I have been deluged by e-mail about disappearing iPods. Here’s what happens in general: Your iPod starts reporting disc (although I’d imagine that “disk” is more correct) errors in iTunes when you try to sync. “The iPod cannot be updated. The required disc cannot be found.” So you reformat your iPod and reload the new firmware. Then your iPod stops appearing in iTunes. It mounts onto the desktop as a disk rather than with an iPod icon. Unfortunately, this isn’t just happening to you. It’s mostly shuffles, but also happened to nanos and 5G video iPods. Anyway, the cure for now seems to be quitting out of and re-launching iTunes and hoping. And occasionally rebooting your computer. Some people have found that it helps to keep their computer from sleeping and enabling disk usage for the iPod. In any case, it’s not just you and it seem to happen to iPods using the latest firmware updates. If you know anything more about this behavior or have any insights, drop me an e-mail or add to the comments. Thanks.

New Years is just a few days away, so I thought I’d take a little time to learn more about Apple Time. Your Mac always knows what time it is because it uses one of Apple’s custom NTP servers. NTP, which stands for Network Time Protocol, provides a way for clocks to synchronize even when faced with variable latency data networks. It was developed back in the 1980’s at the University of Delaware.

In System Preferences’ Date & Time settings, you can selet one of three Apple NTP servers: time.apple.com, time.asia.apple.com, or time.euro.apple.com. Select the one that bests describes your geographic location. Your computer will contact the server on a regular basis to resynchronize your system.

The polling frequency of your clock is set in /private/etc/ntp.conf, where it typically checks for accuracy about every hour. The ntp.conf file, which is used by the NTP daemon (ntpd, ps -ax | grep ntpd), sets a minimum polling and a maximum polling interval. These represent seconds to the power of two. So the (Apple) standard minimum polling interval of 12 is 4096 seconds, or about 68 minutes. The maximum polling interval of 17 is more like a day and a half.

Sometimes despite everything, you may lose sync to network time. Apple has a support how-to posted that walks you through updating your ntp.conf file to deal with this.

Finally, I stumbled across this interesting NTP hack, which allows users without system administrator privileges to access a second time server. Nifty.

Friday has rolled around once again, and this week many of you have new digital music players to enjoy. Load ‘em on up with this fresh heap of Napster freebies.

“Make Love” by Jess Klein
Even with six albums under her belt, Jess Klein’s latest is her most revelatory. City Garden, which features today’s free download, is an emotional work which Klein hopes will “release and heal.” Download this track and get soothed. [Dec 29]

“Ella y Yo” by Aventura
Known for their excellent musicianship, look for these Dominican sensations to enjoy a long and prosperous career. This reggaeton offering features one of the genre’s heavy hitters, Don Omar. [Dec 28]

“Can’t Stop” by Ozomatli
This Los Angeles collective’s infectious mix of salsa, hip hop and jazz-funk has earned them a Grammy and countless fans. Download this track and be among the first to get an early taste of Ozo’s highly anticipated new album, Don’t Mess with the Dragon, currently set for release in March. [Dec 27]

“Two Ton Paperweight (EXPLICIT)” by Psychostick
Originally from Odessa, Texas, this band has undergone many transformations on their way to becoming what you hear today. Almost everyone can relate to this hardcore ode to a less-than-dependable hunk of metal (also known as a car) from Psychostick’s debut album, We Couldn’t Think of a Title. [Dec 26]

“Greensleeves (Alternate Take 6)” by Vince Guaraldi Trio
Merry Christmas from the man behind the music for the beloved Peanuts TV specials. This alternate take from the Charlie Brown Christmas sessions (done as a bossa nova rather than the jazz waltz version used in the show) is from the newly expanded and remastered soundtrack. [Dec 25]

“Jingle Bells” by Lisa Loeb
Pop star Lisa Loeb remembers that Christmas is really for the kids and offers this “gift,” as featured on Kid’s Club–Holiday Fun Volume 1, a diverse collection of children’s holiday favorites. [Dec 24]

“Mais” by Pierre Aderne
Originally released in Brazil in 2005, the third album from this former competitive swimmer has made its way around the world and has become a Top 10 album in Japan. This track features one of Aderne’s diverse Brazilian musical styles. [Dec 23]

Here’s a summary of last week’s Mac Freeware & Free & Open Source Software (F/FOSS) from my personal blog. If you have freeware or Open Source software to recommend for Mac users, please post it in a response here (or email the information to me if you prefer to remain anonymous).

KeePass: Password Safe
Here’s an Open Source application this is even more multi-platform than usual.

KeePass:: The Open Source Password Safe

The original version was written for for use with Microsoft Windows. However, its author lists unofficial ports for Linux/Mac OS X (X11 required for the Mac), Palm OS, Pocket PC (Windows Mobile), and even the USB flash memory U3 portable smart technology format.

The application’s official description reads: KeePass is a free/open-source password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way.

TextWrangler 2: Mac Text Editor
If you ever want to waste a lot of time, bring up the topic of favorite text editors in a group of software developers.

Even though I have a couple of favorite text editors, I’m always looking at other editors just in case they do something better than the ones I’m using.

Here’s a freeware text editor for the Mac that might be interesting if you are one of those people who keep looking at other text editors too.

Bare Bones Software TextWrangler 2

I don’t see Ruby in the list of programming language syntaxes supported for highlighting and function navigation.

VLC Media Player
When I bought my Mac mini I had a couple of video files I had created under Microsoft Windows that did not play on the Mac. More recently, when I wiped Windows XP Home Edition off of my PC and installed Windows XP Media Center Edition in its place, I found that I couldn’t play commercial DVDs on the system because Media Center did not include the necessary CODECs.

In both cases, I turned to the Open Source…

VLC Media Player

…to quickly get running (I have yet to bother to look for CODECs for Windows Media Center Edition) to play my videos.

Yahoo! Bookmarks Beta
Until recently Yahoo!’s MyWeb and Bookmarks were separate web features. Yahoo merged MyWeb into Bookmarks recently (I’m guessing within the last two months or so). All my MyWeb site links and descriptions were moved over to…

Yahoo! Bookmarks Beta

This merged beta looks better than MyWeb did IMHO. I like the thumbnail image of each bookmarked page. And, the new color scheme is a lot easier on my eyes. The one thing I miss though is an RSS feed of my bookmarks.

It looks like Yahoo! is trying to move its Bookmarks (formerly MyWeb) away from a social networking tool to simply a personal bookmarking tool and keeping del.icio.us as its social network bookmarking site.

Gigavox Levelator Upgraded to Version 1.1.0
Gigavox has an upgrade for their popular audio leveling freeware tool…

Levelator 1.1.0

Versions are available for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. There’s a note on the site that says Linux coming soon.

The java-based tool is aimed about podcasters/netcasters who have two or more people on a podcast. The two helps to adjust the audio levels for multiple speakers.

I had an interesting (ok, that may not be the right word) opportunity to compare Apple and Dell support handling recently. The results may surprise you (I know I was surprised). My Dell Lattitude D600 notebook (about 2.5 years old at the time) had a sudden hard drive failure about 2 months ago. Last night, my 8 month old MacBook hard drive died just as suddenly. But, let’s see what happened after that.

Phone call delay: Both Apple and Dell kept me on hold for between 5 to 10 minutes. Not too bad.
Tech Rep: Both tech reps were male and based in the US. Ok, still similar.
Tech Rep Cordialness: Have any of you run into reps that are reading from some bad decision tree script? Fortunately, neither the Apple nor the Dell reps were among this group. Both let me tell them what diagnostics I had already performed and skipped the useless questions in the decision tree.

This is where the similarity ends.

Dell: The tech rep agreed with my assessment that the drive was dead and I had a new hard drive in 48 hours. They provided a label and box for me to ship my dead drive back in. I was up and running before heading home on Friday.
Apple: The Apple tech rep said the drive was probably dead but would not ship a drive to me. Instead, he insisted I go to the Genius Bar at a local Apple Store. Oh boy, I get to fight the crowds just a few days after Christmas. Just what I wanted to do after work (actually I had to leave the office early). He set up an appointment for me at 4:40pm.

Apple Store: The shopping center was packed. Fortunately, I found parking at the top level of the parking structure. The Apple Store was even more packed with a line to the cashier about 12 deep. The Genius Bar had just one iPod Genius and one Mac Genius. The appointment list displayed above them was packed. The harried Mac Genius had three dead or dying Mac notebooks of various types in front of him with a couple of small Firewire external drives. One guy came in after his appointed time and pushed the already delayed Genius’ schedule back even further. This fellow had a dying hard drive in his 5 year old PowerBook and a flight to Australia 6am Saturday morning. He ended up pairing up with a sales person and buying a new MacBook (good decision IMHO). The Mac Genius agreed that my hard drive was dead. Unfortunately, the Apple Store didn’t have any spare drives. So, I’m faced with a 7 to 10 day wait now.

I asked the Mac Genius if he could have Apple just ship me a drive directly and let me replace the drive (as I did with the Dell notebook). Unfortunately, there is a complete disconnect between the Apple Store Genius Bar and Apple Care. So, no, he could not help with do that.

I must commend Mac Genius Jason at the Ala Moana Apple Store, btw. He was a picture of patience and diagnostic efficiency in the face (literally) of a bunch of annoyed/depressed/anxious customers with Macs in various states of distress. The iPod Genius to my right was a similar picture with the distressed iPod owners he faced. Kudos to those Geniuses for really keeping their cool in a noisy environment with clearly distressed customers in front of them.

I left my MacBook at the Apple Store but am calling Apple Care when they re-open Friday morning to see if they can’t speed up this repair process. Surely, Apple’s fabled customer service should at least be able to match Dell’s? And, no I don’t have Pro Care, just the 3 year Apple Care extension. But, I don’t have a special Dell support contract either, just their 3 year extension.

One more thing (to borrow Steve J.’s line): The Dell Latitude only requires a single screw to be removed to remove the hard drive. The MacBook requires removing the battery, unscrewing three screws, and removing a metal strip before you can remove the hard drive.

Have your temporary Webkit files disappeared from your /tmp folder? Perhaps you should be looking in your /var/tmp folder instead. Recently Firefox and Safari seem to store flash temporary items in a new location. Look in /var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems. (This assumes that your user id is 501, which is typical but not certain–type id at the command line.) Instead of being named “Webkitplugin”, the file will be called something like “TemporaryFlashItem”.

Here’s part 2 of my round-of of the year’s Mac news and opinions here at the Mac Devcenter blog. If you missed Part 1, here it is.

Another astonishing thing happening in the Mac developer community. 100 developers signed up for MacSanta, offering 200 products.

This practically proves that there is a need for a Mac Marketplace.

Here’s this week’s edition of Napster Freebies. To sum up the feedback from the last few weeks, these links seem to work internationally and do not require a Napster account to use. If you find otherwise, let me know by email or add a comment below. I hope you enjoy the music and that you discover an artist or two this way.

“O Come, O Come Emmanuel” by Aaron Shust
This staff member and worship leader of the Perimeter Church in Atlanta paid his dues playing colleges and coffee houses, drawing on influences including Motown, Bob Marley, and U2. Hear the result in his take on this enduring carol. [Dec 22]

“Stalk U” by Los Abandoned
Los Abandoned unite the Casio keyboard with gritty electric guitars and bittersweet ukulele to form their post-punk/Latin-alternative sound. What does that sound like? Download this track and find out. [Dec 21]

“How Long” by Kenny White
Veteran songwriter/composer Kenny White has done everything from commercial jingles to working with the likes of Linda Ronstadt, Dwight Yoakam, and Gladys Knight. This track is from his latest album, Never Like This. [Dec 20]

“The Awful Things” by Simon Dawes
Malibu’s most wanted indie-rockers keep it loose, clanky, and cool on this fan favorite from their first full-length album, Carnivore. Enough chunky guitars, melodic hooks, and hand-claps to satisfy the most jaded power-pop aficionado. [Dec 19]

“Grim Reaper Blues” by Entrance
On his fourth Entrance album, Guy Blakeslee realizes a fully amplified electric orchestra to channel his free-flowing spiritual theater, equally inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Timothy Leary, and Delta-Blues legend Charley Patton. [Dec 18]

“When We Were Young” by Life of Riley
Houston-based alt-rock brothers Cassidy and Brice Campbell made a name for themselves producing hits for Christian groups including Inhabited and Modern Day John. This wistful rocker is the first single is from their new band’s debut album, Days Aw [Dec 17]

“Posters” by Jeffrey & Jack Lewis
Already known as an underground comic book artist and for his association with the Moldy Peaches, Jeffrey Lewis has just released his third album, recorded with his bass-playing younger brother, Jack. Is that a snippet of Gilligan’s Island melody we detect at the top? [Dec 16]

Here’s a summary of last week’s Mac Freeware & Free & Open Source Software (F/FOSS) from my personal blog. If you have freeware or Open Source software to recommend for Mac users, please post it in a response here (or email the information to me if you prefer to remain anonymous).

Freeciv (Clone of Sid Meier’s Civilization for multiple OSes)
I mentioned in an earlier post that I was once addicted to games like Sid Meier’s Civilization.

Open Source supporters may find it interesting to know that there is a clone of it that runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Freeciv 2.0.8 (released March 6, 2006)

GIMP and Gimpshop
The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is a powerful bitmap image manipulation application that is available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows through the magic of the Open Source community.

GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program

But, despite its power, what if its multiple disconnected windows interface throws you for GUI loop? It does take a while to get comfortable with that interface and you might now want to have the time. No problem. Head over to take a look at…

Plastic Bugs Gimpshop

Adium Multi-IM Protocol Client for Mac OS X
I’m not much of a IM user, but if you are and you use a Mac, I’m told that…

Adium

…is the free Open Source IM client to try out. It documentation says that you can use it to IM users of AIM, Jabber, MSN (now Live) Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and more.

It has been available as a Universal Binary since version 0.88 (current version is 0.89.1).

Flip4Mac: Play Windows Media Files on your Mac
The Mac is known for its multimedia capabilities. But, one of the things I noticed when I got my first Mac (a Mac mini) back in 2005 was that it couldn’t play the Windows Media audio and video files commonly used by many sites like NPR (National Public Radio). Microsoft had not pulled support for its Mac version of Windows Media Player yet. So, all was not lost. But, Microsoft soon after pulled that version out of production. Shortly after it licensed…

Flip4Mac

…to let Windows Media files play in QuickTime. I’m using it on an Intel-based MacBook (1st generation with a mere Core Duo :-).

A new version of iTerm is out today that brings some very noticeable speed and font rendering improvements. If you tried iTerm before and didn’t like it because it felt slow and the display appeared ever-so-slightly fuzzy, get this update and see that things are looking a lot better. It now looks and feels just as fast as Terminal…plus it has tabs and other niceties that Terminal doesn’t.

Try it and feel the improvement.

And while we’re on this topic, does anyone have any intel on Leopard packing a new Terminal?

Was 2006 a good year for Apple? Yeah, I’d say so. If only for the incredible speed and smoothness of the transition to Intel, not forgetting all the new iPods, Core 2 Duo processors, and hints of what’s to come (in the form of the iTV and Leopard sneak peaks).

How have we covered things here at the Mac DevCenter blog? In an informative and entertaining way, we hope. Here’s an overview of the news from the first half of the year; I’ll post the second half tomorrow.

PreFab Software just released the 2.0 update to their UI Browser software. For those of you unfamiliar with this product, it allows you to select any on-screen element and determine how to address it via AppleScript and System Events. This can save you a huge amount of effort when you attempt to script Applications without (or with inadequate) AppleScript dictionaries. The 2.0 update is now a universal binary with enhanced functionality to make the scripting process easier. You can read about the specific updates here.

Parallels released Parallels Desktop for Mac Beta-2. This beta update addresses what I’m guessing is one of the most asked for features: USB 2.0 support (vs. the slower USB 1.1). The USB 2.0 support is not complete yet as Parallels admits in their press release: Work with critical USB 2.0 devices like external hard drive, printers, and scanners at full native speeds. Just plug and play! A heads up; “isynchronous” devices like Bluetooth devices, webcams, etc. do not work with USB 2.0 yet, but we’re working hard to get them up and running.

Parallels Transporter lets you migrate a VMware Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC image to Parallels. Add all this to the Coherence mode made available in the first beta and enhanced in this one and you have to wonder how VMware’s Fusion for the Mac will fare when they release their first public beta (presumably in a few weeks during Macworld).

So, is the PS CS3 icon a placeholder or not? My guess was that it was a placeholder. I was wrong. Scott McNulty of TUAW found out otherwise via John Nack’s blog. Veerle Pieters’ weblog has a full description of the two-letter mnemonic development along with interview questions about the choice with Adobe designer Ryan Hicks.

The debate that has risen up around iconography and the merits of what we’ve done taken in a broader context is impressive. The new direction is a bigger change than I think anyone in the public would have expected from us, change on that scale is going to be hard and of course there are those who will rise up and scream heresy. Honestly, we have been living with the icon system internally on our own machines for so long now that it’s a bit hard to remember what the big deal is. We’re as varied and hardcore a user group as will be found anywhere, we’ve found the stuff just works. Done.

Love ‘em? Hate ‘em? Me? I hate ‘em.

Off all the CS3 updates, it’s the “workspace dock” that makes me most uncomfortable. I’m not sure whether or not I (a) like this change, (b) can live with this change, and (c) can use the changed interface effectively. I know the Adobe engineers were busy at work trying to get all the things we do a lot of into a central location, but the new workspace dock is cluttered and more than a little hard to use. Yes, all our normal friends (”info”, “layers”, “history”, etc) are there, but they’re in new forms or new locations or get accessed in new ways.

The workspace has several presentations. You can collapse or expand either side of the dock by clicking the double-arrows at the top. When collapsed, the icons on the left side gives single-click access to your history, brushes, tool presets, and several other utilities. I can’t really imagine a time you’d want to collapse the right-hand side. To access any of the palettes, just click the tab with the name (as you are used to doing) or, when the tab is closed, use the Window menu to reopen it. I’m guessing there’s supposed to be an easier way to add palettes, but I couldn’t find one yet.

I’m more than a little disappointed that I can’t just drag stuff around the screen the way I used to (like putting the Info panel here and the layers panel there). Everything is docked to the dock, which I’ll grow used to, but which kind of ticks me off. Oh well, can’t have everything.

O’Reilly received questions about Parallels Desktop for Mac from reader M.D. and sent it on to me. M.D. asks:

I see the PDF you have for sale.

1. What does it add to the Parallel manual?
2. Is there a “missing manual” or idiot’s dummy guide for parallel?

M.D.: My O’Reilly Short Cuts PDF Windows for Intel Macs focuses on giving Mac users tips on using Microsoft Windows XP on a Mac. The value-add for Parallels users running Windows as a Guest OS lies in two main areas. First, it provides basic Windows configuation and security information. Second, it provides Parallels specific tips where appropriate. For example, the fact that Safe Mode boot does not work and a reminder to make simple backups of the virtual hard disk file to remove the need for Safe Boot. I’ve attached the Table of Contents for the PDF at the end of this blog entry.

I also answer questions about virtualization now and then in one of my personal blogs. You can click on the virtualization category in its left sidebar to find virtualization specific items. I plan on posting more items specifically about running Windows Vista in Parallels over the next few months.

You should also take a look at Parallel’s Official Blog maintained by the main PR guy Ben Rudolph (who is way more techie that the typical tech company PR person IMHO).

Looks like I’m not the only one who was wowed by Parallels Desktop for Mac in 2006. Macworld’s readers gave it the nod for the favorite Mac software for 2006.

Readers’ Choice Awards: Parallels Desktop and 24-inch iMac

Jeremiah Foster has already posted that ZFS, the open-source 128-bit file system, is coming to Leopard. I just wanted to add that where ZFS totally rules is in handling multiple disks, creating virtual storage pools that span more than one physical device.

Other cool stuff includes “snapshots” that retain access to unchanged data for updated files and which create read-only restore points, “copy-on-write” that keeps the file system from overwriting live data, and dynamic striping, which boosts system throughput while distributing the write-load across storage devices. And that’s not even mentioning OS-integrated check summing for data integrity.

I’m not sure that ZFS will entirely replace HFS+ any time soon, but it’s nice to see that Apple is moving in the right direction. I haven’t had a huge amount of exposure to ZFS, so if any of you Sun Microsystems-type folk want to chime in, please let us know your thoughts about the file system.

One of the biggest changes I’ve encountered so far in CS3 involves the Curves tool. Curves, which allows you to control pixel-by-pixel brightness levels by editing an interactive brightness look-up table, been fully redesigned and updated.

Remember the old Curves dialog? It looked like this. Many things have not changed. You still have the eyedroppers, the pencil/path options, the Auto levels and so forth. Also, Curves is still accessible by pressing Command-M or selecting the Image->Adjustments submenu.



The new Curves dialog is larger, cleaner (at least in my opinion) and has a few lovely new features as standard elements. I love seeing the pixel-brightness histogram built right into the display as a default feature. It’s also nice to be able to simultaneously edit each of the channels and the standard input/output number display is also appreciated.

I’m not sure whether the Presets are a new feature or not, but I’m really enjoying using them. They offer a nice place to start Curves-wise for certain classes of images.

According to World of Mac the ZFS (Zettabyte File System) will be implemented in the upcoming Mac OS X release. This is pretty amazing news I think. According to Sun, who developed ZFS, the file system “is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We’ve blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that’s actually a pleasure to use.”

It has been suggested that the ZFS file system is being called Time Machine, which looks pretty good to me.

Yes, there is a touch of marketing speak there, from both Sun and Apple, but if it delivers on half of its promises, it will be a significant improvement on what we have today. Kudos Sun and Apple!

I’ve finally had a chance to play around with Photoshop CS3. In fact, I’ve now made it my default image editor so I’ve been doing actual work with the software. Although there’s some new functionality, it’s really the changes in look and layout that grabs your attention. Here are just three of the changes that I’ve noticed, as a first taste of what’s new.

The software “phases” in. When you make Photoshop active, the software uses some sort of alpha-transparency mode to overlay the rest of your desktop. This creates an odd feel to the program that sets it apart from the rest of my software. I’m not sure if this is going to be a standard presentation for other applications in upcoming OS updates, but it certainly stands out.

The default toolbox layout has changed. Instead of the standard 2-by-whatever layout that we know and love, the default toolbox is 1-by-much-longer. It looks better. And it takes up way less horizontal space. I was completely lost, however, in terms of finding the actual tools and quickly changed back to the standard 2-by presentation. To move between the two layouts, just click the double-arrow over the stand-in Photoshop icon.

You get task-sensitive cheat sheets (as well as a way to save your workspace layouts). I’m not sure whether this feature is going to stay in the production CS3 or not, but the Window -> Workspace menu lets you locate tagged menu items that affect particular tasks. Tasks include “Image Analysis”, “Web Design”, “Color and Tonal Correction” and more. From a reviewer point of view, I particularly liked Window -> Workspace -> What’s New in CS3. Select this and then click Yes to apply the workspace. Open your menus and you’ll find various items highlighted in pastel colors. (Here they’re blue, but for other tasks they are violet, or pink, etc.) To return to the normal menus, choose Window -> Workspace -> Default Workspace.

The new WriteRoom 2.0 beta from Hog Bay Software has a bunch of new features, one of which is the addition of an “Edit in WriteRoom” command for most Cocoa-based applications.

Installed just by clicking a button in the WriteRoom 2.0 prefs, the command becomes available in any Cocoa app that also uses the NSTextView class to display text. That includes Safari.

That means that any form field in Safari can be edited, in glorious full-screen simplicity, using WriteRoom. Nice for posting to weblogs, but also pretty nice for composing and replying to messages in Gmail. Hit Control + Command + O to open the field in WriteRoom, compose away, and when you return to Safari your text will be there, ready to send.

What you end up with is a hybrid email client that uses your browser just for the browsing bit - for listing and finding messages - and WriteRoom for the editing bit. It’s nice.

Since January of this long, very long year, Microsoft has been the target of all laughs and criticism. Vista is late, the Zune is a disaster, the company does not innovate… The list of all they do not do, in the eyes of the public, seems to grow daily. Yet, we seem to have forgotten to ask ourselves what we, in the Mac world, have done.

In the latest innovative move by Mac software developers to pool their resources and help promote their products, the MacSanta holiday discount campaign has been launched. By simply using the discount code “MACSANTA” before December 25 on a variety of different Mac software sites, customers can save 20% off the list price on some of the most popular and respected Mac applications.

It may not quite be the Mac Shareware Store that Oliver Breidenbach is calling for, but with participants like BareBones Software (BBEdit) and Rogue Amoeba (Audio Hijack Pro), you can definitely get some deals on some great Mac software. If you want to see a list of the companies participating, join the campaign with your own products, or read a silly Mac holiday poem,
visit the MacSanta site.

A few weeks ago, I asked the rest of the Mac Devcenter contributors to their favorite new app of 2006. Nominations had to have been released - or reached 1.0, or some other similar milestone - within the last 12 months.

So here are our favorite new apps from the last year. What’s yours?

Congratulations to Phillip Ryu and John Casasanta for the runaway success of MacHeist. In just seven days, they sold more than 16,000 of their shareware app bundles with a gross revenue of almost $750,000 (estimate based on published $185,000 donated to charity representing 25% of the revenue). It surely exceeded everyone’s expectations and probably Phillip’s and John’s wildest dreams.

It is frankly astonishing to learn that Mac users are prepared to spend this kind of money on shareware apps if they are presented in an interesting way. It also shows that Mac shareware app developers could make a lot more money if they would band together. After all, this is about $75,000 per app in a single week and I am sure that not very many (if any at all) of the participating developers ever sold as much in a single week. In addition to that it seems that the regular revenue at least for us was not less than usual. So this really is on top. Those $75,000 would be a nice boost to our yearly revenue.

So what do we learn from it?

• Bundles of say 5 to 10 apps priced at slightly more than the most expensive app (a slight adjustment I would make to the current setup) are really appealing to customers and make it much more likely that they actually buy the product, even if they only imagine a marginal usefullness of the other apps in the bundle.
• Getting exposure is much easier for the bundle than for the individual app. If we can avoid building factions and get more developers to support this, the exposure could even be bigger.
• Advertising for such bundles would also be much more cost effective.

There are also a couple of points to give thought about:

• Although I got emails from many people claiming that they never bought “shareware” apps before and a very small number of the 18,000 people had previously been in our database, I think that MacHeist still did mostly reach the same kind of customers that we had before. Apple sells about 1.8 million Macs a quarter, so the 16,000 represent a bit less than 1% of the Mac sales of the Quarter. Or 0.2% of the year.
• 16,000 customers in just 7 days require a lot of handling and not everything on our side went smoothly, mostly because we expected much less. In addition, the increasing spamfileritis creates many problems in actually delivering the licenses to the customers.

So, how to move on?

I think a Mac Shareware Store is called for. A place where customers find interesting bundles, that has an affiliate system to reward developers who drive traffic to the platform, a system where people earn mileage points towards future purchases, accepts all kinds of payments and puts gift-card-like displays into the Apple Retail Stores. Add to that a MacUpdate/Versiontracker/Mac Products Guide like functionality and the talent of a Phillip Ryu and John Casasanta for marketing. Something like the Windows Marketplace.*

The economics of a place like that would have to be a bit different than that of the MacHeist, but instead of a one off pot luck shot it would probably be a solid business with a good revenue stream. To make it fair, the company could sell stock to the developers who list their products. 40%-50% of revenue could go to the developers, 20%-30% into marketing and advertising, 20% into operations and 10% into profit for the owners.

In fact it should be much like iTunes. An app pre-installed on all 1.8 million Macs sold in a quarter, with an editorial content, built-in download system and copy protection. You know, I always wondered what the “Mac OS X Software…” menu entry in the Apple menu is about.

* Before you fire up your flamethrowers: Yes, it does not have Phillip or John working for it; Yes, Vista is a Mac OS X rippoff; I just mention it because it is a basically good idea and has many of the attributes I would like to see in a Mac Market Place. Apple,… do …something!

The notMac Challenge is a recent effort that aims to create the incentive for developing a .Mac replacement in exchange for $10,000. From the official website:

Since Apple decided to start charging for dotMac, I’ve spent $495 to keep some useful files remotely accessible on my iDisk and sync my bookmarks, address book and calendar between computers. While I find these features incredibly useful and convenient, I have no need for any of dotMac’s web-based services, and as a result, I don’t think I’ve been getting a good value from Apple. I know that workarounds exist that allow one to take advantage of dotMac’s services without a dotMac account, but they require a level of technical proficiency that I just don’t have. I’ve no doubt there are a lot of people like me.

The goal of the notMac Challenge is to create the incentive for someone to make an alternative dotMac solution available for the general public. Since this is something that could benefit a large number of people in the Mac community, I figure what better way to create that incentive than to invite anyone interested to contribute to the reward.

To make the stakes even richer, I’ll match every contribution up to a total of $10,000. So, if you contribute $100, I’ll double it for a total of $200. Hopefully, in a short amount of time, the prize pool will be large enough to encourage someone out there to liberate the less technically literate of us from the obligation to pay Apple $99 a year.

Sounds neat, doesn’t it? It’ll be especially interesting to see what kinds of developers step up and how all of the administrivia works out assuming geographically separated developers who don’t know one another try to coordinate and manage the work to a schedule. Heck, just doing the “general contracting” for an effort like this could be quite time consuming if enough parties were involved. Still, $10,000 sounds pretty reasonable considering that much of this work could be pieced together with some existing high-quality applications and a relatively minor amount of custom scripting.

Of course, a fixed $10,000 prize doesn’t address the recurring cost of web hosting for thousands of potential users, so perhaps that figure is just for the initial development of an out-of-the-box notMac server?

In any event, I wish these folks the best of luck. It’s always exciting to root for the underdog.

Remember Mac OS X’s first high-profile security vulnerability? A very long time ago, when most of the Mac community still thought of UNIX as a promised land of security, stability and compatibility, when Apples were still blue and glossy, when the Dock was still wearing its stripy baby costume, it was discovered Software Update could be lured into downloading rogue updates from a malicious server. Panic ensued, as well as an update, that Apple promptly and dutifully issued. The Mac world was hurt but not defeated. Yet, that very issue that prompted so much frantic updating persists in a great many applications to date. Somehow, nobody seems to care.

Last month, Andrew at MacWork.com wrote an intriguing post about one of his customer’s Powerbooks getting literally fried by a botched cable modem service call. After a rash of questions and doubtful comments he’s now posted all the grisly details, with photos, in MacInferno Part II: The full story of how the cable company incinerated my Powerbook.

If you like seeing toasted hardware, it’s worth checking out. I’ve had my own experiences with inept cable technicians before, but this one definitely takes the cliche to a whole new level.

Since last week, more and more international readers have e-mailed me to let me know that they’ve been able to download tracks from the O’Reilly Friday Napster posts. Because of that, I’m just going to stop saying “US Only”, because clearly it isn’t. As always, if you enjoy these posts or want to give me some feedback, drop me an email or leave a comment. And don’t forget to tell your friends to pop by on Fridays and pick up their freebies to fill up their iPods.

“Tightwire” by Tom Langford
Over a decade has passed since Langford hitchhiked through Europe, living on bananas,