FYI: I’m going to try to release this Mac OS X freeware, Open Source, and free web services summary list on Wednesday from now on. Ruby on Rails 2.0 Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:58:32 Ruby on Rails 2.0 is out. This web development framework written in the Ruby dynamic programming language was the hot web dev topic for the past year or two (is it still a hot topic?). read more UnRarX 2.2: Mac RAR Extraction Utility Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:35:00 UnRarX 2.2 is utility for Mac OS X to unpack files stored in the Rar archive format. I don’t use Rar. If you do and have tried UnRarX, please let us know here how it works for you. The UnRarX website says that source code will be released on SourceForge. However, there isn’t any source code on there. So, although UnRarX lists its license as GPL, I’m going to call it Freeware for now. Flickr Integrated Picnik Web Photo Editor Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:52:53 read more DLO OpenFM: Find Open FM Frequencies Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:53:40 DLO is an iPod peripherals retailer. However, they do provide one very handy web application on their website… DLO OpenFM …finds open FM frequencies in your area (US only) by ZIP code or City/State. If you use a DLO (or any other) FM transmitter with your iPod or MP3 player, this can help find an unused frequency in your area to use.

I’ve been curious about the Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array and how it might perform on my AirPort Extreme network. if this combination turned out to be practical, I could have 2 Terabytes of hard disk backup storage available to any computer on the 802.11n network. The big question would be speed. How would Drobo’s USB 2.0 connector fare when deluged with the onslaught of RAW photos that I accumulate on a weekly basis? The good news is that Drobo and AirPort Extreme play nice together. I can easily mount the disk array from both my Tiger and Leopard machines. It is the height of convenience. The bad news is, yes, the read/write times are slow. For my various tests, it took 90 minutes to transfer a 14 GB Aperture archive from a FireWire drive (connected to a MacBook Pro) to the Drobo. There’s a nice little discussion about this happening on the Inside Aperture site titled, Alas, No Aperture on my Drobo. And I’ve featured the Drobo in this week’s Digital Story podcast. My bottom line? Despite the lethargic write speed, I’m really happy to have the Drobo on my network. I have a gigantic image library stored on it that I can browse via Microsoft Expression Media. And I’m currently looking at Port Map and basic Leopard tools for remote access to the drives. i must admit, it’s been a fun project.

“Last weekend, I decided to expand Coverflow to work with my entire photo album,” said Erica Sadun in her recent post, Accessing all your onboard photos from your iPhone database. “This involved exploring the MusicLibrary and PhotoLibrary frameworks to find out how I could extract a complete set of albums and their pictures. The PLPhotoLibrary class proved to hold the key. With it, I could request an album list, and then build up a dictionary of photos that linked back from the image identifier to the album it came from.” She then goes on to post the code on how to accomplish this. Quite nice.

Todd Ogasawara has continued to publish his Mac FFOSS (Freeware/Free and Open Source Software) column on O’Reilly’s Mac Center. If you’ve fallen behind on what’s new (and cheap) in the Mac universe, you might want to hop over there for a peek.

Over on the new O’Reilly Mac site, Gordon Meyer posts his thoughts about the EyeTV Hybrid: “The EyeTV Hybrid is very portable; it’s not much bigger than a typical USB “thumb drive.” It’s not as portable if you need an antenna, of course, but you might not need one. I live in the city, and can literally see the broadcast towers on nearby skyscrapers, so I was able to receive 10 digital and 12 analog channels just by plugging the unit into a free USB port.” If you’re thinking about revisiting EyeTV, you might want to take a look at Gordon’s post.

Erica Sadun has posted a raft of excellent iPhone technical shorts on O’Reilly’s Digital Media Mac Blog. Topics include Programmatically Handling iPhone interruptions, Creating an UIImage from a URL, and plenty more. If you’re an “under the glass” iPhone type, you should definitely check out what Erica has been writing about lately.

“With more than 450 exhibitors at this year’s Macworld Expo, it’s impossible to see it all,” writes Jochen Wolters. “Which is a shame especially because of all those countless small and medium sized companies whose product announcements are often drowned out by the major news from the big players like Apple or Microsoft. Hence, let me point out five products I stumbled over at the 2008 Expo which, in my humblest of opinions, deserve a bit more attention than they have received so far.” Jochen goes on to list his picks in the post titled, Macworld Expo 2008 Favorites.

Gordon Meyer writes in PhoneValet & iPhone: Instant Landline Voice Mail: “Parliant’s PhoneValet has been a valuable part of my automated home for a few years now, but the recent addition of built-in iPhone/iPod touch support has pushed it close to a “must have” tool. PhoneValet has long had the ability to answer the phone, present a simple (or sophisticated, if you’d like) voice mail system, and record messages. It’s also been able to send email notifications of incoming messages and, more recently, offered a web-based interface to view call logs and play voice mail via the PhoneValet Anywhere add-on. But for me, it took the iPhone to gel all these pieces into a coherent and very useful whole.”

Microsoft Office Workspace Live Cannot Display PowerPoint 2007 Slide Deck Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:47:42 read more Microsoft Office Live Workspace: A Definite Sleeper Hit Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:25:41 read more Jaxtr: Post and Route an Alternate Phone Number Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:47:29 read more TubeTV 0.9.2: YouTube Video Converter Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:27:18 It figures. Right after I said I only found one YouTube downloader/converter for Mac OS X in a Mashable list, I found a second freeware option while thumbing through the current issue of Mac Life (Dec. 2008, p. 18). It is… TubeTV 0.9.2

FYI: I’m going to try to release this Mac OS X freeware, Open Source, and free web services summary list on Wednesday from now on. Ruby on Rails 2.0 Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:58:32 Ruby on Rails 2.0 is out. This web development framework written in the Ruby dynamic programming language was the hot web dev topic for the past year or two (is it still a hot topic?). read more UnRarX 2.2: Mac RAR Extraction Utility Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:35:00 UnRarX 2.2 is utility for Mac OS X to unpack files stored in the Rar archive format. I don’t use Rar. If you do and have tried UnRarX, please let us know here how it works for you. The UnRarX website says that source code will be released on SourceForge. However, there isn’t any source code on there. So, although UnRarX lists its license as GPL, I’m going to call it Freeware for now. Flickr Integrated Picnik Web Photo Editor Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:52:53 read more DLO OpenFM: Find Open FM Frequencies Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:53:40 DLO is an iPod peripherals retailer. However, they do provide one very handy web application on their website… DLO OpenFM …finds open FM frequencies in your area (US only) by ZIP code or City/State. If you use a DLO (or any other) FM transmitter with your iPod or MP3 player, this can help find an unused frequency in your area to use.

Track Santa Using Google Earth on Christmas Eve Sat, 01 Dec 2007 21:26:49 If your child (or you for that matter) want to track Santa’s progress in style on Christmas Eve head over to read the Official Google Blog item… Tracking Santa, then and now read more HubbleSite Gallery: Put the Universe on Your Desktop Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:34:56 It doesn’t get much more amazing that this… Images from the Hubble Telescope… HubbleSite Gallery Be sure to check out the Wallpaper section of the site for free downloads of truly amazing images. My Cool Button: Create Web 2.0 Candy Buttons Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:46:56 Although I believe in all the Web 2.0 hype, on bad days I may respond to the “what is Web 2.0″ question with: It’s all about candy colored buttons! If you want quickly build some of your own Web 2.0 candy colored buttons, head over to… My cool button Its single page menu driven service is so simple even I could build a button :-) Google Maps Terrain View Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:51:20 Google Maps’ new Terrain View kind of looks like a blueprint to me (maybe it’s the colors). You can see buildings in a 3/4 3D-ish relief view with hills looking like a big smudge (see that thing between the Street View and Traffic buttons above?). Terrain View also doesn’t let you zoom in as close as the Map or Satellite views do. BTW, the pure Satellite view with no street labels is gone. Satellite gives you what used to be called Hybrid. read more Firefox 2.0.0.10 Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:51:50 NOTE: 2.0.0.11 was released after this blog item was originally posted Mozilla released Firefox 2.0.0.10. According to the release notes, it provides three security related fixes. I will say this about Firefox though. Although it has been mostly stable on Mac OS X, the Windows versions have had a lot of big memory leaks in previous versions. The memory leaks seem less severe starting with, hmm, maybe 2.0.0.8. It still seems a lot slower to me that Firefox 1.5 on both Mac OS X and Windows to me though. I haven’t tried the Firefox 3 betas yet. read more Get Tube: Convert YouTube Video on a Mac Sun, 25 Nov 2007 21:41:07 After reading about Ares Tube for Windows, Basketball Jones (check references to Cheech and Chong if you don’t know about that character :-) asked if there is some app for Mac OS X that can convert YouTube videos. Here’s one that claims to do the job for Mac users… Get Tube It was the only Mac OS X based application in a YouTube converter article over on Mashable.

Top European developers have banded together to offer a Mac software feast under the headline “Give Good Food to Your Mac” to holiday shoppers over the next ten days. In contrast to other deals in the past, this one offers a steeper discount the more products you choose. A kind of ad hoc bundle deal. This is another experiment at gaining attention for the products of innovative Mac developers. Apple sells more than 2 million Macs in a Quarter, but for independent Mac software developers it remains a challenge to reach a larger audience.

I’ve previously written about how I use Radioshift as part of my home automation setup. However, in the last week or so I’ve been using it as a desktop application, as it’s intended, instead. And frankly, it’s driving me crazy. I’m continually running into two problems: First, the show streams from KGO-AM are seriously messed up. Without exception, about half-way through the recording, the first 10 minutes of the show repeats. Sometimes this happens more than once. After the repeated segment, the show picks up where it was before the flashback. It’s frustrating, and I’ve reported the problem to Radiotime (the provider of the streams), but it is exacerbated by Radioshift’s interface. Which is the second problem. Although Radioshift is sometimes described at “TiVo for radio,” it really doesn’t offer many playback controls at all. There’s no “resume playback” feature, so if you stop listening to a show, you can’t get back to where you left off. Not only does Radioshift not remember your stopping point, it does not offer any controls for navigating the recording. No rewind. No fast-foward. But there’s an easy workaround that you can use until Rogue Amobea addresses this oversight. Specify QuickTime Player as your “audio editor” in Radioshift’s preferences. Then, when you want to listen to a show, click “Edit Audio” to automatically open the recording in QuickTime Player. This works exceptionally well because QuickTime Player, even without buying QuickTime Pro, provides almost all the playback controls that Radioshift lacks. My favorite is that the fast-forward button, if held down while the audio is playing, allows you to skim ahead and easily skip over commercials. If you do have QuickTime Pro, you can use the AV Controls to speed up the playback of talk shows. Simply open the AV Controls window, then adjust the Playback Speed setting. I use about 1.5X faster. Then, adjust the Pitch Shift slider until the voices sound normal again. It’s really quite amazing and a great time saver. Finally, don’t forget that you can also skip to points in the recording by dragging the playhead. If you want to temporarily mark a point in the recording for later review, use the “I” and “O” keys during playback to set selection markers in the QT window (QT Pro required). I hope these tips help you get more out of Radioshift. If you have one of your own to share, please leave a comment.

The 43Folders piece Workflow for the Fujitsu ScanSnap reminds me that I haven’t written about how I’ve been using my ScanSnap S500M. I got it about 5 months ago, and its easily the most useful electronic gizmo purchase of the year. (Since I bought it, the newer S510M has been released.) I was hesitant to get a ScanSnap because of its price, but when I discovered that it was available through my credit card company, via Amazon, in exchange for “reward points” I dove right in. I already had a flatbed scanner, but the ScanSnap’s document feeder and single-pass duplex scanning makes it a lot faster and less hassle to use compared to a flatbed. (It’s not, however, a high-resolution photo scanner so if you’re into that, you’ll need to keep your flatbed.) My second concern was about the size of the scanner. I really don’t have room in my office for another piece of equipment, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the ScanSnap is a lot more compact than it appears in a photograph. Its footprint is less than the size of standard US piece of paper, and its height, when closed, isn’t much taller than a CD jewel case. You need a bit more room when it is open, but it is very portable and I keep mine tucked away behind my Cinema Display when I’m not using it. I’ve been using DevonThink Pro Office to catalog and manage the PDFs that the SnapScan creates. So far, I’ve got about 1,000 documents spread between three DevonThink databases. (I have no idea how many pages that is total, maybe around 5000, see below for details.) Here are some notes about my workflow: I wait until I have 10 or more things to scan, instead of scanning documents “on demand.” This is because I don’t keep the scanner hooked up all the time, due to space limitations and a paucity of unused USB ports on my iMac. I’ve eliminated about 3 boxes of stored paper so far, and thrown away countless of magazines I was saving for just a few articles. Now, when I see something I want to save, I tear the pages out and put them in my “to be scanned” pile. Some might consider this a “marriage saver.” The three DevonThink databases I currently use are: one for conjuring literature, one for household/legal items (bank statements, credit card bills, pay stubs), and a general “this is cool” catch-all. My intention is to eventually use DevonThink’s AI to categorize documents and my understanding is that specialized domains are better kept separate for this purpose. I haven’t yet tried to train the AI, though. I normally use Skim to view PDFs, but while scanning I prefer PDFPen instead. It’s the perfect tool for this task because it lets me rearrange and delete pages within the finished PDF. SnapScan does a good job of automatically removing blank pages, but when scanning magazine articles I sometimes need to eliminate the back-side of the last scanned page. I only wish that DevonThink Pro allowed you to specify a preferred PDF application instead of using the system’s setting. Speaking of DevonThink Pro wishes, here are some additional items that would improve my satisfaction: DevonThink shows the file size of a PDF, but you have to open it to see the number of pages it contains. To me, pages are the most important count, not bytes. The integration between SnapScan and DevonThink basically boils down to SnapScan sending an open-event to DT after the PDF is initially created. It would be much better if the two could actually “talk” to each other. For example, in order to make a single-sided scan you have to use SnapScan’s contextual Dock menu. A set of controls for this within DevonThink would eliminate this awkwardness. While the OCR process that DevonThink uses is essential for finding things later, it’s unfortunate that you can’t easily postpone until after you’ve completed several scans. Your choice is to either wait while each document is recognized immediately after scanning, or to turn off the OCR and then tediously process each document later. If you do this, you end up with two copies of the document in your database, one that has been OCR’d and one that has not. This is probably my biggest “gripe” with DevonThink so far. A similar, but more minor, nit. When DevonThink opens the scanned file it can prompt you for meta info to add to the PDF. Title, author, and so on. Unfortunately, the document info dialog is modal and the author’s name defaults to your login name; which of course is rarely the right answer. The folks at Devon Technologies are too generous with their trial period for DevonThink Pro Office. You can use it a very long time before it starts urging you to buy it. In fact, when it goes into “sales mode” it simply stops running the OCR process. Which, as I’ve discussed above, could be viewed as a timesaver. So, all-in-all, I’m satisfied but there are plenty of opportunities for improving the workflow. I think the DevonThink Pro Office, PDFPen, and SnapScan combination is a real winner. There’s no doubt that this is the first time that I’ve felt good about converting to a strictly digital storage method for paper files. If I discover any more tips, I’ll add them later. For now, just a quick note that SnapScan and DevonThink Pro Office are working just fine for me under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. If going paperless appeals to you, now might be the time to dive in.

A few years ago, I peeked over the shoulder of a very dear friend as he was using his computer. “R” is a computing guru through and through, spending his days between WebObjects applications, Aperture, countless browsers and utilities. He is the kind of user who cannot work with less than four partitions and three huge disks attached to his machine. And work he does, brilliantly. In fact, I have rarely seen anyone squeeze so much computing power out of his machine. Imagine my surprise when I noticed how close to the defaults R’s installation was… Mine, on the other hand, used to be customized to the brim: special icons, menus haxies, applications from all over the web. I did not spend hours applying changes, mind you, but they all came gradually from the moment I unpacked my Mac. Curious, I inquired. R’s reply was pretty simple: “You’ve got to learn to live with the defaults.” Uh? For a long time, I just could not really make sense of it. Then, in the middle of this OS transition, now equipped with two more machines than I had at the time - yes, that’s a lot, although not everything is the top-of-the-line latest and greatest, I assure you - and a lot more going on in my life, I suddenly can make sense of these words: the more you customize, the greater a pain it will be to move from one machine to another. Apple’s defaults may not be the best for my current mindset but they are the same across every single machine they make. Learn to live with the defaults and every Mac will be tailored to your “preference.” Of course, that is an ideal situation, and we will all make some changes here and there but the fewer, the better. I’ve spent the past couple months attempting to “re-learn” using my Mac with progressively more default settings. Guess what? I’m much happier. Not because I agree with them all but because I have a lot less to worry about when switching machines. This, in turn, helps me focus on my data which helps the computer part fade into the background, as it should do. We do, indeed, have synchronization options now but how reliable are they when it comes to carrying across all your settings from all your applications? So far, it has been more trouble than help on this end. And you, what do you think of Apple’s defaults? Do you use them? How do you translate your own settings between various configurations?

A former Apple engineer told me the iTunes team is adding features faster than they can be documented. Here’s one I’ll be using a lot: a way to re-download deleted podcasts. Occasionally, podcast episodes don’t download completely. This happens to me a lot with This American Life, and it recently happened with my own podcast, Digital Media Insider (home page | iTunes link). So I figured I’d delete the partial download and try again. But I couldn’t get it back. iTunes didn’t show the deleted episode when I clicked “Update Podcast”: Unlucky 13: After deleting the partially downloaded episode 13, I couldn’t get it back. Right-clicking and selecting “Update Podcast” wouldn’t display the missing episode. The secret, I learned at KD Murray’s site, is to collapse the episode list by clicking on the disclosure triangle next to the podcast’s name and then to Option-click the triangle again. That expands the episode list and shows the missing episodes in gray with a “Get” button next to them: Option-clicking the disclosure triangle next to the podcast’s name reveals the missing episodes. Now, normally you wouldn’t want to re-download episodes you’d deleted, so I can sort of understand why this feature is hidden, but by using it on some other shows to which I subscribe, I discovered episodes I didn’t realize I’d missed. And the partial-download problem is probably fairly common, so it might be nice to have a “repair podcast” menu option. Or better, since the duration of the podcast should be recorded in the XML file, make iTunes smart enough to re-download truncated episodes itself. What “hidden” iTunes features have you found?

I’m a Windows Mobile fan (sorry ’bout that) but that doesn’t mean I’m a Windows Mobile fan-boy. I go off on mini-rants now and then and thought I would share a side-by-side comparison of what the Weather.com sites formatted for generic mobile devices (like Windows Mobile) and the version formatted for the iPhone looks like. FYI: The little rant on one of my personal site-blogs was about getting Microsoft to fix broken components like the Windows Mobile web browser. MacDevCenter readers can just look at the generic-mobile vs. iPhone formatting to appreciate what an impact the iPhone is having on web design for mobile devices.

Google announced that Google Docs can now be retrieved and viewed (but not edited) on Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and iPhone/iPod touch devices. Documents and spreadsheets can be viewed on all of those device types. Presentations can only be viewed on iPhone or iPod touch devices (for now according to the announcement). I created a quick and dirty (and blurry… sorry ’bout that) 2 minute video demo using an iPod touch. I hope they add editing and Google Gears offline features real soon.

The big news of the day is of course Steve Jobs announcement of an iPhone SDK for February. I am very excited about this. It is an important signal to the Mac OS X developer community that Apple values our commitment to Mac OS X and rewards us with letting us have a part of the success that it will enjoy as OS X on embedded systems. We can’t wait to get started. My company, Boinx Software, will certainly make software for the iPhone.

Well, you could argue that any one of the OS X ‘Big Cats’ was the winner, simply because Apple has made a user-friendly UNIX system that outperforms most, if not all, other operating systems. Leopard is now fully POSIX conforming making it more inter-operable with other POSIX systems. Some other goodies are things like DTrace which will help hardcore C hackers more than those who are building widgets, but still, there must be some hardcore C hackers out there eager to build things for the Mac, and hopefully not just device drivers, though those are welcome. I look forward to using XCode 3. XCode has always been one of the best IDEs out there, not really fair to call it an IDE since it is so much more fundamental to Apple development than just an IDE. Sadly, Apple seems to have neglected perl. Though perl 5.8.8 is going to be included in Leopard, 5.10 is due out shortly. (It has been due out shortly for a long time now.) Also, Apple completely neglects mention of perl on their fancy 300 Leopard features page. There is one mention of perl in association with DTrace but otherwise Ruby and Python get all the attention. With so many perl developers carrying around Apple laptops and so much Apple or Mac specific software on CPAN you would expect more and better perl integration in Leopard, but you would disappointed like me.

Apple posted a single web page that lists and describes Leopard’s many new features. You can find it at… Mac OS X Leopard 300+ Features List

Am I the only one who wonders how they got this headline past Steve?

Looks like Ars was right about iTunes Plus changes today. iT+ tracks are now 99 cents (US), down from US$1.29, and there are a number of new tracks available from independent labels. When I checked my iTunes Plus status (go to the iTunes Store’s home page, then look over on the right side for iTunes Plus), I was offered three upgrades (click for full size image): The upgrade price remains US$3 per album, or 30 cents a track, even though the Plus price has dropped to the $9.99 album / 99c track that I paid originally. I wonder if the people who howled about the iPhone price cut are going to scream bloody murder about this too. Whatever, I want better sound and no DRM, and this is cheap. First rule of capitalism, kids: stuff is worth what people will pay for it. Two upgrade weirdnesses: when I clicked “buy now”, I had to wait for an e-mail with the link to my upgraded songs: What, are the indie records so low traffic that they’re ripping the Plus versions a la carte? Probably not; I got the e-mail within five minutes, and off I went. Another difference I noticed is that the DRM’ed versions of these songs are put in an “Original iTunes Purchases” folder (as before), which is then put in the Trash. I don’t believe my last upgrade was automatically trashed like this. So, anyways, I’m delighted to see more iTunes Plus music and a price cut, almost certainly a competitive response to the very impressive Amazon MP3 Downloads Store. But I do hope we see more indies on here… almost everything I listen to is indie (or imported game/anime music from Japan), and those of you who listen to the CBC Radio 3 podcast will recognize Controller.Controller, Malajube, and Fond Of Tigers on my upgrade list above. Still, I can think of a lot more indies that I wasn’t offered upgrades of: Chixdiggit, The New Pornographers, You Say Party We Say Die, The Delgados, etc. I’ve got some anime music video plans that I’ll need non-DRM versions of Rilo Kiley and Immaculate Machine for, and I’d really rather work from a high-bitrate MP3 or AAC than have to resample with Audio Hijack Pro. Still, this is a positive development. Let’s hope all the artists and labels participating in the DRM free stores — whether iTunes, Amazon, Snocap, or otherwise — do well. After all, there’s lots of great music out there to discover, and I have another 80 GB to fill on my iPod.

I want to give a shout-out to Apple Insider for a stellar series of “Road to Mac OS X Leopard” articles detailing changes coming in the any-day-now update. They offer a layer of depth and context well beyond what you can find on the official Leopard site. Not content with a bulleted list of UI tweaks and bug fixes, AI has been providing history lessons on each application and technology, with nostalgia-producing screenshots and reminders of just how far we’ve come. The latest post was today’s “Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Mail 3.0” which includes some hints at just how close Apple came to biting the dust thanks to mismanagement in the 80s while it traces the history of email apps on Mac, then wraps up with details on the new version of Mail. Others in the “Road to…” series: Time Machine Spaces Dock 1.6 Finder 10.5 Dictionary 2.0 Preview 4.0 Thanks much to Apple Insider for going beyond the call of duty.

Yesterday, user Yacko asked me why I keep closing and re-opening applications on my Mac, especially since Mac OS X has been built from the ground up for multitasking and features many a way to hide, minimize, tuck away and generally forget about unused processes, applications or even documents. Now, my personal preferences matter little to the world but, giving the question a bit of thought, I realized there is more to it. If you came to my office at night, you would find, in addition to the big, hungry attack dogs, a dark, silent room. Every night, I religiously power down every single device, from router to computer and from printer to headphones. Mind you, everything is set up to run smoothly: the wiring is new and up to the last standards, there is a UPS in front of every device giving them enough juice to withstand power cuts - which, in a city like Paris, are about as common as acts of selfless generosity. The office is also wired for fire detection and we have remote backups, so there is little to be worried about on a daily basis. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely within acceptable computing standards. Yet, over my years of computing, I have come to appreciate that consumer machines are seldom made to run continuously. Even on today’s Mac OS X, a stable, UNIX-based OS with no fundamental faults that would require frequent reboots - compared to say, Windows Me -, things get wonky after a while: console starts logging messages along the lines of “unknown error” and “this really should not happen” every couple seconds, memory leaks from a few well known applications like cooling fluid from old G5s, lookupd, the master of all things DNS on the Mac, starts whining and slowing down and complaining Apple.com does not exist. Meanwhile, the router freaks out and slows down on its own accord when the ISP starts shuffling IP addresses. Even my past three cell phones, each from a different manufacturer and sporting a different mobile OS, required rebooting about every week, lest one wanted them to place spontaneous calls to Scotland, freeze mid-call or mix address book entries. Now, you may believe I have a remarkably unstable installation and I know many users who have not rebooted their Mac in weeks. I even know Linux and Windows users who never reboot. Yet, it is my experience their machines often end up full of quirky bugs, annoyances and refresh issues, that they often chalk up as “normal” and blissfully ignore. After all, to each his thing and if they feel comfortable with it, that’s perfectly fine. In our world of fast release cycles, there is almost no time for long-term QA. Sure, applications are opened, tested, sometimes very well, and closed when the next build arrives and the cycle is repeated. Devices and applications however are rarely left to sit alone and just “do their thing,” because it is often assumed little goes on when a computer is not used. That, of course, is untrue: network interfaces keep receiving and sending packets, background processes keep backgrounding and disks keep spinning. Millions of little silent operations that are seldom tested together over time. The solution? It’s an old trick and it’s vexing at times because it makes you feel like you live in 1996. It is, however, easy: power down the machines at night, power them back up in the morning. If that’s too much for you, do it once a week. Additional points if you have an AppleScript that clears up all user caches before shutting down: I know I do and I know it helps. Sure, it gives me time to grab a cup of coffee while Mail starts up and rebuilds its indexes but I’d get the coffee anyway and I’d rather do this often than stop seeing new messages or be asked to read five new messages out of two - true stories, I assure you. To answer your question, Yacko, I am not a Windows switcher. I’ve lived with the Mac my entire life and with UNIX for the best part of it. Yet, even in this day of high availability, 24/7 serving and fast booting, I just don’t believe in keeping things running all the time. Even my toaster gets unplugged at night: I’m sure it runs embedded Linux somewhere. And even if it doesn’t, that is one less appliance that could spontaneously burst in flames at night from a short. What are your experiences?

Have you ever seen the default wallpaper of a Windows 95 installation? That horrendous, disgusting, depressing shade of gray-green that, for years, went mocked and scorned by many? It turns out it may just be what the doctor ordered for long term computer use. Have we missed something all along? For years, I have switched between the Apple sanctioned Mac OS X wallpaper, namely Aqua Graphite, and photos or pictures gleaned from the web. For years I have looked at my screen and lived like every Mac user, regretting my inability to somehow find the perfect picture, the one I never grew tired of. One day, about a month ago, out of sheer amusement, I picked “Solid Kelp”, Apple’s version of the Windows 95 desktop background. Yes, it looked terrible, but with my 30″ display being mostly covered in windows all the time as of late, my desktop picture mattered little. Plus, it was the only color I had never tried. A few weeks later, I can report this is the desktop picture that I have used for the longest period at a time. Yes, it is a depressing shade of green but, interestingly enough, it blends perfectly in the background: it does not kick contrasts up like a dark gray background does, it does not make the screen harsher like light grays, reds or yellows. It just sits there, creating a backdrop that is dark enough to make things pop but light enough to keep contrasts pleasing. Interestingly enough, I have also noticed a great reduction in eye strain. Even more so than with the Apple provided blue or mid-gray drops, that are usually a good bet for prolonged screen use. Less flicker, fewer headaches and less blurriness. Of course, any shade of green, even if it is called Kelp will not replace good computing practices: look away, stand up, drink lots of water and clean your glasses. Yet, this little discovery has greatly eased my computing life. For those of you who have trashed Kelp, try using the following color (#497568):   What do you think?

Since the introduction of the iPhone, Apple has been the focus of criticism from many a member of the computing community: keeping the platform closed is an outrage, a Microsoftian move, living proof of the evil that lurks underneath the company’s cheerful facade. Whether you agree with these points or not, one cannot deny Apple has pulled all the strings to indeed keep people out of the iPhone and send a firm message to those who had dared trespass - and I am not even talking about “bricked” iPhones here since knowing whether the side effect of the upgrade was intentional or coincidental is still everyone’s guess. Surprisingly, however, keeping the iPhone closed may be a good thing. Mac OS X and the iPhone’s OS, “OS X” have a lot in common. They’re not quite the same beast but it is a reasonable assumption that they share more than a few common traits. If rumors about the iPhone migrating to Intel processors at some point are true, they will have even more in common. Over the past few weeks, hackers and enthusiasts have given the iPhone’s platform a thorough massage, attempting to break through Apple’s barriers. More often than not, such breaks progress not by unraveling Apple’s attempts at locking things down but rather by circumventing them through the exploitation of some bug or vulnerability in a component of the OS. Mobile Safari and Mobile Mail have come under a lot of scrutiny - imagine creating a (paying, of course!) web page that iPhone users could visit to automatically unlock the phone through the crafty exploitation of an image-based bug. In many ways, unlocking research has turned into security research. Sure, the unlocking community may not be comprised of security experts and their proceeding as far as uncovering vulnerabilities may be hit and miss. Yet, for as long as evident exploitable vulnerabilities will exist in Mobile Safari and OS X, Apple won’t be able to keep the platform really locked down. Not all vulnerabilities are exploitable, that is for sure. Contractually however, could Apple justify ignoring a potential means of unlocking even if no exploit yet exists? Only their own lawyers know but I guess this is a chance they would prefer not to take. Since the locking people seem insistent on catching up with the unlockers, one can only hope they will be given incentive to look into these security vulnerabilities and give a couple nudges to those in charge. If a patch is written for OS X, one can only hope that it will be written for Mac OS X too, even if that means waiting for a WebKit update. In the end, our Macs may end up being a smidge more secure thanks to the iPhone. (And let us not forget the launch of the iPod touch and its predictable trickling down the iPod lineup can only accentuate the crowds’ desire to break into OS X, pushing the phenomenon further.) Idle speculation? Wishful thinking? Watchathink?

If you’re interested in music production on the Macintosh, here’s a trio of recent postings on the O’Reilly Digital Media Center web site which you may find worth a look. Last week, I reviewed “Sequel,” Steinberg’s entry-level music software package. Shipping with a huge library of loops, samples, and software instruments, Sequel is a very respectable challenger to Apple’s GarageBand, and well worth checking out if you would like to start making music on your Mac. And checking Sequel out is easy, as Steinberg is offering a downloadable trial version of the software. Music technology was also prominently featured at last week’s Apple Expo Paris. To find out which three products from that category were (or, rather: “I considered”) the most noteworthy at the show, check out Musique sur une Pomme Américaine.

I read a number of Apple rumor sites speculating about Apple replacing the Mac mini (a moment of silence for mine that passed on last week) with a Mac nano. Some of the rumor items speculate that Apple might dump the optical drive (DVD) from the unit to save space. Here’s the thought that prompted this posting though… When Apple introduced the iPod nano, they dumped the hard drive from the mini line and went to flash storage. I think Apple needs to keep an optical drive for at least playing CD music and DVD video without having an ugly cable attached device on a Mac nano. But, what about dumping the hard drive from the Mac and either going all flash storage (say 30GB) with the option of a 80 to 320GB drive in a small enclosure either beneath or above the Mac nano with a seamless bus plug (like a notebook in a docking station) instead of a cable? I just hope they have it ready for sale soon. I need to replace my Mac mini and am waiting for Leopard and whatever new Mac emerges before doing so.

When I want to concentrate on a computing task, I often invoke the Finder’s “hide others” command by Command-Option-clicking on an icon in the Dock. But my screen is so big and my desktop so cluttered that merely hiding the other applications is hardly restful. In less time that it would take to clean up the piles of icons on my desktop, I whipped up this AppleScript and mapped it to a function key. It grabs the path of the frontmost application, launches Katsura Shareware’s free Screenshot Helper — hiding everything on the desktop — and then switches back to the original app. (* db Hide-the-Desktop By David Battino, Batmosphere.com, 2007-09-30 This script hides the desktop and then switches back to the previous app. Requires Screenshot Helper, free at www.katsurashareware.com. *) set front_app to (path to frontmost application as Unicode text) tell application "Screenshot Helper" activate end tell tell application front_app activate end tell Hopefully your virtual desktop is tidier than mine, but you may still find the “do something and then switch back” routine helpful. Katsura Screenshot Helper covers your messy desktop with a pure color or photo.

My 2.5 year old 1st generation G4 1.42GHz Mac mini (and the first Mac I ever bought) bit the dust. I’m pretty sure it is either a system board or power supply problem (betting on the power supply being the problem). Although I thought about it at the time of purchase, I decided not to get AppleCare for a desktop Mac mini even though I told myself it is really a notebook without a battery. So, now what to do with it? Everything is backed to to an external hard drive. So, data loss is not a major issue. ifixit.com has how-to guides for everything but the power supply. So, I’m guessing it may be a difficult part to find. If it is just a power supply issue, I’m tempted to try to stick it in a bigger case of some kind and use whatever power supply will work with it (regardless of size). Any leads on that idea? The next decision is what to replace it with. The new iMacs look great. But, I really really hate the idea of all-in-one computers (with the exception of notebooks of course). The Mac Pro is way too expensive. And, the Mac mini? Well, that first one went bye-bye in under three years and appears difficult for my less than nimble fingers to repair (compared to regular ol’ non-Apple large PCs which are easy to open up and replace components). The various Mac rumor sites have been talking about a sub-notebook sized device being introduced in October. That sounds pretty interesting. But, all I really need is a small iTunes box with a browser and email client (the Mac mini is perfect for that). I just took a look a the 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini. But, do I really want another hard to repair box? Actually yes, but… :-) Well, time to look around the house for a putty knife I guess. Might have a little project for it this weekend.

So far, I’m pretty much enamored of Rogue Amoeba’s new Radioshift application. If you haven’t tried it yet, it allows you to easily listen to, and record, radio shows from around the world. It makes automatically recording new episodes of a show, or “subscribing,” as simple as TiVo does for television programs. I think Radioshift would be a wonderful addition to my home, and I want to run it on the Mac that I already use for home automation. However, Radioshift isn’t really optimized for use in a “server” situation. That’s understandable, but it hasn’t stopped me from tying to bend it to my will anyway. Here’s are notes on my progress so far: • I love that Radioshift uses a background process for recording shows that you’ve subscribed to. This means that you don’t have to leave the app running all of the time. You can use the sound files directly, without opening Radioshift, too. You’ll find your recorded shows in the ~/Music/Radioshift/ folder. • I want to listen to my recorded shows using another computer, because the home automation Mac is tucked away in a corner and I rarely use it directly. Radioshift doesn’t have any built-in support for sharing, but I can load the above-mentioned files into QuickTime Player (or similar) after mounting the server’s drive. The bonus prize for doing this is that QuickTime Player allows you to fast forward during playback, to skip commercials, which is a feature that Radioshift currently lacks. • If you don’t care about skipping commercials, just use the Finder’s built-in ability to play QuickTime files, as shown below. Very handy! • Radioshift does, apparently, have the ability to add recordings to your iTunes Library. This means you could use iTunes sharing to listen to the shows on other computers. However, this doesn’t work for me. First, I haven’t been able to get Radioshift to successfully add a recording to iTunes. But even if it did, it’s a manual process (Radioshift doesn’t do it automatically) and I don’t want to keep iTunes running on my home automation Mac. Although parts of this feel a little awkward, so far I’ve found it worth doing. I hope that as Radioshift continues to evolve the process will get easier. If you have tips to share, please feel free to chime in.

Nearly a year ago, I posted about the notMac Challenge, an effort to come up with a replacement for .Mac. Just recently, I received some encouraging news that I wanted to share with you: Several months ago I started the notMac Challenge to generate incentive for a developer to create an easy-to-use replacement for Apple’s dotMac service. Thanks to the generosity of people from around the world, the prize grew to a value of $7,836, and as a result, I’m very happy to announce that Ben Spink has submitted a solution. Contributors to the notMac Challenge have been testing the submission for the last couple of weeks and after a few minor tweaks, it appears to be functioning well. During the final week of evaluation, I’d like to invite everyone to download Ben’s solution, try it out and post their feedback on the notMac Challenge forums. You can visit the main page and navigate to the forums, or go directly to the discussion thread that includes Ben Spink’s solution. Although the notMac forums would be the most appropriate place for technical feedback related to the product itself, feel free to post any other thoughts below.

Perhaps having learned from the Amazon Unbox fiasco, the new Amazon MP3 Downloads Store fails to suck. Frankly, there is a lot to like here, and it might be the first viable iTunes competitor. Not that Apple should be concerned, I think, but more on that in a minute. The store’s songs are MP3’s with no DRM, encoded at 256 kbps (actually, it’s VBR, so your bitrate may vary slightly). The key consequence, and the reason that this store may succeed, is that these files work on iPods, as opposed to all the WMA-based predecessors that required Windows and players other than the iPod (you know, the ones that make up the 20% or so of the MP3 player market that isn’t iPods). Amazon’s not the first, of course. EMusic has been doing a subscription-based MP3 service for a while, and I’ve bought MP3’s from smaller services like Snocap (they work with video game music stars OneUp Studios, for example). But Amazon has two million songs, and at a nice high bitrate, with prices significantly lower than iTunes Plus. Speaking of pricing, one objection I do have is that if you want to get the discount for buying the whole album, you have to use 1-Click and install the Amazon MP3 Downloader, which is only available for Mac and Windows. That means Linux users will have to pay more to download each track individually, but then again, they’ve been largely cut out of music downloads thusfar, so it’s still a win for them. And I’d still prefer to work with a shopping cart than the pushy 1-Click, but whatever, if that’s how Amazon feels they have to be… Here’s a peek at the downloader app: When you get the downloader, it tests things by buying you a song of its choice for free. No, I wouldn’t ordinarily have been shopping for The Apples In Stereo, but it could have been worse (it could have been The Eagles). By default, the downloader puts files into an “Amazon MP3″ folder in your Music folder. If, like me, you’ve moved your iTunes library to another drive or partition, change this in the preferences before you do your first download. In another interesting default, the downloader automatically adds your purchases to your iTunes library. Overall, it’s a very nice service, and puts up a serious challenge to iTunes. Should Apple be scared? I doubt it. The iTunes store has always been only marginally profitable — all Apple’s power and money comes from the iPod. This store is just another way to get content into your iPod, and if anything, making it cheaper and easier to feed your iPod may make users even more enthusiastic about feeding their iPods. Sure, being MP3 makes it easier to migrate off iPod someday, but after all these years, we have yet to see rival hardware manufacturers make even a small dent in the iPod’s popularity, so as long as Apple keeps putting out great iPods, they’ve got nothing to be afraid of. Now if Amazon would only do this with video…

If you look at the Google Docs pulldown New menu, you’ll see a new option labeled Presentation. I’ve been waiting for Google’s presentation tool since hearing Google CEO Eric Schmidt announce it at the Web 2.0 Expo this past April. While it doesn’t match the features available in Apple’s Keynote or Microsoft’s PowerPoint, its strength lies in its barebones simplicity. It looks great for creating 3 to 10 simple slides for a quick presentation. It can import PowerPoint PPT files (but not the newer 2007 PPTX files). However, it does not export out to PowerPoint PPT files. Instead, it has the option for you to download a ZIP file containing an HTML presentation pack for local computer use. So, you only need a browser for local presentation and can do so even without an Internet connection. I’m hoping for to see at least three more features added in the near future. First, Google please Gear-ify Documents, Spreadsheet, and Presentation so documents can be developed and used offline. Second, allow using images from Picasaweb instead of requiring image uploads. Third, let us embed video from YouTube into Presentations. Is Google Presentation a threat to Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, or even OpenOffice.org Impress? Not… quite… yet. But, Google Presentations has a lot to offer right now. Hey, can someone try it out on an iPhone and iPod touch to see how it looks/works there and report back here?

I just walked through the 3-step process to receive my $100 credit for being an early iPhone adopter. The process couldn’t be easier. You enter your phone number and serial number on the Apple web site, they SMS you an access code, you enter the code and receive the credit that you can use online or in person at an Apple Store. I haven’t commented much about the early-adopter penalty. Maybe because I’ve been one for a long time. But I can’t ever remember receiving a credit because I bought technology on the first day it was available.

Here’s an unformatted collection of thoughts and experiences since picking up a 160 GB iPod Classic, the last one in stock at the Apple Store in Alpharetta GA, last weekend. This blog is going to be from the point-of-view from someone who’s jumping from a 2nd gen (click wheel) iPod to the 6th gen “classic” model. So some of this is new to me and won’t be new to those of you with more modern iPods. Though I’m not completely oblivious to iPod evolution: I have been borrowing a 2nd gen nano from my wife while my old one is in the shop (no, it’s not back and not refunded after more than two months; yes I have initiated a chargeback). I’ll Take the 160 Gig Classic, If You Have Them in Silver, Please Over the course of August, I set about re-ripping my entire CD collection, pictured below. I’d previously ripped probably about 200 CD’s at various bitrates, and with the advent of iTunes Plus re-setting my feelings about appropriate bitrates, plus a 300 GB second drive in the G5 still only half full, I decided to move the collection up to 192 kbps AAC for rock, 256 for jazz, classical, soundtracks and everything else. Rather than pick and choose what to rip, or try to figure out exactly which discs I’d already done, I figured it would be faster to just get everything. At the end of this process, I had a library that was about 60 GB. So when Steve announced the new iPods, I was kind of stumped. To their credit, Apple has rolled out an iPod product line that’s very clear in the appeal of each unit: ModelConcept ShuffleTiny, cheap, giftable NanoSmall, cheap, video, giftable ClassicEnormous storage TouchNovel, new functionality, widescreen video I’d been pining for an iPhone-like iPod, but the iPod Touch would only be able to hold a quarter of my music, and wouldn’t have much room for video. So given this chart, and with the size of my library fresh in my mind, the sensible choice for my needs was the Classic. Yeah, the widescreen would be great for video, but I just didn’t know how much video-watching I would really need (besides, if I’m traveling, I probably have my PowerBook and can watch DVD’s on that). Of course, some people are asking why there wasn’t an iPod Touch offered with an HDD. I suspect that would be too much a change of the form factor of the Touch, making it un-Steve-ishly bulky. So, given the choice between compromising the Touch and having more models out there than Apple would usually prefer, they chose the latter. But I wonder how long the Classic will really live on? 160 GB is crazy huge… maybe when Apple can get 32 GB of flash memory at a reasonable price, we’ll see the end of the HDD-based iPod. Initial Sync Copying 60 GB of music over USB 2.0 is no small task. I initially was just going to have iTunes sync my library to the pod, but then thought better of that and went back to manual mode. I selected all my tracks and dragged them over: I let that go for about two hours. When it was done, iTunes got slow and balky, and wouldn’t let me copy video to the iPod. Eventually, it just crashed. So, I ejected the iPod and found that rather than having 10,000 songs in my pocket, I had 0. Grrr. At this point, since I had little or no usable data on there other than my podcasts, I did a “restore”, and then started copying songs in smaller chunks, about a thousand at a time. Much better. Notes and Nonsense So, anyways, I finally had all my tunes, plus a few ripped DVD’s and a TV show I bought from iTunes. So how well does it actually work? Here are a few impressions: Notice how the screenshots show the menu set against part of an album cover? The cover art is randomly selected from your library, and moves with a sort of “Ken Burns effect”, changing every 8 seconds or so. Cover Flow is stupid. No, it’s inconsistent. iTunes knows to group together artists from a compliation like a soundtrack, either by use of the “compilation” flag, or by assigning an “album artist” (even if it’s just “various artists”). The iPod, on the other hand, repeats a cover over and over again, once for each artist on the album. Maybe iTunes is right and the iPod is wrong, maybe vice versa, but they really ought to both work the same way. Syncs take a shockingly long time. Shocking because it’s not clear that iTunes is really doing anything — before you get to the file-copying, you’ll spend as much as 30 seconds enjoying the Spinning Beachball of Doom. Ejecting the iPod Classic takes about 60 seconds, which seems ridiculously long. Memo to self: only plug it in to sync and charge, because waiting for the eject is damned annoying. Since we’re talking about the old-style iPod screen, and not the widescreen of the Touch, 4:3 video like TV makes a lot more sense than widescreen movies. To illustrate, the TV show Rumbling Hearts versus a DVD rip of the widescreen movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension: The cable connection is inconsistent: sometimes neither the Finder nor iTunes notices when I’ve plugged in the iPod. In a weird case earlier today, I plugged in the iPod and went on with some other business, not noticing that it hadn’t mounted. Later, an iCal alarm woke up the iPod and made it beep, and with that, it mounted in the Finder and appeared in iTunes. Weird. I forgot to take a picture of this, but kana characters look beautiful in the new GUI. If you’re into J-pop or J-rock or other content where the song titles are in Japanese or Chinese characters, you’ll find it’s crisp and clear to read on the screen. Hey, have you been using the enhanced podcast format (either with apps like Garage Band, or the Chapter Tool)? Well, you can stop now. The iPod Classic doesn’t show the images at the chapter stops. Come to think of it, it looks like the Chapter Tool has disappeared from Apple’s website too? Oh, and you know what? I’m thinking 160 GB might end up being more than I really need:

I just posted a quick how-to over at TUAW regarding installing the latest binary iPhone developer toolchain. You can download a copy and use the package to get started with iPhone programming. The hardest part of the entire exercise involves copying your iPhone file system to your Mac.

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

I receive (and ignore) a lot of press releases and new product announcements, but this one caught my eye and looks pretty interesting. MicroNet has just released a low-end NAS storage solution that can put terrabytes of storage into your home network for a surprisingly affordable price — their 1TB model lists for just $339. Aimed squarely at home power users and small office situations, the new Fantom Drives G-Force MegaDisk NAS appliance features an integrated print server, an iTunes music server, and NTI Software’s Shadow zero-touch automated backup, and comes in 1.0 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2.0 TB configurations (list prices: $339, $579, and $999). If you’ve been amassing a collection of digital photos, music, and movies and don’t have a backup system in place, this new NAS appliance sounds like a very attractive option. I haven’t crossed that line into measuring my data in terrabytes yet, but I’m rapidly getting there and I’m happy to see some serious storage solutions hitting the market that won’t break the bank. We’ll try and get our hands on a demo unit of the G-Force and let you know how it performs.

I’ve been reading a bunch of statements from various analysts/pundits about the significance of the iPod touch with a combination of amusement and puzzlement. Some of the puzzlement comes from the statements directly and some indirectly. For example, here’s one of many quotes from an article over on PlaylistMag.com: “It’s the Web in your pocket,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research. “For $300, you get a mobile Web browser with touch-screen input.”. Uh, so what are the dozens of devices from Palm, Nokia (770 or 800), and bunch of Windows Mobile WiFi enabled PDAs? They vary in price. But, a bunch are in the $200 to 400 range. And, they’ve been around for years. So, what is the real difference? The real difference is the capability of the Safari browser (so I’m told since I haven’t tried it for more than a few seconds). Most of the mobile browsers that have been used for the past few years are basically toy browsers that require specially formatted web pages to avoid scrolling continuously just to read some text. The exception in the non-iPhone/iPod touch world is the Operamini browser currently in beta release. Here’s another quote: In fact, Gottheil said that the iPod touch’s selling potential is actually increased precisely because it is decoupled from a two-year phone contract with AT&T, something required with the iPhone. This is an interesting observation because the exact opposite is going on in the non-Apple phone-PDA world. The phone-less PDA type devices like the Palm OS based Palm boxes and Windows Mobile based Pocket PCs were the norm for years. Then, the Palm Treo (original Palm OS version) and Microsoft Windows Mobile touch-screen (Pocket PC Phone Edition — AKA Professional Edition) and non-touch screen (Smartphone AKA Standard Edition) took over leaving manufacturers like Dell to completely abandon the phone-less Pocket PCs (their great Axim line with WiFi and Bluetooth but no phone radio). I’m really hoping that the iPod touch redefines and reinvigorates the phone-less PDA market the same way the original iPod redefined the PDA market. And, yes, I didn’t get an iPhone because I didn’t want to switch to AT&T Wireless and be locked into their contract. Here’s a third quote from the article: Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner, said in an e-mail interview that having both an iPod touch plus a cell phone would be a “great set for many of us to use.” But he discounted the iPod as a business tool that IT shops would support. Unfortunately and unhappily, I agree with this statement. But, that is only because IT shops don’t seem to support mobile devices of any type including Microsoft’s Windows Mobile which is actually designed for integration with Enterprise infrastructure. A fourth quote: “A usable portable Web browser will appeal to both personal and business users, and Web sites and applications oriented to the mobile browser will proliferate,” Gottheil and Byrne wrote in a TBR statement on the iPod touch Wednesday. Hack, hack, cough, cough. There’s a couple of weird things about this general idea. I noticed that a number of iPhone specific pages from major sites like Digg and Facebook appeared. But, this puzzled me since the big deal about iPhone’s (and touch’s) Safari browser is that you don’t need specially formatted pages. That said, there are a lot (though not enough) pretty well done pages formatted for WAP and other mobile browsers already. If the iPhone and iPod touch take off, we may see more. But, umm, I though they didn’t need it :-) But, putting aside my hopefully not too snarky comments above, I think the general sentiment coming from the experts is right. I’ve long lamented the loss of choices of non-phone Windows Mobile products. I hate having to tie a Pocket PC purchase to phone service contracts or pay a premium for an unlocked phone. I think the iPhone’s impact, large as it is, will be dwarfed by the iPod touch which allows anyone to buy it without a phone contract. I also think that lines of people should be outside of Apple’s campus in Cupertino with placard demanding an SDK so we can see apps developed for it without resorting to hacks. My pre-order for the iPod touch went out the day it was announced and I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival in a couple of weeks. And, in a effort not to monopolize the MacDevCenter blog with my iPod touch mutterings, I’ll mutter away on my personal blog which currently focuses on Windows Mobile (and will still focus on that since I enjoy using that platform). If anyone wants to talk touch, drop me a line at editor(AT-SIGN)mobileviews.com. Perhaps we can set up a TalkCast at TalkShoe with other new iPod touch owners.

OK, geek boys and girls, pop quiz: How do you use Safari’s built-in RSS reader as a feed aggregator? Go ahead, take a minute to figure it out. Take 5. Whatever you need. I’ve got time. In January 2003 I predicted that major browsers would have RSS capabilities built in within a year. Turns out I was off by about 18 months. So here we are in late 2007. Despite Apple’s innovations in bringing RSS to the browser, the Safari RSS experience still isn’t fully baked. In fact, it’s totally anemic. Of the people you know who use Safari rather than Firefox, how many also use its built-in feed reader rather than a standalone aggregator? None? Me neither. It’s not because Safari’s RSS reader isn’t pretty. It’s a nice way to digest the site you’re currently looking at quickly. But as we all know, that’s missing the point. RSS only becomes a time saver when you can harvest dozens or hundreds of sites at a time, skimming for interesting headlines, drilling down where the meat looks tasty. The power of RSS is not just in a cleaner way to parse a page, but in aggregation (though it is nice to ditch the clutter of a single page at times). OK, so how do you do RSS aggregation in Safari? Should be easily figure-out-able. First off, clicking the blue RSS badge in a URL field does not subscribe you to a feed - it just lets you view it (how many people want to view a single site’s feed?). Once you’re viewing a feed, you need to bookmark that. Hold up right there. Clicking an RSS badge should throw a dialog: “Subscribe to this feed?” That change alone would result in far more uptake for Safari’s RSS reader. When you do save an RSS bookmark, it gets filed along with your other bookmarks, not grouped with other RSS entries (philosophical question: Is an RSS bookmark the same as, or categorically different from a regular bookmark?). So now that you’ve bookmarked a feed or two, how do you view them together, so that they become more useful than a bunch of bookmarks to simplified white pages? Safari’s bookmarks manager will intelligently locate all your intermingled bookmark feeds and show them in a list, but without showing story summaries or offering any kind of grouping functionality (the new folder icon is grayed out in this view). This is a promising start - maybe you can see aggregated bookmarks with story summaries as fly-outs from the Bookmarks menu? Nope - this “All RSS Feeds” collection is only available in the bookmark manager itself - you can’t make it appear in the Bookmarks menu. And why do you have to Manage Bookmarks when you want to read your feeds? Why is there no “Feeds” item on the View or Window or Bookmarks menus? The only way to truly aggregate RSS feeds in Safari (that I can see) is to bookmark them together in a single folder, which must live in your Bookmarks Bar folder. Once that’s in place, click on that folder in the Bookmarks Bar and select “View All RSS Articles” from the bottom of the menu. Wow. Why is this so difficult? Safari isn’t Final Cut Pro. You shouldn’t need to turn to the documentation to figure out how to view a simple aggregation of feeds. What’s that? The documentation doesn’t even mention that it’s possible? Silly me. I gave Apple the benefit of the doubt when RSS capabilities first appeared, but continued using NetNewsWire, thinking I’d return later when the feature matured. But now it’s been a couple of years, and I finally got around to installing the Safari 3 beta. Love the new in-page search, love the resizable text fields, love the speed. But the RSS reader? Unchanged, as far as I can tell. What’s going on here? An RSS reader will be built into Leopard’s Mail.app, which could change the game a bit. Let’s hope it runs with the ball, though that leads to philosophical question #2: Are RSS feeds better suited to live in the browser, or your mail reader? Apple - Whatever you do with RSS in Leopard, please turn up the voltage on the de-confusifizer. RSS is important technology, and consumers aren’t going to get excited about it until you simultaneously show them its power and make it simple. Isn’t that what you do best?

If you’d like to get your weather forecasts in iCal, head on over to Weather Underground, find your city, and check out the top right-hand of the page for the ICAL icon. There’s also an RSS feed. I don’t have any other ical-format calendaring apps handy, but this might well work in those, too. (Not sure when WU added this functionality — might well have been there for a while. :)

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