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The Parallels Desktop for Mac virtualization software is in Release Candidate 2 stage.and includes the Compressor utility to reduce guest OS virtual disk space use. The list price went up from $49.95 to $79.95 but the pre-order price remained at $39.95. So, I pre-ordered my copy this morning. I’m downloading the RC2 version this evening (still a free test drive) to test it out on a MacBook.
Since Google expanded internationally and got to face language barriers as well as legal discrepancies, they have an established policy of auto-detecting the country from which a user originates and present him with the “right” language. It’s nice, too nice actually. In fact, it’s as nice as a Microsoft Office Assistant: a little can be great fun but too much just makes you want to slam the computer through the window.
Why is video chat between Windows and OS X so hard? Jason Levine is asking a very reasonable question.
Desmond Elliott is coding for Camino this summer, and he wants your thoughts on how to improve its tabs. Let your imagination run riot - what tab features would you like to see most? (Personally, I’m pretty happy with Camino’s tabs so I hope Desmond doesn’t change too much. Automatic tab saving between sessions would be welcome though.) There’s a related thread on the Camino mailing list you can keep an eye on.
Meanwhile, Andy Matuschak thinks many Mac OS X apps could do a better job of updating themselves, and his Sparkle module is attempt to do something about it: “Sparkle is a module that developers can stick in their Cocoa applications (five-step install!) to get instant self-update functionality. By that, I mean that your app will be able to update itself, not just check for new versions: it’ll read the update information from an appcast on your server, download, extract, install, restart, and even offer to show the users release notes before they decide if they want to update.”
Matt Neuburg on DEVONagent 2.0. He says it’s a mixed bag: “Here, you are not shown just what plugins this Search Set uses; instead, there’s a list of all 130-plus plugins, and you must hunt for which ones are checked - not easy, because the plugins are arranged hierarchically, so you have to keep opening disclosure triangles, manually. But you still don’t know what each plugin actually does, because DEVONagent provides no interface for displaying this information. Instead, you must open the DEVONagent application bundle and read an embedded XML “plist” file. These files are the heart of DEVONagent’s functionality; yet the program gives you no interface for viewing and understanding them!”
QuickTime is a wonderful authoring tool, enabling webmasters to blend in video, flash, dynamically loaded content and to wrap it all in a cross-platform, configuration-detecting snippet of code. In fact, thanks to the (relatively) new QuickTime to JavaScript bridge, there is little that cannot be done within QuickTime when it comes to providing a rich interactive experience.
What if Tuesday never came? That’s what it looks like right now. We’re still stuck solidly in the middle of last week in the US iTMS store as well as the several other-country stores I checked. Maybe Memorial Day messed things up…
Hey Derrick!
Here’s another, sometimes easier, way. Open the Doc file in TextEdit and then choose File -> Save As and choose HTML from the File Format pop-up.
That having been said, take note that TextEdit reads many but not all Word Docs and that details often get lost in the mix. On the up side though, I feel a lot safer opening Word attachments in TextEdit than I do in Word.
jpkang writes: I think Derrick’s point was that the HTML that Google produces is much cleaner/readable than the standards-compliant HTML that most text editors produce nowadays (with tons of CSS tags).
TextEdit rocks at this. Open TextEdit -> Preferences. Choose “Open and Save”. Set the Document Type and Styling. (I prefer to pick No CSS from the styling pop-up, XHTML 1.0 Strict from the Document Type popup, and Western (Mac OS Roman) from the Encoding pop-up.) Close the Preferences pane.
If you have a MS Word doc that you want to convert to HTML, the last thing you’d ever use is the “Save as Web Page…” command in Word. Talk about terrible code! Instead, you can send the attachment to your Gmail account and use the “View as HTML” link. Once the page is displayed in your browser, go to “View Source” and copy the code. Most of it is very clean and quite useable. I’m surprised however, that Google doesn’t use the XHTML version of the break tag…
Last week, we talked a little bit about the business decisions that prompt Ambrosia Software’s commitment to old platforms and code. This week, Ambrosia’s own bitwise operator, Matt Slot, tells us a little more about what this commitment means to the average coder in the trenches. Is supporting a single product through numerous generations of platforms and OSes an untenable mandate handed down by our short-sighted management overlords? Matt doesn’t think so.
And he should know. He’s Ambrosia’s point-man on porting and maintaining Apeiron X, a game that, with its recent update to v1.0.2, now runs on all Macs — from 68k to Intel, from OS 9 to Tiger. How does one pack all that multi-platform goodness into a single binary?
iDont.com at first appears to be just another anti-iPod site created by a talented graphics designer with too much time on her hands. However, it actually is a heavily disguised ad for SanDISK’s new Sansa e200 portable music player. Just like Real’s ill-fated “Freedom of Music Choice” campaign from 2004, it claims to be about freedom of choice, of thinking for yourself instead of mindlessly following the majority crowd. Which, in itself, is a feasible marketing message, if it wasn’t for the fact that the site’s underlying leitmotiv is to insult iPod users downright. Have a look at their “Materials” section and you’ll know what I mean.
If you have to resort to this kind of marketing tactics, more often than not it’s because your product is not desirable enough in its own right, or is not different enough to lure customers over to it from the market leader. If you do have a great product, just showing off the product’s features (including non-technical aspects like styling and prestige) alone should suffice to make that product successful. The iPod is a good example for how this can work.
But there’s more to it: attacking your competitor’s customers instead of your competitor’s products is not only lame; it is downright dangerous. Regardless of whether this strategy succeeds in getting new customers to buy your product, it will ensure that those whom you attack may never consider buying from you again, even when they’re looking for a replacement of whatever they are using at the time.
In the case of the SanDISK campaign, any time I’ll be seeing one of their products, I’ll be reminded that they once compared me to sheep, chimps, or donkeys just for being a satisfied iPod user. And I don’t really think that someone who views me that way is worthy of my business.
Here’s the problem. Perl? Great. Love the Perl. CPAN modules? Not so great. Well, yes, they are *great* in a they-kick-ass-in-all-the-functionality-they-provide, but they’re not installed on the default Mac OS X user’s machine. So not so great. Sure, Apple includes the command line cpan utility (man 1 cpan), but don’t you want utilities that just, you know, work? Without any further laborious installation of packages?
Subject: Tarsiers ate my post Erica Sadun wrote:
My “Copying YouTube Videos Part II” post seems to have been abducted by wayward tarsiers. Any idea where they may have taken it?
More after the jump…
As part of its iPod+iTunes expansion scheme, Apple recently made some important changes. Strangely enough however, these were almost obliterated by the more popular Nike co-branding and the arrival of the first MacBook units. Yet, we may have witnessed and ignored the one thing that is going to propel iTunes into its next level of success.
A few years ago, the Durex Condom Company started co-branding with various “good” companies. Among them was a car manufacturer, who touted their cars were “as safe as Durex condoms”. Needless to say, the whole contraption flopped miserably, despite a rather warm reception from the ad crowd — a group to which I am sometimes told I belong. Now, the Apple+Nike campaign sounds like a good idea in many aspects but, for some reason, I can’t help equating it with the defunct Durex+ efforts. (Note the effective use of a mathematical operator underlining the close relationship existing between both corporate DNAs in a symbiotic, market-empowering, consumer-centered fashion.)
The trick for copying YouTube videos I mentioned in a previous post seems to have broken. No worries though. Here’s a workaround.
Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only and may not be used, copied, reproduced, distributed, transmitted, broadcast, displayed, sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of the respective owners…If you download or print a copy of the Content for personal use, you must retain all copyright and other proprietary notices contained therein. You agree not to circumvent, disable or otherwise interfere with security related features of the YouTube Website or features that prevent or restrict use or copying of any Content or enforce limitations on use of the YouTube Website or the Content therein.
% cd /tmp % ls -lt total 20528 -rw------- 1 ericasad wheel 10478103 May 25 08:46 WebKitPlugInStreamRGr3qd -rw------- 1 ericasad wheel 526 May 25 08:43 WebKitPlugInStream3iFMhq -rw------- 1 ericasad wheel 13145 May 25 08:42 WebKitPlugInStreamk9BljY -rw------- 1 ericasad wheel 60 May 25 08:31 objc_sharing_ppc_501 -rw------- 1 security wheel 24 May 25 08:31 objc_sharing_ppc_92 drwxrwxrwx 3 root wheel 102 May 25 08:31 printers/ %
% cp WebKitPlugInStreamRGr3qd ~/Desktop/copiedvideo.flv %
I know it is silly to get excited over the arrival of a notebook computer. But, I was pretty darn excited when my MacBook arrived on Tuesday (after a wild journey that went from China, Alaska, Indiana, California, and finally to my state). After the intial excitement, I started looking at the various questions I had about the MacBook garnered from web while waiting. Here’s what I’ve found so far…
There’s a new bleeding edge version of TextMate out as of yesterday; Paul Bissex has some thoughts about it.
GROSX lets you subscribe to syndication feeds in Google Reader.
A snippet from Gary Krakow’s review of Windows Vista Beta 2: “Beta 2 is a good looking operating system with a number of new features, which will be familiar to you if you’ve played with recent versions of Apple’s OS X.”
AppleScript for Beginners. I’ve been looking for a series like this for a while now…
Hot Mac? See the Intel Mac Temperature Database.
Some MacBook benchmarks that suggest it is a very powerful machine, given that it is aimed at the consumer market. “Contrary to bizarre rumor, the MacBook can indeed run Final Cut Pro, and it can run it quite well.”
David Chess on his new MacBook: “And mostly I’ve got a new toy to play with. Pretty much it’s just a standard Computer, but there are various odd and fun things (the peculiar noncontiguous keys, the glossy screen, the built-in camera that when you first power it on and start setting up it turns on so you can take an Account Portrait of yourself, which is really good User Experience and very Appley). It’s small and light and fast and shiny.”
Interesting to note Samsung’s planned release of notebooks with solid-state storage instead of a hard disk - The Reg has details. Is a similar computer on any drawing boards at Apple? Would you want one?
Apple and Nike teamed up to offer a sensor for Nike’s Air Zoom Moire shoes that connects wireless to an iPod nano (presumably not a Shuffle or standard iPod). The NikePlus.com website says that the products will be available on July 13.
Convert a Raw file to Tiff or Photoshop formats in seconds? Yes! Lighten the picture, add sharpening, and increase saturation? No problem. Maybe you want to take your Raw file, save it to PDF, then encrypt it so it’s protected from prying eyes. You bet.
Do you need a high-end image editor, such as Camera Raw to perform this magic? Hardly. Tiger users have a powerful tool right there in the Applications folder that can execute these tasks in less time than it takes to launch Photoshop. The magic software is the often-overlooked Preview app.
You can discover all of Preview’s image editing power in the post titled The Simplest of All RAW Converters. Preview does a lot more than open PDFs…
Can I still rotate video clips in QT7? Sure you can. In QuickTime Pro, type Command-J, select the video track, click Visual Settings and then use the left or right rotate buttons.
Apologies in advance. Going over phone lines to the iTMS is pretty hellish.
My esteemed colleague Jochen Wolters wrote a piece about the next “Insanely Great” Apple product. Like most, well, insanely great pieces, it got me thinking: does something along these lines have a place in Apple’s lineup today?
As part of Apple’s well-executed transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, the new MacBooks follow the same pattern as the previously released MacIntels: just like the Intel-based Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro product lines, the MacBooks sport a completely revised motherboard and a few welcome new features — e.g., the built-in iSight camera — in an almost unchanged outer shell. It would not surprise me if the PowerMac G5, the last product line yet to be moved over to Intel chips, would also feature new innards in an only mildly modified case.
So, while Apple’s current model line-up features state-of-the-art machines that combine elegant looks with rock-solid performance, there’s been a distinct lack in the “insanely great” department lately. Let me point out two of my dream Apple products that I would consider worthy of the “insanely great” label.
Assuming that the new MacBook also serves as a replacement for the 12″ PowerBook, there is room for a smaller-sized portable computer in Apple’s line-up. Although it is anything but a new idea, I would like to see a MacTablet machine. A good friend of mine has been using a Windows-based tablet PC for a long time now, and he’s really impressed with it. Except for using a stylus to get data into the machine, however, it behaves exactly like any other Windows PC. Which made me wonder what Apple could come up with if they used the same approach as they did with the iPod and “just” re-thought the whole tablet PC category: Take the best ideas from the Newton, the Palm, the PocketPC (if there are any “best ideas” in that platform…), the Ultra-Mobile PC, and better smart-phones like the Sony P-9xx line, and see what this “MacFilofax” could look like…
Somewhat bigger in size than current PocketPCs, with a UI featuring OS X’s Aqua look-and-feel and the ease-of-use of iTunes/iPod, optional phone support, and a scroll of electronic paper that you can unroll from the side of the machine to extend the screen, Apple could go wild with ideas on this one, and I’d say they should.
Even if you use your Mac for processor-intensive tasks like video or audio editing, and you want all the processing power you can get, you may not necessarily require the expandability of a PowerMac-level machine. For example, if you’re into digital audio, there are now numerous I/O solutions based on external devices hooked up to the computer via Firewire, so you don’t have to rely on the classical PCI-card approach anymore. Wouldn’t it be cool, then, if you could have the power of the next-generation Intel-based PowerMacs inside a small box just slightly bigger than a Mac mini?
So, here’s my dream workhorse Macintosh: a quad-core processor; support for at least 8G of RAM; a SuperDrive and room for two hard drives; three Firewire 800 ports, optical audio I/O, and state-of-the-art driver support for mLAN. And all of this packaged in a slim, shiny case, which takes some design cues from the current PowerMacs and has the exact same footprint as the MacBook. Take it with you on the road, place your MacBook on top of it, hook both machines up with a LAN patch cable, and run your creative software of choice in distributed mode — a truly portable solution with the processing power of a high-end workstation. Insanely great indeed!
What would your personal insanely great über-Mac dream machine look like?
Until very recently, this sort of thing was just a daydream:
But now, thanks to Parallels and Virtue, it’s possible to turn your Intel Mac into a multi-OS environment within which you can flit from OS X to Windows to Linux or pretty much anything else that takes your fancy, with a simple keystroke.
Don’t be fooled by appearances. In this video clip, it looks as though the user is leaving OS X completely when using Ubuntu Dapper and Windows XP. In reality, both of them are running inside Parallels, which is running on OS X. The visual effects that make each new OS swoosh in from one side are simply that - visual effects. Apple’s own Boot Camp solution is different; it lets you boot into different operating systems. Under Parallels, the “guest” systems are running inside their own virtual machines alongside the “host” OS, Mac OS X.
In the video above, we’re shown each OS doing some basics, running a browser and perhaps one other app; it would be interesting to see just how far you can push the CPU before it falls over.
But that doesn’t make this demonstration any less impressive. For people working in one OS and wishing to test something in another, or simply use a single Windows app in an otherwise Mac-oriented workflow (hello, Lotus Notes users!), a setup like this looks pretty compelling.
Note also that Parallels is still a Release Candidate, so you should be prepared for unexpected behavior, crashes and so on. Be backed up, people.
This month, Ambrosia Software announced an update to their highly-addictive and award-wining game, Apeiron X. This update didn’t steal many headlines. It was only a point-release, after all. And it didn’t add a bunch of new levels or secret weapons. When you’ve got a track record like Apeiron has, you don’t mess with success.
So what’s the big deal about version 1.0.2? Apeiron is now a Universal binary. And what’s so special about a universal version of everyone’s favorite mushroom shooter, you may ask? Easy. Now that Apeiron has added Macintels to its list of compatible machines, it officially runs on every generation of Macintosh.
The Google Web Toolkit looks cool, but at the moment, Mac users might think they are locked out: on the download page, you can choose Windows or Linux. And if you download either one, you might be discouraged to find shared libraries in the form of .dll or .so files.
The Linux version does work on the Mac, but you won’t be able to run it in hosted mode since that mode depends on SWT (that’s what those shared libraries are there for, apparently). Hosted mode gives you more debugging power, so you are giving that up on the Mac.
To use web mode, run the autogenerated MyApplication-compile script to compile it all to JavaScript, then open MyApplication.html in a browser.
Here are the steps to unpack it and create your first app. I haven’t gone beyond these basics, but it should be enough to get you started:
$ tar xfz gwt-linux-1.0.20.tar.gz $ cd gwt-linux-1.0.20/ $ ./applicationCreator com.mycompany.client.MyApplication Created directory /Users/bjepson/src/gwt-linux-1.0.20/src [etc., etc.] $ ./MyApplication-compile Output will be written into ./www/com.mycompany.MyApplication Copying all files found on public path Compilation succeeded $ cd www/com.mycompany.MyApplication/ $ open MyApplication.html
Once you’ve done that, you should see something like the following:
The free Mac version of Google Sketchup is not quite ready yet, but in the meantime the Sketchup team announced availability of the Sketchup Google plug in for Mac OS X, which provides owners of a a Sketchup license with direct integration with Google Earth.
The free version of the software is licensed only for personal use; professionals are still required to shell out about $400 for the Pro version. The additional pro features include better export options (especially 3D export formats, animations and walkthroughs) and email tech support.
I never fail to be amazed by the kind of work Sketchup allows people to produce.
Parallels renamed their virtualization software for Intel-based Macs (formerly Parallels Workstation) and went from a beta-release to a release candidate:
Now, I have something to look forward to while I obsessively check the progress of my MacBook as it travels from Suzhou, China to the U.S. :-) I’m also wondering how Photoshop Elements 4 runs in Rosetta on the MacBook.
In the world of DSLRs, black means business. Apple must have observed what’s going on in other areas of consumer electronics. The white iBook has always been a great machine, but its cute exterior may have deterred macho users. Now with Intel inside, the new MacBook comes in both black and white… but going macho will cost you an extra $200. Is it worth it?
I did a quick poll among our Mac DevCenter bloggers. I’ve heard everything from, “I Just want the Darth Vader MacBook” to “I really like the look of the black one, but I don’t think I’ll be spending money just for that,” to the more practical, “I am inclined to buy the black one as well… I want to check out the keyboard, the surface (does it scratch easily?) and the screen (can I bear the reflection?) first.”
It’s not uncommon to charge a bit more for the “pro” look. It’s been happening for years in the camera world. It’s not the money that tops my concern list, rather, will the black surface be covered with oily finger prints…
Ever had to take a Hard Drive out of any of the PowerBooks that have been introduced since they moved into shiny alumnium or titanium shells?
Remember the amount of swearing that caused the paint to literally peel from your walls? I sure do. While getting a Hard Drive out of a Pismo or a Lombard was certainly non-trivial, getting one of an aluminum powerbook required spelunking gear and rappell lines. Don’t even get me started on the iBooks, we could be here all day.
Not so, the new MacBook. Check out the video from Macworld.com:
With levers to make sure RAM comes out properly, and an easy-to-remove S-ATA drive, I’m going to come right out and say that the MacBook is a piece of engineering that has been sorely lacking from the Mac world for quite some time.
Thanks, Apple, for giving us real choices this time around.
iWeb officially supports multiple web sites now, but it must be said that the implementation of this feature is messy and less than intuitive to most people. Why can’t iWeb simply do “New”, “Open” and “Save” like all the other apps?
How to run Classic apps on Intel Macs. Cos you need Hypercard on your MacBook, doncha?
Oh look, Stream Recorder records streams as MP3s.
Daniel Eran spells out five architectural flaws in Windows; Mac OS X avoids all of them. (Which is not to say that OS X is free from flaws, of course…)
Tom Yager made some thought-provoking comments about Apple’s closing down of the OS X kernel on Intel machines: ” Even if I don’t need to hack the kernel, knowing that I can affords me a level of self-sufficiency and insulation from vendors’ whims that fixed system software, such as Windows, does not.”
Derek Powazek on black MacBooks: “Until then, I’ll happily keep pecking on my second favorite laptop ever, my aluminum Powerbook with a keyboard that’s designed for grownups, and the matte finish is where it belongs - on the screen.”
Could Apple do more for early Aperture adopters? Some of them feel hard done by because there’s little sign of a sensible upgrade path for their computers.
Update
Oops, forgot to add a bunch of other interesting stuff that was lurking in a hidden Camino window :)
Final Cut Express HD 3.5 is out now; upgrade price is $99.
What would you like to see in future Mail updates? Hawkwings is asking.
While we’re talking email clients, EWeek has some good tips for looking after Thunderbird
And Dennis Sellars starts the wishlisting for 10.5 Leopard - what would you like to see in it? I’m still missing tabbed folders from the OS 9 days, and in my opinion neither the Dock nor the Finder toolbar are suitable replacements…
