Apple’s latest experiment in consumer satisfaction is, I think, a fascinating new tool in the company’s never-ending quest to attract more users to the Mac platform.

Here in the UK, there’s a small chain of independent record shops called Fopp. One of Fopp’s great attractions is that it has what’s known as a “Suck it and see” guarantee. You can buy any CD, and if you don’t like it, you can take it back. Simple as that.

As a result, people go to Fopp to buy stuff because they know they can take more risks, and feel more relaxed about spending money.

Apple’s Mac mini offer works the same way. Right from day one, the Mac mini has been aimed squarely at people who need a decent computer at a low price. But for many Windows users, even the low price doesn’t tip the balance for them. There’s still an element of risk in purchasing a Mac mini, simply because to those people, the Mac is an alien thing. OS X represents a learning curve, no matter how shallow, and that puts people off.

The Mac mini test drive takes away the feeling of risk, the fear of the learning curve.

People can buy a Mac mini and be assured that if, after 30 days, they still don’t like it, they will have lost nothing. They will still be able to get a refund and spend the money again, on something less risky.

But Apple has a hunch - a pretty solid one, I suspect - that the returns will be a minority of the sales. Apple’s confidence in the friendly nature of OS X is not misplaced. Just look at most reviews of Mac hardware that have appeared in Windows-specific magazines in recent years. Even long-time Windows writers have publicly conceded that OS X is an excellent platform, especially for newcomers.

The offer won’t provide a huge boost to Mac mini sales; a modest one, at best. But it will make the difference for a small percentage of buyers, people who have been wavering because of this fear of the unknown. Most of those people will now buy, because they feel more secure. And most of those buyers will, I think, end up keeping their computers.

And that’s what Apple wants. When your market share is at about 3.5%, even a modest boost can make a serious difference to quarterly figures, and when you’ve got analysts on your back wondering how to manage the transition from one processor architecture to another, good quarterly figures can be a big help.

Comment on this weblog

Related link: https://www.t-mobile.com/hotspot/

According to a CMP TechWeb article T-Mobile Hotspots in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are free until Friday Sept. 2.

Sites Laid Low By Katrina Traffic

You can get more info about and locations for these hotspots at:

T-Mobile Hotspots

If you know of other mobile tech help for those affected by Hurricane Katrina, post the info here.

Submit your mobile-device-friendly websites to Google Sitemaps, folks! Google just made it mobile-friendly.
According to the blog entry…

Alan Strohm, Google Mobile team: Small is beautiful

…
webmasters of sites of all sizes can submit their mobile website URLs to Google Mobile Sitemaps, an extension of the Google Sitemaps program. And just as cool, mobile phone users can search through these, and other mobile-friendly websites, using Google Search for the Mobile Web.

You can learn more about Google Mobile Sitemaps (beta) at…

Google Sitemaps (BETA) Help

Let us know about your phone/PDA friendly website too.

Related link: https://www.onfocus.com/2005/08/3732

As lead editor for O’Reilly’s Hacks series, I field proposals for Hacks books on a daily basis. I also usually have several books in various stages of acquisition, writing, or production, all of which of course have authors and (this being Hacks) numerous contributors. Beyond the questions about which topical areas we’re looking to publish on, the questions that come up most often are usually variations on the theme of what makes a hack and how one should be written.

I’ve long wanted to write something for current and prospective authors, contributors, and other O’Reilly editors (to share with their authors) that explains exactly what we mean by “a nonobvious solution to an interesting problem.” But, of course, I haven’t had the time to do so, so I often go through various rounds of trying to explain something that, when it comes right down to it, you really need to just grok. Unfortunately, after a few attempts to put a fine point on the term hack (as used by O’Reilly), I often end up resorting to a description that’s not much better than Justice Stewart’s infamous definition of obscenity: namely, “I know it when I see it.”

Today, I was discussing a new project with Paul Bausch, who has established himself as a model author for the series (including Amazon Hacks, the forthcoming Yahoo! Hacks, and an as-yet-unannounced third Hacks title), and I learned that he’d quietly drafted his own take on this theme. Paul’s an author who groks the Hacks format with little need for supervision or guidance, so I was particularly interested in his perspective. He didn’t disappoint, so I asked him to share his sage advice with the world. Thankfully, he agreed.

Here’s what he describes as his Hack template:

I view a hack as a project the reader can accomplish. The reader also needs to know why they might want to accomplish the project and have an idea of what the project should look like when they’re finished. Here’s my template:

1. Why this hack is needed (story, build desire)
2. Describe the relevant features
3. Hack prerequisites
4. Hack code/procedure
5. Example of the Hack in action
6. Brief summary (why the reader rocks!)

7. If possible, Hack alternatives

Whenever possible I use the conventional Hack headings of The Code and Running the Code to separate parts 4 and 5. And the heading Hacking the Hack for part 7.

The rest of his post fleshes out his philosophy and approach in more detail. Though there are certainly things I’d add if given the time, and other views and approaches are certainly welcome (Hacks contains multitudes: it always has room for a variety of perspectives and embraces diversity of opinions and approaches), Paul’s explanation and tips are as great a start as I could have hoped for.

If you’re thinking of writing for the Hacks series, currently writing for us, or just want to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the sausage is made, you’ll definitely not want to miss it.

Got a Hacks hack? Share your best practices for effective writing, Hacks or otherwise.

Last week we all had an engaging discussion about what happened to my Safari?. Lots of issues were raised, and some good advice shared. The tip that has helped me the most was clearing the “other forms” in my Autofill preferences. Safari ran much better after doing so.

Then yesterday Apple released Safari 2.0.1. I’ve downloaded the new version from Software Update and have been using it to browse my favorite sites. I’m also writing this post in 2.0.1.

I’ve noticed performance improvement. My Gmail account is definitely snappier, and overall surfing seems faster. I know it’s always hard to tell at first because “we want it to be better.” But after a day of work, I think it really is improved.

I couldn’t find any major issues on the Apple Discussion Boards, so it looks like it’s time to turn it over to you for your comments. How’s Safari 2.0.2 (or the upgraded Panther version) working for you?

If you’re a power user, you probably have something like this in your dock:

This is an alias of the Applications folder, which I dragged into the Dock. The reasoning is simple - I have more commonly-used applications than I’d care to put on the dock, but if they’re not on the dock, then I have to:

1. Open a Finder window
2. Click on the Applications folder in the left nav
3. Find my app and double click it

Putting the Applications folder in the Dock allows you to right-click (or ctrl-click) it for a contextual menu listing its contents, ie, all your applications

This saves a few steps, though you still have to scan/scroll through the alphabetical listing to find your app. So it kind of sucks. If you need something from the Utilities folder, then you’re into the realm of hierarchical menus (yuck), and it sucks a lot more, as this example shows:

Moreover, this will only find apps in the Applications folder. Everything I use in /Developer/Applications, like XCode and Interface Builder, doesn’t show up.

At some point, I realized that Tiger has freed me from the tyranny of this wannabe Start Menu. I was searching for something and in the results, which are sorted by type, I noticed “Applications”. I realized that it was entirely practical to simply type the first few letters of the app I needed and get to it that way:

In fact, if you use the keyboard equivalent for Spotlight (command-space if you only use one input method, ctrl-space if you use more), you can find your app without taking your hands off the keyboard.

This approach doesn’t care about hierarchies — after all, that’s the point of Spotlight — so finding deeply-nested applications or those outside the Applications folder is equally easy. In fact, that’s probably the only significant hazard: if you have multiple OS X partitions (say, for testing purposes), you can get this weird situation where you pick up applications from different partitions:

OK, which one of you Printer Setup Utilities is from Tiger, and which is from Panther?

Still, it’s so useful that there’s really no need for the Applciations-alias-in-Dock trick anymore. So long, wannabe Start Menu!

Are you launching apps with Spotlight?

According to an IDC survey, 30 percent of cameraphone users say they plan to buy a standalone digital camera after their introduction to digital photography on their phone.

Mobile Pipeline: Cameraphones Create Standalone Digicam Sales, Survey Finds

Anyone who has taken photos using a cameraphone knows that most cameraphone’s do not take photos anywhere near the quality of even a low-end standalone digital camera with a similar resolution (say 1 megapixel or less).
And, some industry analysts and pundits have been telling us that cameraphones will cannibalize digtal camera sales.
Even though I’m a huge cameraphone fan, I’ve never subscribed to that opinion.
And, as a person (perhaps one of the few remaining?) who prefer best of breed standalone devices (phone, PDA, camera, MP3 player, etc.), the camera part of my cameraphone will continue to be used for only those photographic events where I don’t have my Canon SD200 (or whatever digital camera I am using at the time).

Was your cameraphone your first digital camera (probably not true for 99+% of the O’Reilly Network crowd :-)?

OK folks, the invites from Apple’s PR team were sent out today. The essential text reads:

1000 songs in your pocket changed everything. Here we go again.

So you can bet that between now and that day, the rumor sites are going to be on overdrive, trying to second-guess His Jobsness and figure out what the big surprise is going to be.

People will doubtless be placing money on some kind of video device, a videopod that does for film and TV what the iPod did for music. That would be the kind of thing to ‘change everything’ again, wouldn’t it? Especially if it had some kind of direct link to an iTunes Music Store-style service for the downloading and purchasing of video content.

What other ideas could change everything again? An iTunes phone, or combination phone and iPod device, might be interesting, especially if it could connect directly to the iTunes Music Store and download songs without the need for a computer.

Or might we see a radically different handheld device, one that’s more like a computer than a player of files? Something that runs OS X and can be used for all manner of mobile computing functions, music and video included.

I’m inclined to suspect it’ll be some kind of video tablet device. But heaven forbid I should ever indulge in groundless speculation. That’s not like me at all.

Sooooo, whaddya think it’ll be, huh?

I was flipping through the just-released Digital Photography Pocket Guide, 3rd Edition last night, and I thought this would be a great time to share some shooting tips.

Before I do, however, I want to mention that this 3rd Edition of my photo guide “hits the mark” that I’ve been striving for since I originally conceived this book. This time around we got the perfect storm… in a good way. Brand new design from Mike Kohnke and Marcia Friedman, tech review from James Duncan Davidson, gorgeous printing and paper (thanks Cambridge crew!), great editing from Colleen Wheeler, and on and on. This edition is improved in every facet, and the info is totally up to date.

OK, but you want tips right now (while you wait for your book to arrive). First thing, don’t let your digital camera get too hot, as in the glovebox of your car. We’ve seen that hot image sensors produce more image noise. So treat your digicam with the same care as your film-loaded 35mm camera.

If you’ve made the switch to digital, and you’re thinking about selling your 35mm SLR, be sure to hang on to all the filters, step-up rings, lens hoods, flashes, pouches, etc. I keep my stuff in stackable boxes that are marked on the outside. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found the perfect accessory in one of those boxes to tackle a job with my new digital camera. By repurposing this stuff, you’ll save yourself hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars.

Get serious about portable backup solutions. There are many times when you won’t be able to take your laptop with you. Check out devices such as the current iPods (color screen) with the camera connector, Palm LifeDrive, and other hard drive devices that let you offload your pictures and keep shooting. I prefer double backup myself, so I’ll take extra memory cards too so I can have pictures on both the hard drive and memory cards. I try to keep them in separate cases as I travel.

Shade your lens when shooting in bright conditions. If the sun is shining directly on your lens, you’ll lose contrast at best and gain lots of flare at worst. Use a lens shade, your hand, or a copy of The Digital Photography Pocket Guide to keep stray light off your glass.

If you want to shoot at high ISOs, such as 400 -1600, get the biggest image sensor you can afford. Small digicams are great for daylight shooting at ISO 100, but those little sensors create too much noise at 400 and above. You’ll notice a big improvement just by stepping up to an APS sensor such as the one in a Canon Digital Rebel or a Nikon D50.

Keep a plastic ziploc bag in your kit. You never know when Mother Nature will rear her head and hit you with rain or swirling sand. A plastic bag to protect your camera is a godsend. And if you’re shooting outside on a cold night, put your camera in the bag before coming back indoors. That way the condensation will form on the bag as everything warms up, not the camera itself.

And finally, take lots of pictures and don’t forget to archive them. The joy of digital photography is the freedom to shoot, shoot, shoot. But also get yourself an extra FireWire drive, and backup, backup, backup.

More tips to come…

I’m not sure if there’s much of a blog here beyond the screenshot, but take a look:

As you can see, all of my contacts in the O’Reilly group have either voice or video capability. Thanks to built-in mics, cheap webcams and iSights, etc., we’ve gone from multimedia chat as the special case to multimedia chat as the norm.

One other thing you might notice: four of the six contacts have the “multiple” icon, meaning they’re on Macs running Tiger. I knew that lots of O’Reilly people were Mac fans, but wow…

Are most of your buddies voice/video enabled?

At first I thought I was dreaming. Site traffic to Apple Matters as indicated by page loads was growing exponentially. I’ve gone through these spurts before so I wasn’t entirely surprised. Still, this was consistent, big number growth in traffic.

Then I wondered, which pages are they visiting? Which stories are getting the most traffic? And this was when I was humbled. Turns out that growing traffic was largely due to my RSS feed. In fact, about 70 percent of the page loads for Apple Matters are to my RSS and Atom files.

At first I was despondent. I mean, all that pleasure coming from increased traffic was for naught, right? Well, yes and no. At least people were engaged enough with the site to add it to their newsreader of choice. However, RSS feeds are a black hole of traffic, which is why companies like Feedburner exist, and I presume, are doing well. I have no idea how many of those hundreds of thousands of RSS page loads are actually being just loaded, vs. scanned, consumed, and ultimately linking to an actual story on the site.

Another reason I was disappointed by RSS sucking up so many page impressions was that it meant I wasn’t making as much on advertising. Ok, ok, I said it. The A word. Advertising. Well I’m unapologetic. While Apple Matters is far from a huge moneymaker and I have bills to pay. Hosting, my writers (yes they are paid, albeit nominally), my developer, and other expenses. Oh, and then there is this strange notion of making money to pay for food, clothing for my kids, etc (although Apple Matters is not my main source of income).

Each time a user loads one of my pages I am compensated, albeit quite a tiny amount. Let’s say, for example, that an average advertiser pays me $5 per 1000 page impressions. Each time you load a page on Apple Matters I’m getting .005 cents. Wow.

Consider it a form of micro payment that the readers seemingly are unwilling to pay. Either that, or no one has figured out the business model of micro payments adequately enough (actually, someone has, but it has not taken off yet).

To put it another way without advertisers a lot of great content on the web wouldn’t exist. I am always amazed at how people proudly proclaim that they have blocked ads. Currently it doesn’t have an effect on site’s revenue because an impression is measured by a call to the ad server, regardless of whether the ad loads or not. However, partly because of the prevalence of ad blocking, technology is being developed to count an ad impression only when it is seen on the page, unblocked.

We live in a society, for better or worse, that requires us to make money for the work we do. How would you like it if someone came to your job and said, you know what, I’m just not going to pay you for what you do.

You wouldn’t.

Which leads us to the wonderful world of RSS advertising. Each innovation on the web appears with an altruistic sunnyness. Indeed, in the very beginning of the web commercial hyperlinking was strongly frowned upon by the geeks that knew the infrastructure. No one could have imagined a commercialized web with Amazon, eBay, let alone all the porn sites out there. But eventually they had to capitulate. And now we have ecommerce. Yes, a substantial part of the web still runs on passion alone, and many places are a combination of passion and commerce (like Apple Matters). But the notion of the web as a commercial-free zone was forever put to rest with the Netscape IPO.

But those idealistic folks still exist. And their latest fury is directed at RSS advertising. At the same time that I saw that I was losing all this traffic to my RSS feeds I also heard rumblings of GoogleAds in RSS feeds. I have Google Ads on my site, and because they are cost per click (CPC) they don’t provide the kind of revenue a cost per impression (CPM) ad can provide. But still it is income. However, at the same time as the innovation of RSS advertising was being explored some were already imploring that RSS was no place for commerce.

Like the original folks of weblore these people argue that RSS is pure content. It must be untainted by the stain of commerce.

Yes an RSS feed is very similar to a webpage, a television, a magazine, or a highway. It is a place where our eyes spend time. And therefore a place where advertising makes sense. Like advertising on a webpage, advertising in an RSS feed is extremely targeted and, increasingly, measurable.

With each passing day various companies are figuring out the server infrastructure and measurement challenges to providing ads in RSS feeds. I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet. But I’m happy to know that soon, 70 percent of my page loads can be monetized in some way. And I can continue to pay the bills.

Is RSS advertising a good thing, a necessary evil, or just inevitable?

I just finished setting up my iChat 3.0.1 client for Google Talk. Mac folks don’t have the Google client available, but Tiger users can take advantage of the Jabber capability in iChat3 to log into the Google server. We can also use Adium, GAIM, and Psi.

I’m sure you’ve read plenty about Google Desktop, but you won’t be able to experience it unless you’re running Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP 3+. Of course Tiger provides you with much of that same muscle. So maybe it isn’t a big deal.

If you go to the Google Earth download page, you’ll discover that “Apple Macintosh computers are not supported at this time (but we are working on it).” Yeah, OK thanks for that. Want to give Picasa a spin? Oops, it’s a .exe download. Sorry.

The feeling I get isn’t that Google is anti-Mac, they just don’t seem to care that much. My Gmail account works fine in Safari, and I think that Google Talk will be serviceable with iChat. But that seems about it for now.

The odd thing is, in the beginning I felt a kinship with Google. They were the alternative who thought outside of the box. For some weird reason, I always thought that Google would be Mac friendly. In a way, I guess they are… sort of.

A number of security conscious work sites ban entry camera phones and mobile devices with wireless data features (including WiFi, Bluetooth, and Infrared).
MSDN blogger Jason Landridge mentions a product from Credant that might be able to help end the need for such severe policies banning devices many of us consider critical to our day-to-day work (and play).
Jason describes Credant’s product as:
One of our Partners Credant has a solution called Mobile Guardian which provides the ability to control cameras, disable bluetooth and infra-red as well as provide encryption and policy management. This is a really secure/controlled way of ensuring that the features you don’t want people to have access to are disabled whilst still retaining the flexibility the device platform offers.

• Disabling Phone Camera’s, Bluetooth and other capabilities on Enterprise devices
  
• CREDANT Mobile Guardian Enterprise Edition
  

Would this kind of product help you get your mobile device back into your office/workplace?

Ben’s Bargains reports that Shop4Tech.com is offering the DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 for $139 with free shipping after applying code FT10 for 10% off.
Over at the Defyne forums (site of the iTele development), poster FyNight reports “The linux-dvb people beat me to it this time; they already have a Fusion HDTV 5 driver (or beta version of it at any rate). ” Unfortunately, we still have to wait for the Mac drivers.

Some of you might remember my article about Tweaking Apple Mail from earlier this year. In it, I raved about Mail Act-On, Scott Morrison’s Mail plugin that lets you add all sorts of smart keyboard shortcuts based on custom rules.

Well, since then Scott’s been working on a follow-up, which he officially released today. It’s called MailTags and it offers something a bit different. When invoked, MailTags lets you add comments (or Flickr-style tags, if you wish), due dates, and flag markers to individual messages in Mail. You can also create Projects and assign messages to them.

Needless to say, all of this additional data is searchable in Mail and Spotlight, but better still it works perfectly with Act-On and with Mail’s own rules functions. You can combine MailTags data with Act-On rules and Smart Folders to create powerful automated workflow assistants.

As a result you can really turn Mail into a clever email management machine, incorporating some of the sorting and management tools that have until now only been seen in big-name apps like Microsoft Entourage.

MailTags stores data inside mail message files. (A future version may use a separate database too.) This means you need to have local message files for MailTags to use, but Scott says that even IMAP users should be able to use the plugin, as long as their email message headers are stored on the local machine.

I’ve had a play with MailTags during the beta stage and I think it’s going to be a very popular tool. Like Act-On, it’s donationware; I’d say it was well worth sending a few dollars in Scott’s direction if you like what you see.

Had a play? What do you think?

The Sony Playstation Portable 2.0 firmware upgrade was supposed to be available on Aug. 12. Then, it slipped to the 15th. It took a while (Aug. 23), but from my quick look, the wait was worth it.
The firmware upgrade information page lists all the new features (see link below).
The main one, for me, was the addition of an official web browser.
The browser works better than I expected from a user-input point of view.
And, the analog joystick, makes navigation on a page reasonably easy.
There’s already a couple of sites with page formats specifically designed for the PSP.
If Sony produces a USB keyboard and desk stand (to prop it up), we may finally have the web tablet for the home that has talked about for so long.

• Sony PSP 2.0 Firmware upgrade instructions
  
• Sony PSP 2.0 Manuals
  

Did you upgrade your Sony PSP to 2.0 yet? Built a web site for it yet? Let us know.

For those of you who were too busy petting their Meerkats to look at their RSS aggregators yesterday — OK, it’s really an O’Reilly insider joke here —, let me say that our editor, Derrick Story, published a blog on Safari and his personal experiences with the application.

This got me thinking about our beloved browser, currently battling in my Dock for its status of default browser — a status I change more often than socks, for testing purposes and just the kicks I get from using pop-up menus.

It turns out there is one feature out there I would really, really love to see added and its notable absence from all browsers out there is something I can’t really understand. Those of us who routinely develop web sites and applications know how important it is to clear (1) caches, (2) cookies, (3) favicons and (4) history between every test lest we want to run into inexplicable behavior — and this with every browser.

The problem is that there is no way to do that that does not involve a clicking and dialog-dismissing extravaganza. Fun, fun… We have a reset Safari menu but it also clears Keychain auto-fills and that is a sanity-threatening proposition — ever worked on beta sites with 2 layers of (purely useless because non-encrypted) password protection? Using private browsing might be a workaround but it does not provide the same level of confidence-inducing foamy scrubbing I need to perform about 50 times a day.

So, what is a poor little FJ to do? Whip up AppleScript, that is! Thanks to the magic of “do shell script” commands and “rm” handlers, I now have a “Reset Safari” option that just fits my needs.

I have never loved my Scripts menu as much! If the people in Cupertino who came up with the idea could send me their address, I would gladly express a box of French cookies to them! (Oh, the same applies to the WebKit and Safari teams, by the way, who are doing a superb work with the browser, even if the very little specific feature I have in mind is not available.)

Update: I have added, as requested, the script below. Please consider it uses “rm” commands and is only in alpha stage — it works on my little machine but I did not test on a larger scale. All disclaimers apply: use at your own risk and, please, backup your data! As they say, it comes with no warranty whatsoever, expressed or implied.

try
    tell application "Finder"
        -- Let's get the name of the current user
        set myUserName to (do shell script "whoami")
        -- Is Safari running?
        set safariIsRunning to false
        if (do shell script "ps -U " & myUserName) contains "Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari" then set safariIsRunning to true
        -- Let's quit Safari or the cleaning will not take effect
        if safariIsRunning then tell application "Safari" to quit
        -- Let's delete the application's cookies
        try
            set deleteCookies to 1
            do shell script "rm -r /Users/" & myUserName & "/Library/Cookies/"
        on error
            set deleteCookies to 0
        end try
        -- Let's delete the application's caches
        try
            set deleteCaches to 1
            do shell script "rm -r /Users/" & myUserName & "/Library/Caches/Safari/"
        on error
            set deleteCaches to 0
        end try
        -- Let's delete the application's icons
        try
            set deleteIcons to 1
            do shell script "rm -r /Users/" & myUserName & "/Library/Safari/Icons/"
        on error
            set deleteIcons to 0
        end try
        -- Let's delete the application's history
        try
            set deleteHistory to 1
            do shell script "rm -r /Users/" & myUserName & "/Library/Safari/History.plist"
        on error
            set deleteHistory to 0
        end try
        -- Let's delete the application's downloads folder
        try
            set deleteDownloads to 1
            do shell script "rm -r /Users/" & myUserName & "/Library/Safari/Downloads.plist"
        on error
            set deleteDownloads to 0
        end try
        -- Let's reopen Safari if it was running when the script was called
        -- Note: this does not always work! Eeek!
        if safariIsRunning then tell application "Safari" to activate
        -- Let's conclude by letting the user know everything is OK
    end tell
    if safariIsRunning then
        tell application "Safari" to display alert "Safari has now been cleaned up." message "You can now resume using the application." as informational buttons "OK" default button 1 giving up after 2
    else
        tell application "Finder" to display alert "Safari has now been cleaned up." message "Changes have already taken effect and will be retained the next time you launch the application." as informational buttons "OK" default button 1
    end if
on error TheError
    tell application "Finder" to display alert "Safari could not be cleaned because of a script error." message "Below is the error returned by Apple Script, which may assist you in troubleshooting this issue:" & return & return & TheError buttons "OK" default button 1 as warning
end try

What are your AppleScript-based sanity-saving tips?

I’ve noticed little things in the Safari browser (v 2.0) lately that are worrying me.

For instance, when I misspell a word, then CTRL-click on it, I’m not offered a correction for the misspelling. Since I do a lot of typing in web forms, such as this weblog, that’s a drag. Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I tested this function on a machine that has Safari 1.2.4 running on Panther, and it worked just like I remembered. I was offered a correction for the misspelled word.

As a side note, I recommend keeping a machine in the fold running previous versions of the OS and major apps. I realize it’s a luxury, but I can’t tell you how many times this has saved my sanity.

Back to Safari 2.0 — is it me, or am I seeing the spinning beach ball more than ever? There are days when the browser just doesn’t want to perform. We all need our Jolt I suppose, but where do I add it for this software? Things really seem to slow down when I have Automator open (which I just adore!). Could be coincidence, I guess.

I realize I’m demanding of my hardware and software. And overall, Safari is my browser of choice (with Firefox close behind). But things just don’t seem right these days. And I’m wondering, is it Safari 2.0, Tiger, the Internet itself… or me?

PS: If it’s me, please be kind…

Whenever I set up a computer for a new Mac user, I am often requested to enable something to help them troubleshoot issues from far away. The problem, of course, is what this “something” could be. Indeed, I am always reluctant to enable VNC or ARD access onto a computer that I know may not be always kept up-to-date or plugged into firewalled networks. There is nothing wrong with VNC or ARD, really, and both can be used in a secure fashion but they do tend to require more work than a purely built-in Mac OS X component such as SSH, that will automatically get updated along with other parts of the operating system — you do use Software Update, don’t you?

The main problem of course is that SSH clients are not overly user-friendly for the most part — in a GUI world, that is of course. Almost while brushing my teeth (as this seems to be the proverbial time when ideas should strike) yesterday, I remembered good old SFTP.

After all, most FTP clients have made great efforts to be very user-friendly as of late. An application like Transmit or its open-source counterparts can be understood even by beginners in a matter of minutes. SFTP has nothing to do with FTP, of course (it is disguised SSH) but, as many users equate STFP with “Secure FTP” literally speaking, most FTP clients now include SFTP support.

Putting 1 + A, I immediately came to conclusion 2B: i.e. Transmit could be used as a GUI on top of SSH. Simply turn on remote login on a Mac, through the Sharing preferences pane, and point your Transmit at it to enjoy secure, GUI-powered remote access to a computer. Since an application like Transmit (and, again, many other clients) enjoy integration with text editors, permissions changing support, and more, most administrative tasks can be performed in a breeze.

Sure, you don’t get the full GUI you would with VNC or ARD but, with the extra security this solution brings, and the relative absence of configuration it requires, this is a little trade-off for most.

PS: Of course, punching a hole in a firewall, even on port 22, even if only the latest SSH protocol is listening (which requires command-line tweaking on the Mac you are configuring), even if the world were a happy place, is still punching a hole in your firewall and makes the computer vulnerable to attacks, including good old brute-force password cracking methods. Use with caution and seek medical assistance should irritation or redness occur.

Last week, after touting the virtues of Tiger’s Burn folders, I asked the question: “Do we still need Toast?” On Friday, Roxio responded with Toast 7. Apparently they’re not quite ready to fold up their jewel cases and go home.

This is a major upgrade to Toast Titanium. Not only have they improved their existing workflow for creating discs, they’ve added goodies such as an iLife browser, H.264 compression, a Dashboard widget for audio recording, DivX to DVD burning, DVD copying, and tons more.

Toast 7 debuts at the end of the month. It’s going to cost you though… $99 for the box, with a $20 rebate for existing users (gawd I hate rebates).

So now the question isn’t so much, “do we need Toast?”, rather, “are the new features worth spending $99 for?” (and hoping that the rebate actually comes). I have to say, Roxio has made a compelling argument for “yes.”

A few days ago, I remembered I needed to cancel an Audible account that I had opened a little while ago for testing purposes. Indeed, since I routinely purchase Audible books on the iTunes Music Store, I did not want to keep an account at their main site — even though both entry points to their catalog have distinct and real advantages.

When dealing with a serious company such as Audible, asking for an account cancellation is no trouble: shoot them a mail and wait for the reply to come back within the next business day. Helpful, courteous, efficient, I only have positive comments about the people I have dealt with — OK, maybe their outsourced support site is a bit of a mess but that is another story and certainly no showstopper, provided they keep it in check.

The one thing I don’t really understand is why their corporate guidelines ask their people to sign “We wish you many hours of great listening” — or something closely along these lines. That’s OK if I’m writing about opening an account but why tell me that as I cancel one? Maybe something else would have made more sense such as “We would be delighted to serve you again in the future.” — or something equally general, silly and soothing.

Most, if not all of the companies I deal with, offer excellent support, hire real people speaking real English (or French or German) and who more or less all know the ins and outs of the product they are supporting. While I’m glad to report that none of these companies has dramatically changed their support staff over the past year, an increasing number has started using similar taglines. My host asks me to “let them know if I need any more help or support”, a software developer constantly asks me how they can “Work with me towards the full resolution of my issue” and my airline always “thanks me and wishes me a great day on behalf of [insert name], a founding member of the so and so alliance”. Eeek!

I don’t know why marketing departments feel obliged to implement such procedures. Do they feel threatened by their own employees? Do they feel they train them so little they need to script them to death? In my experience, so far, none of these measures were justified and the people who were writing the messages certainly had the brains to come up with the appropriate signature, all by themselves…

Another question for E-mail marketing books, I guess…

It is no secret for anyone remotely surrounding me, I am a big Bare Bones fan. BBEdit is the application I run most and Mailsmith is one of my 4 e-mail clients. Technical support at Bare Bones has never let me down and, overall, I have no real gripe about any of their software. (By the way, they didn’t send me a free serial number for anything either so don’t worry about the little rave review.)

If there is one thing I wouldn’t call Bare Bones applications, it is «fun». BBEdit may be genius but it is not something you would launch when you’re bored, just to put a smile on your face. Or is it? I recently, out of sheer boredom, scanned the credits of BBEdit and found

this little gem

hidden within.

I’m sure most long-time BBEdit power users will know it by heart (I’m slow at seeing this kind of things) but if it can put a smile on the faces of your coworkers on a gloomy Monday morning, I thought it was worth sharing.

Any application theme song you especially like?