In an interview with Reuters Steve Jobs is quoted saying that customers are “not interested” in a subscription-based model for buying music.
What? None of them? How many has he asked?
|
|
| CARVIEW |
Select Language
April 2007 Archives
PETA folk look away. Charlie Sorrel at Wired has posted about a new kind of mouse mod to accessorize your MacBook. It’s a mouse mouse.
Shudder.
What were they thinking? I mean Taxidermy is icky at the best of times. But to turn a dead animal into a productivity aid? Ewwwwwww. You’d have to touch the thing all day long.
And Sorrel suggests this idea could be taken further, to produce an iPod case.
Excuse me while I run to the bathroom to vomit.
In today’s Mac Devcenter article, I wrote that iQuiz Maker will not import raw data files for you to create trivia packs. However, iQuiz offers a nice feature that I did not cover in the article. It allows you to open and edit all existing trivia packs installed into the iQuiz 1.0 folder in your iTunes/iPod Games directory. “All existing trivia packs” includes the custom ones you build according to the directions in my article.
This means that you can use all the iQuiz Maker features with your custom trivia packs including its game emulator. So if you want to play an iQuiz game without your iPod, just launch iQuiz Maker, select your trivia pack and click Play.
For those of you who want to try out the multiplication and trivia packs I mentioned in the article, you’ll find them here. These include three variations on the multiplication game, the
C source used to create them, and a set of six trivia packs built using trivia data from the net that was represented as open-source and/or public domain on the sites I downloaded from. (If anyone knows otherwise, please let me know and I’ll remove them.)
At last month’s Musikmesse, there was good news and not so good news from Apple.
The good news is that this year saw Apple’s most eye-catching Messe booth, yet. Following Apple’s signature black/silver/white design, the booth was bigger than in previous years, featured a larger demo theater, and also boasted a more prominent location on the show floor. A welcome sign that Apple is serious about this industry.
The not so good news: Apple made no announcements whatsoever.
Late on Friday, Apple released a software update designed to fix performance of MacBook and MacBook Pro batteries.
But additional statements from Apple since that release have been a little more forthcoming. If the update doesn’t fix your battery, Apple may be willing to send you a free replacement, even if the computer is out of warranty.
The qualifying symptoms of a dead battery are:
- Battery is not recognized causing an “X” to appear in the battery icon in the Finder menu bar.
- Battery will not charge when computer is plugged into AC power.
- Battery exhibits low charge capacity/runtime when using a fully charged battery with a battery cycle count (as shown in System Profiler) of less than 300.
- Battery pack is visibly deformed.
Judging by the reactions in the Apple Forums, a lot of users are very pleased to see the release of this update (although a few have reported problems after installing it). It’s fair to say that battery performance, and stories of warping batteries, have been a problem for Apple for some time now. Some action to remedy the situation is welcome, although some sufferers of swollen batteries might wish it had happened sooner. Don’t forget, though, that there was a previous MacBook Pro battery recall in July last year, so it’s possible that some users will be getting a second replacement battery as a result of this new offer.
Personally speaking, the battery horror stories I kept reading were one of the main factors that stopped me buying a replacement portable computer earlier this year.
Brian and Richard, creators of the admirable FreeMacWare site, are handing it over to new owners. They’ve done a great job of highlighting decent Mac freeware, let’s hope the new team keep up the good work.
Script Software has released version 5.3.3 of cross-platform data analysis tool KnowledgeMiner.
Declutter your desktop; a simple desk-hack to help hide those pesky wires.
Tim Gaden’s on the top of all things email-related, as usual, and reveals that the latest WebKit builds improve your use of Gmail (and other webapps) in Safari.
“Steve Jobs solved my MacBook woes” - or words to that effect. Scrivener creator Keith Blount describes his awful experience with a first-generation MacBook and subsequent purchase of a MacBook Pro. In the post, he says:
After the discolouration issue finally got resolved (mainly because I wrote an angry ranting e-mail to sjobs@apple.com and had Corporate Relations sort it out for me), the notorious random shutdown issue raised its ugly head, necessitating a repair.
Fumo, the smokin’ Quicksilver interface. Personally, I’d prefer to stick with something a little less animated.
The makers of MacJournal have been busy; there’s now a Windows version called, um, WinJournal.
iStumbler Release 98: WiFi/Bluetooth Network Activity Monitor
The latest version of the freeware Mac OS X wireless network detection tool was released this past February.
iStumbler Release 98
iStumbler not only detects WiFi. It also detects Bluetooth wireless activity as well as Apple Bonjour network sharing.
A Dashboard iStumbler widget is also available from the same site.
Google Presentation (PowerPoint-like app) Hype
There’s been a lot of talk on the net about Google’s Eric Schmidt announcing that a presentation manager (PowerPoint-like) web application that will be available within a few months. The hype is that the Google Docs (word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation manager) will be an Office killer. I was there along with thousands of other people at the Web 2.0 Expo keynote presentation yesterday when Schmidt showed a few plain slides of black text on a white background before making the announcement. And, I think that most of the hype in the news is just that: hype. When asked, Schmidt himself said that it is Google Docs is not positioned to be an Office killer. He considers is complementary (as do I).
maccam: USB Webcam Support
I have an old 640×480 Intel USB webcam that I wanted to try with my 1st generation Mac mini (G4 variety). The camera is auto-magically recognized by Windows XP and works fine there. So, I was surprised how awful the image from it looked when I tried the Open Source…
maccam: USB Webcam Support for Mac OS X
But, your mileage may vary. So, if you have a webcam on the list of supported devices for this project and have a camera-less Mac, check out macmcam and see if it helps you out.
HandBrake 0.8.5b1 Released for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
First there was HandBrake (the premiere Open Source DVD to MPEG4 solution for Mac OS X), then it slowed down, then MediaFork picked up the slack, then they announced regrouping and working together. And, now, here’s the latest version:
HandBrake 0.8.5b1
While it is great to see the project reinvigorated, the big news, I think, is that it is no longer just a Mac OS X based project. There is also a Windows and a Linux installer available with this release (as mentioned by the MediaFork people earlier in its development).
There are some applications that I just can’t live without.
A week or so ago, I performed a complete re-install of my main working computer. Part of the process included going through my Applications folder and trashing every app that I just didn’t need, cutting it down to the bare minimum. As it turned out, I only ended up keeping half of all my existing apps in the new set-up.
1. iPhone looks like it will ship on time.
2. Apple hinted that supplies may be initially limited, saying that iPhone availability will depend on initial demand.
3. In January, Apple suggested that revenues would be down now that the holiday season had passed–and they were not.
4. Europe will get the iPhone in Q4 this year
5. I’d love to see Apple’s definition of “incredible”, particularly in regards to Apple TV’s “incredible reviews”. Most of the reviews I’ve seen so far have been mildly positive to quite negative.
Over at Mac OS X Hints, an anonymous poster has discovered that Apple TV retains whatever sort order you set in iTunes. If you want your music to show up in alphabetical order, make sure you click on the Name header in iTunes before you sync to Apple TV.
Apple just had a Q2 2007 Financials conference call and mentioned Apple TV and a subscription model–but for free software updates not for content–would be implemented. From what I gathered, iPhone and Apple TV will use subscription-type accounting to provide free upgrades that will “surprise and delight” customers. If anyone has further details about what this “Apple TV Subscription Model” refers to, please feel free to elucidate in the comments or drop me an e-mail.
By the way, Apple declined to announce the number of Apple TV unit sales to date.
Over at AppleTVBBS, poster mtech figured out how to stream Internet radio using VLC. He installed a copy of VLC and my perlbin plug-in and then created individual “station” files in /Users/frontrow/perlbin along the following lines:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $status = system("/Users/frontrow/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC https://wnycam.streamguys.com");
According to a follow-up post, you can also create a pls playlist for use with the ATVFiles plug-in.
Browsers are everywhere and nowhere, they are getting built into applications so that soon one will not need a stand-alone browser, you can just use whichever app you have at hand or your file browser. The most recent example is Coda from panic software, but it by no means is alone. Coda may be a little different from other apps in that it is purpose built as a web development tool, and it looks to be a mighty good one at that, still lots of applications these days are network-aware and/or have plugins to the network to get data. In fact nearly all of the apps open on my Mac right now have a network component; the Dashboard apps, iCal, iTunes, and Terminal, not to mention Safari.
It is an interesting development that browsers as well as network-aware applications are starting to proliferate since it offers us a counter-weight to the view that applications are migrating from the desktop to out on the network. What if the network is migrating to the desktop?
These applications are breaking down the binary opposition of ‘desktop’ and ‘network’ applications, the distinction in computing between ‘local’ and ‘remote’ resources. They can do this because of two chief reasons;
1. Apple has provided the software to build browsers easily with WebKit
2. Network connections are becoming faster and ubiquitous
Are Coda and other applications, not just Shiira, the logical outgrowth of Apple Open Sourcing WebKit? Is this the kind of innovation that keeps Apple at the forefront of usable computing? If the answers are yes maybe Apple should open up more. I think Apple should continue to share important parts of its proprietary technology to allow innovation that gets incorporated back into the OS in the form of third party applications. Look at Coda and iWeb, they are similar aren’t they? Which one would you like to have? Wouldn’t Coda be a persuasive argument for buying a new Mac if it was bundled in? I think so.
Another thing that makes this possible is the ubiquity of network connections and the seamless way they integrate into desktop applications. Now you can unplug your apps and the network appears to remain, all the functionality is there, the data is just time shifted to the point where the network connection is active again. This makes the network irrelevant, or at least transparent in the sense that you do not need to be “online” to get your work done; you will be “online” eventually and your work will propagate to various servers once your connection is live again so one can just work without worrying about network presence.
The recent release of Coda has been splashed all over the Internet over the past few days. As usual, the Panic team has done an outstanding job and delivered an application that is both visually innovative and quintessentially Mac-like. Coda, unfortunately, does not fit into my already Panic-powered workflow, except for one little gem, that I already cannot live without.
I just noticed that Tim O’Reilly blogged about the Better GMail Firefox extension. As a GMail user, I think that this extension is a great addition, but it makes me wonder — how long before Google absorbs it into the core GMail application and renders it obsolete? And if that should occur, does it conflict with Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra?
Perhaps I’m speculating a bit to assume that Google would even consider incorporating all of the Better GMail features and render it useless — but why wouldn’t they? After all, they have an incentive to make GMail the best possible application that it can be so that they can continue harvesting data, targeting advertisements, making a profit, etc. Besides, there are all of those IE users who will probably want those extra features too, right?
So…would Google stealing someone else’s GMail hacks constitute any form of evilness at all, or is it fair game? When would they be crossing the line? Could Google could avoid these predicaments by handing out spot bonuses for ideas that are good enough to “steal”?
Panic Software’s new Coda app offers a new approach to web site development, claiming to offer everything you need in “one window”.
The very first thing that struck me about it was the eye candy. Create a new site, fill in some of the server details and click “Save”, and the sheet you were filling in doesn’t slide up like most sheets do; it elegantly swishes out of view, flipping itself over in the process. It’s the kind of thing we’ve got used to seeing in Dashboard widgets, not desktop apps.
The second thing I noticed was the toolbar is not a toolbar, it’s a means of switching between modes. In fact, it’s not even customizable in the standard way. There are no other toolbar buttons other than those used to switch from one mode to another, and the search box.
There are lots of controls everywhere else though. Above and below the edit window you’ll see various contextual buttons and twiddles that change as you move between modes.
The code editor at the heart of the app is SubEthaEdit, which means it has Bonjour network sharing built-in. There’s a neat toggle button for switching the sharing on and off.
I haven’t yet got my head around the handling of CSS. It’s possible to create a .css text file and edit it by hand; it’s also possible to use the CSS mode to access a GUI for creating CSS using good-old point-and-click. The hows and whys of which system to use, and when, escape me for now. But as the title of this post says, this is just about first impressions.
So far I’m enjoying it. The eye candy is attractive without being too intrusive; the system of “Sites” for managing projects is nicely done, and the inclusion of entire HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP reference books is an innovative and smart idea.
UPDATE:Steven Frank’s overview adds more context and is well worth reading before you dive into Coda.
I’ve dabbled in Perl, messed with csh, but I always seem to come back to C (and her sisters) and Smalltalk. Now I have a little space in my life to learn a new language. Help me figure out where I should direct my energy and let me know why this will take me to new and important places development-wise. Thanks!
So here it is. The proof of concept Finder Hiding widget. So why did I bother? What’s the big idea? It goes basically like this: Apple TV (and, presumably the upcoming iPhone) can run many Intel Mac OS X applications because Apple TV is, essentially, an OS X computer that runs a slight variant on the OS. However, Finder wants to take over and control the way users interact with the unit. It refuses to hide, it refuses to hand over control to another app.
More after the jump…
It looks like iChat in Leopard is going to be more scriptable than ever before according to this article from Apple. You’ll be able to use Cocoa to access iChat views and write to them from your applications:
IMAVManager *manager = [IMAVManager sharedManager]; [manager setVideoDataSource:myView];
But what really interests me is the enhanced AppleScript access that will allow you to start video chats, send messages, and create iChat event handlers.
See that picture? That’s what happens when you attempt to hide Finder.app using releaseAllDisplays. Yes, you can kind of get Finder to hide but then when you launch another application, things get confused as to who is allowed to draw what. This shows me opening what should be a menu and revealing part of Finder.app’s screen saver.
With the help and knowledge of AwkwardTV’s Eric III and Alan_Quartermain, I did manage to create a plug-in that hides Finder but I can’t seem to launch a program successfully and get it to take over the screen. My greatest success involved launching VLC from the command line and having it play back a movie full-screen. Finder stays hidden and VLC’s constant video updates and redraws prevented the issues seen here. Unfortunately, you could not control the video playback at all using the remote control.
In other related news, Alan_Quartermain has posted an advanced Apple TV coding tutorial about creating custom controls that is well worth checking out.
Ack. A bit lighter than usual for last weeks collection of Freeware and Free & Open Source Software for Mac OS X last week. If you have any suggestions of F/FOSS Mac OS X apps that I haven’t already mentioned in the past months, please let me know!
SuperDuper! Mac Backup
SuperDuper! is a Mac OS X freeware application that can perform scheduled backups from hard disk to hard disk (e.g., internal HD to external Firewire/USB HD). More advanced features can be obtained by paying $27.95 to upgrade it to the for-fee version. But, the free version looks usable and useful to a lot of people.
Jaiku: Twitter Wannabe? Twitter Killer? Or Something Else?
Want to express yourself in 140 characters or less? There are at least two well-known web services that let you do just that. I mentioned Twitter a while back. Now, I’m trying out…
Jaiku
Jaiku has a few more features like the ability to add other RSS feeds (including Twitter) to your stream. But, I think Twitter is easier to read with its slightly larger font. I find this whole co-presence idea interesting. It really does play into the notion that in an Attention Economy privacy is being defined as openness.
The grand jury has closed the books on the Cobb County, Georgia iBook-purchasing scandal.
Helvetica, the typeface, has been a part of Macintosh since way way back. One of the most widely used sans-serif typefaces, it gained much of its current popularity because of its Macintosh bundling and its presence as one of the four core fonts bundled with Adobe PostScript. Inspired by and representative of the Swiss school of typography, it’s still in use on newer OS X Macintoshes and has expanded into a three face family: Helvetica, Helvetica CY and Helvetica Neue.
Now the Globe and Mail reports that Helvetica has inspired a new movie about the typeface, its history and its use. (I wouldn’t mind catching a showing if it pops by the art theater in town.) Want more? You can read Lars Müller’s “Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface” (availabe at Amazon) or pop by Mark Simonson’s website to learn about the Scourge of Arial, an Helvetica wannabe, typeface-come-lately.
Lots of new stuff on the Apple TV front today. Here’s a brief rundown of it all:
Elgato released EyeTV 2.4. Download it here. Lots of bug fixes and, best of all, Apple TV export. Here’s a screen cap from Monday’s “Drive”, which I recorded in High Def and then exported to Apple TV format. It automatically loaded into iTunes. Unfortunately, you really do need to sync these things or use 802.11n because streaming playback with this bandwidth nearly killed my 802.11g network. Lots and lots of pauses. Also, the detail looked very soft to my eyes, not nearly as crisp as the High Def original.
Screen shot from “Apple TV video” exported from EyeTV High Def content. [Click to open at full resolution]
Apple posted a few Apple TV hints in their RSS support feeds. According to Apple, Apple TVs can be stored in media cabinets despite their warmth. Also here’s a doc about Apple TV Standby Mode.
I completely rewrote all my plugins. Here are updated versions of the two I’ve previously talked about and a new one. The URL appliance lets you load video from the Internet by supplying URLs in a text file. The Perl appliance runs any perl file you drop into /Users/frontrow/perlbin. And the new one, Quit, lets you quit form the Apple TV UI. I tried uploading the project sources but I ran into a file size limit with the O’Reilly server. If you want copies of the source, just send me e-mail. The new versions should all run concurrently on Apple TV without interfering with each other the way the earlier prototypes did.
URL Appliance: Download file
Perl Appliance: Download file
Quit from UI Appliance: Download file
Speaking of the URL appliance, readers have asked me if I could mod the plug-in to allow users to label their URL files. You can actually do that right now without any modifications. Just put text labels into your urldata.txt file. If you try to load a label, Apple TV will simply tell you that “no content was found”. The URLs should load normally.
Create your own organization in the urldata.txt file. [Click to open at full resolution]
The OmniZoids have just released OmniPlan 1.1. From the announcement:
The new version contains several stability, import/export, printing, and AppleScript support improvements.
The update is free to license-holders. The release notes are here, and from them you can see that nothing’s changed since 1.1 RC 6. OmniPlan users: what do you make of it?
Apple posted a list of the new Bug Reporter features, which include an improved look & feel. If your bug is closed as a duplicate, you can now find the id for the original bug report which remains active. The active reference number appears next to “State: Duplicate”
Shortly after completing my article about Google Desktop for Mac, I decided to remove the application from my system. Why? Because:
- Although the indexing went fairly smoothly, it seemed that there were ongoing performance issues. Things just felt slower almost everywhere. There was a noticeable increase in disk grinding and fan noise; Activity Monitor showed the various processes associated with GDesktop were busy - no single one of them to any great degree, but the combined effect was noticeable. True, this is on a G4 machine with only 768MB RAM, and better-equipped computers would surely run more smoothly.
- I didn’t find the central feature of GDesktop - the combining of search results from the web and from your local disk(s) - a very compelling one for me. I tend to know when something I need is on the web or on my computer, and would prefer to use appropriate tools in each case.
- Following on from that - I said in my article, and I still maintain, that GDesktop is about searching and Quicksilver is about doing. I don’t consider GDesktop’s features to be worth the demands it made on my system, because I tend to perform doing functions much more than I perform searching functions.
Which is a long-winded way of saying: it didn’t feel right for me. But that’s just a personal view. If you have either warmed to Google Desktop, or similarly removed it from your computer, I’d love to hear why.
In case you haven’t seen it: The Joy of Tech’s “The real reasons Mac OS X Leopard is late…”
I like the “Someone keeps pressing the Time Machine button..:” reason best.
Apple just updated a bunch of their high level Developer Notes that provide developers with technical descriptions of Apple products and capabilities. The updated items include Audio (both analog and digital capabilities), Bluetooth, Ethernet, FireWire/1394, Mac Pro, PCI, RAM expansion, USB and video.
One nice thing about Mail is the Redirect feature, which lets you forward mail to a particular address so that it does not appear to have been forwarded from you. The final recipient sees the message just as you did when it arrived in your inbox.
One annoying thing about Mail’s Redirect feature is that it cannot be used on more than one message at a time. You can’t select, say, the entire contents of one mailbox and tell Mail to redirect all those messages to your Gmail account. If you select more than one message, the Redirect menu item is unusable.
Google Data APIs provide a standard interface to access Google-based data stored on Google Base, Blogger, Google Calendar and so forth. Today, Greg Robbins announced that he created a Cocoa-friendly Objective-C API/framework. You can read more at his blog post, which is here.
Looking for an iSight replacement? iChat supports some USB cams in 10.4.9, but it’s not easy to find the right ones.
I was away on vacation last week, so I missed all the fuss about Apple’s announcement postponing any release of Leopard until October.
But now, catching up on the news and reading a week’s worth of email (and at the risk of finding myself tagged as “hoi-polloi”), it doesn’t sound like much of a big deal. I’m certainly not bothered about it. In some respects, I’m pleased.
First, it means I don’t have as much pressure on me to upgrade my hardware. I was seriously thinking of buying new kit, and have been for some time, but my existing Macs run 10.4.9 very happily and there’s no need for me to spend money replacing them until Leopard is released, or even some time after that. This delay gives me some extra time to save up some cash.
Second, I’d rather whatever got released is good stuff, and if that takes a few more months, so be it.
And third, the rapid development of earlier versions of OS X is not necessarily the pace that all versions should be developed at. As a community, we were treated to an incredibly swift path from 10.1 to 10.4, and now that 10.4 has matured I see no reason not to work happily for it for a while. There’s no need to change just for change’s sake.
As I was browsing through some Google gadgets, I ran across To Do List and was incredibly impressed with it. I’ve been looking for a simple, elegant, web-based way to organize my various todo items for some time and have often thought that the ideal place for such a thing would be somewhere in GMail. Well, sticking a todo list on my customized Google homepage is the next best thing and works just fine for me. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a sample screen shot:
As you can see, the interface is simple and clean. There are no advanced settings to speak of, or anything else relatively complicated for that matter. You simply type in an item to stick it on the list. From there, you can delete it, edit it, or change the priority. I can’t speak for anyone else, but that’s about as complicated as I need it to be.
Also, these things look like they’re as fun to develop as they are to use based on the information in the developer’s guide. Can anyone attest to that?
Is anyone else finding these neat little gadgets to be a useful as I am?