As I’ve continued to read up on what’s being said about the Dashboard/Konfabulator issue, I’ve found two pieces that I think are useful and worth passing along. Not surprising, they come from two writers whom I read regularly and respect.

The first piece is by Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame. In his weblog, What should Apple do?, he echos the sentiments of many of us who are involved with independent development for Mac OS X. He thinks Apple should encourage private developers by cutting deals with them for the products they create that are absorbed into the operating system. Brent isn’t approaching this as an ethics issue, rather as smart business. He also makes it clear that he’s talking about Dashboard and not Safari RSS.

The second noteworthy piece is by Bill Palmer, Oh well, maybe next year. You have to scroll down past his disappointment in Steve’s keynote to get to the section titled, Not so rosy. Bill echos another thought that I’ve had, which is the fact of the matter is we don’t know what went on between Arlo Rose and Apple concerning Dashboard.

We do know that they have a history that includes a previous legal tussle over Kaleidoscope. We do know that neither side is maintaining a fan club for the other. But beyond that, neither you nor I know exactly what transpired. Bill does a good job of bringing that point to light.

Remember that old saying about disagreements? There are two sides to every story: yours and the sh*t head’s. I’m not sure which one is which here. But I do have a request: I’d like to see more visible Apple support for independent developers. As Brent Simmons says, “It’s just good PR. Worth ten times the price they would have paid.”

In his WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs gave us a taste (not to mention two install discs) of good things to come via Tiger, the next generation of Mac OS X due for release in 2005. As a digital media guy, you’d think that I’d be writing this piece on Core Image or possibly the H.264 codec — don’t worry, I will. But not today.

The technology that will have even a bigger impact on my life is Automator, a scripting powerhouse with a beautiful GUI. To be honest, it’s what I always wanted AppleScript to be, and mollifies my disappointment with AppleScript Studio. Automator gives me the ability to create workflows on the fly across applications and OS functions. It allows me to think about the task I want to complete and not how to write the script to do it.

I’ve used and praised AppleScript countless times over the years. Most of my QuickTime production is accomplished via AppleScript. But there are days when I’d like to adjust this or change that, and I end up doing it manually just because I don’t want to fool around getting a script to work correctly. Next thing you know, I had lost the inspiration of what I was trying to do in the first place.

Now with Automator, if I think of a task I want to accomplish, chances are I can build the script (and save it for the future) within a matter of minutes. That’s right minutes.

So even though the effects I bring to my pictures and movies with Core Image and Core Video will make my eyes dance with happiness, the fact that I can create those productions in less time (I’m thinking far less time) with Automator is the true digital media gift from Tiger.

Related link: https://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/06/28/liveupdate/index.php?redirect=108…

At WWDC today, Steve Jobs mentioned one of the 150 new features in Tiger, the next version of Mac OS X. It’s called Spotlight and it sounds a whole heck of a lot like Be File System to me. Has Apple’s investment in Dominic Giampaolo finally paid off? Here’s what Maccentral reports on Spotlight.

Also new is a search technology called “Spotlight” that Jobs said “is years ahead” of Microsoft’s new operating system — it works similarly to the song search technology in iTunes, and can find files and content in standard formats. What’s more, it’s extensible, and works with most current applications. It’s integrated into the Finder, Address Book, Mail and System Preferences.

Unfortunately, I’m not at WWDC, but I know a lot of you are. Can anyone report back with more details?

UPDATE: Apple is providing a sneak peak at the new Tiger features including Spotlight.

Can anyone report back from WWDC with more details?

Just as we were all getting used to taming a Panther, Apple has the audacity to innovate again! Those who dislike any innovation would be served well to look at the Windows operating system where change comes in the form of a constant stream of security patches and virus downloads. Apple is on the move again, running through the cat kingdom and giving us the almighty Tiger.

Here are some predictions. Firstly, people will complain that they will have to pay for it. They’ll say we bought 10.1, we bought Jaguar and then Panther. They’ll whine and complain and talk about how much it costs. To these trouble-makers I have a very simple response. Don’t buy it. Last time I checked car manufactures make you pay for that new improved car released months after you purchased your new car. It costs money to pay people to innovate. Enough said.

For the rest of us living in the real world many pleasures and some frustrations inevitably await us. Receiving a new Apple OS is like getting a surprise from the God’s, one is never quite sure what it will be but you know it will have hints of genius at every turn. From Steve Job’s vision to our computers. I love it. Enough religious metaphors, it’s time to get to the nitty gritty, here are my top ten Tiger hopes:

1. More GUI interfaces to the underlying OS. I want to turn PHP on and off with the click of a button.
2. Robust trouble shooting tools built into the GUI. I should not have to buy Cocktail (which is a great app, btw) to get the job done.
3. Clean up the metal, a little. I’m one of those seemingly rare users who doesn’t absolutely hate the metal finder. However, on a 12 inch powerbook things can get a little wasteful at time.
4. Further integration of iApps. The way the iApps are starting to work together is brilliant. Make it more so.
5. Innovate the Address Book, iCal and Mail. Things look bad when Palm address book is still easier to use than Apples.
6. Some kind of database built-in. Mysql, filemaker, something. It’s time to make the power of databases available to everyone.
7. I should never ever see the damn beachball on a dual 2.0 G5. Apple developers print this out and paste it in your cube as a goal to reach ASAP.
8. Fix fonts. Fonts in OS X are a step backwards from OS 9. FontBook is a joke. Fix it.
9. A faster finder. I want things super-duper zippy even when I’ve selected a thousand files to copy.
10. Shock us. Awe Us. With something none of us would ever think of. That’s innovation.

What did I miss? What do you want included in Tiger?

Related link: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/community.html

If you’re coming to Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco, clear a spot on your calendar for Wednesday evening. (June 30, 7:30PM-9:00PM)

I’m hosting O’Reilly’s birds-of-a-feather session about Home Automation using Mac OS X. Come join your fellow Mac-heads for casual discussion and brainstorming about using Mac OS X to upgrade your house or apartment. I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

Related link: https://www.smarthome.com/pr04-8.html

The home automation world has a love-hate relationship with X10 technology. It has been around for 30 years, and has some obvious problems, but it’s the de-facto standard. With millions of units sold, dozens of manufacturers supporting it over the years, and a huge collective knowledge base of how to work around its quirks, its going to be tough for a competing technology to knock it off its throne.

But that hasn’t stopped lots of upstarts from trying. Currently, the most promising is Zensys’ Z-Wave. It’s wireless, has support from several industry players, and everyone is pretty much hoping that it will gain enough momentum to be worth investing in.

Recently, Smarthome Inc has entered the fray too. They’re introducing Insteon (”instee-on”) and it looks very interesting. According to their website, Insteon combines traditional power line control with wireless networking. That is, it’s backwards compatible with existing X10 equipment, and it uses mesh-networking to communicate with Insteon-capable devices.

That’s a sweet combination, and a very smart move. In order for any new home automation technology to get enough traction to really take off it has to appeal to those who are already automating their homes. And today, that means you have to work with X10. Requiring customers to adopt a new approach that abandons their current investment, as so many others have tried, is asking too much. It just might be that Insteon has found the approach.

What’s your reaction to Insteon? Yawn, or Yahoo?

Related link: https://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/06/17/music.napster.reut/index.html

Call it the battle of the dueling business models: Apple creates the kick-ass iTunes Music Store at practically a loss in order to sell the very profitable iPod and now Napster gets into the business of giving away MP3 players in return for a one-year subscription.

I suspect that Steve Jobs is right on two points. One, people like to buy music and own it. It’s what we consumers have been doing for decades. Renting is for movies. We also hate mp3 players that can only hold a measly 128 megs of music, like the one Napster is giving away. The iPod revolution is driven by the fact that you can put a ton of music on your iPod, quickly and easily.

So what’s the story? Napster, in the end, is giving away nothing.

Does the Napster offer entice you?

Wednesday afternoon I experimented for the first time with binding Panther Server to our Windows Active Directory. In the XServe’s Directory Access app, I selected Active Directory, entered the domain and forest, computer ID, and it all just worked - I could see all of the users and groups on the domain from the Mac’s Workgroup Manager. I was so impressed. Decided to wait for the next day to do more integration testing.

Thursday morning I got an urgent call from the sysadmin that many of the Windows machines on our network were unable to log on because DC “mulder” was not responding, and that according to the System Events logs, the AD services seemed to have crashed exactly when I bound the Mac server to the domain. I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t intended for the Xserve to become a directory server (and had explicitly not set up that capability), just a client. How could this have happened?

Called Apple, and the rep said he had never heard of this happening before, and seriously doubted that the Mac could have been responsible for the outage. Our sysadmin called Microsoft, who stayed on the phone with him for a long time until they finished reconstructive surgery (first for domain services, and then for replication, which was also busted).

So what happened? The domain controller did not have its own machine name listed in its “machines” list. When I was filling out the Bind To tab, out of a combination of overzealousness, ignorance, and not RTFMing carefully enough, I entered the name of the machine I was binding to (mulder, the domain controller) into the ComputerID field. I know now that I should have entered the name of the Xserve into that field. When you bind, a key for the binding machine is created in the directory’s “Machines” list. And the Win2K domain controller happily created a machine there called “mulder.” This basically confused the hell out of mulder’s directory services and its ability to replicate with the other domain controller (scully). A case of identity crisis and overwritten kerberos keys. Everything seemed hunky dory from the Mac side, but directory services for the rest of the network were effectively fubar for the better part of a day. And the sysadmin justifiably hated me.

Whose fault was this? Mine, for not reading up carefully enough. Win2K’s, for being so willing to take suicide orders. And Apple’s, for not providing a little more guidance in what’s supposed to be entered into the ComputerID field (even pre-filling it with the Xserve’s hostname would have been enough of a clue to make me realize what was expected there).

How far should OS vendors go to prevent actions that can kill a network?

A few days ago, when reading my daily number of Apple-related articles on the Internet, I stumbled on a web page from a respected computer magazine (not a Mac one), talking about iPods and how great they were. Since I always enjoy seeing what people like and dislike with the same product, I proceeded to read…

However, there was a slight problem… After two mere sentences, the text ended abruptly, with no apparent way to go further. Since this was not a “preview” of a paid site, I looked desperately for an appropriate link and finally found it, at the very bottom of the page, right after 4 piled up banner ads. To make things easier, the link was in pale blue over a white background, surrounded by flashing “click me”, “you won” and “you have mail” GIFs — probably a way to make the user look for a longer time, increasing the exposure of the ads.

Then, I looked more closely at the structure of the page. It appeared that, even though the site was a legitimate one from a big money-making company, only a small frame in the center of each page and the buttons bar at the top came from this company. In a desperate effort to increase ad revenue, the webmasters has literally framed any usable content with banners or buttons, making the site not only ridiculously slow to load but also unbearable to read — after two minutes of GIF-powered brainwashing, I had to turn images off completely to focus on the review. The size of the frame allocated to usable content was so small that the short column about iPods was cut in 6 or 7 pieces ! Imagine the size of this site on the server !

Unfortunately, poorly designed sites and visual SPAM are so common on the Internet that they would not be worth a blog. What worried me more is the amount of coding, scripting and cookie-ing that went with all these ads. At least 3 ads providers had teamed up to deliver so much “interactive content” to “potential customers”. Simply by loading the page, my browser’s CPU consumption doubled and I was sent around 20 cookies, refreshed on a regular basis to make sure that I would not be presented with the same ad more than once…

Safari, Mac OS X and my cable provider all worked together and digested this incredible amount of junk pretty well… However, I cannot imagine what may have happened to someone surfing on a Windows XP machine, with dial up — there were a few pop-ups, pop-unders and ActiveX niceties lying around, according to what I saw in the code of the page.

Advertising on the net may be necessary (I am not really convinced of that one but let’s pass) but we seem to have reached the point where sites are literally built around ads, not the reverse. I have nothing against one or two banners on a page if it can help someone run a great site. However, too much is too much, even for the most enduring Internet users.

Many people I know use anti-ad systems, that effectively get rid of 90% of the banners they are seeing, if not more… Sure, this solves the problem temporarily but it is far from a good solution : since banners are less effective, sites are beginning to pile them up to ensure that the remaining users who do not block them will compensate for the others. SPAM (through mail or even IM) is growing since a certain population of the online advertising industry needs to find other ways to express itself…

What if, just for fun, sites cut in half the amount of ads they include ? They may be pleasantly surprised… If the goal of advertising is to seduce people and convince them to buy a product, you may as well do it gently and with style : it will be all the more effective.

Until next time, dear Mac users, enjoy thinking different !

Related link: https://macminute.com/2004/06/14/dvd

Has Steve Jobs been a recent victim of the body-snatchers? Steve has spoken in the past about how copy-protection mechanisms do not work, about how they’ll never work, and about how the real answer is a social (or economic) answer instead of a technological one. But today we get a Steve that says this?

Jobs even suggested that high-definition DVD burners not be bundled with computers at all — a scenario he said in an interview was ‘extreme’ and one that ‘I hope we don’t have to get to, but it helps to put the issue in perspective.’ He said it is up to the tech industry to prove to Hollywood that high-definition content can be adequately protected. In making his argument, Jobs signaled that he is for now siding with Hollywood, rather than Silicon Valley, when it comes to protecting movie content from pirates.

What is he thinking? This doesn’t sound like the same old Jobs. Not only is he evangelizing DRM, he’s also suggesting hamstringing the Macintosh platform (a platform positioned for content producers) in order to placate the movie-industry. Is this merely shortsightedness from the Pixar CEO or has Steve had a change of heart?

What does this mean for Apple and the industry as a whole?

Related link: https://www.java.net/cs/user/view/cs_msg/5000

Over on java.net, we have a licensing forum that will be running for another week, and one of the topics discusses the very different expectations that we authors have of how our work will be protected and how it’ll be used. In general, I really want readers to be free to take code I’ve written for an article or book and apply it to their own work, even going so far as to copy and paste it in, with no restrictions on how they use it (no attribution, no required give-away of their stuff, etc.) On the other hand, I would be really pissed if someone grabbed my prose and passed it off as their own writing.

So, in kicking off this thread of the discussion, I’m asking a few questions:

• What’s with the double-standard?
• Should article and book code have its own license or copyright / public-domain statement?
• As readers, what kind of license would you want on article/book code? Would an attribution requirement keep you from using the example code?

If you have a java.net login, I hope you’ll join us to continue this discussion.

Please join the discussion on java.net rather than adding comments here.

Linux Journal has an article discussing the U.S. Dept. of Labor’s Workforce Connections Zope-based software product developed by DevIS that was released as Open Source code. The article speculates this code may be the first released by the U.S. government as Open Source code.

Not to take anything away from the fine work done by DevIS (who I had the pleasure to meet with during a conference last year), but the code may have been beaten by a few months for the title of first Open Source code released by the U.S. government. (Not that who was first is really that important compared to the importance of the DoL/DevIS contribution, by the way!).

According to the About Workforce Connections™ page, the Workforce Connections code was released on Dec. 25, 2003.

However, on June 6, 2003, the military health group’s The Pacific Telehealth & Technology Hui press release said:
An electronic healthcare information system that operates on a Linux platform is now available to hospitals and clinics worldwide in a non-proprietary, open-source version The Pacific Telehealth & Technology Hui (Hui) announced this week the release of the Hui OpenVistaTM software on SourceForge.net, an open-source software development web site.

In any case, who was first is not important in the larger scheme of things. I just wanted to point out that there is at least one other project that was released in 2003. And, with all the work going on in various places, there may be yet another project that was released even earlier :-)

Do you know of any other U.S. Government funded software projects released under an Open Source license? Let us know!

Related link: https://www.osxfaq.com/radio/05-2004/05-22.ws

A couple of weeks ago, I had a great time talking to Scott Sheppard and Christian Pickman on the Inside Mac radio show. We chatted about some of the fun things you can do with home automation, and touched on the best software programs for extending your “digital hub” to include your home or apartment.

If you missed the show, visit the recap page and click “Listen Now” to tap into the crystal-clear replay.

Here are some links for the products mentioned during the show:

XTension by SandHill Engineering
Indigo by Perceptive Automation
WeatherMan by AfterTen Software

If you need an X10 starter kit or modules, visit Smarthome, Inc.

Also, don’t miss Alan Graham’s Home Automation with Mac OS X.

The best way to get started with home automation is to dive right in. Is there anything holding you back?

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

On the face of it Airport Express sounds really really cool. Stream tunes to your stereo anywhere in your house. Just plug it in to your wall, connect an audio jack out into your stereo and you are done.

Well, almost. Unlike digital music players that let you stream and control your digital music collection Airport Express is merely a streaming device.

Want to actually control your next track? Or pause what is currently playing? You have to traipse to wherever your Mac or PC is and control the songs from there. If your machine is in the same room you are in better luck. Still it’s not ideal.

The problems with Airport Express don’t stop there. Want to stream songs to multiple machines that are playing are different songs? Can’t.

The Airport Express is undoubtedly a cool product that fills a need within the Airport line. The ability to extend a wireless network with a small device is great. But as a home audio device it has much to be a desired.

I have called, in the past, for Apple to create an iStereo, a digital componant that would stream music like the Aiport Express does but also let users control their music from the device. I suppose if the next version of the iPod has Bluetooth built in that could solve part of the puzzle. Still, the market is begging Apple to create a stereo component. HP has done it, Linkys has done it, and any number of small aftermarket players have done it. Unlike these companies Apple has the most to gain from getting a device out in the marketplace. Steve, spend some of the 5 billion you have in cash and get the job done. Now.

Related link: https://today.java.net/jag/page7.html#62

It’s been kind of fun to follow the “will they - won’t they” discussion around the possibilty of Sun open sourcing Java and Solaris. Yesterday, ZDNet ran a story that quoted Sun Java Technology evangelist Raghavan Srinivas saying “We haven’t worked out how to open-source Java — but at some point it will happen [..] it might be today, tomorrow or two years down the road”. There is also James Gosling’s blog which indicates that thought is being given to how this might be done in his post Open Sourcing Java.

As for the Solaris front, Cnet Asia recently ran the story Sun confirms plans to open source Solaris quoting Sun president Jonathan Schwartz as saying “I don’t want to say when that will happen, [..] But make no mistake: We will open-source Solaris.”

And then there is this sneaky article which appears to add more to the discussion. The following was published today.

< questionable content >
Sun’s CEO Scott McNealy has squashed hopes that its Java programming language could be made open source, and cast a shadow over Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz’s statement yesterday that the Solaris operating system was to go the same way.

At a news conference during the public sector technology showcase FOSE 2004, McNealy said he couldn’t understand how open sourcing Java would solve anything.

< /questionable content >

Doesn’t Matt Whipp’s PC Pro article make it seem as if McNealy made his remarks after Schwartz. How else could McNealy squash hopes over Schwartz’s statement from yesterday? It is true that McNealy made the comments about open sourcing Java - but he did so back in April at the FOSE news conference mentioned in the second paragraph. Later in the story comments from March are referenced. Where is the news in this story that is labeled “news” and subtitled “latest”.

My local JUG mailing list has picked up on this story and there is an active discussion. I don’t know whether or not Sun will or will not open source Java and/or Solaris - but before anyone gets worked up over what is and isn’t happening, we need to consider the source.

Related link: https://villagevoice.com/issues/0422/conaway.php

Some street poets have been having fun with Apple’s recent ad campaign in New York.

“The “i” in iPod “stands for isolation,” the writer had scrawled above one silhouette of that annoying lone figure dancing. “The ‘i’ stands for insecure,” for “irrational,”…”

Other people fought back in this war of words, answered with the scribbled words, “iWant.”

What would your contribution be?

Since many articles and blogs already revolve around the newly updated .Mac services, it is easy to miss a quieter update the .Mac team introduced recently… Indeed, the .Mac learning center has just been redesigned and features an improved interface, speedier access to the various tutorials and new sessions.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend it ! Even experienced users will find some useful information in it — we all miss a few basic things when we learn to use an application or an operating system.

New Mac or .Mac users will also find tons of interesting information about how to make the most of their computers and to protect their data.

Until next time, dear Mac users, enjoy thinking different !

What do you think of the new learning center ?

Related link: https://www.smarthome.com/1132ip.html

It’s great to see SmartHome continue to offer new home automation products that work with well-established systems. That is, instead of putting forth a whole new “standard” for control and automation, they’re finding niches within the X10 world that aren’t currently well served.

Now they’re providing a solution for remotely-controlling your home via the Internet. The new PowerLinc IP is a standalone network device that provides a web-based interface to your home. Unlike other solutions, you don’t need a computer up-and-running, just connect this box to your home broadband network. The PowerLinc IP, in turn, is connected to a PowerLinc II controller, which is what translates your Web input to X10 commands and sends the commands to your house via the power line. (Interestingly, SmartHome decided to require the old-style PowerLinc II, instead of the much newer PowerLinc USB, for this new product.)

Out of the box, the PowerLinc IP is set up to poll a server at SmartHome to see if you’ve sent any commands to your home. Yes, you read that correctly, SmartHome acts as the intermediary for controlling your home. This really bothered me at first, but it’s clear that the system is designed this way in order to lower the technical sophistication threshold necessary to use the product. By having the device poll for commands SmartHome avoids firewall and dynamic IP address issues that would otherwise limit the product’s appeal to the average home user. According to the manual (available at their website) the device polls for commands about every 10 seconds. Once a command is received, it checks in every 3 seconds, to see if there are immediate subsequent commands to process. So in practice, it could take about 15 seconds for to turn on a light in your home from afar. Not too shabby at all.

But the really good news is that you don’t have to sign-up for and use the SmartHome intermediary servers. You can talk directly to the PowerLinc IP using HTTP. You’re on your own if you do this — SmartHome support won’t assist you in figuring it out — but they promise to provide a technical guide for implementing your own HTTP controller from the product’s website. (Alas, it’s not posted there yet.)

So, if you already have a computer-based home automation system, using something like XTension, Indigo, or HomeSeer, you may be better off working with the web-control options those applications already support. But, on the other hand, if you’re a home automator looking for a simpler solution, or want to add Web-control for a vacation home, the PowerLinc IP looks quite promising.

Have you tried the PowerLinc IP?

Related link: https://gallery.ipodlounge.com

The iPod is much more than a shiny little thing that plays music. For some intangible reason people are passionate about their iPods. What other device would you ever have people taking the effort of taking (most often) interesting photos of their device and posting them on the web?

So it is with the iPods Around the World gallery from iPodlounge.com. The gallery currently contains almost 3000 images of iPods in their worldwide settings. The Eiffel towers is represented in a number of photos, one of my favorites being this shot. Apart from a great collection of the iPod in geographic settings (pyramids, buddhas, etc) there are great shots of people interacting with iPods. I would never let ever of my sons get within drooling distance of my iPod but, I must admit, that this is a dynamite shot.

The iPodlounge gallery proves what many of us iPod owners know. There is something intangible about the iPod that transcends technology. Maybe it’s because the iPod is the conduit for our musical passions? Or maybe it’s because it’s so darn beautiful.