You know the old saying: “Don’t buy a Mac right before Macworld.” There’s a similar axiom in the photography world: “Want to buy a new digital camera… better wait for PMA.”

What the heck is PMA (other than a flat-sounding acronym)? It stands for Photo Marketing Association, and they sponsor the must-see photography show in the US. This year’s event is in Orlando, FL, Feb. 20-23. It is an amazing event.

The reason why I suggest you hold off on buying anything before PMA is because the camera manufacturers time their big announcements for this conference. For example, it was at last year’s PMA that we found out about the Canon Digital Rebel XT. And I think there will be some amazing stuff announced in February this year. For example, I think we’ll begin to see the big 2.5-inch LCDs on almost all new DSLRs. This alone is worth waiting for. I have a big screen on my Canon 5D, and it makes my older DSLR screens look awful puny.

I’ll be attending PMA and will post my findings from the gigantic trade show floor (it’s many times bigger than Macworld SF). Most likely the announcements made at the show will be ready to ship right away. So if you’re itching for a new digicam, hold off for a few more weeks. It should be worth the wait.

Traditionally divided, browser authors and development teams have recently come together, trying to outline the basis of common interface and technological principles that would provide users, no matter their browser and platform of choice, with a common set of clues as to which sites they can and cannot trust. Generally speaking that initiative is laudable, as it would make it easier for less experienced Internet users to pick up on potential dangers and on the significance of similar situations across a wide variety of sites.

I’ve tuned in daily to Rocketboom for a while now.* The Rocketboom eBay auction is just a stunt but it’s getting plenty of attention. Also, in the first day the bidding has gotten up to $6100.

The bigger story is that this popular video blog is about to include commercials in its daily cast. Two things to note: first, they are doing this in the most tasteful way possible. The ad will run at the end of the program. Secondly, they are offering a subscriber service at $3/month for an advertising free version with extra content.

We’ve been struggling with the same issues. We want to expand and improve our podcasting offerings, but we need to cover our costs. We recently added an advertisement to the beginning of some of our programs. What else should we try?

* Reminder to self - run the interview with the developer of FireAnt on Distributing the Future.

Last week’s release of Yojimbo by Bare Bones Inc showed that the company is not content to rest on its BBEdit-colored laurels. Lots of people had lots of questions following Yojimbo’s release, and earlier today I had a chance to put some of those questions to Bare Bones boss Rich Siegel.

Siegel denies that the app is part of a diversification effort by the company, which relies on continued sales of BBEdit for a large part of its income. Instead, he says, Yojimbo was a long time in the making, and like BBEdit and Mailsmith, resulted from one of the Bare Bones team feeling the need for a specific function.

I’ve spent the last couple of days messing around with iWork 06, getting to know the new features and writing an article about them at the same time, and I noticed an interesting little something.

One of the nicest new features in iWork is the ability to do the same kind of image editing within Pages and Keynote that you can do in iPhoto, using the Image Adjust panel we’ve grown accustomed to.

But there’s something funny about the Adjust panel in iWork 06. It’s not the same as iPhoto’s.

Soon after my copy of iLife 06 arrived, I settled down to do the install. As large installs go, it was pretty normal and uneventful, and I only made minimal changes to the default install options.

But after the install, I had to do a double-take at my Dock - suddenly it was twice as long as it had been. Huh? While my eyes had been busy watching the installer, iLife had added icons for all the new iLife applications to my Dock, without asking me first.

Now, a user’s Dock is a very personal thing - everyone has their Dock set up in a way that suits them. Me, I don’t have any applications in my Dock; rather than use it as a launcher, I use it to monitor what’s currently running. The addition of these iLife apps annoyed me because it forced me to interrupt my work and re-arrange my Dock the way I like it. Sure, this only took a few seconds, but it’s the principle.

I can understand that Apple wants to give new Mac users a helping hand, and it’s fair to say that some newcomers can feel confused after installing new software and finding nothing on screen to tell them what’s happened. Switchers from Windows, especially, are accustomed to seeing icons added to their Start menus or to the Desktop itself.

So my suggestion would be that the iLife installer should include a checkbox - checked by default would be fine - saying that icons for all the new software would be automatically added to the Dock. Then people like me, who like to keep their Dock under control, would have the chance to uncheck the box and remain untroubled.

My 4GB iPod nano is nearly at capacity. The 5G iPod w/video is nice. But, I’d like a bigger screen. So Apple, could you please build an iPod DS (dual screen) in a clam shell form factor to protect the larger screen?

Next in an occasional series[1] on creating a full-screen writing environment is an article by Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders: Open Thread: Developing for Full Screen Mode? Here’s his summary of what it’s all about:

Essentially, it temporarily hobbles your maddeningly versatile Mac into a machine for doing exactly one thing, being whatever is appearing in your single Full Screen window. And you might be amazed what a nice thing that can be sometimes.

Merlin asks what is involved in giving a Cocoa application the ability to take over the screen. There are some informative technical responses in the comments about how one would do this with a Cocoa app, which you should check out for direction if you’re interested in adding this capability to yours.

In addition to the X11+window manager idea I mentioned in this space previously, there was a pointer to this thread on ArsTechnica regarding the fun GLTerminal, which allows you to create a nifty “Wargames”-style terminal environment. (GLTerminal should not be mistaken for GLTerm, a different beast altogether.)

[1] See Full Screen Text Editing and GUI Schmooey

For about three days now, half of Paris has been unable to place mobile calls through our national cell phone provider, Orange. For about three days now, only a couple managers at the company, when hard pressed, end up admitting there is an issue with “calls that are not SMS” while level one support keeps sending customers back to the booklet that came with their handsets for troubleshooting information. For three days now, nobody has said a word about it.

Now that the Disney-Pixar deal has happened, there’s more than a little idle speculation about Disney being quicker to put their stuff out digitally through iTunes, Steve becoming CEO of Disney, or even the two companies merging.

In short, no, no, and no.

So you thought it was okay to joke about overthrowing the government? You thought your rights were protected by the Constitution, the Parliament, or law of the land.

Well you were wrong, we were all wrong. What should we do about it? Encrypt our email.

The NSA reads your email, the European Union saves your telephone calls for later use, Yahoo hands over your search results to the government if they ask nicely (or not). Everything you do online can easily be stored and recalled to be used as evidence against you.

This is fine of course, if you are terrorist or are communicating with terrorists. But what if you have a legitimate interest in Eugene Debs, John Kerry or healthy dissent? Well you are in luck because you can encrypt your email with GNU Privacy Guard.

GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) encrypts your email with your private key and makes the contents only openable by those to whom you send the email. This is a great way to provide yourself with privacy and ensure that it will be more difficult for those who want to snoop on your private communications. GPG can be used on nearly any operating system and integrates particularly well with Apple’s mail program as well as Thunderbird and Evolution. The government, any government really, has ways to break this encryption, but it will take a while if you use a strong key.

Start using GPG, write to your friends and family, speak your mind freely with Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote in mind - “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

Like Giles, I’ve been playing with Bare Bones’ new app, Yojimbo, and I really like it.

Yojimbo includes a feature that allows you to sync your items between computers via .Mac. .Mac users are used to this kind of convenience with their Safari bookmarks, calendars and keychains, but now it’s open to any developer to use for their own data. Although technically different, it’s effectively IMAP for your data.

This is a really interesting trend to me and it will, I think, start to emerge as a killer feature for both the applications that implement it and for .Mac itself. Apple’s online service really struggles when compared to free mail services like Gmail or low-cost services like Strongspace, but nobody has a sync solution like this.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m wondering what kind of a world .Mac Sync could open for wi-fi enabled handheld devices, but that’s another post for another time.

A project I’m finishing off involves a simple little front end that I’ve decided to implement using some DHTML. As I was reading up on JavaScript’s setTimeout method as part of my DHTML research, an interesting thought crossed my mind: would it be possible to make a strobe light out of that old archaic CRT monitor sitting on my closet floor and such a weak (as in weakly typed) language as JavaScript?

Well, I decided to give it a try and it actually worked out pretty well — although it did give me a mild headache after I had the not so keen idea to stare directly at it for a few seconds. Be warned that if you’re that one other extremely unlucky person, you might just ruin your equipment (or cause someone you know to have a seizure) by running a script as powerful as this one.

Here’s the code you need to make use of that old dust magnet.

<html><head>
<title>Strobe</title>
<script>
<!-- If you're extremely unlucky, you may break your equipment, or worse, have a seizure -->
function toggleBgColor()
{
  document.bgColor = document.bgColor == '#ffffff' ? '#000000' : '#ffffff';
  setTimeout('toggleBgColor()', 75); //in milliseconds
}
</script>
</head>
<body onLoad='toggleBgColor();'>
</body></html>

Just save the code as a webpage (text file that ends in “.html”) and open it up in your favorite semi-modern web browser to let the fun begin. Pretty simple, huh?

Can you think of anything better to do with that old monitor than make a strobe out of it? (Or do you know of any other JavaScript hacks that could potentially be hazardous to your health?)

I’ve been following conversations around Apple software lately. Starting with Aperture, which has had its share of tough press, I often think that many people just don’t understand it. It might be *too* innovative. We just published an article, What the Critics Don’t Get About Apple’s Aperture that sheds a few beams of light on this subject.

But it doesn’t stop with Aperture. Mail.app, Safari, iPhoto, and even recently, iTunes have all taken their fair share of criticism. I’m not saying that any of these apps are perfect. I know darn well they’re not. But I’m wondering about the level of scrutiny that we apply to them. Apple software just seems to attract a lot of attention.

For example, Microsoft Digital Image 2006 Suite doesn’t seem to get nearly the spotlight that iLife ‘06 receives, even though the Windows platform is many times bigger. I just did a Google search on “Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006″ and got 149,000 hits. I then did a search on “Apple iLife ‘06″ and got 284,000 hits. Yes this is just one very arguable data point, but it does reflect my own observations. People love to discuss and write about Apple software.

Now I don’t really have a stunning conclusion for these observations. I’m just fine saying, for whatever reason, we seem to hold Cupertino products to a higher standard. And maybe one of the good things that come from this phenomenon is that Apple receives tons of feedback to help them improve their products. And one thing I do know; they are listening.

I was just reading a column by Ted Landau where he discusses some things to keep in mind before you buy a MacIntel. Ted raises some good points, and the column is worth a read.

I’ve been thinking about this issue myself. At the moment, my driving need is to edit Raw images in Aperture on a laptop, and then have room to store them. My current PowerBook can’t apply the changes as fast as I want to make them. And my 80 GB hard drive… well it’s feeling like one of those miniscule trunks in a two-seater sports car. To tell you the truth, I’m beginning to loath my hard drive.

So even though an Intel processor is tempting, what I really need is a better video card, more RAM, and a bigger hard drive. This is what will drive my decision to buy a laptop. Yes, the CPU is important. But it’s not my sole consideration for buying a new computer. I need the whole package. And that’s when I’ll make the leap.

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

Like many of you, I too am a paid .Mac user, and I have been for a couple of years now. But if it weren’t for all of the pain involved in transitioning from one e-mail address to another, I wouldn’t renew it. Heck, I might just chock up the loss of time and people I may never get back into contact with again and still not renew it — but I’ll just be totally honest here and tell you that I haven’t decided yet.

As a Mac enthusiast who has renewed at least for one term and shelled out about $200, I feel like I have a genuine right to complain about my prestigious $100/yr @.mac address (what most of you all also get for your Benjamin too), and so I’ll go ahead and get to my point: iCal support stinks. It’s plain and simple. No, I’m not the busiest man in the world, but I would like to be able to do more than view my calendar online. Rather, I’d like to be able to edit it too. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, to tell you the truth, I think that for $100/yr, it is a pretty simple request, because Backup, Virex, and my quirky iDisk sure aren’t worth it — at least not to me.

So what’s better? Well, I think we all know of at least one web-based e-mail client that does a pretty darn good job of integrating calendar support. Yep, the notorious Outlook Web Access. Although (thank God) I personally don’t own any MS machines/licenses myself, one of my employers owns plenty of them — more than any other single organization in the world to be exact (any guessers?) — and you know what, I’ll go ahead and tip my hat to them. By gosh, MS doesn’t do many things well by my standard, but they sure do have a snazzy web-based e-mail client with calendar integration. And it even works pretty well in Firefox. Imagine that. I don’t even want all sort of bells and whistles though — I just want a few basic features that allow me to add and edit events on my calendar without having to tote metal around with me all day long. Honestly, what good is a read-only calendar in this day and age for anything except birthdays or football game schedules?

But before going, I’ll leave you with a thought provoking blurb from a quasi-flame war I had the pleasure of partaking in a little while ago with some folks much smarter than I am:

[With the whole Disney/Pixar thing going on] Steve’s calendar is bound to get more complex and, hence, iCal [will] get better…Seriously, though, since nobody at Apple is probably allowed to publish their calendar, I believe nobody there ever feels a need for that feature to work reliably.

Or since they never leave the Cupertino campus (apparently), perhaps they haven’t cared to add in editing either? Hmmm, an interesting thought in any event.

At least I can be thankful that they haven’t adjusted the cost of .Mac for inflation yet.

Should I gamble again this year?

Related link: https://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/

A classmate of mine tonight made an excellent point about the symbology that is inherent in computing. Think about it from an outsider’s perspective, from someone who’s never used a computer seriously, only rarely, casually. The representations that we use to represent things are really quite silly.

In the olden days of the Mac, I remember a specific icon that drove me crazy: the paint bucket. It didn’t look like a paint bucket to me at all, rather some bizarre odd shape that didn’t made any sense at all. Icons that are clear to some folks are far from intuitive to others.

Think about it. If you click on Firefox or Internet Explorer, what are you clicking on? A stylized E? A fox on a planet? What do those mean, really? Look at the icon for Safari. It’s a compass. But how does that represent the web to a new user? I’m not sure it does.

A picture is supposed to speak a thousand words, but are those words the same to all users? Some icons are well designed. Mail.app and Address Book in OS X are absolutely unmistakable in their function. But other icons, including some for my favorite applications have too many permutations.

NetNewsWire is one of my mainstay applications, but the icon could be just about anything. Is it a program for tracking satellites? For tracking satellite TV listings? No, it’s a newsreader, and a kickass one at that.

FirstClass is a server/client mail reader, whose application is people sitting around a table. Is it a program for scheduling meetings? for conference room management? Well, kinda, but it’s primary use is groupware and email.

Apple isn’t entirely guilt free here, icons for QuickTime and Dashboard are far from immediately obvious, which makes for a question: is the language of computing something we have to train people into doing, or is it really as easy as we’d like to believe? The answer’s in the icons, but like all pictures, the interpretation is key.

Are icons really as useful as you’d like?

Writing Webcam offers view of living like a dog for the Chicago Tribune, Alex Goldfayn describes how a couple of installed a home webcam in order keep an eye on their pet dog while they’re away from home.

If you’ve got a broadband Internet connection at home, and a pet that you’d like to keep an eye on (out of concern or curiosity) this really is a great solution. I’ve had a “ScooterCam” for a few years now, which allows my wife and I to check in on Scooter, our dog, and it is also greatly enjoyed by friends and family. Here’s a photo that was captured by my friend Kathy one day when she peeked in our pup.

Like the folks in the article, I use a D-Link DCS-900W camera. It’s wireless, so it’s easy to position and connect to our home WiFi network, plus its built-in web server means that I don’t have to a computer turned on in order to access the image. I’ve also had good success with this camera’s wired hard-to-find sibling, the DCS-1000, which is a fine choice if you happen to have a network connection near where you plan to use it.

Details about my setup are in Smart Home Hacks (see Hack #82 - Monitor Your Home with a Network Camera on page 295). There you’ll find that in addition to connecting to the camera for a live picture, you can use a computer to automatically grab an image from the camera and upload it to another location, or send it to your cell phone, at either regular intervals or on-demand. But that’s a more advanced setup, for the basic camera setup, it’s quite simple, and quite rewarding.

Woof!

Bare Bones, maker of BBEdit, has released Yojimbo, an information manager for OS X that indicates something of a new direction for the software company.

For starters, this app looks like a modern Cocoa application should. It has the kind of toolbar you’d expect to see, with clear, modern icons. Very unlike the old-school, and sometimes criticized, BBEdit document toolbar.

And it costs $39 for a single-user license, a nice, low price point that will appeal to people accustomed to good-value applications from competitors like Omni Group or Macromates.

Yojimbo (hmm, I’m really not convinced about that name) combines many day-to-day functions. It stores notes, bookmarks, and secure information. The layout reminds me a little of DEVONthink, but is much simpler. The essence is is that it stores data, any kind of data - text, images, PDFs, web pages, passwords and serial numbers (and any other kind of Sekrit Stuff) in encrypted notes.

Control-click options on a stored note in Yojimbo

One of Yojimbo’s key features is the ease with which you can get data into it. I dragged a folder full of text files right in; you can also drag stuff to a floating tab called the Drop Dock, or invoke something called the Quick Input Panel. This last device pops open with whatever you last copied to the clipboard already pasted in the correct field; in most cases you just need to add some metadata, if you wish, and click the Create button. Very slick.

If you’ve used apps like DEVONthink and Mori (formerly Hog Bay Notebook), the whole approach will feel very familiar. Indeed, the app itself is incredibly easy to get used to. Bare Bones is right to say “there’s no learning curve”.

It’s been a long time since we saw anything really new from Bare Bones. Yojimbo is a radical new step forward for the BB coders, and I hope the first in a series of smaller, cheaper, more nimble applications from them.

I shall spend some more time with Yojimbo in the coming days and come back with a more detailed review later this week.

Is this the start of a new era at Bare Bones?

I have a friend whose favorite saying is, “Anything worth doing is worth doing fast.” It’s the perfect mantra for online publishing, but not so easy for books. Or is it?

O’Reilly has just introduced Rough Cuts. It’s a service that gives you access to books before they’re published. These early chapters won’t be fully edited or formatted for print. They will, however, be very current.

The first Rough Cuts are Flickr Hacks, Ajax Hacks, the Ruby Cookbook, and Ruby on Rails: Up and Running.

When you buy a book via the Rough Cuts service, you get access to an evolving PDF manuscript. You can download and print it, or read it online. You also have a chance to shape the final product through your suggestions, bug fixes, and comments made directly to the author and editors through Safari’s Notes feature.

There’s a great story behind this product’s evolution. You might want to read Tim O’Reilly’s post on The Long Snout. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a glimpse into the future of book publishing.

I’m getting tired of guys who have done just a little bit of Ruby telling us that Java isn’t cool. I’m ok with Java not being cool but the examples I keep seeing (other than the Rails examples) are how much faster you can write “Hello World” in Ruby than in Java. I’m not here to refute that - Ruby does look cool and it is on my list of languages to learn.

I’m currently having a blast playing with Smalltalk. I should have taken the time to learn it long ago. I’m sure Smalltalk will help me when it’s time to tackle Obj C and Ruby and it is already improving the Java code that I write. Despite those benefits, the real reason I’m finally seriously looking at Smalltalk is because I want to teach my eldest daughter to program with Squeak, Croquet, and Scratch. These are some killer environments - there is a lot of “cool” left in this aging programming language.

It’s not just the Ruby guys who have been picking on Java as not being a cool language - it’s all those Perl guys. There are a lot of things wrong with Java, but having the Perl guys lecture us on what’s cool would be like me telling my wife which shoes to wear with some outfit.

In any case, I think I’m hypersensitive about this right now because I’m trying to recruit cool Java talks for this year’s OSCON in Portland. Now that Java is so commonly seen as an important part of many enterprise applications, that is all that folks see it as. I had breakfast last week with Head First Java authors Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates. They are working on a Java Champions project with Sun and Kathy is also on the program committee for OSCON. The three of us ran through a number of open source cool Java projects we’d like to see present at OSCON.

Sure, we’re going to also look at the Harmony and Eclipse proposals - but give us something to show these Ruby and Perl folks. Give us something to show them that Java is still a compelling language and programming environment. Submit your cool Open Source Java proposals to OSCON today.

One of the questions I’ve been getting a lot lately is what happens when you edit an image that’s stored outside of iPhoto 6? Now that you don’t have to import images stored on your hard drive into iPhoto 6 (you can “point” to them instead), does this mean that when you edit those images they’re stored outside of iPhoto too?

They are not. Once you edit an “outside the library” image, iPhoto 6 makes a copy of it and stores it in its Library. Take a look at this file path for a picture I made adjustments to:

On the left you’ll see the file path inside my iPhoto library (~iPhoto Library Fourteen) that leads me to the copy of the image that iPhoto made when I edited it. What’s nice, however, is that it uses the same folder name (Sebastopol Jan 06) in the iPhoto Library as I used to store the image on my hard drive. It was a cinch to find the edited image.

If I use the “Revert to Original” command in iPhoto, the application removes the altered image from my iPhoto library (and in this case the folder too because it was the only image in it.)

Hope this helps…

A Slashdot blurb from a while back, The Future of Emacs said that “Emacs 22 will have many new features such as support for Mac OS X and Cygwin; mouse wheel support and many new modes and packages.”

Woo hoo! Mac OS X support. This is a big deal, because Emacs has been somewhat notorious in terms of its Mac maintainability. Here’s what I mean: a few laptops ago, I had a Rev/A iBook which didn’t get any hardware acceleration from OS X (we’re talking 10.0 and maybe 10.1 here), so I found myself using X11 and xterm instead of Terminal, since X11 wasn’t bogging my sad little iPurse down with fancy Quartz rendering in software. Given that I was in X11, I wanted a more X-aware Emacs than ships with OS X, so I was glad to see that fink’s emacs build left the X11 stuff in.

But things change. Two computers later, I now prefer the Terminal, since it supports UTF-8 text (i.e., two-byte character sets), and is easier to do copy-and-paste with. But I still wanted to be able to do Emacs in separate windows, since my typical Java development environment is to have one or two terminals and 2-5 editor windows open. Mixing Terminal and X11 didn’t seem like a great idea, so I needed a real Mac OS X app. There are a couple projects to do this listed in Version Tracker, but they seemed a little fragile.

Speaking of fragile, back in the fink world, every time a major version of OS X came out, they’d be broken for a few months, so when I was on X11, I’d be broken. I checked out Darwin Ports, but their emacs port crashed if you tried to build it with X11 support. So I filed a bug in November, 2002. And it defied fixing, because when Darwin Ports’ Landon Fuller looked at how Fink got it to work, he reported “The fink hacks are pretty ugly” and opted to wait for “upstream fixes”.

Long wait, because I started getting mail about this last fall, three years after filing it. It had become one of the longest-open bugs in Darwin Ports.

So, I need my own Emacs .app, which various projects provide in a fairly fragile form, and also want an X11 version, which the major port projects have had problems building (Darwin Ports) or maintaining (Fink). And since I’m rapidly falling out of love with Fink because of what seems to be an abandoned port problem with them, I decided that I’m finally going to just start building my own stuff and give up on package managers.

So, um, how do we build this thing?

Getting emacs22

First, you need the source. When I went googling after reading the Slashdot post, I found a blog on building emacs22 for Tiger (in Japanese). It’s mostly right, but the checkout information has changed.

To check out emacs, drop into the command line and create a temporary folder… mkdir ~/tmp will do nicely. cd into and do:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs

This will create an emacs folder in your current folder. Now we’re ready to build.

The basics of building

You have two choices: building a double-clickable .app, or building the usual command-line-launched binary, presumably with X11 support. These choices are mutually incompatible: you can’t create both with one build. Moreover, I’ve found that installing the Carbon app will deploy pieces that break the X11 support, so if you’re going to do both, do the Carbon app first, then the X11 binary.

The build uses the following basic steps

• configure - prepares make for the build, discovers information about your system needed by compilers and other parts of the build
• make bootstrap - apparently only needed because you’re building from CVS (see INSTALL.CVS).
• make - do stuff
• make install - put the pieces in their appropriate places on the system. You generally need admin privileges to do this, so plan on running sudo make install

Each build tweaks these steps, so read on…

Building the Carbon app

To build the double-clickable app, you pass the flag --enable-carbon-app to configure. In fact, that’s the only thing you need to do special. Here’s the steps:

• ./configure --enable-carbon-app
• make bootstrap
• make
• sudo make install

The last step installs the Emacs.app into the Applciations folder. You’re ready to go — double click it to launch it.

Two interesting things to note: if you want to launch the Emacs.app from the command-line, you can use the path /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs . You can, in fact, set this as your EDITOR, meaning it’ll be used for typing in CVS or Subversion comments. You can edit your .cshrc or .profile (depending on whether your shell is tcsh or bash respectively) to pick this up. For example, I still use tcsh (yeah, on OS X since DP3, back when they didn’t include bash) and I use the following in my .cshrc:

alias emacs "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs"
setenv EDITOR /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

Also, this is interesting: emacs -nw (for “no window”) will keep you in the Terminal, instead of bouncing Emacs into the Dock.

Speaking of the Dock, double-clicking the app icon after an instance is running, or kicking off a second one from the command-line, will cause multiple Emacs applications to appear in the Dock, as pictured below. Not very Mac-like of course: a proper Mac application would open a new window in the already-running instance.

Building for X11

OK, if you want an X11 version (instead | also), do the following.

First, the docs advocate a make distclean so you don’t pick up anything from your earlier build — if you skipped ahead to this point and didn’t build the Carbon version, you can skip this.

Also, you generally need to have installed not only Apple’s X11, but also the X11 SDK (an option in Apple’s installer), to compile X11 stuff on OS X. No, I didn’t try uninstalling mine just to see if it breaks… seriously, folks…

Next, tell configure that you’re building the X11 version and not the Carbon version. The docs also advocate explicitly targeting an install directory other than /usr, since that will get clobbered by future system updates. /usr/local/ is a pretty typical choice for this purpose (obviously, you’ll need to explicitly run /usr/local/bin/emacs to pick up this version, and/or change your .cshrc or .profile as described above.

So here’s the deal:

• ./configure --without-carbon --with-x --prefix=/usr/local
• make bootstrap
• make
• sudo make install

Get X11 running and kick off a /usr/local/bin/emacs and you’re in Happy X11 Emacs Town:

And hey, check out the version number:

So does it work on the Intel Macs?

Good question. I don’t see a -arch argument in the gccs, so I don’t think this is a Universal Binary. Then again, if it’s only to be used on the machine it’s compiled on, it seems to me like it should work — that’s the point of configure after all. If you have a shiny fast Intel iMac, try it and post a comment here.

Your mileage may vary

This has worked for me for a month or so, and I’m really happy with it, and looking forward to Emacs 22 being final someday. Hats off to the development team for making the Mac build so painless.

…and if it doesn’t work for you, I’m not tech support and I’m not your mom. Attempt to deal.

Have you tried emacs22 on OS X? Anything interesting to share?

Take a wifi card, an audio in/out card, sundry other little bits of circuitry and a splash of C code, and what have you got?

Why, Radio Babylon of course, programmer Andy McFarland’s lo-fi but very cool little music device for electronics and software hackers.

This tiny little jumble of wires uses Bonjour to connect to any shared iTunes libraries it can find. Then it picks a song at random and starts playing. Everything else is on the todo list.

Andy began the project to learn more about gumstix, a selection of tiny little boards of Linux-capable goodness, for sale at reasonable prices to hobbyists, geeks and anyone with spare time to hack.

But who knows - maybe Andy’s clever idea might inspire some future official iPod feature. If you’ve been following the Mac rumors recently, you’ll have noticed some interest in an article at The Times that blithely predicts a wireless iPod in the works.

And why not? If the iPod were wireless, it would not always have to be playing music stored on its own hard disk. If it incorporated Andy McFarland’s Babylon idea, or something like it, you could use the iPod to access all your digital music (and video) while you were still within range of your network. The hard disk would only be used while out of range. Perhaps the hard disk could be deactivated altogether by putting the iPod into a ‘Home’ or ‘Network’ mode. Just think of the extra battery life.

Okay, let’s get one thing straight here: I am a paid .Mac member, so I have every right to bitch and complain. In fact, I’ve been a .Mac member so long that I remember when it used to be called iTools. And like most .Mac members (and long-time Mac users), I remember that fateful day in 2002 when Steve Jobs announced at Macworld New York that the iTools service would be renamed .Mac, and that it would no longer be free. But, hey, you’d be getting all this great stuff to go along with it.

That was then, this is now.

According to Macworld magazine, there were roughly 2.4 million iTools users when Apple made the switch to .Mac. Granted, a lot of those 2.4 million “people” were probably like me, folks who registered multiple iTools accounts for various reasons. (I’ll admit, I had three iTools accounts, one each for my wife and I, and another that I used strictly for extra iDisk storage.) And according to Steve Jobs’ keynote address at Macworld San Francisco last week, there are now over 1 million paid .Mac members. (Keep in mind that Apple switched iTools to .Mac back in July 2002, and they’re just now up to 1 million paid .Mac members. Even if half of the iTools members had two accounts, that still means it’s taken Apple 3.5 years to get to the million-member mark.)

So the question of “Why has it taken Apple so long to reach 1 million paid .Mac members?” comes to mind. Well, the first reason would be the cost of the service; $99 per year. When you take a free service and suddenly put a price tag on it, people will jump ship, and in this case, people jumped ship in droves.

Before I wrote Inside .Mac, I asked a lot of paid .Mac members what they were using the service for, and the majority of those people said email and iDisk storage. So, at the time, they were paying $99/year for 15 MB of IMAP email space (with a 3 MB/message maximum size), and 100 MB of iDisk storage space. That’s a lot to cough up annually for just a couple things you would normally get for free with your ISP. One obvious way around the email storage issue was to set your client to use POP instead of IMAP, but that takes away the “email anywhere” feature.

As I tried to point out in my .Mac book, there’s a lot more to .Mac than meets the eye. At the time the book was printed, email and iDisk space were the same, but you also got Virex for virus protection, Apple’s own Backup application for backing up your data, the online HomePage tools, and the iLife applications iMovie and iPhoto just started to have built-in integration with .Mac.

Also, if you looked in the folders on your iDisk, you’d find a folder called FreePlay Music, which included hundreds of music tracks which you could use, for free, in your iMovies. To me, the FreePlay Music tracks alone were worth the price of the .Mac membership. But now they’re gone, and so is Virex. In fact, Virex 7.5 was so brutal on the system that Apple quickly withdrew it as a benefit application, and now when you look at what you get with .Mac, you won’t even see Virex listed anymore.

So, just what am I getting for my hundred-bucks-a-year? According to Apple’s site, this is what you get with a .Mac membership:

• Publishing with iWeb (requires iLife ‘06).
• iDisk storage of up to 1 GB of space that’s shared between your iDisk and .Mac email account.
• Groups (and each .Mac Group you create takes up a minimum of 30 MB of storage space from your iDisk!)
• Sync (built into Mac OS X Tiger’s System Preferences)
• Member Benefits, such as discounts on select software and free samples from the GarageBand Jam Packs.
• Access to Apple’s online Learning Center, some of which is available without a .Mac membership, and some just for members.
• Photocasting (requires iPhoto 6, found in iLife ‘06)
• Backup 3, Apple’s own backup application which you can use to backup data to your iDisk, to your hard drive or an external disk, or to CD or DVD.
• Mail, available as IMAP or POP (default is IMAP), and shares storage space with your iDisk.

---

There’s also a .Mac Family Pack, which lets you set up and manage up to five .Mac accounts, but we won’t cover that here. Instead, I’m choosing to focus on the single-user .Mac membership.

---

When you think about it, .Mac costs you more than just the seemingly $99/year membership fee. Let’s see, I paid $2000 for hardware, $99/year for .Mac, $79/year for “upgrades” to iLife so I can use the .Mac features, and now .Mac has been bound into the OS, so I’m paying, on average, about $129/year for OS upgrades as well. Forgetting the price of the hardware, at the base level, .Mac is costing me — roughly — $300 per year! Now, American Express has a trademarked slogan, “Membership Has Its Privileges,” but so far with my .Mac membership, I’m not really seeing those “privileges.”

When things like the FreePlay Music get unceremoniously dropped, when Virex starts uncontrollably running processes on my system and brings it to its knees, and when the online HomePage tools suck so much that Apple realizes they need to come up with another solution (iWeb), and then charges you for that solution, there’s a problem!

I already have a Google Gmail account that gives me, what, 2.5 GB(!) of email storage space for free, and there are lots of online storage sites that offer way more storage for less or free (if you don’t mind bloated ads being served up in your face).

So what’s the .Mac Advantage?

From what I can tell, the only .Mac Advantage (and granted, this is a big one) is tighter integration with iLife and the OS. And while that integration with Mac OS X is nice to have, it makes me more dependent upon the OS and the iLife applications (iMovie, iPhoto, and now GarageBand and iWeb) than ever before. And at the very base level of just the cost of a .Mac membership and yearly “upgrades” to iLife, I really find myself asking if it’s worth paying $179 a year for.

If .Mac is going to be so tightly bound into the iLife apps and the OS, then a .Mac membership should be bundled in with one of them. Well, at least that’s my opinion. Right now, iLife costs $79 per year with no incremental upgrade cost (which really chaps my hide, but I’ll complain about that one later). Why can’t Apple charge $129/year for a version of iLife that includes a .Mac membership? Or why can’t Apple charge $159 for an OS upgrade (the last two system upgrades for Panther and Tiger were $129 each) that includes a .Mac membership? Doing either one of those would greatly increase member retention and add a bunch of new members to the service.

Granted, I can see where this might be an accounting nightmare for someone at Apple if they have to split hairs to push funds over to the .Mac team, but still, it’s simple enough math that my 9-year-old nephew could figure it out and make it happen.

The way I look at it, I’m being taxed to the tune of $100/year by Apple to have a .Mac account, and that’s not really fair. I’ve been a faithful Mac user for years, and I believe in supporting and evangelizing the platform just as much as many of the other Mac faithful out there, but this to me just seems wrong. .Mac offered more in the way of services and “freebies” to its members in the early days than it does now. If things like “Publishing to the Web” and “Photocasting” are listed as member benefits — and are only available by purchasing the latest copy of iLife — then those really aren’t “benefits”; they’re add-ons that cost me a fee.

Do I feel like I’m getting my $99.95/year out of .Mac? Nope, I don’t. Will I renew again next Fall? Most likely; mainly because all of my friends have been reaching me at my mac.com email address since I registered the account name with my iTools account long ago. I don’t want to give up that address, but I don’t think I should have to pay $100/year for it when I’m already buying a new copy of the OS and iLife annually.

Apple should put an end to the .Mac Tax and just roll it into the OS or iLife. It makes more sense that way. Well, at least that’s my opinion; what say you?

Should Apple roll an annual .Mac membership fee into iLife or future upgrades to the Mac OS X operating system?

I depend on 3rd party apps and plug-ins when using iPhoto. I thought I’d give you a quick rundown on how they’re working with version 6.

• iPhoto Library Manager — I’m still using version 2.0, which I like a lot. It’s been fine in iPhoto 6, allowing me to switch among my libraries and create new ones. Here’s the official word from Brian’s site: “Photo Library Manager 3.1 and earlier are partially compatible with iPhoto 6. You can still use iPhoto Library Manager to create new libraries and switch between them, but the album copying, merging, and importing features are not currently functional. An update for iPhoto Library Manager will be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks to provide full compatibility with iPhoto 6.”
• Photon 1.1.1 — Everything seems fine with this plugin for posting iPhoto images on Movable Type and WordPress blogs.
• BetterHTMLExport 2.1 — This wonderful web page plugin that I also use for creating navigation on CDs works the same as always with iPhoto 6.

If you’re using 3rd party apps with iPhoto 6 that I haven’t covered here, will you post a comment and let us know how they’re working for you?

Related link: https://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/9042

In Have you looked at iTunes?, one of my O’Reilly brethren, François Joseph de Kermadec, got me to thinking about a particular point he made:

[The] full screen video playback, that is handled so smoothly by QuickTime Player, has iTunes stop, jitter, pixellate… It does not feature any controls in full screen mode whatsoever, it does not hide the cursor and, best of all, the screen saver has been known to go ahead and cover it.

Amen; I absolutely agree — pretty poor effort there by the iTunes folks. Especially since any AppleScript amateur can script up an 80% solution to this problem in about 5 minutes. But for this very reason I think we can forgive Apple, at least for the time being, since they’ve made it so darn easy for us to fill the void.

Here’s a quick and dirty first run at things:

tell application "iTunes"
	activate
	set theList to (get selection of front window as list)
	set trackCount to count of theList
	if trackCount is 0 then
		tell application "iTunes" to display dialog "No track selected. Try again" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
	else --assuming only 1 movie selected
		set theTrack to item 1 of theList
		set thePath to the location of theTrack
		tell application "QuickTime Player"
			set show welcome movie automatically to false --remove annoyance
			activate
			try
				open thePath
				present movie 1 scale screen --again, assuming 1 movie. full screen even without Pro
			on error
				tell application "iTunes" to display dialog "Oops. Some error occurred." buttons {"OK"} default button 1
			end try
		end tell
	end if
end tell

Open up Script Editor, paste in the file, make sure it compiles, and then save it in your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder (creating it if necessary.) Now, instead of clicking on a video (part of the missing 20% of our solution), you just run the video from the script menu from up in the menubar. Your video should run at fullscreen in QuickTime (even without Pro) and you’ll also get access to those controls and nice things that come along with QuickTime.

Feel free to polish it up.

My first impression of iPhoto 6 could be summed up in one word: “Wow!” My second and third impressions aren’t bad either.

iPhoto 6 has reached maturity. And Apple has brought this lovely image management tool to this point without destroying its friendliness or charm. I’m going to highlight just a few of my favorite features here today. I’ll be drilling down into more detail in future articles, and of course in, “iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual.”

But for now, I want to start with Apple’s claim that performance is improved. It is. I’m sure mileage will vary, but on my PowerBook 1.5 GHz, everything improved from scrolling through thumbnails to editing Raw files.

Speaking of Raw files, Apple has introduced a new advanced preference called Use Raw files with external editor. This enables me to double-click on a thumbnail for a Raw file and have the image open in Adobe’s Camera Raw. If I prefer to use Apple’s Adjust palette for editing, I can either change the preference, Option double-click on the thumb, or right-click on the thumbnail and make the appropriate editing selection. I have a brief tutorial on iPhoto 6 Raw options that you can read for more detail.

This conversation can’t go any further without mentioning Full Screen mode editing. Just click once on any thumbnail, tap the Full Screen button, and watch your image fill up the screen against a black background. You have all of your editing tools hiding on the bottom and the thumbnails hiding on top. A simple mouse-over reveals them.

CMD-click up to 8 images in thumbnail mode, then tap the Full Screen button and compare them all at once. You can magnify each image using the slider at the bottom of the screen, or by simply pressing the 1 key (100%), 2 key (200%), or the 0 key to return to “fit in screen” size. You can rate your photos using the floating info box (and add comments too). Everything works great in full screen mode. If you have really big Photoshop images, they may take a few seconds to reach full resolution. But for my cameras, including the Canon 5D, the performance was excellent.

While I’m on editing, the new Effects palette is useful. It provides you with one-click enhancements, enabling you to return to the original at any time by clicking on the center tile in the palette. I particularly like the “Edge Blur” effect for portraits. It’s quite professional looking.

And did you notice that you can now have iPhoto point to existing images that you have organized on your hard drive… without actually importing them into the managed library? It’s true, if you uncheck the box labeled “Copy files to iPhoto Library folder when adding to library,” you can have iPhoto point to your original photo files instead of duplicating them in iPhoto’s library — and still make full use of iPhoto’s tools. The option is under Advanced in the preferences dialog box.

While you’re there, you might also notice tha