I’m always interested in trying something new, especially when that something competes in a space where competition seems impossible. Take Macintosh music players for instance. There’s iTunes, and then there’s… Well, there really is nothing else because iTunes effectively killed the market by being both good and free. (I’m talking the Mac version of iTunes here; I acknowledge the debate over the quality of the Windows version.)


the 800-pound gorilla

Singing a Sweeter, Simpler Song

A few weeks ago, I came across an application called Songbird. It’s an open-source music player that runs on the Mozilla XUL Runner platform and is compatible with all operating systems supported by that runtime environment. It’s designed primarily as a music player, and is not ideally suited for podcast viewers or people who use iTunes to access TV shows and movies. The developers want it to do one thing and one thing well.


looking good Miss Morissette

The interface is very similar to iTunes, but there are only so many intuitive things one can do with a media player’s interface. All interface elements are responsive, and the UI looks fine on Mac OS X. I could complain that the scrollbars are out-of-place, but iTunes’ scrollbars are wrong too.

Songbird made some very good impressions on me right away. If you already have an iTunes library (or Windows Media library, I presume), the application will import your media and playlists on first launch – making migration initially effortless. Additionally, the application is pretty responsive, and it has access to several community-developed plugins that allow you to do things like download lyrics, get album art from LastFM, search for concert tickets for artists in your library, and sync with iPods and other MP3 players.

Managing your plugins is very simple with a built in manager that will check for updates automatically as well as recommend popular plugins from the Songbird website. To further simplify matters, Songbird features an integrated web browser that allows you to check out and download plugins directly from within Songbird.


browsing the web in Songbird

For users who think iTunes mini player is a tad large, Songbird also has you covered. The mini player in Songbird is just a few pixels tall.


this picture is full size

Finally, Songbird proved itself to be incredibly stable. It never crashed or hung once for me, but the folks at Ars did run into a couple of snags. Regardless, I find this release an impressive effort that’s worth checking out. It has some problems, but Songbird 1.0 does a great job managing and playing music files without a lot of clutter or distraction.

Some Sour Notes

With any piece of software, especially software as young as Songbird, there are going to be a few issues. Here are some I ran into.

• Protected AAC/WMA. Songbird will import your entire music library – even the stuff it can’t play. This leaves the user to remove protected music from the playlists.
• CD Ripping. Right now, you can’t import a CD into Songbird. The tracks have to be digital.
• iPod Ejecting. This doesn’t always work well.
• Album Art. I couldn’t find a way to automatically search for and add album art. Songbird also doesn’t import album art from iTunes.
• No Equalizer. Depending on your music collection, you may or may not miss this.

Final Thoughts

Whether or not you like Songbird will depend on how much you have invested in iTunes or Windows Media music. Since both of those stores lock their music to their player, you won’t be able to take those tracks to Songbird. However, if most of your music comes from your CD collection or from DRM-free stores like Amazon MP3, you might find Songbird a worthwhile download. It’s a simple application to get used to, and it strips away much of the bloat that’s becoming standard with bundled media players. Through downloadable plugins, you can make Songbird as simple or as complicated as you want it. If you just want a simple application to manage your music files, Songbird may hit all the right notes for you.

Tags: software, itunes/ipods, songbird

Today is my wife’s birthday! Happy birthday to her! On with the links.

LittleSnapper in action: Sharing



On his Realmac blog, Nik has loaded a video that walks through using their new application to capture, store, and upload screenshots of websites. He promises more previews to come, and LittleSnapper should be available for download before the end of the year.



Daring Fireball: The Phone Company

John Gruber writes about the iPhone’s success and how it has quickly become the strongest part of Apple’s product offerings financially. Also in the post: iPhones outsold Blackberries last quarter!

A Smattering of Obama Links

Warning: these next links reflect by personal political bias. All opinions below are expressed reasonably and without any appeal to primal fears or phobias.

• The New Yorker: The Choice: I’m late posting this one, but the editors of The New Yorker construct a well-written and persuasive article about their endorsement of Barack Obama. Note that this article was written early after the signing of Public Law 110-343.
  
  
• The Chicago Tribune: Obama no Socialist: How do you know if you’re really a Socialist? Try asking an organizer for Communist Party USA.
  
  
• Rolling Stone: Block the Vote: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Greg Palast write about the GOP’s recent attempts to create voting into an obstacle course that will disenfranchise key demographics who traditionally oppose Republican candidates. This article ties in with their new website Steal Back Your Vote.

Tags: apple inc, iphone, software, politics

If you haven’t checked out a web application called SUMO Paint, I highly recommend it. It’s an online painting and image manipulation application that features several shape tools, filters, artistic brushes, a symmetry tool, color picker, and much more. It’s very impressive as a web app, and it’s free to use.


SUMO Pain in Safari

I’m not very skilled drawing with a trackpad, but those of you out there with tablets will be able to produce some great work here. Be sure to check out the image gallery for some examples of work people have done in SUMO Paint.

Tags: software

Zune Spotlight: Zune Takes Music Discovery to the Next Level With New Ways to Find and Access Digital Music

The Microsoft Zune gets a nice update with new software features and a new blue color. The neatest feature allows users to tag songs they hear on FM radio to buy from the Zune Marketplace. This is great if you are one of those people who always forgets what that song is they really like!



Engadget: Microsoft's BlueTrack mice are here -- laser bids a tearful goodbye

Another nice new Microsoft product. These mice use a new wide-angle blue beam that allows them to accurately function on a greater variety of surfaces.



Lifehacker: A First Look at OpenOffice.org 3.0

Jason Fitzpatrick takes a look at how the new version of OpenOffice is shaping up with emphasis on the improvements in the Mac version.

Tags: microsoft, zune, software

With the release of the iPhone 3G, Apple's developers has given [dot] Mac a long-needed overhaul and have rebranded the effort as MobileMe. Email addresses that used to end with "@mac.com" now end with "@me.com" (though the former still works), "web.mac.com" domains can now use "web.me.com." However, "homepage.mac.com," like this site uses, does not translate into a me.com domain.

The services offered through MobileMe are targeted at both Mac users and PC users, particularly those who have an iPhone of iPod touch – a probable reason why the [dot] Mac moniker was dropped from the branding. MobileMe is designed to help keep things like email, contacts, and calendars synced between your computer(s) and iPhone/iPod touch while also providing a venue for sharing photos and limited backup options.

Logging In

There's nothing really special here unless you are a former [dot] Mac user. The login screen for [dot] Mac was terrible, and this is a huge improvement. Moving on.

iDisk

iDisk has been improved in many ways, using a column view rather than the old list view. Drag-and-drop works as expected between folders as well as the sidebar. Anyone who is used to the Macintosh Finder will feel right at home here. Down in the bottom left corner, a progress bar shows how much space is used on iDisk, and you can conserve space by creating compressed archives of items of folders. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful getting this feature to work while testing.

Mail

Apple's web-based email interface is uncannily similar to their desktop email client. Like iDisk, if you are familiar with Apple's desktop application, the web application will seem right at home. Mail has extensive preferences, including junk-mail filtering, aliases, and the ability to check other accounts as well as automatically forward me.com mail to other accounts. Drag-and-drop support is pervasive throughout Mail.

Unfortunately, I ran into a significant bug using Mail. When I deleted a message, many times other messages would be deleted as well. Needless to say, this renders Mail pretty unusable until Apple irons this problem out.

Contacts

Contacts serves as MobilMe's answer to Mac OS X's Address Book application. After a slight delay, my contacts synced with MobileMe. Contacts can also import and export vCards, which are used by Address Book, Outlook, Thunderbird, and other contact managers. Adding and editing contacts manually is a simple task, and I did not run into the deletion bug here that was present in MobileMe's Mail interface.

Calendar

Calendar is very similar to iCal. (Notice a theme here yet?) Syncing went smoothly. Calendar supports day, week, and moth views. Adding and removing events is a breeze, but I didn't find a way of importing or exporting calendar data outside of using iCal, which makes me wonder how useful this service will be to Windows users.

Other Notes

• MobileMe supports double-clicks on items as well as the delete key. Unfortunately, many other keyboard commands do not work.
• Shift-clicking to select multiple items works as expected as does cmd-clicking.
• When MobileMe is processing something, there is a small progress indicator at the bottom right of the sidebar.
• Dragging a message to the trash in Mail circumvents the deletion bug I encountered.
• I couldn't get photo uploading to work, so that's why the Photo Galley is not included here.

Conclusions

In all honesty, MobileMe is not very compelling at the moment. It promises great features, and it is beautiful to look at, especially when compared to other online calendar or email services. However, the bugs are deal-breakers. Photo Gallery refused to upload any photographs. Calendar offers no standard importing of exporting options, and deleting messages in Mail can result in unexpected behaviors. Hopefully, these issues are resolved quickly.

If you already subscribe to [dot] Mac, MobileMe makes sense to keep. It improves on the previous service in almost every way. If you use an iPhone or iPod touch in combination with a computer for managing messages, contacts, calendars, and messages, MobileMe might be worth subscribing to for the simple syncing features. Unfortunately, MobileMe can't compete with similar online offerings for general users until the kinks are worked out.

Update: It's important to note that Apple has apologized for the troublesome MobileMe transition and is providing all subscribers with an additional thirty days of service, free of charge.

Tags: mobileme, software

Hmm, tags are broken in the new maintenance release of RapidWeaver. I hope they get that fixed soon.

John Nack on Adobe: Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe's 64-bit roadmap

Short story: Adobe Photoshop CS4 for the Mac will not be 64-bit. It will be 64-bit for Windows (but you will have to own a 64-bit edition of Windows to take advantage of it).

For more technical commentary on the events leading up to this discrepancy and the potential impact, see posts by John Siracusa at Ars Technica and John Gruber of Daring Fireball.



Ars Technica: Apple passes Wal-Mart, now #1 music retailer in US

I think the title says it all.



BBC News: 'No Sun link' to climate change

I'm not sure that headline is even close to being grammatically correct, but that's beside the point. The lesson here is that, yes, we should still be working on cutting those carbon emissions. We can't blame the sun for everything.

Tags: software, environment, itunes/ipods, adobe

March 21, 2001 marked the official release of Mac OS X 10.0 to much fanfare and gnashing of teeth. Yes, I meant to write that. OS X was a milestone Apple achievement. It delivered on their long-term goal to finally deliver a next-generation operating system to their users. It was a complete break from the aging monolith that was the classic Mac OS. It brought new technologies and a new user interface to the Mac-faithful. However, there were some bumps in the road during those first few months of life.


Apple gave the world the first real look at OS X when they released the $29 public beta in August of 2000. I was an early adopter, and ordered the beta almost the moment it became available on Apple's website. As soon as the software arrived, I performed a clean install on my PowerBook G3. There would be no reverting to Classic for me – it was OS X or bust! (I should mention that my iMac DV retained OS 9 for quite some time, so I did have a serious safety net.)

Those early days – while problematic at times – taught me about one of the most valuable resources Mac users have: independent software developers. In the early days of OS X, the shareware and freeware developers moved more quickly than the corporate giants in bringing their products to OS X. As I browse my Applications folder today, more of the programs contained within are from independent developers than corporations. To this day, those independents, by and large, make software that better integrates with OS X and feels more Mac-like than anything Adobe or Microsoft puts out.


With the release of OS X 10.2 Jaguar in August of 2002, my iMac upgraded to Apple's new operating system. By now, I was more comfortable in OS X than OS 9, and all of the applications I regularly use had OS X-native versions. In fact, many had dropped support for OS 9 by now. System 10 was the unequivocal future of the Macintosh operating systems, and there was no more point in holding onto the past.

10.3 Panther would be the last version of OS X for my aging iMac. By the time Tiger was released, we had a PowerMac G5, but we still had the PowerBook G3. I upgraded the PowerBook to Tiger, but quickly returned to the previous system when it became obvious that OS X 10.4 was jut too resource-intensive for my old laptop. It's still running Panther in my classroom, keeping all of our textbook music in iTunes. It's not many laptops that can say they are still in active service after eight years of use!


I haven't upgraded to Leopard yet. I'm guessing the PowerMac will stay on Tiger, but the MacBook Pro seems to be ready to move on. Things like Time Machine, Quick Look, improvements to Preview, Cover Flow, Stacks, and many other small touches are compelling. Apple really have brought OS X a long way since those first feeble steps seven years ago, and I'm excited to see where things go next.

Tags: macintosh, software, os x

I was going to post some news on the RIAA, but I felt it would hurt my Karma. Here's some awesome stuff instead!



What Kind of World Do You Want?

Here's a video sharing community by Five for Fighting dedicated to giving contributions to charities you select every time a video you upload is viewed. It's a neat concept, and some people have created some very moving videos.



Adobe Labs: Buzzword

This is an amazing online word processor. It's responsive, recognizes some common keyboard commands, and just plain looks nice.


via Daring Fireball



Fluid

Speaking of web applications, this neat little utility lets you create separate desktop links to all the web apps you use. Each web application opens in its own site-specific browser, giving them their own workspaces separate from your traditional web browsing. It looks really great, but I don't have Leopard yet. However, if you do, it looks worth checking out!

also via Daring Fireball

Tags: riaa, technology, software, adobe

So I'll get to writing another real post before long. Until then, more links!

Apple – Mac Pro

The Mac Pro received a substantial update yesterday. The standard configuration comes with a whopping eight cores of processing power, but if you need to pinch those pennies, you can save $500 by settling for a measly four cores! In related news, the XServes saw a comparable upgrade.



Newsgator: NetNewsWire 3.1

NetNewsWire is free as of today. It was formerly $30. If you are a Mac user, this is a great application, and I recommend you give it a try.



Indexed: Even Grandpa Was a Punk Kid Once

This post is so very true. It's amazing what you can communicate through a Venn diagram and an index card!



Whatever: Why It Won't Work

John Scalzi on Sony's, um, brilliant (cough) new way of selling DRM-free tracks. I think he nails it on the head. From the article:

So to recap, what you’ve got here is a system that makes people leave their house in order to download music at their house, and makes them go to a store to get music that they could get at the store, somewhere else.

via Daring Fireball

Tags: drm, macintosh, software

I just noticed that QuickTime no longer has window borders. Is this new to the most recent point release, or have I been missing something? Anyway, I've been wondering how long it was going to take for QT to lose those bulky borders.


hello, borderless goodness

Tags: software

Safari is the default browser on my MacBook. I've tried several others, but I just keep coming back to. It has some intangible quality that just makes it enjoyable to use, so I thought I'd try out Safari on my XP machine at work. Since I use Safari at home, nothing about its core functionality came as a surprise to me. I'm used to how it renders fonts. I'm aware of its limitations. I know exactly what it does well and where it could still use growth. When Safari was released on Windows, those individuals who downloaded it did not know what to expect, and the initial reactions reflected that. Rather than focus on those details, I just want to write about what the user experience is like on XP in general.

Using Safari on XP is, in short, a strange experience. Apple does nothing to make Safari feel like a Windows application. In fact, they seem to go out of their way to make it look and feel as much like a Mac application as possible.



This is what Safari looks like on Windows XP – almost exactly how it would appear on Mac OS X. It's almost as if Apple is using their flagship browser as a not-so-subtle advertisement for their operating system. From the toolbar icons, to sheet dialogues, to the scrollbars, Safari stands out with its uniquely Mac experience. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective.




Even the menus, toolbar buttons, and in-page drop downs look like the come directly out of OS X. Almost every interface element is customized to look exactly like the browser's Mac counterpart. Again, if you've ever used Safari on a Mac, then you will know exactly what to expect on Windows. Very seldom did any Windows-like elements appear while I used Safari on XP. One of those times was in printing. A standard Windows print dialog appeared, which was rather visually jarring. The other Mac to Windows difference I noticed is in the browser window's controls, which more closely resemble what you would expect on Windows in shape and position, though they were not the default XP controls.


mac controls and windows controls

In the end, what does this experience mean to Windows users? If you are looking for an application that provides a peek into the general Mac experience, Safari might provide an interesting insight. However, users merely looking for a browser to replace Internet Explorer might be put off by the sheer unfamiliarity of the interface. Quite frankly, Safari does not fit in on Windows, and this inconsistency seems intentional. It's as if Apple is sticking an ad for OS X in front of WIndows users every time Safari is launched, and that will likely prove off-putting to many individuals. In this case, I think Apple should have tailored Safari's interface to fit better into Windows, allowing users a more seamless experience, rather than making it so obvious this is a piece of Macintosh software.

As an experienced Mac user, I personally love using Safari on Windows. It's a far better experience than using Internet Explorer, and I can't get Firefox to function properly on our machines at work. However, experienced Windows users may be quickly turned off by the nonstandard interface, never giving the application a second glance because it is so glaringly out-of-place. The Windows browser market is a pretty crowded place, with IE dominating the casual users and Firefox entrenched with more tech-savvy users. Apple is going to have a hard time gaining a following in this market, and I think they are sabotaging their own efforts by not creating an experience that fits in with Windows more seamlessly.

Tags: software, safari, browsers

MacUser: iTunes + iPod a monopoly? If so, then dibs on the shoe.

Dan Moren discredits recent claims that Apple holds a true monolopy with iTunes and iPods – specifically answering a rant from ZDNet. The article is pretty humerous, but it gets the point across. I thought this quote was especially insightful:

This argument would be a heck of a lot more compelling if it weren’t for the thousands of hardware devices that require their own proprietary software. Just the other day I was looking at writing up a nifty USB pedometer for my Gadgetbox column. Unfortunately, there’s no Mac software, and it comes bundled with its own proprietary Windows software. Where are the cries of monopoly? Are you bummed that you can’t install the PS3’s new firmware on your Wii?

For the record, I use iTunes. My library has 1176 songs in it. Of those, a whopping 39 are iTunes store purchases. Yeah, I feel really locked in here.



Naked Light

This image editing application looks amazing. It makes me want Leopard even more. A download should be available Friday.



Gamespy: Super Mario Galaxy Review

If you enjoy playing the best, then you absolutely need to play Super Mario Galaxy. It's our favorite Wii game this year, and a strong contender for the best game of the year.

Just for fun:

Tags: itunes/ipods, software, video games

Flock 1.0 was released for general consumption late last week, and it offers another browser alternative for Mac, WIndows, and Linux users. It bills itself as a social web browser, and it integrates functionality with several social networking and media sites to bring a richer experience to your web browsing. If you never use online services like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Flickr, Flock may not be for you. However, if you are a fan of Web 2.0, you might want to give this browser a try.

Cool Features

Flock stands out from many browsers with some very sleek and useful features, though some could use some refinements in their implementation.

The Media Bar is unique and presented well. It's function is to allow access to media streams from various video and photography related sites like YouTube and Flickr. The Media Bar can either appear along the top or the bottom of the browser window.


interesting images from Flickr


top rated YouTube videos

The Media Bar allows you to interact with the videos and photos in various ways. You can save media or send videos and images to online friends trough simple drag-and-drop. You can copy code to embed objects web pages, and, if you are using a blogging engine that Flock recognizes, you can add these images or videos to your blog with a single click. It's a handy addition for individuals who browse a lot of online media.

The People Sidebar is another unique interface feature to Flock. It allows you to integrate services like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr directly into the browser. For example, Flock can track recent Tweets made from Twitter as well as recent comments made about your Flickr images. I couldn't test the Facebook or YouTube integration since I do not have an account on either, but I did have problems with the Twitter interface sometimes not showing the most recent Tweets (when compared to my Twitter page or results in Twitterific). Still, for individuals hooked on social websites, these features may be great time savers.


twitter in the sidebar and the web clipboard

Another interesting sidebar feature is a Web Clipboard. This clipboard allows you to save links, text, and images from websites for later use. I immediately found this useful in gathering information to possibly use in link posts. The tool is self-explanatory, and it worked flawlessly.

Complimenting the Flickr and YouTube integration, Flock allows for direct uploads to these services. The Flickr uploader was pretty good, but it lacked the ability to add a photo to a specific album. However, it does support writing descriptions, tagging, and privacy settings.


uploading to Flickr

RSS integration is a standard browser feature these days (though I still prefer using a dedicated aggregator), and Flock provides a nice interface for subscribing to feeds. When a site has an RSS feed available, an orange icon lights up in the address bar. Pressing this button will open the feed up in Flock.



Once you are viewing the RSS feed, you have the option to subscribe to this feed with a single click. Flock offers single column or double column views, and articles are marked as read once you scroll past them. You can also choose to view article titles, truncated posts, or full posts (for those RSS feeds that supply full articles). It's well implemented, but I wish there was a way to customize how often it refreshes subscribed feeds.



Flock can additionally be used to edit blogs if you use a service like Blogger, Typepad, or WordPress. (I am unfortunately unable to test this feature thuroughly.) Other nice touches include instant search results, and you can add any site to the search bar that has an integrated search engine. Finally, links that would usually open in a new window automatically open in a new tab, avoiding the hassle of multiple browser windows. In all, Flock contains many unique features that cater to primarily individuals who enjoy social networking, and these features are implemented pretty well. There's some room for improvement, but the package is enjoyable to use as a whole.

The Interface

One of the challenges with creating an application containing so many features is in creating an interface that remains simple and accessible. Here, Flock runs into a couple of small problems. For one, the interface can become very cluttered very quickly if you have the Media Bar and sidebar open simultaneously – a natural side effect of so much accessible information and media.


Also, the default theme is pretty busy. Fortunately, Flock will support themes later this year, so hopefully something a little more subdued will become available soon.



Otherwise, there are some other small elements and widgets that look a little out of place (especially in the bookmarks bar and the preferences window), but this is standard for Firefox-based browsers on OS X at the moment. We'll see if any of the work on the upcoming Firefox 3 addresses those issues.

Technical Issues

I ran into few real issues while testing Flock. The RSS reader does not seem to automatically update your feeds without a relaunch of the browser, nor could I find a way to schedule feed updates. (Someone correct me if I missed something.) Likewise, the Twitter sidebar seldom had the most recent Tweets from individuals I'm following, and I would have to visit Twitter to see their most recent comments anyway – negating the usefulness of the sidebar. Finally, I ran into some slowdowns if I had more than a couple tabs open, and the application crashed a couple of times while I was using it. However, none of these issues negate the usefulness of Flock. They merely diminish that usefulness.

Update: About refreshing feeds (from the Flock FAQ):

Every hour Flock will check feeds for updates. You can refresh individual feeds by using the Reload button while viewing a feed.

Final Thoughts

Saying all this, I do like Flock. Does it need work? Sure it does, but it functions well as a 1.0 product, and it has something going for it most other browsers lack. Flock has personality. It's fun to use. Take Internet Explorer, Camino, Firefox, and a myriad of other browsers. They all have unique features and issues, but they all essentially feel the same to use. Flock stands out from the pack because it dares to be a little different, and, as a Mac user, I can appreciate that. I seriously doubt Flock will be replacing my usual browsing routine of WebKit + Vienna + Twitterific anytime soon, but it's caught my interest. I'll be keeping my eye on this browser as it continues to grow and receive updates, and I recommend you check it out as well.

Tags: software, flock, browsers

I like Paul Thurrott. Really. However, his recent post regarding some users having installation issues with Leopard is just unfortunate. In it, he begins by taking Apple to task for an unwise icon choice for representing PCs in Leopard.

"Apple is so lame and so childish that the icons it uses in Leopard for networked Windows PCs are CRT displays with a Windows blue screen of death. Normally, I'd see this for what it is--typical juvenile stupidity from Cupertino..."

He goes on to point out that some users are experiencing installation issues that also results in a similar blue screen.

"You see, Leopard has its own blue screen of death. And it's happening to an alarming number of people who buy the new OS and install it on their Macs...Have fun with those blue screens, Apple. My advice: Describe this as feature number 301. Heck, you might be able to wrangle 3 or 4 new features out of it."

The problem I have here is that he is acting every bit as childish and immature as he claims Apple is being with this icon (which I'm sure few users will ever even see). He also foregoes any fact-checking as to the root causes. He just reinforces bad stereotypes of Mac-bashers, a stereotype he usually doesn't fit. This tirade is below him.

Fortunately, John Gruber comes along to straighten the facts out regarding the mystery of the blue screen:

"But, as far as I can tell, there is no mystery involved. There is one and only one known cause for this problem: old versions of Unsanity’s Application Enhancer, a.k.a. APE."

There are some exceptions to this statement (which Mr. Gruber admits to in his write-up). However, by and large, this problem is created by Application Enhancer, which is used for unsupported system modifications. The problem turns out to be that several Logitech mouse users may have an old version of APE on their systems without knowing it.

"Logitech Control Center currently installs APE 2.0.3, but previous versions of their installer used older versions of APE, which versions render Leopard unbootable. This is particularly pernicious given that most people installing Logitech’s software have never even heard of APE or Unsanity, let alone realize that Logitech is installing it on their system."

Most Unsanity customers would disable APEs without prompting. We know we are messing with the untold depths of the system and need to undo it all before performing a major upgrade. However, the story is different for someone merely buying a mouse. The issue here is not how Apple let this flaw exist in their software. The issue is why in the world a respected company like Logitech relies on an unsupported system hack to make their hardware work with Mac OS X.

Just for fun, here's the controversial icon:


I include this for a couple of reasons.

1. So you can see what all the fuss is about if you don't happen to be a Mac user with Leopard installed and sharing Windows PCs.
2. Just to demonstrate how huge Leopard icons are. Yes, this is the actual icon.

Irony or potential humor aside, this small problem has gotten too much attention. Maybe if Windows included something silly like this, I'd be on the other side of the fence, but I'd like to think not. Anyway, the Leopard BSOD can be prevented by having the latest version of APE on your system or by disabling it altogether before installing, and I bet that icon will change within the first couple of point releases.

After all, this is nothing. Does anyone remember the Panther File Vault bug that would eat your Home folder? Now that was worth writing home about.

Tags: macintosh, software, apple inc

Some of the visual asthetics of Leopard bother me in the screenshots. It's the way I am. I'm a UI junkie, and, while I like visual flair, I grow annoyed if the eye candy begins to detract from the experience as a whole. Once I get to use Leopard, I might change my mind, but right now I'm not sold on the new menu bar, the new Dock, or the way stacks fan out. Well, strike that last one. I gained some appreciation for that interface nuance earlier today.


image from apple.com

I always disliked how the stack curved slightly to the right, until I was working this morning and I noticed how my mouse hand drifts to the right when I try to go straight up. In fact (and I tested this against an enlarged screenshot, so you know its scientific), my hand drifted along basically the same arc the stack has!

In other words, this interface element that looks like useless eye candy actually has purpose. It's easier to intuitively navigate than a straight column. Once again, Apple shows its attention to detail even with an interface element that most users won't give a second glance.

Tags: macintosh, software, technology, os x, leopard

Indecision 2008: Stephen Colbert for President?

It's like Man of the Year without the lousy techno-thriller subplot. If this goes anywhere, I wonder if he'll shed his Colbert Report persona in any interviews or (gasp) debates. On the other hand, he communicates well through his satire. Hey, if Arnold can be governor...

By the way, if you like Colbert, you'll love his ice cream.



Freeverse: Periscope 1.5

Freeverse updates their $40 webcam utility with some refined features and a completely redesigned UI (thank you). The demo period lasts for 50 hours and does not limit functionality.

via TUAW



Macworld: Apple says iPhone complies with eco standards

Apple tells Greepeace to go stick their heads in some hazardous materials themselves.

“Like all Apple products worldwide, iPhone complies with RoHS [Restriction of Hazardous Substances], the world’s toughest restrictions on toxic substances in electronics,” an Apple spokesperson, told Macworld. “As we have said, Apple will voluntarily eliminate the use of PVC and BFRs by the end of 2008.”

Macworld: Jobs: iPhone SDK coming in February

I don't think I quite believe Jobs' spin on why the SDK is coming so long after the phone, but at least it is coming. Oh, and it will also work with the iPod touch.

Tags: politics, silly, software, environment, apple inc, iphone

Daring Fireball: The Amazon MP3 Store and Amazon MP3 Downloader

There’s very high “it just works” factor here. Music is easy to find, easy to buy, and easy to download once you have the Amazon MP3 Downloader installed. When you download music with Amazon MP3 Downloader, it simply shows up in iTunes, as you’d expect, with no manual importing or additional action required on the user’s part. Sync your iPods, and the new music shows up there, too.

This could be huge.



Look Me In the Eye

This is the blog of John Elder Robinson, author of Look Me In the Eye (due out today) about growing up with and continuing to live with Asperger's Syndrome. I'm going to be hitting our nearby B&N after school to check this book out!



Inhabitat: PREFAB FRIDAY: Zero-Energy MkLotus debuts!

Here's an incredible new eco-prefab home showcased on the lawn of San Francisco's city hall. Check out the Flickr photoset for some other great pictures.




EcoSpeak: An interview with ex-IPCC co-chairman Sir John Houghton

Mr. Houghton puts global warming in some historical perspective and still comes to the conclusion that our current level of carbon emissions are cause for concern. He also discredits our politicians' recent obsession with ethanol:

Ethanol from corn is not a good deal. Why it is being pushed by President Bush, I don’t know. It’s been disastrous for the price of corn and it’s not helping the CO2 budget significantly at all.

Rogue Amoeba: Radioshift

John Gruber has the best analogy: "Like TiVo for radio."



Finishing the fight: Ars reviews Halo 3

Ars Technica reviews Halo 3's single player campaign. I won't give away the whole review, but here's a snippet:

Suffice it to say that there are a couple of twists and turns that some may not have been expecting, and some familiar faces will come and go, to the surprise and shock of long-time fans. When the game is done, though, one thing is certain: fans will have the closure they were looking for.

Tags: software, environment, video games, literature, itunes/ipods, asd

A Collection of Apple Lock-In Posts
• Wil Shipley believes Apple's strategy of lock-ins will soon collapse upon itself.

• John Gruber agrees and goes so far as to say...

The best thing that could happen to Apple this year would be for Microsoft’s Zune 2.0 to be a kick-ass product, both technologically and in terms of being designed to make customers happy, not entertainment conglomerates. Apple needs competition.

• Paul Thurott says, "I told you so."



Engadget: NBC to offer free "NBC Direct" download service, iTunes competitor
from Engadget:

The company is going to start testing a new NBC Direct service in October with full, free downloadable episodes which can be stored up to seven days on Windows PCs. The shows will be on offer for a week as soon as they've aired, and will include imbedded, un-skippable ads.

Wow. That sounds like the company is putting customers first. Wait, what was that? Oh, battling the 0.01% of consumers who pirate programming is your number one priority! Now it all makes sense...

I like John Gruber's take:

So his number-one priority is piracy. Not making high-quality shows. Not forging a sponsorship or advertising model that is less annoying and distracting to viewers, such that they (the viewers) would be less likely to want to fast-forward the advertising messages. No, piracy, that’s his top priority.

Infinite Loop: OpenOffice Aqua still a year away
Sigh. Mac OS X has been out for how long? Seven-ish years now? How long did it take to figure out this whole OS X thing was more than a fad?



Google Video: Conspiracy Theory Rock
Awesome parody of School House Rock.



Apparently, this video has only been broadcast once, and it was back on March 14, 1998.



Flickr: 24 fps

This photoset features the last frame from several classic movies. Neat stuff. (See how many of the films you can name from the pictures! I could name ... like two.)

via DF

Tags: software, silly, apple inc, iphone, itunes/ipods, politics

One of the things that really bugs me about the interface of Internet Explorer 7 is the menu arrow at the end of the address bar. If you are on a standard website, the arrow is in one place, but if you visit a secure website, the arrow moves to make room for another interface element.





See that lock icon. Yeah, it makes the address bar menu jump about 30 pixels to the left. Like I pointed out back in this post, I don't like moving targets. Really, who does? Would it not have made more sense to stick that icon inside the address bar perhaps? What about directly under the Refresh button to the left of the Home icon?

I'm not a professional designer, but it surprises me that both Microsoft and Apple let this mistake get past. People rely on motor memory instinctively, and moving interface elements impede that simple element of human adaptation. If you want to make your application more learnable and usable, all clickable elements of the main interface should consistently appear in the same place – not suddenly move due to a specific circumstance. The only one who should be able to move interface elements around is the user.

Tags: software, microsoft, browsers

Sibelius 5 is the most recent version of the composition and music layout tools by Sibelius Software. It is also the first version to ship as a Universal Binary for Macintosh computers – making a very anticipated release. The previous PPC versions run terribly on Intel Macs, so I was excited to download a demo for the most recent version.

Installation was as simple as can be hoped with any OS X application. Simply drag the application to your Applications folder, and you're done. The rest of the application feels much more Mac-like than version 4 did, but some strangeness still exists. The most obvious example is the application toolbar, which just looks out-of-place.


Other visual bugs exist throughout various dialog boxes, but this strange piece of UI design stares at you all the time Sibelius is open. Regardless, the rest of Sibleius' interface is very simple an unobtrusive.


clean and simple – Sibelius does a good job at avoiding distraction

The New Features

Sibelius 5 features features some enhancements and new functionality over previous versions. Panorama view removes all page breaks from your score and views everything in one infinitely continuous horizontal system, creating a simpler way of viewing the music you are working on.


an instrumental part in Panorama view

Sibelius 5 also makes it easy to extract parts. This was really a new feature with version 4, called Dynamic Parts, but, since I'm still using Sibelius 3 at home, this feature continues to impress. You simply write your score, choose a part from a menu, and the part immediately appears. This is a huge timesaver.

Another innovation to Sibelius 5 is the Ideas Hub. Using this feature is pretty similar to using loops in programs like GarageBand, and it's a fantastic addition to this application. SImply put, if you think of something off the top of your head, you can notate it out, open the Ideas window and save the clip of music until you are ready to use it – a simple process of copy and paste. Even better, you can listen to the music clips in the Ideas window, and double-clicking one of the snippets allows you to edit the notation.


viewing and editing an Idea

When I wrote about SIbelius 4 (which I never bought because the Intel Macs came along), I was pretty critical of Sibelius' fairly lame selection of quality samples when compared to Finale. While I still feel Finale has the better sample collection, Sibelius 5 has drastically improved in this area, including over 150 high quality instrument sounds. (Of course, many more can be purchased separately.) Also, Sibelius has gained support for VST and Audio Units – giving users greater flexibility in choosing virtual instruments from other manufacturers.

Other improvements include an improved equalizer, special measure numbering, easier cues, and instrument doubling in parts. Sibelius 5 also includes a font that writes the name of the note inside the notehead – a great addition for those of us working with younger musicians.

Conclusion

Overall, Sibelius 5 is a very nice improvement over previous versions. Unfortunately, some interface bugs are annoying, and I'm beginning to question the priority of Macintosh development at Sibelius Software in recent years. Back in the early days of OS X, Sibelius showed up the competition time and again in adopting new Macintosh technologies quickly and effectively. Recently, however, the Mac versions of Sibelius feel more of an afterthought. I hope I'm wrong, but $600 is an awful lot to spend on software that sometimes just feels buggy. Fortunately, bugs can be fixed.

Compared to its competition, SIbelius feels much more intuitive than Finale, and it is far more capable than Encore or other similar products. Both Finale and Sibelius have distinctive strengths and weaknesses as composing solutions, but Sibelius has the edge in my book. For the most part, it gets out of the way and lets me concentrate on my creativity, which is exactly what this kind of software should do.

Tags: software, sibelius, opinion

iWork '08 was released on August 7 with some improvements to the existing presentation and page layout applications and a brand-new spreadsheet application called Numbers. Over a series of three posts, I'm going to take a look at the new features introduced in this version of iWork.

• Keynote
• Pages
• Numbers

I will be the first to admit that I have a hard time wrapping my head around spreadsheets and spreadsheet applications. I find that Pages (or Word) does all I need for the tables and charts I usually need. Consequently, I rarely touch applications like Excel, so some trepidation went into writing this overview. However, the more I used Numbers, the less daunting the application seemed.

Usually, when you open a spreadsheet application, you see something like this:

a blank spreadsheet in NeoOffice Calc

This interface is daunting in its sheer lack of guidance. Of course, you could always follow a Wizard of some sort, but those can be equally as frustrating. It was with some surprise that opening Numbers (and choosing one of the offered templates) resulted in this:

Numbers' grade book template

Templates are present in Excel as well, but the simple flexibility of the templates in Pages makes them much more attractive to use.

Numbers takes an approach to spreadsheets very similar to creating a basic document. Sheets are arranged along the side as page thumbnails would be in Pages or slides in Keynote. Tables themselves are treated like objects and are each self-contained spreadsheets within your larger document. If you are comfortable with how the other iWork applications handle document objects, Numbers will feel pretty familiar. On the other hand, users who are very comfortable in Excel might need some adjustment.

selecting tables and basic formulas from the toolbar

Fortunately, this document-like approach makes it much easier to create spreadsheets that will print out predictably – something I've always had problems accomplishing the few times I've used Calc or Excel. For even further refinement, Numbers features a print view that is fully interactive and allows you to have complete control over how the spreadsheet document looks.

Working with data seems intuitive in Numbers as well. For example, if a cell is set up to calculate a formula, an editor appears atop to the cell when you select it (as opposed to being at the top of the screen or inside the cell where it might not fit).

editing an equation in cell E3

I also noticed that selecting a graph tied to the data in a specific table highlights the table, clearly indicating how the data is correlated. It's a small touch but a nice one.

the colors in the table match up with the graph

As far as Excel compatibility goes, I haven't been able to test the exporting quality, but NeoOffice Calc has had little success opening Numbers-exported Excel documents. Importing a very large Excel worksheet I have from school resulted in very few errors, and Numbers informs you of any issues when you import.

import errors

Numbers furthermore lacks support for Excel macros as well as AppleScript (a strange omission). I found little else to complain about, but I've read that performance suffers if you create large tables.

In all, Numbers adds a needed component to the iWork suite, and it does so with an approach that is both fresh and accessible. Serious power users and businesses might find the application limiting, but Numbers should capably fill the needs of most home users. I could write for quite a while about how simple conditional formatting and equation editing is, about how much easier Numbers is on the eyes when compared to other spreadsheet apps, or a plethora of other topics. However, I'll just wrap up by saying that I could actually see myself voluntarily opening and using Numbers – something I cannot say about any other spreadsheet application I've used before.

For further reading on Numbers:

• Mac Thought Crime: Numbers rocks: how I forgot about the review and ended up doing my budget
• Macworld Review: Numbers '08

Tags: software, iwork, opinion

Sci-Fi Lists: Top 100 Sci-Fi Lists

I've read most of the top 20, and I'm pleasantly surprised by number one.



Ars Technica: AACS DRM tentacles reach far into operating systems

So, when thinking about this issue, we have to ask ourselves: is a company like Microsoft or Apple likely to tell Hollywood to jump off a cliff? No, because both companies know that users will want to play HD DVD or Blu-ray discs on their computers. Microsoft didn't tell AACS LA to stuff it, and Apple won't tell them to, either.

Marcello's Homepage – Comics – Calvin & Hobbes

Every Calvin and Hobbes comic strip ever published. I can now sleep better at night just knowing these are here.



PagesUser: A Huge Saving of Space

So that's where all those megabytes went... I had a hunch.



Red Sweater Blog: We're In This Together

It’s pretty awe-inspiring to sit in the same room while the makers of competing products such as BBEdit and TextMate, or Transmit and Fetch discuss product design issues, laugh at each other’s jokes, and yes, withhold some of their more strategic plans! But almost everybody in the room, competitor or not, is respecting each other’s work, and having a great time.

This is something I really like about being a Mac user. The third-party developers (especially the indies) are generally nice people, and the cut-throat feeling pervasive in the Windows software market is all but absent.



Infinite Loop: The secrets to Apple's success in marketing to teenagers

In addition to the reasons listed in the article, I think another factor in Apple's success with young people is that Apple doesn't talk down to them or try to create a blatantly corny atmosphere of "hipness."

Tags: silly, keynote, literature, software, drm, apple inc

iWork '08 was released on August 7 with some improvements to the existing presentation and page layout applications and a brand-new spreadsheet application called Numbers. Over a series of three posts, I'm going to take a look at the new features introduced in this version of iWork.

• Keynote
• Pages
• Numbers

Pages was packaged with Keynote in 2005 in the first iteration of iWork. Pages received decidedly mixed reviews, but Apple has continued to improve its page layout application over time, resulting in the most recent version.

Initially, Pages was not a word processor (like how most people use Microsoft Word). Rather it focused on page layout more akin to Microsoft Publisher or Adobe FrameMaker. Indeed, you could use Pages for simple word processing, and I have done so on many occasions. Unfortunately, Pages has offered such a fundamentally different approach to creating documents than Word that a perceived learning curve is in place. This harmed Pages popularity quickly.

Now, in version 3, Pages is truly reaching maturity as a product. However, compared with other documenting applications, its interface is very clean and uncluttered. Compare the screenshots below of Pages running on Mac OS X and Word 2003 on Windows XP.

x

A lack of clutter is not indicative of a lack of functionality, however, and Pages is packing a lot of enhancements and a few new features under its hood. The first thing I noticed was a detail that might skirt by most users – its install size. One would expect Pages 3 to be larger than Pages 2, but quite the opposite is true.

x

As you can see, Pages has lost considerable weight from one version to the next – dropping nearly 600 MB. (Also, Keynote has lost about 1 GB off its size. I wonder how they trimmed the applications' weights to such an extent.)

When the Template Chooser is brought up, there are many new templates to choose from, and they are now divided between "Word Processing" and "Page Layout."


Word Processing offers much more basic templates than Page Layout

Regardless of the mode you use, Pages behaves basically the same once you begin creating your document. Like, Keynote, Pages has had a toolbar facelift and has received Instant Alpha and Photo Frame capabilities. Pages has also gained a contextual Formatting Bar, and this little widget quickly makes the application much more usable as a word processor. Prior to this release, to change fonts, you had to open a separate pane, and all basic formatting options were most easily accessible through a pane called an Inspector. (On the upside, I personally grew very comfortable with keyboard shortcuts. On the other hand, this turned off several potential users.)

Now, similarly to Office 2007, a small bar is present beneath the main toolbar icons that customizes itself to the part of the document you are currently working with.


working with text


editing chart properties


editing a picture

This Formatting Bar is extremely useful and all but eliminates the need to resort to the Inspector for anything but the most tedious of settings. This is a welcome addition, and the only criticism I have is that the bar is very small. There seems to be no way to make the bar larger, and this could prove a problem for users with less than ideal eyesight.

Pages has also gained some more refined equation editing for charts that seems to come directly from Numbers, the new spreadsheet application bundled in iWork '08. In the Inspector, you can set conditions and basic equations with a simple click, and the formula editor automatically appears overs selected cells that are set to respond to formulas. I'm not sure if all of these features are new to Pages 3, but this is the first time I've noticed them – making certain tables much easier and more intuitive to generate than before.

setting conditional formatting


the new equation editor

Finally, Pages 3 features better compatibility with Word documents than its predecessors – even compatibility with Office 2007 Office Open XML files. This also applies to change tracking, which would not translate from Pages to Word or vice versa prior to this release. Now Mac users can use NeoOffice or iWork to interact with Office XML files. Ironically, a version of Microsoft Office for the Mac featuring this capability is not due out until early next year.

With Pages, Apple has made some relatively small changes that drastically effect its usability. In some regards, it feels like a new program altogether. I've been fond of Pages since its release and have used it pretty regularly. These enhancements will only serve to increase my use of and enjoyment with this application.

For more reading on Pages:

• Apple's Pages site
• Macworld: First Look at Pages '08

Tags: software, iwork, opinion

TUAW: John Lennon On iTunes

And we all download/And we all download...



Infinite Loop: RIP AppleWorks

I'm really surprised Apple killed this product today – more or less because I didn't know the product was still alive as of yesterday.

Tags: software, itunes/ipods

TUAW Exclusive: Pixelmator in-depth screencast

This app is just looking cooler and cooler. My wallet curses these awesome Mac software developers and their great products!



Ars Technica: Report: Gamers largely clueless about next-gen console media capabilities

Considering how insanely expensive these new consoles are coupled with the fact that 2/3 really need a HD-capable TV to show off their capabilities, this is truly surprising.



FatBits: Stuck on the enterprise

John Siracusa on Apple's focus on consumers:

Still holding that thought about the Intel stickers? Listen again to Steve's final words on the subject. "We put ourselves in the customer's shoes and say, what do we want?"

This is why Apple does not compete in the enterprise market in the traditional sense. This is why no other company created the iPhone. This is why most desktop PCs are pieces of crap. When you don't focus on the user, the user gets shafted.

Tags: macintosh, video games, software, apple inc

iWork '08 was released on August 7 with some improvements to the existing presentation and page layout applications and a brand-new spreadsheet application called Numbers. Over a series of three posts, I'm going to take a look at the new features introduced in this version of iWork.

• Keynote
• Pages
• Numbers

Keynote is the original member of what would eventually become iWork. It was released in 2003 and has seen three major updates since them, each bringing new functionality as well as general improvements.

One thing I noticed immediately in Keynote '08 was that the toolbar icons seem to have received some attention. I think this may be the first facelift the toolbar has received since the initial release. The toolbar is now unified, and the new icons are more illustrative than photographic.

Keynote '06 toolbar

Keynote '08 toolbar

The toolbar icons do not seem to be resolution independent, nor does the application icon support a 512x512 resolution, both expected due to the impending release of Leopard. However, digging through Keynote's packaged resources, I did find some icons for iChat Theater, which is a Leopard feature. Perhaps new icons will come in a software update. (I also noticed some other organizational differences in the package that I'll have to keep in mind when digging for resources.)

As far as visual enhancements to presentations go, Keynote '08 comes with a few new themes, transitions, and build effects, along with a new way of animating text and objects called Smart Builds.

You can see all the new themes above. My wife is very fond of Harmony, and I like Vellum and Industrial the most. I'm not too fond of Craft or Stock Book personally, but many of you will have different opinions. No Keynote themes seem to have been removed from the previous version in this upgrade, which is a first.

There are a few new 3D slide transitions: color planes, confetti, and swap, and there is one new 2D transition called Blur. New build animations include comet, confetti, drift, flame (which is terrible), and sparkle. Text builds contain all of these plus blast, bouncy, confetti, convergence, and squish. Some builds and transitions are amusing, needing to be avoided in professional presentations at all costs, while others like blur and drift can be quite dramatic.

Smart Builds create a sophisticated animation between objects – rotating or flipping between images. Really, seeing is better than explaining, so here's a video:

Click here for video

Another new visual flair comes by way of path animations, called Action Builds in Keynote. Basically you can determine a path for text or an image to follow, but the neat thing is that the object can change states while progressing along its path. For example, an image can change size or opacity during its transition. You can set items to move along a straight or a curved path. Again, showing is better than explaining:

Click here for video

Keynote has gained some interface refinements in a smart formatting bar (which I will talk more about in the Pages overview) and live image resizing within a mask – making the task of resizing masked objects far less tedious than the preceding version of Keynote. Also, you can now record your voice in sync with your slides and animations. Couple this with the fact that Keynote integrates with iTunes and Garageband, and you have a nice way of sharing your presentations with audio. The recording options are limited, but patience will yield decent results.

Another advertised new feature is Instant Alpha, which brings another image editing capability to Keynote (like shape masking and Image Adjust in the previous version). Instant Alpha is designed to quickly and easily remove backgrounds from photographs.

x

It's important that the background is pretty solid and distinctly contrasts from the main image. Otherwise, the results can get messy. It's a feature that works well enough to be a timesaver, but it can't altogether replace a more professional graphics app if you use alpha transparencies a lot. (Hint: using shadows can hide rough edges in the Instant Alpha transparency.)

FInally, it's possible to add special frames around images in Keynote slides outside the usual shadows and lines. In the object inspector, there is a Picture Frame option under "Stroke," and you will be able to choose from twelve different frames available to that theme. It's not a huge feature, but both my wife and I would have loved this option with some projects we did last year and earlier this year.



That covers most of Keynote's new features. Most of it is good stuff, and I've only run into a couple bugs so far. The only problem with all of these great improvements is avoiding going overboard when creating a presentation. If you have a Mac, you really should own iWork, and I think that will become more evident as we look at more of this application suite.

For more reading on Keynote's new features:

• Apple's Keynote Page
• Keynote User: Quick Keynote '08 New Feature List
• Macworld: First Look: Keynote '08

And don't forget to check out my iWork tagged Flickr photos!

Tags: software, opinion, iwork, keynote

Presentation Zen: Steve Jobs and the art of the swordsman

This is a good post by Garr Reynolds about the Art of Steve when it comes to presentations. Good stuff.



Ars Technica: Adobe, Microsoft accused of infringing on browser-related patents

Here we go again. All I want to know is why this company was awarded this patent years after this specific interface paradigm was already in use.



Apple – QuickTIme – Apple Special Event – August 2007

If you want to watch Steve Jobs' presentation from yesterday, it's right here. A fast connection is recommended.



Apple – iWork – Trial

If you have a Mac, you should download the trial version of iWork '08. It's only a 469 MB download!



Wired: Aug. 7, 1991: Ladies and Gentlemen, the World Wide Web

The "tubes" went public, and the world began to change.



Engadget: Apple calls multitouch Mac a "research project"

Sounds like Apple is still considering adding multitouch support to Macs. Chances are, this will show up in notebooks before desktops. I was not suprised that yesterdays announcements did not include a multitouch Mac.

Tags: powerpoint, microsoft, software, macintosh, apple inc, browsers, adobe

Apple's press event today contained virtually no true surprises, but that doesn't mean there isn't some good stuff here for any tech enthusiast to get excited about.

New iMac

The new iMac is very similar in form to its predecessor but just a tad sleeker. They took a good design and made it better. Just for reference, here's a picture of the previous model and the new side by side.



I'm not too sure what else to write about this upgrade. The specs are nice, and the prices are even better than before – especially on the higher end models. I've already written a bit about the new keyboard. I like the looks, but I'd definitely want to get my hands on one before purchasing. (But it would look nice attached to my old but reliable PowerMac G5...)

The only weird bit is the wireless version of the keyboard. It has no number pad. It's layout is basically that of a laptop keyboard – which is what I primarily use. However, some consumers and business folks might not like that.

the wireless keyboard

iLife '08

This came as a surprise to me because I really wasn't expecting iLife to be upgraded until Leopard came out this October. Among other improvements, iPhoto has gained the ability to automatically show or hide given photos in your library. It has a new organization option called "Events," and it has gained the ability to publish to a [dot] Mac web gallery with some sleek effects.

iDVD has received some new themes and better encoding while iMovie looks like a whole new application (with a new icon even). It can now manage videos (a la iPhoto) as well as create. iMovie integrates with [dot] Mac and YouTube, and it features a retooled interface for making movie creation even easier. I guess Apple felt like they needed to do something new with this app since Windows Movie Maker was so capably aping it!

iMovie

iWeb has seen some basic improvements in theme handling, and it now supports personal domains. It features Google Maps and Adsense integration as well as Web Widgets – showcasing content from other sites like Twitter, Flickr, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the blogging component has received much attention based on the website. Finally, GarageBand comes with new arranging and automation capabilities as well as a new visual equalizer. Magic GarageBand is a new mode that allows you to quickly experiment with and create new music.

In all, the upgrades are pretty small, but the enhancements to iMovie seem worth the price alone.

iWork '08

This was another upgrade that I thought would not be coming until after Leopard (and one I'll be posting some more on after I finish downloading the 469 MB demo). It turns out, according to John Gruber, iWork installs the Leopard ImageKit for Tiger users. I wonder if any other apps can take advantage of ImageKit once it's there.

Keynote features new path animations (huzzah), new text effects, transitions, and themes, and it has a new feature called Instant Alpha that is supposed to remove the background from an image. I'm assuming the background needs to be solid, but I'll find out when I start playing around. Pages seems to have borrowed a trick from Microsoft with contextual toolbars. It also features separate modes for word processing and page layout, and its tracking feature is now compatible with Word.


the new contextual toolbar

The big news in iWork is a new spreadsheet application called Numbers that claims Excel compatibility. It features the same simple interface as Keynote and Pages, and it offers flexible ways to analyze variable in your data to see instantaneous results. I'm going to be doing a lot of spreadsheet work this coming school year, so this application really intrigues me.


Numbers

Other Updates

A few other products got quiet upgrades today. The Mac mini was boosted to Core 2 Duo processors and 1 GB of default memory. Airport Extreme received gigabit ethernet. [dot] Mac storage was bumped to 10 GB (from 1 GB) with 100 GB of monthly data transfer as well as new web gallery support and server-side spam filtering, which should make some iPhone users happier. Finally, the MacPro gets a new PCI RAID option for those of you with an extra $999 laying around.

All in all, it's been a busy day in Apple product news. My favorite bits are the iWork upgrade and the new iMac, but I'm also happy about the bumped [dot] Mac storage. I'll be back on in a couple of days with some iWork '08 impressions!

all images in this post are courtesy Apple, Inc.

Tags: macintosh, opinion, software

In 1999, Apple released a humble product called Mac OS X (pronounced "ten") Server 1.0. In look and feel, the operating system was very similar to Mac OS 8 (and 9), but, beneath the interface, the system contained some drastic changes that would eventually revolutionize the entire Macintosh software line. It eschewed the classic Mac OS nanokernal for the NEXTSTEP hybrid kernel, and it contained a hybrid of classic Macintosh features and NEXTSTEP features – even requiring an emulation layer to run classic Mac OS applications. This Mac OS was unlike anything that had come before it. In fact, it was really Mac OS in name only.

A Little Background

In 1986, two years after the introduction of the Macintosh and and the Mac OS, Steve Jobs found himself ousted from the company he helped create. Ever the entrepeneuer, he quickly launched into two new ventures – one was an unwanted animation studio that would become Pixar, and the other was a new computer company called NeXT.

NeXT computers were technnically advanced for their time. They were released in 1990 with 25MHz processors, 8 MB RAM, an ethernet port, 256 MB storage, and a 1120x832 display. In contrast, typical machines of the time would have had 16MHz processors, 640 kb RAM, no networking, 10-40 MB storage, and 640x350 displays. NeXT Computer is considered a pioneer in brigning networking to desktop computers. The first email programs and web browsers were developed for NeXT. Unfortunately, the NeXT hardware was doomed to failure (mainly due to prohibitively high costs), but the operating system would live on.

NEXTSTEP was released in the days of Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7, and it stood out from its competition both visually and in capabilities.



Mac OS 7, Windows 3.1, and NEXTSTEP. These screenshots are all courtesy of Wikipedia.

NEXTSTEP was based on the Mach kernel and BSD. It featured object-oriented programming based on the Objective-C language. It was meant to be viewed on higher-resolution displays, and it included many software tools for networking and collaboration. Additionally, NEXTSTEP was the first general operating system to handle color standards, advanced sound processing, modern typography, and internationalization. It's interface featured real-time scrolling and window dragging as well as window notifications and transparency. Again, this was all in the early 90's, well before the world would be captivated by Windows 95.

NEXTSTEP faded into obscurity after the mass adoption of Windows 95, but it would find a strange rebirth in 1996 when it was acquired by Apple, and Steve Jobs returned to the company that had rejected him ten years prior.

Reinventing the Mac OS

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple through the NEXT acquisition, Apple had already put massive efforts into overhauling the Mac OS through the Copland and Taligent projects (though some Copland features were eventually incorporated into OS X). Both of these systems were laid to rest in the late nineties in favor of Rhapsody, an operating system based primarily on the OPENSTEP (neé NEXTSTEP) operating system. Rhapsody eventually became Mac OS X Server 1.0 which would lead to the public beta of Mac OS X.


OPENSTEP and Rhapsody (both courtesy GUIdebook) side by side

Though called Mac OS, system 10 shared little in common with the previous Mac operating systems outside some superficial interface elements. Like NEXTSTEP, Mac OS X is based on the Mach kernel and BSD Unix. They are both object-oriented environments based on the Objective-C programming language. Both feature a dock, system services, managed memory, and preemptive multitasking. In fact, if you crack open the UI of most Mac OS X applications, you will find files with the extension ".nib" contained within. NIB is short for NeXT Interface Builder.

Like Mac OS X Server 1.0 and the Rhapsody developer builds, Mac OS X is incapable of natively running applications written for previous versions of the Mac OS. These applications were relegated to a "blue box" called Classic, and they could not take advantage of Mac OS X's more advanced features. The Classic layer, effectively the final vestiges of the original Mac OS, lost support with the recent Intel-transition of Macintosh computers, placing the final nails in the coffin of the system that served Apple since 1984.


System 1.1 (from GUIdebook) next to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (from Apple)

As John Siracusa wrote last year (on the fifth anniversary of Mac OS X), "The Mac is dead. Long live the Mac." OS X is Mac OS in name only. Truth be told, Mac OS X is the never-released NEXTSTEP 5, for the system shares much more in common with that legacy than with the Mac OS legacy. Apple took a daring move with Mac OS X in that they completely pulled the rug out from under their current OS foundation and replaced it with something entirely new – a feat that other OS vendors have been reluctant to attempt.

As Mac OS X becomes a more mature product, it resembles NEXTSTEP more and more while retaining the style and simplicity Mac users have come to expect. NEXTSTEP and the classic Mac OS were products doomed to failure – the former for being too far ahead of the times and the latter for being to far behind – but Apple has created a powerful and stable operating environment from the ashes of both, similar to each but ultimately original and innovative.

Tags: software, macintosh, leopard, os x

#open.ended: OLPC project tests WebKit on the XO laptop

And WebKit continues to gain momentum as a viable alternative web rendering engine.



Insanely Great News: Paperclip: Designed by Apple in California

This has to be the most hilarious thing I've seen today. The "instruction manual" is priceless.



Opposable Thumbs: A look at the possible racism in Resident Evil 5

Personally, I prefer Silent Hill over Resident Evil any day, but this still an interesting issue to watch.

From the article:

The game is being designed by Japanese artists, not white Americans. The game uses a well-established character from the Resident Evil series who is white, Chris Redfield. Capcom wanted to move the setting to Africa, where most people are black. I don't think Capcom ever sat down and thought about the political reasons for having a white soldier against black zombies, it was simply an organic continuation of a story and a character that began years ago.

Tags: silly, software, video games

Ars Technica: Autism May All Be In the Genes

I tend to be skeptical of all-or-nothing correlations in behavioral science. An individual may be more prone to autistic tendencies due to genetic makeup, but environment will still influence the development of a social disorder to some extent.

However, I do have to admit a biased viewpoint...



The WebKit Open Source Project: WebKit Project Goals

WebKit development is surprisingly transparent when compared to Apple as a whole. Check this out for an idea of where they are taking WebKit, the most prolific web content engine for Mac OS X.



Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

Overall, another very good quarter for Apple. Hopefully, they will get their products to comply with the new Energy Star standards by the end of the current quarter.

Tags: education, software, browsers, apple inc, asd, science

Specere: Menuet and Art Collector are now Charityware

From the site:

We're going to give you Menuet and Art Collector, and all we ask for in return is that you'll donate what you can to a charity. If you can't donate money to one of the charities offered through our site, please go ahead and help out some local charities with old clothes or perhaps some of your time as a volunteer.

Ars Technica: RIAA spends thousands to obtain $300 judgment

Don't these guys have anything better to do with their time and resources?



Indexed: Do Your Thing

This makes me happy.

Tags: software, riaa

Ars: Technica: Gaming has no significant effects on schoolwork, sociability: study

From the article:

Instead of turning kids into loners, gaming largely fell in line with general trends of social interactions. Although there was some variability between the sexes, children who gamed with their friends generally spent more time with friends in every other activity.

and:

If people are concerned about the lack of reading done by adolescents, the fact that non-gamers spend only eight minutes a day reading should be a far larger concern than the fact that gaming causes that figure to drop by a little more than two minutes.

Yet the mainstream media put this study in a far more negative light.



YouTube: iPhone: The Music Video

This is hilarious, and no tech writer but David Pogue could pull this off! (By the way, is that New York representative John Hall at 2:16 in this video? If not, the guy bears an uncanny resemblance!)





RealMac Forge

Realmac Forge is an open-source portal for Realmac Software products. Realmac Forge was set up so users and developers can collaborate and produce new and exciting plugins for RapidWeaver.

Tags: video games, education, silly, software, iphone

Kwik-E-Mart - a photoset on Flickr

Brilliant marketing. Absolutely brilliant.



Perian: The Swiss-Army Knife for QuickTime

Perian is a free open source plug-in that greatly expands QuickTIme's file compatibility. This is a must-have for every Mac use.



Playlist: iTunes loses lock on Universal music

I can't tell if this is really a big deal or not. Basically, Universal is giving Apple the same treatment they give other music retailers now. The quote from an Apple rep in this article makes absolutely no sense. I think someone forgot to proofread:

“We are still negotiating with Universal, the music is still on iTunes, and their not resigning is just not true,” said Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr.

Internet Nexus: Apple apparently sold a lot of iPhones

Three sources, three widely different sales projections. Apparently Apple sold somethere between 200,000 and 700,000 iPhones this weekend ... give or take a few.

Tags: silly, software, itunes/ipods, iphone

Intrepid Liberal Journal: Workers Have the Right To Remain Silent: A Podcast Interview With the ACLU's Bruce Barry

Basically, employers can currently ignore the First Amendment rights of their employees – and this should be especially important to bloggers. If you write or say something that upsets them, contradicts decisions, upsets their political views, or merely generally irritates them, they may fire you. The podcast discusses the issue very thoroughly.

It's ironic that I should stumble upon this story on the tenth anniversary of this Supreme Court decision (and I don't mean ironic in the rain-on-your-wedding-day way).



PC Magazine Review: Dell XPS M1330

This is, without a doubt, the sexiest Windows-based laptop ever created. If it weren't for the blue LEDs and the obligatory marketing stickers, it might just be as drool-worthy as a MacBook Pro.

However, we need to work on the name. XPS M1330? That's like running into a strikingly beautiful and achingly intelligent woman but learning her name is Hanktrude. It just mars the experience. Anyway, cool features, light, small, $2,200. Check it out if you use THOSE computers.



Here are a bunch of prerelease reviews of the iPhone. Nothing staggering here at all. THe general gist is that the iPhone works exactly as advertized (including the improved battery life). The touch screen works well but takes getting used to. EDGE is slow. If you want to read the full reviews, click away!

• The Mossberg Solution: The iPhone is a Breakthrough Handheld Computer
• NYT: The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype
• Newsweek: At Last, the iPhone
• USAToday: Apple's iPhone Isn't Perfect, But It's Worthy of the Hype

So will the iPhone do to the mobile phone industry what the iPod did for digital music. Who knows? It could be incredible. It could be the next iPod HiFi. Still, if I try one out in a store and don't instantly dislike it, that will say a lot about it as a cell phone!

via DF and TUAW



Oliver Toast: Introducing MiniMail

This small app creates a small notification window for Apple's Mail application – much like the notifier featured in modern versions of Outlook.


screenshot by Oliver Toast

It's a neat idea, and it costs $9. Personally, I'm happy with Mail.appetizer which offers the same basic functionality for free. (However, MiniMail definitely offers more features.) Here's what Mail.appetizer looks like:





Ars Technica: Microsoft's anti-virtualization stance: forget DRM, think Apple

Ken Fisher thinks Microsoft's stance that limitation of Home editions of Windows virtualization based on DRM concerns is a snowjob. The real motivation may be to make it more expensive for Mac users to create virtual Windows machines.

Microsoft using arbitrary methods to stifle the competition? I can't imagine...



Ars Technica: Exonerated defendant sues RIAA for malicious prosecution

The title says it all.

Tags: technology, software, microsoft, riaa

Ambrosia Software: SnapzProX

Me (embarassedly): "Oh, so you are a universal app now. Well, that sure took a while. Um ... you know, after you didn't speak to me for months I thought you had ... you know ... called it quits. So, yeah, I've been seeing this younger and lighter screenshot utility. Um, no hard feelings?"



I totally did not see this coming. No, really! No sarcasm here. Honestly, I expected Manhunt 2 to recieve some controversy, get mediocre reviews, and sell decently – but for it to get banned from its target consoles? Paint me green and call me Gumby! And I thought Hot Coffee was a train wreck!

• Opposable Thumbs: The Manhunt Saga: ESRB assigns AO rating
• 1UP: The Murder of Manhunt 2: One Day Later
• 1Up: Nintendo, Sony Policies Prohibit AO Manhunt 2

By the way, Manhunt 2 is one of only 23 games to receive the esteemed AO rating. Manhunt 2 now joins the honorable ranks of such titles as WET-The Sexy Empire, All Nude Nikki, and Cyber Photographer. That's classy!



Rands In Repose: Keynote Kung-Fu

Learn subtle ways of Keynote, young grasshopper, and stun many throngs.


Um ... HADOKEN!!!

Tags: software, video games, keynote

Ars Technica: First look: Safari 3 beta on Windows vs. Firefox 2 and IE7

It's sad to hear that the release of Safari on Windows is not better executed. Yes, this is beta software, but it is also software Apple is sticking in front of the world to use and abuse. Though not the absolute best, Safari is still a fine browser for Mac OS X. I hope Apple reacts quickly to the criticism their browser is receiving on Windows.

Tags: software, browsers

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

Now that we've looked at RapidWeaver's improvements and drawbacks, this post will be dedicated to looking at two of RapidWeaver's alternatives on the Macintosh as well as some useful add-ons for RW.

iWeb – Apple; Preinstalled; $80 (part of iLife)
If you've bought a Mac in the last year or so, you have iWeb already. iWeb is part of Apple's excellent iLife suite of lifestyle applications. (iMovie, iDVD, Garageband, and iPhoto are also part of the iLife package.) iLife is geared toward making blogs, online newsletters, and photo galleries a simple process. It succeeds in this admirably as long as you are okay with its limitations.

Like Apple's iWork applications, iWeb is heavily template based. You choose what kind of website you want to create, and iWeb offers a set of templates you can choose from. As expected, the templates are well designed and visually pleasant.


choosing an iWeb template

Once you pick a template, editing the site is much like editing a document. You plug in images and text where appropriate, and the process is very fast and fluid. Performance is snappy, and it's possible to generate a nice looking site with little effort and no specialized web knowledge.


editing a site in iWeb

The iWeb experience is great, but the limitations become apparent quickly. First and foremost, straying from the template layout can become a pain – especially in blogging where every new entry reverts back to the default settings. Blogs do not support tags or categories, and there is no easy way to install custom templates or permanently modify those included. Finally, iWeb defaults to PNG images, which are great, but some browsers (read: Internet Explorer) do not always handle them correctly. This means your iWeb page may not look the same in different browsers.

iWeb is a nice application, and I actually prefer working in iWeb over RapidWeaver, but RapidWeaver is far superior in terms of flexibility, features, and browser compatibility.

Sandvox – Karelia Software; $50 (standard), $80 (pro)
Sandvox was introduced scant weeks before the introduction of Apple's iWeb as an alternative to RapidWeaver. Like these other applications, it's purpose is to give non-web designers a simple way to create great looking sites. Sandvox comes in two editions with the Pro version allowing for more direct code interaction and modification. Sandvox has a very unique interface and some interesting options in creating web sites.

Like iWeb and RapidWeaver, Sandvox is template based.


the template gallery

Similar to iWeb, you get to directly edit the site visually. Whenever anything is changed in a sub-page, the homepage is automatically updated to reflect that content. Also, one feature I really like in Sandvox is something called Pagelets where you can add Digg links, Flickr photostreams, RSS feeds, page counters, and other useful content to your sidebar with one click. Sandvox also boasts some nice eye candy in browsing and changing site themes.


editing a site in Sandvox

I feel like Sandvox's blogging tool is awkward, and, like iWeb, there seems to be no support for categories and tags. The templates' properties (like page-width and colors) are not easily modified, and, in stark contrast to RapidWeaver, the developer's website does not facilitate easy discovery of third-party themes, pagelets, and plug-ins. Additionally, sites created in Sandvox have a default homepage that you can't manually bypass or remove.

Out of these three apps, I like Sandvox the least, but your personal preferences may differ. Sandvox is a nice step up from iWeb, but it still falls short of RapidWeaver's standard in my opinion.

Buying Advice: RapidWeaver – Realmac Software; $50
My money went to RapidWeaver before iWeb and Sandvox were even available, but my purchasing advice hasn't changed. RapidWeaver does have a higher learning curve than these alternatives, and it does have some issues, but it is the best way to quickly and inexpensively produce a nice-looking site. It supports every feature a modern website is expected to have, and an active development community creates even more possibilities for the application.

If you already have iWeb on your computer and it meets your needs, go with it. It's a great program and produces nice web pages. However, if you want to move past iWeb's limitations, get RapidWeaver. You won't regret it.

Useful RapidWeaver Resources

Themes. The first place you might want to start expanding RapidWeaver is in your theme collection. There are a number of first and third-party themes available for free and for purchase. Some theme developers include: elixer graphics, Blue Ball Design, Multithemes, and seyDesign. Additionally, Realmac offers some additional business themes and blog themes of their own, and they showcase themes by other developers. Finally, a site called Charcoal on the Wall is a good place to go to browse and preview additional themes.

Plug-ins. Plug-ins extend RapidWeaver's functionality. For example, RapidFLV makes embedding Flash videos a simpler task. RapidBlog integrates RapidWeaver with Blogger, and YourHead Software offers a number of plug-ins designed to give your website some additional style and polish. Again, be sure to visit Relamac's page of plug-ins for even more great add-ons.

There is even more – downloadable theme styles, code snippets and even some utilities are available to enhance the RapidWeaver experience. In addition to the add-ons section of RapidWeaver's site, the RealMac forums are a great place to discover more about this application and complimentary products.

That wraps up this look at RapidWeaver 3.6. I hope you found it informative and useful – if not at least interesting. RapidWeaver is a great application for simplifying the process of making a web site. It's reasonably priced for the features it offers. It has a great development community built up around it, and I'll definitely be purchasing an upgrade license in the near future. If you have a Mac, and you are interested in setting up a website, you can't go wrong with RapidWeaver.

Tags: opinion, software, rapidweaver

Introducing Sibelius 5



I'm happy to see this Universal Binary of Sibelius finally come out. I'll post some impressions of the demo once I get done with the RapidWeaver posts.

PS – It's lame that Scorch is still PPC-only. C'mon, how hard is it to update a browser plug-in?



Opposable Thumbs: Microsoft seeks answer to question, "Would global warming make for a good game?"

I picture controlling Al Gore racing his hybrid through angry mobs of staunch republicans in a Grand Theft Auto-inspired gore-fest. (No pun intended!) After escaping, you would have to coordinate your fellow environmentalists in covert stealth missions (Sam Fisher-style) that infiltrate heavily-armed Big Oil corporate offices where you ultimately will battle Mother Brain. (After all, there is no possible way these oil execs are really human.)

Side missions may include freezing ice cubes big enough to cool the oceans, setting up polar bear habitats, and discovering alternatives to using oil in producing plastics. Man I need to learn game design. I think I have a winner. Now if I can only talk Al into some voiceovers...



Apple – Safari 3 Public Beta

This is a smart move by Apple. More users will drive better support by web developers. This benefits Mac users and iPhone users. Not to mention (as DF points out) that this will lead to a bunch more integrated search revenue from Yahoo! and Google.

Windows users, get downloading! Mac users, hold your horses. It doesn't offer much the current version lacks, and updating may hose other WebKit-based apps and widgets. (Trust me on this one.)



Daring Fireball: WWDC 2007 News

He calls it "WWDC 2006 2.0." While I am stoked about Leopard, I have to admit that I felt pretty "meh" about the other announcements.



Apple.com



I like. When you visit, try the search field in the upper-right corner. I was pleasantly surprised.

Tags: software, video games, environment, microsoft, browsers, wwdc, apple inc

Steve Jobs outlined some more info about Leopard during his Keynote speech at this years WWDC, and Apple's website has even more. Here are some of the overall impressions I've gained.

Eye Candy Is Important

One of the big changes (improvements may be debatable) in Leopard is in the visuals. Everything seems geared toward visual impressiveness. This user interface (UI) is intended to make people look at Vista and think it looks clunky.

x



x
all images from apple.com

I've read many power-users bemoaning the fact that visual flair is becoming too emphasized in modern operating systems, and it doesn't look like that trend is reversing anytime soon. Personally, I like visual enhancements so long as they do not come at a cost to usability. The only complaint here is in the menu bar. The menus look out-of-place when invoked.


it's translucent now

iTunes = Mac Experience

Apple wants iTunes users to feel right at home in the Leopard UI – iTunes being the only Apple interface many potential users have daily contact with. As a result, the majority of the system resembles iTunes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the revamped Finder.


image from apple.com

From the window design to the sidebar to Cover Flow, the Finder basically recreates the iTunes experience in file management. The message: "If you enjoy using iTunes, you will enjoy using a Mac."

Organize Your Way

Stacks, the Dock, smart folders, Cover Flow, Quick View, Spaces – all of this gives the user greater flexibility in how he or she uses a Mac.


a stack of documents (from apple.com)


Quick View in Time Machine (from apple.com)

It's all about giving you greater flexibility and more options in how and where you access your files, media, and applications. Content is king, and Apple is giving us many ways to experience, organize, and access that content.

One Size Fits All

Steve Jobs made a joke during his talk that Leopard will come in three editions – Basic at $129, Premium at $129, and Ultimate at $129. He thinks most people will buy the Ultimate Edition. The simple fact is that you don't have to worry about which version of the OS to upgrade to because there is only one. Ease-of-use is a hallmark of the Macintosh experience, and that simplicity begins with the purchasing process.

Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on Leopard in October.

Tags: software, opinion, macintosh, leopard, wwdc, os x

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

As much as I respect and enjoy RapidWeaver as a product, there are some areas in which the software could still use improvement in the new version. Fortunately, RapidWeaver recently saw a 3.6.1 update that resolved a couple of the issues I was going to write about, so that was a welcome surprise.

Inconsistent Performance

iWeb is not one of my favorite Apple products, but one thing it has going for it is performance. It can open and save my website (100+ MB) in mere seconds, sometimes perceptually instantaneously. RapidWeaver is another story. In fact, this is my biggest complaint about RapidWeaver, and, if this one problem was fixed, I'd be satisfied. The simple truth is that loading and saving large documents in RapidWeaver is a pain, and the new version shows no significant improvements in this area.

To test performance, I ran these tests 3-6 times, depending on application crashes and tester errors. I then averaged the numbers. The only open applications were Pages, RapidWeaver, and Activity Monitor. The test computer has a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 1 GB of memory. The document is 122 MB.

Here are the averages of opening my site in RapidWeaver 3.5 and RapidWeaver 3.6:

RW 3.6 only shows real improvement in CPU usage here. RapidWeaver 3.5 suffered two application crashes in this test, and version 3.6 suffered zero. Anecdotally, I've had version 3.5 take up to two minutes to load my site document on several occasions.

Here are the numbers for saving:

Note that version 3.6 is actually more resource-hungry that 3.5 in saving the same document. Neither version crashed while saving. Annoyingly, my computer becomes basically unusable during the saving process, and, again, I've encountered numerous occasions where RapidWeaver 3.5 has taken much longer to save a file than these numbers show.

FInally, take a look at RapidWeaver's overall memory usage. This is memory usage while completely idle:

While using RapidWeaver, it gradually consumes more and more resources. Unfortunately, after quitting, those resources sometimes stay tied up, leaving the computer in a state where performance is going to be generally poor – forcing a restart to reclaim that memory.

This is my biggest complaint about RapidWeaver, and again, I would be happy if performance was the only big issue the Realmac team tackled for version 3.7. I don't know how many other RapidWeaver users share this opinion, but fantastic new features can be tarnished when the most basic tasks – loading and saving – are an aversive experience.

Other Issues

I really only a few additional complaints about RapidWeaver 3.6. The inability to create tables within the application is a pain. (The tables in this post are screenshots of Pages.) Not all included themes take advantage of the Theme Styles I praised in the previous post. All new themes have flexible color settings while many of the older themes do not. It would also be nice if user's could link to hosted images rather than embedding them into the blog file. Finally, there is still no easy way to set a site's default font. If I want my blog to be in a different font, I would either have to edit the css file or change the font one entry at a time.

That's really it as far as criticism goes. RapidWeaver is a very nice application with just a few small issues. For me, performance is the biggest issue, and, if that could be resolved, RapidWeaver 3.6 would be a near-perfect application for my purposes.

In the next post about RapidWeaver, I'll share some info about competing products, useful add-ons, and buying advice for version 3.6.

Update: You can in fact link to images in the blog editor. You just have to use "img src=" bracketed by < >. (I was making a mistake!)

Tags: software, opinion, rapidweaver

Ars Technica: Product loyalty: consumers mistake familiarity with superiority

Basically, this article states the obvious point that we value familiarity in products we use. However, I think our tendency toward "Cognitive Lock-in" makes leading technology companies wary of truly innovating.

From the article:

Overall, the results suggest that all the years of arguments over the relative merits of things like the Mac and Windows user interfaces were a waste of time: we're generally convinced that whatever we're familiar with is the best.

Apple – MacBook Pro



Faster processors, faster buses, more default memory, faster burners – what's not to like? Oh, and the 15" uses an LED display resulting in some better battery life.



OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X

As excited as I am about this project, I think I'll wait to download until the list of known issues stops saying things like, "You cannot print" and "OpenOffice.org will crash after quitting."

Another thing: does anyone else find it strange that they refer to the application as OpenOffice.org rather than just OpenOffice? Seems odd to me...

Tags: macintosh, software

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

Though the blogging tool is certainly the most important to me, RapidWeaver has seen some further improvements in its most recent point release. In this post, we'll take a look at some of those other enhancements.

Photo Albums

The interface for creating photo albums has hardly changed at all, except for the removal of picture previews and the ability to add some text at the top of the album page. Those seem like strange omissions, and it makes me wonder if I am perhaps merely missing something in the interface.

x
3.5 on the left; 3.6 on the right

The real change comes with the way the photo album module handles Flash slideshows. The previous version looked nice already, but the new slideshow offers better navigation, background audio, a variety of transitions, and the "Ken Burns" effect.

x
3.5 on the left; 3.6 on the right

FInally, the photo album offers integration with Flickr photostreams. All you have to do is have a Flickr RSS feed, and RapidWeaver will showcase your hosted pictures.

Theme Styles

This feature has been pretty heavily emphasized, and I have to admit that it's a welcome addition to the software. In previous versions of RapidWeaver, a theme might have a predetermined set of color schemes, but, for real control, you had to resort to opening the theme package and editing the css stylesheet.

x
3.5 on the left; 3.6 on the right

This new feature gives you nearly unlimited control over the way colors are used on your site. However, for control freaks, some css editing might still be necessary. This features is not currently implemented consistently across all themes, and we'll take a look at that in my next post.

The Kitchen Sink

RapidWeaver 3.6 also boasts a number of other small improvements that make the software even better. A Snippets pane allows you to store commonly-accessed HTML code for easy retrieval. The application has improved making lists. The various inspectors have been consolidated and simplified – making for better usability. The software also performs better overall (with a couple of caveats). In all, RapidWeaver 3.6 is an impressive update filled with great new features and welcome improvements.

In the next installment, we'll take a look at some of the issues I've run into using this software. Stay tuned!

Tags: software, opinion, rapidweaver

Whoa. I completely let these events get past me. The first link is an interview between Walt Mossberg and Steve Jobs and the second is a combined discussion by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage together. Good stuff!

• D5: Apple CEO Steve Jobs [Video]
• D5: Transcript – Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at D5

Apple - iPhone - TV Ads

The name says it all ... coming June 29. Me? I just want an iPod that looks like one of these. The sooner iPhone gets out of the gate, the sooner a widescreen iPod takes a bite out of my wallet.



Polar Clock

This clock is completely mesmerizing.



Bean: An OS X Word Processor



This is a lightweight, free, open-souce word processor for OS X. It has broad document compatibility, but its features are somewhat limited (as is to be expected with free software). I've only used it once so far, but it seems to be stable and snappy. Really, my only complaint is that the toolbar icons could look a little bit nicer. Head over to the site, and download it for your Mac!

Tags: software, technology, iphone

RapidWeaver 3.6 was released a couple of weeks ago by Realmac Software. Since this site is maintained using RapidWeaver, I am very interested in this application's progress. Over a few separate posts, we're going to explore new features and improvements in the software, areas that are problematic, and we'll finish up with some final thoughts and advice.

Posts in this series:
Improved Blogging • Other Improvements • Picking Nits • Alternatives and Wrap-Up

I spend most of my time in the blog editor of RapidWeaver, so I'm going to concentrate on that component for the entirety of this post. You can see in the screenshots below that the interface for editing blogs has not changed much since the last version. Some interface elements have been added, but little else has changed. However, those small changes add up to some welcome new capabilities.

x
3.5 on the left • 3.6 on the right

Instead of using drop-down menus for categories, RW 3.6 uses a text field that will auto-complete as you type. Tapping Return/Enter will add the category. This text field also facilitates adding multiple categories to a post – a welcome enhancement to RapidWeaver's blogging tool.


title and category in 3.5


title and categories in 3.6

Tagging works much the same way in RW 3.6. This generates a tag cloud in your sidebar with frequently-used tags appearing in larger text than more infrequently used tags. This is another feature I'm excited to see appear.

x
a couple of RapidWeaver tag clouds

The only other real difference I noted in blog editing is the fact that you can now choose whether or not an entry is published from the main list. In the previous RapidWeaver version, you had to select a post first, then choose to publish it or not.



Overall, the enhancements to the blog editing tool in RapidWeaver are welcome changes. The typing of categories and tags really goes much more quickly than menus. (Fortunately, tapping Esc will bring up a list of categories and tags.)

The enhancements look minor, but they bring a lot of nice functionality to blogging with RW. I've already begun converting the blog portions of this site over to RapidWeaver 3.6, but it's going to take a while due to some snags I've run into with the migration process. (That will be a topic for a later post.) Next time we'll take a look at some of the other new features – including a nicely improved photo gallery.

Tags: software, opinion, rapidweaver

Edutopia: Fast Forward: A School District Redefines Learning

Not only is this a nice article promoting project approach learning, but the elementary school I work at is featured in the article!


some of the wonderful children I work with


two of my favorite people



Pixelmator



This is an open-source based commercial photo editor with a very unique-looking interface. It also integrates with a lot of Mac OS X technologies, and it features GPU acceleration. It's due out in July and will cost $59. I'll definitely be downloading this when it becomes available.

Also, TUAW has posted a video of the application in action.

Tags: education, work, software

Another year has past, and another memories DVD is finished for our outgoing fifth graders. This year's video project followed very much the same workflow as past years', and the entire process was very smooth.

The Good

The new MacBook Pro performed like a champ except for when I was overtaxing memory. I think it's already time to add a couple of gigs, but I only experienced one application (iDVD) hang throughout the entire process. Also, after burning 110 copies of the video, only one coaster was produced that I know of. Again, the results were good overall.

Keynote Pro's Barcelona theme and Keynote's own shape drawing capabilities came in handy. The drawing tools in Keynote enabled me to create "tabs" that helped make photographs in the video look mounted as if in a scrapbook. Barcelona helped create a very unique feel for the slides about a class trip, and I'll definitely be inclined to purchase additional themes from Keynote Pro in the future.

x

Finally, Lemkesoft's GraphicConverter gave me a good alternative to PhotoShop Elements (which is not yet a Universal Binary for Intel Macs). I was impressed with this software overall, but I may still get a new copy of PS Elements whenever a Universal Binary is released.

The Less Than Good

I wanted to use a song our children recorded as the background music to the video, but the sound quality of the recording was so poor, it really wasn't an option. The only other complaint I have is that a second Keynote theme I purchased, called Rounded Corners by PagesUser, wasn't as useful as I had hoped. (Also, the purchasing experience was pretty poor.)

I also have to continually remind myself that the transitions Push Up, Push Down, Grid Left, and Grid Right do not export to video correctly and should be avoided when building the slideshow in Keynote.

Final Note

This year's project was done with the same versions of iWork and iLife as last year, so everything went about the same. The better hardware smoothed out the process, but this year was really a refinement of last year's techniques. Hopefully, new versions of iWork and iLife will come along about the same time as Leopard, and I'll have some new features to play with for next time.

If you want to see a more detailed description of how I put these slideshow videos together, read this post on my Simply Presentation page: From Keynote to iDVD.

Tags: technology, software

Okay, I've about polished off my PS2 and GameCube libraries in the shadow of next-gen iterations. The PS2 hasn't been that difficult in that it has been insanely successful, so its games are still provided retail space. The 'Cube, however, is a different matter, and its titles are quickly vanishing into thin air.

A couple titles in particular have been especially elusive:

x

Chibi-Robo I can understand. It probably only sold marginally well at best, and it doesn't have any brand recognition going with it. Mario Tennis, on the other hand? I mean, really – I can find, Super Mario Sunshine, Mario Golf, Mario Kart, Mario Strikers, Mario Baseball, but no Mario Tennis! What gives? It's even going for an arm-and-a-leg secondhand on Amazon Marketplace!

I have to give an honorable mention to Zelda: The Minish Cap here, as well. This is another one of those fantastic Nintendo titles that just up and disappeared after a few months at retail.



I know I can fire up the credit card and buy these pre-owned, but I have a bias against that. Part of it is my autistic trait to want everything flawlessly new. (I will return a CD, game, or almost anything if the packaging is so much as scratched.) However, I also have a problem with the fact that the publisher gets no kickback from used copies and is therefore unrewarded for the great title they produced.

Oh well, the obsessive-compulsive completion nut in me might just override the obsessive-compulsive media moralist. Amazon Marketplace may be my last refuge of 'Cube hope!

Tags: video games, software

Photo Drop

This is an amazing little widget aimed at quick-and easy photo resizing and editing. It's free, so try it out if you're a Mac user!

Tags: software

MacWorld: Mac native OpenOffice gets shot in the arm from Sun

This is becoming like the Duke Nukem Forever of Mac ports.

Tags: software

It's been a busy week in the world of indie Mac developers. Instead of creating several tiny links to these products, here's a quick look at some of the bigger releases in the past week:

Panic – Coda
From the site:

So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, running queries in Terminal, using a CSS editor, and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we realized. “And much cooler.”

x

Coda is simply a one-stop solution for individuals who like to hand code their web sites. Right now, it's a bit over my head, but I'll keep revisiting it as my coding skills improve. John Gruber has some interesting thoughts on the product right here, and I was also pointed to this post on Upstart Blogger with thirty tips and tricks for Coda.

Coda is a very accessible application, and the UI is gorgeous. The price is a bit steep, though, at $99. However, Panic is offering Coda for $79 right now.

MacRabbit – CSSEdit 2.5
This is another product aimed at web developers, and it is specifically designed for editing CSS stylesheets. It is a very nice-lloking application. The feature-set is good, and the price of $30 is not bad at all for the functionality it offers.

x

CSSEdit is especially handy for tracking downs specific elements you might want to change, and you can preview those changes live. This application just keeps continuing to impress me. I've had some experience manually tweaking CSS stylesheets, and this product is just fantastic for that.

Peter Borg – Smultron 3.0
Smultron is a free text editor that is aimed at beginning and advanced coders. It supports syntax coloring (for several different programming languages from .ASP to Fortran to Ruby to Lua), split window editing, line numbers, Java compiling, code validation, and may other advanced features. Is it as comprehensive as something like TextMate? I don't actually know, but it's pretty good, and the price can't be beat if it meets your needs.

x

Rogue Amoeba – Fission 1.5
Like many great applicaitons, Fission is a very simple tool. It's aimed at editing and converting audio files losslessly. You can copy and paste audio files, split long files into shorter segments, cut unwanted sections, or tweak volume levels. The interface is clear and accessible, and, as an added bonus to Rogue Amoeba fans, the applications integrates tightly with Audio Hijack Pro.



Fission costs $32, but owners of Audio Hijack Pro 2 or higher are eligible to buy it for $18.

Freeverse – Periscope
Periscope is a utility from Freeverse software that is intended to make life with your webcam a little simpler and more fun. It allows you to set your webcam to capture images when certain criteria are met. You can add text, logos, or timestamps to the pictures taken, and the application makes it easy to share your photos via .Mac, email, Flickr, iPhoto, etc.



The only bone I have to pick with this application is that it is kind of ugly. It does not use standard OS X widgets, and the window behavior is ... odd. It just does not feel like an OS X app, and, for $30, it should. I don't think it offers enough functionality to justify the price tag, so a little more polish would go a long way in making that price easier to digest.

Acqualia – Picturesque
Picturesque is a very simple image editor aimed at dressing up your pictures for websites. It's opening interface is very reminiscent of AppZapper with the user dragging an image into the empty application window. Once you open an image, you can add shadow, glow, reflection, curved corners, or edges. A background color can be specified, and the image can be resized using a simple slider.



It's functionality is pretty limited, but it performs its purpose. I do have one little gripe though. Where can I specify what percentage of the actual size I'm viewing the image at. That seems like a setting I should be able to change. Picturesque is $20.

Acqualia – Soulver
Soulver is, in fact, pretty cool. The concept is simple but unique. Make a calculator that lets you enter equations as plain-English phrases. This allows you to think of math in more practical terms that we usually would using a standard calculator.



The problem is that the language you use has to be pretty specific (as the screenshot above illustrates), and this limits the real-world usefulness of this product. I especially had a hard time getting subtraction to function reliably. Still, it's a great concept, and I hope the developer keeps working on improvements. Soulver is $18.

I've probably missed more great software releases, but these hopefully provide some good highlights. Most of these are probably being overshadowed by the release of Coda, but if you are a Mac user in search of a few good downloads this weekend, there is some good stuff here.

Tags: macintosh, technology, software

Presentation Zen: PowerPoint: sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying

This is a great collection of humorous PowerPoint related videos. My favorites are "Is there life after death by PowerPoint?" and "Chicken, chicken, chicken."



Andrews McMeel Publishing: Fans From Around the World Interview Bill Watterson

It's a nice set of questions. Unfortunately, no one asks when on earth he's going to return from the sky and save us from the sheer banality of recent comic strips. (I mean, come on, Garfield hasn't been funny in ages; Zits is fine; but the funniest comic is Peanuts ... by a dead guy!)

PS - Calvin is my hero.



The Inquirer: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. not nicking art after all

Well, that's good. I still don't like typing that title...



Flickr: Steve Jobs on the cover of April 1993 UnixWorld

He looks so much different with hair...



Apple – Final Cut Studio 2

This is a pretty big update to Apple's professional film editing suite. Along with all existing components receiving new and upgraded features, a new application called Color has been added. I'm not going to tell you the price here. It's too high risk for people with heart conditions, who are pregnant, or who could possible have blood pressure – of any kind.

Tags: powerpoint, silly, video games, software

This is a quick update to my original series of posts looking at NeoOffice 2.0, a free suite of office applications based on the OpenOffice project. If you missed the initial overview, the original series is listed below:

NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

Last week, NeoOffice recieved an incremental upgrade to version 2.1. Notable new features include support for Office 2007 OpenXML Word documents with support for Excel and PowerPoint OpenXML in a future release. Support for Excel VBA macros is reaffirmed – important because this will be the only tool on the Mac with this feature once MS Office 2004 is discontinued. The default icon set is now Akua, and version 2.1 gains more support for native Aqua widgets.

The first thing I noticed is that NeoOffice 2.1 launches in about one-quarter the time version 2.0 did on my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, the application is still modular with no way to select which module opens upon launch. I'm poking through the application package to see if I can find an easy workaround for this. I'll make a new post if I can come up with a solution! OpenOffice for Windows is treated like a suite of applications, so this derivation should be able to emulate that feature.

As advertised, NeoOffice looks much more like a Mac OS X application upon launch, and the Akua toolbar icons look right at home.



The close widget still does not behave correctly when a document has unsaved changes, though, and dialog boxes as well as contextual menus still look like the are emulating aqua. They are close to being right, but the difference is noticeable. (This is true for drop-down menus and tabs too.)

x
so close yet so far...

Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents all seem to import just fine. The only problem I've had with opening Word documents is if the document uses non-standard bullets. With PowerPoint files, sometimes image formatting and transitions may be lost or altered. I haven't been able to test macro support as I have no documents requiring that feature. As far as Open XML Word documents go, I've downloaded three sample documents and none of them have opened correctly. However, like Excel macros, this may not be a feature I'll use often enough to miss.

Overall, this update does little to make NeoOffice 2.1 more compelling than version 2.0. It's still as reliable as it ever was, but it still feels slightly out-of-place on Mac OS X. That said, it does make for a compelling (free) alternative to MS Office 2004, and the performance gains alone should be enough to encourage existing users to upgrade. Especially if you are an Intel Mac user tired of Office's Rosetta-dependent performance lag, download NeoOffice, and give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Tags: software, macintosh, neooffice

Apple – Dashboard Widgets – Kuler



This is a really neat widget from Adobe that will display the newest, the highest-rated, or the most popular color schemes form the kuler website.

via TUAW



Apple: Mac Pro

Wowza! That's a lot of cores! The 8-core option will set you back $1500! On the other hand, Cinema Displays have all received price drops. The 20" is $599; 23" is $899; and the 30" is $1799. Whenever we upgrade the desktop for my wife, I'm thinking a Mac mini and a 23" display will suit her well.

Tags: software, macintosh

SFGate: Bad behavior in the blogosphere

The San Francisco Chronicle has a decent overview of the events surrounding the abuse aimed at Kathy Sierra and the subsequent hiatus of Creating Passionate Users. Again, of all people, I have such a hard time believing she was made into a target.



Playlist: iTunes Completes Me

...and this wasn't a feature from day one because?



Scribd: They didn't study

Here is a small but amusing collection of "creative" answers from students who either became too frustrated with the material or just had no clue what they were doing.



Infinite Loop: Minireview: NeoOffice 2.1 for OS X

All in all, this is a highly-recommended download. But that doesn't mean there aren't any downsides. This Aqua version is a far cry from early X11 StarOffice ports that looked like they were running on Windows 98, prehistoric save dialogs and all. But if you're one to complain about UI consistency, you may be less than impressed by by the look and little things, such as the way the home and end keys on the keyboard behave like they do on a PC (or a Microsoft application). And NeoOffice's look is very much inspired by Microsoft Office.

Also, performance was sluggish on his PowerBook G4. On the other hand, it's pretty zippy on Intel Macs.



OpenOffice.org: Press Release – OpenOffice 2.2

This update patches some newly discovered vulnerabilities, improve on-screen text appearance, and has other small improvements.

Tags: blogging, silly, neooffice, software, itunes/ipods

Adobe Creative Suite 3

Suite flavors from $1599 to $2499. I only wish I could afford this stuff!



Newlaunches.com: Top 10 Apple products which flopped

My favorite on this list is Cyberdog. It's like Microsoft BOB for the internet. That's not a compliment, by the way.

via TUAW



Opposable Thumbs: Game Review: Burnout Dominator (PS2)

This is an odd beast: a Burnout game that focuses on long stretches of road, careful use of your boost, and a return to the fundamentals of racing. Is that a good thing? It really depends on your tastes, but in Dominator it seems like you're giving up much of what made the series great in order for Criterion to explore some of the classical elements of the series in the current market.

Myself, I initially liked Dominator. It's single player mode is pretty compelling, but multiplayer is a buzz-kill. Aftertouch slowdown and crashbreakers are disabled in multiplayer. Bleh.



FreeSMUG: NeoOffice 2.1 is available as a free download

This is based on the OpenOffice 2.1 code-base, and it features support for Office 2007 documents and Excel macros. I'll post impressions sometime next week, but I've already noticed one big improvement: It launches in about a quarter of the time as 2.0.3.

Tags: software, neooffice, video games, apple inc, adobe

Both Ars Technica and TUAW are reporting that InputManager plugins will be disabled in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

from Ars:

"Apple isn't really broken up about it since InputManagers were often used for nefarious purposes anyway," our sources said, but the loss of InputManager control will break a lot of shareware and commercial software that currently makes use of that control. 

To tell you the truth, I've read about possible InputManager exploits, but I've never seen any "nefarious" plugins in the wild.

Now, in the original version of the Ars post (I wish I had a screenshot), there was speculation that this would break Unsanity haxies, but that info has been altered since then. Still, I thought I would shoot off an email to Unsanity and get a direct answer. Rosyna was kind enough to provide me with some answers, and I thought I'd share these with you here.

Q: You may not be able to answer this one, but can any of you confirm or deny rumors that InputManager plugins are broken in Leopard?

A: We cannot comment.

No surprises here!

Q: Whether or not the rumor is true, do you see the disabling of InputManager plugins as a good thing or a bad thing?

A: I couldn't say, honestly. If true, it'd cause a lot of useful software to be otherwise disabled.

Q: Would this impact APE in any way if it were true (hypothetically speaking)?

A: Why would it impact APE at all? APE has nothing whatsoever to do with InputManagers. Only two of our products (SCR, MEE) use Input Managers and both of them are quite free. Input Managers are cocoa only and are therefore not adequate for our needs.

At this point, my other questions were rendered moot. The short story is that APE is here to stay.

Of additional interest, the TUAW post has a comment with a questionable picture (comment #7) that refutes the total disabling of InputManager plugins, and an update at the bottom of the Ars post says this:

When you install Leopard, InputManagers are (currently) disabled by default, but they can be enabled when Leopard finds something of yours that uses an InputManager and presents you with a dialog box. You can currently enable them this way, but if you click "Disable" (which is the default option), they apparently go away for good. "That's what Apple says is the current behavior. They're not sure what the final behavior will be," says one developer. "Apple says they are deprecated, and in 'a future release' they will be disabled pernamently. They won't say if that release is 10.5.x or 10.6."

As far as InputManager-powered products go, I guess we'll just have to wait and see, but it does seem certain that APE modules will be completely unaffected by this, which is good news for me as well as many other Mac users!

Tags: software, technology, os x

Unsanity's products always seem to spark debate in the Mac web-sphere. From some of the more vocal members of the development team to the rather roundabout ways their products interact with Mac OS X, they are a company that polarizes the community surrounding them. Negative attention is turning toward the company again as Apple is making it clear in their developer's mailing list that they officially do not support systems on which Unsanity's Application Enhancer is installed.

George Warner:

Our (Apple's) official policy is that we don't support APE'd systems. Period. The data miner that parses all the crash logs that are sent to us automatically ignores any report that has APE api's in the backtraces or dylb lists.

Likewise If DTS receives a crash incident with API in the backtrace or dylb list we will not investigate it. Our "standard answer" in this case is to inform the developer that we don't support APE and that we'll only be able to help them if they can reproduce the problem without APE installed.

The simple fact is that APE works some strange mojo on your Mac to do its magic, and some users resent that. Others point to serious problems APE can cause on systems. Just search for "Application Enhancer" or "APE" on the MacNN forums for a good idea of what I'm talking about.

Regardless of the risks, I have to admit to being an Unsanity customer since the early days of my Mac OS X adoption. I can hardly remember what it was like using OS X without APE installed and a couple of its companion products (called "haxies"). I have registered four of Unsanity's haxies, but I only actively use two. One product is ShapeShifter, a theming utility for OS X, and the other is FruitMenu – the utility that keeps me coming back.

After transitioning to an Intel Mac, Unsanity's haxies were seriously slowing my system down, among other factors, and I ended up removing them and the APE module from my system. No buyer's-remorse was involved. I had gotten years of use out of the products and was perfectly okay with leaving them behind. However, once Mac OS X 10.4.9 was released, allowing for a more efficient version of APE to be released, I found myself reinstalling these utilities primarily for a single feature of FruitMenu. Allow me to illustrate.

If I'm working on a project for work or this site, I typically have several applications open at once, and I'll cmd-Tab between them as needed. I imagine you might have a similar workflow. Unfortunately, look what happens to the menus as applications change:

Menu headers jump around based on the length of the application's name. This is most noticeable with the File and Edit menus, which appear in nearly all windowed applications. This means if you are a clicker (like me), there is a moving target on top of the screen, especially in the case of Word in this illustration.

FruitMenu has an option in its Preference Pane to use applications' icons to denote the application menu in lieu of the programs' names. Take a look at how this alters the menu bar:

Now the menus remain much more static, thus improving the overall usability of the menu bar. The File and Edit menus stay exactly consistent. Some might raise the concern that it is not ideal UI design to use an icon for a menu because it is not immediately apparent that the icon is a clickable item. However, I would say Mac users are used to icon-activated menus due to the Apple menu in the left-hand corner and the various other menu extras that appear to the right (not pictured). I personally think that the usability gains granted by turning the application menu into an icon trump the negatives.

In short, this feature keeps bringing me back to Unsanity's APE modules. It really surprises me that this behavior isn't the Mac OS X default, and FruitMenu will stay on my system as long as it performs reliably. Between the release of 10.4.9 and Unsanity's resolution of APE's pre-binding issue, I perceive no performance lags on my modded system, so I guess I'm okay with some system mojo happening just as long as everything is sailing smoothly and I get to have my Menu bar the way I like it.

Tags: software, opinion, os x

Update 03/15:
The file I needed was not in my Home directory. It was in HD/Library/Preferences, not User/Library/Preferences! All I can assume is this file is located centrally so one activation code can be used regardless of how many user accounts are on the machine. I have overcome, but I still strongly dislike product activation keys.

Original Post:
I made the mistake of using Apple's Migration Assistant when setting up my MacBook Pro. I say this was a mistake because I was migrating information form a PPC Mac, and I found out later that migrating PPC to Intel in this method can cause performance issues on the Intel Mac – which it very noticeably did. Therefore, I backed up important information and did a clean install of OS X on my new system.

Very carefully I placed everything back where it should go (only to discover that I failed to back up some Keynote themes that were not in my Home directory, but that is easily fixed). So far, everything has worked very well, and the machine's performance is much better. Unfortunately, I have run into one snag:



Yes, my friends, what you see is a product activation dialog for iWork. For some reason, putting iWork back onto the machine – even after copying all related files I could find with a Spotlight search – resulted in them being detected as unlicensed.

Like any good person, I grabbed my product manual where I had affixed the serial number, and my eyes caught an unwelcome surprise. The serial number I had was my old iWork '05 number. The iWork '06 code was nowhere to be found. All I can figure is that I tossed the iWork '06 number on accident during a cleaning spree while saving the old one.

This is the only Apple software product I use that requires activation. iLife requires no activation. Even OS X installs without a serial number. Why then does Apple needlessly complicate matters here? By requiring product activation, Apple is basically treating their users like thieves, but they are being inconsistent about this treatment! Unfortunately, I am no thief. I am just really absent-minded once I get into cleaning fits. However, the result seems to be the same: I'm screwed.

The lack of iWork brings many of my projects, including portions of this site, to a screeching halt, but I hate the idea of buying software that I have already paid for, especially since a new version of iWork could be released any day now. My frustration with this is very high, and I am not sure how I am going to solve this. I can't find a section on Apple's site for lost registrations. No one has been able to point me to where this activation file might be hidden. (My pre-reformat system is still backed up to an external drive.) I don't know if I should just go buy a new copy of iWork or not.

I already didn't like product activation steps because of the mistrust they infer. Now I'm really upset by them. I don't like being treated like a pirate when trying to use a legitimately purchased copy of software. Sure, serial numbers have their place in online-distributed applications, but they are an unkind gesture in boxed software. This is one valid reason why.

Tags: software, iwork

Back during TED 2006, New York University research scientist Jeff Han blew his audience away with a demonstration of multitouch, "interface-free" computing. Although he claims the technology is far from new, it is unlike anything I have seen before. Take a look at the video:



If that didn't floor you, watch it again. Try interfacing that way with your tablet computer, your DS, or your smart-phone. Honestly, put the stylus away, and try to use multiple fingers on the display simultaneously. What happens? Either nothing occurs, or only one input is registered. This is one reason why touch screens have yet to catch on as mainstream computer interfaces. They offer no significant improvement over mouse and keyboard while retaining several drawbacks.

Contrast those interfaces with this. Jeff Han demonstrates ten simultaneous fingers and infers more could be detected. Look how smoothly everything works despite Mr. Han's apologies for how rough this technology still is. Fast-forward to January 2007 and the announcement of the iPhone. Jeff Han says that he is not surprised that Apple is the first to bring something like this out, but I seriously doubt the iPhone will be the only product in which Apple bundles this technology.

In fact, the track pad on the MacBook Pro I am using is sensitive to multiple touches. If I tap on the track-pad while another finger is resting on the pad, the computer registers this as a ctrl-click. If I slide two fingers across the pad simultaneously, the computer treats that input like a scroll-wheel – both vertically and horizontally. If I do this while holding down ctrl, the screen can zoom in or out, and I imagine that upcoming MacBooks may implement iPhone's "pinching" gesture for this same functionality (at least in apps like iPhoto).

Of course, iPods with a similar display and interface as the iPhone are a very safe bet. However, let's take this further.

• Resolution independence is a guaranteed feature of Leopard due out sometime between now and June. This allows screen zooming to be handled much more smoothly than is possible right now.
  
  
• Apple's interfaces are primarily designed to be accessible without resorting to secondary clicks or hidden menus. There are exceptions to this, but Macintosh user interfaces would need little tweaking to be "hands-on" ready.
  
  
• iPhone is built on OS X, and it shares some core technologies with Leopard. Therefore, core iPhone technology could be efficiently ported to Mac OS X computers.

Yes, this evidence is (very) shaky, but I think Apple is the right company to get us rethinking interfaces again. Apple controls the software and hardware of their platform, and this will make such a shift less difficult than if Dell and Microsoft (for example) were trying to implement a similar approach. It just makes sense for Apple to be the company that starts pushing this kind of technology.

Keyboards and especially mice are not well-understood by the masses. I'm always helping adults mouse around their screens and click the correct buttons. They were a good solution when they came out, but over twenty years have passed with no significant progress. Just as Nintendo has pushed the envelope as far as gaming interfaces go, Apple is a natural choice to elevate computer interaction to new levels. I'm ready for the next big thing. I just hope Apple begins pushing this technology sooner rather than later.

Tags: software, apple inc

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is now available. The price is $199 for a limited time. It's regular price will be $299. I only wish Adobe would stop making people sign in to download a demo!



ZREO: Zelda Reorchestrated

This site has some nice high-quality mp-3s of music from various Zelda games. I think this epitomizes "labor of love." Also, they provide album art if you want to keep the music in iTunes.

via Digg

Tags: software, video games, adobe

Freeverse: Think

This is a new (free) app from Freeverse that drops a plain background behind any app you choose thereby eliminating distraction while you work. The concept is not new, but Freeverse's implementation is well thought-out and worth trying.





Infinite Loop: Apple Inc. and Apple Corps come to new licensing agreement

"It is great to put this dispute behind us and move on," manager of Apple Corps Neil Aspinall said. "The years ahead are going to be very exciting times for us. We wish Apple Inc. every success and look forward to many years of peaceful co-operation with them."

So when will the Beatles end up on iTunes now?

Tags: software, technology, apple inc

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

As I wrap up these posts on NeoOffice, I can't help but be impressed by the software. Are there rough edges? Yes. Are there some usability issues that need to be resolved? Yes. However, the size and scope of this project is just impressive, especially when considering the small size of the development team and the fact that this is not commercial software – it is entirely free. Its very existence (as well as that of its parent project OpenOffice) sternly challenges the notion that we as consumers are obligated to continually pay for expensive productivity software.


Will NeoOffice supplant my normal workflow involving Keynote and Pages? Probably not. I like these two applications too much to give them up, and I will happily upgrade to the next versions of these applications whenever Apple rolls them out. On the other hand, can NeoOffice replace my Office installation? That is a more interesting question.

On my PowerMac G5, Microsoft Office outperforms NeoOffice at every turn. It's more reliable, and it is more stable. On the other hand, NeoOffice and MS Office are very comparable in terms of performance and stability on my new MacBook Pro. I still see some weird redraw issues in NeoOffice, but not near what was present on the G5. (By the way, these performance gains support my theory that the PPC version of NeoOffice is being throttled by the Java code.) The fact that I like the layout of NeoOffice's interface better than the mess of floating toolbars that is Microsoft Office 2004 is additionally helpful.

I think I'm going to try to supplant Word and PowerPoint with the NeoOffice equivalents for the next couple of months and see how things go. Those are my two most commonly used Microsoft applications, so this will grant me plenty of opportunities to grow even more familiar with NeoOffice and grow accustomed to its quirks. However, I will probably still upgrade to Office 2008 when it becomes available later this year, especially if I can still get it through the university.

As a couple of final notes, starting February 27, the NeoOffice team will begin seeding a new milestone of their product to members of their Early Access Program. One key feature of this release is support for OpenXML documents and VBA macro support. Also, the OpenOffice team is currently working on a Mac OS X native version of the original, and I'll be checking that out when it becomes available. Ideally, I think it would be great if the OpenOffice team and the NeoOffice team combined resources as opposed to creating competing free products.

By and large, I've really been getting into NeoOffice. As I learn more about coding, I will definitely look into contributing toward ways I hope the product can be improved. It amazes me that something like this can exist in an economy that has become so centered around commercial solutions and specific vendors, and I hope NeoOffice continues its development for many years to come.

Tags: software, opinion, neooffice

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

So far, my experience with NeoOffice has been a positive one, but I can't help but feel this application seems out of place in Mac OS X. Here are some points I've accumulated. Please note that some would be far easier to implement than others. In an ideal world, any of these could be achievable, but I understand that the NeoOffice team is very small, so few or none of these wishes may make future versions.

Native Interface Components

NeoOffice seems to rely on Java's cross-platform interface elements to fit into Mac OS X. As noted in the post about look-and-feel, this works – but only to a point. Some interface elements, like the close button, don't behave as they should, and many Aqua-fied Java elements just look awkward. Moving forward, it would be nice if NeoOffice began to slowly adopt an entirely Aqua native interface that fully blended into the Mac OS X environment. Right now, the interface still feels foreign despite its shiny exterior.

iLife Media Browser

This one may be harder to implement since I don't think Apple has a public API for interfacing with the iApps. Still, some programs like RapidWeaver and Swift Publisher have pulled it off. There is even a shareware application called Media Browser that gives users a universal iLife media browser. This would hopefully be a part of making NeoOffice play nicer with iPhoto and iTunes media.

Drag & Drop Improvements

I noticed many times that I tried to just drop an image into a NeoOffice document window directly from the Finder or iPhoto, the image did not appear. I had to go through the "Insert > Image > From File..." method. If you are like me and keep all images in iPhoto, this is not a fun solution at all. Hopefully, future versions will offer better drag-and-drop support.

x
Drag & Drop or a media browser (like the one shown here from RapidWeaver) are both more efficient than browsing for an iPhoto image.

Modular or Not Modular

This last one is pretty big in terms of what philosophy NeoOffice is following. Right now, NeoOffice is a modular application. This means you open one application to access all of its components. This is in contrast to Microsoft Office or Apple iWork, for example, which are application suites. The programs work together, but you open the application unique to the kind of document you wish to create (presentation, spreadsheet, text document, etc.). The problem I run into with NeoOffice's modular state is that I must open a Writer document first, regardless of what I wish to create. Then I can choose a different document type from the application menu or the Dock menu.



It would be nice if, when NeoOffice is launched, a project selector of some kind would appear. I'm partial to the one that appeared when launching Appleworks 6 that gave you access to each module, your recent documents, and some templates and assistants (think wizards) by way of a series of tabs. It was clan, uncluttered, and it got the job done. If NeoOffice wants to remain modular, it really should adopt a project launcher like this. Otherwise, each module should be a separate application, making NeoOffice into an application suite instead.


AppleWorks Starting Points. Image from Wikipedia.

Conclusion

There are other things I would like to see – soft shadows, better translucency effects, better scroll-wheel support in drop-down lists (like the font menu) – but these are really some of the bigger elements that would make NeoOffice an even better experience for end users such as myself. None of these are really deal-breaker quality exclusions, but including features like these would help NeoOffice blend in even better with Mac OS X and other applications.

Tags: software, opinion, neooffice

CNN Money: Exxon linked to climate change pay out

Exxon: "Here's $10,000. Now go sow public confusion about climate change like a good boy."



The Politico: Gore to Testify on Climate Change

Gore will be testifying before two committees he has served on in the past regarding recent climate change. It's interesting that he is the only witness who will be testifying at this time. I wonder why there are not some more.



AppleInsider: Apple working on hot-unpluggable iPods

All I can say is this: It's about time! (Really, this whole mounting and unmounting of physical drives is so 80s!)



Adium

This Mac OS X chat client is great, and now it has (finally) reached 1.0 status!



Globe and Mail: Exxon's 'outlandish' earnings spark furor

Isn't this the second or third year in a row Exxon has posted record profits? They really aren't even trying to hide the exploitive greed anymore. They just attempt to justify it.



iClip 4

This is a very nice update to a small app I really like. It provides multiple clipboards that any application can access. If you are a Mac user, you should try iClip out. (Warning: this link is not Internet Explorer friendly.)

via TUAW



iConcertCal

This is an interesting hack of the iTunes visualizer. It retrieves information about upcoming concerts in your area based on artists in your iTunes collection. I have to admit that this is pretty neat (and that no one I like ever comes to Indy). The program is available for Mac + Windows.

via TUAW



CPUs: Let them do the thing everyone else tells them not to

This post fits in so well with my philosophy of education, and I love the image at the beginning!

Tags: environment, politics, technology, software, itunes/ipods

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

In addition to Writer and Impress, NeoOffice includes modules called Calc, Draw, Math, and Base.Each of these has unique functions and adds value to the overall NeoOffice package. I am not a heavy user of these features, so I am not ready to speak to the quality of these products. This post will just let you see what they look like and what functionality they provide.

NeoOffice Calc

This is a very important component for MS Office compatibility – the spreadsheet application. Excel is used and misused in many work environments for a variety of tasks. Calc is the only Excel alternative on the Mac platform that can run macros in the spreadsheets, and when Office 2008 ships for the Macintosh, NeoOffice Calc will be the only solution for macro-embedded Excel files as the next Mac version of Office is dropping macro support. This fact alone should make Calc alluring for Macintosh business users.

x
Excel & Calc side-by-side

I simply imported an Excel spreadsheet I use a lot at school to see how it works in Calc, and I'm happy to say that everything seems intact. As you can see, some of the formatting in the top cells disappeared, but that is hardly mission critical. The little I know about Excel works as expected in Calc, and I have to say that the NeoOffice alternative is much less cluttered. (As an aside, MS Office 2008 for Mac is finally ditching those annoying floating toolbars.)

Math & Base

I really can't say much about either of these as I have no experience with math and database programs. However, it is important to note that these programs fill voids in the world of Macintosh productivity suites. No Macintosh office suite ships with a database solution – not even the most expensive version of MS Office. I suppose you could count AppleWorks, but Apple doesn't really support that suite anymore as iWork is slowly assuming its place in Apple's software matrix.

Math seems to be a very straightforward equation editor, and I had little trouble figuring the application out. Base has a much steeper learning curve, but it looks similar to the limited exposure I've had to Access. Database users should be comfortable here, and the program is fairly flexible, supporting Access, MySQL, and other popular database formats.

x
Math and Base in action

Draw

Many Mac users remember the drawing module that was a part of AppleWorks. Unfortunately, while Pages and Keynote have some nice drawing tools, there has not been a simple drawing application included with Macs for quite a while. While Draw was fun to use, like MS Paint on Windows, I really couldn't see myself ever using this module (although it is much more flexible than Paint).

Conclusion

NeoOffice is a very complete package. Basically every element you would expect to find in a business-class productivity suite is here, and the entire package is free. While I have some reservations about the current version of NeoOffice, the value of the suite is undeniable. There is a ton of functionality packaged here, more than is available with any single commercial Macintosh productivity package. That fact alone makes it worth downloading and trying out.

Stay tuned. For my next NeoOffice-themed post, I'll be delving into a small wish-list for the application.

Tags: software, opinion, neooffice

Viidelectrix

Homestar themed Flash games optimized for the Wii browser and the Wii remote. (They also work in browsers. Secret Collect is my favorite!)



AppleMatters Interviews the Macalope

The Macalope has become one of my favorite bloggers recently, and this interview is just classic. The only problem is that the interviewer tries to be as funny...



Ars Technica: Adobe announces pricing, availability for Lightroom

Ars Technica posts details about the official pricing and availability of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. It costs the same as Apple's Aperture, but the system requirements are not as steep. I wonder how it will actually perform on those lower-end supported machines.



Infinite Loop: OpenOffice.org (Aqua) needs you!

Ars blogs about the development of the Aqua version of OpenOffice. What I can't understand is why they don't put resources into helping the NeoOffice project rather than insisting on reinventing the wheel.



CPUs: Sensemaking 4: Summary of your comments

In this final post on making sense of complicated information, Dan Russell sorts through the numerous comments made about his posts and draws out some of the most helpful and interesting.

Tags: technology, silly, software, adobe

If you're attending online courses, there is a pretty good chance you've had to use Macromedia Breeze Meeting at some point (Now Adobe Acrobat Connect). The most recent version of the software supports Intel-based Macs, but all previous versions are PowerPC only.

"No problem," I hear you say. "Apple's Rosetta technology should do the trick." And you would be right if Breeze functioned as a standalone application, but it does not. It is a browser plug-in. Safari runs natively on the x86 processors, but this requires any compatible plug-ins to also be developed as Intel binaries. (This same issue faces Photoshop users. PPC Photoshop plug-ins will not work in the Intel-native Photoshop CS3.) This presents a problem if you ever have to present in Breeze.


On an Intel Mac, you will likely get stuck right here.

Fortunately, there is a workaround for this issue, but it will slightly slow down the browser you are viewing Breeze in. Simply find your browser in the Applications folder. Press command-I or choose "Get Info" from the File menu, and select "Open using Rosetta" in the info pane.

x

Now, when you visit your Breeze session, the plug-in will load correctly. I recommend using this trick on a secondary browser if possible. That way your everyday browsing habits are not slowed down by the Rosetta layer. My daily browser is Safari, but I use Camino (a Firefox based browser) for Breeze meetings.

Tags: macintosh, software

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

I'm going to get something out of the way right now. Subjectively, I like NeoOffie Impress better than MS PowerPoint 2004. I'm going to be critical of a few points in this post, so I just wanted to get that out of the way first. Having said that, let's move on...

Upon opening a new Impress document, I had to sigh when I saw another wizard greeting me. Fortunately, you can jump out of the Wizard by clicking "Create," and it's possible to disable this Wizard altogether in the preferences.


It looks like my work computer!

Impress has an interesting tabbed interface atop the main document window, and these tabs cycle between different views for your presentation. The choices are Normal, Outline, Notes, Handout, and Slide Sorter. Of these, I thought Notes was particularly useful because this feature could be used to create annotated slide handouts like the one's I discussed in this post.

x
The Normal and Notes views


Slide Sorter view

The interface for NeoOffice impress is at once more inviting and more prohibitive than MS PowerPoint. It's more inviting in that the interface is much less cluttered than PowerPoint's. One of the more interesting ways in which this is accomplished is through toolbars that appear and disappear as they are needed. For example, if I select some text, the picture formatting toolbar is replaced by the text formatting one. Also the use of thumbnail slide's in the navigator is far superior to PowerPoint's habit of only showing the slide's text. (I know this problem is unique to the Mac version of PowerPoint.)

Unfortunately, the interface is more prohibitive in that many features are buried in subcommands and dialog boxes. Doing something so simple as changing the background color of the slide requires jumping through a few hoops, but I felt like this dialog box served to illustrate this issue best:



Yup, that's a dialog box for cropping an image. This is what you get when selecting the crop tool from the toolbar. In every other app I know, cropping (or masking) is done directly in the document window and applied to the image live. By contrast, in NeoOffice Impress, you have to manually choose the dimensions of the image. This can be much more accurate, but it is less intuitive to the average user. Fortunately, that thumbnail image previews your changes before you apply them.

My other main criticism of Impress centers around performance. It's bad. It makes my G5 feel like a G3 trying to run Unreal Tournament 2004. It is that painful at times. Dragging objects around slides always left visible screen artifacts on my machine, and I was finding myself continually minimizing and restoring the document window to minimize the clutter created by these artifacts.



Unfortunately, bringing the document window out of the dock carried its own hazards. Sometimes, it would take Impress a few minutes to redraw on the screen, and the whole application locked up once in the process of redraw.


I had to eventually Force Quit the app to escape from this.

Again, my experience tells me that the Java code in NeoOffice is the culprit here. I don't care what the theory says, in practice complex Java code runs poorly on PPC processors. If I'm correct, these performance issues practically disappear once I get a chance to test this software on an Intel-based Macintosh.

Other small quirks persist. For example, drag-and drop support for images is inconsistent at best, making the use of iPhoto images tricky (though I found copy-and-paste to be a good workaround for this). Copying and pasting elements from one slide to another does not always work, and customizing toolbars proved to be a futile task. It was easy enough to go through the customization process. The problem is that Impress would revert to the defult toolbars every few minutes.

After these criticisms, it may be hard to believe my first pragraph – that I like Impress better than PowerPoint – but it is true. At this point, Impress canot supplant PowerPoint when I need to create more PC-friendly presentations due mainly to performance issues. However, Impress just feels more thought out than PowerPoint does, and that is a great testament to the power of Open Source. One example of that really connected with me was in adding text to a formatted object or image. In PowerPoint, you have to either select the object and choose "Insert Text..." from a contextual menu, or you just create a separate text box and place it atop the image. In Impress (as in Keynote), all you have to do is double-click the object – it doesn't matter if it's a drawn shape or a photograph.

NeoOffice Impress shows great petential, but it is hampered more severely than Writer in terms of bugs and performance. If Impress were more responsive and more predictable in its image-handling, then it would easily supplant PowerPoint. As it is, NeoOffice Impress is an application I really like but can't see myself using on a daily basis.

Tags: software, opinion, neooffice

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

The look-and-feel of applications is pretty important to the Mac experience. Well designed Macintosh applications have a polish to the user interface that is seldom present on other platforms. Therefore, if NeoOffice is going to gain a healthy following among the Mac-faithful, it is important that it have the Macintosh feel correct. This aspect may be somewhat abstract and trivial to alpha-geeks and power users, but the user experience cannot be ignored when developing an application for the Mac.

Saying this, how does NeoOffice do? Put simply, I've seen better, and I've seen worse – much worse.

Upon launch, I found the toolbars to be immediately distracting. The icons in them were spartan at best, and it really looked like a stereotypical open source project. Toolbars are nearly indispensable in office appications, so this was a difficult flaw to overlook.


The default toolbar appearance in NeoOffice Writer

Fortunately, it didn't take me long to figure out that you could change the toolbar's appearance within the preferences. Also a program called Iconic allowed me to install additional sets. Here are some variations for the toolbar:


The Industrial style


The Crystal style


The Akua style

The default style would be at home on Windows 95. Industrial looks very GNOME to me while Crystal makes me think of Windows XP. I bet you can guess which of these icon sets I'm using right now in NeoOffice. (Hint: It's phonetically identical to "aqua.") Fortunately, some small changes in the preferences can really lead to a more pleasant visual experience with NeoOffice.

x
Before & After!

Unfortunately, even after some tweaking, a few elements still seem very out-of-place. Many small widgets in the interface lack the Aqua look-and-feel emulated by the rest of the program. Some text looks incorrectly placed in tabs, and the floating toolbars are boxy and Windows-esque (with the window controls on the wrong side of the toolbar).

x


Another Aqua discrepancy I noticed was in the window controls of the main application. In most OS X applications, if you have unsaved changes in the documents, the red "close window" control has a dimple in it. Otherwise it is smooth as the other buttons. In NeoOffice, the red "close" button is smooth whether your document has unsaved changes or not.

x
Pages shows the document has unsaved changes. NeoOffice does not.

Despite these shortcomings, NeoOffice does integrate well with Mac OS X in some key areas, including the print, save, and open dialog boxes/sheets. The application uses the standard controls for printing and saving that you would find in any native OS X application. This is a nice touch of familiarity in the application, and it keeps the user experience in these areas consistent with what you would expect for a Mac application.

x
Here are some native dialogs in NeoOffice.

Overall, NeoOffice succeeds in almost feeling like a native Mac application, and, when compared to the X11 version of OpenOffice, that is a pretty impressive accomplishment. Some minor issues hold the product back from really creating an immersive Macintosh experience, but it is important to remember that this product is a work in progress. It is only consistently developed by three guys who are (for all intents and purposes) unfunded. NeoOffice 2 is the product of hard work and dedication. Yes, the interface has some inconsistencies and could use improvement, but it is a solid starting point.

In their wiki, the NeoOffice team states (regarding the use of Java): "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then to the end user it's a duck, and end users have made it pretty clear they want a duck; whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." Right now, I can tell that the duck is drinking coffee even without diving into the documentation. However, at this rate, it won't be long until NeoOffice can seamlessly blend in with my other Macintosh applications.

Tags: technology, software, neooffice

I've heard about the project known as OpenOffice on many occasions as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and I was pleased to find a Macintosh version of the office suite on the project's website. What did not please me was the X11 requirement for the OS X version. Fortunately, it was not long before I discovered a project called NeoOffice written in a combination of Cocoa, Carbon, and Java. It's based on the OpenOffice 2.0 code base but runs natively in the OS X aqua environment.

Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.

Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts

Upon launching NeoOffice, I was immediately greeted by a setup “wizard,” which immediately set within me a sense of foreboding. “Wizard” is not a very Mac-like term, but I went through the process, which, in and of itself was fairly painless. The only real nit to pick is that registering the product took me to a sign-in page for existing NeoOffice users – not a page to create a new account.



That aside, NeoOffice Writer looks a lot like MS Word for Windows. This is by no means a slight. It just means that Office users will feel right at home in the interface. On the other hand, it does look alien on the Mac desktop as even the Mac version of Word looks very different from its Windows counterpart.

x
NeoOffice Writer on the left; Word on the right.

In terms of functionality, Writer has pretty much everything users have come to expect in a word processor. The only notable absence has been a built-in Grammar Check. On the other hand, NeoOffice seems to have some drawing tools, like curve, circle segment, and pie that are not present in Word. Also, NeoOffice has a built-in bibliography database available in the Tools menu. Unfortunately, I can't get it to format a bibliography automatically the way EndNote will in Word. Another good bit of news is that NeoOffice has extensive macro support – a feature that is scheduled to be eliminated from the next Mac version of Office.


Writer open with the database browser and macro dialog box.

As far as other features, Spell Check seems on par with Word, and you can right-click on a marked word for spelling suggestions – just like in the Microsoft alternative. In fact, you can do an awful lot with text formatting by right-clicking on it, something I think MS Word is definitely trailing the OpenOffice team on.



You can export a document as a PDF directly from the app, a task which is roundabout in Office 2004 for the Mac and nonexistent in Office 2003 for Windows. Included templates and clip art is minimal, but templates found here and clip art here work fine with the NeoOffice applications. Since I seldom use templates or clip art, this doesn't really bother me.

I opened a few MS Word documents with NeoOffice with varying results. Basic documents opened without a hitch. Many that contained drawings or shapes also opened fine, but the shapes would occasionally be in the wrong place. Some opened and could be edited while others opened as "read-only" and I had to "Save As..." to edit. Bullets points were consistently lost in the transition, but, surprisingly, most clip art and images survived the transition. Overall, the application's compatibility with Word documents is pretty good.

On the downsides, the look-and-feel (which I'll talk about more in another post) doesn't quite fit in with Mac OS X despite efforts to aquify the application, and performance is sluggish on my G5 PowerMac. This is especially true in redrawing elements like toolbars. On my PowerBook G3, the performance is downright dismal. I suspect the combination of PowerPC and Java elements is the culprit. On the other hand, there is an Intel build available, and I'll be interested in trying that out whenever I get around to updating my hardware.


Just waiting for the rest to show up...

In conclusion, I can see where NeoOffice could supplant MS Office for the budget-conscious. While it has some issues, it is very capable on its own and in working with Microsoft-compatible formats. Stay tuned for some more posts like these in the near future regarding NeoOffice!

Tags: technology, software, neooffice

This is so neat, I have to share: In the Mac OS X 10.4.8 update, the Keyboard & Mouse Preference Pane has been modified to allow for automatic screen zooming (independent of Universal Access controls).



As you can see, if you hold down Control while using the scroll wheel, zooming is automatically enabled. Here are a couple of screen captures. One is a normal shot of the screen. The second shows zooming enabled.

x

Also, once the screen is magnified, you can navigate around simply by moving the mouse. You can actually achieve a pretty intense magnification with this method, and it is another hint at resolution independence being a possible feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. (It's already available in Tiger but not at the user level.)

Furthermore, this is a pretty handy feature for presentations that include software demonstrations. Right now, enlarged icons and controls look fairly pixelated, but the use of resolution independent elements could make this feature even smoother. Imagine being able to demo iMovie or MS Word and smoothly zooming in on a feature you are elaborating on without having to visit a preference pane or using a static magnified screenshot.

Little touches like these make me like my Mac even more. Thanks to the great Daring Fireball for pointing this feature out. (You can see his blog in the screenshots.)

Tags: software, os x

Usually, I would just stick something like this in my Links Blog, but this one actually makes me want to jump up on a soapbox.
x
A new HP camera is actually being marketed with the idea that it can slim the subject of the photograph. Yes, friends, if you think your significant other is just too heavy looking in a shot on your vacation, no problem! Merely adjust a slider, and you can help him or her virtually shed unnecessary pounds! Here are some shots of it in action (straight off HP's site):





Now let's take some notes:

• The models on HP's site are only females – talk about gender stereotyping.
• The models look fine as they are. HP marketing is essentially saying healthy-looking women are in need of slimming, so you must be too.
• Can we talk about social pressures regarding anorexia at this point?

I may be a bit harsh here (which, you have to admit, is very unusual for me), but this whole concept is being promoted in a very irresponsible way. "You are not good enough. You look fat on film. Let us fix you." I can admit that, by and large, many Americans are overweight. Even I'm not as fit as I could be, but is this how we need to solve the problem? Are we so incapable of caring for ourselves that we need to artificially create better selves? I hope not.

Stuff like this just boggles me. All this really does is vertically stretch the entire picture, but it just makes me a little sick-to-the-stomach that somewhere another boardroom has made a decision that only further exploits weight insecurities (specifically in women) at both extremes. I no boycotter, but when we get a digital camera, I doubt it will be a HP right now.


Also, Jason Fried of 37 Signals has made a post about this "feature."

Tags: opinion, technology, software

Apple's event on Tuesday brought about an updated iTunes application among other announcements. Historically, iTunes has foreshadowed future trends in Apple's GUI from the brushed metal appearance of iTunes 1.0 to the darker unified look of iTunes 5, so I thought the new iTunes was worth a look.
x
First up, I couldn't help but notice (as have many others) that the icon returns to the blue of iTunes 2, but the beam connecting the eighth notes is thicker than in previous versions of this icon. I'm glad blue is back. It was my favorite iTunes icon!
x
Now right here is a shot of iTunes 6 & iTunes 7 side-by-side. (You can click these images for a larger view.)



Immediately, it is noticeable that iTunes 7 sports a much more subdued interface. Colors in general are muted, and it doesn't even use standard aqua scroll-bars and checkboxes. Also, some elements have been moved around, but it didn't take me too long to find everything (except the Visualizer button seems to be entirely gone).

The sidebar sports more defined categories than did iTunes 6. The headers (oddly) are in all caps, but they do a nice job separating built-in libraries from online elements and user-created playlists. Overall, the sidebar looks much cleaner than before.

Also new are some buttons that control how you are viewing your media. The first button is the classic iTunes list view; the second button shows a list with album art, and the third button is the new Cover Flow view (in which Apple did the "right thing" and bought out the developer who inspired them).

Below is a shot of the new Cover Flow view. It's a very nice way to view your album art, but I have noticed it can be a little glitchy when browsing too quickly.



On the store side of things, movie downloads and games are new features. So far, only Disney-owned studios are available for purchase, but that still makes for a devent variety of films to choose from. I'm not thrilled with the movie prices, but they aren't bad either. Here's a look at the movie section of the store:



As you can see, Apple implements the new Cover Flow view into the movie store. This is also true of the TV store, but the music store hasn't adopted this look yet. I found browsing through the movies and watching trailers rather painless, but I haven't purchased a movie, nor do I foresee myself doing so in the near future. In thruth, I don't understand all the excitement surrounding video downloads, but I'm not much of a TV-watcher or movie-goer as it is.

Here's the new game section of the store:



The addition of this section, I have to admit, was surprising to me. I had heard rumors about Apple hiring and contacting game developers, and iPod related games seemed a natural progression. I guess I just didn't figure they would start selling them through the iTunes Store. It is a pretty convenient way to make sure iTunes can manage all things iPod.

I've been using iTunes 7 for a couple of days now with no real problems. The only glitch I have run into is the fact that Cover Flow sometimes uses placeholders instead of album art if I scroll too quickly. Otherwise, this is a great update. I love the new view options (even if one does seem directly copied from Windows Media Player 11), and everything else seems to be pretty well polished.

As I said earlier, iTunes often seems to preview future trends in Mac OS GU, and I admit that I hope this continues. By and large, I like the direction iTunes is going with its UI. The muted colors and subtle gradients work, and I even find myself drawn to those "fuzzy" scroll-bars. The only thing about iTunes 7's interface that bugs me is how strongly it contrasts with the rest of Mac OS X. Hopefully, the rest of the Mac OS experience will continue to follow iTune's lead.


By the way, Paul Thurrott has uploaded a nice gallery of iTunes' new iPod interface. You can take a look at it right here. (Wow, I never thought I'd link him twice in one day.)

Tags: software, opinion

I have to admit that I have been Microsoft hating just a little more than I would like lately, so I thought I would balance the karma with a post about something Microsoft is currently working on that intrigues me.



This is a picture of the Ribbon in MS Office 2007 (yoinked from Jensen Harris' great journal about the evolution of the MS Office interface and all of the work that goes into a project like this). Basically, it takes the place of the complicated system of menus, submenus, and toolbars Office has been using for the last decade or so.

Why does this intrigue me so?

First of all, the Ribbon reminds me of the Inspector found in Pages and Keynote (probably inherited from their NeXT ancestors), which are two of my favorite applications. Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying Microsoft is copying Apple with the Ribbon. I think the manners of implementation are different enough to be considered distinct concepts. However, despite its shortcomings, I like the iWork Inspector, and I find myself drawn to the Ribbon in Office 2007 because of the noted similarity.

Additionally, the Ribbon seems like an effort on the behalf of Microsoft to demystify Office to a certain extent. How often have you or someone you've worked grown frustrated with PowerPoint, Excel, or Word because feature XYZ is so buried in a sea of menus and dialog boxes that a strategy guide is needed to traverse the apparent labyrinth? I know I have. With the Ribbon, more features are accessible at the highest level of interface – right in front of your face.

Unfortunately, the Office Ribbon still contains some of Microsoft's signature clutter:



I mean, really, where do you even begin with this mess? How can this be streamlined and simplified without losing functionality and meaningfulness? Right now, this Write Ribbon from MS Word 2007 is an aesthetic nightmare. In all respect, though, pretty much any setting you need for formatting text is very accessible. In direct contrast, the default toolbar for Pages 2 is very unobtrusive, but a user (who has not found the Inspector) may be left wondering how to do so much as make his/her text bold or change the font size.

Where is the happy medium? Where does usability meet simplicity, and how can feature- richness be communicated without visual clutter? Can the ideas of the iWork Inspector, the Office 2007 Ribbon, and the simplicity of an Apple toolbar be merged? To me, the Ribbon is the most interesting interface element to come out of Redmond in years, and I am interested in seeing how it evolves as Office 2007 nears completion.

Tags: software, microsoft

Not more than a couple of days after I learn about Monaco, I see this little entry on M-Dollar about Windows Live Product Search and Academic Search, and I've come to a conclusion. I don't think Microsoft purposefully sets out to be the big imitator it comes off looking like. I think this "me too" image is purely the result of not knowing when to say, "enough is enough."

For the past decade (give or take), Microsoft has basically owned the operating systems market. Atop that, they dominate the market for office productivity. These two markets are highly lucrative, but it doesn't stop there.

• The Internet becomes popular. Browsers begin to emerge, and, after a few years of watching, Microsoft decides it wants to own the browser market and releases Internet Explorer. Of course, for the best web experience, websites should be optimized for IE. Sure, it may damage how they render in other browsers, but that's just collateral damage.
  
  
• Microsoft wakes up one day and notices that game consoles have been popular for the last twenty years. Perhaps it's time to jump into that market and try to dominate it with the One Development Platform to Rule Them All (which only works with Windows-based PCs and XBox, but you didn't want to develop for anything else). However, Microsoft did get online console gaming right.
  
  
• Security seems like a growing market on PCs. After all, active viruses are only a small problem (and this list doesn't even count trojans as far as I can tell). Microsoft notices a couple of companies are making money selling security software, so they decide that they will try to own that market as well with OneCare.
  
  
• Digital music seems to be doing well. There are quite a few retailers of digital music, and many of them require Windows Media Player. This seems to Microsoft like a great market to jump in and try to dominate as well.
  
  
• Companies like Google and Yahoo do well with the search market. In fact, Microsoft has already been overtaken in the initial round of the search engine battles. Does this deter Redmond? No. Defeat merely serves to infuriate the giant.

Is this list comprehensive? It is not even close, but it does serve to illustrate how Microsoft comes off as a copier. In each of these instances, Microsoft was late to the market. In fact, the market was well established before the Redmond Giant lumbered in. They can't sit back and allow other companies to fulfill the various niches the technology market allows. Microsoft seems to feel it has some Manifest Destiny to dominate in each and every sector of the market. As a result, Microsoft has to play catch-up with the products already available to consumers, and feature replication (a la Froogle) becomes inevitable. In the end, Microsoft looks like a bully, and their "innovative" features are just variations on what is already available. Hence, "Redmond, start your photocopiers."

Tags: opinion, microsoft, software

As watermarked, this photo is from MacMinute.com.

You know, back in 2004, when Apple unveiled this poster and others like it at its World Wide Developers Conference, it seemed like a pretty snarky thing to do. Despite the snide approach, many Mac users would say it rings true. Even some Windows users attest to it:

"If you're familiar with iCal, you know all you need to know about Windows Calendar."

"...just know that a DVD movie making application, similar to Apple's iDVD, is on the way."

--Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for WIndows December Vista Preview 2.

Still, some of Microsoft's moves seem logical at the time. For example, Outlook will not be shipping with the Home & Student edition of Office 2007, so bundling a simple Calendar application with Vista makes sense. Microsoft Movie Maker (a blatant rip-off of iMovie) is already offered for XP. Adding a DVD creator is the next logical step. Okay, it would have been a logical simultaneous step, but we're talking about Microsoft here, and slow progress is expected.

In truth, up until now, I was never much of a "Microsoft copies Apple" screamer. I mean, really:

• Adding a nicer interface and finally making use of graphics cards just makes sense even though OS X has been concentrating on this aspect for a while now.
  
  
• Yes, Safari beat Internet Explorer to RSS support, but I believe Firefox had RSS even before Safari.
  
  
• Yes, Apple had iTunes before Microsoft added a store to Windows Media Player, but they could've gotten that idea from anyone.
  
  
• Sure, Vista gadgets look like a Windows version of Apple's Dashboard, but Konfabulator and Desktop X were doing this first.
  
  
• Yeah, Apple supported drag-and-drop positively years before Microsoft did, but isn't drag-and-drop a natural evolution of GUI?
  
  
• Sorry, Windows had Fast User Switching before OS X.

Yes, Apple has beaten Microsoft to the punch with many things we now take for granted, but the tables have been turned from time to time. It is not a foregone conclusion that Microsoft just sits back and waits to see what Apple does so they can copy it. At least, that's what I thought.

Then I came along this – a project codenamed Monaco. I'm sorry, but how blatant and cheap is that? Let's see. Apple fulfills a niche market by offering GarageBand to its users through iLife, and Microsoft says, "Hey, they have a toy we don't! Let's do it too." It's not enough that there are plenty of third-party music sequencers for Windows. No, it seems that because Apple is making the product and bundling it with their computers (effectively making it seem like part of the OS), Microsoft absolutely has to do the exact same thing.

This is just sad. Redmond, start your photocopiers indeed.

Tags: software, microsoft, opinion, wwdc

Wow. Just wow. Things must be really cold right here at the moment. Thanks to Boot Camp (have to love Apple product names, even the temporary ones), Intel Macs can now dual-boot Mac OS X and WIndows XP.

I have to admit to not knowing what to think of this. On one hand, this could generate a lot of consumer interest in the Macintosh as switching is no longer an all-or-nothing proposition. Furthermore, this could be great for the education sector. Think about it; you can now teach about all of the major operating platforms on one machine.

On the other hand, I remember talking once to a developer who thought creating a Mac port of her product was a waste of time because Mac users could always pay for a copy of Virtual PC + Windows to run her software really slowly, and that solution was good enough. This move could potentially encourage some developers to get really lazy. "You want to use our software? Just dual-boot."

Should Apple be able to retain the developers, this could be a good move. As I earlier mentioned, this could entice people who might otherwise view purchasing a Mac as a risky investment.

Despite the weirdness of this announcement, you have to love some of the barbs Apple dishes out to Microsoft on the Boot Camp product page:

On BIOS & EFI:

"Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries."

On Security:

"Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes."

(Actually, I would avoid the internet with the Windows partition as much as possible!)

In the end, in case you can't tell, I really don't know what to make of this announcement. The thought of running Windows on a Mac makes me want to wash my brain out with soap, but I can understand the appeal to others. I just hope the major Mac-supporting developers stay on board, and I hope the smaller developers like Delicious Monster, RealMac Software, Panic, and the Omni Group continue to make their awesome Mac-only products that help make this platform unique.

I guess I, like many others, will just have to sit back and see where this goes.

Update 4/6:
A favorite blogger of mine, John Gruber posted this interesting write-up on what this whole Boot Camp thing means for the Mac. The article is called, "Windows: The New Classic." (Warning: language.) Toward the end of the article, he makes an interesting observation about the Boot Camp icon (which seems spot on), and he includes one of my favorite recent geek jokes in the article as well:

"What's the difference between OS X and Vista? Microsoft employees are excited about OS X..."

Additionally, I mentioned the potential for the Boot Camp solution in the classroom. Actually, this looks like a much more interesting solution for multiple platform environments.

Tags: software, microsoft, opinion, os x

Take a look at this:



iPhoto has abandoned brushed metal. This is also true of iMovie and iDVD (which also got a spiffy new icon). Each of these applications has adopted the "Them With No Name" that iTunes introduced last fall, retaining the slightly darker appearance of brushed metal, but smoother and without those thick edges brushed apps (like the Finder) have.

I wonder if iCal, Finder, and the other remaining brushed metal applications will all adopt this look by the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Only time will tell.

Tags: software

Screenshots of a new build of Windows Vista (formerly known as Windows Longhorn) appeared on Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows a few days ago. Being the desktop voyeur I am, I couldn't help but pop over and ogle the screens for a while. For reference, here are links to his screenshots: Installation; Desktop, My Computer, and Network; Control Panel and Aero Glass Customization; and Applications.

Once I started to delve into the screenshots a couple of things struck me.

• Translucency and text can work. If you look at the screens, you will notice that translucency is subdued behind areas that need text, like the Start Menu and location and search fields. In the case of window contents, translucency is completely eliminated, and that looks almost out of place in Vista. Translucent elements are prevalent in Vista, but they are implemented in a fairly nice manner.
  
  
• What did they do to the Start Menu? The Start Menu has been receiving tweaks pretty much since its first appearance. Now they have removed "Start" from the icon that activates the window, and have made the icon into a sphere that awkwardly protrudes from the task bar. This protrusion carries over to the user icon atop the Star Menu (when active). The user icon proudly protrudes from the top of the menu like some royal crest. Let's hope they kill this whole icon protrusion thing before people come to accept it.
  
  
• Outlook Express has become Windows Mail. Alright, call this Apple copying if you must, but I feel the name change is logical and welcome. "Outlook Express" tells you nothing of the application's function unless you use Outlook in your workplace. "Windows Mail" is a much more user-friendly name, and it's nice to see this change.

Overall, Windows Vista seems to be coming along well. Installation is still an ugly process (visually), but I'm sure that will be cleaned up before the public release. After all, installation gives users the first impression of your system. I can't say I've ever been a fan of Microsoft's default user interface for any of its versions of Windows. (I was a user back in the days of Windows 95 and Windows 98.) However, Vista seems to be gaining a nice sheen previously absent from Windows.
x
Unfortunately, my mind keeps going back to Whistler. This was a nice evolution of the Windows interface that eventually transformed into the eyesore that is Windows XP. (Oddly enough, both Mac and Windows themers have created themes based on this visual style that never made it into a publicly available version of Windows.) Hopefully, Microsoft will keep these nice touches that are present in current builds of Vista and refine them rather than pulling out something completely different at the last minute. Windows XP is not nice to look at. Vista is, and I hope it stays that way.

Tags: microsoft, technology, software, opinion

I promised this post months ago, but I just haven't had the time to hash it out. Now seems as good of a time as ever since at least one of my grad classes is mostly caught up for the moment! This is by no means a comprehensive review of Mac OS X 10.4, but I hope it provides a decent overview and a good perspective on one person's experiences using this product.
x
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was released on April 29, 2005 to wide acclaim and wide criticism. As per Apple's recent tradition, the product was $129 ($69 for educators). There was much ado over "200 New Features" from Apple's PR, and there was general complaint and mockery regarding a $129 fee for a "point release" from the critical. The truth of Tiger is somewhere in the middle. You have to pick some pretty fine nits to find "200 New Features." On the other hand, Mac OS 10.4 is more than a general "point release."
x

An OS By Any Other Name...

I've often said that Apple sells itself short in the nomenclature used for it's "X" systems. To illustrate this, some history:
x
(At this point, some of my more tech-savy readers should skip ahead.) Mac OS X, pronounced "Mac Oh-Es Ten," is not really the tenth version of the Macintosh Operating System. The original Mac OS died with the passing of Mac OS 9. The current system is based on UNIX, and it is a marriage, sometimes inelegant and sometimes uncomfortable, of the Classic Mac OS and another OS project that was called NeXTSTEP. As such, Mac OS X 10.1 was really version one of a new product. (No, I refuse to count Mac OS X 10.0 as anything else than an expensive beta.)
x
With each successive release, this product has matured considerably, so much so that screenshots of Mac OS X 10.1 look very foreign to someone used to working with Mac OS 10.4. In fact, these two systems look about as similar as Windows 98 and Windows XP. However, public perception can be that progress has been minimal because of how Apple has chosen to name their new operating system. It would be more accurate to view this product as Mac OS X Version 4 than as a simple point release.
x

Installation and First Impressions

My system disks were of Mac OS X 10.4.0, and installation was breezy. It took a little over 20 minutes to install on my G5, but it took quite a bit longer on my PowerBook G3. After rebooting, there was some performance lag as Spotlight indexed my hard drive, but that was quickly resolved. I quickly played with as many toys as I could including Automator, Dashboard, Spotlight, and the snazzy new screen-savers! Everything worked as expected.
x
My G5 seemed noticeably faster overall. I'm continually impressed how each Mac OS revision seems to make that machine snappier (even though it's a 1.8 GHz SP, which is supposedly adversely affected by 10.4). Startup time is also speedier. On average, my G5 takes roughly 30 seconds to boot. Unfortunately, Mac OS 10.4 has had the opposite affect on my PowerBook G3, and the poor thing seems to struggle under this system's weight. I guess I should have known I was in trouble when my old PowerBook was not on the initial list of supported hardware. (It appeared a few days later.)
x
What about stability? So far, there have been no kernal panics. Actually, I have been fortunate enough to never have had one of these, and I have been an OS X user since the Public Beta came out. My PowerBook began my OS X experience, and my old Graphite iMac DV joined the X era when Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" came out. In addition to the lack of kernal panics on either my G5 or my PowerBook G3, I have experienced no system freezes, and the only application to "Unexpectedly Quit" has been Microsoft Word 2004 on my laptop. My desktop has had absolutely zero flakiness ... outside of some that was my own doing.
x
My only real complaint is the fact that 10.4.1 and 10.4.2 (as well as some other miscellaneous updates) had already been released prior to my purchase of Tiger in late August, but the boxed version I got did not contain these updates, so both my desktop and my laptop had to download those updates after installation. I had kind of expected those updates to be "in the box" by then. For reference, 10.4.1 had been released May 16, and 10.4.2 had been released July 12. My purchase of Mac OS X 10.4 was on August 20.
x

New Features

Dashboard: Dashboard is the flashiest of the new features, and it is the feature that will probably remain most associated with Tiger. Dashboard is a compnant of Exposé, which was introduced by Apple in 10.3 "Panther." Dashboard is a separate layer from the desktop that runs mini applications callsed "widgets." These widgets are one-trick ponies that can do things like track shipments, monitor the weather, control iTunes, convert measurements, and act as a calendar. There are thousands of widgets freely available for download on the Internet, and there are a few more sophisticated ones that cost a few dollars. Fortunately, Apple has included an interface for installing and managing widgets as of the 10.4.2 update.



By in large, I find Dashboard pretty useful. I used to run Konfabulator strictly in Konsposé mode, so Dashboard offered little adjustment for me. The screenshot shows my most frequently used widgets, and they all do the job well. My only gripe is with the general laginess of Dashboard when you open it the first time after login. Personally, I have to recommend a tiny app called Dashboard Starter if you think you'll use Dashboard a lot. All it does is launch Dashboard on login, thereby making the widgets more responsive once you are ready to use them.

Spotlight: Spotlight is the integrated system search feature of Mac OS 10.4. You can envoke Spotlight by clicking on a magnifying glass icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen or by using the keyboard command Command-Space. Spotlight searches while you type, which is fine on fast systems, but I wish there was the option for it to wait for you to hit Return on my slower G3 system. Most of the time, if I lose something, Spotlight can find it for me. However, on my PowerBook G3, I've noticed that about half of my documents never get searched, and I'm not sure how to correct that situation. I'm a pretty organized person and seldom lose track of where I have information stowed, but Spotlight has come in handy during those times I have lost track of stuff.

Here's what a Spotlight window looks like if you ask it to show you all results from the Spotlight menu. Could this be the future of the Finder?



Automator: Automator may be one of the cooler new features that few will discover and even fewer may use. I can't comment too much about Automator because I'm still learning about it. Basically, Automator is designed to bring one-step goodness to repetitive tasks. For example, you could apply a sepia tone filter to multiple photographs at once. You may want to assign Spotlight Keywords to multiple items, or you could name several files sequentially (August 01.pdf, August 02.pdf, etc.). There is a learning curve involved, but Automator is a nice example of how Apple sometimes succeeds in thinking outside the box. I think I'm going to really like Automator once I get used to it.

Here's a screen capture of one of Automator's sample workflows. You can add and rearrange steps using simple drag-and-drop.



Other New Features: QuickTime is now at verison 7 and supports a new high-definition codec. Unfortuantely, QuickTime 7 does not seem to be as responsive as QuickTime 6 was when viewing .mpg videos in a browser window (Safari or Firefox). Some new Finder features include Burnable Folders and Smart Folders. Both are quite useful, especially the Burn Folders, which allow you to set up a burn session without a CD or DVD actually being inserted in the drive. FIanlly, the built in RSS support in Safari is cool, but if you are used to a dedicated RSS aggregator (like NetNewsWire), Safari probably won't offer enough features to make you switch.

There are plenty more little touches that separate Mac OS X 10.4 from previous releases, but this gives an overview of some of the most obvious enhancements.

Under the Hood

More important than the superficial enhancements are the "under the hood" improvements to Mac OS X 10.4. These are the changes that most will never see or know about but that affect how the system and applications work. Apple refers to these as "key technologies," and they include such elements as H.264 support, Core Image, Core Data, and Core