The worst thing about feeling ill is the lack of motivation. It’s not just that you’re incapable of doing anything constructive, you also tend to be completely uninterested in doing it.

In the middle of last week I caught a bug and ended up spending a day in bed. I took the usual list of things upstairs - paracetamol, water, a decent book, a laptop - and settled down to spend a day doing as little as possible.

I took the painkillers. I drank the water. I read almost all of the book. And on the laptop? It would be nice to be able to say that I managed a little work, or caught up on my bulging ‘toread’ folder, or dealt with some of the email backlog; but I did none of those things. No, I played games.

Partly because of my age, and partly because I’m just not very good at computer games generally, I often enjoy playing ‘retro’ games. Give me something that looks and sounds like the mid 1980s and I’m a happy man.

And where did I go on my hunt for entertainment? Why, Emacs of course.

Now I’ve encountered the Emacs psychiatrist before, and I knew about Emacs Tetris. But that didn’t stop me firing up Tetris once more, just to check it was still functioning as it should. After 30 minutes or so of mindless block-sorting, I was convinced that it was.

But there’s much more buried underneath the Tools -> Games menu in Aquamacs Emacs, my favorite ‘Aquafied’ fork of Emacs; Snake, Solitaire, Tower of Hanoi, even a dungeon-style text adventure. Really, enough to keep you busy for hours on a long flight, or even a day spent sneezing and coughing in bed.

What games do you play on your Mac when you can’t be bothered to do anything else?

Well, I almost made it yesterday, I promised two more posts for the day in my first blog of the day and I almost delivered. Alas, in the end, sleep won over and I just had to give in. Nevertheless, I did finally finish my third posting and here it is now for your viewing pleasure.

In this entry I will cover one of my favorite features of the Python programming language—its documentation tool pydoc.

pydoc is a tool that comes with Python that can be used for viewing and generating Python documentation. The main reason I love this feature is because it means that everywhere I go, I have easy access to Python’s documentation. Thus, I don’t need to carry heavy books, or download extra documentation, and best of all, its all accessible from the command line, so I can access documentation while programming without even switching applications. The pydoc documentation tool can even be accessed from within Python’s interactive interpreter. What this means is that if I need to use Python for a simple task like parsing files to make repetitive changes to the text, then I can do so by firing up the Python shell and typing out my program and if I can’t remember how to do something I just import pydoc and look it up in the documentation.

What I propose to do in this blog is just go over a few of my favorite features of Python’s built-in documentation tool. I’ll go over how to view and search documentation, how to use pydoc in the Python shell, how to view HTML documentation using a built-in web server, and how to generate HTML documentation for your own python files.

Why don’t we start with using pydoc from the command line. Let’s say that you’re programming in Python and you find you’ve forgotten how to quit a program. You remember that there is function in the sys module, but you can’t remember the name of the function (I know you can probably guess that its sys.exit(), but bear with me, it was late when I came up with this example). What do you do? Well, in this case you’re going to call the pydoc program from the command line, like so:

$ pydoc sys

Keep in mind that the dollar sign, ‘$’, is the command prompt and not part of what you’ll actually type into the Terminal. Once you’ve typed in the line above and pressed Return, you should see something that looks somewhat like a man page, and as such, it will act like a man page as well. So, since we are looking for a function, we can narrow down our search by pressing the forward slash, ‘/’ (just like in Vi, this allows you to do a text search), character and typing in the search term, in this case we will type in ‘FUNCTIONS’ (yes, case does matter, so make sure it’s in all caps), then press Return again to start the search. Subsequent searches for the same term can be performed by repeatedly pressing forward slash ‘/’ and Return. You can also use the arrow keys to navigate the documentation or just hit the space bar to scan through a page at a time, and to quit your pydoc session, just type the letter q at any time.

Well that pydoc command works great if your at a command prompt, but what do you do if you’re currently in the Python interactive shell and you need to look up something in the documentation? Well, you could always suspend your session with a Ctrl-z, follow the instructions above, and then enter back into the shell where you left off by typing in fg and Return. Another option would be to import the pydoc module directly into your current Python shell session and use the help command to find the documentation you need. Below is an example of how we might check the documentation for the sys module, like we did in the last paragraph, but this time during an interactive Python session.

>>> import pydoc
>>> import sys   # Import this in order to check its documentation
>>> pydoc.help(sys)

So, now we’ve accessed the pydoc tool from the command line and from Python’s own interactive shell. The only thing left to do is get our documentation into a nice HTML document.

If you’ll remember earlier, I mentioned that you can generate HTML documentation using pydoc. Below is just one example of how you can do this (by the way, the open command just launches whatever application is the default for dealing with the specified file. In my case, it would open the hello.html file in Safari):

$ pydoc -w hello > hello.html; open hello.html

The final feature of the pydoc tool that I want to show you is the web server feature. Basically, by calling pydoc with the -p option and passing to it an open port number, you will start a web server that will allow you to access all of the Python documentation on your system through a web browser, and by “all”, I mean both Python’s own documentation and documentation for your own files as well (assuming you’ve used docstrings correctly and you’ve added your file’s location to the PYTHONPATH environment variable). Below is the command that will start your pydoc web server on port 9999:

$ pydoc -p 9999

Once, you’ve started your pydoc web server, you can see all the documentation by loading the following url in to the web browser of your choosing:

https://localhost:9999/

So, that’s it for now. Those are all my little tips and tricks that I use on a regular basis. Once you get used to the having all the documentation you need right there at your fingertips you’ll find it hard to go back to other languages that aren’t quite as accommodating. You’ll also appreciate the ease with which you can document your own code just by adding a few lines to the beginning of each function, method, class, module, etc.

I look forward to talking to all of you again very soon…see you in my next post.

If you know of, or find, any other interesting uses for the pydoc tool that I haven’t covered here, make sure you leave a comment for the rest of us so we can get some use out of it as well. I know I’m always interested in learning a few new tricks.

We’ve been covering how to shoot movies and the best ways to compress them for the latest iPod. But what if you want to transfer content from a DVD you already own to the iPod?

There’s a nifty piece of open source software called HandBrake that lets you convert DVD content to MPEG-4. Here’s a tutorial page that explains the process.

HandBrake is available for both Mac OS X and Linux. It was originally developed for BeOS

Finally, you may have noticed that I’m back from the wilds. I’ve posted a few of the shots I captured while camping. If you like such things, here’s an image of a Blue Heron, a 14-point Tule Elk, and a funky Post Office. I’ll be posting more over the coming weeks.

As promised, I am back with my second blog post for the day. This one is on an Open Source visualization project called Graphviz that was developed by AT&T’s research lab. I found this project in a fit of rage as I was trying to draw a graphical representation of a decision tree for an article I just finished this weekend and I’ve got to tell you, I’m in love with it so far.

I’m not necessarily the best at using drawing tools for the computer. Programs such as Visio and OmniGraffle, though quite useful, frustrate me to no end. Thus, I tend to get a little bit aggravated at these products from time to time and this week was no different (luckily my apartment’s walls are insulated well enough, otherwise, my neighbors would have assumed my vocabulary was made up of only four letter words).

This past week I was using OmniGraffle (which I actually think is a really great program) and it was taking way too long to draw and make changes to a graph of a decision tree for my article. I had spent hours with the application creating my diagram and was only about halfway complete when I reached the limit of how many objects I can place in the diagram (just in case you don’t know, the trial version of OmniGraffle has this limit, not the full-fledged version). Since, I’m somewhat allergic to paying for software and I wanted a much easier way to complete my diagram, I decided to take a look for something else I could use, and low and behold, I found it. The holy grail of graphing software for programmers—Graphviz. This program is beautiful. It allows me to create graphical diagrams the way the good lord intended for me to—by scripting them, of course.

Seriously though, Graphviz is a really nice tool for creating diagrams that combines an easy to use textual description language with a set of graphical visualization algorithms. It can export these diagrams to a plethora of different formats (SVG, JPEG, and PDF to name just a few). While I’ve not had a lot of experience with it, I can definitely tell you that it will be my tool of choice for creating simple diagrams for class, work, articles, you name it. I was able to learn enough of the dot language (dot is the simple text language that you’ll use to describe your diagram) in about an hour to complete my diagram. Total time for learning and creating my diagram’s description—1.5 hours. Total time to get halfway to completion with OmniGraffle— approximately 2 hours.

Now, while I’m gushing over this new tool, I don’t want you to think this is a silver bullet or anything. Like I said earlier, I’ve had very little experience with Graphviz, but from what I’ve seen, the more complex the graph gets, the better off you may be using a tool more like Visio or OmniGraffle. Nevertheless, for most of the jobs I need to do, this tool will do me just fine, and as I stated before, its an absolute breeze to use. And, even though this tool was originally created with other operating systems in mind, it does have an OS X port which looks really nice and it was done so well as to have actually won an Apple design award in 2004.

Just to give you an idea of how easy it is to produce a decent looking diagram, I’ve included below the dot file that I created to generate my decision tree diagram for my article below:

digraph dtree {
    node [fontsize=10, shape=box];
    age [label=Age, style=filled, fillcolor=grey89];
    age1 [label="< 18n---------n2-will buy/1-won't buy", shape=plaintext];
    age2 [label="18 - 35n---------n0-will buy/4-won't buy", shape=plaintext];
    age3 [label="36 - 55n---------n5-will buy/3-won't buy", shape=plaintext];
    age4 [label="> 55n---------n5-will buy/0-won't buy", shape=plaintext];
    income [label=Income, style=filled, fillcolor=grey89, pos="111,170"];
    high [label="highn---------n0-will buy/1-won't buy", shape=plaintext];
    low [label="lown---------n2-will buy/0-won't buy", shape=plaintext];
    no1 [label="Won't Buy", style=filled, fillcolor=burlywood];
    yes1 [label="Will Buy", style=filled, fillcolor=burlywood];
    no2 [label="Won't Buy", style=filled, fillcolor=burlywood];
    marital_status [label="Marital Status", style=filled, fillcolor=grey89];
    yes2 [label="Will Buy", style=filled, fillcolor=burlywood];
    married [label="Marriedn----------n0-will buy/3-won't buy",
             shape=plaintext];
    single [label="Singlen----------n5-will buy/0-won't buy",
            shape=plaintext];
    no3 [label="Won't Buy", style=filled, fillcolor=burlywood];
    yes3 [label="Will Buy", style=filled, fillcolor=burlywood];
    age -> age1 [arrowhead=none];
    age -> age2 [arrowhead=none];
    age -> age3 [arrowhead=none];
    age -> age4 [arrowhead=none];
    age1 -> income [arrowhead=none];
    income -> high [arrowhead=none];
    income -> low [arrowhead=none];
    high -> no1 [arrowhead=none];
    low -> yes1 [arrowhead=none];
    age2 -> no2 [arrowhead=none];
    age3 -> marital_status [arrowhead=none];
    age4 -> yes2 [arrowhead=none];
    marital_status -> married [arrowhead=none];
    marital_status -> single [arrowhead=none];
    married -> no3 [arrowhead=none];
    single -> yes3 [arrowhead=none];
}

Now, keep in mind that the code listed above was not written to be beautiful, or reused, or for that reason, even legible. I wrote it after only studying the documentation on the dot language and graphviz for about an hour, not to mention that I just wanted to get a usable diagram up and running as soon as possible. That said, I do think it is a good example of just how easy it is to use Graphviz to produce rather good looking diagrams. Below is the product of the script above after being ran through the Graphviz visualization tool and exported to a JPEG.

So, that’s Graphviz. My recommendation is that you go out and download it and give it try. There’s a very good chance that it may save you some time on your next project or research paper. However, before I sign off on this article there is one more thing that I want to share with you all. If you are an Emacs user (as I am) then it might be nice to have a dot-mode that allows you to edit *.dot files in Emacs with syntax highlighting and all. You can find the emacs lisp file here. Below is the line you need to add to your .bashrc file (if your using bash as your shell) if you want to be able to open *.dot files from Emacs.

(load-file "PATH_TO_FILE/graphviz-dot-mode.el")

That’s it, go out and download everything and give it a try. If nothing more, it is rather fun to play around with. In the meantime I’ll play around with Graphviz myself and see if I can’t put together a more in depth article for MacDevCenter.

Stick around for my next posting on Python documentation.

I have to start this post off with a quick apology for already breaking the blogging schedule that I had setup in my first posting. In it, I stated that I was going to try (notice the word “try”—rule No. 1: always leave yourself a way out) to maintain a weekly posting schedule. Well, here it is only my second blog posting and I am already falling behind schedule. I do have good reasons for this though. I haven’t been slacking off these past two weeks, but rather I have been putting the finishing touches on a brand new article for O’Reilly’s ONLamp website, which, by the way, I’m hoping you all will come and checkout as soon as it goes live. (Shameless plug alert!!!) The article is the first in what I hope will be a very entertaining and informative series on artificial intelligence programming with the Python programming language. In the first article in this series, I go over decision trees, a topic of machine learning in which the program learns—through a set of example data—how to classify records in a dataset. So, as soon as the article goes live, I’ll blog it here and give you all a chance to run on over to the ONLamp site and read up on decision trees.

So that’s what I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks, but what about today? Well, in order to make it up to each of you for my most egregious disregard for schedule keeping, I thought I might try to make several posts today. First, there is this sad attempt at attrition in which I’ll also cover quickly a new tool that all you OS X / Unix lovers can use to make your DarwinPorts experience a little nicer. Following this, I have two posts that I have been working on for the past couple of days, that I plan on sharing with you all today. The first of these will go over a tool that I recently found while working on the aforementioned decision trees article. It’s called graphviz and it makes creating diagrams as easy as scripting. The second article is going to go over one of my favorite features of the Python programming language—its documentation. We’ll cover pydoc and docstrings and all of that fun stuff. It’ll be great, so make sure that you tune back in in the next few hours for each of these postings, or better yet, why not just subscribe to my RSS feed.

Now that I’ve gotten all of the apologies and previews out of the way, why don’t I go ahead and get to the point of this post. In my last post I quickly pointed out two very important applications that you’ll no doubt be using from time to time if you make a habit of following my blog closely, namely, the Fink and DarwinPorts projects. (By the way, if you missed my last post, and you’re interested in using either of these tools, make sure you check it out. It has links to two great MacDevCenter articles that will get you started in both of these programs.)

If you took the advice in my previous post and installed both of these programs, then one thing you’ll notice is the lack of a GUI for the DarwinPorts program. Fink comes with its own GUI, FinkCommander, however, DarwinPorts (at least to the best of my knowledge) comes with nothing more than a command line interface. Now, while I’m not dissing the beauty and efficacy of a CLI interface (far from it, I’m writing this post in Emacs from the Terminal application as we speak), I do realize that not everyone has the same appreciation for it that I do. So, I did a bit of digging around the ol’ interweb and came across a nicely designed Tcl/Tk based GUI entitled PortAuthority for the DarwinPorts application.

Installation of PortAuthority couldn’t be easier (well, I guess if somebody else installed it for you, or if supermodels were installing it…ok, tangent, let’s get back to PortAuthority, shall we?), just go to the PortAuthority website and click on the download link on the right side of the page. This will transport you to the project’s page on sourceforge. From there just download the zip’ed file and unzip it onto your computer. Inside the zip’ed file is a single binary that you can drag-and-drop into your Applications folder, and that’s it, you’re all done. Double click the application and get started with some downloads. If you’re using OS X 10.4 (Tiger) then this application should “just work”, since this edition of OS X comes with a fairly significant subset of Tcl/Tk for Aqua. If you happen to be on an earlier version however, you can download Tcl/Tk for Aqua here. Its a fairly easy install as well, since binary distributions of each with a familiar installer package can be found for, I believe, all of the former OS X renditions.

Ok, so I hope I’ve redeemed myself in each of your eyes. I have apologized and I’ve even come bearing gifts (well, just one gift really, but “I come bearing gift” doesn’t have the same ring to it). I hope you’ll all download the PortAuthority program and give it a try. Its quite nice, and best of all its Open Source. So, not only is it free to use, but you can also take a look at the code if you’re interested in learning any Tcl/Tk scripting, which is not a bad idea since this is an extremely portable, easy to use, and ubiquitous scripting/gui combination. So, enjoy the application, and I hope you’ll all come back in a few hours for my next posting on Graphviz.

See you then!!

In Is Mac gaming still a punchline? I mentioned that ‘there is some hope to be found in open-source games.’ Today I’m going to point out some of those bright spots. This isn’t an exhaustive list of open source games that work on Mac, just the ones I’ve had a chance to play and enjoy. I’d invite you to list other favorites in the comments.

A caveat: like many open-source projects, these are not as polished as would be commercial releases. On the other hand, if you have the programming stuff, you can make changes yourself. Also, if you’re not comfortable in X11 or on the command-line, you might want to stick to the for-money world for now.

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Freeciv

Appropriately enough given the inspiration for my earlier post, the first game is Freeciv, a Civilization clone that has an old-school feel to it. If you’ve played Civ, you’ll be right at home in Freeciv. There’s also an active developer and player community, always a plus.

The project didn’t try to replicate an old Civ experience: they’ve actually one-upped the original by including multiplayer and alternate rulesets.

Warning: Freeciv is just as addictive as its inspiration. Do not start the game if you have anything else you need to get done over the next few days.

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Scorched 3D

Video games with artillery pieces lobbing things at each other have been around since forever. Over the years, the concept has moved from arcade to console to home computers and back again. Entertaining examples on Mac: DomeWars and Treads of Fury. The long-time popular favorite, however, was the old DOS game Scorched Earth.

Nowadays we have the thoroughly awesome Scorched 3D, where multiple players (bots or online opponents) fire tons of different kinds of weapons at each other over destructible island landscapes, gorgeously rendered in OpenGL. If you’re going to have a bunch of destruction, it should be easy on the eyes. ;)

One tip: if you run it in windowed mode (as opposed to fullscreen), choose the ‘Invert mouse y axis’ option to get the cursor moving correctly.

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TripleA

Back to the strategy genre and another title with board-game roots. Axis & Allies recreated WWII from an abstracted grand-strategy perspective, a casual family game rather than a hardcore simulation. (An official computer version was released a while back.)

TripleA is not technically a clone of Axis & Allies, but more of a ‘gaming framework’ that you can use to create all kinds of different game experiences, simple or complex. One of those is a re-creation of A&A. It is Java and fairly polished, but there are some glitches and strange behavior.

You can play locally, over a network, or (and I love the fact they added this) via play-by-email. They are working on an AI, but it was not enabled in the last stable version I tried (0.6.0.1).

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Vega Strike

Do not download Vega Strike. Do not install and configure it. Whatever you do, do not launch it and begin playing. Do not buy and sell resources. Do not get involved in epic space battles. Do not warp from system to system, trying to avoid (or get involved in) the space-opera backdrop of conflict among a dozen different groups. Do not marvel at the gorgeous 3D graphics.

If you fail to follow my advice, you will be sucked into an endless cycle of enjoyment, from which there can be no escape.

Did I mention there’s a Star Trek mod under development? Don’t download that either.

Think of the children. Or, if you’re like me, and the ‘child’ is 18 and taking care of himself, think of the dog, who will be standing next to you whining pitifully for a walk. ;)

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Given the popularity of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre in the commercial gaming industry, it’s no surprise there’s a lot of development happening in this arena (so to speak). I’ll just highlight three here, which are in various stages of development and quality.

Nexuiz

Networked deathmatch is what the developers are going for with Nexuiz, bringing it back to basics. They’re also intent on not requiring a high-end gaming rig to play, so that’s a definite high point. Checking out the screenshots, you can see they haven’t skimped on graphics quality.

Cube

Cube is intriguing as much for its engine as for its game play. From the website: ‘Cube is a landscape-style engine that pretends to be an indoor FPS engine, which combines very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail on most machines. Uses OpenGL & SDL.’ What that means for you is that they’re going for a good-looking environment to run around in, shooting stuff. This isn’t the latest Doom3-based crazy-graphical experience, but it’s fun for a distraction.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is based in the Return to Castle Wolfenstein world. This isn’t an open-source title from what I can tell, but it is free and there’s an active 3rd-party developer community.

It’s a little confusing the various related websites and whatnot, but basically from the official site’s Flash interface, you can get info about Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory which is described as ‘a free stand-alone, downloadable multiplayer game in which players wage war as Axis or Allies in team-based combat.’ W:ET is developed by Splash Damage. There’s also the players Resource site.

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FlightGear

Finally, there’s a game in a genre that has a special place in my heart: FlightGear, a flight sim. This is rough around the edges, and you’ll be challenged getting used to everything, but there is great potential here. Considering how much commercial alternatives cost, slack can be given with relative ease. ;)

Do you have your own favorites? Is open-source worth the trouble? What’s your take?

Related link: https://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/

I don’t know about you, but after having Tiger for many months now, I can say without a doubt that Spotlight is my favorite feature. It changes the way I do my work, and a while back, I wrote an article on how it can really shave some time off of your daily grind. My dependence on it has continued to grow steadily since then, and I’ve especially come to appreciate the productivity I gain by using it to look up bookmarks. It’s indispensable during research, and for that matter, I don’t even bother hierarchically organizing bookmarks anymore.

Like many of you, however, I often switch back and forth between several different browsers — mostly Safari, Firefox, and Camino — and along the way, I’ve noticed that Firefox (as of 1.5 beta 2) still isn’t making its bookmarks searchable. Of course, can use a workaround, but I find this rather annoying and disappointing, so I just started working on Bug 293323 to get Spotlight integrated into Firefox. Hopefully it’ll come to closure soon.

And since we’re talking about bookmarks, it looks like .Mac makes a pretty good sidekick to Spotlight. I tote my PowerBook around everywhere I go, so I don’t experience many of the .Mac frustrations that I so often hear about, but as I understand it, the iDisk is continuing to be a real crowd pleaser. Safari can automatically sync bookmarks with .Mac, and there’s a Firefox plugin that can export them to the iDisk for you, but unfortunately, Camino is still lagging behind a bit. It looks like the best way to work out Camino’s shortcoming (for now) is to export your bookmarks as a webpage via the Edit menu and manually save them to the iDisk. Heck, this is an easy one to knock out, so I figured I’d go ahead and crank on it, Bug 228123, as well. I’d like to see Camino continue to fight the good fight. And besides, you gotta do your civic duties, and I’d rather lay down code than pick up cans on the side of the road any old day of the week. But that’s just me.

Is Spotlight and/or .Mac changing the way you work? What apps do you use that could make better use of them?

Related link: https://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/79223/creative-warns-of-christmas-mp3-player-shortag…

Normally, I try to post about topics that have contemplative intellectual value of some form or another, rather than just ramble out personal commentary. This time I couldn’t resist being a commentator, although there is definitely a thing or two that must be pondered here.

You know those experiences where every once in a while you run across a webpage and you just think to yourself, “Is this for real?” Well, I just had one of those, and here it is. It’s a news blurb where the CEO of Creative makes some pretty pathetic excuses about how they’re going to run short on their 1GB flash MP3 players around the holidays — and it’s all because Apple is hogging up the market.

Umm. Does anybody see anything wrong with that logic? Let’s see if we can make it a bit clearer in case you missed it the first time through:

if Creative can’t stay competitive then
   Whine, complain, and blame it on Apple // ?!?

Oh, and I guess it’s worth mentioning that this activity took place amid a conference where Creative announced a bigger than expected loss. What message exactly does this send to the shareholders? To just go ahead and invest in Apple (who will apparently be doing quite well over the holidays) until Creative can get its act together? If I owned any Creative stock (Nasdaq: CREAF), I’d be pretty ticked right now.

Here’s a couple of interesting quotes from the story. They’re from the Chairman and CEO of Creative himself, Sim Wong Hoo:

Industry demand for high-capacity flash memory currently outstrips supply and this will impact availability of our 1GB flash MP3 players for the holiday quarter…The shortage of flash memory … is primarily a result of a special deal that Apple has secured from a key supplier

Excuse me? Isn’t a “special deal” the kind of leverage that makes or breaks a company when it comes to supply and demand? Apparently, what this means is that people who would otherwise (possibly) be buying Creative MP3 players won’t be able to, because they just won’t be available. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see their players going on eBay for hundreds of dollars because of a shortage spawned by a “special deal.” Rather, they’re just going to have a particular part of their body handed to them and Apple is going to continue scoring big. Here’s the way I see it:

if Creative has less players in the store then
   Apple probably makes more money // fine by me

Would Steve get up on stage and whine like that, or would he make things happen? Or at least cleverly divert our attention by pushing another product for a while instead? Probably neither of those things: he would have used his uncanny ability to deliver and would have secured a “special deal” to make sure that Apple didn’t get into this predicament. Oh, wait a minute — he actually did that already! Whew, and to think I was getting concerned for a moment.

Thus saith Sim Wong Hoo once more:
…a number of competitors in the MP3 space have been forced out of the market because of the competitive pressure that Apple is applying.

Hmm. That’s deep. I could spend the next hour or two trying to unravel the mystery behind it, but I’d rather hear from you.

Am I being a bit harsh here, or should a chairman be derailed for making public comments like that?

Related link: https://money.cnn.com/2005/10/20/technology/hp.reut/index.htm

The Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD war is spilling over into nearby fields, including Java, thanks to the fact that Blu-Ray uses Java to provide its interactive features. Consider the following quote from an article from EE Times, in which HP’s general manager for personal storage says HP compared Blu-Ray Java to the Microsoft-created iHD interactive standard in the HD-DVD and “found Java in Blu-ray was much more mature and robust with complete test suites. In contrast, we found many holes in Microsoft’s proprietary iHD.”

Then tell me how it is that last week, HP called for Blu-Ray to adopt iHD?

If you want to stop here for a quick recap, a good source for information on the Java spec for Blu-Ray, BD-J, is the JavaOne 2005 session “Java Technology Goes to the Movies: Java Technology in Next-
Generation Optical Disc Formats”, which is available from JavaOne Online. BD-J is a J2ME Personal Basis Profile with API’s borrowed from interactive television (DVB with the broadcast stuff taken out), HAVI (for a consumer electronics oriented GUI), plus the previously-moribund JavaTV API (for the concept of an Xlet) and Java Media Framework (for reasons unstated… perhaps pity). The resulting platform claims to offer deep programmability, including layering of graphics, video, and background, synchronization with video (either in a tight frame-accurate style or a looser callback scheme), and more.

Details on iHD have been somewhat harder to come by. I did find a general description in the article HP requests feature additions to Blu-ray disc technology, in which Microsoft’s director of technology strategy for Windows Digital Media says the idea behind iHD is to “use Web-like tools such as XML, and that would make it very easy for a creative person that did not need to be a software programmer, to be able to create interactivity menus and applications for optical media,” adding “the vast majority of studios prefer iHD over BDJ, because it’s easier to author, you can have your creative people involved, it’s cheaper, [and] it’s got all these benefits.”

OK, seriously, we’re still comparing markup and executable languages? This is like saying that HTML is better than C because it’s easier.

Oh, I know, context: easier for the content developer. No kidding. As the JavaOne session says: “Most content will probably be written with high-level tools” and that “opportunities exist in tool building”. Clearly, the expectation is that simple markup environments can and will be written on top of BD-J, quite possibly including iHD, but the fact that the standard is the executable allows these environments to compete, and doesn’t close the door on functionality advancements. The interactivity can get better as developers discover new ways to exploit BD-J. Plus, nobody’s writing “bonus” games for the kids with a markup language, at least not one that will be interesting for more than two minutes.

The big picture is that this remains a consumer electronics versus PC’s battle and the consumer electronics side is winning. Forrester says Blu-Ray will win, and Warner Bros adopted Blu-Ray and joined its board last week. Blu-ray certainly has immense advantages, not the least of which is the fact that it will be on the PlayStation 3, set to launch early next year. The PS3 makes the scenario more interesting by including internet connectivity as standard equipment — internet connectivity is part of the BD-J spec, and if Sony’s implementation chooses to implement it, then there are tremendous opportunities for fundamentally new kinds of content, with material available and updated even after the disc is stamped and sold, to say nothing of e-commerce plays (every movie can have its own online store, accessed from the disc).

By the way, if you’ve heard this from me before, it’s because I was advocating using Java as a home theater technology a few O’Reilly Conferences ago, in a session called Why Mac Users Hate Java.

One thing that bugs me is that I haven’t found how to get started with BD-J. Consumer electronics devices aren’t the most open thing in the world to begin with, so maybe it’s not surprising that you can’t just get an SDK from www.blu-ray.com and start coding with your J2ME environment of choice, emulating the player until real hardware and burners are generally available. It’s possible this is a pay-to-play scenario, to keep the platform limited to the expected players (movie studios and other content developers); I simply don’t know. Still, it would be tremendously interesting to see how far you could take Blu-ray as a general-purpose J2ME application delivery environment, something that some talkbacks to one of my java.net blogs called for.

By the way, would anyone be interested in a series of blogs in which I try to get the needed tools and develop BD-J software?

The irony of today’s Aspyr release date announcements is pretty apparent. What was announced? Civilization III: Complete for Macintosh will be released in December, while the highly anticipated Civilization IV is coming in ‘early 2006′. I know this thanks to a press release on MacNN, not (at least as of this writing) due to any notification on the Aspyr website.

Why is this ironic? Well, mostly because Windows-using friends of mine got their copies of Civ IV today.

Now, there’s nothing new about the sad state of Mac gaming. It has been a punchline for a long time now, and one of the biggest talking points Windows users love to throw in our faces (also one-button mice, but never mind that). Mac gaming, to use the technical industry insider term, bites.

Looking at the What’s New In Mac page for Aspyr.com, the five featured ‘new’ games at the top of the page are (with their accompanying real release dates in the rest of the computing world, according to gamespot.com):

* The Sims 2 (2004)
* Stubbs the Zombie (2005)
* Sim City 4 (2003)
* Doom 3 (2004)
* Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 (2004)

Stubbs is only out for Xbox at the moment, so there’s an actual new one. Oh, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006 was released last month, by the way.

Not to pick on Aspyr too much, but again, nothing new here. It is saddening for someone who remembers the heady days of Marathon, the original SimCity… heck, The Ancient Art of War was the very first Mac program I ever used back in 1985. Saddening, but not news.

Nowadays, I’m probably more likely to pick up a Playstation 2 controller if I want to play a ‘modern’ game. It’s just pragmatism, really, after years of trotting out the old ‘At least we have the big games, even if they are 6 months late!’ argument. Mac gaming might have the quality games (although even that is arguable), but quantity-wise, there is no comparison.

There is some hope to be found in open-source games, but not for the latest greatest. And of course there are individual titles here and there that are joyfully Mac-only, but not like the envy-inducing Marathon days. (A side note, which would you rather have had released this year: a Doom movie, or a Marathon movie? Well, there’s always Halo. ;)

Sure, we could make the point that the lack of games means we can be way more productive sans distraction, but what do y’all think? Can Mac gaming be resurrected? Is it really that big of a deal? Isn’t gaming a barometer for the health of a computing platform?

What’s your take? Sticking with Sim City 4? Or does the Windows gaming aisle call you with its siren song?

Seems like there is a buzz in the air these days about the demise of Java. Two recent examples include Marc Andreessen’s comments on how Java has acquired all the issues that its predecessors have and how PHP will take the lead away from Java in the not so distant future and Bruce Tate’s recent OnJava article on specific places where Java is losing ground to other languages.

So is Java on the way out ? I hope not, because I believe that fundamentally Java is a great language, but Java does have some real problems. I think the root cause of most of the problems is Java’s enormous scope and complexity.

A couple of months ago, after reading all sorts of articles on Ruby and Ruby on Rails, I decided that I would try them out. My goal was not to create some epic program, just to get something working that gave me an idea of what Ruby was all about. I started by downloading and installing Ruby (not realizing that it was included in OS X) and some libraries, then I downloaded and installed Ruby on Rails, then I found an article at OnLamp.com and used it to create my first Ruby on Rails application. Total time from the first download to the program working, including setting up the database, was somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half. Not too bad, from my point of view that is just about the right amount of time a developer should be willing to dedicate to going from no knowledge to having a simple working demo. The same thing in PHP might not have been as easy to code, but the setup would have only 10-15 minutes, giving me more than an hour to code up an example

How long would that whole process take in Java? Just think of all the steps involved: downloading and installing the JDK, figuring out to use Tomcat (or some other servlet engine), installing Tomcat, getting the JDBC driver, setting up the JDBC driver, deciding how to do the database queries (either through your own code or with Hibernate or some other package) — then assuming I didn’t go off shaving yacks, I would finally be ready to sit down and write code.

Think about this: Java is so complex that new OS X versions come out months after the Windows and Solaris versions and needs to be compiled and optimized by Apple, not Sun.

What’s worse for all this complexity, we don’t even get :

• a basic scripting language
• a built in, simple web server
• a built in, simple servlet container
• a built in build tool
• …

Sure all of these things exist in the greater Java community (Groovy, Jigsaw, Tomcat and Ant respectively, for example) but since a large amount of Java’s installed base is developing web apps, why does Sun keep adding marginally useful Swing widgets instead of trying to include things that developers might actually use ?

What does Java need to do to get it’s act together ?

Related link: https://www.flickr.com/do/more

I’ve been a .Mac member since the iTools days, when space was free and email was plentiful. At the time, it was a great service that interoperated well with all Macs, and gave Mac users a chance to store their photos in striking galleries, build cool webpages and have a neat, short email address.

But then came Flickr, which took care of all my hosting needs, with more space than I could shake a stick, or my Canon 10D, at. For a quarter of the price. Now, I can’t make pretty webpages, and I can’t mount my flickr storage on my desktop, nor can I get email, but wow, what an improvement over the .Mac photo gallery. With Fraser Speirs’ FlickrExport, I sure can’t see a difference in the interoperation of the .Mac service versus the Flickr service.

Now, Flickr’s doing things that even iPhoto can’t do, allowing you to make DVD slideshows without a DVD drive, turn your photos into (expensive) stamps or turn Target into a 1 hour photo place for your prints. What’s best about the whole thing is that flickr has free accounts with full access to all these features. And $25 buys you twice the space for photos than a .Mac account, at a quarter the price. {Note after the fact: $25 buys you 24GB of photo uploads per year, with an unlimited amount of storage. Meaning you can literally keep adding 24GB of photos a year to your flickr account. Try doing that with .Mac!}

The problem here is that with the exception of data-syncing, .Mac is a the same service it was in the late 1990s, and that’s concerning. If I wasn’t so dependent on my mac.com email address, I might well be looking elsewhere for email services and relying on flickr for the rest of what I use .Mac for. How can .Mac improve as Flickr has in order to keep your business?

Flickr or .Mac?

Related link: https://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/kluyt_qa.html

Jan Heiss interviewed Onno Kluyt, senior director and chair of the JCP on Sun’s site in an article titled Ensuring Speed and Openness at the Java Community Process. I was at EuroOSCON at the time enjoying Onno’s home country and have only now gotten a chance to read the interview carefully.

Onno begins by addressing what he considers to be the misconception that JCP standardization is slow. He says that from February 2000 until today the JCP has delivered three versions of J2EE with a fourth expected by the first half of next year. Onno counters “In that same period Microsoft still has to get around to delivering Longhorn.”

I’m baffled.

Why is that a counter argument to the speed or lack thereof of the JCP. He could equally have said “In that same period Apple has delivered five versions of Mac OS X and four versions of Mac OS X server.” But that would be no more relevant. J2EE is not an operating system. He could just as well have said “In that same period GM has delivered five lines of cars” or “the price of gas has doubled”. None of these address whether or not the JCP is slow.

Further, the fact that there are regular releases of J2SE and J2EE is not really the complaint with the speed of the JCP. The complaint is how long it takes features to make it into a release. Onno answers this with the statistic that “In the first three years of the JCP’s existence, JSRs took 100 to 150 days longer to complete than JSRs that were started in the last three years.” That’s a wide range 100 to 150 days - and what is the average time to completion now?

I’m not saying Onno’s job is easy. There are a lot of JSRs that are never completed and there are JSRs which are mired in politics. I just don’t think that this addresses the issue of standardization being slow. The traditional complaint is that we build a JSR before we have working code. We don’t often take something that’s working and build a spec around it. Imagine what we’d have if Spring or Hibernate had to go through the JCP before being released.

Onno then addresses sources of FUD around the JCP. His answer concludes, “When a company outside the Java ecology tries to confuse its audience about Java technology and the JCP, that is expected. But for companies that benefit from this ecology, it’s disappointing when they only manage to find negativity.” I’d love to know who he’s calling out here.

At JavaOne 2004 there was a panel on the JCP where very serious issues were raised. I give Sun a lot of credit for hosting this discussion at their developer conference, but it was clear that individual members, corporate members, and non-members all had concerns with the JCP. I thought it was healthy for the community that these were raised in a public forum and have been heartened that many of them were addressed. There may be some companies that fall into the “negativity” category, but I think most members are more interested in improving the entity to which they belong.

Slow or no?

There are two welcome changes for 5th generation iPod (nano and video) owners.
(1) nano and video iPods show a blue dot next to podcast “artists” with unplayed podcasts.
(2) Podcast is a top level category under Music (although it is still listed inside of Genre too).

Gotta give credit where credit is due.
I noticed change number 2 after the last couple of updates for Tiger and the iPod.
But, I did not notice the blue dots at all.
I read about it on
The Unofficial Apple Weblog: 5G iPod treats Podcasts like iTunes

Any other as-yet little known iPod UI tips and tricks for 5th generation iPods?

David Weinberger’s Point. Shoot. Kiss it goodbye is a wonderful essay on the fundamental problem of digital photography.

Digicams make everything so quick, so easy, that we all go a little crazy. We take hundreds, thousands of snaps and actually look at, or make use of, a tiny fraction of them. We’re filling hard disks with gigabytes of pictures, and we have no idea of what’s there and whether it deserves to stay. If you could find all the bad pictures, all the useless ones that you’re never going to use again, wouldn’t it be nice to dump them and free up some space?

Sure, some people are organised enough, and have the spare time to devote to keeping their photo collections under control. You can get hold of apps and plugins like Keyword Assistant which makes adding tags a breeze, but that still requires you to devote the time to sit down and do the tagging.

I believe there’s plenty of people - myself included - who are too lazy or too busy to sit down for hours at a time, tagging or otherwise organizing their photo collection, no matter what software they use to do it. We need something that fits in with the way we work.

So here’s my idea. Let’s call it Tagnag.

It’s an app, or a utility, or an iPhoto plugin. It works by interrupting you at a time interval you set in the prefs - every five minutes, every two hours, once a week, whatever - and showing you a photo from your archive. Under the photo is a blank text field and a line of instructions saying: “This photo has no tags. Please enter some now; or hit Command+Delete to remove the photo from your archive.”

All the user has to do is bang in some tags (names, places, anything meaningful to them) and hit Enter, and the Tagnag window disappears, making changes to your iPhoto/iView Multimedia/A.N. Other Photo Manager App database in the background. You’re free to carry on with your work.

OK so it will take a while to go through a collection of thousands of photos, but the idea is that this approach is flexible and fits in with your other tasks, in a manner that suits you. If you find yourself sitting in an airport with nothing constructive to do, you’d be able to engage Tagnag’s “Turbo” mode and zip through 50 or more photos one after the other.

Did somebody say Lazyweb?

So, there are new PowerBooks and new dual-core PowerMacs. Nice.

But I don’t think I’d buy one right now.

OK, sure, the politically correct thing to say is that “if you need a computer now, go get one”, “all products are vapor until they ship”, etc. But given the Intel transition, is that really a good idea?

The key is probably: how soon will it be until new stuff that you want won’t run on your PowerPC Mac? Here’s how I’m teasing out this logic: at WWDC 2005, we were promised a look at Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) at WWDC 2006, which is next Spring or Summer. There’s usually a lag between unveiling an OS to developers and shipping it, so the developers can learn and use the new features. Add 6-12 months to the Leopard preview and we probably don’t expect Leopard until, what, late 2006 or (more likely) sometime in 2007. Intel Macs are supposed to ship in mid 2006, so clearly some future version of Tiger will support them, as will Leopard.

Apple said with the release of Tiger that the timeframe between major OS releases would slow down, so when do we expect to see Leopard’s successor? If Tiger shipped in 2004 and Leopard is in 2007, then maybe Mac OS X 10.6 ships around 2010 or so. That’s four years after the Intel switch.

And therein is the big question: will the PowerPC’s be sufficiently old by that point to justify not supporting them in OS X 10.6? There’s a big cost to having dual-platform code: everything has to be compiled for and tested on two different architectures. At an Apple BoF at JavaOne 2005, the Apple guys said they were a little concerned about how they’d now need to support six Java runtimes: Java 1.3.1, 1.4.2 and 5.0 for PowerPC, and 1.4.2, and two different HotSpot VM’s for 5.0 on Intel. Oh, and Mustang (Java 6.0) ships in Summer 2006, so add two more, one each for PowerPC and Intel. Multiply this line of thinking across all the major libraries and frameworks — Quartz, OpenGL, QuickTime, Core *, Cocoa, Carbon, AppKit, etc. — and supporting those four-year-old boxes may start to look like something of a luxury.

So, I suspect that Leopard is the end of the line for PowerPC, and that 10.6 will be Intel-only. That means you are buying into a four-year dead-end on PowerPC. Is that OK? A lot of professionals and business types figure that computers have a three- to four-year expectancy of usefulness, so maybe that’s OK. In the home realm, I think people are more careful with their money and expect their computers to last longer (even if they do upgrade this frequently, I’m not sure people really realize that they do).

My brother asked me recently if he should upgrade his ancient iBook now. Knowing the terrible performance of the Apple laptop line — notice that the new PowerBooks didn’t get any faster in the latest rev — I said he’d be much better off toughing it out until the laptops go Intel. The crazy fast desktops may be a different story, but I still think you have to admit to yourself that you’re buying four years of Mac, and amortize appropriately.

This is where you flame me for telling people that they shouldn’t buy Macs now.

Related link: https://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/10/10/how-to-podcast.html

In
How to Record a Podcast Interview, Glenn Fleishman shows you some nifty tricks for recording your audio, especially if you want to capture phone interviews for syndication. His toolkit includes Soundflower, Skype, Audio Hijack Pro, Audion, and a USB headset.

Related link: https://venture.blogs.com/vb/2005/10/web_20.html

David Hornik wandered around the Web 2.0 conference asking various attendees “What is Web 2.0″. Hornik’s Web 2.0 blog entry lists those interviewed as ” Caterina Fake, Toni Schneider, Ross Mayfield, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, Anil Dash, James Joaquin, Evan Williams, and many more”. He has edited the various answers together along with a jingle and an intro that he recorded on the drive into the conference. Download What is Web 2.0 (time 10:46, 7.9 MB)

Related link: https://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail452.html

ITConversations has posted a podcast of Gary Flake: Yahoo Research Labs from the O’Reilly ETech 2005 conference. At the time of this talk, Dr. Gary Flake was Director of Yahoo!s Research Lab, and he discusses the philosophy behind the Research Lab. He also demonstrates some of the new tools being developed a Yahoo!, including a collaborative prediction system (with prizes!) in which you can participate. The MP3 runs 17:25 and is 8 mb.

In a recent entry — Full Screen Text Editing — I looked into the options for creating a writing environment that encompassed the entire screen, hearkening back to halcyon text editing days. Here’s a followup on a couple of items in that article.

I mentioned that apparently Tiger had removed the ability to use >console as a login name and thus bypass the OS X GUI. A commenter said that it worked on their installation, and with a little investigation it seems as if that on clean Tiger system, i.e. not a Panther one updated to 10.4 like mine, this does still work.

At the end, I wrote about trying to get the minimalistic ratpoison window manager working in X11. Since then, I came across another WM that seems to fit the same bill, and with the added bonus of compiling without errors, at least on my test system. The Ion window manager (despite being in fink unstable as an older version) is built from the ground up with the keyboard user in mind. This offers an alternate route to investigate for those who want to achieve a similar experience.

Another option that is available without a bunch of additional installation is using screen, the familiar terminal-based WM, which can actually divide up a single Terminal window into multiple regions simultaneously. Of course, you’re foregoing finer GUI living ;) but that does have its advantages if you’re trying to get a bunch of writing done.

Related link: https://chuck.goolsbee.org/archives/14

I love my Keychains. I have two: my really, really secure one, and my normal every day one. My normal contains my passwords for things like my blogs, logins for the New York Times and Washington Post, and various other trivial passwords that I’m supposed to remember on a whim. My email and several other more critical things, like my bank logins and whatnot, remain hidden and secure in my sooper sekrit keychain. My friend Chuck discovered an infuriating behavior in OS X Tiger this week that makes me wonder about the security of the keychain feature:

On a whim, in MacOS X 10.4, because I was tired of my old login passwd, I changed it. No biggie, right?

I was presented with a dialog, basically saying “Your keychain password has also been changed.” …huh?

Bahhhh!!! No! I didn’t want that!

What’s worse is that he can’t change it back. Like my simple keychain, his simple keychain password is engrained in muscle memory. Unlike my simple keychain, his simple keychain password is short, and so Apple won’t accept it. The purpose of the keychain system is to allow many keychains with varying degrees of security, and increasingly difficult passwords. Is there a way that Chuck can go back to using his short, but secure, password?

Keychain Woes? Share on.

INT. DAY.

A TYPICAL CORPORATE MEETING ROOM

A large oval table surrounded by people.

They’re a mixture. Programming dudes. Marketing dudes. Sales dudes.

They’re all looking at a MYSTERIOUS DUDE, hidden from view behind us.

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
Whatcha got for me, guys?

1ST DUDE
New iPods, boss! Triangular! Here!

1st Dude tosses a plastic gadget across the room. A hand flicks up in front of the camera and catches it, SNAP! Like that. The hand pulls down, clutching the gadget like a claw.

(Beat)

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
I hate it.

F/X: Sound of something hitting a trash can.

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
Next.

2ND DUDE
Uh, we got some new UI mockups for Leopard. No borders - that’s sure to go down well. And a new skin we’re calling “Brushed Purple.”

(Beat)

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
Get out of here.

2ND DUDE
But -

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
Does purple say ‘cool’? Does purple say ’success’? Does purple say ‘Look at me, everyone, I’m a Mac user’? Does it? Huh?

Collective mutterings: “Nossir,” “Right on,” “You got it,” “The man’s got a point there.”

2nd Dude’s chair scratches across the floor. His face hangs down, shamed. He moves to stand up.

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
Purple. Purple. That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.

2nd Dude starts to move away from the table.

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
Wait a minute.

2nd Dude lifts his head. His face a picture of misery.

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
You said something about no borders?

2ND DUDE
Uhhh - yeah.

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
I like that. That will go down well. And what are the corners like?

2ND DUDE
The corners? Well, uh, they’re like the old corners. Ya know, kinda rounded.

MYSTERIOUS DUDE
Pfft. Rounded’s out. Don’t you use iTunes anymore? Gimmie squarer corners. Ditch the purple, and gimmie squarer corners. You got that? Squarer!

We momentarily zoom in on 2nd Dude’s face, which is slowly brightening into a smile.

Then suddenly cut to Mysterious Dude, whose identity is now clear, even though he is silhouetted by a brightly-lit Mac desktop projected on the wall behind him. The Flurry screensaver is running, and it appears that the moving curves of light are coming right out the top of Mysterious Dude’s head. Like he’s a genius or something. The very air around him crackles like a force-field.

We zoom in on the screen, over Mysterious Dude’s head. We hear the people in the room starting to laugh; nervously at first, but then with increased confidence.

FADE TO BLACK POLO NECK

And with Leopard will we rule the world! Mwa-ha! Ha! Hahahahahahahahahahaha!

Like a lot of people, I am kind of sick about hearing about “Web 2.0″. Between the hype and people forcing the definition towards whatever they want it to mean, like most buzzwords it is starting to mean nothing. I think the real question to ask about any software product is “does the software (or really the developers) get it?”. It does not matter if the software is hosted on the web, uses tagging, or offers syndication; it’s whether it uses the resources that are available to make cool and useful applications. The application could be on the web, on your desktop, in Dashboard or just about any other place. Really cool apps use everything available to do their tasks well and in the right context.

For instance:

• Delicious Library gets it. Not only is it cool and easy to use, but it uses information in a totally unintended and smart way. It finds the information you need at Amazon, downloads it and keeps it on your machine. Why not make it a web app and keep the information on a remote server ? Because keeping the information remotely does not add any value. Is it “Web 2.0″ ? Who cares, it uses data it retrieves online to do something cool.
• Voodoo Pad gets it. They took a web application concept and applied it to a standalone application. Gus Mueller, the author, knew that lots of people would want a wiki, but didn’t want, have or need the web server that most require. Is it “Web 2.0″ ? Again, who cares? It turns a Wiki into a personal tool instead of a group tool, which is interesting and useful.
• BackPack gets it (well, actually 37signals , the authors of BackPack really get it.) Setting up pages is easy, signing up new users is easy (unlike .Mac’s new groups feature) and updating pages is easy. Is it “Web 2.0″ ? Shockingly, again I say, who cares ? BackPack is not the first group management product, but they use technology to solve a simple problem in an easy to use way.

Don’t get me wrong, none of these products is perfect, but the developers all get it. They know what makes their products special and how it helps their customers.

There are lots of applications that do not get it, and it isn’t just a matter of desktop applications versus web applications. Photo sharing is a perfect example. Why have people flocked to Flickr ? It was not the first site to host photos, services like Snapfish, Shutterfly and KodakEasyShare Gallery have been doing that for years. Those other services just don’t get it . They make people create accounts to view photos, something that often takes more time than looking at the photos in the first place. They make your computer act like a physical photo album, which is neither hard nor interesting. Flickr isn’t better because it is “Web 2.0″, it is better because it offers lots of features, is easier to use and doesn’t put arbitrary constraints on users. Sure a lot of Flickr’s novel and most hyped features (like tagging) are “Web 2.0″ buzzwords, but that isn’t what makes it better. The developers at Flickr get it, they know that they can offer a lot more than the simple photo album’s that others offer, so they do. If Flickr had no tagging at all, it would still be a huge improvement over Snapfish, even though you can’t purchase hard copies of photos at Flickr.

Developers need to write software that gets it. It doesn’t matter if it’s called “Web 2.0″, “Web 999.0″ or anything else that makes a nice sound bite (and i fully understand that “get it” could easily be construed as a sound bite.) If you want people to use it and love it, the software needs to do something special.

What other software gets it or doesn’t get it ?

A tip for those who are running Tiger and want to change the hostname that shows up in their terminal prompt.

In the past, on pre-Tiger systems, folks were told to edit their /etc/hostconfig file and change the hostname variable from AUTOMATIC to yourhostnamehere. This was to forestall the ever-changing prompt problem, which annoys laptop users who move from network to network and could find themselves ‘jsmith@dhcp-123.45.6.7′ or ‘jsmith@nameofbox’ or any number of things, depending on where they were.

That HOSTNAME=-AUTOMATIC- variable is missing from a fresh install of Tiger, however, and from what I’ve been able to research, Tiger no longer uses it anyway. :) But rather than bothering with that, you can just edit the way your prompt looks using your .bash_profile file.

Bash is the Bourne Again Shell, the usual default CLI shell on Linux and (nowadays) Mac. Which is handy if you flit between the OSs. You can control various options for your Terminal experience inside an invisible file named ‘.bash_profile’ in your home directory. Invisible to the Finder, at least, but editable from within the Terminal. So if it doesn’t exist, you can create it using vim or nano or emacs or whatever your favorite CLI text editor is.

Add these lines to .bash_profile to get the unchanging hostname and a little bit of enhancement from the default prompt, assuming you wanted the hostname to be ‘mithrandir’:

PS1="[u@mithrandir:w] "case `id -u` in     0) PS1="${PS1}# ";;     *) PS1="${PS1}$ ";;esac

Prompt-futzing is a dear old tradition in geek circles and a good example of the true necessity of spending a few hours hacking in order to save less than a minute every day. :)

Got any favorite CLI prompt futzes?

Related link: https://digg.com/apple/Apple_Front_Row_Hack_Surfaces

There are Several Sites reporting that Front Row can be retrieved (albeit in a shady grey market sort of way…) from the internet and installed on most Macs. So, of course, being the lunatic early adopter that I was, I installed it this morning.

The hacked version that’s making its way around the internet is a copy of Front Row that’s bypassing the requirement to have the remote present for startup, and includes a new set of bezel frameworks that need to be installed in /System/Library/Private Frameworks, as well as the application itself which has to live in /System/Library/CoreServices and your apps folder. Don’t forget iTunes 6.0.1 and Quicktime 7.0.3, since otherwise Front Row will freak out when you ask it to look at your iTunes Library.

Good luck, however, getting it to work with the DVD player on the Mac mini. I’ve been unable to view the Lost Season 1 DVDs that I have in my office. It just doesn’t want to communicate with the DVD player application that exists as a part of the Mac OS X install on my mini (currently 10.4.2). If you’ve figured that part out, do let us know in the comments.

Now, it’s no picnic running the app. The mini is a bit underpowered in the video department with just a quarter of the video RAM that the iMac G5, and it shows. Perhaps this is why Apple is currently keeping the lid on Front Row until things get a bit more beefy in that department (ah, January, how soon you are, yet how far!). Now, Front Row seems to be a transparent screen applied in a specific way, bringing up each application involved in the background (you can tell because when the application needs to be…unexpectedly quit, iTunes and iPhoto are running), which could be gumming up the works a bit.

Overall, it’s functional. Just don’t expect it to work as advertised.

Have you installed Front Row?

While doing some research for a writing project, I visited HP’s Mobile Printing page…

HP Mobile Printing

…and learned that…
Since 1992, HP has been committed to delivering a high-quality, complete printing experience for customers using mobile devices. Because customers can use similar mobile printing software offerings (see list, below) that are compatible with Pocket PC and Windows Mobile OS platforms, HP has decided to focus on other areas of its mobile printing and imaging strategy where solutions may not be so readily available. As a result, HP will discontinue HP Mobile Printing for Pocket PC and HP Mobile Printing SDK for Pocket PC, effective October 1, 2005. Any current customers / developers may receive basic phone support for six months thereafter, with all support for these products ending on April 1, 2006.

Bummer…

No more free Pocket PC printing option…

Computer Business Review printed and then retracted an interview with an Access (which now owns PalmSource) spokesperson saying that Palm OS had reached the end of life. But even if Palm OS remains viable, isn’t it time that Apple re-enter the PDA market?

Steve Jobs is on the
cover of the Oct. 24 issue of Time Magazine
with the title heading The man who always seems to know what’s next.
I hope what’s next is Apple revisiting and re-entering the PDA market Apple created in between Jobs’ Apple leadership periods.
Although I tend to use phones and PDAs based on Microsoft Windows Mobile, it was always obvious that a healthy and innovative Palm competing in the market was good for all PDA/phone users.
The Treo 650 (which emerged from Palm’s purchase of Handspring a while back) is a great product that is rightfully getting rave reviews from pundits and end users.
Microsoft’s approaching Palm to create a Windows Mobile version makes this very obvious.

The Palm software as we know will probably undergo a metamorphasis similar to the one we saw when Apple went from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X and its Mach/BSD based UNIX kernel.
So, Palm won’t disappear, just yet IMHO.
And, yet, I think a more innovative dynamic force is needed to revitalize the non-phone PDA space.
The Apple iPod is already half-way to becoming a PDA.
All it really lacks in on-device user-input for contacts, events, etc (let’s just forget the Motorola ROKR iTunes Phone for now, please).

Competition is good for consumers in the gadget space.
So, Mr. Jobs, I hope you consider re-entering Apple in the PDA space with the, uh, hmm Apple iPad (iSlate? iNote?) (yeah, no one will hire me as a marketing person, I know).

Would you buy an Apple iPad?

I’m very taken with Minuteur, the timer utility for OS X that I stumbled upon recently. The simplicity of the interface is refreshing, as is the manner of its execution. To set the timer, you simply drag the timer, just as you might twist an old-style kitchen timer. The sound effects are perfect copies of real-world timers. The app closely resembles the real world device it emulates. Nicely done.

Another eye-opening discovery is MacDent Pro, a practice management app for dentists everywhere. Who knew?

Finally, miniTunes and iTunes Links both look like potentially useful little helper apps for those people who like to fiddle with iTunes.

Downloaded anything more fun than a tax form recently?

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

Anyone reading this post probably already knows about ZabaSearch, but just in case you don’t, click on the link and look yourself up on it. Then when you’re done looking yourself up, try to look up some friends or family. And if you wonder where they live, go on over to Google Local, and type in their address. Be sure to choose the satellite photo option if you want to get a better view of the neighborhood.

If this is the first time you’ve put those concepts together, you might be in a state of shock and amazement. Phrases like “invasion of privacy” might be running through your head. But are either of the sites really a threat to your privacy at all? I guess it depends on how you define the term — and I’ll leave that for you to determine — but at least someone out there is probably outraged about all of this.

ZabaSearch is basically a public information search engine. They hail what they call “data democratization”, which basically means that if there’s public information out there about you, then you have access to it — but so does everyone else. They’re just facilitating the process.

For example, you can feel free to go to your local county courthouse and look up records that are publicly available to discover who owns particular properties, who has recently been in court, etc. — and along the way, you’ll stumble across addresses, the names of spouses or children, and all sorts of other goodies. Some companies do nothing but harvest this information so they can sell it to solicitors and make a few bucks. So ZabaSearch doesn’t generate any data about you that’s not already out there in one form or another, it just provides a one-stop shop for accessing it all. Before you decide to dedicate your life to the eradication of ZabaSearch, check here for some interesting reading from a legal perspective on what can be done when data democratization verges on privacy invasion.

So what’s all of the fuss about? Does ZabaSearch really give us something that a Yahoo! People Search hasn’t been for years? Or is it the momentum and the scare of where this could go that’s getting people all riled up?

Since I mentioned Google Local earlier, I’ll throw out another quandary for you. If there were publicly available commercial satellites that could give you great resolution within a meter or so in almost real time, could that system possibly constitute an invasion of privacy? Let’s assume that the system would be affordable enough that anyone could just sit on their computer and “browse the world” (assuming good weather.)

Very cool, right? That person with the big fence around their home that acts so secretive all of the time — well, you’d be able to get in on the secrets in no time. Want to know how close the pizza delivery person is to your house? Just take a peek at your neighborhood when you’re expecting them. Cops could pursue criminals as they flee just like on Enemy of the State and the paparazzi wouldn’t have as many problems chasing the celebrities anymore.

But the ease of it all would provide criminals (or perverts) with a lot of leverage too. Want to rob a house when the family goes out for dinner? No need to case the joint in your car across the street anymore. Just watch from your computer screen and then trot on over after they leave for dinner one night. Have a pal watch the place and give you a heads up when they’re coming back so that you don’t get caught.

So is it cool or scary? Where do you draw the line with this stuff?

Disclaimer - I own Apple stock. (Not as much as my wife does, but still.)

When I showed my wife the brand new application, iTunes, she raved. I had been trying to get her to use linux at home so I could have a Microsoft-free household. It had not been going well, and this wasn’t her fault, she has a Masters Degree and had been using computers for years, it really was that Desktop linux was not quite ready. In any case, she understood the implications of iTunes in light of the public debate about illegal file sharing and ease-of-use. She had a little savings and threw it immediately at Apple stock at about $17.50 a share.

Apple has done well since then. It split a while back at a bit more than $80 or so a share and it has climbed above the $55 mark recently. It has outperformed Microsoft as well as the software industry in general. Even if you compare Apple to Sony, with whom it directly competes, it has done a lot better. Apple has done significantly better, orders of magnitude better. Why?

Since Steve Jobs arrived back at the company, it has renewed its focus - the customer. Apple makes hardware and software for people, “the rest of us,” whereas Microsoft and others make software for markets. This may seem a facile distinction, but I think it bears scrutiny. Let’s look at two of the new pieces of hardware from both Microsoft and Apple; the iPod and the Xbox. Both are squarely aimed at consumers, not businesses, both have sizable market share, however the iPod’s market share is significantly more than the Xbox’s, and both are well-made products. Yet Microsoft continues to lose money on the Xbox division while Apple has posted some of its best quarters ever.

Microsoft identifies a market, like gaming for example, where there are significant sums to be made. They compete aggressively, market aggressively, but fail to really understand the consumer. To the gamer, the game is the thing. Yeah you need a kick-ass machine, but the content is what really matters, content is king in the gaming market and this has made Microsoft play catch-up since it cannot leverage its monopoly. There are more games for other machines and until Microsoft can dominate with a greater number of games, and the must-have games, its competitors dying the Netscape Death.

Apple has in the iPod a product that works, and plenty of music and TV content to go with it, in a way that anyone can enjoy. This is something that Sony only sort-of understands. Sony sees the gamer and the need for games, they see the fact that controlling content allows them to sell hardware, but after the Walkman, they cannot seem to find their magic design touch. Although the Sony-Ericsson Mobile phone Walkman might just be it, it is no iPod killer, becuase there is no simple interface to content like iTunes. Sony also has problems when it comes to software, they do not get open source and do not have access to the army of coders Apple has access to.

Apple has growth opportunities, something that is harder to say about the Microsoft behemoth with 264 billion dollars in stock market value, maybe that is why Microsoft appears to be ready to play smash mouth football again. A recent AP article reports Microsoft is recanting on a demand that hardware suppliers not allow other software on their iPod-like music players has raised some eyebrows, especially just before Microsoft are about to appear in front of U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, again.

Apple has revived itself from near death by focusing on the consumer and building really great products. When they switch over to their new Intel chips, I imagine that is when the Microsoft Operating System hegemony will noticeably erode.

Open a can of womp-ass!

GeekTool is a System Preferences pane for Mac OS X that allows the user to make an arbitrary number of customizable windows overlaying the Desktop, showing logs and other text files, results of CLI commands, or images (e.g. from webcams or server reports). Rather like frameless term windows.

Upon the release of Tiger, however, GeekTool suffered from a framework-related bug and ceased being usable, unfortunately for the many geeks who’d gotten used to depending on it. The developer refused to release a 10.4 update, citing the need to work on paying projects, and so the program has fallen by the wayside for Tiger users for some time now, replaced by other, less elegant solutions (like Dashboard or Konfabulator Widgets).

To the rescue came JAW software, updating the open-source GeekTool in an unofficial branch that removes the offending function that was causing the problem, as well as fixing other bugs. The JAW build is available from their OS X miscellanea page.

Some of the conversation between Tynsoe and JAW can be found in this MacOSXHints story, Install a modified Tiger-compatible version of GeekTool. See also this recent 43folders post by Merlin Mann, GeekTool’s new Tiger compatibility (and using it to build your own Batcave) for some cool uses.

Back in the pre-Tiger days, I designed a couple of GeekTool monitors: Mini-Monitor, which displays unread counts for Mail and NetNewsWire in a tiny window, and iTunes Monitor, which combines GeekTool and the iTunes Command Line Control utility to get plaintext control over your musical library.

Related link: https://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/

When Merlin Mann talks, folks listen. And last week when he talked about status pages, I listened. I too, love the concept behind a basic status page, and I’ve finally gotten off my ass taken care of creating one. But, Merlin’s right, it would be great if it was an automated thing.

I was thinking in the shower this morning, what a perfect task for automator. You can trigger it from an event in iCal (just a basic script containing: open /Users/tombridge/Desktop/Status) and make Automator do all the hard stuff. Setting up the basics was easy, you can make Automator “Ask for Text” and give yourself a little prompt question. Being a bit of a card player, the first question I ask myself tends to be, what hand are you holding? The way this looks in Automator is thus:

When you append text to a file, it opens a fresh TextEdit document and surely enough appends the text. Sadly, though, as part of the execution of the script, Automator completely ignores my “Default Responses” for the content of the previous answer field, and I can’t get it to actually save the contents of the text file, even though I swear I used the “New Text File” object correctly. I’ve tried it at the top of the document and again at the bottom, but with no joy.

Of course, it’s pretty damned difficult to convince Automator that I’m done with the text file and to open a URL of my choosing so I can handle the copy/paste interaction into the WordPress template I set up.

What’s really frustrating here is that Automator could seriously rock. There’s so much potential here, it’s just that we’re not seeing a ton of it in practice. I’m also very frustrated by how laggy and slow the application’s interface is, despite a decently powerful (1.5Ghz G4) powerbook and a good chunk of RAM (1GB), I am frequently stuck waiting for the workflow pane to scroll and that’s just really lame.

There has to be a good non-AppleScript solution here, I’m just not seeing it. Can you point out my mistake?

[Update]: I’d like to thank Steve Weintraub from Automator World for firing back an email with the proper fix for my questions issue. If you set the text arrow at the top of each set to disregard the result of previous action, your correct default text will appear. However, I’m still stuck with the problem of saving this entry text, which seems to fail no matter what I try.

Can you solve this? Tell me how I screwed up.

Imagine this scenario: Overnight someone sneaked into my office and upgraded an application on my computer. An application I had been running happily for months, and one that worked well and served my needs.

Obviously, nobody asked me if I wanted the upgrade. What’s more, the phantom upgrader also didn’t check that the new version was compatible with my Mac. Okay, maybe they did test but decided that the wrinkles weren’t all that bad and that I could probably live with them until they got around to sneaking back in again and doing another drive-by upgrade.

Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Absurd, yet that’s exactly what happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I was preparing for a trip to San Francisco and mapping all kinds of things - my hotel, the conference venue, my friends’ houses and the place I’m going to show off my awesome born-in-the-UK bowling skills. Then Google decided to roll out a new version of Google Maps and it didn’t work cleanly with Safari.

Here I am, in the middle of an important organisational project and the single most important application for that project was just given a disruptive upgrade. Did anyone warn me that I should expect and plan for disruption? No. Could I pull out the installer CD and go back to an old, known-good version of Google Maps? No. Could I long-term refuse to upgrade on the basis that the current version met my needs and I prized stability over features? Not a chance.

Now, I don’t intend this to pick on Google Maps. It’s a product I love and use all the time and I’m as delighted as the next person when I go to my favourite web apps and great new feature have just appeared. I jumped for joy when I discovered that Google Maps had added satellite images for the UK. I was delighted when Flickr added image clustering, but what’s clear is this:

Web 2.0 applications are not just websites anymore - they’re applications (and, in some cases, platforms) that people have begun to critically depend on for their work.

I don’t personally use 37Signals’ Backpack application, but I hear a lot of raves about it in the productivity circles I hang out in. What happens when your central productivity application and all its data is no longer under your control? What happens when it’s down for maintenance? Is this an acceptable business risk? I’m a firm believer in outsourcing those business needs outside one’s core competency, but I’m a bit of a sceptic here.

Of course, there are many matters that are far from business-critical for which it will make perfect sense to hand off responsibility to a web-based application host. Flickr is a great example - I can live for a couple of hours downtime where I can’t post my photos. My Livejournal is another fine example. Even downtime on my IMAP mail server is mostly bearable, on account of having a rich local cache which ensures continuity of access to existing information. The subject of the “rich local cache” is a whole other topic for another blog post.

My point is simply this: until you can use web applications offline, their appeal and broad application is necessarily limited to those times and locations where bandwidth is readily and reliably available.

Been hit with a flaky upgrade? Love the ease? Hate the surprises? Talk about it.

I’m sorry to keep banging on about this, but it really makes me mad that handling an IMAP email account should be such hard work.

Last night, Mail was misbehaving again. I was searching for a particular message I knew was there, using a keyword I knew was present in the message, but Mail stubbornly refused to find anything. After finding the message I wanted manually, by opening my storage mailbox and scrolling through it, I angrily decided to look elsewhere. Again.

My friend Dave said he’d ditched Mail in recent weeks, to move to Thunderbird. “It’s so much faster than Mail,” he said. “And you can do almost everything with the keyboard.”

So I fired up Thunderbird again and re-taught my fingers to hit different keys to the ones they are used to, and forced myself to put up with the fact that Thunderbird always brings the browser to the front when you click a link (Mail is able to keep the browser in the background when you Command-click). I stuck with it almost half a day, and was just starting to feel comfortable when I found myself needing to search again - and guess what?

Thunderbird pulled the same trick. It wouldn’t find a message I knew to exist.

By now I was ready to pull my hair out at its roots, but I stayed calm, quit Thunderbird, and tried faithful old Eudora again. Nothing does searches like Eudora, I reminded myself. But Eudora looks awful, it won’t put outgoing messages anywhere other than its own Out folder, and has the same URL-clicking trouble (although see Krioni’s comment on my last email moan for a possible solution for this). It lasted about 10 minutes.

Powermail, which I tried in earnest just a few weeks ago, had some kind of hissyfit and crashed to a halt every time I tried to connect to the mail server. Oh well.

I was on the verge of downloading Mailsmith to give it a go when I remembered that it doesn’t do IMAP at all. I spent two minutes thinking of more options - GyazMail, Mulberry, even Entourage - and realised that at this rate, I might spend an entire working day just messing about trying to find The Perfect Email Program, which we all know is just a myth.

So I said aloud: “I cannot be bothered,” and went back to Mail once again.

I know it will drive me mad again sooner or later (probably sooner), but I think today’s messing about has taught me this: it’s quicker and less hassle to cope with Mail’s occasional mood swings than it is to spend hours and hours trying to find something that doesn’t have slightly different, but equally infuriating, mood swings of its own.

Let’s hope the rise of AI doesn’t bring about software with *real* mood swings…

I tend to be way too cerebral. I spend a ton of time keeping up with the latest research related to my profession, reading nerdy books, working logic puzzles, tinkering around with pet projects, etc. At least once a week, however, I try to set aside some time for creative activities such as brainstorming in hopes of restoring some balance to my mind.

Here’s one topic that I’ve noticed always comes up on my brainstorming list: What’s the next great piece of software going to be?

By the Church-Turing thesis, it’s believed that anything you can describe can be implemented as a piece of software (go ahead and try to disprove the thesis — I dare you), so this gives us a lot of options. I find this particular topic interesting because although we have a surplus of software out there, only a fraction of it truly qualifies as innovative and useful. If you don’t believe me, go out to MacUpdate sometime and take a look for yourself.

But the problem at hand isn’t because there’s a shortage of developers. There are tons of code mongers out there that would love to pump out an implementation and make the big bucks if it weren’t for one little thing — a clever idea. In fact, there’s only one characteristic about the idea itself that’s even worth mentioning: it just needs to be capable of spiking a demand. In a free market, the supply will rise out of the depths to meet the demand, someone will rake in the cash for a while, eventually the idea itself will become more of a commodity, and then everyone ends up living happily ever after. Well, sort of.

Although we’re talking about software here, you can’t help but bring hardware into the discussion. As an example, what good would iPhoto be if digital cameras weren’t a commodity? You wouldn’t honestly arrange your clip art in iPhoto would you? I suppose you could go to the trouble of scanning in all of your images, but even then, we’re back to talking about a piece of hardware that the software leans on: a high performance scanner that’s designed to mass import your photos, or maybe even a device that takes negatives and pumps out a digital image.

In any event, if digital cameras weren’t hot commodities, you could bet that the designers of photo apps would be doing some serious analysis of some other market — whichever one supplies the next best piece of hardware that would make their application useful to the masses. We could take another step back and divert into a discussion of physics since that’s really the next step back (what empowers our hardware), but I think you get the idea.

Although it’s easy to overlook, the hardware/software relationship is a pretty important one to notice. You couldn’t have an e-mail client or web browser without the internet infrastructure in place. You wouldn’t have bleeding-edge games coming to the market in droves if it weren’t for the uber-accelerated graphics cards that are available, and you certainly wouldn’t have operating systems as ravenous for resources such as Vista finally crawling out if manufacturers such as Dell weren’t able to mass produce systems capable of running all of that bloatware.

So here’s my question to you: What’s the state of the market right now? Are we saturated with useful software until a truly cutting edge new piece of hardware is introduced? Or do we have plenty of hardware and it’s just that application developers aren’t thinking outside the box enough?

What piece of software is missing from the marketplace that you’d like to see, and what hardware commodity is stopping it from getting there?

I understand that some developers got their Nokia 770 delivered recently. However, the rest of us are still waiting for Nokia’s Internet mini-tablet to hit US shores. While you wait, take a look at the Sharp W-ZERO3 available in Japan. Unlike the slate-only 779, the W-ZERO3 has a pull-out querty keyboard and some other nice features.

There’s a nice flash demo of this Microsoft Windows Mobile device at…

Sharp W-ZERO3 Flash demo

This Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 Phone Edition device (PHS, not CDMA or GSM) has a 3.7″ 640×480 (VGA) LCD display, 802.11b, all the usual Microsoft Mobile Office apps (including the newly revived Mobile PowerPoint Mobile), and a length-wise QWERTY keyboard reminiscent of the old Handheld PC form factor.

Anyone in Japan have one and able to tell us more about it?

Whether you like it or not, the porn industry is one of the best predictors of how new technologies will fare. They helped usher in the home video revolution, fueled early adoption of the Internet, and now have begun to produce video specifically compressed for the new iPod. People who say Apple’s latest device isn’t revolutionary should take note.

In a Macworld UK article by Jonny Evans, he writes, “Sites from the dark side of the Web are already rushing to buy QuickTime Pro licenses so they can create viral transmissions intended to pounce down the broadband pipe into Apple’s new media players… The tech-savvy adult industry understands how to harness the Internet to stimulate audiences, create brand loyalty and drive demand. As expected, it is rushing to embrace this new iPod-driven, portable-video gold rush.”

I’m happy to say that I thought the new iPod was impressive before the porn industry embraced it.

As a bit of market research following yesterday’s announcement of Aperture, I decided to hit the blog trail and see what people on the street were saying about it. Aperture is a new application from Apple, to be released in 4-6 weeks, that serves as a workflow and production tool for digital photographers. It offers more than that, and many people believe it will be a Photoshop killer at some point (maybe not right now).

To conduct this bit of research, I went to Google and used their blog search capability, and simply searched for “Aperture + Apple”. There were 639 results.

Anyhow, here’s what people have had to say.

Note: I have not edited the following blog excerpts. What you see here is what you’ll see if you follow the “Post” links — typos and all.

Jeremy Ferguson

https://www.jeremyferguson.net

“Billed as being “Designed for Professional Photographers,” Aperture is Apple’s answer to serious digital workflow management + retouching tool. Is this the fabled Photoshop killer Apples supposedly sitting on for a while now.”

Post: https://jeremyferguson.net/blog/index.php?title=apple_releases_aperture&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg

https://www.i-marco.nl/weblog

“Looks like the ultimate RAW editor. But… $499… ARGH!!!!”

Post: https://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2005/10/19/apple_aperture

Jay Savage, The Digital Photography Weblog

https://digitalphotography.weblogsinc.com

“Ok, I’m back from the Apple Special Event preview at PhotoPlus, and I’m having to eat my words. I said they’d have pro software for us, but that a photo expo would be a silly place to debut hardware. I was wrong, in part because the new Aperature editing software needs the new hardware. Video editors will love the new computers, too, though.”

Post: https://digitalphotography.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000340064123/

Jeff Croft

https://www.jeffcroft.com

“Aperture looks really, really impressive. So are its system requirements.”

Post: https://jeffcroft.com/blog/links/archives/2005/10/new_stuff_from.php

Peter Beninate

“Apple has just announced a photo post-processing application called Aperture. The Quicktime demos are quite impressive. I think one of the best features is the RAW workflow. If this feature delivers like Apple says it does, it will take much of the hassle out of shooting in RAW.

Post: https://bjubloggers.com/2005/10/20/apple-aperture/

Apple Aperture: iPhoto Replacement?
John Faughnan

“I’ve been wating for Apple’s new Aperture photo software for a few years now. At $250 (educational, I teach) I’ll likely buy it — unless it’s unbearably slow. (Hardware requirements are immense, either Aperture is a fundamentally stupid piece of software or the requirements are for working with tens of thousands of 30MB raw images.)”

Post: https://googlefaughnan.blogspot.com/2005/10/apple-aperture-iphoto-replacement.html

Drooling Over Aperture
Danny Ngan

https://blog.dannyngan.com

“Apple seems to be on a roll with new product announcements lately. First the iPod nano, then the new iPod video, a brand new iMac with built-in camera, and, as of today, quad-core Powermacs, slightly refreshed Powerbooks, and, my next drool-worthy object of desire, Aperture. Aperture is Apple’s new pro level photo editing and management application that is to iPhoto what Final Cut Pro is to iMovie. Bigger, fancier, and, of course, more expensive.

Post: https://blog.dannyngan.com/2005/10/19/drooling-over-aperture/

Aperture — Apple Strikes Adobe?
Raj Boora

https://idarknight.blogspot.com

“Well, I haven’t seen the Apple site update yet - but Engadget tells me that Apple has released quad core machines (with a terabyte of possible storage to boot) and Aperture - a RAW editor. It looks like Apple is finally moving into Pro Photo.

Post: https://idarknight.blogspot.com/2005/10/aperture-apple-strikes-adobe.html

David Baily

https://bogiesblog.blogspot.com

“As a photographer, I just have to say that Apple has made my dreams come true. At least, a photo management tool that handles RAW digital negatives natively and without the pain associated with Photoshop. Well done Apple on yet another fantastic piece of software.”

Post: https://bogiesblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/apple-aperture.html

Unknown

https://ns1.typepad.com

“yes, apple comes out with more goodness. and more badness. i looked at aperture on apple’s site only to fall in love with the software and then find out that my 12″ powerbook isn’t buff enough to run it. OUCH! but aperture has alot of things i’ve been begging for in a photo program. it’s basically adds the best of iphoto + iview media pro + final cut pro into one photo application.

Post: https://n1s.typepad.com/journal/2005/10/aperture.html

Aperture - Wow.
Ted Leung

“Today Apple announced Aperture, which they describe as “the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers”. After watching the videos on the Aperture pages, all I can say is Wow.

Post: https://www.sauria.com/blog/2005/10/19#1405

Adobe In A Two Front War
Doug Dobbins

https://www.dougdobbins.com

“Apple has demo’d and launched Aperture, a high end professional photo software package. As Apple did with Final Cut Pro, they are now taking on another Adobe product, Photoshop. Final Cut Pro did so well, Adobe stopped making Premiere Pro for the Mac.

Post: https://www.dougdobbins.com/2005/10/19/adobe-in-a-two-front-war/

The Photographer’s Best Friend: Aperture
Ajit Anthony

“Among the many announcements that came from Apple, today, most revolved around pro hardware but overlooked was a software called Aperture. This pro software is a juiced up iPhoto, a place to store photo’s, do some image editing, a lightbox but on your computer. Taking a look the website, I am surprised that there was not something like this already on the market. Though Graphic Converter and Adobe Bridge are excellent programs, Aperture is more suited to be the perfect little assistant to the photographer or even a graphics artist. My only wish is that Apple would have released this a little while ago when I had to stitch and organize hundreds of photographs for a video graphics job. Some of the more intriguing features to me are: non-destructive editing, some great export options, quick tags, the light box atmostphere, and stacking. It also supports RAW files but that has become standard now. But overall, this looks like an incredible software but pricey at $499.”

Post: https://www.dvguru.com/2005/10/19/the-photographers-best-friend-aperture/

Creative Bits
Post by mijlee

“Well Apple have released their ‘PhotoShop beater’ and it looks like it’s going to do the same to the Photographers market as FinalCut did to the editing industry.

Post: https://creativebits.org/photography/aperture

Apple Aperture - Photoshop Killer?

“Apple’s new application for pro photographers, Aperture, is iPhoto on steroids rather than a straight-ahead Photoshop killer.

Post: https://holyhoses.blogspot.com/2005/10/apple-aperture-photoshop-killer.html

So there you have it, word from the masses on Aperture. What’s your take on Aperture? Whether you’re a professional photographer or someone who takes a boatload of pictures with your aging Canon S200 (like me), what do you think of Apple’s new digital imaging app? Think it’s going to be a Photoshop killer as some people are predicting?

Share your thougths…

And here’s one final thought from me: If you don’t think Aperture is a Photoshop killer now, the one thought that keeps running through my head is “Does Aperture have a plug-in architecture?”. If it does, I can see where there will be a booming market for people to develop Core Image-based image effects and such. And if that is possible, Adobe better look out.

Tell us what you think of Apple’s Aperture.

While we stand by to see how Hollywood reacts to episodes of “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” playing on the new iPod, we can take content creation into our own hands. Heck, we did it with audio. Why not video too?

You might not realize it, but the compact digicam you have tucked away in the sock drawer is an idea tool for creating movies for the iPod. All you need is 320×240 resolution. Any camera can do that. Plus, with the new Export preset in QuickTime Pro 7.0.3, it’s just a matter of shoot, compress, and upload.

If you’re interested in playing with this, you might want to hop over to my brief tutorial and podcast on The Digital Story.

Apple today reaffirmed its position as supplier of supremely expensive products for graphics professionals, with a series of hardware and software announcements that will have everyone drooling but only a small minority opening their wallets.

A collection of new PowerBooks with increased screen resolution and better battery life is the first thing. A 1680 x 1050 pixel display on the 17 inch model is certainly going to be lovely to look at, but inside it’s still a G4 processor. In its attempts to reinvigorate laptop sales between now and the Intel switchover next year, a better screen and battery are the least Apple could offer.

And there’s no denying they look like very enticing machines, but before you reach for your Apple Store bookmark in Safari, you might want to take a look at the minimum specifications for Apple’s new professional photo editor, Aperture.

This much-anticipated app was an obvious one for Apple to release. After all, it had ‘pro’ software in other areas of creative media, but only iPhoto for photography.

Aperture offers RAW support, extremely detailed metadata support, real time image editing, and loads more. As predicted by many folks, it really is a ‘pro’ iPhoto. The quick tour and the gallery of screenshots are particularly enlightening.

But wait, the lowest of the minimum specifications is a 15 inch or 17 inch PowerBook. The recommended specs are a dual 2GHz G5 machine, 2GB of RAM, and of course one of the best graphics cards.

That’s one resources-hungry app. Makes you wonder what they’re planning for the Intel machines, doesn’t it?

Until they appear, if you want to get the best out of Aperture you’re probably going to have to cough up for a dual dual-core Power Mac G5, the new big beast in the Mac world. And what a beast it is, crammed with more slots for more extras than most people could ever need. You wanna run eight 23 inch Cinema displays from your Power Mac? Well, now you can. You know, for those really wide screen movies.

These computers, and this application, are the luxury goods, the top-of-the-range products for the most dedicated of professionals. This might well be the curtain call for the PowerPC architecture. The final act.

Like the look of this stuff? Or still holding out for an Intel machine?

Related link: https://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.html

Vienna is a Mac OS X news aggregator in the same vein as NetNewsWire, but open source. While it certainly isn’t as featureful as others in the field, Vienna seems to have the basics down pretty well already. Unpolished in spots, but definitely promising. Being that it’s open source, if you have the skills to make it better, you can.

A tip. Vienna has a preference so you can choose to ‘Mark current article read’ either ‘After next unread article is displayed’ or ‘After a short delay’. However, the delay is far too long for my taste as I jam through headlines I want to ignore.

Thankfully, there is an item in the .plist file for Vienna that can adjust the time of delay. Open up the file ~/Library/Preferences/uk.co.opencommunity.vienna2.plist in a text editor or the Property List Editor if you have the developer tools installed. The item is ‘MarkReadInterval’, which is set at 0.500000 seconds. I changed it to 0.100000, which feels, yes, snappier. ;)

Steve Jobs isn’t really the photo dude at Apple, but Rob Schoeben is (VP of Applications Marketing), and he announced “Aperture” today at the Apple press event in NYC. This is the professional post production image app from Apple that we’ve been waiting for.

In a nutshell, Aperture is designed to make your Raw workflow as painless as managing Jpegs. The engineering team has spent almost two years researching how photographers like to work and what’s most important to them in post production. The design team took what they learned, combined it with the power of Tiger, and created Aperture.

This isn’t iPhoto. It will cost you $499. For pros, it’s justifiable because at $100 an hour in time savings, you get your money back quickly. To really appreciate this app, you have to see it operating on two side-by-side 30″ displays. (Today’s hardware announcements are in concert with Aperture and Final Cut Studio.) This is particularly helpful when you’re culling images — placing them side by side at 100 percent — trying to quickly determine which are the best.

I’ll certainly cover more about this app in the near future. But for now, I’ll leave you with this… If you’re a Raw shooter who is trying to figure out the least painful workflow for managing these files, you’re going to want to check out Aperture before making a final decision.

Related link: https://lists.apple.com/archives/quicktime-java//2005/Oct/msg00055.html

Update, Oct 20, 2005, 9:30 PM EDT - this has been fixed. See the talkbacks.

The first word of the problem came in Dominik Grusemann’s message to the quicktime-java list on Sunday, QTJava not valid:

Since today I get the following Exception:
This version of QTJava has expired
java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
Well, I know what it means, but I think having the
most current version of Quicktime installed,
this should not happen.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
Dominik

The problem was also reported almost immediately to Apple’s support forums. And sure enough, any QuickTime for Java program on Windows now fails, because any such program must call QTSession.open() to use QTJ, and QTSession’s static initializer calls a QTBuild.isValid() method, which is now throwing an exception.

The problem appears to be a beta expiration mistakenly left in the production version of QuickTime 7. If you reset the Windows clock to October 15th or earlier, QTJ applications will work again. For example, running the QTVersionCheck example from chapter 1 of QuickTime for Java: A Developer’s Notebook will produce the following, if the system date is 10/15/05 or earlier:

$ ant run-ch01-qtversioncheck
[ant output omitted for clarity]
run-ch01-qtversioncheck:
     [java] QT version: 7.0
     [java] QTJ version: 6.1

On the other hand, if you run it on or after 10/16, you get:

run-ch01-qtversioncheck:
     [java] This version of QTJava has expired
     [java] java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
     [java]     at com.oreilly.qtjnotebook.ch01.
             QTVersionCheck.main(QTVersionCheck.java:34)
     [java] Caused by: java.lang.SecurityException: QTJava has expired.
     [java]     at quicktime.util.QTBuild.isValid(QTBuild.java:72)
     [java]     at quicktime.QTSession.<clinit>(QTSession.java:73)
     [java]     ... 1 more
     [java] Exception in thread "main"
     [java] Java Result: 1

So, tiny little mistake, but huge, huge deal, as this basically breaks every QTJ application on Windows (QTJ on Mac does not have the bug). And this comes just when things were getting better for QTJ on Windows, with QuickTime 7 installing it by default instead of making Java developers jump through extra hoops to get it installed.

Apple can fix things quickly - after all, it only took a few hours to take down iTunes 2 after reports surfaced that its installer could erase the target drive. In fact, QTJ’s original chief architect, Bill Stewart, has already said that a fix is underway. For the truly desperate who don’t mind breaking the QuickTime license terms in an emergency, there’s the option of compiling a non-broken version of QTBuild (aside: this is the kind of scenario that led to the Java Internal Use License back in the Java world).

Maybe I’m stretching for a bright spot, but one thing that surprised me was all the new people posting to the quicktime-java about the problems they were seeing. Instead of just the list regulars posting, it became clear that there are lot more people actively working with QTJ than is immediately apparent from only the high-profile QTJ projects like Amateur, I/ON, Magnolia, etc. So many people responding so quickly to the problem indicates there is a lot of QTJ use under the radar - internal-use apps, kiosks, education, hobbyists, etc. Let’s hope for their sake that Apple gets an official fix out quickly. Today would be good.

Did QTJ’s 10/16/05 bug affect your work?

• Topwriter: hidden app that keeps the text you’re writing in the top half on your screen, autoscrolling any document you’re editing.

• Finger Doodle: lets you doodle on screen by idly tapping and twiddling your fingers on the trackpad.

• FileStickies: just like Stickies.app, but with sticky notes you can attach to files or folders by just dragging them into place. When browsing in the Finder or by any other means (Quicksilver), a simply keycombo would make the FileStickies connected to any selected file(s) reappear, ready for editing or moving.

• Swatch Suggest: a one-button app. Click the button, and it presents you with a color swatch suggestion. Click again for another. Repeat until happy. (The app would update itself automatically with new swatches over the infonets.)

• Screen Use Monitor: leave it running for a few days, then take a look at the report it generates. The app would show you with diagrams and animated screenshots how you use your computer’s display; where you tend to be working most, and which bits of the display tend to get neglected.

• And finally, A simple email program that handles IMAP accounts with the grace and simplicity of Finder Mail, which I fell in love with back in my OS 9 days.

What software would you like to see?

Related link: https://www.apple.com/ipod/accessories.html

OK, stories about people getting their new fifth generation iPods are starting to pop up. So, now it is time for me to ask the masses a question since I can’t find the answer on Apple’s site.

How useful is the new Universal Dock? What I am hoping that it will provide, along with the Apple Remote, is a quasi Front Row experience. I want to be able to see the normal iPod interface on my TV so that I can browse my music (and now videos – but I’m mainly interested in this for music) from the sofa with an on screen display. Does it do this? Or does the video out only send a signal when it is playing a slideshow or a video?

Also: Interesting 5th generation iPod photos on Flickr

So, how useful is the new iPod Universal Dock?

The New Yorks Times/CNET News.com reports in…

McDonald’s, Nintendo seal Wi-Fi deal

that McDonalds (and their WiFi provider Wayport) will offer free WiFi gaming access for Nintendo DS game console users.
This, in my unsophisticated marketing mind, is brilliant.
McDonalds already draws hordes of early grade school kids with their Kids Meal toy “freebies”.
Now, they can attract the slightly older kids and teenagers (and probably some adults too!) with free WiFi for DS gaming.
I just bought my child a DS and the Nintendogs game.
It looks truly addictive.
Nintendogs can already detect other DS’s running Nintendogs in bark mode.
So, I can see kids DS’s barking at each other in McDonalds and then switching cartridges to play a WiFi multiplayer game.

You can read a few more details about Nintendo’s free WiFi network launch in my blog entry at…

Nintendo DS WiFi Service Going Live on Nov. 14

Got DS?

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

iPhoto is currently my image management tool. It works well with my PowerShot S410, and with my 10D. But there are things about it that drive me absolutely batty, and I’m hoping that Apple’s going to make a long stride forward tomorrow when they plug their gap. Apple actually has two holes in the imaging field. If you look at the video model, there are three levels of application: iMovie, Final Cut Express HD and Final Cut Studio. Three pricepoints, three levels of features. For those of us who love to take photos, I’d like to see the same delineation.

For now, we’ll call them iPhoto, Darkroom Express and Darkroom Pro. Honestly, if these turn out to be the names, I’m totally guessing, and no Apple employee has leaked me word one, those names just make sense to me. What I’m hoping we’ll get is a mid-level program (Darkroom Express) in the $100 to $200 range that will allow for better library management, enhanced image retooling and some serious color correction and photo maninpulation. What I’m also hoping Apple has under its hat is a version of Darkroom to keep Adobe on their toes.

Everyone worries that Apple cows to Adobe to avoid competing with them as to keep the applications that DTP folks know and love available for the Mac platform. However, that’s allowing Adobe to bully Apple, to control Apple, and I think Steve’s probably had just about enough out of Bruce Chisen. When Photoshop Elements didn’t get an upgrade this year, that unleashed the hounds over at Apple. I know that there’s room on my dock for one more application. Here’s hoping Apple’s got the right solution.

What do you want to see from Apple in a more professional photo application?

In my previous prognostications, I had predicted that there would be more than music discussed during the Oct. 12 “One More Thing…” media event. Indeed, Steve Jobs introduced the new iMac with Front Row, built-in iSight, and tons of goodies.

But I could have sworn there would have been an imaging announcement on the 12th too. I left the California Theater happy with what I heard, but scratching my head about the whole photo thing. That’s because I didn’t know at the time Apple had another media event planned. This week, they are gathering the troops again in New York City to make an announcement in conjunction with PhotoPlus Expo. There’s my photography announcement, dang it.

I’m bringing this up because it’s clear that Apple has no intention of being a one-trick iPod company. Apple interests are much broader than that. You don’t think computing is important to them? Wrong! They are very serious about the Mac, OS X, and the professional apps that run on it. And if you attended the NAB show earlier this year, you saw how they dominated the floor with Final Cut Studio and related products.

Now it’s time for photography. This week you’re going to see the same serious intentions in this medium that we’ve witnessed in digital video and music. And when you roll the whole thing up — Unix platform, music, video, hardware, enterprise computing, and now photography — it will be clear that Apple is more than a company that makes iPods.

Hello all, my name is Christopher Roach. Ok, lets go ahead and get all of the roach jokes out of the way right now. Got that out of your system? Good, then let’s begin.

The editors at O’Reilly were kind enough (read crazy enough) to give me my very own weblog. So, here I am writing my very first blog entry and I was thinking that it might be a good idea to start out by introducing myself and talking a bit about what I hope to accomplish with this public forum for my thoughts and opinions.

So, why don’t we start with me. Well, I’m a software engineer with my Master’s in computer science, and my undergrad degrees in Finance and Economics (so, I’m basically an engineer with common sense, frightening!). I’ve written a few articles for O’Reilly in the past. If you’ve read a few of my articles, then by all means, congratulations, you obviously have unsuspected depth. Just in case you haven’t, feel free to peruse them and send me questions or comments if you have them.

If curiosity got the best of you, and you actually looked over my author’s page, you no doubt noticed that most of my articles (with the exception of one) are programming tutorials. This leads me to the second task of this blog entry, namely, what I hope to accomplish with this blog.

Well, I am a complete and total programming geek, which you can obviously tell from the title of this blog if you are as well (extra points to those of you who can name the language in which the title is written). I love collecting languages, editors, IDEs, you name it. If it has something to do with programming, I’ll download it and try it out. What I’m hoping to do with this blog is to treat each of you out there to a barrage of little articles that will hopefully introduce you to new programming languages and their uses on the Mac. I also plan to bring you reviews of different programming tools, libraries, IDEs, etc. If it has something to do with programming and it installs on the Mac, I plan on writing about it. So, in the end, I hope to accomplish all of the tasks in the following list:

• Introduce you all to some new programming languages.
• Introduce you to some new programming tools (IDE, editor, SDK, etc.)
• Introduce some new programming techniques, paradigms, libraries, algorithms, etc.
• Get non-programmers interested in the art of programming.

So, that’s it. That’s who I am and those are the goals that I am tasking myself with. I’m hoping to keep up with a weekly posting schedule, with the occasional rant or rave posting (hey, I did mention that this was a forum for my own opinions, didn’t I?). Well, now that all the introductions and formalities are out of the way, why don’t we end this blog by actually doing something productive.

The last thing I want to do before closing out this blog entry is to go over a few tools that you will all need to download (if you don’t already have them) if you plan on keeping up with all of my postings. Quite a bit of the technologies we will be looking into will be Open Source from the Unix community and as such it will be beneficial for you to have a few of the tools that make downloading and installing ports of this software onto your system easy. Of course, I’m referring to the Fink and DarwinPorts projects.

As I stated above, both of these projects are concerned with porting, and making accessible, the entire world of Unix Open Source software to the Darwin community. Fink has been around a bit longer than DarwinPorts and therefore has more software ports available. As a result, I tend to use Fink more often than I do DarwinPorts, however, its a good idea to have both just in case the software you’re looking for isn’t available on one or the other.

If you are definitely planning on installing these two systems on your computer, you’re in luck, because O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter has a couple of good articles on each of these systems. Koen Vervloesem recently had a great article on installing Fink on OS X. This article will cover everything you need to know about downloading, installing, and using Fink on OS X. Ernest E. Rothman has also written an article dealing with using DarwinPorts for the same tasks. The latter article is a little more dated since it was written for Panther, but I don’t believe that much has changed as far as using DarwinPorts, however, I do believe that a reliable binary now exists for installing DarwinPorts, so you may want to check that out before following the instructions for downloading and installing DarwinPorts from CVS.

So, that’s it. We’ve come to the end of my very first blog posting. It was very nice meeting all of you, and I sincerely hope you’ll all come back here from time-to-time to check out my postings. It’s my desire that all of you will find something of interest here and if you have any requests for something you would like to know a little more about, related to programming of course, please feel free to post a comment and let me know, and I’ll try my hardest to fit them into either my weblog or, if the topic is rather extensive, I may write an article or two on it.

Until next time, thanks for dropping by, and I’ll talk to you all again very soon.

Sony released a version 2.5 upgrade for its Sony Playstation Portable on oct. 13.

Sony PSP 2.5 Update Page

Sony PSP 2.5 Features

The update page provides a brief summary of the upgrade featues including LocationFree Player that lets you stream video from your own sources to the PSP over the Internet and viewing copyright protected video stored on a Memory Stick Duo.
This is an interesting set of released enhancements coming on the heels of the release of Apple’s video iPod and Apples Disney/ABC video content distribution agreement.
You can learn more about LocationFree at:

LocationFree for Sony PSP

What’s your take on this Sony PSP 2.5 firmware upgrade?

Microsoft reports that the security patch released on October 11 fixing issue in Bulletin MS05-051 causing severe problems. Here’s what I found after installing all the patches on several PCs.

CNET’s News.com reports on problem here…

Critical Windows patch may wreak PC havoc

Here’s what I found:

• Desktop PC 1 running Windows XP Home Edition. No problem.
  
• Desktop PC 2 running Windows XP Home Edition: No major problems on reboot. However, Microsoft Office 2003 patches would not install using the web based update process. I ended up downloading the full installation file and then executing it from the hard disk to get it run.
  
• Desktop PC 3 running Windows XP Home Edition. No major problems on reboot. However, Microsoft Office XP Professional patches would not install using the web based update process. I ended up downloading the full installation file and then executing it from the hard disk to get it run.
  
• Notebook PC 1 running Windows XP Professional Edition. No problems.
  
• Notebook PC 2 running Windows XP Professional Edition. My user profile settings disappeared and I could not login after the first reboot. I was able to login after the second reboot but my user profile settings had disappeared. The user settings reappeared after the third reboot.
  
• Notebook PC 3 running Windows XP Home Edition. The notebook stalled in the middle of the boot process and reported This application or DLL C:\Windows\System32\umpnpmgr.dll is not a valid Windows image. I tried using a Safe Mode reboot and also restoring using . I ended up reformatting and reinstalling Windows XP on this notebook (data was backed up, so no hair pulling took place :-). I applied all the patches again to this rebuilt PC (upgraded to XP Professional Edition since I had to rebuild from scratch).
  

As you can see, I had a real mixed bag of experiences during this Patch Tuesday period.
I hope you had a better more consistent experience.

What happened to your Windows XP box after installing this past Patch Tuesday’s security patches?

Just last year I sat in the front row and listened to Mark Cuban (the genius of the content delivery business and consequently rich guy too) respond to questions at the first Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. About half way through his session, someone called out “Apple Computer.” Mark shot back, “niche player.” He went on to say that Apple will never hit the big time because they don’t think big enough. I guess thinking big is not the same as think different.

Mark Cuban on stage at the 2004 Web 2.0 Conference.

Now don’t get me wrong. I dig Mark Cuban. My favorite quote by him is: “If you look around the bargaining table and you don’t see the sucker, guess what? It’s you.” That’s great stuff. And today he was quoted in a CRN story as saying, “(ABC’s) Bob Iger has enabled a new revenue stream, which if it grows, could definitely be the revenue stream that saves primetime network TV.” (I think Bob Iger is the CEO of Disney, which owns ABC, but I could be foggy on that. Cuban didn’t say “ABC” to my knowledge, that must have been added by an editor.)

According to the story, Cuban appears to think that Apple is the initiator on this TV deal, but won’t necessarily dominate as they have with music. “Distribution must expand beyond Apple, and it will. It will be interesting to see how fast MicroSoft, Yahoo, Google, Sony (If Sony had an ITunes and an ABC deal for the PSP..wow !), AOL and even retailers like Walmart Online and Best Buy respond. Which they will. They arent going to let Apple run away with this market like they did music.”

I can’t verify these quotes because I didn’t actually hear Mark say them, but the words do sound like his.

A lot of people must agree that Apple is on to something here. Stock closed today at $54. It’s gone up nearly $5 a share since the announcements at the “One More Thing…” event on Wednesday. These are the same investors who dumped Apple stock a few days before because despite having one of its best quarters ever, it didn’t meet their “expectations.” This is a tough crowd.

And so is Mark Cuban. He didn’t get rich by being nice. So, does he still think Apple’s a niche player? Possibly. Between opinions of industry giants such as he, and those demanding investors, you can see how brutal this game is. And yet, Apple keeps rolling along.

So my question is: is it really a niche when you’re a billion dollar company? Man, this is a high stakes game.

Related link: https://www.apple.com/itunes/

Well, that didn’t last long at all. Apple released iTunes 5 just five weeks ago. And now they’ve released iTunes 6! I figured this is a good time to talk about the new features in iTunes. I’ll get to the new stuff in iTunes 6, but first I’d like to go over what I think are the real gems that Apple gave us in iTunes 5. And, unfortunately, gapless playback wasn’t added in either of the recent updates.

Five

Apple released iTunes 5 to coincide with the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone and the iPod Nano. But, the features added for those two products aren’t what I would consider the highlights of that event. There’s more there once you scratch the surface (no pun intended).

Here we are inside of iTunes’ preferences. This is sort of a new feature in iTunes 5. When iTunes began support for podcasts and the podcast directory, Apple added a podcast preset for the AAC encoder. iTunes 5 has renamed this to Spoken Podcast to reflect the fact that it is using optimizations for encoding voices and not music.

Apple moved the preferences for displaying the Podcasts and Music Store sources from the General tab to the Parental tab. The Parental tab is totally new to iTunes 5 and also has checkboxes for sharing music and hiding explicit content from the Music Store. On Macintoshes, you can lock all of the preferences on the Parental tab by clicking the lock icon and authenticating as an administrative user.

Smart Shuffle was one of the features that Steve Jobs touted at the Apple special event where he announced iTunes 5. As Steve said, Smart Shuffle was created to make shuffling your music less random. The human mind is programmed to seek patterns — even where there are none. We anthropomorphize random shuffling and think that iTunes is picking music we like. Well, Smart Shuffling gets rid of that. It makes it less likely that songs by the same artist or from the same album will play next to each other.

Another shuffling improvement is the ability to shuffle by grouping. Grouping is a field that people use for classical music and I don’t know much about. I’m sure many people are very happy about this, though.

Here’s yet another feature that diehard iTunes fans have been waiting for. The ability to encoded AAC files (.m4a) with a variable bit-rate. This lets the encoder decided whether more bits are needed for complex sections of a particular song instead of encoding the entire song — even silence &em; at the same bit-rate. Now if only the Pioneer head unit in my new Scion XA would play back AAC files instead of just MP3 and WMA! (Scion, what were you thinking?)

The MP3 encoder is also improved. Use this opportunity to explore iTunes’ preferences for yourself if you haven’t already.

You can get to this window by selecting a song, and choosing Get Info from the File menu. The Options tab is where the real jewels of the iTunes 5 update are in my opinion. Something everyone has been longing for is an easy way to make any file bookmarkable. There have been many AppleScripts created to solve this dilemma and I’ve always had varying results of success using them. My iPod wouldn’t wake from sleep what seemed like about half of the time when it went to sleep while playing one the files I made bookmarkable with AppleScript. The checkbox on this screen that allows you to do this is new in iTunes 5, and I haven’t had any problems that required me to reset my iPod in the many weeks I’ve been using this feature.

Another new feature here is to mark a file as one that should be skipped when shuffling. This is a great feature for any spoken word file you have in your library that you wouldn’t want to come up while you’re rocking out to a shuffling of songs. I use it for audiobooks that I have ripped myself.

Both of these checkboxes are checked for podcasts that are downloaded through iTunes. Because of this, podcasts have been removed from the podcast ghetto they were in in prior versions of iTunes and now show up in other areas of iTunes such as Smart Playlists.

Speak of the devil… This is how you can identify podcasts in Smart Playlists. They’ve added a boolean field to files that is true for podcasts that have been downloaded via iTunes. This is a good way to get podcasts onto your Shuffle.

Six

Shortly after iTunes 5, the Nano, and the ROKR were released, Steve Jobs scheduled another special event to discuss One more thing… That one more thing turned out to be three. Steve also announced the new Imac (Act I) and iPod (Act II). But, I’m only here to talk about iTunes 6.

At the beginning of what he called “Act III,” Steve told his audience that Apple has now distributed over 200,000,000 copies of iTunes; and those are just the copies they know about. He also mentioned that Apple has been able to grab 84% of the US market for music purchased via downloads. Where 5’s new features were mainly behind the scenes, 6’s are all out front — assuming you spend time in the Music Store.

The ability to purchase items as gifts from the iTunes Music Store, is the first new feature mentioned in the event. You can give an individual song, an album, or even a custom playlist just for your friend. This brings those embarrassing romantic mix-tapes into the 21^st century.

Apple has also enabled customer reviews. If you’ve been waiting to write a scathing review of Pretty Vegas or a glowing one of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, now is your chance.
And in their wisdom, Apple has seen fit to include customer reviews reviews. You can let Apple know if you find a review particularly helpful or not after clicking through to the more detailed reviews page. Maybe we should all let Apple know what we think of Luke’s lovely comment.

Apple has also added recommendations to the Store. They look at your purchase history and suggest other albums and songs that they think you’ll be interested in. From the screenshot that I took, you’d probably think that I have strange tastes. Please believe me when I say that I just haven’t bought enough from iTunes for Apple to make good recommendations. No, I’m not listening to Christmas music in October.

Apple has released this feature in a beta state, and they’re seeking feedback on how well it works.

This is the big one. Apple has started selling videos on the Store. They’re selling for $1.99 a pop, which I think is $1 too high. But, it isn’t an unexpected price considering the current goings-on.

Customers can choose from among 2,000 music videos, six Pixar short films, five different TV shows from ABC & Disney (Desperate Housewives and Lost among them), and innumerable video podcasts. The TV shows will be available for purchase through iTunes the day following their original air date. To be honest, though, I don’t see the point of buying these videos when I can get them for free over broadcast TV or down the road when they come out on DVD. Maybe it is just because I don’t subscribe to cable, but the only show I’d pay for is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And I’d only pay 25¢ per episode for that. If Apple and Comedy Central are smart enough to offer this, I could watch yesterday’s Daily Show on the bus ride in to work every morning for about $5 a month ($60 a year).

At any rate, the videos are 320×240 (the native resolution of the new iPods) and encoded in H.264. They are protected with FairPlay DRM just like music purchased from the iTunes Music Store. However, the restrictions are slightly more aggressive: you can still play them on up to five computer and on unlimited iPods, but there will be no burning to CDs or DVDs. Steve made it a point to say that there are no rental fees and the media never times out.

Even if you don’t buy any videos from the iTunes Music Store (or have any included in albums you buy from it), you can still use some of the new iTunes Video functionality. There is now a Videos source that will display any videos that you have added to your iTunes library or have been received via podcast. Subscribe to Systm and check it out.

One more thing…

iTunes 6 has smoothly rounded corners! iTunes 5 had these horrible chopped off corners and it’s good to see Apple fixed this bug in the past five weeks.

PS — I really had to shrink my screen shots to get them on the O’Reilly site. If you want to see this article with larger images, go to IntTech or Brewing Designs.

Have any questions about these features or discover any additional features? Tell me about it!

When I discovered that I couldn’t use iPhoto 5 or Bridge for .CR2 Raw files from the new Canon 5D DSLR, I had to start looking for workflow workarounds. I decided to start with what’s right under my nose: Canon’s “Digital Photo Professional” (version 2.0) that was included on my bundled Solution Disk (version 11.0).

After testing the Raw files I shot at the Apple “One More Thing…” event, I concluded that Canon’s software was pretty good for browsing and rating my images, but not as enjoyable as Camera Raw for editing them. And that’s the workflow I’m using at the moment: Canon DPP for browsing and sorting and Adobe Camera Raw for the actual editing.

I’ve published more detail about this, plus a cool group shot of Steve Jobs and Wynton Marsalis.

Related link: https://www.apple.com/support/tiger/burn/

13 Oct 05 @ 2pm - Thanks for all of the great feedback about Toast. The problem is…I just can’t bring myself to pay that kind of money for something just for this specific little purpose. Truthfully, I was hoping that someone would point me to some website that Google had mysteriously hidden away from me. So if anyone would find the app described below useful, respond with a “hear, hear!” (and possibly recommendations for **simple** options) and I’ll work something up that’s nice enough to share.

Every now and then I need to copy a CD. Sometimes it’s an audio CD and sometimes it’s a data CD. After making what I feel has been a reasonable attempt to find a simple 2-click solution, I’m left empty-handed.

Before I take matters in my own hands again only to find out that someone else has saved me some work, could someone please tell me that I at least have a reasonable expectation? Why should there have to be a visible artifact during this process? From Disc Utility’s help:

You can use Disk Utility to quickly make copies of a CD that contains information. To do so, first you create a copy, or “disk image,” of the CD. Then you can make additional copies from the disk image. To learn more about using Disk Utility, open Disk Utility, in the /Applications/Utilities folder, and choose Help>Disk Utility Help.

Now that’s just clumsy (although it does have its uses.) And sure, there are plenty of ways to do it in Terminal — and I’m all about Terminal — but can it really be the case that someone hasn’t already automated the task to the following simple process:

Click 1 - Click the app to start the process (we’ll assume it’s already in the dock.)

Click 2 - Prompt for the CD you want to copy if the drive is empty or confirm the one that’s already in the drive. Click “Continue” to proceed.

When it’s time to enter a blank CD, automatically eject the drive, wait for a blank disc to be inserted, and then continue without any intervention at all.

Notice that the intermediate step of creating the artifact goes unseen, and you might even have one default option that would automatically start the copying process if a non-blank CD is already in the drive when you open the app. That would take us down to 1-click

I don’t want configuration options and variety. Just a simple 2-click solution. Do I have to sweat to get it?

Would anyone else even be interested in such a thing or is this my own little selfish desire?

In the last month or so I’ve been helping out with the port of a Math visualization application. Help out is a polite way of saying I’ve refactored a bit here or there but the other developer is doing all of the work. I’ve written a bunch of test code and I understand his design and I now have some fundamental questions that I’ll explain in this series of blog entries.

First, I wonder whether or not we should move the project to J2SE 5.0.

This is a Java application that targets college students, professors, and professional mathematicians. There may be high school students and teachers here or there who use it as well. The application should be ready in six months to a year. What in Java 5 will make a difference to the lives of an end user?

I worry whether or not moving to Java 5 will mean that there are some people who will not be able to use this application. Tiger does not seem to benefit the end user (except for some of the threading facilities that have been added). Any thoughts on this?

Moving to Tiger will make the code much cleaner. It will be easier to understand the current codebase and it will be easier for developers to add surfaces and curves that the software will represent. As I read the current code I see places to use everything from enumerated types, to generics and annotations, to the enhanced for loop. All of these features that I fought a year ago, I’m now finding what I consider to be obvious places to apply them.

Part of it may just be laziness on my part. As I’ve become accustomed to some of the Tiger conventions, it’s become less common for me to think about how I would work without them. One obvious place this comes up in the current application is in working with collections of points and vectors (vector as in ordered tuples representing derivatives). I take iterating without iterators and using generics when pulling an element out of a collection for granted now.

So this brings me to my questions:

(1) how do you decide it’s time to move to Java 5.0 - and

(2) what are your reasons for and against doing so?

Is it time for Tiger?

Okay, so everyone’s abuzz today with news of the new iPod, and the new iMac. Video on your iPod, blah, blah, blah. Well, okay, maybe not blah, but you get my point. Unlike listening to your iPod, you can walk around and do stuff without worrying about walking off the curb and getting clipped by a bus. (Well, at least most of us can.)

To me, though, the new iPod is a device that’s ahead of its time. Just as the first generation iPod revolutionized the way we listen to music, the new iPod will revolutionize the way we consume television. Sure, the initial appeal of the new iPod will likely be commuters who, for example, ride the MBTA’s Commuter Rail to and from Boston and want to catch up on their favorite TV shows. A DVP in your palm, per se. What appeals to me most about the new iPod is not the small screen (I sure wish Apple would’ve gone with a PSP-style design with a wider screen that takes up the front and thumb controls on the sides), but the possibility of dumping Comcast or cable TV in general. The new iPod, in my not so humble opinion, is competition to the cable companies, and they should beware.

Think about it…

At present, I pay about sixty bucks a month to Comcast for a bunch of crappy channels I never watch, mainly so I can get local TV, ESPN, OLN, CNN, and a few random channels I watch during my insomnia fits. And because I’m not willing to belly up to the trough and spend money on a premium package to get HBO for shows like Six Feet Under or Deadwood, I end up renting previous seasons’ shows from NetFlix.

So now I’m thinking, hey, if Apple were to strike a deal with HBO or Showtime, they could really change the way people watch TV shows. Make it a subscription service. I want to subscribe to the next season of Deadwood, so that’ll be $20 or $25 for QuickTime H.264 HD versions of the show that I can download and watch on either my iPod or through my Mac (with the help of Front Row, but more on that in a sec), and they’ve just changed my viewing habits. The day after an episode airs, iTunes snags it and downloads it to my Mac and syncs that with my iPod. That’d be so cool! Not just because I could watch the episodes while commuting on the bus or from the comfort of my living room, but because it turns the screws on the cable companies who get way too much for what they offer. HBO and Showtime might even possibly make more this way than they would by getting whatever kick-back it is from the ca-co’s.

And that leads to the “telegraphed punch”. Apple clearly has something up Steve’s sleeves with Front Row. I mean, just look at it! If you thought today’s media event was about “One More Thing…”, think again people. This is just the beginning. Speculate, postulate, hypothesize…whatever…but you can bet that the new iMac is just “The First Thing” we’ll see that has Front Row inside. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball said it best:

“The full-screen UI of Front Row is just begging to be hooked up to a TV. Begging. Now that there exists a “video iPod”, the next new “Apple has to be working on this” mega-rumor is going to revolve around how Apple plans to bring this Front Row UI to your TV. What’s interesting about this is that while Apple has a reputation for making spectacular announcements, their long-term strategy for a media entertainment platform is unfolding incrementally.”

Around this time last year, rumors were running wild that Apple was going to come out with some new home theatre device at Macworld San Francisco. Instead, we got to see the Mac mini debut, which was close, but not quite what some people were expecting. And with MWSF2006 just around the corner, I’m sure the rumor mills will be having a field day with hints and speculation about an Apple home media center device. It’d be great to see something that’s the same size as other home stereo components, except something that’s wireless and is packed with a large hard drive, a G5 chip, and a kick-ass graphics card. Charge $499 for it and I’m sure it’d sell like hot cakes.

Sure, I can’t wait to get the new iPod, but what I really want is the next “One More Thing…”

What are your thoughts about the new iPod and Front Row?

Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in. Good movies are like that. You just keep thinking about them long after you’ve left the theater.

Apple’s “One More Thing…” event is also in that category. Today’s presentation was a lesson in how to launch a product. First you chose a compelling location: The California Theater in San Jose. This place is stunning inside and out. As you’ll see from the shots I’ve included, the lighting and ambiance complemented Steve’s narration.

Wynton Marsalis thrilled the audience during the “encore” performance at the California Theater.

Which leads me to the framework for the event itself: the 3-act play. This device is both entertaining and useful. You actually knew where you were during the course of the presentation. Each act added a little anticipation as we churned toward the climax of the play. The products themselves — iTunes 6 and the iPod video — were worthy of the build up. I like this format and wouldn’t mind seeing a variation of it again.

Steve Jobs was well-prepared as always. But he seemed even more relaxed and witty than usual. He was the narrator with perfect timing. Did anyone notice that he wasn’t wearing blue jeans?

After the show, Steve Jobs shows off the new video iPod to the press.

After working through the announcements themselves, Steve introduced Wynton Marsalis. It’s still about the music, isn’t it? Wynton and his fellow musicians were outstanding. It was a tasteful convergence of place, content, and performance. High marks to Apple for orchestrating this event. And yes, I’m still thinking about it…

So Steve pulled some surprises out of his hat this morning, unveiling not just a video-enabled iPod (which everyone was expecting), but also a completely new home entertainment, or “media center” strategy, which no-one was expecting - at least not with the iMac.

There was much speculation about an Airport Express that handles video (surely this can’t be far away), and in the past there’s been plenty about the possibility of the Mac mini having center stage in Apple’s quest to conquer the TV room. But the iMac? I don’t think many people saw that coming.

It makes a lot of sense though. An iMac plus a low cost TV card suddenly looks like an attractive option for a TV, as long as you don’t expect too much in terms of screen size.

With the creation of the Front Row remote control interface, Apple has turned the iMac into an appliance, a mission that Jobs has taken on personally for years now. He has always wanted the computer to offer appliance-style (think TV) simplicity so that it could appeal to the wider masses. With Frontrow, he has that simplicity.

And with the changes to the iTunes Music Store, now offering music videos and selected TV shows, he has the beginnings of some high quality content to offer to those masses.

Apple always thinks about the nitty-gritty stuff. When you buy a TV episode from iTunes, it appears automatically in your Front Row menu. You don’t even have to drag anything from anywhere; it just happens.

It’s all such a change from just a year ago. Steve has never been very positive about the idea of video on an iPod.

Look, here are some of the things he’s been quoted as saying on the subject:

“So you can do video on these devices if you want to, but the things that are suboptimal about it are the screen size and the battery life - things like that.”

“Whether people want to buy a device just to watch video is not clear - so far the answer’s been no. Devices that do video… have not been successful yet. No-one’s figured out the right formula.”

“You can’t watch a video and drive a car. We’re focused on music.”

Video is “the wrong direction to go”, “there’s no content,” “the screens are too small” and competitors to the iPod putting R&D into providing video are “digging in the wrong place.”

Well, Steve must now have decided that battery life is no longer an issue, that the screens are just the right size, and that there’s some perfect content.

Yes, there is content that’s high quality. Getting Desperate Housewives and Lost among the first batch of programmes is Jobs doing what he does best.

His introduction to them went like this:

“What’s the number one TV show? Desperate Housewives. And what’s the number two TV show? Lost. And what channel are they on? ABC. And who owns ABC? Disney.”

(Pause)

“I know these guys.”

Steve’s TV executive pals have agreed to be his lab rats, as he undertakes the next great Apple experiment; can he do to TV what he’s done to music?

It’s all about supply and demand. In the past, Jobs has made a point of saying that people won’t buy a video iPod because there isn’t the demand for it, and there isn’t the demand because there’s no supply either. No-one was offering low-cost downloads of interesting content.

And content is what people demand. With the ABC/Disney/Pixar content sourced for this announcement, Jobs is effectively making a public declaration to the rest of the TV media industry: “See what we did with music? We can do it for your TV shows too. You can still make money out of this. Don’t hesitate; join us.”

Hands up if the Photobooth demo made you laugh

One neat thing about QuickTime is that it allows you to treat songs from the iTunes Music Store pretty much like any other QuickTime content. In particular, this means you can play the DRM’ed audio files, and discover their metadata. I covered this from a Java POV in the book QuickTime for Java: A Developer’s Notebook, and from an Objective-C POV in the article What’s New For Developers in QuickTime 7.

This makes QuickTime very useful in general-purpose media applications, as it apparently the only way to work with these DRM’ed files outside of Apple’s applications.

So, obviously, with the iTunes Music Store now selling videos, you have to wonder if that works the same way.

I’ll cut to the chase: it doesn’t.

I bought the Pixar short Boundin’ for the sake of experimentation. Also, my three-year-old loves it. QuickTime Player can play this file, and checking the movie properties reveals video in the “AVC0″ format (?!) at a rather low resolution of 320×176 with millions of colors, and audio in “AAC (protected)” format, stereo 44.100 kHz. The low video resolution suits the iPod and the little player window that is iTunes default, but it’s not particularly pleasant to look at in full-screen.

If you’re a Java programmer and you use the book’s BasicQTPlayer example from chapter two, opening the file Boundin’.m4v kicks up the error:


quicktime.std.StdQTException[QTJava:6.1.3b1],-2126=notAllowedToSaveMovieErr,QT.vers:7038000

at quicktime.std.StdQTException.checkError(StdQTException.java:38)

at quicktime.std.movies.Movie.fromFile(Movie.java:211)

at quicktime.std.movies.Movie.fromFile(Movie.java:174)

at com.oreilly.qtjnotebook.ch02.BasicQTPlayer.main(BasicQTPlayer.java:52)



While using the Obj-C “QTMiniDemo” from the article offers a less-descriptive error with the same error code:


Creating qtmovie

Error!

2005-10-12 16:19:59.882 QT7MiniDemo[443] ERR: NSError "an unknown error occurred" Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-2126 UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription = "an unknown error occurred"; }
an unknown error occurred



Perhaps Apple will give us a call we can make that will allow us to open the movie and get a visual component but not save it or do other things that would piss off Hollywood. Let’s watch for release notes of the next SDK, and/or the valuable (if dated) Letters From the Ice Floe (starring KickTam, the forgotten QuickTime mascot).

Planning on writing an app to work with iTunes Music Store movies?

OK folks, here’s the skinny:

TV on your iPod: TV shows for two bucks. Watch on the run. This is part of iTunes 6 (wha? we only just got iTunes 5!). Other features include music videos on the iTMS, short films (Pixar, there’s a shock), and gift tokens; also some Amazonization, with user reviews and “If you liked that, you’ll like this” cross-selling.

New video-enabled iPods. H.264. Video out. 2.5 inch screen. Verrrry thin. 20GB and 60GB. Also available in black. But … 4:3 screen ratio.

New iMacs: 1.9GHz 17 inch, and 2.1GHz 20 inch. Slimmer, slightly less boxy body. Built-in iSight camera. Nice touch: the screen itself flashes white to illuminate your face when you take a self-portrait. No modem! (About time too, I say.) Machine also comes with FrontRow, a tiny iPod shuffle-like remote control. This is a move to push iMacs, not Mac minis, as the home entertainment appliance. A very interesting direction.

Here’s a look at what FrontRow looks like on screen. Kinda like the iPod menu system, right?

More detail and analysis to come later.

After all the hype, are you left with a warm glow or a feeling of bitter disappointment?

The release of Apple’s fourth quarter financial results look great on the press release. It’s the “best year in Apple’s history,” says Steve. You’d expect him to say something like that, and some of the big numbers published would make anyone happy: $3.68 billion quarterly revenues, profit of $430 million; 1.2 million Macs and 6.4 million iPods sold; “staggering” demand for the iPod nano.

But if you have an hour to spare, it’s well worth taking some time to listen to the conference call Q&A session for business analysts to ask any question they like about the company’s performance. Although the executives answering the questions are as tight-lipped as you’d expect them to be about forthcoming events, such as the Big Launch coming later today, a number of tiny interesting snippets emerge.

Firstly, the business community is not overly impressed with all of the results figures. Referencing iPod sales numbers, one analyst remarks: “Frankly, they’re pretty weak.”

Question after question comes about the transition from iPod mini to iPod nano. If Apple was winding down mini distribution in preparation (which it was), why weren’t the nano sales even better? There is much talk of “constraints” on the iPod nano supply, but the Apple executives will not be drawn on what those constraints might be. Several analysts press them on the supply of iPod components - perhaps it’s not as good as Apple hoped? But the executives always answer with the same “iPod nano demand is staggering; we cannot predict when supply will match with demand” mantra.

None of which is to say that the iPod does not continue to be a huge success. In August, 75% of all MP3 players sold in the US were iPods. Apple expects a third of new automobiles launched in 2006 to have direct iPod connectivity slots. As for digital music, Apple says it has 80% of the US market in legal music downloads.

Falling DRAM prices were an unexpected bonus for Apple during the quarter. While it’s not stated explicitly, the implication is that this might be why some desktop models, notably the Mac mini, benefited from a default RAM boost to 512MB.

Back to school business has helped Apple along towards the end of the quarter. But the executives refuse several times to say how many desktop machines have been sold (although they’re happy admit that a “normal seasonal decline” has had an effect). Growth in Europe has been impressive, up 92%.

Finally, as far as today’s Big Announcement goes, a couple of things I noticed. In the official press release, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer is quoted saying: “Looking ahead to the first quarter of fiscal 2006 which will span 14 weeks, we expect revenue of about $4.7 billion.” Compare that to the $3.68 billion for this last quarter. During the conference call, one of the executives admits that the prediction takes into account the new product launch. He also makes reference to the “announcements” (plural, not singular) and passing mention of PowerPC product improvements.

Based on which, I predict today’s event will be about more than one product; not just “One more thing”, but several, at least one of which is expected to be partially responsible for a huge sales boost (an extra billion dollars) between now and next spring. Also, we’ve yet to see the final PowerPC Mac released before the Intel switch next year.

The countdown has begun…

If you have a new Canon 5D and are ready to shoot Raw, be prepared for a few bumps in your workflow. You can’t use the current version of Bridge or iPhoto 5 to browse your thumbnails. You can open the .CR2 files in Camera Raw 3.2. More on this by reading Dealing with Canon 5D Raw Files.

In preparation for NaNoWriMo, as well as connected to my recent explorations of emacs and general Terminal goodness, I’ve done some investigating of what options are available for creating a full screen writing environment.

There are different meanings for ‘full screen’ — at its simplest, one application is taking up most of or the entire screen. How much of the rest of the OS/UI environment is visible is the crux of the matter. Otherwise you can just maximize your favorite text editor’s window and be done with it.

After quite a bit of trying out various options and arrangements, I’ve settled on two.

The first (the capability for which has been removed as of Tiger from what I can tell) should be familiar to longtime Mac OS X users: using >console as a login name, no password, which brings up a terminal-style login prompt. Then you can use vi or emacs or whatever you like for a true full-screen experience. Something close, at least in spirit, is to create a new window in Terminal, give it a larger font size, and then maximize the window.

This brings up a set of options that sacrifice the ‘full’ full-screen arrangement for ease of use. Using the non-metal Smultron, I jacked up the text size with a maximized window, then got rid of everything else I could. I have the Dock hidden all the time now, so that was already gone. Hid the toolbar and the left-hand document list. This left the standard menubar up top, the window title bar (with widgets in graphite rather than colorful), some framing along the sides, and the footer at the bottom with a small wordcount status item. The extraneous stuff is pretty subdued, particularly if I ditch the unnecessary menubar widgets — which is technically all of them apart from the Spotlight icon which is not generally removable. But I’ll probably leave the clock and Airport indicator.

Very much the same type of thing can be achieved in most word processors and text editors. After experimenting with a number of them, I eventually settled on getting a similar effect in TextEdit by setting it to Wrap to Page, then maximizing the window and zooming in to 200%. What’s the difference? Eh. I lose the ongoing wordcount at the bottom, but I imagine that would get distracting after a while. Less framing around the edges which is cool. And by using Wrap to Page, there’s a nice bit of white space on either side of the text. Here’s a screenshot.

So much for the free options. The rest of the candidates are newer writing programs such as MacJournal, CopyWrite, Jer’s Novel Writer, and Ulysses. These are $29.95, $29.99, free (until version 1.x), and ~$120 respectively. Their full-screen presentations vary but are relatively equivalent. The real question is how much you wish to pay. Or if you do.

What’s the big whoop about full-screen? Well, it’s something to do with the terminal-based text editing obsession we’ve talked about recently. Perhaps it’s different for writers, but having what amounts to a blank piece of paper and nothing else on the screen is very attractive, not to mention conducive to getting the words out.

Addendum: something I am hoping to get to work (but ran into errors during compiling) was using the X11.app along with the ratpoison window manager. Saw this mentioned in a MacSlash article about the topic: Full screen Text Editing?

NOTE: Both photos linked directly from the Palm.com site

Palm released the $99 Z22 (with 160×160 color LCD) and $299 TX (with both Bluetooth and WiFI and a 320×480 color LCD). It will be interesting to see what Palm OS fans think about these new budget priced PDA entries.
The Z22 is the lowest priced PDA I know of.
However, it sacrifices screen resolution and music/video playback.
The TX is the lowest priced PDA with both Bluetooth and WiFi (it also has 128MB internal RAM).
It also has a relatively high resolution 320×480 color LCD.
However, it cannot record voice memos and has a relatively slow 312MHz processor (compared to the 416MHz processors in the T5 and LifeDrive).

Palm Z22 product page

Palm TX product page

I’ll wager (figuratively, of course :-) that both units will sell pretty well at their budget price points.

Buying a Z22 or TX? Let us know what you think of your new PDA!

F-Secure announced its F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus
for mobile devices (PDAs and Smartphones) running Microsoft Windows Mobile. But what, exactly, is it guarding against?
If I’m reading the press release correctly, it does not scan for a carried virus (a virus that attacks, for example, Microsoft Windows XP but does not affect Windows Mobile).
And, I am hard pressed to think of a virus/worm affecting Microsoft Windows Mobile that is in the wild (not a lab demonstration).

Even the malware affecting Symbian-based smartphones are not very virulent.
For example, security.itworld.com
interviewed Peter Firstbrook (Program Director at Meta Group)
earlier this year.
Here’s one quote from Mr. Firstbrook:
Most viruses require gullible users to execute them. For example, the Cabir worm requires Bluetooth users to initiate an action not just once but twice or more. So the obvious advice is to not accept or execute code from an unknown source (similar advice our moms gave us years ago to not accept candy from strangers).

If someone from F-Secure would care to to enlighten me and other users of mobile devices based on Microsoft Windows Mobile, please do!

BTW, the press release dated Oct. 10, 2005, states support for Windows Mobile 2003 and 2003 Second Edition.
However, it does not say anything about supporting the current generation Windows Mobile 5 devices.

As a side-note, F-Secure has a website formatted for display on mobile devices at:

https://mobile.f-secure.com/

Know of any virus/worm/malware in the wild that targets Microsoft Windows Mobile devices?

Related link: https://macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/8050

Earlier I authored a post entitled “How Intellectual Property Laws Can Drain Your Battery’s Juice” but tried to steer the discussion away from intellectual property controversy as much as possible. After getting some inspiration from David Battino’s “NetFlix for Free . . .Plus a DVD-Copying Tip” post, however, I’ve decided to go ahead and vent something I restrained myself from last time: Is ripping a DVD always a crime — no matter what?

If you always do things by the book — no matter what — then you’ll probably nod immediately and say, “Well of course it is. The disc contains a warning that expressly forbids you from copying it without the authoritative written approval of … and they’ll drag you out into the street and whip you with a stick if you even think about it.”

If you’re this kind of thinker, then you’re underlying thesis is probably based upon the notion that in purchasing a DVD, you’re gaining the rights to view the contents of the physical disc and you’re completely and totally bound by the licensing agreement — no matter what. No backups, no copying, no compressing it to another format, etc. Ok, that’s all well and good. No one is can fault you for that, but make sure that you’re just as diligent in calling the mattress police if you ever find one with a tag that’s been prematurely removed. (Fletch anyone?)

Assuming that there’s a least a few dissenting opinions out there, what about those folks who want to copy a DVD for what would otherwise be a totally legitimate purpose if it weren’t for that little warning? To quote David: “After I watch the movies, I’ll delete the copied files; I have no interest in piracy, just time-shifting”

Amen. If I had to guess, I’d think there might just be a silent majority out there that feels the same way.

Although I can totally empathize with the mattress police crowd, let’s pretend that we’re philosophers and make the assumption that it’s at least a possibility that those DVD warnings are inherently bogus, and thus, they should be disregarded entirely. But let’s not be intellectual property pirates either. We’ll go along with some of the conventional wisdom of the audio industry and assume that it would be alright to legitimately backup and make a copy for personal use.

Assuming that you haven’t violently left the building by now, I’ll take it that you’re willing to play along — if for nothing else then to play devil’s advocate. While there’s a number of ways that we could slice this pie, I don’t even necessarily want to be dogmatic about any particular point of view as much as I just want to throw out some of the possible options for analysis.

To give all of this abstract talk a little more concrete grounding, I recently noticed that the local McDonald’s has a DVD rental machine. You swipe your card, and out pops a movie for a buck. As long as you return it to the machine within 24 hours, all is well. If you don’t return it within some time period, it becomes yours and you get charged. It’s a pretty clever technique. They lure you in for a cheap rental, and you likely spend money on food as you pass through.

Let’s assume that we’ve rented a DVD for a 24 hour period and have a DVD ripper handy. Without trying to be tooexhaustive, here are a few possible scenarios:

• You return the movie after watching it
• You return the movie without watching it
• You rip DVD, don’t watch it, and delete it within the 24 hour rental period
• You rip DVD, don’t watch it, and delete it 48 hours later
• You rip the DVD, watch the ripped version within the 24 hour rental period and then delete it immediately
• You rip the DVD, watch the ripped version within the 24 hour rental period, but don’t delete it until 48 hours later
• You rip the DVD, don’t watch it till 48 hours later, but immediately delete it after watching

Can we devise some kind of ordering scheme and then make a clear division between “right” and “wrong”? Or does the law trump all else and ultimately dictate that we should just stop all of this free-thinking nonsense?

I understand the difference between renting the rights to view the contents of a physical disk for some time period and purchasing the right to view a disc as a one time service but am still interested in hearing what you have to say about all of it.

True or False: Ripping a DVD is always a crime — no matter what.

“Software Update” is one of my favorite features of OS X. Instead of having to search for and then download OS updates, every day in the background the updates are downloaded and installed for me.

Unfortunately it is one of the features, at least so far as I can tell, that Apple has not opened up to outsiders. So just about every new application out there has its own “Check For Updates” feature built into it. For the most part this is not much of a hassle, but there are any number of applications on my laptop that I run infrequently or mainly when I am not connected to the Internet.

My brother, a film editor, has it worse. He does not have connectivity at home and therefore does not connect his main work machine, a G5 desktop, to the internet very often. This may sound odd, but being connected to the internet does not add any value to the work of a film editor. Plus the natural waiting involved in editing coupled with the endless ability to waste time on the internet is a dangerous combination.

The other day he called because he was unable to get some video to work in one of his editing applications. It took a while to debug, but finally we figured out that he was missing a CODEC that was in an update that he didn’t have installed. Eventually he was able to download it to his laptop and install it on his desktop machine. The process of getting the update was a bit like the old days though.

Is there any better way to get updates, either batched for users who are often offline or a system where all applications can register themselves, where to look for their updates and how often to check ?

Any other features you’d like to see in a future version of “Software Update” ?

Related link: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/5071215/detail.html

Since it’s dropped off the radar of most Mac news sites, here’s an update on the proposed Cobb County, Georgia iBook program: a grand jury has convened to determine if the $100 million contract was illegally granted to Apple. This is an extremely unusual development, as the use of special grand juries in educational issues in Georgia is rare, and moreover, seemingly no one is claiming any illegal behavior in the bidding process.

There are two separate issues in this controversy. The first is whether the bidding process unfairly favored Apple. That’s what the grand jury is investigating. But that’s not what scuttled the plan: what brought it down was that it was to be paid for by a voter-approved SPLOST (Special-Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) that was sold to the voters as a general-purpose educational technology and infrastructure upgrade. Taxpayers balked at the idea that it would instead be used to pay for laptops to be used by students: many didn’t believe assurances that the computers could be kept safe, functioning, and easily replaced, while others got into a predictable and short-sighted “use Windows because that’s what businesses use” snit. They sued the county - represented by an ex-Governor, no less - and a court issued an injunction against continuing the program. At that point, the county abandoned the program, regardless of the suit’s outcome.

Curiously, you can still find Apple’s news release announcing its selection as the supplier for the program. Memo to Apple: it is long since time to begin the cover-up and pretend that this never happened. Y’know, like OpenDoc.

C’mon, shoot the messenger!

Nintento announced its Nintendo WiFi Connection wireless service launches in the US on Nov. 14.

Nintendo Creates An Easy, Accessible Video Game Network - And It’s Free

The press release mentions four upcoming Nintendo DS games that will be WiFi game-play enabled: Mario Kart DS, Animal Crossing: Wild World, Metroid Prime Hunters, and Activision’s Tony Hawk’s American SK8Land.
Nintendo also announced it Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector that creates a Wireless Access Point for households that do not already have a WAP. It plugs into a computer plugged into a broadband connection and (presumably) creates a wireless bridge for the DS.

This will create interesting LAN policy management issues for parents as a potential horde of pre-teens discover real-time wireless web game-play from anywhere in a WiFi equipped house or free hot-spot.

Have a Nintendo DS (or, more likely, a pre-teen or teenager in your house with one)?

We’ve had Tiger for a while now. Even though there’s still lots to explore under the hood (and leverage for application building), some of its marque features, such as Dashboard, are beginning to feel as comfortable as an old pair of jeans.

I’ve been thinking though — beyond the initial excitement over Dashboard, does it have staying power as an useful tool? My own experience has been up and down. At first I set up my wall of widgets with great enthusiasm, only to be distracted by other things, then to get excited again when a new widget comes along that I like.

My bread and butter widgets are what you would expect: weather, stock quotes, Thesaurus, baseball scores. I seldom launch Apple’s calculator app these days because it’s more handy to use the simple one included with Dashboard. And I’m enjoying many of the third party widgets too, such as Wikipedia and Ambrosia’s envelope printer.

There are also actual sysadmin and dev tools, such as RegexToolbox (regular expression parser & evaluator), IP Widget (shows your internal or external IP address), AirPort Radar (quickly scanning for wireless networks — love this one!), Firewall Switch (check if your firewall is on, and switch it on or off), and Hashes (computes SHA1, SHA, MD5, and RMD160 hash values).

It’s true, Dashboard might not be my favorite Tiger feature, but I would miss it if it were gone. And I really like the opportunity it provides developers to promote their enterprise and products. So not only is Dashboard as comfortable as old jeans, it’s just as valued.

In Software Engineering, the Model-View-Controller pattern is well established. In such an architecture, data is held in a data model that represents the relationships between all the different parts of information. Access to this data model is mediated by a controller that ensures that the model stays consistent, and users interact with the data through a view - a particular human-understandable representation of the data and its relationships.

One of the big wins of the MVC pattern is that you can have multiple views onto the same data. You could represent a database as a a number of tables with rows and columns, or as a set of circles with connecting lines representing the relationships between the data objects.

Another example: remember when Apple introduced the system-wide Address Book in Mac OS X? It was a fine 1.0 product, but of limited application because only Apple internal applications could integrate with it since the API wasn’t public. At that time, the model and the view were combined so there was only one view possible - Address Book.app.

Then, in Mac OS X 10.2, Apple introduced the Address Book Framework. In doing so, they separated the model (your contacts) from the view (Address Book.app) by inserting a separate controller (the Address Book Framework) and thus made it possible for third-party applications to read and manipulate the model. Suddenly the value of putting all your contact data in one place grew significantly. Suddenly Delicious Library could use your contacts as a database of book borrowers, you could link to contacts in VoodooPad, you could do all kinds of things. The actual Address Book application was just one way to look at the database.

In the Web 2.0 apps that really Get It, they have a database backend, a web frontend and - crucially - some kind of web services API in between. Flickr is a great example of this kind of architecture - almost everything you can do through the Flickr website can be done programmatically through a desktop application.

The way I hope Web 2.0 will evolve is with web-based and native desktop applications hand-in-hand. Think about it like Address Book - with a database backend (the model) and a web services API (the controller), the actual web site itself becomes just one of potentially many views on the data. That other view could just as easily be a native Mac OS X application that calls the site’s API.

The future shouldn’t be looked at as being a battle between web apps and desktop apps - it should really be both at once, in hopefully perfect harmony, each playing to their strengths. Far from a harbinger of the death of the desktop application, I think Web 2.0 - if it means anything at all - means that we’re entering a new golden age of development on the desktop.

The acquisition of NetNewsWire by NewsGator is a prime and recent example of a Web 2.0 company recognising the importance of giving users a native dektop application to view the same data that they can view on the web.

Thoughts on the role of desktop applications in Web 2.0?

Just a quick note to let you know that B&H Photo has started shipping the Canon 5D, and that it’s also showing up at professional camera stores. I have more about this over at The Digital Story.

My impression is that many people are viewing next week’s media event as an extension of the Sept. 7 announcements in San Francisco. The thinking being that something wasn’t quite baked last month, but is ready now. Apple’s promotion of the Oct. 12 gathering, “One More Thing…,” set this tone from the beginning.

My two cents is that Oct. 12 isn’t just about music. Apple is also strong in photography and video. The bulk of their video announcements were released earlier this year at NAB, so that leaves photography. We haven’t heard much in this area lately, have we?

I’m also thinking hardware. We had the big Intel announcement at WWDC earlier this year, but not much in terms of computing hardware since. Holiday shopping is upon us, and I think Steve has something for under the tree.

All of this doesn’t exclude an iPod announcement. But, I don’t think that’s the focus of this event. I do expect an update on the negotiations with the record labels, and am hoping for good news there. We’ll find out next week.

If you dig around a bit, you’ll find that /private/var/log/secure.log contains a record of your recent screen saver authentication activity. A typical snippet looks something like this:

Oct 6 19:46:51 Goliath com.apple.SecurityServer: authinternal failed to authenticate user matthew.
Oct 6 19:46:56 Goliath com.apple.SecurityServer: authinternal authenticated user matthew (uid 502).
Oct 6 19:46:56 Goliath com.apple.SecurityServer: uid 502 succeeded authenticating as user matthew (uid 502) for right system.login.screensaver.
Oct 6 19:46:56 Goliath com.apple.SecurityServer: Succeeded authorizing right system.login.screensaver by process /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app for authorization created by /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app.

So if anyone has recently failed at guessing your password, there should be a line containing the string “authinternal failed” (shown above), and assuming you had just stepped out for a little while, this line would have a recent time stamp and be toward the bottom of the log.

Here’s a quick one liner you can run in Terminal that will flag invalid login attempts for the current day. Wrap it up as a Bash script if you find it to be handy.

cat /private/var/log/secure.log | grep "authinternal failed" | grep "`date | awk {'print $2 "  " $3'}`"

In case you’re new the pipes and filters architecture, this is just a little three-part pipeline. It’s pretty simple, but you can check the man pages by typing man <command name> in Terminal or post back up a question if you want additional info. The only thing you may not have seen before is the command substitution that takes place with the grave accents. All that’s happening there is that the output of the command in the accents is replacing the command itself. The output that’s substituted back in for the command is what grep picks up and uses as a filtering criteria.

You should note that although our three-part pipeline does tell you about invalid attempts, it doesn’t tell you anything about valid logins (meaning that someone did successfully guess your password.) If you want to know about them, you’ll need to get a synopsis of the most recent activity. Taking the last 6 lines or so from the log file should be enough to tell if you if there has been any covert activity since your current login and when you stepped out to lunch.

cat /private/var/log/secure.log | tail -6


So back to that question…

…Ever had your screen saver hacked? (and are you sure)

Related link: https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/10/interview_with_greg_reinacker.…

The sale of NetNewsWire from Ranchero to NewsGator was all the rage on Tuesday, prompting everything from congratulations to hair-tearing. What was most fascinating about the whole process was the way that the community responded to the news. Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons held both a press event with mainstream media, as well as making themselves available to bloggers like Niall Kennedy, who posted the audio of his interview with them to his weblog.

With both companies involved heavily in the RSS world, not to mention blogs, it’s no surprise to see them turn to blogs and accept blogs as covering media in this instance, it’s just the first time that I can remember that it’s happened so quickly and so candidly. The interview’s about half an hour long, and Niall asks some excellent questions about how Brent and Greg are going to proceed and what it’s like to work in a distributed software firm.

What do you make of the migration from press-events to blog-events?

I’ve been covering the iPod nano since its release. And I have to say, to date, it seems to be one of the most discussed iPods since the original product launch. We all know there’s a bad batch of nanos out there with screen problems. But the other discussion, and the one that I think ultimately needs resolution, concerns the surface coating of the device.

I think Walt Mossberg sums it up best when he wrote today, “I believe Apple should include a strong, thin case with every nano, starting as soon as possible. And Apple should research some sort of tougher coating for future nano models.” I’m with Walt on this.

Linus Torvalds once called the Apple kernel “peice of crap”. Of course he is entitled to his views. Today he develops the linux kernel on an Apple computer though apparently stripped of the Apple operating system. In fact, in 1997, Steve jobs even asked Linus to work for Apple, presumably to fix the so-called “crap” kernel. Linus declined, and today we have many different kernels that hackers can hack on as we move forward in the free software eco-system.

Both kernels, XNU and linux, offer fundamentally different designs that reflect different philosophies but there are many similarities. By extension there are many similarities and differences between OS X (Darwin) and linux as operating systems.

I hope to use this blog to compare the two operating systems and to try to understand their impact on people who use them, largely from a free software perspective. With the upcoming Apple processor switch, the comparison between Apple and Linux seems timely; the unix wars are on us once again. Or maybe they never left.

Have your say;

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

Tom’s Hardware
(one of those destination sites on the web) launched MobilityGuru. They describe it as our new site covering laptops, PDAs, and all manner of other portable and mobile devices. Mobility is cool. It is the new desktop, or some such idiom.
You can find it at:

https://www.mobilityguru.com/

Know of other cool new mobility/wireless related sites?

O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference starts tomorrow in San Francisco, and you’ll probably be hearing about it a lot this week. In fact, we’re featuring Tim’s essay What is Web 2.0 on ONJava starting Wednesday night, to help Java developers understand these changes and new ideas.

And I imagine a lot of you are going to say: Where’s the Java in Web 2.0?

Fair enough. In fact, the word “Java” appears only once in Tim’s essay, in a section on “Rich User Experience”:

As early as Pei Wei’s Viola browser in 1992, the web was being used to deliver “applets” and other kinds of active content within the web browser. Java’s introduction in 1995 was framed around the delivery of such applets.

So, you might be saying, the last time that Java mattered in terms of Web 2.0 was ten years ago?! That’s not quite true… but it’s not all wrong either.

Reset. Let’s define what we’re talking about. Tim offers seven principles of Web 2.0:

1. The Web as Platform
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence
3. Data is the Next “Intel Inside”
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models
6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device
7. Rich User Experiences

How do these relate to Java? The key may be understanding that Web 2.0 primarily operates further “up the stack” than the language level. Tim makes this point by comparing Netscape and Google — the browser doesn’t matter anymore, what you do with it does. Given this, many of these values (particularly 2, 3, and 4) can be achieved with more or less any language.

Java figures in point five… arguably as an example of what not to do. Java programming isn’t lightweight, and you need only a single 1500-page J2EE tome to remind you of that fact. Java’s intrinsic philosophy is to catch everything at compile-time, to treat all significant activity as strongly-typed interfaces whose actual implementations may be provided at runtime, but whose signatures need to be known ahead of time. Even the most flexible and robust of Java’s network frameworks, Jini, exhibits this philosophy. The web services frameworks are heavily tilted towards equally formal standards, like SOAP. But look at what Tim notes about this approach:

Similarly, Amazon.com’s web services are provided in two forms: one adhering to the formalisms of the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services stack, the other simply providing XML data over HTTP, in a lightweight approach sometimes referred to as REST (Representational State Transfer). While high value B2B connections (like those between Amazon and retail partners like ToysRUs) use the SOAP stack, Amazon reports that 95% of the usage is of the lightweight REST service.

The formal Java developer will presumably cringe at the brittleness of parsing XML from an HTTP stream and simply hoping that it’s well formed and makes some kind of sense — wouldn’t it be better to lock this stuff down with a nice RMI call? — yet that simply isn’t how things are being practiced.

Point six: software above the level of a single device… hello? Remember us? Write once, run anywhere? Surely everyone’s got at least one t-shirt or other piece of conference schwag with that motto, right? Well, what the hell happened? Last I checked, most Java developers were on the server side, where the “everywhere” is a very specific “somewhere” that could have been spec’ed and coded to months or years in advance. Java applications and applets hopping from device to device? By and large, it’s not happening. In fact, Java SE seems firmly wedged on the PC, apparently not relevant to other devices well-capable of running it.

Interesting thing to note, though: Tim’s examples of this principle are iTunes and TiVo. Those are not cross-platform applications. What matters is that the media they play crosses devices, but the software in the iPod is not the iTunes code-base, nor does the iTunes Music Store need the capabilities of the iTunes client. The credit here should go to the standards bodies like MPEG. Same goes for the TiVo Media boxes that host and swap MP3’s and JPEGs.

To me, that smells like an opportunity. In the iTunes case, two of the devices involved in the value chain — the computer and the iPod — have a fundamental need for some of the same capabilities: playing music, reading its metadata, organizing the music, etc. Java across devices means your media management apps could travel with your media, a premise I explored long ago in What If the iApps Had Been the jApps?.

There are technical hurdles — Java SE still has a distribution problem, it’s not a genuine super-set of Java ME, small devices are notoriously variable — but at least we can offer an alternative to writing your app all over again for every device in the chain. It’s an important step.

Point seven: rich user experience. OK, raise your hand if you implicitly trust AJAX. Now how many of you with your hand up run IE on Windows?

Seriously, Google Maps is great and all, but I’m really leery of compatibility. Remember, there isn’t even a standard here, just some widely-held ideas about stuff known to work with (some) current browsers. As badly incompatible as JavaScript-heavy sites are across browsers, it’s not a stretch at all to imagine that scenario replicated in the AJAX era, with the other browser makers forever struggling to attain bug-for-bug compatibility with IE, which is the only thing many developers will code for and test against. True story: my last job before moving to editing/writing full time was to convert a Swing app to a DHTML web application. It was spec’ed as running only on IE 6 for Windows, and no time was allowed for testing or fixing on any other browser or OS (or even back-porting it to IE 5). Don’t think that’ll happen all over the place? How many managers out there are interested in spending any developer hours supporting Opera? Or Safari? Or anything that runs on Linux?

Java has a far stronger compatibility story, one that just works and will satisfy those critics who will put aside their prejudices long enough to look. For a client-side story, it’s worth looking into Java Web Start. This technology has had a rough history, but it’s finally delivering for a lot of people. If you have JWS — and if you have J2SE 5.0 or if you’re on Mac OS X, you’re good — try out this Web Start-ed Sudoku app (more info on its home page). Web Start also speaks nicely to the Web 2.0 principle of “End of the Software Release Cycle”, as each launch of a JNLP file can check back at its home page for updated code, allowing the developer to constantly update clients with minimal fuss.

So there potentially is a Java side to Web 2.0… what remains is for developers to realize that Java is a compelling, quality technology that solves real problems at important points of contact in the Web 2.0 world. The open-minded will be able to see past what’s cool and what’s hot and I think they’ll find that in some cases, Java is what works.

Will Web 2.0 be Java-powered?

In advance of next week’s special announcement from Apple, some of us journalists have been sent a link to a special piece of beta software called iSpeculate. It’s a great new utility designed to save you the trouble of speculating about forthcoming Apple annoucements. All you see is an empty window, and a toolbar with a single button: Speculate. Here’s what appeared in the window when I clicked that button…

Video iPod?

VidPod? VeeeeePod? VPod? VP?

VPC?

VeeePC? VerrrryPC? Very PC?

Very small PC?

Mac nano!

Tiny weeny Mac nano!

With color screen!

Tiny weeny little color screen!

Screen Mac? VPod?

Screen+nano+vpod =??

VMac nano?!

Tiny weeny home media device!

With color screen!

And clickwheel!

Tiny clickwheel? Cwheel?

Creal? Real?

Really small? Shiny? Camera!

Cameraphone! iTunes cameraphone!

With color screen!

And tiny clickwheel!

Uranium Powerbook? Tablet iBook? uBook? aBook? eBook?

iBook nano! nanoBook! nBook! nook!

Tiny weeny little iBook!

With tiny clickwheel and color screen!

If you’ve had a chance to run a copy of iSpeculate, feel free to paste your results in here.

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

Nokia announced the Nokia Nseries See New Competition. It is a camera phone digital photography competition with a Dec. 16 entry deadline. I might submit a few photos myself :-) You can find more information at:

Press Release: Top photographers spearhead Nokia Nseries See New Competition

Nokia See New site

The site says:

Five of the world’s most renowned photographers will judge the shots that shine brightest and award the winners with the once in a lifetime opportunity to assist one of these award-winning photographers on a commercial shoot. They’ll also win a pair of return tickets to anywhere in the world with Virgin Atlantic. If that’s not enough, the winning images will be pre-loaded onto millions of future Nokia devices as wallpapers.

Got a camera phone? Planning to enter the Nokia See New competition?

Online RSS service NewsGator has purchased Ranchero Software, the family-run software company that produces NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, and other well-known Mac OS X apps.

NetNewsWire is its best-known product, justifiably so. Few other RSS readers on the Mac or indeed any other platform can match it for performance and features. NewsGator clearly wanted to cement itself in desktop RSS software as well as building its online service. The best way to do this for OS X users was buy Ranchero.

NewsGator says it’s going to look after everyone who has bought a NetNewsWire license. If you already own a full version copy of the app, you’ll get free updates and a free subscription to NewsGator for the next two years, which seems a pretty reasonable deal to me.

It looks like you’ll still be able to sync your RSS feeds with other services (.Mac or Bloglines, for example), and won’t be forced to use NewsGator if you don’t wish to. According to the (remarkably well-written and frank) official FAQ:

Brent: The focus will be on NewsGator synchronization, because that’s how we can provide the best syncing. It will work across multiple devices and platforms — even including a web version. The existing syncing implementations will get bug fixes, but rather than scatter our energy across different types of syncing, we’ll concentrate on syncing via the NewsGator Online platform.

The situation regarding MarsEdit is a little less clear. The FAQ says work is underway to find “new homes” for this widely admired weblog editor and other Ranchero products. Let’s hope this doesn’t mean we shall have to wait too much longer for MarsEdit updates.

Does NewsGator meet with your approval?

Seth Dillingham emailed me a few days ago, asking if I could help out by linking to a very special project of his. I think it’s a good cause, so I’m happy to help out.

The short version is that Seth is auctioning, on eBay, a bunch of top quality licensed application bundles for Mac OS X and Windows. The proceeds of the sale will go to cancer research.

The long version is - well, why don’t I let Seth explain it?

This summer I was involved in a huge fundraiser for cancer research and treatment. The event is called the PMC, or Pan-Mass Challenge. It’s basically a “bike-a-thon”, but it’s the biggest sports fundraiser in the country, and has raised over $120 million.

My goal this year is $6,000. Last year I raised just $4,000.

I’m a programmer by trade, and this summer I had an idea: I contacted all the other programmers I know (and some I didn’t know) and asked them if they would donate some of their software to an auction in support of cancer research.

Nearly all of them said yes, and the result was overwhelming: they donated almost $11,000 worth of software (retail value)! Here’s the details.

I divided all of it up into ten CD’s: five identical Mac discs, and five identical Windows discs, each worth about $1,100. They’re all being sold on eBay, and the proceeds are all being donated to the PMC.

So if you’re interested in grabbing a fantastic, personalized bundle of apps including NetNewsWire, BBEdit, Mailsmith, Voodoo Pad, and Delicious Library (to name just a few), now’s the time to get bidding for one of Seth’s exclusive disks. There’s still plenty of time to make your bid.

What’s more, we should collectively raise a glass to the software developers large and small who were only too happy to help Seth out when he asked, and provide him with the licenses necessary to make this auction such an attractive bargain.

Oh, and Seth - good luck for your next bike ride.

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?

Those who weren’t satisfied with the iPod nano and the iTunes phone can get another fix on Oct. 12. Apple has sent out media invitations for an event at the California Theater in San Jose on Oct. 12. The title: One More Thing…

More to come as I find out.

Apple is going to announce its Q4 financial results on Oct. 11…

For the last six years, I’ve begun most mornings by reading technology news reports, opinions about products and companies, and analysts surveys of the hottest properties. If you didn’t know that I was a journalist, you might think I was a stock broker… not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But I’ve never really been compelled to invest in stocks directly. In 1999, I watched the dot-comers flaunt their soaring options while I collected a paycheck, put some in savings, and maintained my milk-toast 401K retirement account. Some of those dot-comers really got rich, others didn’t. Many of them have less put away than me.

But it’s a different time now, isn’t it? As I follow Apple’s upward trend — according to my Dashboard Stock Widget, Apple stock hit $55 a share this morning — I wonder about applying the knowledge that we have about this company to our own benefit. Not in a greedy way, but in a common sense way. I’m talking about the real research we do everyday about Apple’s products, fiscal health, and business plan. Isn’t that the same stuff that serious investors do?

It’s not hard to buy stock. Learning Perl is hard. You can open a Scottrade account for less than $500 and have it operative within a few days. So why, as technologists, do we seem so hesitant to discuss this side of the business?

Microsoft collected a bunch of articles to help Palm OS developers port their applications to Windows Mobile for the upcoming Windows Mobile based Treo (sometime in 2006).
You can find the page at:

Welcome to Windows Mobile

Among the collected articles, this one is a good starting point:

A Guide to Windows Mobile Programming for Palm OS Developers

Planning on porting your Palm OS application to Windows Mobile for the new Treo?

Related link: https://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=3183

Brent Simmons pointed to (Green characters on black == bliss) one of my recent stories on emacs, talking about having a special place in our hearts for terminal-based text editors, thanks to our history with Apple II back in the day — it spawned a bit of an investigation as to which word processor it was that neither of us could remember. Turns out it was Word Handler II, which I tracked down thanks to recognizing its cover in an image attached to an eBay auction of old Apple stuff. I’m mirroring the image here.

In the bottom left, the leatheresque cover. :)

Now if only I could track down a screenshot….

We Mac users are often given to gushing. It’s easy for us to lean over someone’s shoulder as their Windows laptop shudders to a halt with a Blue Screen of Death, and whisper: “There’s a better way, you know. My Mac never does that.”

And it’s easy for us to scoff at Windows Explorer, to point and laugh at Outlook Express, and to roll our eyes skywards when we hear about Yet Another Virus. We have it so good, we tell our Windows-bound buddies, because we use Mac OS X. We have great software, a great OS, great applications, and none of that rubbish with viruses.

But you know what? There’s something that Microsoft is doing much better than Apple. Not only doing it better, but improving with each and every day that goes by. It is a cutting-edge activity for large corporations, something that few businesses today have even tried, let alone got right. But Microsoft has got it right and is reaping the benefits.

What is this mysterious activity I’m talking about?

Opening up.

Microsoft is opening up like no other company I have ever seen. Just take a look at all the detailed information about Office 12 and Windows Vista that is coming out on weblogs written by the coders and managers working on each project.

These weblogs are not professional PR. They are not written by flacks on behalf of the coding team. They are not full of dumb marketing speak and pointless slogans.

But they are full of detail, full of facts, full of stories of success and sometimes failure. When something goes wrong, these MS webloggers tell their audience about it, they fess up. Then they get back to work, and fix the problem.

As a result of their open policy, we know a great deal about forthcoming versions of Windows and the applications that will run on it.

No other company the size of Microsoft is opening up to this extent. Most companies a fraction of Microsoft’s size are terrified of being so open.

But I think it’s about time we collectively recognised that MS is right at the leading edge of corporate communication, using weblogs as a tool to directly connect MS employees with users, Windows developers, and excitable nerds. Microsoft is going on a journey as it works on Vista, and its customers are being invited to tag along.

This is business weblogging the way it should be done. Microsoft hasn’t insisted that all the staff blogs are on the same site, nor that they should all look alike, nor even that they should carry the MS logo. Instead, they are found in all sorts of places - some on blogs.msdn.com, some on msn.com, some completely independent ones (the best-known and most obvious being Robert Scoble’s Scobelizer). The company webloggers have been allowed to get on with it, to get the information out there. They haven’t been held back by branding, or the need for senior management to approve what’s OK to post, and what’s not. (I have no doubt that there are some things internally declared “Unsuitable for weblogging”, but what remains is far more than most companies would normally be prepared to reveal.)

Compare with Apple’s corporate communication strategy. Apple releases information when it is ready to, on its terms. Steve makes a keynote speech at some conference, and within minutes apple.com has been updated. Otherwise, Apple tends to remain silent, unless it wants to say something.

I think it’s about time Apple opened up. I think Apple’s most valuable asset, the coders and designers and developers who work inside 1 Infinite Loop, should be allowed the same kind of freedom that Microsoft has granted its employees. Wouldn’t it be nice if we Apple users could watch Leopard take shape, and comment on its progress, rather than meekly accepting it as a finished product when the launch day arrives?

Would you like to see Apple opening up?

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

All of this text is transcribed as it happens. I realize I had to paraphrase, speech attributed to individuals is paraphrased and often incomplete as I did not have a recording device handy. Corrections are, of course, welcome.

Moderator: With Apple doing fantastically, and a huge lead in the music market, is this the second coming of Apple?

Rik is the editor of MacAddict Magazine.
Tom Negrino is a book author and longtime contributor to Macworld.
Dori Smith is a book author and longtime contributor to Macworld.

The questions were prepared by the NCMUG membership, and 15 minutes per.

Question 1. Why did apple really switch to Intel, and should I hold off on purchasing?

Dori: They’re two questions, let’s handle them separately. Why is Apple switching to Intel

Tom: The real reason is what they said. There’s nothing wrong with better faster and cheaper, and in terms of the power curve, when you look at the G5s and the Intel future road map for chips, the Intel chips are going to be better, cheaper and faster, what’s not to like? They’ve got the software to work on it.

Rik: Intel is a platform company, not just a proc fab, there’s terminology called Northbridge and Southbridge, Northbridge is communication between processor, memory, graphics and Southbridge is all the other stuff. Intel makes wifi chips, and all sorts of other great technologies. Apple should leverage Intel’s development there. Apple gets to pick and choose out of the platforms, which is good. The new chips that are coming down the line are great AND low power. Power Per Watt becomes the new standard. Going down to the Xscale chips and there’s a lot there for mobility devices. We’ll see mild revolutions in early 06 and really revolutionary stuff in late 06.

Dori: One of the reasons I see is that Steve doesn’t like to look like an idiot. He got a lot of grief for the 3.0 Ghz promise.

Rik: He hates being out of control more than that.

Dori: Apple would like to be shipping better laptops. They really, really would. They wanted G5 laptops, now they need to look elsewhere because IBM can’t deliver.

Tom: The low power chips that are currently shipping are a “major crime”. I’ve got a 2.5Ghz G5, it’s pretty zippy. Dori has the top of the line powerbook (1.67Ghz G4), it’s a 1/3 of the speed of my desktop. That’s the best machine money can be. Both machines cost around the same. Apple is desparate for more powerful laptops, Intel can supply those, Apple cannot.

Rik: Soon after the switch was announced, Free Cell/IBM came out with a lower power G5, but it’s not lower enough.

On to the second part:

Should I wait to buy?

Dori: No, buy it when you need it. You shouldn’t be able to tell the difference, aside from speed and cost, and those always happen anyway

Tom: I have to keep up with the joneses, I have to buy a desktop every 18-24 months, pretty much since 1990 when prices got slightly saner, I’ve spent the same amount of money for every machine I’ve bought ($2500). That price I spent on the G5 gave me a little more machine than the 128k Macintosh I bought in 84. If you need a new Macintosh, get one today. There’s no good reason not to. The software that runs on it today will run on it tomorrow.

Rik: Buy the tool you need. However. There are a few things that will happen when we move to Intel: Rosetta for example. It’s a translator, it’s gonna be a translator, things will run more slowly. We don’t know HOW slowly. Native Intel stuff will run faster, though, but that won’t be right away. Intel will happen for the laptops and minis first. You’re not running after effects on your mini or your iBook. If you are, that’s dumb.

Tom: Have you seen Rosetta running?

Rik: Yes, I have, and it depends on what you’re running on it? Anything that does AltiVec or parallel processing takes a serious dive.

Question 2: If you could have two new features in the next OS, what would they be and why?

Dori: The two things I want are a decent Location Manager, and it sucks. I have a laptop that goes back and forth between office and house, and that needs to happen. I want JavaScript to run inside AppleScript Studio. It’s a better language and it ought to be a multi-language application. Call it Scripting Studio.

Tom: I would like for apple to completely revamp the AppleScript Language so Dori will stop swearing about AppleScript. Things have to change. Other than that, Honestly, I’m not displeased with Tiger. I like what Automator can do, I like Spotlight and Dashboard. There are lots of little things about Tiger that are unsung. Setting up Printers for example, and network printers Just Work. It’s little things, perhaps that you only do once or twice, and that’s a big deal.

Rik: I really kinda like the OS. I want to see Sharing completely rethought. I want to share things at a document level. I want it all to be done transparently. Let’s make this human, not computer based. Rethink it all. On a small level, Spotlight does things that annoy me. It doesn’t show you the volume of the document in the document path. I want to see the file path shown when I click on things, etc.

Tom: I would really like to use my desktop from the laptop or vice versa from any terminal.

Dori: Apple is 99% of the way there and that’s important.

Question 3 Apple has two iPods that are USB only. What does this mean for Apple Hardware? Is Firewire dead?

Rik: It ain’t dead. FireWire is far from dead. USB 2.0 is supposed to be faster, but Firewire beats the pants off it in disk transfer. Firewire is here to stay, well, the same was SCSI was.

Tom: Apple deals with different markets. USB 2.0 makes a lot of sense because all those iPods are going to Windows customers and they need USB 2.0. They need to sell a LOT of iPods and they do, you need to be working with USB 2.0.

Rik: Firewire puts out of a lot of Power out there, 15 watts. USB 2.0 is 500 mW.

Tom: The Video market is all about firewire. Those people pushing a lot of bits through a cable are doing it over FW800 and FibreChannel

Dori: I got nothing to add that hasn’t been said.

Question 4 Do you see any significant changes in software development for the Mac as opposed to the PC?

Rik: This was a weirdly worded question. Intel’s development tools are coming over, and Apple’s tools are quite good. How are they gonna handle Intel boxes? Pretty good so far.

Dori: Two things i can think of. It’s gonna be a pain in the butt who did their stuff with CodeWarrior or with older IDEs, they’re gonna have to bring their code into the future (ed. present.) and they have a horrendous curve and they may have to rely on Rosetta. That’s going to require a lot of changes. The other place is that there are gonna be a crapload of hackers trying to figure out how to run OS X on stock hardware. Apple’s gonna work hard to keep that from happening. Many people want to buy $299 boxes and run OS X on it, and Apple wants to avoid that because they’re a hardware company. If you can run OS X on any Intel box, Apple has failed.

Tom & Rik: it’s part of the challenge.

Dori: you can get a refurbed mini for $399.

Rik: It will be tricky to move to Intel. You can code deep in the environment, not using the APIs, and those people are hosed. The Big-Endian, Little-Endian switch is going to be really, really hard on people. If you’re writing for libraries, great. It’s no surprise that Quark took forever, they had ancient, ancient code. Photoshop was similarly afflicted. This is a place for many people to move around and make advances.

Rik: we could talk about trusted computing, but that would suck, so we won’t. If you google anything today, google Trusted or Trustworthy Computing.

Tom: Apple is going to use pieces of that tech to prevent the Apple OS from working on plain Intel. It seems to me that if Apple loses that battle, they may have lost the war.

Dori: Apple has to solve this. There are numerous reports of the current dev version running on Intel hardware and that’s a real, big, big, problem.

Rik: It won’t be as easy as you think. You might get it running, but things won’t work.

Question 5: If I’m a windows user considering a switch, what are the pros and cons?

Dori: Pros are easy. Number One Con is what’s your current investment in Windows software? You can get a Mac for $400, but your software investment might be a few grand. The software cost is gonna suck.

Tom: But there’s a window of opportunity there, if you just bought a copy of Macromedia 8, the box comes with one license, for Windows OR Mac, but not both. [Discussion ensued about licensing issues here, not worth catching] If you’re upgrading at the same time, crossgrades may be possible.

Rik: One of the cons is that you’re gonna be lonely. There aren’t a lot of us. You have to be independent. There aren’t a lot of PC peoples. On the Pro side, this could sound squishy, aesthetics matter. They really really do. Mac OS X is a better aesthetic experience than XP, and I’ve played with Vista and it’s still not as nice. When you spend all that time staring at a computer, it’s important to be staring at something beautiful. It makes a difference to your soul [applause]. It’s good for you.

Dori: Windows users have all SOLD their souls…

Tom: I’ve got a Mac and a PC, and I have that PC using Voice Recognition for my writing and there’s nothing like that on the Mac. iListen isn’t near as good as Dragon Naturally Speaking. I work in XP all the time, and I won’t go that far to say I feel dirty afterward, but I never feel quite comfortable in the PC. It’s hard to quantify, feeling more comfortable on the Mac. Mac OS X is so different from the early Mac days that at the point where we had to switch, it would have been a viable choice to consider moving to the PC, and XP was new. I tried that, it didn’t work for me. Aesthetics ARE important. The things that help you get your job done faster and easier without having to think about how the computer works are completely different.

Rik: Our company Future Network USA, our IT director put in the proposal to change the whole company over. We don’t want to deal with the spyware.

Question 6. We now have Tiger and Intel OS update. What’s the next paradigm shift for the next cat?

Dori: The next cat is Leopard. We’re not talking about it, but it’s Leopard. It’s better than housecat, or civit, or what have you. This is totally crystal ball, we’re moving toward assuming you’re always connected, wherever you are. You’re not a standalone user.

Tom: We’re seeing that transition already. The google services I use daily, many times a day, google search, google maps. If you’re using Mapquest, Google Maps is Just That Much Better. Gmail. Google Mail. Personally, I use Entourage as my main mail reader, but it’s nice to have all my incoming mail in one place. Entourage automatically reforwards my mail to a gmail account, so I can see it all when I’m not at my machine. It’s there forever, and it’s easily searchable. We’re seeing more and more great stuff every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple and Google cozy up a little bit for Leopard.

Rik: I’m not the world’s greatest prognosticator. If I were forced to answer… 1, the computer will disappear more and more. It’ll be more and more transparent. Always on the web. Viiv is a keyboardless Intel box that handles all your home entertainment machine. that’s not a computer, but it is. this is the direction we’re headed toward. it’s like cars. We’re moving toward that future. But, I’m a geek, so I go into /Library and modify .plist files. Computers are going to get both more transparent and more opaque, on two different paths. You may not know it’s a Mac anymore in the small market. Quad cores in 2007, Xscale is in testing now. OS, not for a while. The Viiv platform will run any qualifying OS. Could be a Viiv box in our future

Tom: So you have a handheld computer. They’re not very powerful. If you have a handheld computer that’s on WiMax, you don’t care how powerful that is. The thing you’re holding can talk to something far more powerful on the network and distribute it somewhere else. It’s all becoming thin client again.

Question 7. Do you see a shift toward more laptops as they’re more mobile.

Dori: I went laptop a while ago, I won’t go back. I can go anywhere, and I do, and all my stuff is with me. It’s always there. I can’t imagine going back to a desktop machine. What’s tempting? More powerful desktops. Hopefully that’s changing with Intel. First Intel laptops? Q2 or Q3 next year.

Rik: Yonah chips, middle of 2006.

Dori: Power books before iBooks. That’s just my guess.

Rik: Yonah will be a dual core, but it’s not the new architecture one that will go into the other machines. Yonah performance won’t match Merome or Conroe. We’re going laptop. The world is going laptop. That said, lots of people can’t use them. the faster drives need to hit the laptop market. If you’re rendering a lot, you need a desktop. Syncing may solve the problem eventually.

Question 8. There’s a lot of talk about convergence. Where are we heading?

Dori: That’s an odd term, it means different terms to different people. Minis as home entertainment units. When a mini replaces a tivo, that’s an interesting day.

Tom: We can’t buy dominant stuff, so we have Replay TVs. A dedicated box is better for whatever you want to do, Replay TVs are great because they work with each others. Converging the computers and entertainment devices, some of it will happen, yes, but I’m not sure I want to see that. Some cool stuff is happening, with Squeezebox for example. It’s a networked music player. It draws all the music from iTunes into my stereo. No more changing CDs. A competitor did the same with the Roku Soundbridge, plus a giant alarm clock that does something similar.

Rik: Multimedia players, when they get transparent, will get good. But we’re stuck with the spork. The ROKR is a spork. We can put a water bottle together with a dress! But…why?!

Tom: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Question 9: What happens with printing? Will we see more laserjets? inkjets?

Tom: www.dell.com and go look at their PostScript color laser printer. You can get one from $300 to $400,

Rik: The image quality does fine photo quality prints on color laser is great but Epson’s not going away with their 2200s and 2400s and 4000s. B&Ws laser printers are cheap as hell now, $150 or so.

Question 10. Why did apple give up on PDA?

Dori: They didn’t make money.

Rik: Phones are where it’s at. PDAs are of little value unless they’re blackberries

Dori: Blackberry is great because it’s network enabled. That’s where they make the money: the network. Apple won’t get into that business.

What’s your vision for the future of the Mac?

Related link: https://www.releasethedogs.com/mtr/

My 17″ PowerBook goes with me everywhere I go and is always within an arm’s reach. If it’s not sitting on my lap or on the desk in front of me, you can rest assured that it’s just a few feet away playing some music, crunching some numbers, or safely stored away nearby in my backpack. Really, I only have one complaint about it: the 2.5-3 hour battery life just isn’t long enough. Now, granted, that’s a reliable 2.5-3 hours that’s been steady and true for going on two years now — better than any experience I ever had back during times-that-shall-not-be-named — but I’d still like to be able to get more out of it. It really bugs me when I’m forced to work in an area that I otherwise wouldn’t just because I need to plug in.

The simplest and most obvious thing I did to get more battery life was that I bought a second battery. This small investment doubled the amount of time that I can work on my PowerBook, taking the grand total up to 5-6 hours. Better yet, I don’t even have to shutdown and reboot to swap out the battery. I can just close the screen, do the switcheroo , and open back up the screen. I didn’t even know that hot-swapping the battery was possible until my first battery got so low one time that my PowerBook wouldn’t come out of sleep. I was forced to change out the battery without shutting down (which I had been doing for well over a month by that time), but to my complete surprise, things came right back up and nothing missed a beat. I wonder if there’s anyone else out there that still doesn’t know this is possible? Was/am I the only one?

Anyway, if you dim the screen and don’t use bluetooth or wireless, you might even be able to squeeze another 30 minutes or so and push 7 hours of outlet-free, totally unplugged work on two batteries. That’s almost a full work day and enough time to get you through a transcontinental flight. This is truly a great thing if you’re one of those people (like me) who feels obligated to work for the entire duration of a boring airplane ride.

But if you’re not working on an airplane ride, you’ll probably be doing one of three other things: talking to the person beside you (even if it’s against your own will), sleeping (possibly to avoid talking to that person beside you), or watching a movie (with headphones, and again, to avoid that compulsory chatter.) I’ll leave you to your own devices for handling the first two, but will have to point out that your battery life is going to take a beating if you try that third option. I’m sure it’s possible, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to successfully watch an actual DVD from the disc on my 17″ PowerBook without having to plug it in at some point — although I know that I have come close a few times. Although the large screen would seem to be the likely culprit, it appears that the SuperDrive might be the one hogging up all of the power.

Recently, I’ve been doing some tinkering and found a simple solution that can get us through a 2 hour movie: rip the DVD to your hard drive with MacTheRipper and play it from your hard drive instead of the way you normally would with your SuperDrive. From there, you can watch it with Apple’s DVD Player. All you have to do is choose “File -> Open DVD Media” and point to the “VIDEO_TS” folder inside the main folder that MacTheRipper created.

Although MacTheRipper will copy CSS “protected” DVDs (or so it says) that have restrictions telling you not to copy them, there are plenty of “unprotected” DVDs out there like home videos that you can unquestionably copy, so keep that in mind if anyone ever tells you that MacTheRipper is a tool that could only be used for illegitimate reasons.

But since we’re on the subject, wouldn’t it be nice if it weren’t illegal to copy a DVD that you already own to your hard drive? This sure would save us some juice on those plane rides.

There have also been times when I’ve rented movies, but returned them before watching because I just never did get around to it. It seems like it might be nice to have a service one day that sold you the rights to view a movie one time as opposed to the rights to play a physical disc for some specified time period.

Anyhow, my purpose here was more about telling you how to save some juice than it was to ponder intellectual property laws, although that is an interesting subject that you can feel free to comment on if you like.

Know of any other good tips for squeezing extra juice out of your battery?