: “Buy me! I’m so cool!”

Let’s hope Steve and his team have been planning Tuesday’s keynote with this in mind. The ball’s in their court, and they need to hit an ace.

On a recent business trip to California I made a hasty technology purchase that I regret. Hopefully by writing about it I can spare someone else the same mistake.

The Netgear Storage Central SC101 seems to be a network storage device (NAS) but it is not. It’s actually a storage area network (SAN) device. That’s neat, but the packaging never uses the word “SAN” and instead touts that it uses “standard TCP/IP-based” networking. It also says that its provides storage to “all PCs on your network.”

The latter statement is false. It only works with recent versions of Windows. If “all your PCs” include Mac, Linux, or older Windows system stay far, far away from this product. It requires special drivers that are not available for other platforms. And without these drivers, your systems simply cannot communicate with the box.

I sure did feel like a sucker when I realized all this. Then I took a closer look at the package and realized that the wording was purposefully vague about exactly what the product is. It’s really pretty neat that they are selling a SAN for such a low price, and one that works with an ethernet connection, so it’s odd that “storage area network” never appears anywhere. Just to confirm my mistake, and see if there was any workarounds available, I went online and did some searching. (Yes, I should have done this before I bought the thing. My bad.)

What I found was that I’m not alone in feeling deceived and disappointed. There are a few who like the Storage Gear SC101, and many who share my view. Take a look at the reviews on Amazon to see the diversity of opinion.

As they say, buyer beware.

Sunday; January 29, 2006 Update

Case in point, today’s CompUSA newspaper ad circular lists the Storage Central for a good price, $99, but identifies it as a Network Attached Storage device. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

There’s always a moment during the process of learning an application where the light goes on and you say to yourself, “Ah ha!” As I’ve been preparing for my Inside Aperture Power Tools workshop, I’ve had my share of “Ah ha”s. But I want to tell you about the most important one, because it’s at the root of so many misconceptions about this product.

I’ve interviewed photographers and read plenty of reviews and blog posts about Aperture’s limitations. About how Apple makes you do things its way instead of the way you want to work. Most of the time, this just isn’t true. And much of the confusion comes from one area: Presets.

I’ll use the simple slideshow as an example, because I fell prey to this one myself, originally complaining that you couldn’t add music to the presentations. Wrong. When I chose the slideshow command, I saw this option on the screen.

What I didn’t realize at the moment, but know now, is that those few measly options are just a few convenient presets that Apple has provided me. If I go to the bottom of that popup up menu, I can choose Edit, and get this.

Now I have all sorts of options, including music, that I can configure and save as my own preset with the + button in the lower left corner of the screen. If I want to remove any of Apple’s presets, just highlight it and click on the - button.

You’ll see these options over and over again throughout Aperture. Take a look at “Export Version…” for example. There’s some powerful stuff there. So the key is to look for that edit option at the bottom of your popup windows. By doing so, it will change your Aperture experience greatly.

More in this series…

• Pt. 1 - Performance on a PowerBook
• Pt. 2 - Raw Files & CS2
• Pt. 3 - Digital Asset Management
• Pt. 4 - User Feedback

Dan Wood, whose Watson web services software was pushed aside by the steamroller that was Sherlock 3, has since been working on another application: a web page editor called Sandvox.

Plans were made to start unveiling Sandvox to the press at Macworld next week; things were looking good. Then someone claimed to have found a reference to something called “iWeb” on Apple’s web site, and the rumor mill cranked into overdrive. Might Wood be a victim of Apple’s steamroller twice?

Even if the iWeb reference is true, the name ‘iWeb’ could mean a lot of things. Yes it could be a web pages editor, but it could also be a new interface for .Mac, or a new tool combining iCal calendars and Address Book calendars with .Mac accounts. Perhaps it’s a personal web clippings database or a weblogging/podcasting tool (as opposed to a page editor).

Whatever it turns out to be, Dan Wood is making use of his company’s size and agility to change plans at the last minute. He’s announced that Sandvox will be released as a public beta on Monday, giving everyone time to try it out. Then, if iWeb is real and does something similar, Dan will still have the satisfaction of saying that he got there first.

Software

When you look at what Apple’s done in the past, it’s pretty easy to make some assumptions about what they might release at MWSF. The first, hugely obvious one is a rev to iLife.

iLife

Since MWSF is a huge opportunity to reach consumers, it makes total sense for Apple to update and announce releases of their main consumer apps, the iApps, better known as iLife. Based on prior history, I think it’s pretty safe to assume we’ll see iLife ‘06 release at MWSF. Of course, then, the bigger questions are:

• What will that rev to the iLife suite consist of?
• Will more pieces be added to the puzzle?

Both are valid questions, so let’s start with the first one. It makes sense for Apple to offer updates and revisions to all of the iLife apps. My guess is we’ll see more refinement to applications like iMovie HD and GarageBand, and I’m really hoping that iPhoto will get an overhaul to the point where it could be considered Aperture Lite. And we know we’ll see another rev to iTunes, even if it’s some sort of incremental update, just to keep with the spirit of offering an updated app for the suite. Maybe iMovie and iDVD will gain more themes and possibly more effects, but not so much so that it’ll keep consumers from purchasing Final Cut Express or going full-tilt and purchasing Final Cut Studio for all the advanced video editing and DVD production tools.

So what else can Apple add to iLife ‘06 to make it the next-greatest thing since sliced bread? The first thing I’d like to see added to the next rev of iLife is a version of Front Row that’ll run on any G4 or better Mac. One of the more shocking announcements earlier this year wasn’t the ROKR iTunes-equipped cellphone, but instead the new G5 iMac that just happened — in a typical Steve Jobs “Oh, by the way…” style — to include a little application called Front Row. We could see that something like this was coming, but there was no heads up. To make matters worse (or better, depending on whether you’re a glass is half-full kinda person) is that Front Row wasn’t made available as a stand-alone application that you could buy or download from Apple’s online store. Nope, if you wanted Front Row, you had to belly up to the bar and purchase a new G5 iMac.

As you can imagine, this chapped the hides of many of the Mac faithful, and it wasn’t long before Front Row showed up on BitTorrent. And not long after that, it wasn’t long before people figured out how to get Front Row running on everything from their current PowerBooks to the Mac mini.

So what’s so appealing about Front Row that it has people scrambling to get a copy of it now instead of later? Well, for one, Apple hasn’t said “Boo!” about it since releasing Front Row with the new iMac. And of course, that’s sparked a new round of rumors that Apple might be working on some sort of home theatre/media center device that’ll include Front Row. Time will only tell, but from my own opinion, that’s what I’d love to see. I really don’t see the value in sticking a G5 iMac in my living room, but what I really want is an Apple-branded media center device that has wireless and connects to my surround-sound stereo system and wide-screen television. But now I’m getting ahead of myself, so more on this in a bit…back to iLife ‘06.

So yeah, I think adding Front Row to iLife makes total sense. Front Row gives you a front-end to iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie, so why not make it available for use with pretty much everything else you might want to stream through to your television or stereo system. C’mon, you can see this punch telegraphed from a mile away. It’s coming.

Is there anything else Apple can add to iLife ‘06? Um, well, uh, how about that Photo Booth app? Again, it’s something you can only get with the new iMac. C’mon! Apple’s decision to release hardware-only software releases would be like Nike releasing the best damned sports shoe and telling everyone that it’s only available in a men’s size 6. Would Shaquille O’Neal hack off 16 inches of his foot to wear the shoe? Hell no! So why should I be forced to buy an iMac to get Front Row and Photo Booth? Yeah, I know, your goal is to sell more hardware, blah, blah, blah…but c’mon! People want this software, and when you see a demand for it, you need to spin on your heals and find a way to sell this stuff quickly. You know it will sell. You know we’re all a bunch of crack addicts with high-limit credit cards…give us what we want.

So, okay, now that I’ve maligned both Apple and all the Mac faithful (myself included) in one fell-swoop, let’s move on…

iWork

iWork, uWork, we all work for, well…da man. Okay, back to the ballgame.

Long ago, Apple introduced their lightweight “office” application suite known as AppleWorks. Problem was, AppleWorks wasn’t really a work-grade application suite, and it’s been the forgotten stepchild ever since it was first introduced. Then, just before Macworld SF 2003, rumors started flying around that Apple was working on a revision of AppleWorks for Mac OS X. And there was much rejoicing. Then Steve Jobs jumps on-stage at Moscone, and introduces…Keynote. Apple even gave us press folks NFR copies of Keynote so we could play around with it, test it out, tell people what a great app it was, etc. And it was. Keynote was a good 1.0 application, but it didn’t have anything else to go with it. Keynote gave us a superior presentation tool, it opened and exported files for PowerPoint, it employed QuickTime transitions, and it made me very happy. But it needed a best buddy and a couple of friends to go with it.

Then MWSF2004 came along and we saw…bubkis! Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Well, at least in the way of accompaniments for Keynote. Nope, Keynote was left in its 1.2 phase and there was no announcement of any sort related to AppleWorks or any other apps to go along with Keynote. So we sailed through the rest of 2004, using Keynote and dreaming of the day when it would have a couple of buddies to go out to the pub with. But alas, nothing else came out in 2004. It wasn’t until, oh, around this time last year that we started to hear rumors of an application for creating documents. One of the rumors even said that the application’s name would be Document, which of course made me start thinking about emails I would send to friends, “Hey, here’s a Document document.” Of course, if Document really was an early name for the app, it’s obvious that someone else within Apple (probably the janitor in Building 3) realized this was a goofy name and they decided to change the name to Pages. So now we have Pages documents, which doesn’t sound too bad, but let’s not get caught up on the name. We finally had a friend for Keynote, and Keynote itself was updated to version 2, and both were packaged as iWork.

Will MWSF2006 bring anything new for iWork? Or will iWork-related apps be restricted to odd-numbered year releases? It’s hard to say, but one thing’s clear, iWork is a consumer application suite, and if Apple wants to compete with Microsoft Office (come on, please, Please, PUH-LEEZE!), they’ve got to add a few more pieces of software to the iWork suite, and what a better place to announce these changes than at Macworld.

So, what does iWork need? Well, it needs a spreadsheet application for one. Something that’ll open and work with Excel spreadsheets, and not just the most basic form of Excel spreadsheet, but something that does what Excel does and more. What would this app be called? Well, Buddha only knows, but one thing’s for sure, Apple wouldn’t call it iSpread (insert tactless humor here). Let’s see, we have Keynote for giving, um, presentations, Pages for, um, creating documents, so if we’re getting a spreadsheet application, maybe they’ll call it Numbers.

Why Numbers? Well, if you go over to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office’s web site (USPTO site), and do some fine digging around (like I did), you’ll discover that Apple has trademarked a couple application names that could — just maybe — be used as the name for a spreadsheet application. Here’s what I found:

• Numbers (Trademark Serial #: 78646677)
  Description: Computer software
  Filing Date: June 8, 2005
• iCalc (Trademark Serial #: 78596181)
  Description: Computer software
  Filing Date: March 28, 2005
• Graphulator (Trademark Serial #: 78560028)
  Description: Computer hardware; computer software
  Filing Date: February 3, 2005

So, there you have it: Keynote for presentations, Pages for documents, and Numbers for spreadsheets. The naming sounds logical to me, but we’ll have to wait until next week before we really know anything for sure. Not that my Magic 8-Ball isn’t trusty, it’s just that you never know what could happen at Macworld. I can’t see Apple using iCalc or Graphulator for the name of a spreadsheet application, but then again, you never know. Of the three possibilities I found on the USPTO site, Numbers makes the most sense, then maybe iCalc to stick with the whole iApp thing, but Graphulator? Seriously, now. We already have Automator. Graphulator? Please don’t do it.

But wait! Could there be more?

Yes, after further digging around, I wonder whether there could be a lightweight database application in the works. Why? Well, again, the USPTO’s site coughed up this tasty tidbit of info:

• iFile (Trademark Serial #: 78680095)
  Description: computer software for management of personal and business information for individuals and groups, computer software for data synchronization, calculation, expense management, database management, document management, project management, electronic mail, electronic messaging, online chat rooms, data sharing, text editing, word processing, contact information management, task list management, graphics, automated reminders, time management, scheduling, and publication of information to a website, and instruction manuals in electronic form sold as a unit supplied therewith
  Filing Date: July 27, 2005

If iFile is real, the part about “publication of information to a website” makes me think that there could be some sort of tie-in with .Mac so you can publish information to your .Mac HomePage or to a .Mac Groups page.

Hardware

Okay, kids, here’s the part of the show that’ll make your Visa card melt in your wallet. Ever since Steve Jobs announced Apple’s switch from IBM to Intel chips, we’ve all been chomping at the bit, waiting for Apple to release something other than an over-hyped developer box (which, by the way, you have to pay for and then return it to Apple by the end of 2006…yep, Think Different…nyet).

Intel PowerBooks and iBooks

So, what might Uncle Steve have up his sleeve for us at MWSF2006? Well, if you believe the rumor sites, the first in line is an Intel-based iBook. Ho-freakin’-hum. Seriously, folks, who all out there wants to see Apple make an iBook their first entry point with Intel-based Macs? Not me. Two years ago, when Apple unveiled the 12″ and 17″ Aluminum PowerBooks, Steve said it would be the year of the laptop. 2004 gave us a new line of PowerBooks that have since been seriously hobbled by IBM’s decision to screw us all by deciding to focus their chip development for cars and game consoles. Great! Thanks, Big Blue. But enough of my angst over the way PowerBooks have continued to lag behind in speed and performance over WinTel laptops.

If you were at WWDC2005, or if you caught the replay of the keynote, you could see the look on Steve Jobs’ face when he said Apple was making the switch to Intel. All we can guess is that IBM blew an opportunity with Apple by not delivering the chips they said they would, and that pissed off Apple. Out with IBM and in with Intel. Fortunately, Apple had been working on an Intel version of Mac OS X right from the very start, just in case such a thing ever happened. So yes, rumors of the Marklar project were true way back when, and Apple finally got fed up and called IBM’s bluff. Good for you, Steve! (Hey, when you can see all of the dual-core G5 chips going up to Redmond to feed Xbox 360’s, and not over to Cupertino for the Power Mac line, it doesn’t take a genius to see that something’s amiss.)

So now that IBM’s out and Intel’s, um, In, which boxes are going to be the first to be branded as “Intel Inside” Macs? To me, Apple needs to rev the PowerBook line — and fast! Let the iBooks, iMacs, Mac minis, and the Power Mac line come later. Apple needs to bring out the bitchin’ fast PowerBooks at MWSF2006, and release all three sizes — 12-, 15-, and 17-inch models — at the same time. (Please don’t make us wait another 9 months to see the 15-inch PowerBook like we did when you announced the Aluminum series. (Don’t make me sing bars from the Spice Girls disc, “Give Me What I Want, What I Really, Really Want.”)

To redeem themselves, Apple needs to make PowerBooks the first line of Intel-based Macs. PowerBook users have been the lot who’ve been overlooked for far too long. Sure, we get a little speed bump here and there, or some new feature like the Sudden Impact thingamabob, but what we really need is speed. Again, don’t make me quote Tom Cruise from Top Gun (”I feel the need. The need for speed.” Crap, there you go, you’ve done it again!) Give us faster PowerBooks and please don’t make us wait until WWDC2006 rolls around or until the end of the year…give them to us now. I realize that MWSF is a consumer show, blah, blah, blah, but “consumers” don’t just use iBooks and iMacs and Mac minis. When I go to the local coffee shop to work, I see more students with 12″ PowerBooks than I do with iBooks, and even rarer, those toting around Mac minis. (Okay, in all fairness, I’ve not seen the latter, but still, it’s not chic to be seen in a Portland coffee shop with anything other than a shiny PowerBook.)

So what would I like to see in an Intel-based PowerBook? First and foremost: speed. I want a blazing fast PowerBook with a kick-ass graphics card that’ll let me run apps like Aperture or Final Cut Pro without making me think “Man, when did the sloths take over my Mac?” Oh, and I don’t want to be working on my PowerBook with “Chuck’s nuts roasting on an open fire…” playing through my mind. It’s gotta be fast, and it’s gotta run cool. From what Steve said in his WWDC2005 keynote, that’s what we should get — cooler running, faster processors — so make it so. More pixels on-screen would be nice, too (courtesy of better graphics cards), but what I really want is speed.

The next thing I want in a new PowerBook is a casing that doesn’t act as a force field to AirPort/WiFi signals. I have the oldest PowerBook at O’Reilly (I’ve had this 667 MHz TiBook since August 2002), and the Titanium case makes it impossible for me to use wireless in my home and on the road. My solution has been to use a Linksys PCMCIA card, but I shouldn’t have to. I’ve also heard from people who have the Aluminum PowerBooks who have the same problem. So, what could Apple do to give us cool looking laptops that don’t shield AirPort signals? That I’m not sure of, but maybe we should move away from metal casings on PowerBooks. Sure, they’re pretty, but the whole purpose of having a laptop is to be able to work wirelessly, and when the case shields the signal, there’s a problem.

Built-in iSight Cameras?

Oh, and as far as that rumor goes about building an iSight camera into the lid of the new PowerBooks…please don’t do it. Whoever did the market research on this should really be taken out back to Building 5 and handed a mop. To me, that just adds another bit of unnecessary gadgetry and I can see where many of these will get damaged, forcing people to send their prescious workhorse PowerBooks into AppleCare to repair the camera. Seriously, the one thing I hate having to do is give up my laptop for 3-5 business days to fix something minor. Case in point: the latch on my PowerBook’s lid has been broken for months, but since I use my PowerBook every day, I can’t afford the time away from it to get a 10-cent magnetic latch fixed. Things like this should be things that can be fixed in an Apple Store; I shouldn’t have to give up my laptop for a week, and if the new PowerBooks sport built-in iSight cameras, that’s what we’re all going to be faced with.

Consumers won’t benefit from having a built-in iSight camera. It’s the same reason why I won’t purchase a television with a built in DVD player or VHS player: when that component of the device breaks, you’re screwed, and so will be the case for when that built-in iSight breaks. We’re screwed. We’ll have to send in our PowerBooks or iBooks or iMacs just to get a $50 camera replaced. Loss in your customer’s productivity should be part of the equation, Apple. And if you can’t guarantee that I’ll get my Mac back in less than 3-5 business days, at least give me AppleCare Pro: out today, back tomorrow service. If it can’t be fixed in an Apple Store, they ship it out to a repair center where it receives priority fixin’ and is sent back to the customer that night.

iTheatre: The Mac Home Theatre Experience

Okay, this one’s seen lots of rumors lately, but the one thing that I think we should expect to see is some large move from Apple into the home theatre space. Prior to MWSF2005 there were lots of rumors floating around that Apple might be working on a home theatre device, known as iHome. Instead, all we got was the Mac mini, and don’t get me wrong, the Mac mini is a wicked-fast little machine (hey, it’s faster than the aging TiBook I’m writing this from), but it wasn’t quite what people expected.

As mentioned earlier, Apple introduced a new app, Front Row, with the upgraded G5 iMacs. If that wasn’t a telegraphed punch, then I don’t know what the hell is. To me, Front Row was Apple’s way to test the waters; to see how the Mac faithful would react to a home theatre application.

So what’s the next step? Pairing a Mac mini-type computer with Front Row and packaging it in a box that fits in with my home theatre system. Something wide, black (with a chrome Apple logo on the front, obviously), and fits in the cabinet with all my other audio-visual gear. Make it the same width as my tuner, equalizer, DVD player, CD player, etc., so it doesn’t stick out like an obvious sore thumb. Make it look like it belongs in a stereo cabinet. The box should have wireless so I can stream photos and music and movies to it, and it should have a DVD tray so I can insert movies and/or listen to CDs.

Of course, the next question is, what type of machine will this be? Will it be TiVo-like, in that it has a hard drive and runs a full-blown version of the Mac OS X operating system? Or will it be some new hybrid device? Um, yeah, the latter.

For those of you who’ve been paying attention to the rumormills lately, you’ve no doubt seen the one about Apple buying up a bunch of flash memory. Something like $1.2 billion worth. I don’t know what your thoughts are on that, but that’s a shitload of flash memory. What the hell does Apple need with that much flash memory? Certainly it can’t all be for iPod shuffles and nanos. Okay, maybe some of it could be used for those, but come on, that’s still a shitload of flash memory.

My thought on this is that some of the flash memory will be used in the iPod line, but I think the rest will be used to run a lightweight version of Mac OS X in a home theatre device. Now I know you’re all thinking that I’m smoking from a crack pipe, but c’mon, think about it. If you have a component in your home theatre system, you want it to turn on when you hit the Power button on the remote, right? Well, that same theory would apply to an iTheatre device. You don’t want to wait for an operating system to boot and load from disc. If you have a lightweight version of the operating system that can live on flash memory, you’ll get an instant on, and when it needs to do something more complex, then and only then will it need to access the disc to launch a program or provide some other service. Again, it’s all about speed, and when it comes to your home theatre, you want that device to turn on when you want to use it, not 30- or 60-seconds later. Now, now, now!

My final thought on what I’m calling the iTheatre is that it should be priced at the same level as the Mac mini or less. Make the price comparable with other home theatre devices and you’ll sell a bunch of them. Price it too high, and you’re forcing the early-adopter market to be the ones to buy and play with them first while locking out the rest of the wider, broader consumer market. I’m sure that more people would buy a $499 device than a $699 device, unless the $699 device comes with an iPod nano.

More on Intel Macs

Just when you thought I’ve said enough about the Intel Mac line, think again. To remind everyone, Steve Jobs said that the transition to Intel would start mid-year 2006 and go through 2007. All of the rumor sites have been reporting that Apple’s ahead of their earlier projections, and my guess is that we’ll see all of the Mac hardware line switch to Intel in 2006, and I’d like to think that Mactel hardware will be introduced in the following order:

• PowerBook
• iBook
• iMac
• Mac mini
• Power Mac
• Xserve

Apple’s bread and butter are the laptops, so it makes sense for PowerBooks and iBooks to be intro’d first with the Power Mac line (including the Xserve) coming later in 2006. And what makes me think that we’ll see all of these Intel Macs in 2006? Um, well, that would be the next big kitty: Mac OS X Leopard.

In his WWDC2005 keynote, after announcing the Intel switcheroo, Steve Jobs told developers that a beta for Mac OS X Leopard would appear at WWDC2006 and that it would release in late-2006 or early-2007 (around the same time Microsoft releases Longhorn, now known as Windows Vista), and that Leopard would run on the PowerPC and Intel Macs alike. If that’s the case, then why drag out moving the entire hardware line until a time after Leopard releases? No, that won’t happen. I think we can expect to see the entire Mac hardware line revved by the end of 2006, and certainly in time for Leopard’s release, whenever that will be.

The $64,000 Question: What’s the Next Big Thing?

Over the last few years, we’ve seen Apple evolve from being a hardware and OS company that built a few apps, to being the dominating force in the consumer music space with the iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes Music Store. When Steve Jobs told attendees at the Macworld New York 2003 keynote that Apple was going to innovate out of the recession, he didn’t falter. We’ve seen Apple introduce the Apple Stores, and their success has a viral quality that introduces non-Mac people to Apple and its products. In this year alone, we’ve seen the following from Apple:

• The Mac mini
• iWork (including Keynote 2 and Pages)
• iMovie HD
• Final Cut Express HD
• iPod shuffle
• Speed bumps for iBooks and PowerBooks
• Final Cut Studio with Motion 2 and Soundtrack Pro
• Mac OS X Tiger
• A 2-for-1 stock split, followed by a constant upward trend in the price of Apple’s stock
• iPod nano
• A new G5 iMac with a built-in iSight, and Front Row and Photo Booth software
• An iPod that plays video
• Aperture
• Dual- and Quad-core Power Macs

So what can we expect to see in 2006? Here’s a bit of what’s on my wish list:

• Intel Macs all around by the end of the year.
• A home theatre device (iTheatre?) that comes with Front Row, AirPort, Bluetooth, and perhaps (if we’re lucky), some sort of DVR capability as well so we can record shows.
• Soundtrack Express. We have Logic Express and Final Cut Express, why not make a lightweight version of Soundtrack and market toward those who create Podcasts. Keep it loop-based, give it more of an audio-in, and tack on some one-click way to publish Podcasts either direct to iTunes (a benefit of buying the app), or to your .Mac HomePage or some other site.
• Bigger and better versions of the iPod shuffle and nano (”bigger” meaning storage capacity without an increased price).
• iLife ‘06 (I think that’s a given every year, though, at Macworld)
• iWork ‘06, with updated versions of Keynote and Pages, and hopefully Numbers and iFile.
• Upgrades to the .Mac services, along with a lower price tag. While I like .Mac (hey, I wrote a book on it), $100/year is pretty steep.
• Universal Binaries all around (as Intel Macs hit the street, everything will have to be a UB)
• iTunes Movie Store, the new video iPod is just the first piece of the puzzle (think bigger and look for the telegraphed punch people). The iTunes Movie Store would work with Front Row on the home theatre device, and would have some sort of subscription service that allows you to subscribe and automatically download movies and television shows.

Finally, the one thing I’d like to see from Apple later this year is Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5). I know we’re not supposed to see the preview until WWDC in June, and that Steve Jobs said in his WWDC2005 keynote that Leopard wouldn’t release until late-2006 or early-2007, but I’d really like to see Apple ship the new OS in time for Christmas this year. It would be great if Leopard could hit the street before Windows Vista debuts so us Mac Folk could snub our noses toward Redmond once more.

Enter the Mac Pundits

As the final piece to this article, I’ve solicited input from some of O’Reilly’s Mac authors and bloggers to get their opinions on what Apple might announce at MWSF2006 and throughout next year. Here’s what they had to say:

• Brian Jepson, co-author of Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks
  
  • My only prediction is that there will be an x86 Mac Mini with a weak enough video card so as to pose no threat to the high end machines; I’m thinking it will have a max of 32MB VRAM. I think a similarly configured iBook is less likely, but possible.

    Then, what I’m probably going to do is order that Mac Mini right away and put my 12″ PowerBook up on eBay so I can unload it before the value drops too much. Then I’ll put the proceeds in the bank and wait for an x86 PowerBook or iBook that meets my needs. :-)

• Ernie Rothman, co-author of Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks
  • I guess an Intel-based PowerBook wouldn’t surprise me, but it would be nice to see an Intel-based iMac, too. What about 64-bit Intel-based Macs; when will we see them?
• Dave Taylor, author of Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger
  
  • I’m just dying to see a Mac Tablet PC. Honestly, and I’ve been blogging
    about it for months now. I call it the “PowerPad” in the spirit of Apple’s
    naming, but I think all the pieces are just about in place - we just need to
    switch to the Intel hardware. Probably not MWSF in January, but this summer?
• Jason Deraleau, coauthor of Running Mac OS X Tiger
  
  • Intel Macs: There’s a lot of rumor and guesswork about Intel Macs at Macworld in January, but there are at least two products that are guaranteed to be announced. It’s no coincidence that the version numbers of the iLife and iWork suites correspond to the years they’re released. With the coming of 2006, Apple’s sure to show us revamped versions of both of those products.
  • iLife ‘06: I expect to see both Photo Booth and Front Row make their way into the suite. I wouldn’t be surprised to see iMovie picking up some CoreVideo tricks and iPhoto doing the same with CoreImage. With a bit of luck, iPhoto will also improve its RAW support by taking some pointers from its beefed up brother, Aperture. And, of course, iLife will have the usual additions of new themes for iDVD, the latest build of iTunes, and a tweaked GarageBand.
  • iWork ‘06: This isn’t quite as certain. Keynote will be on its third release and I imagine that we’ll see some new themes for that as well. Pages 2 will likely be more stable and (hopefully) a bit faster, plus sport some new templates. It’s not unreasonable to expect both of those apps to gain a few new features in the process. However, what I’m really hoping for is Apple’s long rumored spreadsheet app to make an appearance, bringing me one step closer to freedom from Microsoft Office.
• Chris Adamson, O’Reilly Network editor and author of QuickTime for Java: A Developer’s Notebook
  
   
  iTunes’ adoption of Podcasting has been seriously under-appreciated — any Podcast worth its salt is on the iTunes Music Store, and many are using Apple’s “Enhanced Podcast” format to include timed images and links. So, my first few wishes are all podcast-related:
  • iPodcast: Take the analogy to iMovie, iDVD and iPhoto and this is obvious: a simple yet powerful app for capturing, editing, producing, and distributing podcasts.
  • Documentation and a QuickTime API for creating enhanced podcasts: Apple’s “enhanced podcast”, supported by iTunes 4.9 and up and iPod photo, video, and nano, is a curious frankenstein of concepts from QuickTime (chapters, HREF tracks, video samples of arbitrary length) and MPEG-4 (the .m4a container). The provided tool to create them is a beta-quality command-line app that requires an XML file for input. Nuts to that: open the format, support it with a QuickTime MovieExporter component, and then everyone’s podcast-building apps can support it (which will serve to boost iTunes and sell more iPods).
  • iChat voice recording: Or, more generally, the ability to record voice chats to disk (if it can be made to work for Skype too, better yet). Ideally, we should be able to record each participant of a multi-party voice chat into separate tracks of a QuickTime movie. The implications for podcasters are awesome: you can sweeten your call-in guests after the fact, fixing levels, keeping people from talking over each other, and eliminating noise. Note that separating out the participants into individual tracks is what makes this idea different from the current practice of just using Audio Hijack Pro.
  • Overhaul .Mac, slash its price, do both, or just nuke it: Notice that in iPodcast, I didn’t mention the option of publishing your podcast to .Mac. That’s because .Mac home pages don’t support RSS. In 2005. Lame. In fact, none of .Mac’s current offerings are very compelling or come close to supporting its $100 a year price. Consider that this used to be the free iTools service, and then consider that most of what .Mac does is available for free elsewhere: mail (GMail), web space (MySpace), photo hosting (Flickr, any of the photo processors). Worse, features like sync’ing address books and contacts between Macs are deliberately crippled in OS X in hopes you’ll go the .Mac route. Add to this the confusion of explaining .Mac to the switcher or new user, and I think you’ll agree that not only is .Mac overpriced, it may actually be harming the Mac platform. I hope that by the end of 2006 it’s either free or dead.
  • Blu-Ray Studio Pro: you know, like DVD Studio Pro. Apple joined Blu-Ray’s board this year, clearly picking sides in the next-gen movie disc battle. By providing pro tools for authoring discs — particularly if they can simplify the sophisticated yet difficult interactivity options provided by the Java-based BD-J — they’ll create a must-have pro tool and help their format win the war. Plus, with Sony talking about using the older MPEG-2 codec on their Blu-Ray discs, it may be necessary for Apple to push the H.264 codec that is also supported by Blu-Ray and was the centerpiece of QuickTime 7.
  • Apache 2.0: I’ve been trying to run apache2, mod_dav and mod_dav_svn on a G4 Cube, and even with fink it’s miserable. Please finally move OS X’s default web server up to Apache 2.0 and compile in the more popular modules. Plus, easy-to-use DAV will make it easier to host our iCal calendars.
  • Better keyboards: Mighty Mouse was a good first step. Now about these keyboards: they’re pretty, but the feel is lousy, as is the keystroke motion. I have a nasty habit of doing my HTML tags entirely with my right hand, and when using an Apple keyboard, if I’m not perfectly centered over right shift, the key just jams on the post when I press down. That’s why I replaced it with an old Macally iKey that I originally bought for online PlayStation 2 gaming.
  • PowerBook AirPort range: Seriously, stop encasing PowerBooks in enclosures that WiFi signals can’t penetrate. I’ve had to put a NewerTech external antenna on mine just to stay on-network in my own house. iBooks get such better reception, it’s not funny.
  • A software update to add FireWire compatibility to iPod nano and 5G iPods: Some iBooks and iMacs from just two years ago are effectively incompatible with the entire iPod line. Talk about forced obsolescence!

  And my completely wild wish:

  • “Final Fantasy XII” on Mac OS X, day and date with the US PS2 release: The release of Square Enix’s latest RPG continues to slip on the PlayStation 2, something the company can ill afford. If Apple were to throw some money and expertise at a Mac version, and Square went along (like I said, they probably need the money), the Mac would get a game with a massive fan base, very high public regard, and a Mac game to talk up that isn’t just a year-old PC port. Plus, I believe the styles of games that Mac users go for are different than those that are popular on the PC, and bringing over a thoughtful, beautiful, story-driven epic from the console world seems like it would suit the Mac community better than the usual shooters, Warcraft-clones, and MMORPGs that can’t play with their PC counterparts.

• François Joseph de Kermadec, Mac DevCenter Blogger
  
  • A better iSight: Is the iSight Apple’s forgotten accessory? Since the introduction of the original FireWire iSight, its only update has been as an internal component, embedded into the iMac G5. Whether the iSight is squarely headed that way or will continue to exist as a separate product for portable computers, I wish a new version of that excellent product could make video conferencing sharper and clearer — especially in challenging (read: everyday) conditions.
  • Dark Aqua interface: The Blue and Graphite themes are great but little suited to all-day use. A darker, smoother variant of Aqua, playing on dark and light grays instead of beige and light grays wold make for an easier experience — and blend in with the existing suite of Pro Applications.
  • Revamped .Mac: Our beloved .Mac service is quickly falling behind and falling apart. Drastic action is required to take it back on track. I’m not talking AJAX or GBs here but simply service and reliability, for which that Apple product used to be known.
  • Less features, more fine tuning: Tiger introduced some amazing features that leave plenty of room for fine-tuning and deepening. Let’s focus on making the good great before adding new features and buttons to our operating system of choice.
  • iWork: Keynote rocks but Pages still has the blues. Let’s hope the next iWork update brings Pages up to par with its predecessor and makes both applications as compatible as one would expect two pieces of a suite to be — even if they have very little in common technically speaking.

• Giles Turnbull, freelance writer and editor, Mac DevCenter Blogger
  

  Here’s some Mac-related stuff I’d like to see in 2006:

  • Tagnag, or
    similar.
  • BBOutliner,
    or just support for folding in BBEdit.
  • A .Mac service that’s genuinely useful, offers cutting-edge web-
    based functionality, and is good value for money.
  • A new version of Mail that is fast, dependable, and doesn’t
    suck.
  • Airport Express video.
  • An Intel-powered, incredibly small, lightweight, no optical drive
    iBook; this would be the perfect writer’s tool and would probably
    make the PowerBook I’m using right now feel like an ancient, bloated,
    overweight doorstop.
  • An Apple-branded mobile phone, that doubles as an iPod, runs a
    decent OS, has a camera, and talks to my Macs effortlessly and
    wirelessly. And wuvs me.
• Tom Bridge, writer, technologist, Mac DevCenter Blogger
  
  • I think we’re in for a laptop revolution that will begin in March, forcing me to live an entire 45 days without a laptop (I give mine back to my employer on 27 Jan) that will bring dual core Yonah processors to the iBook and PowerBook line.  Costs will not change much beyond the current scheme, but battery times, performance numbers and hard drive stats will all go up significantly.
  • iLife ‘06 will feature a Podcasting studio and extended podcasting support on .Mac to go with it. iMovie HD will also add a vlog template or six that will become popular with everyone from the porn industry to the tech industry.  Instead of just 1GB, Apple will give us 5GB in .Mac to pump out as much podcasting as we like. Each account will have 1TB of data transfer, but more will be available.
  • The mini will morph into a media center like device featuring cable card access and an iPod dock built into the upper face, and add SPDIF out for home theatre sound.  In a year, it will add a Blu-Ray drive to take advantage of this. The box itself will be roughly the size of a Yamaha stereo tuner and have cart mounted HDs much like the Xserve, as well as an internal HD (3,5″ SATA this time) and cost roughly $1500. Apple will announce their take on the DVR and partnerships with Comcast and Time Warner and a satellite provider to be named later.  HD will be the focus of the new machine.
  • And of course iPod numbers will be trotted out from the holiday season that make Steve smile bigger than he ever has before and make Apple investors request a cigarette and a light after the keynote.

Conclusion

Okay, so there you have it…I’ve blathered on long enough. Let me know what you think. And if you’re going to Macworld next week, stop by the O’Reilly booth and let’s talk Macs; I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Tell us what you think…what are you hoping to see most out of MWSF next week?

Related link: https://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/media//news/CC518319

I can’t make it to San Francisco this year for Macworld Expo.

It’s killing me.

Intel laptops. iLife ‘06. Predictions of home media centers and Front Row for all. It’s enough to make me itch like the addict I am. But how am I supposed to get my fix? I just know that because I can’t be there this year that Apple will do something super crazy cool that I will want, but can’t see.

In the past, Apple has streamed the Keynote live to the world, but even despite the gajillions of dollars they have in the bank this year (thanks in no small part to the four iPods a friend of mine bought this Christmas), they won’t be doing it again this year. This causes junkies like me to refresh sites like MacMinute and TUAW in order to get just the barest of snippets from inside Moscone. If you’ve ever seen

Once upon a time, they even satellite-cast the Keynote to the Apple Retail Stores, but all five locations in DC have said they’re not going to be doing anything for the Keynote this time round. And of course, it’s not like I can look forward to a short train ride to New York this summer to catch Steve at the Javits Center, since IDG and Apple are feuding about the summer conference and Apple’s presence there, too. And I surely can’t afford a WWDC junket, not with a $1500 pricetag.

Sigh.

How’s a guy to cope?

How are you coping if you can’t be there?

I thought I’d pull my head out of my Aperture for a few minutes to share a few things that will be happening at Macworld SF next week.

There’s going to be some truly exciting photography news. Apple and its (partners/competitors… depending on what day of the week it is) are going to be firing some heavy artillery. The upshot for those of us who love photography: good times! Be sure to check Mac DevCenter on Monday for the latest news.

Speaking of Monday, I’ll be leading my Inside Aperture Power Tools workshop. Scott Bourne from ApertureTricks.com will be joining me on stage. Plus, I’m meeting with the Apple product manager today, and I think he’ll also be there to handle some Q&A sessions. This is going to be the Aperture event next week. There’s still room if you want to join in.

I’m also leading a User session on How To Use Your Digital Camera, which will be more fun tricks than boring How To.

There’s some really cool stuff going on with Digital Photography Day(s) on Tuesday and Wednesday. Macworld Magazine is conducting their own cool photography event at 1pm on Wednesday. I’ll be joining them on stage showing off some photo techniques.

And if you’re a User Group member, I’ll be hanging out in the User Group Lounge at 4pm on Thursday. Finally, the O’Reilly Booth is going to be teeming with activity, including talks by David Pogue and the rest of us. Be sure to check out the schedule.

So, stay tuned for all the announcements early in the week. It’s going to be a good time for photography enthusiasts.

Everyone’s tossing around their own wish-lists for the future of Apple’s iBook and PowerBook lines in the Intel era. Here’s my take on the matter - it’s slightly different from most. Almost all the speculation and fantasising that I have read assumes that Apple will keep the product matrix as it is, but simply introduce new models in the same slots.

I’d like to argue that there’s a case for three distinct lines of laptops. Here’s my thinking:

iBook

The iBook has always been a great budget laptop and it should remain so. It’s rugged enough for school kids and cheap enough that almost everyone I know who is non-technical but wants to get into computers feels able to afford and approach one. I say Apple should keep the iBook line as the clearly-demarcated low-end portable. Of course it should be a competitive product, but keeping a low entry-level is, in my opinion, a good thing.

PowerBook Nano and PowerBook Ultra

The PowerBook has an incredible pedigree in the mobile space, and Apple should continue to capitalise on this. It seems to me that high-end laptop use is beginning to bifurcate. On one hand, you have the true Road Warrior - the person who is more familiar with the interior of a Boeing 737 than that of their own car, who is frequently staying in hotels, hopping on and off wi-fi, always hunting for a power socket in an airport concourse. In my current job, I am that kind of person.

On the other hand, there’s the people who want a laptop that’s almost equivalent to a desktop machine, except that you can fold it up and put it in a backpack. People who are editing video on the go in Final Cut, managing a photoshoot in Aperture or capturing audio with Logic.

On no authority or evidence other than my own experience, I speculate that the former group might well be willing to trade off speed and certain other features against things like longer battery life, lighter weight and greater connectivity. On this basis, I suggest that it might be time to split the PowerBook line into two subtypes to address these two user communities.

PowerBook Nano

The PowerBook Nano is my name for the Road Warrior’s PowerBook, the spiritual successor to today’s 12″ model. Going directly against the Sony Vaio TX line, the PowerBook Nano would be available with specifications like the following:

• Choice of 11″ or 13″ widescreen displays
• 80Gb and 120Gb hard drive options
• A build-to-order option of having two batteries instead of an internal optical drive (which could then be added as an optional peripheral extra)
• Really, really, really good wi-fi reception
• A graphics card that is at least capable of supporting Aperture
• An Apple-designed port replicator solution
• A built-in iSight camera would also be one less thing to pack (or forget to pack)
• Exotic weight-saving materials

Given the target market, I would be prepared to sacrifice some or all of the following to save space and/or weight:

• S-Video port
• Firewire 400 port (although I’d still like a FW800 port for backups)
• DVI port (replacing it with VGA)

I’d also toy with the idea of an optional but built-in 3G wireless modem, but it’s possibly a bit early for that.

PowerBook Ultra

The PowerBook Ultra subtype would be the power-hungry Pro App user’s dreamland. Here, we’re looking at features like:

• 15″ and 17″ displays. A 19″ would be the ultimate laptop porn, but is it even feasible? Remember that we were all shocked at the 17″ PowerBook when it came out - it seems routine now.
• Highly capable graphics cards with dual-link DVI support
• Fast hard drives
• A built-in multi-format media card reader for photographers
• All the optical drive options (possibly even Blu-Ray?)
• All the video output options that a pro video editor could want

Personally, I’ll be first in line for a PowerBook Nano if such a product ever materialises. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Craving for a new PowerBook? Would you like that in Small or Large?

Related link: https://mobile.yahoo.com/go

Yahoo! launched Mobile Go for Nokia Series 60 phones provides rich mobile features including.

• Automatically synching contacts information with Yahoo
  
• Storing photos from a camera phone to Yahoo
  
• Recording voice for instant messages
  
• Email notification
  

You can learn more about this software and service at:

https://mobile.yahoo.com/go

Those of us who do not have a Nokia Series 60 based phone can use the exiting Yahoo! mobile web portal at:

https://wap.oa.yahoo.com/

The Yahoo! Go Desktop service for Windows and Mac OS X uses their Yahoo! Widgets product (formerly Konfabulator).
There is also some other kind of software that will be made specifically for Windows XP PCs connected to a TV (Windows Media Center???).

Have more info about Yahoo! Go? Share it here.

Macromates has announced the release of TextMate 1.5. This replaces the previous 1.0.2 public release with a version combining lots of new features and including a comprehensive online manual.

The update is free for registered users. A license costs 39 Euros. Minimum requirement is OS X 10.3.9.

TextMate’s developer, Allan Odgaard, says he’s taking some time off in the next couple of weeks to enjoy some skiing. He’s confident that he won’t be needed to provide much support for the new release, since it has been extensively beta-tested among existing users.

Personally speaking, I’m still getting a lot of satisfaction from using TextMate, since I switched from BBEdit just before Christmas. As I’m not a programmer, there’s much in the application that I don’t use, but it remains a great app for writing, and well worth the price.

In Smart Home Hacks, Greg Smith wrote about using LanOSD to display notifications of CallerID (and other events, such as someone ringing your doorbell) on all the (Macintosh) computers. (See Hack #31 “Broadcast Messages On Your Home Network” on page 130.)

Unfortunately, the developer of LanOSD has abandoned his application in, well, a hissy fit over Apple switching to Intel processors. Making matters worse, even if you manage to find a copy of the application elsewhere, the last beta version expired in December 2005 so it won’t run at all.

Fortunately, the folks who create Growl have been quite busy and it has really come a long way in the last year. You can read what I’ve written about Growl in the past, but the current scoop is that the network notifications are easier to manage then they used to be. Which means, not only is Growl the only viable replacement for LanOSD, it’s actually a big improvement in because of its features and support.

So I finally spent a few minutes and converted all of my LanOSD notifications over to Growl. It has been working wonderfully! The first thing I changed was the CallerID notification that PhoneValet uses, it was a simple change; here’s how the new code looks:

try
tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
	notify with name "Incoming Call" title "Incoming Call" application name "PhoneValet Growl" description callerName & return & callerNumber with sticky
end tell
end try

One conceptual hurdle that LanOSD users will have to adjust to is that Growl, for security reasons I suppose, requires an application to register itself before messages will be accepted. Here’s the script I used to register my “PhoneValet Growl” script:

tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
	set the notifs to {"Incoming Call"}
	register as application "PhoneValet Growl" all notifications notifs default notifications notifs icon of application "PhoneValet"
end tell

Some of the sample code I looked at re-registers with every message sent, but so far that hasn’t been necessary for me, so I just ran the script above once and everything has worked. I also set up notification forwarding, on the computer where PhoneValet is installed, so that everyone on the network (that has Growl installed, of course) can see who’s calling. (Which I’ve greatly missed since LanOSD self-destructed.)

So, if you’re working on Greg’s hack, this should give you a bit of what you need to substitute Growl for LanOSD. Feel free to leave a comment if you need more help, and I’ll be writing more as I explore what Growl has to offer for home automation users.

Mike Evangelist’s expose of how a typical Steve Jobs keynote speech is put together should not be much of a surprise to most Apple observers.

Anyone who has watched one of these shows (and that’s what they are, little shows, with Steve as the sole performer) will have noticed that they are far from improvised; everything is planned in advance, every last detail.

Every last detail:

No detail was overlooked: for example, while rehearsing the iDVD demo, Steve found that the DVD player’s remote control didn’t work from where he wanted to stand on the stage. The crew had to make a special repeater system to make it work.

I’ve commented here before on how impressive it is that the contents of Steve’s keynotes remain as secret as they do. Sure, sometimes things slip out, but on the whole there’s always one or two big surprises.

Mike’s article shows just how many people are involved behind the scenes, not just on the stage during the show, but back at Apple HQ for weeks, even months, beforehand.

Which means that the Cupertino team must be pretty much done by now; all that’s left between now and next Tuesday will be final tweaks, little finishing touches. Whatever rumors you decide to believe (is it me, or are there fewer rumors around this time?), the actual announcements have already been decided upon.

The rumors I have seen have been particularly exciting ideas, such as the widescreen Intel-powered fast-booting iBook, but I’d like to sound a small note of caution. If such a machine doesn’t get announced next week, it’s not the end of the world. It wouldn’t even be bad news. Apple said they were aiming for Intel machines this year; all the stuff about them making unexpectedly rapid progress, and the possibility of new hardware being announced in January, is all just more rumors.

As long as we remember to treat rumors properly - with an appropriate pinch of salt - we won’t be disappointed by next week’s announcement, no matter what it is or how well it has been rehearsed.

Typical Pocket PC Phone Edition Today screen compared to the Treo 700w Today screen (Treo screen grabbed from Palm.com’s web site)

The eagerly anticipated Palm Treo 700w Pocket PC Phone Edition is available through Verizon Wireless.
Although there are other Phone Edition and Smartphone devices based on Windows Mobile 5, the great Treo form factor and unique Palm touches to the Windows Mobile interface will attract a lot of current Windows Mobile device users (and maybe even a few Palm OS users).

One Palm modification to the Windows Mobile 5 based Phone Edition is the Today Screen (the first screen you see when you turn on a Phone Edition device).
The screen cap on the top is from a typical Pocket PC Phone Edition device (Windows Mobile 5 based).
As you can see, there is not much there that differentiates it from a Pocket PC without phone capabilities.
The bottom screen cap is from Palm.com’s Treo 700w page describing their enhanced Today screen.
In addition to the smaller square screen (240×240 instead of the 240×320 or 480×640 pixels on most Phone Edition devices), you can see the phone-centric touches right away.

Palm Treo 700w Product Information Page

I hope a GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UTMS version becomes available soon so I can try a 700w myself (unless Verizon Wireless reads these sorts of blogs and is willing to loan me one now :-)

Got a Treo 700w? Let us know how you like it.

Related link: https://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/download.php

Everyone has certain apps that they diligently cover, and one of mine is NeoOffice. Since writing an overview of NeoOffice and announcing the release of NeoOffice 1.2 Alpha last month, I’m posting again to make sure you’re keeping up with the latest. If you haven’t noticed, this project continues to make solid improvements — a very good sign indeed. I don’t think we have to worry about this one dying anytime soon. (OSS does tend to do that from time to time.)

It’s an easy (but rather large) download with plenty of bug fixes since the alpha release, so go get it. If you have a slow connection, just set it up to download while you get some ZZZ and you’ll have something to look forward to in the morning.

I know from previous discussions that NeoOffice is a hard sell for some of you, but if you don’t have anything new to say, I’d still like to ask you to do something: point out one thing you love and one thing you hate about it. If everyone takes a moment to respond, it’ll be interesting to see what the cumulative stats end up being — and it will be good feedback for Patrick, it’s lead developer.

And BTW, did anyone else notice that the they dropped the trailing “/J” as of the 1.2 alpha release? No need to make that distinction anymore, I suppose.

As always, I love to hear about your thoughts on office productivity tools, so feel free to chime in with what you use to get your work done.

Related link: https://www.macnn.com/articles/06/01/04/appzapper.for.os.x.tiger/

One of the most beautiful aspects of OS X is the application install/uninstall process — for many apps, you simply open a disk image, drop the app in /Applications, and that’s it. Then when you want to uninstall, you just drag the app out of the /Applications folder and into the Trash…well, almost.

I say “almost,” because many apps leave behind artifacts such as caches, preferences, etc. You can find a lot of this stuff in ~/Library if you care to take a look. Sometimes the size of these settings and preferences can be substantial, but even if they’re not, I’d still consider them clutter. There are a few apps out there like AppZapper can help tidy things up by searching for and intelligently removing these relics, and while I admire the benefit offered by these clean up apps, I still have to say that I think they’re unnecessary, or at least they could be with minimal effort from Apple.

But it’s not usually a good thing to complain unless you have a better idea, so here goes:

One thing I’d love to see in Leopard, the next major rendition of OS X, is an option for developers to embed information into their applications that would facilitate a complete uninstall by the OS — yet keep all of this completely transparent to the user. At its simplest level, a little plist file embedded into app bundles could contain the locations of caches, preferences, etc., and then when apps are removed from the /Applications folder and dropped into the Trash, the OS would detect the move, parse the embedded plist containing the locations of the relics, and automatically take care of removing them. Perhaps in System Preferences there could be an option to automatically remove relics or prompt the user before cleaning up.

There could be a couple of security issues to consider, namely making sure that when things get automatically deleted that it only happens from “trusted” locations that are designed specifically to hold application artifacts. But that’s the way it is with anything; security is almost always a factor, and there are always risks and rewards to calculate.

In the analysis, though, the way I see it is that the additional burden placed on developers would be minimal, and the effort required from the folks in Cupertino would be minimal — yet the benefit offered to end users would be well worth the investment.

Seems kind of obvious doesn’t it?

So what do you think?

Quicksilver keeps crashing. There, it’s out in the open now.

Every so often I hit Command+Space to launch something, and nothing happens; I look up at my menu bar and find the Quicksilver icon has disappeared. The app I can’t live without just goes “foop” into thin air.

Every time this happens, I grumble and moan and have to use Spotlight to re-launch Quicksilver; and the simple act of invoking a Spotlight search makes me even grumpier.

It turns out I’m not the only one having this problem. A bunch of people have submitted crash reports to Quicksilver bugs forum, describing very similar circumstances.

Even with this minor inconvenience, I’m reluctant to stop using Quicksilver. But today, just out of curiosity, I downloaded Butler, which I haven’t played with for years. I must confess to being quite impressed; it appears to do almost everything I use Quicksilver for. So far, with a few hours of testing, the speed of searching seems a little hit-and-miss; sometimes Butler finds what I want straight away - faster than Quicksilver. But on other occasions, Butler displays the Spinning Pizza of Doom after I’ve typed a few characters.

Nonetheless, Butler looks like a worthy competitor to Quicksilver; if anyone’s done any more long-term tests of the two, I’d be interested to hear their opinions of them both.

And yeah, I know about LaunchBar.

Related link: https://corp.feedster.com/blog/

I mentioned before that Feedster was running a Feed of the Year countdown to honor some of the best (not necessarily the most popular) bloggers out there. Over the holiday we announced the winners:

Feed of the Year: Workbench
Second Place: Treehugger
Third Place: Double-Tongued Word-Wrestler

Roger Cadenhead of Workbench had this to say:

“I’m completely geeked — Feed of the Year is the first award I’ve
won in 10 years of publishing on the web. Ten long years of being
overlooked by the Webbys, Bloggies, Nobel and MacArthur Genius
Grant.

I’ve been blogging at Workbench for six years, and the experience
is ruining me for any other form of writing. I can sit at home in
my pajamas, a cone of Dorito’s crumbs fanning out across my
chest, and write for a worldwide audience that doesn’t have any
demands on the topics I’ll cover. No editors, no business plan,
and no clue what I’ll be reporting tomorrow.

———-

And while the media and bloggers often go on and on about blogging and politics…blogging and journalism…blogging and technology…they often forget to mention that there is a vast topical universe of blogging out there we should clue the world into.

I asked Doc Searls to comment on the importance of blogs:

Blogs — really good ones — aren’t finished work. They’re alive. They have pulse and personality. Like human beings, they converse. They involve themselves in the topics their writers care about. They look to move subjects forward, to have effects. They are expressions of utility rather than futility. They are read and pointed to because they are interesting and good for the world. Just like their authors.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Take a look at the winning sites, and why not also explore the other Top 28.

Related link: https://tuaw.com/2005/12/31/mac-idisks-now-with-1tb-month-bandwidth/

.Mac may be one of Apple’s red-haired stepchildren in some regard: it’s not fully featured, it’s not moved much in terms of features or design since it made the transition from iTools. That, however, may be changing, as TUAW is reporting that the bandwidth ceiling for a .Mac account is now 1TB. This leaves me asking questions like, “Is Apple prepping .Mac for the vodcast revolution? Podcasting storage? Blogging?”

If Apple is really preparing to relaunch .Mac at Macworld SF in less than 10 days, this could be the beginning of that process. Giving people more bandwidth for monthly downloads allows people to think, “Hmmm, what should I be storing on my iDisk?”

The original reporting site suggests, though, that this was a temporary thing:

Readers have noted that the figure has now disappeared from view, the .Mac features list still says 3GB and always has, this quick removal brings us to think that this was more than it first appeared

Whether this hints toward a media center computer from Apple (which I don’t necessarily buy just from this data tidbit), or toward an expanded .Mac with blogging, vlogging, podcasting and other tools at the users’ fingertips, I would certainly find that more plausible as an explanation.

More bandwidth…what’s that mean?