You don’t often hear people raving about .Mac.

People rave about Apple hardware and software, and people rave about iPods, but few people post excitable blog rants about how indispensible their .Mac account is.

Apple has just updated the .Mac offering, announcing a 250MB storage limit (up from 100MB), better email, and lower prices for upgrades and bolt-ons (such as extra email accounts).

It’s a nice package, but you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s not quite up to defeating the online storage juggernaut bearing down on Apple (and everyone else) in the form of Google. After all, you get a gigabyte to play with when you get your Gmail account, and someone’s already turned it into a virtual filesystem, and Google doesn’t even seem to mind.

Of course, .Mac offers unique features for publishing content, and synchronising data between different computers (as long as they’re Apple computers, of course). The fact that much of the .Mac offering requires a Mac is one of the things that might drive people to use alternatives; a lot of people use more than one computer, but many of them use a variety of computers. Mac at home, Windows at work. Symbian-based smartphone while out and about. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a service that works on everything?

If speculation that Google plans to turn itself into a web-based operating system turns out to be true, .Mac will have do offer something seriously special to even keep up. This might well be the first of many changes to Apple’s online service.

Want to rave (or rant) about .Mac? Does Apple need to worry about the GooOS, or are they different concepts, for different people?

Related link: https://www.mac.com

So it’s once again time to bring out my credit card and renew the ol’ .Mac account. While there have been few major feature upgrades this year (as compared to last year), the Tiger Preview makes it sound like there is quite a bit of emphasis on .Mac in the next iteration of the Mac OS. Apparently, Apple has opened up the syncing features of .Mac to developers. I can only imagine the next version of apps that’ll support it.

Thus, this time around, I’m renewing on the hope of new features. I did notice one great new feature in my .Mac Webmail. I don’t know if this was added at some point and slipped by me, but you can create aliases for your .Mac email address. A great way to create a temporary, throw-away address for registering on that questionable web site. A nice little extra. Plus it’s nice to get all the little .Mac freebies throughout the year. Discounts, games, and other goodies definitely help me get more out of my hundred bucks.

And, well, let’s face it: there’s just something cool about being @mac.com. Fanboys unite!

Gonna renew this year?

In a sweeping bit of irony (I’ll get to that part in just a moment), My Yahoo!’s just-announced facelift looks more like its long-lost rival My Netscape than its former self. The new interface is cleaner than the previous jumble, feeling far less like a grab for every last ounce of attention. It’s more customizable, allowing you to augment Yahoo!’s pre-fab offerings with the information sources you follow, drawn in via the wonders of RSS syndication. And a smattering of JavaScript behind the scenes brings interactivity in the form of disclosing, hiding, removing, and reordering information from your chosen sources without need of Update buttons and clunky page refreshes.

The My Yahoo! beta roll-out accompanies a roll-out of a brand new look for the Yahoo! home page. There, too, things have been tidied and tightened substantially. While no minimalist Google interface, it certainly feels more like something designed rather than accreted. There are tabs across the top for major Yahoo! properties and a Y! Services box with links to all the rest. And the in-your-face advertising has been toned down a touch as well–and not a moment too soon for my tastes.

Now for the ironic bit I mentioned. Having discovered, toyed with, and now dived feet-first into RSS syndication and notification, My Yahoo! returns to the very roots of RSS itself: a way for My Netscape to take on My Yahoo! without the unnecessary fuss of having to pay for content. As I wrote on XML.com back in mid 2000:

[RSS] was introduced in 1999 by Netscape as a channel description framework for their My Netscape Network (MNN) portal. While the “My” concept itself wasn’t anything earth-shattering, Netscape’s content-gathering mechanism was rather novel. This simple XML application established a mutually beneficial relationship between Netscape, content providers, and end-users.

By providing a simple snapshot-in-a-document, web site producers acquired audience through the presence of their content on My Netscape. End-users got one-stop-reading, a centralized location into which content from their favorite web sites flowed, rather than just the sanitized streams of content syndicated into most portals. And My Netscape, of course, acquired content for free.

Now, with enough RSS-syndicated content to make you feel like you’re drinking from a firehose, My Yahoo! can reap the rewards of My Netscape’s idea (perhaps a little too early to have the kind of mass-market appeal of today.)

And the irony isn’t lost on the Yahoo! team, mind you; after all, a couple of members of the original My Netscape crew–including Eckart Walther, Netscape parent of RSS 0.9–are working for Yahoo!.

Click the Add Content link at the top left of your My Yahoo! page and, rather than the laundry list of news sources and infotizers you might have come across and summarily dismissed, you’re given the option to snap in pre-fab components, search for content of potential interest to you (from fishing to smartphoning), or simply paste in the URLs of your favourite RSS feeds.

You’ll notice there’s nary an orange [XML] icon in sight and only passing mention of RSS as an alternate form of subscription. Remember, RSS aggregator fans, this is targeted at your Aunt Joan and sister’s friend’s father–the uninitiated for whom a nice, clean, well-lighted news site is more than enough and the new flexibility a new vista of content to explore.

(I’ve often likened the [XML] button to a picture of a transmission on a sign at the airport pointing the way to the rental car center.)

Nevertheless, on the most requested list are sure to be: provide a more RSS aggregator-like view of all content across sources; import subscriptions in OPML format; allow items to be marked as read/unread, saved or sent on to friends; and other such features in constant use by those who live in their desktop- or Web-based aggregator.

Has Yahoo! turned over a new leaf? Will they pay attention to design and stay the course rather than packing in more ads and hidden-in-plain-sight links to services most folks simply overlook? That remains to be seen, but the new My Yahoo! certainly is a good start and one that’s sure to be watched by rivals Google, A9, et al.

(The new Yahoo! and My Yahoo! home pages being beta, you have to explicitly flip a switch to make them available to yourself.)

Do you Yahoo!?

Related link: https://griffintechnology.com/products/ibeam/

Now that I have finished up with the book I hope to get back to blogging here more often! First up is two new products from Griffin Technology, flashlight and laser-pointer for the iPod.

“Introducing the Griffin iBeam set, ready for your dock-connector iPod or iPod mini. The snap-on flashlight is great for finding keys in the dark. The other half of the package is a class IIIA laser pointer, handy for iPod-friendly presentations and other, less professional pursuits. Both units come with a snap-on protective cap that can be attached to any keychain for convenient portability and accessibility.”

Clearly Griffin is aware that these are in the “fun” category rather than the overly useful. After all, if you in the dark you have to first connect the flashlight to the iPod in order to use it! It would be fun to figure out how to create an iPod light show or laser show. Any developers out there?

More than anything, these two products speak to the power of the iPod economy.

Are you going to buy the iPod flashlight and laser-pointer?

Working more efficiently in Cocoa is a skill that can benefit every Mac developer. You can improve on your own, through books, and with the help of peers. But to achieve the next level of craftsmanship, you often need to study with the masters.

Next month O’Reilly is hosting a convergence of skilled Cocoa craftsmen. Scott Anguish is leading a tutorial titled Cocoa Bindings and a session on Writing Interface Builder Palettes. During the same week, Aaron Hillegass is sharing his Best Practices for Cocoa Programmers. Just about the time you finish organizing your notes, James Duncan Davidson starts talking about Test Driven Objective-C Developement.

You might also want to see what’s going to happen with this technology in the upcoming Tiger release. Fortunately we have Wiley Hodges, Senior Product Line Manager - Developer Products, Apple Computer, giving a feature presentation on Tiger, Xcode, and Java.

ADC members and Apple employees should read this notice.

Become a better craftsman by studying with the masters.

It’s almost a certainty that a few weeks after writing an article about something on Mac Devcenter, my use of, or opinion of that software will change completely. Some time later, I’ll be doing something completely different from the thing I said I’d be doing at the end of the article.

I’m fickle like that.

Some examples:

What’s on Your Dock?

Since I wrote this, my Dock has shrunk down to a tiny row of icons in the top-right of my monitor. I only use it to see what’s running, or to drag files directly into BBEdit or Graphic Converter.

Launchers for OS X

I stuck with LaunchBar. Quicksilver is nice, but I prefer LaunchBar.

Outboard brains for Mac OS X

I still use Notational Velocity for storing all kinds of bits and pieces, but no longer as a short-term text editor. Thanks to getting better organised and installing DropDrawers, I’ve been able to do all my editing in BBEdit.

21.5 Things You Can do With Office 2004

Office used to get fired up about once a month for me to maintain my accounts information in a spreadsheet - but in a fit of frustration recently, I suddenly moved all my (very simple) accounting details over to OmniOutliner.

RSS: The Next Generation

I’m still using era for some feeds that I like getting delivered, but have recently spent a lot of time using (and enjoying) the very capable NewsFire program for reading feeds.

Meanwhile, back in my Safari preferences…

I’ve just switched back to Camino, once again, after another brief fling with Firefox as default browser. Why? Wonderful as Firefox may be in many respects, it still suffers some problems that send me scurrying back to Camino every time.

A reader of Mac360 wrote in with comments that had me nodding in agreement.

And for me, the main problem is that if left unused for any length of time, it becomes unresponsive. Some commands will continue to work, but many stop. Mostly, the only way to recover is quit and re-launch.

Camino has no such problems. Sure, it might lack some of the more fabulous Firefox features, like open-all-in-tabs, or block-images-from-this-server, or a dozen other great Mozilla ideas that are so appealing to experienced web users. But Camino’s rock-solid performance outweighs anything it lacks when compared to Firefox. It doesn’t only Just Work, it also Always Works, and for me that’s the most important feature of all.

Are you this fickle? Or worse?

If you’re a member of ADC or work for Apple Computer, you’re entitled to a
30 percent discount at the upcoming O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference, Oct. 25-28, at the Santa Clara Westin.

Come see Stewart Copeland talk about digital music on
the Mac, hear about Tiger directly from Apple presenters (Chris Bourdon, Wiley Hodges, Sal Soghoian, and more), and dig deeper
into Mac technologies than you’ve ventured before.

To take advantage of this offer, go to the Mac OS X Conference registration
page:

https://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/macosx2004/create/ord_mac04

and enter this code in the Discount Code box along with your registration
information:

macosx04ae

If you have any questions, just post a talkback here, and I’ll give you the inside scoop.

Related link: https://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,63911,00.html

I’m a big fan of standalone network cameras; I use them to keep an eye on my house and dog. Although I’ve tried using webcams that are attached to, and driven by, a computer I just prefer the small-size, quiet operation, and general niftiness that network cameras offer. I have both wired and WiFi netcams, but of course find the wireless model more convenient because it’s easier to position and less intrusive with its minimal wires. (It does still need a power supply, after all.)

So I’m pretty intrigued by the new Nokia Remote Camera. Like the cameras that I already have, it can send a snapshot via email when triggered by motion or other sensors. But unlike any other camera, it operates on the GSM network. That means you can install this camera anywhere, provided that you have cell coverage. It even has a battery so it can operate when the power goes out, unlike cameras that rely on network routers for their connectivity.

The Nokia Remote camera also has a larger-than-usual image size (1152 x 864) and sports an infrared mode and built-in infrared illuminators so it can snap pictures during the night. There’s also a temperature sensor and the ability to generate a graph of the last day’s worth of temperature data.

On the downside, its not accessible via a web browser. You can control it remotely with a Series 60 Nokia phone, but that’s no substitute for regular HTTP access to the camera’s images. But more significantly, at least for me, is that the camera needs its own SIM card and cellular account. Unless T-Mobile and other US carriers introduce rate plans specifically for these special devices, deploying the camera, no matter how cool it would be, is likely to be too pricey for most home automators. What a shame.

Thanks for the link, All About Symbian.

What do you think? Are you willing to spring for yet another cell account, just for a camera?

At long last, Ranchero software has released version 2.0 public beta of NetNewsWire, packed with new features and bound to make a lot of existing NNW users very happy.

And not least because it’s a free upgrade from any 1.x version.

Also because, in developing the new version, Brent Simmons took the logical step of addressing the most common requests sent to him by users. People have asked for stuff, and he’s set out to provide it.

Hence a built-in browser, with tabs; items that can be flagged, and will be stored locally until unflagged or otherwise deleted; smart lists of feeds, customized to your whim; and a search system. There’s lots more as well. Those other RSS readers now have some catching up of their own to do.

Simmons makes a point of saying that he didn’t want NNW to get bloated, and all credit to him for that. Everyone dislikes bloated applications.

So the new NNW is strictly an aggregator, and the weblog editor element has been stripped out into an entirely separate new application, MarsEdit. This makes a lot of sense, not just in terms of de-bloating NNW, but more simply to plan for the future. Both news aggregation and weblog editing will no doubt warp and change a whole lot more in the next few years; by creating two new applications, Ranchero allows both of them more room to grow and mature.

Tried it out yet? What do you make of it?

Related link: https://www.lwk.dk/sketch_a_move/sketch_content.html

Louise Klinker and Anab Jain built some toy cars with touchscreens as the bodies. If you draw a squiggle or other shape on the touchscreen with an erasable pen, the car will move in a path that corresponds to the squiggle. Be sure to watch the quicktime movie.

Now here’s a little something that’s niggling me. I’ve added up two and four and made three-and-a-half, but hear me out and see what you think.

We all know about the new iMac G5, and about how it comes in three flavors: 1.6GHz 17-inch, 1.8GHz 17-inch, or 1.8GHz 20-inch. Matches up with the three models of the previous iMac model. Makes sense to do it that way.

Except there’s another flavor, the mysterious “education configuration” that’s mentioned in Apple’s iMac G5 Developer Note but not on the pages of apple.com/imac. Why not?

This lesser known beastie has some interesting differences from the three publicised iMac models. There’s no optical drive, and a different graphics card (NVidia GForce4 MX with 32MB RAM, compared with the main model’s GForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB RAM). It also lacks a modem, and has only 40GB worth of hard disk, compared with a minimum of 80GB on the other models.

So, it’s a cheaper model with less impressive specifications, intended for use in the education sector. Sounds familiar. Sounds a bit like how the eMac started life.

The eMac, bargain workhorse that it is, is starting to show its age. It’s a wonderful machine (I’ve not owned one, but have used a few and have only ever heard positive comments from owners), but with the introduction of the iPod-like G5, is starting to look distinctly unlike an iPod. Might the secretive education configuration iMac be the eMac’s replacement in coming months?

You’ve probably heard a more plausible rumor. Do share.

Just to bring up-to-date some stuff I mentioned last week:

Nisus Writer Express has been updated, fixing a number of bugs that appeared in last week’s 2.0 release.

Screenshot-tastic utility Paparazzi has been updated to 0.1.8 since we mentioned it here a few days ago. Numerous small fixes made.

Talking of screenshots, here’s another interesting little tool that might appeal to some people: Backdrop draws a plain backdrop, either at desktop level or directly underneath the frontmost app, allowing you to snap away without having to clear all the clutter off your desktop first.

You may not have much to say about a couple of small software updates. But I could be wrong.

Related link: https://wood-inc.com

I’m not a designer, but I certainly appreciate great design. And I love watching a great designer work. One such designer is Jennifer Wood. I’ve seen her take a client’s rudimentary ideas and turn it into something magical. But like any great artist, great work doesn’t just come from great talent, it also takes great tools.

Of course, she’s a Mac user.

It really is something to watch someone with the skills who really knows their tools and has that craftsman synergy with them. I’ve seen a lot of people work on different platforms, but there is nothing better than watching a talented person work on a Mac. They seem to almost develop a relationship with their machines and their software.

“As a small design firm, Macs are critical to what we do. For speed, efficiency, and reliability (above all else), you just can’t beat Apple products.”
-Jennifer Wood, Wood & Associates

This really got me thinking…are Mac users also better tool users? What type of artist chooses a PC over a Mac?

Are you a Mac craftsman?

When I introduced my computer last week, I mentioned it was a little old. It’s one of the first line of white G3 iBooks, Airport-compatible and with a pretty meagre 20GB disk.

It’s taken me many years to do it, but I’ve decided to get a broadband wireless network in my house. And these days, Airport cards are hard to find. (Yes, I know I could try and get one on eBay, but I dislike uncertainty, and I’m in a rush.)

So I’ve been hunting high and low for other options. One is to buy a wireless bridge that plugs into the ethernet port on the iBook, fooling it into thinking it’s plugged into a coil of cat5 ethernet cable. A nice-sounding solution, but after hours of hunting, I can’t find such a bridge that doesn’t need its own power supply. Plugging into walls for power means wires, and the whole point of this project is to get rid of the wires.

Another option I considered was a simple USB WiFi bridge. I’ll be honest here: I had no idea these gadgets even existed. It turns out that D-link have just such a device, the DWL-122. Better yet, it’s incredibly cheap and should, in theory, provide all the wireless connection I need for most tasks.

At this point, Google comes to my aid. A few minutes browsing pulls up a very interesting blog post about the DWL-122, and how it has a tendency to crash Mac computers. Badly.

Turns out so many people have been so annoyed by this problem, that hundreds of them have signed a petition asking D-Link to sort it out.

Scrolling down that blog page was an exercise in depression. Dozens of people were reporting identical crashes and freeze-ups, network cutouts and general glitches while trying to use this USB device. What a shame! It sounded like the perfect solution!

But wait - right at the bottom of the page, just a few days old, the recent posts hold out a slender twig of hope. An updated driver for the device has been found, and users report it working well.

It would seem, from glancing at this tale of woe and redemption, that there’s hope yet for the D-Link dongle. I really hope so.

Anyone got any better ideas?

Acknowledgments are usually the last thing anyone reads in a book, particularly a technical one. I myself never used to read the acks until I started publishing them. Now they’re one of the first bits I turn to, finding them at the very least interesting, often funny, very often geeky, and occasionally rather warm and heartfelt. I was thrilled therefore (colour me romantic) to run across the following in Dave Neilsen’s PayPal Hacks acknowledgments:

I’d like to thank … and Erika, my inspiration, who makes me smile every day. Erika, I feel so lucky to have found you. With you, every day is beautiful and new. Nothing would make me happier than to spend the rest of my life with you…Erika Anderson, will you marry me?

I sought out Dave at last weekend’s Foo Camp, just itching to know whether his lady love had yet seen and responded to the proposal. She had not, but he had a little something in mind:

As many of you know, PayPal Hacks was released the first night of Foo Camp. Last night (9/15/04) I took Erika to dinner at the newly remodeled Cliff House (SF) to celebrate the books release. The clear sky and ocean seemed to surround us at our table by the window. Just after a beautiful sunset and before desert, I read Erika the acknowledgements section of the book (see book for marriage proposal). As I finished, I got down on one knee and proposed. She was caught completely by surprise. But somehow, in front of the entire restaurant and with a big smile, Erika said … “Yes!” - So thank you O’Reilly, you have most certainly helped to change my life! - DaveNielsen, enganged co-author of PayPal Hacks

Best wishes to Dave and Erika!

Related link: https://www.newsfirerss.com

I admit it: I’ve been bitten by the RSS bug. Gone are the countless hours I’d waste browsing around all of my favorite sites throughout the day. Waiting for Slashdot to post some new nerdy news. Hoping for a new CPU article over on Ars Technica. Poring over the latest essay from Paul Graham. I’d spend so much time flipping around in all of my bookmarks, needing an information fix.

Then, I started hearing about RSS. The first time I dabbled with it, it was with Ranchero Software’s NetNewsWire. An excellent little app that helped me automate the retrieval of my sites. A great way to help me divert my attention to other tasks instead of waiting for the latest gizmo to appear on Engadget. Obviously I wasn’t the only one enjoying the app; Brent Simmons brought home the gold in O’Reilly’s first Mac OS X Innovators Contest.

Since then, a lot of other news readers have come onto the scene, including Shrook and PulpFiction. There is a growing number of RSS tickers, such as Stickler. And it seems like they’ll give just about anyone an RSS feed these days.

However, a friend of mine recently pointed out NewsFire and I decided to take a look. While not exactly ground-breaking feature-wise, NewsFire has some delicious eye candy and breathes fresh air into the news reader UI. At first appearing rather minimalist, I found its implementation of article browsing to be fantastic. It’s still a two pane interface, but can present item bodies and item listings in the same pane, depending on the view. Here are some screenshots for the curious:

Feeds and article list

Displaying an article

While still in a very, very early release, NewsFire looks like a promising little app. And it’s definitely a gorgeous UI, much like David Watanabe’s other app, Acquisition. I only have a few little gripes. For example, when viewing an article, there are two buttons in the upper right corner. These buttons allow you to move back and forth between articles, but I wish there were a third button: Next Unread. Sure, there’s a keyboard shortcut, but RSS is a mostly mouse experience for me.

It would also be nice if the number of unread articles was displayed on the Dock icon. Smart groups certainly wouldn’t hurt, but I think I’m nitpicking. It’s too early to judge exactly where this little app is going, but it’s certain it’s going somewhere great.

Given NewsFire a spin? Wish it had some killer feature from your favorite RSS reader?

Today’s big browser news (heh, sounds like a web site O’Reilly should set up ;) is the Preview Release of Firefox 1.0 (download), and the inclusion within it of a clever system that combines RSS feeds and bookmarks.

Visit a web site with the location of its feed properly specified in the header, and the new Firefox pops up a little RSS icon in the status bar at the bottom of the window. Make with the clicky-clicky for about two seconds, and you can save the RSS feed as what Firefox calls a “live bookmark” (see MozillaZine for more detail).

My screenshot shows the results:

This is a very attractive way of doing things. Your feeds are brought into your browser, rather than a browser being coded into your aggregator.

What’s also nice is the way you can organize your live bookmarks just like any other bookmark. So if you want to have a folder of often-read feeds on your Bookmarks Bar for quick reference, you can; and if you want to save a bunch of other, less-important feeds into folders deeper down the bookmarks hierarchy, you can do that too. Neat.

(Of course, anyone who likes downloading and using the Firefox nightly builds will have known about this feature for months. But it’s new to the rest of us.)

Do you live for Live Bookmarks?

Related link: https://thinkcycle.org/

Saul Griffith showed this to me a couple of months ago. It’s a web site that allows people to collaborate on new designs for things. We’re thinking of doing something like this for the Make web site.

I’ve been working on an audio restoration project that’s helped me to discover new ways to use my existing tools. The one that I simply can’t live without is the Volume Logic plug-in for iTunes made by OCTiV software. Let me explain why.

I have a 23 year old reel-to-reel demo tape from a garage band I played bass guitar for in the early 1980s. Three of us were song writers and each had a couple of tunes on this tape. I thought I should digitize this work before it turned to dust.

One of the biggest challenges was finding a reel-to-reel player. Fortunately one of my coworkers had access to the mammoth Ampex ATR-700 that strains the back just to look at it. But it was in working condition, and I was in business.

My set up was simple. I plugged a Griffin PowerWave into a 1 GHz PowerBook, then connected the Ampex to the PowerWave. I used Rogue Amoeba’s versatile Audio Hijack Pro to grab the audio and save it to my hard drive as AIFF files. I like Hijack for lots of reasons, but the effects plug-ins are fabulous — from the 10-band equalizer, to VU meters, to noise filters.

And even though the Maxell (gold box) tape had withstood the test of time, between its age and that of the Ampex, I couldn’t quite get the sound I wanted. Until that is, I loaded the digitized music into iTunes and ran it through the Volume Logic processor.

Volume Logic is a plug-in for iTunes that enables real time digital re-mastering. Until recently, I used it to enhance the songs I listened to on my PowerBook. With it, you can control volume, drive, and bass boost. But it also has a set of magic equalizers that are phenomenal.

I found that by using the Loud! setting along with the adjustments for drive and bass boost, I could finally achieve the sound I was yearning for. But I wanted to do more than just enjoy this music on my PowerBook. I wanted to create master CDs to share with my fellow musicians.

Then it dawned on me that I could reprocess the music by running it through Volume Logic. Since I now had AIFF files, I could hijack them again from iTunes (running Volume Logic) to create better sounding masters. What a difference!

The Volume Logic plug-in is available for both Mac and Windows. It costs $20 and is worth every penny… even if you aren’t trying to salvage the music from your first rock and roll band.

Oooh, this is nice. Paparazzi is a smart little Cocoa/WebKit app that provides a nice easy front end for Paul Hammond’s webkit2png code, a command line tool for snapping .png screenshots of web pages.

It’s a nice little app that does pretty much what it says on the tin. What I like is the way it takes a snapshot of the full-length page, not just the part you’d see in a browser. Full-length page screenshots are just a little bit more interesting, don’t you think?

Everybody say: “Screenshots!”

Related link: https://www.nisus.com/Express

Nisus Writer Express 2.0 is now available for download, and many users will be delighted to hear that it now supports tables, user-defined stylesheets and a pile of other features and improvements.

It’s always nice to see an alternative word processor making progress, and this upgrade is bound to make a lot of loyal users very happy.

My first impressions were not great - on startup, the program seemed slow and unresponsive, taking several seconds to translate what my fingers were doing on the keyboard into activity on screen! But after a minute or so, when the disk had calmed down and I’d quit one or two idle applications, things were much zippier.

I shall be putting it to test more thoroughly in the coming weeks, when I shall use it instead of Word or TextEdit at every opportunity, and see how it performs.

In the meantime, the nice Nisus folks have a shiny new weblog to entertain us with, too.

Got any first impressions of your own?

The CM11A interface is the most common X10-to-computer device in use today, but its old-school standard serial interface requires you to use a USB-to-Serial adapter, which adds to the expense and hassle of using a modern computer to automate your home. This week brings a long-anticipated update to X10’s venerable “ActiveHome” power line controller. The ActiveHome Professional (CM15A) not only sports USB connectivity , it includes a built-in RF transmitter and receiver.

In other words, the CM15A consolidates three devices into one. The previously mentioned CM11A power line interface, the CM19A for sending wireless commands to XCam cameras, and the popular MR26A for receiving wireless commands from motion detectors and other X10 wireless devices. That’s a lot of bang for the buck!

Of course, it will take a while before the popular home automation software packages catch up with all these changes. You can get an updated copy of X10’s ActiveHome software now, of course, and it looks to have some other nice changes, but many home automation enthusiasts will wait for packages like XTension, Indigo, and HomeSeer to work with the new device. And, naturally, to see if the CM15A can overcome the CM11A’s spotty track record for speed and reliablity.

If you’d rather not wait, but are interested in USB-connectivity, check out Smarthome’s PowerLinc USB. And when it comes to receiving wireless X10 commands, you can’t beat WGL Design’s W800RF32 — it outdoes the MR26A by adding an external antenna and the ability to receive signals from security sensors.

Is the CM15A too late to the party?

Seeing cross-platform OS X/Windows apps is somewhat unusual; it’s a surprise to find software developers prepared to create a Mac version of their software by default, when the Mac user base is so much smaller.

In one short browsing session today, I stumbled upon Surprise Software’s Docket (a list maker) and Simply Journal, and Suretype a launcher that follows in the footsteps of LaunchBar, Quicksilver, et al.

If anyone out there tries out some of these apps, do post a comment to let the rest of us know what you think of them. Do cross-platform developers make software that’s as good as OS X-only developers? :)

Does being Windows compatible even matter?

Downloaded your 2004-09-07 update yet?

Apple says the update fixes issues with modules and programs including CoreFoundation, IPSec, Kerberos, libpcap, lukemftpd, NetworkConfig, OpenLDAP, OpenSSH, PPPDialer, rsync, Safari, and tcpdump.

Crucially, it makes browsing with Safari that bit more secure, by alerting users whenever web content attempts to execute a file on the local machine.

A lot of people have grabbed it already, and there are reports of some troubles, namely with the FTP daemon and page rendering in Safari.

There’s some discussion of the FTP server problem on Apple’s site, with some helpful additional info.

Seen any problems with the Security Update for yourself? And made any fixes?

Related link: https://www.engadget.com/entry/6437880577833191/

Engadget has a nice piece on how to use your Pocket PC as a Wi-Fi phone. It uses a Vonage account, so you get a real working phone number. Of course, your Pocket PC needs Wi-Fi to make this work.

I thought it might be nice to start this weblog by introducing myself, but then I thought that since almost everything on this web site is about computers, and almost everyone who reads it is interested in computers, perhaps it would be better to introduce you to my computer instead.

Here’s my desktop right now:

As you can see, it’s a bit of a mess. Like most things in my life. I try (I try *so hard*) to keep things organised, but as my friends will tell you, I am a fundamentally lazy person and these efforts to stay on top of things soon fall by the wayside.

This machine is called flange, and it’s a 600 MHz G3 dual-USB white iBook with 640MB RAM (the maximum it will take) and a 20GB hard disk. I bought it just over two years ago and it is still running very well, having had few problems during its life. Considering the amount of time I have spent using it, it’s doing very well indeed.

It currently runs Mac OS X 10.3.2, and upgrades happen rarely because I still use a dial-up modem connection. This is going to change in coming weeks, when I get a super new wireless broadband network set up in my home (of which you will no doubt hear more on these pages).

I am *very* fussy about software, and something of a flitter. If my browser annoys me for some reason, I will switch in an instant to a different one, until it annoys me too. My current set-up includes Eudora 6.1 for email, Camino 0.8 for browsing (with Mozilla on stand-by for certain sites), BBEdit 7 for text (although I’m seriously considering the upgrade to version 8), Graphic Converter for image editing, X-Chat Aqua for IRC nattering, and lots of other little apps for the other little things that happen less often.

I’m a very text-oriented person. My todo list is a text file that I edit in BBEdit. I keep notes and snippets in Notational Velocity, which stores everything as text, but I’ve often wondered about putting them into one huge text file and just using BBEdit’s search feature to find my way around. I download text editors for the hell of it.

It’s a simple sort of setup, but my needs are pretty simple. I’m a writer and journalist, and text is how I earn a living. Luckily, few of the editors I work for ever require the words I produce to be formatted, and in most cases I can just send plain text in the body of an email message. I love being able to work that way.

There are some other computers in my house. A PowerBook G4 on loan, a NeXTStation that I bought for peanuts from a guy down the road, an X86 box that used to run Windows and currently runs the the Lycoris Linux distribution (it was free with a magazine), and a Hewlett Packard Jornada 820 laptop/PDA. Plenty to keep me occupied.

So … anyone round here like talking about computer stuff?

Feel free to say hi

I don’t know why, but when I logged on to MSN Music, I expected to see something similar to the iTunes Music Store. Much to my surprise, I didn’t.

My very first impression is flat. Very flat. Aside from a couple semi-aqua buttons, totally flat. The music seems more boring here.

No knock on Microsoft. It’s me. Really. I’ve become jaded. No longer will simple lists of songs satisfy me. I need top albums, essentials, slideshow billboards, celebrity playlists, side-shuffling albums… I need color! I want one-click ordering directly into my music jukebox. OK, I confess. I like metal.

Am I shallow? Most likely. But I don’t want to change. And I’m certainly not switching music stores. I wish you well MSN Music. I’m sure it’s perfect for some folks… those far less superficial than me.

On the editor’s list here at O’Reilly, we often get into discussions about
technology trends and the latest gadget. But we also talk about the craft
of editing and dealing with the English language, which can sometimes be a
real joy when you’re talking about tech writing. (I’ll get back to the “joy”
in a second.)

No book has sparked more activity on the O’Reilly editor’s list than
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss. In her book, Lynne talks about her frustrations with misplaced punctuation, and encourages us fellow “sticklers” to be on the lookout for improper usage and to correct it whenever possible. She gives the best overview of how to properly use various punctuation marks that I’ve ever seen, and Lynne does so with such grace and humour (sorry, I had to, she’s British) that you can’t help but love the woman.

I’ve read all the “classic” books that editors and writers are told to read
to learn about “proper” style. Books like Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, the AP Stylebook, and the book that most publishing houses refer to as their “Bible” (including O’Reilly), The Chicago Manual of Style. (Yes, I have read the entire CMS. Twice.) But Eats, Shoots & Leaves hits the nail on the head when it comes to explaining how to properly apply punctuation.

Now back to the “joy” I hinted at earlier.

One of the hardest parts of editing and writing technology books is that
you sometimes have to let go of the things you’ve been taught in high school
or university English courses. You see, here is the dilemma:

When calling out UI elements (or other such things you want the reader
to type in) in the text, we often place them in quotations to call
attention to them. The problem is, some of these UI elements (or
typed-in things) don’t have punctuation, so when these fall in the
middle or at the end of a sentence, does it not make sense to put the
punctuation outside of the closing quotation?

For example:

…click the checkbox “Show displays in menu bar.”

After searching Google for “Mac inurl:tiger,” the search results…

Notice the problems with placing the punctuation inside the quotes?
Now I know what you’re going to say: “The punctuation goes inside the
quotes, right?” Wrong. And here’s why…

In referring to the Bible (the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition),
I found the following buried in para 6.8 (p. 242):

“… In computer related writing, in which a file name or other
character string enclosed in quotation marks might be rendered
inaccurate or ambiguous by the addition of punctuation within
the quotation marks, the alternative system may be used, or
the character string may be set in a different font, without
quotation marks (see 7.79).”

The “alternative system” in question here is described in para 6.10 (p. 243):

“Alternative system. According to what is sometimes called the
British style (set forth in The Oxford Guide to Style [the successor to Hart’s Rules; see bibliog. 1.1]), a style also followed in other English-speaking countries, only those punctuation points that appeared in the original material should be included within the quotation marks; all others follow the closing quotation marks. This system, which requires extreme authorial precision and
occasional decisions by the editor or typesetter, works best with
single quotation marks. (The British tend to use double quotation
marks only for quotations within quotations.)”

My interpretation of this is that the proper usage should be:

…click the checkbox “Show displays in menu bar”.

After searching Google for “Mac inurl:tiger”, the search results…

Not:

…click the checkbox “Show displays in menu bar.”

After searching Google for “Mac inurl:tiger,” the search results…

See the difference?

Adding the punctuation inside the quotes implies that, in the first
example, the period is part of the UI element, which it isn’t, and
that the comma would be part of the search string, which it shouldn’t.
And since O’Reilly doesn’t use a different font style or type face for things
that we’ve quoted, that negates the ending statement of para 6.8
(”… or the character string may be set in another font, without
quotation marks”).

While traditional North American (or better, U.S.) style tells you to
put everything inside the quotes — no matter what — that shouldn’t
always be the case. In the case of tech books, the “alternative system”
(”…only those punctuation points that appeared in the original material
should be included within the quotation marks; all others follow the
closing quotation marks.”) should apply.

To quote Lady Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves,
p. 155):

“The basic rule is straightforward and logical: when the punctuation
relates to the quoted words it goes inside the inverted commas; when
it relates to the sentence, it goes outside. Unless, of course, you
are in America.”

And while I am an American, it’s hard to argue with logic.

Sticklers unite!

Are you a stickler for punctuation?