When I want to concentrate on a computing task, I often invoke the Finder’s “hide others” command by Command-Option-clicking on an icon in the Dock. But my screen is so big and my desktop so cluttered that merely hiding the other applications is hardly restful.

In less time that it would take to clean up the piles of icons on my desktop, I whipped up this AppleScript and mapped it to a function key. It grabs the path of the frontmost application, launches Katsura Shareware’s free Screenshot Helper — hiding everything on the desktop — and then switches back to the original app.

(* 
db Hide-the-Desktop
By David Battino, Batmosphere.com, 2007-09-30 
This script hides the desktop and then switches back to the previous app.
Requires Screenshot Helper, free at www.katsurashareware.com.
*)
set front_app to (path to frontmost application as Unicode text)
tell application "Screenshot Helper"
	activate
end tell
tell application front_app
	activate
end tell

Hopefully your virtual desktop is tidier than mine, but you may still find the “do something and then switch back” routine helpful.

Katsura Screenshot Helper covers your messy desktop with a pure color or photo.

My 2.5 year old 1st generation G4 1.42GHz Mac mini (and the first Mac I ever bought) bit the dust. I’m pretty sure it is either a system board or power supply problem (betting on the power supply being the problem). Although I thought about it at the time of purchase, I decided not to get AppleCare for a desktop Mac mini even though I told myself it is really a notebook without a battery. So, now what to do with it? Everything is backed to to an external hard drive. So, data loss is not a major issue. ifixit.com has how-to guides for everything but the power supply. So, I’m guessing it may be a difficult part to find. If it is just a power supply issue, I’m tempted to try to stick it in a bigger case of some kind and use whatever power supply will work with it (regardless of size). Any leads on that idea?

The next decision is what to replace it with. The new iMacs look great. But, I really really hate the idea of all-in-one computers (with the exception of notebooks of course). The Mac Pro is way too expensive. And, the Mac mini? Well, that first one went bye-bye in under three years and appears difficult for my less than nimble fingers to repair (compared to regular ol’ non-Apple large PCs which are easy to open up and replace components). The various Mac rumor sites have been talking about a sub-notebook sized device being introduced in October. That sounds pretty interesting. But, all I really need is a small iTunes box with a browser and email client (the Mac mini is perfect for that). I just took a look a the 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini. But, do I really want another hard to repair box? Actually yes, but… :-)

Well, time to look around the house for a putty knife I guess. Might have a little project for it this weekend.

So, now it is time to decide on whether to get another Mac mini (most likely at this point), get a low-end iMac (not likely), or wait a couple of weeks to see if Apple announces a new sub-notebook form factor MacBook (very tempting).

I’ve mentioned the Alice 2.0 3D graphics app from Carnegie Mellon University whose purpose to introduce programming to kids and college students here before. Since I don’t want to write a maudlin blog entry, I’ll just say that the article linked below from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is about one of the people who helped start the Alice project.

CMU professor gives his last lesson on life

This is a little off the beaten path and US-centric. But, I thought it was important enough to merit blog space (and typing time). The US National Do Not Call Registry began in June 2003. If you signed up then, the 5-year registration period will end for you mid-2008 unless you re-register at…

NATIONAL DO NOT CALL REGISTRY

You can read about this in the Yahoo! News AP article Do Not Call listings aren’t forever.

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Apache httpd 2.2.6 and the legacy version 2.0.61 web server were released earlier this week. I installed the Linux version and don’t have plans to install it under Windows or Mac OS X. So, if anyone does, please chime in to let us know how your installation went on those platforms. Installing it from source on Linux went smoothly as usual.

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Google Presentation launched as part of Google Docs this evening. You can find it listed under the New menu list of the main Docs page. It can import Microsoft PowerPoint slidedecks (older PPT format, not the new PPTX 2007 format). However, it does not export to PowerPoint file format. It can, however, save a ZIP file to your local drive containing an HTML slideshow.

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OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 was released. I didn’t see anything earthshakingly new in the release notes. And, it still doesn’t have a native Mac OS X version. I wish OpenOffice would work with the NeoOffice project to get an official Mac OS X release available.

So far, I’m pretty much enamored of Rogue Amoeba’s new Radioshift application. If you haven’t tried it yet, it allows you to easily listen to, and record, radio shows from around the world. It makes automatically recording new episodes of a show, or “subscribing,” as simple as TiVo does for television programs.

I think Radioshift would be a wonderful addition to my home, and I want to run it on the Mac that I already use for home automation. However, Radioshift isn’t really optimized for use in a “server” situation. That’s understandable, but it hasn’t stopped me from tying to bend it to my will anyway. Here’s are notes on my progress so far:

• I love that Radioshift uses a background process for recording shows that you’ve subscribed to. This means that you don’t have to leave the app running all of the time. You can use the sound files directly, without opening Radioshift, too. You’ll find your recorded shows in the ~/Music/Radioshift/ folder.

• I want to listen to my recorded shows using another computer, because the home automation Mac is tucked away in a corner and I rarely use it directly. Radioshift doesn’t have any built-in support for sharing, but I can load the above-mentioned files into QuickTime Player (or similar) after mounting the server’s drive. The bonus prize for doing this is that QuickTime Player allows you to fast forward during playback, to skip commercials, which is a feature that Radioshift currently lacks.

• If you don’t care about skipping commercials, just use the Finder’s built-in ability to play QuickTime files, as shown below. Very handy!

• Radioshift does, apparently, have the ability to add recordings to your iTunes Library. This means you could use iTunes sharing to listen to the shows on other computers. However, this doesn’t work for me. First, I haven’t been able to get Radioshift to successfully add a recording to iTunes. But even if it did, it’s a manual process (Radioshift doesn’t do it automatically) and I don’t want to keep iTunes running on my home automation Mac.

Although parts of this feel a little awkward, so far I’ve found it worth doing. I hope that as Radioshift continues to evolve the process will get easier. If you have tips to share, please feel free to chime in.

Nearly a year ago, I posted about the notMac Challenge, an effort to come up with a replacement for .Mac. Just recently, I received some encouraging news that I wanted to share with you:

Several months ago I started the notMac Challenge to generate incentive for a developer to create an easy-to-use replacement for Apple’s dotMac service. Thanks to the generosity of people from around the world, the prize grew to a value of $7,836, and as a result, I’m very happy to announce that Ben Spink has submitted a solution.

Contributors to the notMac Challenge have been testing the submission for the last couple of weeks and after a few minor tweaks, it appears to be functioning well. During the final week of evaluation, I’d like to invite everyone to download Ben’s solution, try it out and post their feedback on the notMac Challenge forums.

You can visit the main page and navigate to the forums, or go directly to the discussion thread that includes Ben Spink’s solution.

Although the notMac forums would be the most appropriate place for technical feedback related to the product itself, feel free to post any other thoughts below.

Perhaps having learned from the Amazon Unbox fiasco, the new Amazon MP3 Downloads Store fails to suck. Frankly, there is a lot to like here, and it might be the first viable iTunes competitor.

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Vixy.net bills itself as an online video conversion service. It looks pretty simple. Give it a YouTube video’s URL, select the conversion type, and press the start button. You can choose to convert to one of these file formats: MPEG4, AVI, MOV, MP4, MP3, 3GP. The MP3 option strips away the video and lets you download the audio.

Here’s an interesting joint project by the U. of Washington (UW) and the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI)…

UW CSE and ICSI Web Integrity Checker

…that checks if your ISP is inserting ads for your web browser. Mine is not, btw.

TalkShoe announced its ShoePhone service in both a press release and blog entry. This VoIP service is apparently an add-on to its existing TalkShoe service that lets anyone have a live Internet radio shoe with live call-in participants. The problem is that a bunch of us (myself included) can’t figure out what part of TalkShoe is this new ShoePhone service.

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TestDisk and PhotoRec 6.8 were released a month ago (Aug.13). This Open Source utility pair (versions available for Windows and Mac OS X) can help recover lost partitions, files, and claims to make non-booting disks bootable under certain conditions.

Note-it Express is a Mac OS X (Tiger) freeware utility that lets you sync notes to an iPod by providing an integrated editor and Automator powered script to sync the note after it gets created on a Mac.

If you look at the Google Docs pulldown New menu, you’ll see a new option labeled Presentation. I’ve been waiting for Google’s presentation tool since hearing Google CEO Eric Schmidt announce it at the Web 2.0 Expo this past April. While it doesn’t match the features available in Apple’s Keynote or Microsoft’s PowerPoint, its strength lies in its barebones simplicity. It looks great for creating 3 to 10 simple slides for a quick presentation. It can import PowerPoint PPT files (but not the newer 2007 PPTX files). However, it does not export out to PowerPoint PPT files. Instead, it has the option for you to download a ZIP file containing an HTML presentation pack for local computer use. So, you only need a browser for local presentation and can do so even without an Internet connection.

I’m hoping for to see at least three more features added in the near future. First, Google please Gear-ify Documents, Spreadsheet, and Presentation so documents can be developed and used offline. Second, allow using images from Picasaweb instead of requiring image uploads. Third, let us embed video from YouTube into Presentations.

Is Google Presentation a threat to Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, or even OpenOffice.org Impress? Not… quite… yet. But, Google Presentations has a lot to offer right now. Hey, can someone try it out on an iPhone and iPod touch to see how it looks/works there and report back here?

I just walked through the 3-step process to receive my $100 credit for being an early iPhone adopter. The process couldn’t be easier. You enter your phone number and serial number on the Apple web site, they SMS you an access code, you enter the code and receive the credit that you can use online or in person at an Apple Store.

I haven’t commented much about the early-adopter penalty. Maybe because I’ve been one for a long time. But I can’t ever remember receiving a credit because I bought technology on the first day it was available.

Just noticed that Rogue Amoeba updated their free Mac OS utility…

SoundSource 1.3

This utility lets you easily redirect audio input and output sources.

I used a paid version of the Eudora email client about, hmm, 10 years ago maybe. Stayed with it for a couple of years. I use Mozilla Thunderbird for email these days. So, I was interested to learn about the first public beta release of…

Mozilla Project Penelope: Eudora 8.0.0b1 Open Source Version

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Here’s an unformatted collection of thoughts and experiences since picking up a 160 GB iPod Classic, the last one in stock at the Apple Store in Alpharetta GA, last weekend.

I just posted a quick how-to over at TUAW regarding installing the latest binary iPhone developer toolchain. You can download a copy and use the package to get started with iPhone programming.

The hardest part of the entire exercise involves copying your iPhone file system to your Mac.

O’Reilly Editor Tatiana Apandi talks to Chuck Joiner of MacVoices about the Women in Technology series on the O’Reilly Network, how it came to be, and what she wants to accomplish by giving a voice to a wide variety of women in the technology industry. Tatiana shares some of her personal experiences from tech conferences and beyond, and how they led her to invite technology women from around the world to share their own stories and their unique perspectives on the topic.

I receive (and ignore) a lot of press releases and new product announcements, but this one caught my eye and looks pretty interesting. MicroNet has just released a low-end NAS storage solution that can put terabytes of storage into your home network for a surprisingly affordable price — their 1TB model lists for just $339.

Aimed squarely at home power users and small office situations, the new Fantom Drives G-Force MegaDisk NAS appliance features an integrated print server, an iTunes music server, and NTI Software’s Shadow zero-touch automated backup, and comes in 1.0 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2.0 TB configurations (list prices: $339, $579, and $999).

If you’ve been amassing a collection of digital photos, music, and movies and don’t have a backup system in place, this new NAS appliance sounds like a very attractive option. I haven’t crossed that line into measuring my data in terabytes yet, but I’m rapidly getting there and I’m happy to see some serious storage solutions hitting the market that won’t break the bank. We’ll try and get our hands on a demo unit of the G-Force and let you know how it performs.

I’ve been reading a bunch of statements from various analysts/pundits about the significance of the iPod touch with a combination of amusement and puzzlement. Some of the puzzlement comes from the statements directly and some indirectly. For example, here’s one of many quotes from an article over on PlaylistMag.com: “It’s the Web in your pocket,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research. “For $300, you get a mobile Web browser with touch-screen input.”. Uh, so what are the dozens of devices from Palm, Nokia (770 or 800), and bunch of Windows Mobile WiFi enabled PDAs? They vary in price. But, a bunch are in the $200 to 400 range. And, they’ve been around for years. So, what is the real difference? The real difference is the capability of the Safari browser (so I’m told since I haven’t tried it for more than a few seconds). Most of the mobile browsers that have been used for the past few years are basically toy browsers that require specially formatted web pages to avoid scrolling continuously just to read some text. The exception in the non-iPhone/iPod touch world is the Operamini browser currently in beta release.

Here’s another quote: In fact, Gottheil said that the iPod touch’s selling potential is actually increased precisely because it is decoupled from a two-year phone contract with AT&T, something required with the iPhone. This is an interesting observation because the exact opposite is going on in the non-Apple phone-PDA world. The phone-less PDA type devices like the Palm OS based Palm boxes and Windows Mobile based Pocket PCs were the norm for years. Then, the Palm Treo (original Palm OS version) and Microsoft Windows Mobile touch-screen (Pocket PC Phone Edition — AKA Professional Edition) and non-touch screen (Smartphone AKA Standard Edition) took over leaving manufacturers like Dell to completely abandon the phone-less Pocket PCs (their great Axim line with WiFi and Bluetooth but no phone radio). I’m really hoping that the iPod touch redefines and reinvigorates the phone-less PDA market the same way the original iPod redefined the PDA market. And, yes, I didn’t get an iPhone because I didn’t want to switch to AT&T Wireless and be locked into their contract.

Here’s a third quote from the article: Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner, said in an e-mail interview that having both an iPod touch plus a cell phone would be a “great set for many of us to use.” But he discounted the iPod as a business tool that IT shops would support. Unfortunately and unhappily, I agree with this statement. But, that is only because IT shops don’t seem to support mobile devices of any type including Microsoft’s Windows Mobile which is actually designed for integration with Enterprise infrastructure.

A fourth quote: “A usable portable Web browser will appeal to both personal and business users, and Web sites and applications oriented to the mobile browser will proliferate,” Gottheil and Byrne wrote in a TBR statement on the iPod touch Wednesday. Hack, hack, cough, cough. There’s a couple of weird things about this general idea. I noticed that a number of iPhone specific pages from major sites like Digg and Facebook appeared. But, this puzzled me since the big deal about iPhone’s (and touch’s) Safari browser is that you don’t need specially formatted pages. That said, there are a lot (though not enough) pretty well done pages formatted for WAP and other mobile browsers already. If the iPhone and iPod touch take off, we may see more. But, umm, I though they didn’t need it :-)

But, putting aside my hopefully not too snarky comments above, I think the general sentiment coming from the experts is right. I’ve long lamented the loss of choices of non-phone Windows Mobile products. I hate having to tie a Pocket PC purchase to phone service contracts or pay a premium for an unlocked phone. I think the iPhone’s impact, large as it is, will be dwarfed by the iPod touch which allows anyone to buy it without a phone contract. I also think that lines of people should be outside of Apple’s campus in Cupertino with placard demanding an SDK so we can see apps developed for it without resorting to hacks.

My pre-order for the iPod touch went out the day it was announced and I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival in a couple of weeks. And, in a effort not to monopolize the MacDevCenter blog with my iPod touch mutterings, I’ll mutter away on my personal blog which currently focuses on Windows Mobile (and will still focus on that since I enjoy using that platform). If anyone wants to talk touch, drop me a line at editor(AT-SIGN)mobileviews.com. Perhaps we can set up a TalkCast at TalkShoe with other new iPod touch owners.

OK, geek boys and girls, pop quiz: How do you use Safari’s built-in RSS reader as a feed aggregator? Go ahead, take a minute to figure it out. Take 5. Whatever you need. I’ve got time.

If you’d like to get your weather forecasts in iCal, head on over to Weather Underground, find your city, and check out the top right-hand of the page for the ICAL icon. There’s also an RSS feed.

I don’t have any other ical-format calendaring apps handy, but this might well work in those, too.

(Not sure when WU added this functionality — might well have been there for a while. :)

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NeoOffice 2.2.1, the native Mac OS X port (look Ma, no X11!) of OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 is available. If you’re looking for a free alternative to Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac or Apple iWork, this is it. According to the features page on its website, it includes experimental support for Office 2007 Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files. It also includes some support for Excel macros. This is pretty interesting since Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac will not support Excel macros!

I’ve long said that I just want an “i” (iPhone without the Phone). So, today the “i” (iPod touch) arrived. Ok, it is missing a camera, mic/speaker, Bluetooth (ouch), email client (ouch ouch), and couple of other things. But, it still has enough to appeal to me. I decided to pre-order one for me and one for my daughter as a surprise gift (no one in my home reads anything I write, so, yes, this will be a surprise). Now, part of the rationale is that she can use the Safari browser instead of firing up a Mac for research and homework. Can some of you current iPhone owners let me know how well reference sites like Yahoo! Reference, MSN Encarta, Wikipedia, and Merriam-Webster Online (as well as other middle-school friendly reference sites) renders on your iPhone?

Or is it truly the case that anything that looks ok in Safari on the Mac looks ok in Safari on the iPhone/touch? Any browser gotchas would be appreciated too :-)

Thanks!

A few notable things weren’t announced alongside new iPods today. Yeah, aside from the Beatles (let it go, old media, let it go)…

I love my Apple TV. At first I thought it was pointless technology that didn’t fill a niche. Then I got my iPhone and made two realizations. First, the iPhone has a drop-dead gorgeous screen that begs for video. Second? If I’m going to download the entire third season of House, chances are I won’t want to watch the whole thing on my iPhone. Ah ha! The Apple TV finds purpose!

But even as much as I now care for the little set-top box and the function it performs, I can’t help but wonder as I lie awake some cold, lonely nights how it could have been. It could have been a DVD-ripper. A DVR for the rest of us. A TiVo killer. But Steve made it pretty clear at D that DVR functionality isn’t on the road map for the Apple TV. And far from being a DVD player or ripper, Apple sees the tiny TV appliance as the successor to DVDs.

Of course, that was before NBC’s announcement that they’re pulling out of iTunes.

I’m writing this from the new MarsEdit 2.0, just released by Red Sweater Software. It’s like a familiar friend shows up for dinner and has transformed into a gourmet cook.

After Daniel Jalkut took over development of the app from Brent Simmons, he kept up a steady supply of bug fixes and minor changes. With this newest release, he makes MarsEdit his own.

Check out the full list of What’s New in 2.0, but I’ll say right off the bat that my two favorites (after a bit of futzing around) have to be the revamped interface and the Flickr integration.

This is one of my most frequently used day-to-day applications, allowing me to post to and manage a bunch of blogs without all that inefficient browsing around all over creation. So far, Daniel’s updates have made that job even more of a pleasure.