The thing is, I don’t rotate my vertical images in-camera; I rotate my camera instead. That way I have a much bigger picture to view on an already too small LCD screen.

So when Apple announced they had a new version of iPhoto 5 to download that fixed this problem, I went back to editing Mac DevCenter articles. I didn’t really see the need to download a 41MB file to correct a problem that didn’t affect me. Plus, there’s always the risk of introducing new troubles that I don’t currently have.

For example, one contributor on MacFixIt wrote that the color correction problem came back with the update. (MacFixIt commented that he could correct the problem by rebuilding his library — OPT-CMD on application start up.) I doubt that the color correction problem reoccurs for most users, but it’s precisely the thing I dread with non-essential updates.

So my question to you is: Have you updated to iPhoto 5.0.4? And if so, how is it going?

To update or not to update?

A full featured PDA can serve as a laptop substitute for those times you don’t want, or are not allowed, to have your regular computer with you. I bought a Palm LifeDrive for this very reason.

In this series of weblogs I’ll cover many of the LifeDrive’s features and explain their strengths and weaknesses. I can tell you right now that I think its 4GB hard drive, WiFi and Bluetooth networking, robust battery, and USB 2.0 connectivity are strong points for this device.

The built-in WiFi is quite good. I have easily connected to 802.11 networks at home, my studio, the O’Reilly campus, Starbucks, and friends’ homes. Because the LifeDrive has a good battery, I’m not hesitant to activate WiFi whenever I might want it. And that includes listening to Internet radio.

A basic version of PocketTunes is bundled with the LifeDrive. This app allows you to fill up your 4GB hard drive with MP3s and enjoy music while at work or play. The app is quite good and has most of the controls that you’d want, such as playlists, EQ, cross fade control, skins, and best of all, will play music in the background while you work with other apps on your Palm. You can listen through the LifeDrive’s buit-in speaker, headphones, or external speakers plugged into the headphone jack.

If you upgrade to the Deluxe version of PocketTunes, which I did for $25 (LifeDrive users get a $10 discount off the regular $35 price), you can also get Internet radio stations via the LifeDrive’s buit-in WiFi. I really like this feature.

I have way too much music to use the LifeDrive as my MP3 player. But the beauty of Internet radio is that is doesn’t require any disk space, and the listening options are bountiful. Right now I’m listening to a classic rock station on Live365. The audio is excellent. I never have any drop outs. And even using the non-subscriber version, there are fewer commercials than I’d have to endure on regular radio… plus I always have the option to subscribe and eliminate them all together.

I’ll be covering more WiFi enabled functionality in future chronicles, but for now, I’m going to enjoy this Stones song that’s playing and log off…

The LifeDrive Chronicles
Ch 1 - Internet Radio
Ch 2 - Gmail Instead of POP
Ch 3 - A Versatile Photog’s Assistant
Ch 4 - The Perfect BT Phone Companion
Ch 5 - Audio Shuttle and Player

Owners of iPod shuffles: beware. The next time you attend some geek conference and some dude stands up at the front asking you to raise your hands, think carefully about the possible consequences.

“Some dude” in this instance might be a Scotsman called Ewan Spence who decided to demonstrate the ultimate music mix experiment while taking part in the Opentech geek get-together in London last Saturday.

His idea was simple enough: get the shuffle owners to drop their shuffles in a hat, mix them up, then pull one out again. The shuffle’s design and nature mean that if you do this, you don’t actually lose anything of value. The music on your shuffle is still on your computer. The shuffle you’ve pulled from the hat is just as good as the one you put in, but it has different music on it that you can listen to and discard as you see fit.

Here’s what Ewan intended:

The experiment was planned to go something like this. Two pairs of volunteers would come forward from the OpenTech audience at the Media Stream session (hopefully with a pair of 512mb and a pair of 1gb iPod Shuffles). They would swap over their units with each other, and take away an iPod Shuffle with a different audio mix on it. Taking some media tool, doing something with it, and getting something different. That’s a hack.

Yeah, quite a fun hack. Sadly he didn’t tell the volunteers what was going to happen, and one of them had his PGP Private Key stored on his shuffle. I wasn’t there to see the results, but I’m glad to report that said shuffle owner was eventually reunited with his valuable data.

Next time you’re on a plane or a train and end up sitting next to someone with an identical iPod shuffle to yours, you might like to try the same mixing experiment, if only for the duration of the trip. Who said technology was anti-social?

This is what iPods were invented for, right?

OK, here’s the essentials of today’s new hardware announcement.

First off the Mac mini line now comprises 3 models. The minimum RAM has been upped to 512MB (at last!). The top two models have Airport and Bluetooth built-in, and the most expensive machine also has a Superdrive. (Full specs here.)

As for the new iBooks, there’s no widescreen version I’m afraid, even though plenty of us would have drooled over one. The new minimum processor is a 1.42GHz G4, with a minimum 512MB RAM (upgradable to 1.5GB). Airport and Bluetooth come as standard, along with the superclever scrolling trackpad and Sudden Motion Sensor first revealed in the last batch of PowerBooks.

All in all, a fairly predictable set of welcome upgrades. Both the mini and the iBook are better value than ever before.

Most important, I think, is the increase in basic RAM allocation. Every review I read (or wrote) of the Mac mini raved about its tiny size and excellent performance, but also declared the supplied 256MB of RAM as simply insufficient. I lost count of the number of times I read phrases like: “The Mac mini is a great computer at an incredible price, but make sure you buy more RAM.”

Well, now that has been dealt with. With 512MB as standard, new Mac minis will be able to run Tiger and the iLife apps with few problems.

In a buying mood now?

A quick check of the blogsphere indicates that not many Mac fans are impressed by Apple’s update of the Mac mini and iBook lines. As a mainly Windows & Linux guy, I am though. Here’s why…

When I wrote about becoming a Mac try-er (vs. switcher) in –
Mac Mini Eye for the Linux-Windows Guy
– a number of people commented how I should have bought a higher end iMac or iBook/Powerbook.
Well, here it is months later and I continue to be pleased with the little first generation Mac mini.
The refreshed Mac mini $599 version now includes the once optional Bluetooth and Airport Extreme card.
Its RAM was also bumped from 256MB to 512MB and the upgrade to 1GB could almost (but not quite) be considered affordable as a factory install.
This is great since it means that a person new to the Mac line doesn’t have to consider any additions to the model to have a full featured wireless desktop Mac.
It makes it easy for a mostly Windows or Linux person to take the plunge and test the Mac OS X waters.

The iBook refresh impressed me even more.
Most people noted the RAM bump to 512MB.
But, take a look at the 14 inch LCD model.
The $1299 price tag now includes:

• 512MB RAM
  
• Superdrive
  
• Bluetooth 2.0
  
• Sudden Motion Sensor
  

What do you think of the refreshed Mac mini and iBook models?

My wife doesn’t like OS X. A long-time Windows user, she finds OS X an alien environment. Perhaps that’s because she only ever uses it for short periods of time (a quick surf to a weather web site before breakfast), but anyway that’s how things are.

I remember one of her criticisms related to the way windows are manipulated. She tried to enlarge a window by dragging on one of its edges, and was frustrated when I told her the only way to do this was by dragging the bottom-right corner.

“That’s stupid,” she said. “Windows is much easier to use.”

I didn’t want to argue this one (we have more important things to argue about) but inwardly, I conceded that she had a point. It would be nice to be able to resize windows with more flexibility.

OCSmartHacks has come to my attention and offers not just a solution to this, but dozens of other UI hacks for OS X.

Among the features it includes are access to the Menu bar from anywhere, via a pop-up menu; tear-off menus, NeXT style; and resizing windows using any edge.

Those of you who’ve been using OS X since it was NeXTStep may be very interested to try out the tear-off menus.

This is the result

The software is shareware ($29 for a license) and I have not tried it myself; I was sufficiently intrigued by the online documentation to mention it here.

Are tear-off menus and resize-by-any-edge useful additions to OS X, or needless tinkering?

The latest version of Opera for Mac is (almost) as fast and as fun to use as the version I used to use years ago when I was still on a Windows box. That must have been Opera 3 or 4, I think; since then, all the Mac versions I’ve tried have run like molasses and been about as useful for browsing the web.

No more. Opera 8 is mostly as speedy as any of my (many) other browsers, and after a few hours of use it’s left me giggling like a little kid - not because it’s “Wow! This is so much better than anything else!” - but because it takes me back to the old days.

It’s a bit like seeing an old friend who you’ve not seen for years, and sitting down over some good food, only to find you both get along better than ever before.

Like OmniWeb, Opera is a very different beast from the typical consumer browser. There’s a lot of additional functionality inside that, quite frankly, I have no interest in even trying out: a mail client, aggregator, even a little notes-and-snippets database. It really tries hard to please.

Thankfully it’s very configurable, which makes it easy to switch all this extra stuff off; or at least keep it out of sight if it can’t be switched off.

I’m not suggesting you make Opera 8 your default browser; I certainly won’t be doing that. Safari, Camino and Firefox make better browsers on the Mac, I think. I’m just saying I’m pleased to see this version live up to my (possibly rose-tinted) memories of versions past. And that’s a good thing.

Oh, and while I’m on browsers again: Camino 0.9a2 rocks.

Tried Opera yet?

Related link: https://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=P3KYX40AT2I1YQSNDB…

Like many in the tech community, I found it rather disturbing that someone could be arrested, and then charged with stealing a WiFi signal. What a complete waste of taxpayer resources. I believe (hope) that the judge who sits on the bench will throw out the case.

Here’s why:

If you decide to water your lawn and turn on your sprinkler, and the run-off travels across the sidewalk, off of your property, and enters the drain, and then I come along and start to collect that water and put it into a bucket, you can’t convict me for stealing your water. I never entered your property, never took a step onto your lawn, I simply never trespassed.

WiFi works the same. If you have a wireless connection in your home, and that connection spills over onto the street, how is that any different? While the signal, like the water, originated from your property, it has also left the property and entered into public property. In fact, I could say that when your signal leaves your house and enters my house, you are trespassing. So why not start arresting homeowners with WiFi?

Now the guy was arrested for unauthorized access to a computer network. But if you use the water analogy, while I’m taking water that is still connected to the stream which originates from your home, I’m clearly in public space and am not violating your water network. Would the Florida police arrest me for unauthorized use of a waterway? It’s absurd.

The police clearly overstepped their bounds here. Granted what this guy did might have crossed into the area of tactless and rude, but if you don’t want to share your wireless signal with the world, password protect it and possibly don’t broadcast your SSID. And if you don’t want people using your water, build a moat.

Any other lawbreakers?

The Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) 2.0 firmware upgrade scheduled for release on July 27 includes a real browser (no more fussing around with Wipeout Pure :-) and video downloading (PC World article). There are also rumors that it may include some document readers (or actual office appliactions) and an email client (The Register article).

• 
  PC World: Sony’s PSP Goes Online


• 
  The Register: Sony PSP ‘update’ adds office apps, browser, email

Seen any cool and easy to find text input hardware or software for the Sony PSP?

Related link: https://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/king/2005/072105.html

Cobb County, GA’s purchase of 63,000 iBooks for middle school teachers and students may be falling apart, according to Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Mike King’s column “Bombshell may unravel Cobb laptops”. Choice bits:

The county’s district attorney has been asked to determine whether the bidding process was rigged to make sure that Apple became the favored supplier. His investigation will likely lead to a grand jury probe. And the school board — in what appears to be a rare sign of independence from its superintendent on the issue — has decided to hire an auditing firm out of New York to look over the whole bidding procedure.

and

Lost in the bombshell of that disclosure was the reason for the lawsuit in the first place: that the school district pulled a bait-and-switch on voters in 2003 when they got them to approve about $70 million in sales taxes for new technology but never told them it would be used to purchase 63,000 laptops for students and teachers to take home with them.

As a Cobb County resident and Mac fan, I blogged against the idea a while back because it seemed ill-advised and purposeless. But this is an ugly way for it to go down, and the allegations that the process was rigged on Apple’s behalf could make for some rotten PR if there’s anything to it.

Scratch one success story?

A couple of days ago, the small group who had been working on Saskatoon, a fork of the open source Smultron text editor, announced that they’d decided to take it no further:

The Saskatoon project has stalled out. Despite the lack of a usable binary we have decided to release the source at this time, in the hopes that it will be useful either to Peter Borg (the developer of Smultron, which forms the basis for Saskatoon), or to developers working on a future fork of Smultron.

I asked the group leader, Paul Bissex, if he’d mind sharing with the rest of us why the project came to an end, and he was happy to oblige.

First off, I asked: If I remember rightly, the aim was to make a really good programmer’s editor for OS X.

PB: The three key criteria were: Really Good, Open Source, and Cocoa. Smultron met those, but since everybody has a different idea of “really good” I naturally had things I wanted to add, particularly text munging via shell scripts.

What’s stopped you? Is it just because there’s Never Enough Time (that’s my problem in life) or was there more to it?

PB: That was most of it. I posted some thoughts about it. I went from being self-employed to a very intense (but cool) full-time job in January. I lacked the Cocoa chops to really lead the project authoritatively, and even though a half-dozen people signed on we never got real momentum. If I were to boil it down to a technical reason, I’d say that it was my lack of sophistication with regard to source code management. I set up a subversion repository and Trac server for the project, and all that was great, but I didn’t know enough to create a branch when one developer boldly took up one of my ideas to replace a central part of the app. The replacement code’s performance never came up to snuff, but I hadn’t left us any easy way to back out his changes to give us a usable binary.

The other factor for me is that web programming continues to be the thing that interests me most. So now I’m fishing around for a good web framework project to join.

What would you say is the best programmer’s editor available right now; or, what editor are you using?

PB: It’s funny — I’ve been using TextWrangler a lot. In the shell, emacs. I think BBEdit may still the be best editor available for OS X, but it’s showing its age and is too expensive. Smultron has now added ODB Editor support, which was one of my wish-list items for Saskatoon. I find TextMate very appealing and am about to give it another try. Damn… now you’re making me want to work on Saskatoon again.

So there you have it; my thanks to Paul for talking so willingly and openly. If the thought of Saskatoon withering away bothers you, now’s your chance to pick up the source that’s been produced to date, and run with it. Now there’s a chance you don’t get every day.

Or do you think we have plenty of editors already?

Seems like everyone and their dog either has a podcast or is thinking of getting into podcasting, so it only makes sense for their to be a conference around podcasting. Enter Podcast Hotel, a three-day podcasting and videoblogging (a.k.a. vlogging) event extraordinaire:

Dates: September 6-8, 2005
Location: Jupiter Hotel, Portland, Oregon

Not only am I happy that Podcast Hotel is being held in my backyard (I live in NE Portland), but I think this is a great opportunity for podcasters to get together, share ideas, learn from experts, and explore the next generation of blogging, vlogs. Here’s what the website has to say about Podcast Hotel:

“Part happening, part workshop and part citizen media exercise,
the Podcast Hotel will explore all the aspects of podcasting. We’re
turning the Jupiter - a fun and hip new hotel - into a podcast and
videoblog studio: rooms will be studios; the courtyard will be our
lounge (and the bar and restaurant our playground). Is podcasting
a revolution? Why is big media so fascinated with podcasting? How
do you podcast? What are the latest ways people are using podcasting
for their lives and work? This and more is what you’ll find at the
Podcast Hotel.”

For more information, visit the Podcast Hotel website.

I had a nightmare where someone turned on my iSight and started spying on me.

It looked a little something like this:

The above only works if you have Tiger and an iSight or other webcam. Still, it’s quite a freak out moment when someone else can turn on your iSight and incorporate it into their web page, even though you’re the only one seeing it.

How this trick works: Quartz Composer all the way. If you’ve installed the dev tools, this is definitely something to play with.

The actual composition is trivial and consists of just two pieces: the video input and a billboard to render it:

Drag a line from the video input’s “Image” output to the billboard’s “Image” input, then use the inspector on the billboard to set the width to 2 (you don’t set the height because a billboard keeps the aspect ratio of its sources).

Export this to a QuickTime movie, 320×240. Notice how it’s only 8KB - Quartz Composer compositions are a new track type for QuickTime, and they can be quite compact (especially if, like here, they don’t have any media samples of their own). Open the movie in QT Player just to make sure things are hoopy. Note that only one app can use your camera at a time, so you’ll have to close the Quartz Composer viewer (or quit QC) for QT Player to get the video. Happy? Embed the video in HTML (I have the boiler plate in an old QuickTime for Java article, under the heading “When Not to use QuickTime for Java”). Now you’re all set to scare your dear friends.

BTW, this idea is not original to me by any means. I was originally freaked out by seeing my own image on bbum’s blog-o-mat, which adds a series of video effects to the capture image (again, totally what Quartz Composer was built to do). A sample of that page:

Notice my wife’s G4 Cube over my shoulder!

And I only went looking for that because of an Apple BoF at JavaOne where they showed an “A-ha Effect” video playing in a Java CocoaComponent.

Come to think of it, should I pitch Derrick an article on Quartz Composer? :-)

What is Preview? is the first of a new kind of article that will be appearing at MacDevCenter in coming months. The “What is…?” series will be covering some of the basic nuts-and-bolts, helping newcomers understand their computers better.

While writing the piece about Preview, I discovered a very interesting thing. This app has a missing feature.

In my article, I explain how you can use Preview as a stripped-down image editor, in a manner very similar to iPhoto. There are many features common between the two apps.

And buried deep in Preview’s help files, I found reference to a feature that apparently should exist, but doesn’t.

The help files say that under the Tools menu, you should be able to rate your photos - give them a star rating of one to five, just as you can rate photos in iPhoto or songs in iTunes. Here’s a screenshot of the help page:

But look under the Tools menu, and the option isn’t there.

Is this something that was included in Preview, then taken out? Something planned for a future version? Just a typing error?

As with the other editing functions in Preview, this feature (if it were live) would enable people to create their own image filing system using Spotlight comments, ratings, and the Finder. It provides a database-free method of sorting and managing photographs; an alternative to iPhoto.

I like the idea of rating images in Preview. I hope that this feature sees the light of day in a future update.

What else would you like to see in Preview?

Related link: https://www.sprint.com/datalink

Sprint PCS is a bit late to the broadband mobile wireless game (though not as late as T-Mobile USA). But, its EV-DO offering looks interesting claiming 400 to 700Kbps downstream speeds with burst rates up to 2Mbps.

Sprint PCS’ announcement of their high speed wireless service…

Sprint Enhances Sprint PCS Data LinkSM Capabilities to Enable Wireless Replacement of Wireline Data Access for Business Locations

…paints an interesting picture with promises of high speed mobile service.
If I’m reading their information page correctly, the monthly cost for unlimited data will be the same $80/month as their slower 1xRTT service.

Connection Card Plans

All pricing and available MBs are the same whether Customer Lines use the Sprint PCS Wireless High Speed Data network or the Sprint PCS Vision 1xRTT network. Sprint PCS Wireless High Speed Data coverage is not available everywhere and requires a Sprint PCS Wireless High Speed Data-compatible connection card. Where the Sprint PCS Wireless High Speed Data network is available and a Sprint PCS Wireless High Speed Data-compatible connection card is used, Customer Lines will first attempt to connect to the Sprint PCS Wireless High Speed Data network, then default to the Sprint PCS Vision 1xRTT network depending on coverage and network availability.

In any case, with Cingular and Verizon Wireless already offering high speed mobile wireless service, this leaves T-Mobile as one of the last major carriers still without a high speed offering.

Are you subscribing to a broadband mobile wireless service? How is it?

I received an interesting question that I’d like to know the answer to myself: Who (person and company) invented/created the first camera phone?
The question in my inbox read:

I’ve been searching for the answer to “Who at SHARP/J-Phone(Vodaphone) is credited for the invention of the Camera Phone?”

I can’t seem to find any information outside of the first phone, J-SH04, from SHARP in 2000.

Do you know who it was, or know anyone who may be able to answer this puzzling question?

I did a little research using Google but didn’t turn up anything.
So, does anyone have the definitive answer (and evidence to back it) to this question?

Post other camera phone milestones and interesting trivia here! :-)

When making decisions that might affect my working environment for the long term, I like to think carefully. I’d hate to rush into something, only to end up changing my mind after a few months and having to undergo the hassle of switching from one system to another, importing data from one format to another, or having to re-install data and apps from backups.

(Although ask my friends about my habit of changing weblog CMS every six months or so, then show them the paragraph above, and they will laugh out loud.)

It was lack of trust that stopped me buying an iMac G5 the other week. In terms of specification and price, the iMac was exactly the right computer for me to buy, fitting my needs perfectly.

But I couldn’t help Googling around and finding a lot of complaints. At MacInTouch, there are dozens of reports, over many long pages, of iMac G5 machines overheating, crashing, and simply ceasing to work. Lots of people describe the midplane (essentially the motherboard) of the computer starting to show signs of getting too hot. Specific parts are described as “leaking” or “blistering” shortly before the machines die. Similar reports have popped up on many other web sites, causing some to suggest a recall of the whole product line.

I doubt Apple will do that, but it would be nice if the company could reassure customers, given the large number of problem reports. Was there a problem? Has it been fixed in recent production models? We trust Apple with our money, Apple should trust us with straightforward answers.

It’s also lack of trust that has stopped me dealing with my vacation photos. Let me explain why.

About three weeks ago, just before I went on vacation, I bought a new Mac mini. This was the machine I decided I could trust (and so far, that trust has been very well placed).

One of its main roles was to handle all my digital photography from now on. For some years I’d used Graphic Converter on my iBook G3, but with the new G4 machine I was prepared to consider switching to different software.

“Great,” I thought. “With the G4 power I’ll finally be able to put iPhoto to use. Now that it has some editing oomph too, it’ll be just the thing I need. Editing and management in one app. Perfect.”

But once again, I Googled around, and found disquiet in many places.

Among the comments I found (lightly edited for profanity and clarity) were:

• “iPhoto continually crashes, even on a dual G5.”
• “I’ve got about 20,000 photos and I can’t get iPhoto to work any more.”
• “I’m not looking forward to recovering all my images from iPhoto’s demented file structure.”
• “I’m tempted to bury the Mac mini in the garden and reach for my old Dell.”
• “Arrrrgh! iPhoto is driving me nuts!”

You get the idea. Reports that iPhoto makes further edits the moment you click ‘Done’ or, put another way, messes around with color profiles are unsettling to say the least.

I’m drawn to iPhoto because it’s so easy to use, because it combines editing and managing in the same app and interface, and because there’s a host of clever and useful plugins for it. But I find the numerous reports of trouble too numerous to ignore; they’ve undermined my trust in the application, and left me unwilling to commit myself to using it.

I spent several hours trying alternatives. I looked at Photoshop Elements, and Shoebox, and fired up iView Media Pro, which I’ve used in the past and know to be incredibly fast; but in the end, I came back to my old system of organizing in the Finder and editing in Graphic Converter. The act of using GC on a faster machine made me see it in a new light (and I discovered a hugely useful, time-saving tip as well), and I smiled. “This works,” I said to myself. I can trust it.

How does software earn your trust?

One of the main attractions of Mac OS X Tiger with a .Mac subscription is the ability to sync your Address Book contacts, iCal calendars, Safari bookmarks, and other stuff across several Macs. Although .Mac syncing was available in earlier versions of Mac OS X, several desirable enhancements were introduced in Tiger, including the abilities to sync Mail-related information and passwords from your Keychain. (See https://www.mac.com/1/sync.html for details.) I think there’s much promise in Tiger’s .Mac sync abilities, but there’s been a rather irritating bug in the Address Book sync feature since the initial release of Mac OS X 10.4. The bug, documented by Apple in their Technical Document 301230, is that contact URL field entries cannot be synced to .Mac. Technical Document 301230, dated March 30, 2005, warns that “if you reset the sync data on your computer, then choose .Mac as the master source to replace the data on your computer, you may lose all URL information in Address Book.” The Apple technical document goes on to recommend that you place URLs in the Notes field for .Mac syncing. This workaround allows you to transfer your Address Book contact URls to your .Mac account and subsequently to other Macs, but they will not be available in your Safari bookmarks. The way I understand it, unless a contact’s home page is present in the URL field in Address Book, the home page will not show up in your Safari Address Book bookmarks. There are some workarounds.

• Create a bookmark folder in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar, and copy your Address Book bookmarks into this new folder. You can subsequently sync your Safari Bookmarks to make them available across all of your Macs.
• Cut and paste back and forth between the URL field and the Notes field in Address Book. (This workaround seems to be suggested by Apple in Technical Document 301230.)
• Copy your Address Book folder from ~/Library/Application Support, where the ~ symbol stands for your home directory, onto a tiny USB flash drive and carry it around with you. This really defeats the purpose of .Mac syncing, though.

I hope Apple will fix this in the next update to its otherwise awesome operating system, Tiger.

If anyone has a better workaround or could shed more light on this problem, please post your thoughts.

If I were a betting man, I would have put money down that the 10.4.2 update would fix the color profile problem in iPhoto 5. Good thing I’m not. The problem persists.

For those of you who haven’t been hit upside the head with this annoyance yet, it goes something like this:

• Your digital camera records your .jpg photos using the sRGB color profile. It does this because that’s the industry standard. If you send your image to photo service, it will come back looking pretty much as you expected.
• If, however, you edit your photo in iPhoto 5, the color profile for that picture is changed to Generic RGB. What does that mean? Depending on the type of picture, you can get unexpected results when you output the photo. If you want to see the difference in color spaces, launch the ColorSync Utility in your Utilities folder, click on the Profiles tab, then compare the sRGB and the Generic RGB profiles. It isn’t huge — just enough to be irritating.
• The upshot is that if you want to stay with the sRGB profile, you can’t edit in iPhoto 5. You have to use an external app such as Photoshop.

I have to say, I’m scratching my head over this one. Apple has provided us with this cool Adjust Panel in iPhoto 5, yet many of us can’t use it because of the color profile bug. I’m teaching a half day Mac Tools for Digital Photographers Lab at Macworld Boston on Thursday, and I was really hoping that this problem would be fixed so I could include iPhoto’s image editing in some of my workflows.

Maybe next year…

If anyone has any insight as to why this problem persists, or a good workaround for it, please post.

In no particular order:

• Doug’s iTunes actions adds several useful new options for mucking about with music files.
• Video recorder lets you save live video images from an attached camera directly to your hard disk.
• iView Media Pro actions will come in handy for users of that excellent media cataloguing application.
• Cut and Paste — OK, not actions as such, but very simple workflows for working with clipboard data.
• Create thumbnail poster grabs a bunch of images, thumbnailizes them, and creates a ready-to-print poster. Nifty!
• View items in Terminal takes the input (or, put another way, the output of a previous action), opens Terminal, runs vim, and displays it there.
• Upload to Flickr; well, you can guess what it does.

Got any more?

Recently, there’s been an awful lot of confusion, chaos and legal threats about sharing TV shows. After reading numerous articles on the subject (and not being a lawyer type), I thought it might be a bit of fun instead to invite people to visit my TiVo on a one-on-one basis. (Not broadcasting, not filesharing, just a one-on-one virtual visit to watch TV.) You got iChat AV? Are you set up to video chat with it? C’mon over and watch. From today until 1 August 2005, I’m inviting strangers to pop on over and watch my television.

What I’ve done is this: I’ve hooked the output of my TiVo into my ADVC-100 video converter and from there into my Macintosh. That means whenever I video chat, you see (and hear) my TiVo instead of seeing (and hearing) me. IM me with the show you want to see and we’re good to go. This may be madness, this may be unwise, but I’m curious to know how this all plays out.

Want to share shows in the other direction? I’d love to watch TV from foreign countries! To date, my longest distance iChat TV experiences have been with Japan, England and Australia.

Interested? If so, you’ll need:
* A fairly recent Mac
* A semi-decent broadband connection
* iChat AV
* Some sort of video feed (preferably from your TV! but any feed will do)

Send me a brief e-mail (erica@mindspring.com) and let me know your iChat ID and what kind of shows or movies you’d like to see. Although I’d love to have enough time in my life to write an automatic response system in AppleScript and to hack up an IR blaster to control the TiVo, well, I don’t have that time. I’ve got to do it all manually right now. I’m not always around, but I’ll try to respond to (polite) e-mails in a timely fashion.

Watch this space. I’ll report back periodically on how the experiment went…
Now Playing: “Doctor Who”

What do you think? Is a virtual visit legally the same as a physical one?

Now that things have settled down after the big Intel announcement, I’ve been spending some time doing what I often do; downloading stuff and messing around.

Here’s a few recent discoveries. made before the vacation I’ve just returned from. There’ll be more along soon.

First off is DashOnOff, a prefpane that allows you to switch the Dashboard process off. And on again. And off again. Like a switch. Just like that.

I played with Dashboard the first day I installed Tiger, and have ignored it ever since. I still haven’t seen any widgets that don’t replicate something else already done perfectly well by another app, my browser, or Google. But even though I ignored Dashboard, it still sat there eating CPU. Hence the switch. Click. Click.

(Update: just before posting this, I heard about the new BBC Listen Live widget, which I’ve just installed. Much easier than messing about with browser windows, and the first widget I’ve seen that’s really useful to me. Yay.)

Another neat new thing is iFill, a shareware app from Griffin Technology. The premise is very simple; iFill downloads internet-based radio broadcasts for you, and sticks them on your iPod when you’re not looking.

What I love most about it is the UI; yes I know it’s nothing like any of the User Interface Guidelines but it just looks really nice, and takes a new direction for hardware-oriented software away from the brushed metal look which (in my mind) is already starting to show its age.

Then there’s the Swinging London fonts - free for a limited period only.

And CryptoEdit, which is essentially TextEdit + encryption. Nice idea. NoteList, made by the same team, might interest some of you note-and-snippet-storage addicts.

Along similar lines, there’s info.xhead, a kind of Address Book for, well, everything except addresses. A mini database for any kind of information you want to throw at it. I wouldn’t normally take a second glance at an app like this because I remain a dedicated user of Notational Velocity. But info.xhead (not the sort of name to roll off the tongue, is it?) is Spotlight-friendly and scores one point over NV in that regard.

Hey, what’s on *your* Dock? Or have we done that already?

U.S. mobile phone carriers recently announced various combinations of exchanging MMS (multimedia) messages. But, looking at the separate announcements was confusing to me. So, I drew a little diagram to help me figure out which services can exchange MMS messages.
The diagram on the left is based on information from the CNET News.com article:

Camera phone photos get wider audience

Note that the MMS exchanges are point to point.
So, you could not, for example, send an MMS message from a Verizon Wireless phone to a T-Mobile phone using Cingular as an intermediary (if I interpreted the news articles correctly).

Are you going to start sending MMS messages to friends on other networks now?

As the editor of ONJava and java.net, I’ve put together a collection of documents to help writers with their articles. These include two docs on style and process handed out by most O’Reilly Network editors, a further style guide unique to the Java sites, and an HTML template to get started with (we only accept HTML - no MS-Word). Of course, since these files need to stay together, I’ve zipped them up and send them out as onjava-javanet-writers-guide.zip.

Well, at least I did. I’ve been having a problem with a lot of sites lately, GMail in particular. Apparently, they don’t take .zips:


Hi. This is the qmail-send program at xxxxxxxxx.net.

I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.

This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.



<xxxxxxxx@gmail.com>:

(xxxxxxx@gmail.com) 64.233.171.27 failed after I sent the message.

Remote host said: 552 5.7.0 Illegal Attachment m35si1200988rnd


I suppose this comes from all the vile malware cargo that can come along for a ride inside a .zip, maybe enhanced by mailers (or clueless users) that automatically expand zips, but is banning .zip really the answer? This policy causes so much collateral damage to e-mail functionality, and the spammers and thieves will just move on to any of their other 100 dirty tricks anyways.

Besides, I fail to see how this makes anyone safer. One of my authors said his company has a standing “no zip” policy, so they just swap .piz files — i.e., sender changes the extension from .zip to .piz, receiver changes it back. Easy workaround.

Another approach: just use any of the other, less-ubiquitous compression formats, like tar.gz, StuffIt, ARC, etc.

For the meantime, if you’re trying to write for ONJava — or just interested! — I’ve attached the file to this blog: onjava-javanet-writers-guide.zip. And at some point, we’ll just link the files on the left column of the page.

But still, that doesn’t help for swapping drafts back and forth. This seems like a problem that’s only going to get worse.

Have you been inconvenienced by the ZIP lockout?

Related link: https://wapipedia.org

Peter Shanks posted a message on Geekzone’s forum about why he created Wapipedia.org.

Peter Shanks’ post about Wapedia on Geekzone

The end result is a clean phone/PDA screen friendly site that lets you query Wikipedia’s vast knowledge store while on the move.
I just hope the site doesn’t get Slashdotted!

If you know of other new phone and PDA friendly sites, let me know and I’ll add it to my list on:
MobileViews Mobile Aware Site List

Know of other phone/PDA screen friendly sites? Let us know.

Related link: https://journalism.berkeley.edu/

When an organization prepares to rebuild a large, static web site, the usual buzz is “Which content management system should we use?” On the webmasters mailing lists to which I subscribe, the question is more or less constantly aloat in one thread or another. The question that’s rarely asked is, “Is a CMS right for us?”

After nearly a decade, we’re finally getting ready to re-deploy an institutional web site at work. The current site is around 1400 mostly static pages, all with content deeply enmeshed in layout tables, full of font tags and tons of non-validating code. The gameplan for the redesign is:

1. Determine which outdated pages can be discarded
2. Discard old pages and internal links to those pages
3. Develop a semi-automated way to make all remaining pages XHTML-compliant
4. Suck the guts out of each page and into a CMS or centralized templating system
5. Make sure no critical layouts or formatting have broken in the process
6. Apply new design template at the CMS or templating system level
7. Refresh old content, add new content

As I looked into and thought about content management systems, I came up with a list of challenges I’d have to overcome:

Data lock-in

With a static site, you can switch HTML authoring tools as often as you like. But once you adopt a CMS, you’re committed to a product in a way you weren’t before. If you ever decide to switch to a new CMS, getting your content out of the existing one and into a new one will probably be a major chore. Even though we publish a lot of student sites with Movable Type, the idea of moving our entire site to a CMS, i.e. walking into the data lock-in scenario, gave me a slight case of the willies. Fear of commitment, you might call it.

Maintaining existing URLs

With a large and much-linked-to site breaking incoming links is not an option. Either the CMS we choose has to give us the ability to specify the output location of each database record precisely (keeping in mind that we have a mix of .html and .php pages, even though both extensions are PHP-parsed in our case), or do some very intense work with mod_rewrite. I was encountering a lot of mixed reports from CMS adopters on keeping old URLs intact.

Integration with existing editing tools

The few people who have editorial access to our site are died-in-the-wool Dreamweaver users. I’m a card-carrying BBEdit freak. Moving to a CMS would mean editing all content through web forms. Any CMS we chose would need the ability to send content out to a desktop editor of choice and round-trip it back into the database. Some CMSs can do this, but most can’t. This requirement greatly limited our choices.

Ability to mix existing static and dynamic content

Good CMSs provide a platform in which to both provide static content and to build custom web applications in PHP or other languages. Over the years, I’ve built a ton of custom PHP/MySQL solutions — jobs database, alumni database, course catalog, internal contacts database, student and faculty story submission processor, etc. Any CMS we chose would need to let us seamlessly integrate those existing applications into its framework. Probably possible, but could be tricky or difficult with many CMSs.

Ability to easily search/replace through content

It’s trivial to search and replace text strings through a static site with command-line tools, BBEdit, etc. But not all CMSs offer search/replace functionality inside of databased content.

While it would probably be possible to find a CMS that satisfied each of those potential problems, it would still leave us with data lock-in and, in some ways, less flexibility than we have with a static site. Given that my main goal in considering CMSs to begin with was to achieve total separation of form and content, I started to question whether a CMS was really what we needed.

After a few days looking at ways to attach templates to pages with simple PHP, I found what I was looking for. Smarty Templates is an off-shoot of the PHP project. Without having to adopt a CMS, Smarty gives me server-side caching for fast execution, an easy way to attach a single template to thousands of pages, a methodology for separating out the logic of web application programming from design (so designers can make changes without having to risk breaking PHP code), a ton of plugins… and satisfied every one of my design goals. No data lock-in, people can still use their preferred editing tools… I think we’ve found the perfect fit. The only big CMS feature I would have liked to have had is user-level management, so I could give permissions to various staffers to edit their own content — we’ll still have to rely on filesystem permissions for that. All sites have unique needs, of course, so my conclusions will be different from yours, but I think we’ve found a good fit here. Still in the early stages of this project, but it’s going to be an interesting summer.

Am I missing the boat on this one? Let me know what you think.