Related link: https://www.brockerhoff.net/fai/

XRay developer Rainer Brokerhoff writes that he and his MacMania editor “were commenting on the strangely missing ‘Fax received’ notification [in Panther], when I said I’d seen a suggestion to attach a folder action to the Fax folder; there’s a ‘new item’ script at /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/add - new item alert.scpt. […]
So four hours later (two were used for drawing the icon, of course!), there was born - ta-dah! - the Fax Alert Installer! Freeware, for Panther only. There’ve been about 700 downloads already…”

Related link: https://homepage.mac.com/xmlguy/iComic/index.html

I’ve been thinking a lot about so-called “thick clients” recently, particularly after seeing Watson creator Dan Wood’s session at the O’Reilly Mac OS X conference. I even did a java.net weblog about thick clients and how well-suited Java is for creating them.

One other thing I’ve been doing a lot is reading web comics. To me, Monday, Wednesday and Friday start off with Penny Arcade, Tuesdays and Thursdays are about MegaTokyo. And every day requires a look at Sinfest, which for my money is better than anything in the three pages of comics in the Atlanta newspaper.

So imagine my delight to discover that someone has decided to write a thick client in Cocoa, just for reading web comics. Not only that, it’s really really good.

If you’re interested, stop reading here and go get iComic. For everyone else, here’s a little tour…

OK, first off, you had me at the “cute manga girl” icon:

Seriously though, there’s a lot of cleverness to this app. The interface is remarkably simple yet powerful:

The chosen comic is displayed under a set of tabs which indicate your current subscriptions - Dilbert and MegaTokyo are built in, while others are available as “plug-ins” (presumably HTML scrapers) at iComic’s website. The forward and back buttons go to previous or subsequent strips for the chosen comic. A calendar button pops out a calendar window that can also be used to navigate through the comic, which is useful for more irregularly-published strips. Other features include entering and searching comments for a strip, and quick access for links associated with a strip… absolutely essential for “Penny Arcade”, which sometimes isn’t funny until you read the creators’ blog (if you didn’t know about AT&T patenting an anti-spam-blocking technology, the recent PA about the “AT&T RapeBot” would be inexplicably vicious).

Surely this is a nicer end-user experience than expecting users to find and browse to a half-dozen different web pages, remember or bookmark their addresses, wait for unrelated content to load and be rendered, etc. The only obvious problem is that this steals impressions from sites that depend on advertising.

As I said in my java.net weblog, my one fear about a rush to thick clients is that it could lead to more cases of Mac users getting shut out of content if the content providers write thick clients only for Windows. Java is an obvious help here - Java’s networking, 2D graphics, and Swing API’s would be quite capable of powering an application like iComic, and Java Web Start would be an effective way to distribute, install, and update the client for end-users on Mac, Linux, Windows and future J2SE-capable devices. Unfortunately, instead of writing useful and cool apps, us Java people tend to write IDE’s for ourselves (or worse yet… and please strangle the next person who proposes to write one of these… the XML-based visual Java GUI editor… blech). No surprise that the cool stuff would instead come from the Mac world, I guess. Or in the case of iComic author Steve Saxon, a Win32-to-Cocoa switcher. How freakin’ awesome is that?

What do you think of iComic? Is this kind of user experience going to replace the web in a few years?

I want to celebrate the release of the Digital Photography Pocket Guide, 2nd Ed — now updated, redesigned, and in full living color (but at the same price as the first edition).

Since the whole idea of this project is to help folks get more out of their photography, I thought we could do a little of that in this blog by sharing some tips. Here’s what I’m thinking.

I’m going to post a couple of my favorite tricks, then open it up to all of you so you can post yours too. We’ll let this thing roll on until December 1st. At that time, I’ll choose my five favorite reader tips, and send those folks a free signed copy of the Digital Photography Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition.

Keep These Things in Mind

To pull this off, we need to agree on a couple things:

• You need to include your name with the tip. If you want, you can use an initial and a last name, or first name with a last initial, just something to identify you when I post the five favs.
• Keep the tips short. Refer to my examples below for guidance.
• If two people submit the same tip, the one with the earliest time stamp will be the one considered.
• Your tip has to be time stamped before 5 pm PST on Monday, Dec. 1st. I’ll post the favorites the following Friday, Dec. 5.
• I’m the sole judge of the five favorites, so please don’t argue about them. This is for fun!
• Limit the scope of the tips to digital photography only. That’s what this is all about :)

My Tips

Tip 1: Want to know an easy way to tell which shot in a series (of roughly the same composition) is the sharpest? View the images in “list mode” so you can see their file sizes. The image in the series with the largest file size is probably the sharpest picture.

Tip 2: You want to shoot an existing light shot in a dimly lit environment with the flash off, but you don’t have a tripod or other suitable surface to steady the camera. What do you do? Try using the “camera strap tripod” trick. Sit on a chair or other place. Let the camera strap hang to the floor. Put your foot through the strap and pull the camera upward until you have tension. You’ll be amazed at how steady you can hold the camera this way.

Now It’s Your Turn

Those are my contributions to get the mind clicking. Let’s hear one from you. And thanks for helping me celebrate the release of the new book.

Share your favorite digi photo tip. Be sure to include your name.

Related link: https://poop.sf.net

The poop-group mailing list seems to maintain a page cataloging several implementations of Perl Object-Oriented Persistence: strategies for letting objects intelligently store and retrieve themselves to and from a relational database through simple method calls, without making the programmer laboriously hand-craft the variety of SQL queries this requires.

It describes, compares and constrasts several CPAN modules that have different ways of meeting this end, dividing them into two categories: those that provide a Perl-object interface to an existing database schema (as Class::DBI does), and those that use SQL-based magic to serialize arbitrary Perl classes and objects (a la the Tangram module).

Side note: I found this page through a reference in the excellent Class::DBI module’s manpage. For what it’s worth, I’ll mention how happy I am that I stumbled across it recently; I was able to very quickly turn all the custom modules in my database-heavy work project into Class::DBI subclasses, and now they work better than ever, with significantly less code. At least a couple fine articles on this module already exist elswehere on the O’Reilly Network, such as this one and this other one.

Any poop from you on making Perl objects persistent?

Two interesting pieces of news from the MPEG-4 world…

On Monday, MPEG-LA, the licensing authority that offers a “one-stop shop” for the MPEG patent pool, announced licensing terms for H.264/AVC, the nifty new MPEG-4 video codec.

Generally, the license requires no royalties for the little guy: makers of encoders and decoders don’t owe royalties until they move 100,000 units, then they’re 20 cents (US) a unit to a US$3.5 million maximum, with no royalties due for products sold before 1/1/05. Those providing services (whether per-title or subscription-based) also aren’t charged for the first 100,000, and have a grace period through 1/1/06. Internet broadcasters (those streaming video not on a per-title or subscription basis) get a free ride until at least 1/1/11.

I’m sure someone’s already jumped to the talkback textarea and started typing Pah! Getting paid for ideas is wrong! Everything should be Ogg / Tarkin! Visit my c001 website!. So, fine, go nuts. For my money, or decided lack thereof, these are pretty decent terms, especially where the small guy is involved. If you can move 100,000 units of anything, paying a little bit to the people whose work made it possible is not unreasonable.

Note that this is just for the new video codec. Other MPEG patents may apply, particularly MPEG-4 Systems. Questions about this are still abounding on the MPEG-4 discussion lists.

Also, 3ivx has released its 3ivx QuickTime codec, which provides more advanced MPEG-4 encoding than is possible with Apple’s MPEG-4 codec, such as multi-pass encoding and Advanced Simple Profile features. Note that using some of the advanced features will create files that QuickTime users without the 3ivx codec won’t be able to play.

Go ahead, type it: “Patents are evil! Everything should be free!”

Sorry for the shameless self-promotion here, but I thought I’d let you all know that the third edition of my book, retitled as the Mac OS X Panther Pocket Guide is back from the printer! 158 pages of Panther goodness.

Here are some useful links related to the book:

• The Table of Contents
• Reader reviews on Amazon.com for the second edition, which covered Jaguar.
• Reader reviews on Amazon.com for the first edition, which covered Mac OS X 10.1.
• Order the Panther editon on Amazon.com

Please note that the price on Amazon is incorrect. It’s listed there at $14.95, but the real price is $9.95, and at 30% off ($6.97), that’s a steal.

If you’ve purchased previous editions of this book, please let me know what you liked or disliked. If you’ve bought the new edition, let me know what you think about this one as well.

Now that I’m a remote editor for O’Reilly, I have the pleasure of being able to listen to my collection of music without fear of annoying anyone other than my wife or cat.

It also means that I’m using the iTunes Music Store (ITMS) more often. Of course, my way of justifying my purchases is to make them with an airline card in the hope that the CDs I buy through the ITMS now will go toward miles for another trip to Hawaii. Which of course leads to the whole point of this blog entry: Features I’d like to see added to the ITMS.

So here goes…

Song purchase = credit toward buying that new Mac you want

Buy 10 songs or a full CD and get $2 credit toward buying a new Mac, or some other purchase through the Apple Store. Sure, you’d have to buy 1000 CDs to get a down payment on that G5 you’ve been drooling over, but still, getting some credit toward buying new gear would be sweet. (Another option would be to use some sort of point system and combine that with purchases made through the Apple Stores, both online and retail.)

Bookmarks

Everybody who uses ITMS knows about New Music Tuesday’s. You get an email telling you about the new songs and artists that have been added. Great. You go and listen to a few, but by the time you hit the fourth or fifth or tenth, and you want to go back to an earlier choice, you might be on to something else, or distracted by the phone. It would be great if you could bookmark songs that you like as you’re listening to the previews without flagging them for purchase. That way, you could go back later, listen to them again, and then decide whether or not to make the purchase or dump them from your bookmark list.

Wish Lists

And if you can add a Bookmark, why not let ITMS customers set up Wish Lists, sort of how Amazon.com does?

You flag a song that you want to add to your Wish List, which you can then send to friends and family members via email so they can purchase the songs for you. Sort of how you send a list of CDs to your Mom so she can buy something for your birthday, except now she can just flip a switch and buy it for you through the ITMS. You’d receive an email from Apple, saying that so-and-so purchased such-and-such for you, and then the songs would download to your Mac the next time you launched iTunes.

Credit for returning an unwanted track

Say you purchase a “CD” through the ITMS and you realize that you only like three or five of the cuts on the “disc”. You’re stuck with them, just as you would if you purchased a CD, but at least with a CD you could take them to a local music store and trade them in for credit toward your next purchase. But then you lose the three or five songs you like. Not a win-win for anyone.

But what if you could take the extra cuts you don’t want from a “CD” you’ve purchased through the ITMS and return them and get credit toward your next purchase? Granted, I’m not sure how the crediting would work, or how Apple could verify that you’ve actually deleted a track from your system, but this would be kinda neat.

ITMS Credit Card

Going back to my thought of using my airline card to make purchases on the ITMS to bank miles for a much needed vacation, it makes me wonder if there could be an ITMS Credit Card on the horizon as well. Purchases you make with the card give you credit toward purchasing music on the ITMS or purchasing an iPod and their many add-ons.

All this makes me wonder how long it will be before we have a QuickTime Movie Store (QTMS).

Anyhow, these are just some random thoughts. Let me know what you think, or if you have other suggestions. Also, keep in mind that you can send feedback on iTunes and the ITMS directly to Apple via the iTunes –> Provide iTunes Feedback menu option.

Now it’s time to get back to work and stop dreaming about Hawaii (which could lead to another ITMS purchase).

Share your thoughts here…

I was told about two interesting eGovernment Open Source news items today.

1. MIT/eCAP, Harvard Kennedy School of Government and State of Massachusetts Team for State and Local U.S. Government Open Source Code Initiative and Repository

2. Project Leopard released Leopard 1.0 described as LAMP eGovernment Database Project offers state and local governments a free open source, web-enabled system for use in quickly setting up public information sites. You can also use this system for government-to-government web sites as well. Government Computer News (GCN) provides a bit more background on this item.

For those interested, I tend to blog Open Source in Government items on my personal site on a more-or-less regular basis: Open Source in Government blog

Any other Open Source in Government news items?

Apple’s iCEO Steve Jobs recently met with a group of financial analysts to report on different things about the company. In this report on c|net, Jobs stated that Mac OS X could be ported to run on Intel chips (now let’s not start the rumors of Marklar again), and also about iPods and the iTunes Music Store.

Another interesting bit is this blurb about the number of people who’ve initially renewed their .Mac memberships:

The company is also making money in new areas, such as its .Mac Internet service, which just went through its first renewal period, in which customers had to pay the full $99 price. Jobs pointed out that critics said Apple would never get customers to pay $99 after selling the first year at $49.

“Our renewal rate was 86 (percent) to 87 percent,” Jobs said, adding that that is “unheard of, higher than almost anybody’s. We’ve built ourselves the beginnings of a pretty good Internet services business.”

Back in January at Macworld San Francisco, Jobs reported that ~240,000 people had subscribed to .Mac by the end of October 2002. Depending on how you look at it, of those 240,000 people who initially subscribed to .Mac:

• 206,400 subscribers renewed
• Apple lost 33,600 .Mac subscribers from the initial brood

I’ve renewed two .Mac subscriptions (one for myself and one for my wife), and I know plenty of others out there who’ve re-upped for another year. The real tipping point, IMHO, will be to see how many of us hang on for another round. Apple’s .Mac services are nice, but they still have a long way to go.

While I think it’s great that many people are renewing, I think the bigger question will be how many of those 86-87% who renewed this year will renew next year if the support and services aren’t beefed up.

So, my question to you all is:

• After a year with .Mac, what are your likes and dislikes of the service?
• What would you like to see Apple improve upon over the next year?
• If you’ve been to .Mac’s Support forums, what has your experience been like? Did you get a quick response, or are there issues still floating in Limbo?
• Do you have any hints, tips, or tricks you’d like to pass along to other .Mac members?

Let me hear your thoughts…I know Apple listens here, too.

Did or will you renew your .Mac membership? Do you have any comments or feedback about the .Mac services? Let ‘em fly….

I’m not much of a phone person…perhaps my former jobs in tech support have ruined the phone for me forever. But when my iBook started making an ominous clicking noise before locking up, something had to be done…so I decided to take it to the Palo Alto Apple Store directly.

The “Genius Bar” you’ll find in Apple Stores is just that — a bar-like area in the back of the store, staffed with smart support folks who can service and support Apple products (and who have access to a “hot line” in the rare event that they’re stumped). I was surprised how much like a real bar it could be — during my time there, I saw two Apple Staffers handle up to six customers at a time. While they had me running diagnostics, they helped other customers troubleshoot battery or video problems. But like any good bartender, they were calm, cool, and collected — and back over to me as soon as I needed them.

My Genius Bar experience was really pretty optimal, but as I watched others come and go, I realized that part of that was because I was well-prepared. If you’re having hardware trouble and you’re thinking of taking your machine in, here are some tips that might help:

• You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating: back up regularly, and if the problem doesn’t prevent it, back up immediately before leaving for the Apple Store. If you can’t, there might be options to get your data back, but having a good backup makes you free to try more drastic solutions like reformatting a drive.

• Take your operating system CDs and the CDs that came with your hardware with you. You may need to reinstall the OS under the watchful eye of a Genius, and you’ll need your own copy to do it. It’s also handy to have the hardware test CD that comes with your machine, so the genius doesn’t have to go searching thru their stash to find the one that corresponds to your particular model.

• Take your AC adapter. There will be adapters you can borrow, but its easier to just bring your own, and if you need to boot or install from a CD, you will be asked for it.

• Arrive early, especially if you know your store is a busy one. My particular problem was a bit time-consuming to deal with, so I spent almost two hours in the Palo Alto store, and was glad I’d arrived early — the line didn’t getting any shorter. In other stores, I’ve seen empty bars during mid-day.

• Do make some short notes to take about the relevant details of the problem, but formulate a concise one- or two-sentence description of the problem. They call it a Genius Bar for a reason — despite the slightly hokey name, these folks have seen just about everything and will be able to zero in on a solution for you quickly if you let them.

• Plan to spend some time at the store. You may have to wait for a bit in a busy store, and you almost certainly will need to go through some diagnostics. To put it in “bar” terms, think “going to the pub”, not knocking back a couple of beers while you do something else. It’s a participatory exercise. To be honest, I found it sort of enjoyable to hang out with other Mac users (despite fretting over the fate of my iBook), but if this doesn’t suit your personality, you may prefer calling Apple Support by phone from the comfort of your own living room.

• Have realistic expectations — the Genius Bar isn’t a replacement for Apple’s repair service, and they can’t fix everything on the spot. For example, they can’t replace a hard drive. But they can take care of shipping your unit to repair, which is a real convenience. (Be sure to get your AC adapter back!)

• You can’t go wrong with AppleCare. I almost never buy the extended warranty offered with most electronics and appliances, but I think AppleCare is an excellent option, especially for laptops. They couldn’t solve the problem at the store, but my hard drive was replaced and the unit shipped back to me within a week at no additional charge. It’s true that I probably could have replaced the drive myself for less than the cost of AppleCare, but I still have over a year to go, and that’s a lot of peace of mind.

The staff members on duty in Palo Alto on October 22 were really first-rate, and I’m really glad to have the option of dealing with the problem in person rather than over the phone. Hardware problems are never pleasant, but I’m glad the Genius Bar is there just in case. And if you have the misfortune of taking your own machine in someday, maybe some of these tips will help.

Do you have other tips for making the most out of a trip to the Genius Bar?

Red Hat sent out an email to registered users yesterday announcing As previously communicated, Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 as of December 31, 2003. Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 9 as of April 30, 2004. Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line. Slashdot has
1121 comments on their site about this so far.

Today, we read on Techweb and elsewhere that Novell is buying SUSE for $210 million and IBM is investing $50 million in Novell

One can only wonder what the Linux landscape will look like in 2004…

What will you be running in 2004? Red Hat? Red Hat/Fedora? Novell/SUSE? Debian? BSD? Windows Server 2003? Something else?

As much as I like Panther, and indeed I do, I’m still not ready to jump in with both feet. My rule is to wait for the 10.3.1 update before I completely convert.

Even though there may be some wisdom in this approach, it turns my life into a geek version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I have a partitioned drive on my 667 TiBook, running Jaguar by day from one partition and Panther at night on the other.

The evolution of a number of Mac technologies have further complicated matters, especially concerning Mail.app. At night and on the weekends I’m using all the new stuff — Mail.app, iCal, Address Book, iSync, TextEdit, Preview, etc. During work, it’s the same old stuff — Entourage X, Palm Desktop 4.1, Acrobat Reader 6, etc.

So I have some real decisions to make soon that will impact my workflow. And I want to go over a few of them now in case you’re pondering some of the same things.

• Entourage X vs Mail 1.3 — This is the biggie. I’m still using Entourage in Jaguar because I like the hierarchal folder system for organizing my mail. But in Panther, Mail.app is great. It’s fast, smart, and the way it handles threads might be a tipping point for me. I’m tempted to archive my entire Entourage mailbox as text documents using Entourage Email Archive X and start anew with Mail.app.
• Palm Desktop 4.1 vs Address Book 3.1 and iCal 1.5.1 — This is my second toughest decision. I actually like Palm Desktop for OS X, and it works great with my Visor (with attached VisorPhone). But Palm is sooooo at slow keeping up with OS revs that I’m about ready to throw in the towel with them. As a test, I exported my Palm calendar (as Vcal data) and imported it into iCal 1.5.1. It worked great. And as soon as there’s a Panther update from Palm, I could use iSync to coordinate Address Book and iCal to the Visor. I’m leaning…
• Acrobat Reader 6 vs Preview 2.1 — These are two apps going in two different directions. Adobe seems to be trying to make Acrobat Reader 6 an app to handle DRM and big digital docs. It takes forever to load. Preview is lean and fast and great for general .pdf and .jpg work. Nine out of ten times I want fast. Preview has become my default .pdf reader.

Those are the major decisions that I must make when I switch to Panther full time. The additional goodies, such as enhanced TextEdit, built-in zip archiving, improved networking, etc, etc, etc, are bonuses that make waiting for the complete transition even more difficult.

Until then, I continue to roam with Panther at night…

I’m curious, what decisions are you weighing concerning the Panther upgrade?