ATPMezineVolume11

ATPM 11.08 / August 2005 Volume 11, Number 8 A wee Macintosh! How quaint! And | dinna’ think | could model transparent aluminum on any other machine. in,’tis,century: About This Particular Macintosh: About the personal computing experience.™ ATPM 11.08 z Cover Cover Art ATPM salutes the legendary James Doohan. March 3, 1920-July 20, 2005. “Her new cover art cach month. Write? to us! right © 2005 Lee Bennett!. We ne The ATPM Staff Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Associate Editor/Reviews Copy Editors Web Editor Publicity Manager Webmaster Beta Testers Contributing Editors Michael Tsai? ai’ Christopher Turne Paul Fatula® Raena Armitage® Johann Campbell” Chri ni Ellyn Ritterskamp® Brooke Smith’? Vacant Lee B ae Vacant Michael Tsai!? The Staff! Eric Blair! David Blumenstein Tom Bridge!® Matthew Glidden!” Ted Goranson!® Andrew Kator!® Robert Paul Le Wes Meltzer?! David Ozab?? Sylvester Roque? Law 15 1mailto:lbennett@atpm.com ?mailto:cover-art@atpm.com Smailto:mtsai@atpm.com 4mailto:cturner@atpm.com Smailto:pfatula@atpm.com Smailto:rarmitage@atpm.com Tmailto: jcampbell@atpm. com Smailto:clawson@atpm.com °mailto:eritterskamp@atpm.com 10nailto:bsmith@atpm.com 11nailto:1bennett@atpm.com 12mailto:mtsai@atpm.com 13mailto:editor@atpm.com 14nailto:eblair@atpm.com 15mailto:dblumenstein@atpm.com 16mailto:tbridge@atpm.com 17mailto:mglidden@atpm.com 18mailto:tgoranson@atpm.com 19°mailto:akator@atpm.com 20mailto:rleitao@atpm.com 2\mailto:wmeltzer@atpm.com ?2mailto:dozab@atpm.com ?3mailto:sroque@atpm.com ATPM 11.08 to ya, laddie.” Copy- Cover Evan Trent”4 How To Vacant Interviews Vacant Opinion Vacant Reviews Vacant Artwork & Design Graphics Director Vacant Layout and Design Cartoonist Blue Apple Icon Designs Other Art RD Novo Emeritus RD Novo, Robert Madill, mal Ghandour, Edward G Chvatik, Grant Osborne, Gregory Tetrault. Belinda Wagner, Ja- Tom Iovino, Daniel Contributors Eric Blair, David Blumenstein, Tom Bridge, Ted Goranson, Matt Johnson, Chris Lawson, Robert Paul Leitao, Wes Meltzer, Sylvester Roque, Charles Ros Evan Trent, Christopher Turner, Frank H. Wu, Mac- intosh users like you. Subscriptions Sign up for free subscriptions using the Web form2”, Where to Find ATPM Online and downloadable ues are available at the ATPM Web Site?*. aTPM is a product of ATPM, Inc. © 1995-2005. All Rights Reserved. ISSN: 1093-2909. Production Tools Apache, AppleScript, BBEdit, Cocoa, Docu- tils, DropDMG, FileMaker Pro, GraphicConverter, ISTEX, Mesh, make, Mailman, Mojo Mail, MySQL, Perl, Photoshop Elements, PyObjC, Python, rsync, Snapz Pro X, ssh, Subversion, Super Get Info. original art, and desktop picture may not be reproduced without the express permission of the 2 4nailto:etrent@atpm.com ailto:mtsai@atpm.com 2nttp://www.cornstalker.com "http: //www.atpm.com/subscribe/ 2Shttp://www.atpm.com ATPM 11.08 Michael Tsai? Matt Johnson?® Mark Robinson otherwise noted. You may, however, print or distribute copies of this issue of ATPM as a whole, provided that it is not modified in , Authors may be contacted through ATPM’s , when pro- author or artist, unle: any wa staff, or at their e-mail addre: Legal Stuff About This Particular Macintosh may be uploaded to any online area or included on a CD-ROM com- pilation, so long as the file remains intact and unal- tered, but all other rights are reserved. All informa- tion contained in this correct to the best of our knowledge. The opinions expressed in ATPM are not necessarily those of the entire ATPM staff. Prod: uct and company names and logos may be registered trademarks of their respec’ for reading this far, and we hope that the rest of the magazine is more interesting than this. ue is ve companies. Thank you Thanks for reading ATPM. Cover ATPM 11.08 4 Cover About This Particular Macintosh has been free since 1995, and we intend to keep it that way. Our editors and staff are volunteers with “real” jobs who believe in the Macintosh way of computing. We don’t make a profit, nor do we plan to. As such, we rely on advertisers and readers like you to help us pay for our Web site and other expenses. This issue of ATPM is sponsored by Bare Bones Software!: Text editing & TextWrangler 2 Programming System Administration We've partnered with CafePress.com to bring you high-quality ATPM merchandise”. For each item you buy, $1 goes towards keeping the atpm.com server running. You can also help support ATPM by buying from online retailers using our links*. If you’re going to buy from them anyway, why not help us at the same time? We also accept direct contributions using PayPal* and Amazon's Honor System?. We suggest $10 for students and $20 for individuals, but we greatly appreciate contributions of any size. Finally, we are accepting inquiries from interested sponsors and advertisers. We have a variety of programs available to tailor to your needs. Please contact us at advertise@atpm.com for more information. ® lhttp://www. barebones .com/1900 °http://www.cafeshops.com/cp/store.aspx?s=atpm Shttp://www.atpm.com/about/support.shtml 4nttp://www. paypal .com/xclick/business=editor@atpm.com Shttp://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/pay/T18F41YZD1960K ATPM 11.08 5 Sponsors Welcome by Robert Paul Leitao, rleitao@atpm.com Welcome to the August edition of About This Particu- lar Macintosh! The Macintosh world may be running a month ahead of time because July was an august month indeed! In many locals in the northern hemi- sphere, August is the hottest month of the year. We'll see if things cool down following July’s heated Apple news and new product announcements. To provide some relief from the heat, we'll breeze through all the cool stuff in this welcome to our latest is Millions and Millions of Macs In the three-month period ending in June, Apple Computer shipped well over one million Macs—one million, one hundred eighty-two thousand Macs to be almost exact. Millions and Millions of iPods In the three-month period ending in June, Apple Computer shipped well over six million iPods—six million, one hundred fifty-five thousand iPods to be almost exact. Billions and Billions of Dollars Sales of more than one million Macs and more than six million iPods helped Apple generate more than three and one-half billion dollars in revenue in the three-month period—three billion, five hundred twenty million dollars to be almost exact. Billions in the Bank, Millions More in Earn- ings Apple ended the three-month period with over seven and one-half billion dollars in cash and short-term seven billion, five hundred twenty-six million to be almost exact. The inc es in inter- est rates over the past several months worked to the company’s favor by increasing the yield on the com- pany’s cash. Interest earnings more than tripled to $46 million from $13 million one year before. investments: Half a Billion Songs Served During July, the {Tunes Music Store passed an im- portant sales milestone. The half-billionth song sold moved across the Internet as music fans watched a digital ticker on the Apple home page count up to that monumental moment in Apple history. At the ATPM 11.08 current rate of song sales, the iTunes Music Store might pass one billion songs sold sometime just be- fore or soon after New Year's Day to be almost exact. Sharing the Wealth Apple’s own wealth not withstanding, consumers have been happy to share their own wealth buying music through the iTunes Music Store while buying iPods and Macintosh computers in record numbers. Apple’s share of the US PC industry grew to a reported 4.5% in the 2nd calendar quarter, placing the company in the #4 spot in domestic PC sales. ‘At the current rate of unit sales growth, Apple might overtake Gateway in the #3 spot within the next eighteen months or by Christmas 2006 to be almost exact. Millions of Students, Thousand of iBooks In late July, Apple announced upgrades to its iBook line of laptop computers. The upgrades were an- nounced in time for back-to-school purchases. The new iBooks sport up to 1.42 GHz Gd chips and have built-in AirPort and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. The new iBooks are expected to be a big hit with students who have discovered Apple’s legacy of easy- to-use products through the popularity of the iPod. Thousands of iBooks will be purchased by first-time Mac users as millions of students head back-to-school somewhere between late-August and early September to be almost exact. Millions of Readers, Thousands of Formats Actually, that’s not almost exact. Our monthly read- ership can be counted in the tens of thousands of loyal readers, and each issue of ATPM comes in several dif ferent formats from PDF to the Web. What is exact is our attention to the Macintosh and the world of per- sonal computing. Each issue of About This Particular Macintosh offers unique insights about the personal computing experience as well as spirited reviews of many helpful products. Our August issue contains august information on every digital page. This latest edition of ATPM includes: Welcome Bloggable: Get a Clue Rob Enderle. Robert X. Cringely. Paul Thurrott. The Wall Street Journal. C/Net. In this world of sin and sorrow, there is only one constant: the amazing ability of tech pundits to misunderstand Apple and Macs. In this month’s Bloggable, Wes Meltzer takes another trip around the endle: stupid Apple predictions and anal: volume of other good reading. merry-go-round of es, Plus a large Pod People In this month’s Pod People, Eric Blair looks at how he went from iPod doubter to devout believer. Outliners: Outlining and Styles, Part 2 This month’s ATPO surveys top Mac outliners to see how well they support styles. FileMaking: Fields and Calculations Charles Ross continues his tour of FileMaker by delv- ing into the various field types available. How To: Is Your Memory Failing? “The machine was everything I had hoped it would be. The only danger was that while ake jawed in front of this new speed demon I might drool ting sl on the keyboard and short something out. Then the trouble started...” Interview: John Hart, ModYourMac.com Modding is all the rage in the computer community these days, and the Mac market is no stranger to this phenomenon. John Hart, winner of numerous awards for his work with ModYourMac! sat down with us this month to talk about his latest work, his ons and some tips for those folks considering inspira modification of their own Ma Desktop Pictures: From ATPM Readers This month features images from ATPM readers: Ari- zona, Frog, Red Rock Country, Gateway Arch, and Sunset. Cortland Cortland wraps up dinner with his parents and friends, Wieser Graphic Matt pays homage to influential Web comic from the Frisky Freeware: App Stop Frisky the Freeware Guinea Pig checks out App Stop. lnttp://www.modyourmac.com ATPM 11.08 Review: Backpack As the Web expands, so expands the amount of data we have to track for ourselves. Projects, parties, these are all things that require lists and structures and data. For those who can’t keep track events, of their own wallet without some drama, Backpack your valet, holding bits and pieces of information you need, a checklist to get through all your tasks, and reminders when you forget. Review: Boswell 4.0 Sometimes, as a writer, the perfect. sentenc the tip of your tongue. And sometimes, it’s lost in a file stuck somewhere that you can’t find. Better is on still, a file whose contents you only vaguely remem- ber. Sound familiar? Boswell is the original Spotlight for your writing, a database for everything you tap out on your keyboard, and Wes Meltzer finds that, if you can get over the challenge of using it, you can make sure your writing is always exactly where you expect it to be. Review: Brenthaven Pro 12/15 When a computer bag focuses primarily on isolation and protection; giving little if any thought to style and function, that computer bag can only be a Bren- thaven. In this particular case, the Brenthaven Pro 12/15, which according to their marketing was designed with Apple in mind. Review: Detour The Timbuk2 Detour is a vertical-oriented bag de- signed to be carried either as a brie bag, a messenger bag, or a backpacl over a backpack guy? case, a shoulder Could it win Review: MaxSleeve The perfect traveling companion for your hard-shell backpack or laptop bag. Review: Vyper The booq Vyper carrying case for Apple laptops is stylish and sturdy, according to our reviewer. @ Welcome It’s Just Business! The switch to Intel processors really is just a good business decision which, as a long-time Mac guy, is the bi iced bread! Marry the best operating system to the fastest, coolest running chips on the market, and I’m there! —Grover Watson st news I’ve heard sinc 2 Audio Conversions’ T read all three of your excellent articles about con- verting analog to digital audio for Mac, and I was very grateful to find information for the Mac OS X. I wondered if you have any recommendations or information on the ADVC110° Digital Video Audio Converter, which is powered by a FireWire connector and works with Windows and Os. I have purchased (but not yet opened) the ADVC110 for the reduced price of $269 (regular price $319). I don’t want to waste my money if you think this is an overpriced way to convert analog audio (cassette music and LPs) and video tapes to CDs and DVDs. I hope you have the time to send me some advice. —Judith Easterly If you already own this unit, | think it makes sense to go ahead and use it. It will certainly do what you need. For LPs, you may find it less straightfor- ward to use this device than a Griffin iMic with Final Vinyl. The reason being that Final Vinyl offers proper equalization for LPs (which are cut using the RIAA EQ curve that affects the low and high frequencies) and also boosts the input sensitivity since most record players out- put at a tiny fraction of the level of your CD player (typically 2 mVolts instead of 2 Volts for a CD player or cassette deck). But this device will obviously do things that the iMic won't, namely converting your analog video footage to digital so you can make DVDs, etc. And for cassettes it will be very straight- forward to archive to CD. If you find that LPs are not user friendly with this device, take a look at the iMic with Final Vinyl from Griffin. It's not that expensive, and it is a very easy way to go about converting lhttp://www.atpm.com/11.07/candy.shtm1 °http://www.atpm.com/9.03/under-the-hood. shtml Shttp://www. canopus .us/US/products/ADVC110/pm_adve1 10.asp ATPM 11.08 LPs to CD. But depending on how many you plan to convert, you may be just fine with the ADVC. —Evan Trent Thave a Quad ElectroAcoustics setup, which I bought in 1984. This offers me a 5-pin Din plug output, and Ihave purchased a DiN-to-minijack cable, which now gives me a stereo signal. My Mac is a Pismo Power- Book so the sound card route isn’t an option. You mention Griffin’s iMic, and I just wanted to clarify the manner of connection. Do I simply put my mini- jack into the iMic and hook that up to the USB port? Finally, I’m not an audiophile, but I want to doa decent job on transferring my vinyl. Can you suggest a reasonably idiot-proof clean up application or plug- in to remove noises? You suggest Amadeus 2. Would that still be your suggestion? —Niall Connolly Wow cool—a Quad setup huh? | didn't even know there was a DIN-to-minijack cable avail- able on the market. . .where did you find it? I'm curious. | figured that would be a custom job. Either that or a DIN-to-RCA and then RCA- to-minijack kind of thing. I'd be eager to learn your source for the cable because many of my customers (I run a high-end audio shop’ here in the states) have Quad or Naim gear and would find such a cable useful for the exact purposes you're planning. As to your question...yes the minijack should go right into the iMic and then into the USB jack. And as to software, | would recommend Amadeus. It has several useful filters. If your Quad rig does not have a phono preamp built in, then you may need to use Final Vinyl to boost the signal, and then export to Amadeus. But if you have a phono stage ‘on board, you can go right into Amadeus and bypass Final Vinyl entirely. —Evan Trent FileMaking? This is really a nice introduction to FileMaker! I would like to see more. Going through the FileMaker examples, I see things that are“not explained: very 4nttp: //www.symphonysound.com Shttp://www.atpm.com/11.07/filemaking. shtml E-Mail well. One area that is not clear to me is global vari- ables versus sums and subtotals, e.g. how can you make totals across a selection of records and make it , where it automatically up- available on the ‘ dates? This is useful, for example in an inventory for seeing replacement value. Some of these types of advanced subjects would be very helpful to many users. Thanks for a very useful article! —Gloria Wilson Soundsticks II Review® Very interesting review of the Soundsticks II. I was at J&R in New York today comparing them to the Altec Lansing MX5021. I liked the Soundsticks a lot, ior but was shocked at what I thought was the supe sound with the Altec Lansing for only $20 more. I'm not an audiophile, so I’m wondering if my ear is any good. Have you heard the MX5021? For yet another $80 I could get the Altec Lansing FX60217 that you reviewed, but I don’t think that is as big an improvement as in the MX5021 over the Soundsticks. Am I off base? —Bill Brunelle | haven't heard the MX5021s—but my advice is to trust your own ears. Don't worry about specs or price (within reason). Just because a speaker is a more expensive doesn't mean it's better, but it doesn’t mean it’s worse, either. It doesn't really mean much of anything in today’s world And specifications have become almost entirely meaningless these days. Just about the only thing we can depend on to guide us through the purchasing process are the two holes on each side of our head. So if you found a pair of speakers you like better, go with them! —Evan Trent Hit Me Again® Super article, very s Except for the anti-Italian knock on Ferrari en- gines of course. engine. For showy display, ya know.) —Ed Williams (I own one, not the car, just the Thanks, and also | didn’t quite say Ferrari en- gines aren't good or weren’t part of the appeal Shttp://www.atpm.com/10.04/soundsticks.shtml Thttp://www.atpm.com/11.07/altec-lansing-f£x6021.sht ml Shttp://www.atpm.com/11.07/segments-hit.shtml ATPM 11.08 of the whole car. But it’s not the only consid- eration. Definitely | would love a Ferrari and admit | can't afford one. Now, | remember an analogy about the evolution of computers compared to that of cars. . if only Ferrari did what Apple achieved with the Mac mini. ..hmmm... —Angus Wong Blimey, you do come across as a bit of a zealot, don’t you? I tried to read the whole article but I had to stop. I’ve owned Macs since January 2001 and have been interested enough to acquire an old PowerBook Duo 230 (with dock and external CD-ROM) and have fun with a machine of such vintage, too. I’ve been reading ATPM since 2001 and go through all the back issues, but do you really think a nor- mal/common/garden PC is that much of a handicap? It isn’t. PCs are reasonably friendly. I don’t find them a problem at all. I'd say they're just as easy to use. If Windows didn’t amass the market share that it did, Steve and Co. would be screwing the public just as tightly, if not more so. If I'd have chosen a PC on that day four years ago, I’m sure I would be just as happy. What I like about the Mac has nothing to do with the operating system or the machine in general. What I like about the Mac is the support you get from the installed user base who offer free and insightful information (and fun comments) on Apple discussion boards, Web sites, and magazines like this. If not for the friendly people, I would have no attachment whatsoever. The question is, are these friendly people those who have grown up with the Mac, from the 80s on- ward? If someone were to come to the Mac right now, how differently would they perceive it? Is there really such a big gap between Mac and PC today? I don’t think so, which is why they’re both easy to use. The y gap must have been far wider in the past. Not now. —Matt Thanks for your comments. Am | a zealot? | suppose so. I do claim to be one of the “Mac fanatics” and consider that patting myself on the back. Windows is much easier to use now (es- pecially when equipped with 3rd party add-ons such as Google's Desktop Search and the Fire- fox browser). But, at the same time, the Mac OS has come a long way as well. E-Mail | won't debate with you on the usability issue. Personally, | still think my Mac is way easier to use than my Windows machine, but there are many other factors to consider when deciding on a computing platform, and security is one of them. | also know that | am able to work better and more efficiently in OS X than in Windows XP, but this is my own experience. If you are happy with your PC, as | wrote in the article, good for you. The significance of Windows’ market share, and how it was acquired, is also a controver- sial issue, and effective business “strategies” do not necessarily mean good technology has cor- respondingly been promoted. —Angus Wong No problem. I would like to point out though, that I don’t own a PC. I did acquire my brother’s PC back in late 80s (Amstrad PC1512), but I didn’t get on with it very well. It used the GEM operating system, which I understand was the OS that shipped with the Atari ST. I went from this machine to a Commodore Amiga. In the mid-90s, my friend had a P75 and a P90. Try- ing to get these things to run Doom without a hitch vas a nightmare, but we managed it. Sometimes the sound card wouldn't register, or the machines wouldn’t talk to each other, etc. As cool as these machines were, they were worth. I stuck with my Amiga until 2001 and the guy in the shop just happened to be a Mac fan and sold us on an iMac DV+. So, I stick with Macs through habit now. The difference between PCs of today and those from °96 is massive. Now, they are much more Mac-like. Nevertheless, I do agree with you on the safety of the PC personal details getting hijac Sites like ATPM and Low End Mac (among other: mean I am always scouring eBay for cool old Macs. I came so clos SEs and a C! One day. —Matt I felt they were more trouble than Instead of hunting down an old Mac, | sug- gest you hunt down a recent version of either the iBook G4 or the Mac mini with Tiger pre- installed. Both were upgraded recently and are a super value for money, especially with built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth. You'll need to up the RAM a bit, though. For what it’s worth, around the time you had an Amiga, | had an Atari. Back then, Apple ATPM 11.08 was the enemy because both the Atari and the Amiga had superior technology. | think Amiga even gave Electronic Arts its first major graph- ics platform to justify the company’s break- through business model and marketing strategy. —Angus Wong Podcasting® It is already happening. Sirius radio already has a podcast channel called Podshow produced by BoKu Communications (Adam Curry’s company). BoKu has already recruited and is paying “the cream of the crop” such as P.W. Fenton from Digital Flotsam podcast to produce high quality content. It is the other way around: commercial podcast- ing business is mainly about content quality. No one is going to listen to a Coca-Cola podcast—however high the production values may be—if the content isn’t attractive. (For example, I only to the Virgin Radio podcast because they had taken all the music out and served the leftovers, a.k.a. DJ Banter, as a podcast). Of course, money buys you lots of marketing power and bandwidth, but word-of- mouth (or rankings sites such as Podcast Alley) will make the larger and long-term impact. Isce iTunes and iTunes podcasting as the Amazon stened once of music. The “Long Tail” theory applies fully here as well. —Sw eee Thanks, David, that was interesting—I agree with most of what you are offering, but I also think that commercial interest not withstanding, the Inter- net (and by its mechanism podcasting et.al.) does and will serve as the universal bazaar of ideas and —the relevance and/or veracity of any given an be suspect, but the volume and afforded will be continuously transformative icty and ideas. To the fittest will go the laurels, but to any can go the rewards. —Wendy York Right on, David. Good commentary. I’ve never got- ten the hype behind podcasting, either. Gee, you download an MP3, and it’s got spoken-word content °nttp: //www.atpm.com/11.07/segments-podcast .shtml 10 E-Mail in it. Just like you said, you can play it through any- thing, what’s it got to do with an iPod necessarily? Nothing. That said, I think it’s funny that you—correctly, in my estimation—dismember the term podcasting, yet you mention blogs—I feel the same way about blogs as you do about podcasting. I’ve had a personal Web page up since 1993—if only I had put in a little personal diary (and kept it up!—that’s the hard part) I could have claimed to have kick-started the blog revolution well before its time, blah blah (and named myself Adam Curry). To me, a blog is a personal Web page with di- ary. “Blog” is a cool/hip name for not that new and exciting a concept. —Riot Nrrrd While I agree that the name “RSS with enclosures” reason—I think that everyone figured out that pod- casting wasn’t tied to iPods about six months ago. And while it’s meaningless from a technical per- spective, calling them podcasts was brilliant from a marketing perspective, because it associates the idea with the iPod (a fantastic brand), and it perfectly communicates the simple idea that’s at the core of podcasting—content is “broadcast” straight from the content producer to your personal iPod. So it’s a personal form of communication, under your personal control, not just a means of tuning into a corporate broadcast. Brilliant. And while you're right that one function of pod- s will be to serve as “farm teams” for the big radio broadcasters, I think that it’s much more than that. Aside from the “anybody can do it” aspect, pode ing offers many more advantages—the trols what they listen to and when, in a way that’s physically impossible for radio. And in the long run, that means that podcasting is a better medium than radio, for both the producers and consumers of the “content,” which means that in the long run podcast- ing will displace radio. There are already surveys saying that over one million people in the US have listened to a podcast (before iTunes added podcasting support, mind you). So it’s already a mass market, and growing rapidly, so (in my opinion) it’s a matter of time before pod- casting bypasses radio in the same way that CD-Rs bypassed cassette. Sure, radio will never die out com- s imprecise—apparently didn’t catch on for some c istener con- ATPM 11.08 11 pletely (for broade |-time news but it'll become | cations medium, b it’s great), powerful as a communi- use for most purposes podcast- ing is dramatically better than broadcast radio. I think you underestimate how terrible broadcast radio has become. With rare exceptions, due to cor- porate mergers and the ascendence of accountants and lawyers, radio has no personality and no range. They don’t play mus good, or because people like it, but because it maximizes station prof its (i they're paid to play it). So, similar to the way bloggers comple- because i they won't play anything unle: ment the corporate news channels, podcasting com- plements the corporate radio channels. This means that news and music that wouldn’t otherwise make it to an audience can do so. Sure, 90% of podcasting is bad, but 90% of everything is bad. And in return for the “cost” of having to filter through bad podcasts to find the good ones, there’s the very real value of get- ting access to news and entertainment that is better than you can otherwise get. For example, I have pers covered by the mainstream media. For example, I’m nal interests that aren’t a software developer and a science fiction fan, and like to keep track of international news, topics that don’t get deep coverage on radio. But with pode ing I can get what I’m interested in, and I can li to it exactly when I want to. And it’s not all nice stuff—some mainstream content companies have fig- ured out how to play in the podcast world—the BBC and CNN both have great pod and there are more every day. The only people that lose as podcasting wins are the companies that control dis tent, especially ClearChannel. thing. —Laird Popkin ribution of audio con- And that’s a good We'd love to hear your thoughts about our publication. We always welcome your comments, criticisms, suggestions, and praise. Or, if you have an opinion or announcement about the Macintosh platform in general, that's OK too. Send your e-mail to editor@atpm.com. All mail becomes the property of ATPM. E-Mail Bloggable by Wes Meltzer, wmeltzer@atpm.com Get a Clue Business writers don’t get it. Neither do the pundits. What causes the enduring survival of Apple? Why do people buy Macs? Why do they carry iPods? Ask an economist, and you get the unhelpful an- swer that people are acting against their own eco- nomic interest. Ask a business school class, and you get the even less helpful answer that Apple has locked their com- puter market in, but that they can’t expand it, and they're doing the same thing with the iPod. It’ and I’ve got a couple choice examples of it. But first, I want to apologize to you all. all about user experience, my beloved readers An Apology I know you all missed me last month. (Or not. Hush, you!) Unfortunately, my trusty PowerBook suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure, involving a certain author walking into his room to hear a loud “CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!” noise after a long day at work, and I lost every inch of my preparation for the July issue, including both last month’s Bloggable and a review of issue!. N.B.: This column will be more bullet-point-ed than usual, because of the way Boswell treats entries. I don’t think you will mind. You have my deepest apologies. It means, of course, that my most interesting remarks and links like a Boswell, now in thi about the big Intel switch-over, were los plate of leftovers, I have some lukewarm 4 in journalist-speak, as a service for those of you who party like it’s 1999. But, also like leftovers, they're never as good as the first time. It also means the end of my eloquent, epic lamentation for the PowerPC—though losing said lament will probably add years to your life. But that’s water under the bridge. And now, for something completely different! You Just Don’t Get It So, I said just a few lines ago that business writ- ers, business schools, economists, and almost every- ed approach to the computer market just doesn’t get Apple’s prod- one else who insists on a numbers-| lhttp://www.atpm.com/11.08/boswell. shtml ATPM 11.08 12 ucts and their enduring successes: the Mac as a niche market and the iPod as ab a sample from last month: of-brand device. Here’s « As everyone reading this column knows, the iPod is the most popular device in its market, by a long shot. “What must it feel like to be one of the iPod’s competitors?” I won- (I pity Sim Wong Hoo, Creative's CEO, in particular.) Fast Company interviewed six corporate highers-up at Apple’s competitors in the portable au- dio market for their June is and asked them what it was like competing against an s or?. They have the answer: der from time to time. sue, sucks. in short, it In spite of their article about iPod competition, which makes this very point, Fast Company ran a fascinating article? in their August issue, called “In Praise of Ecosystems.” In it, they demonstrate, like most business magazines, that they just don’t understand the success of the iPod (maybe John Sviokla should read Jen- nifer Vilaga’s notes from June). Oh, and they get their numbers wrong: they say the iPod shuffle isn’t a succ: Fire your fact checkers, guys...I’m going to get up on my soap box here: the problem with the business-school perspective on this is that it completely ignores user experience. Sviokla writes: Throughout industrial history, open standards have enriched customers and fueled productivity... Likewise, the Internet, with its open set of tools for communication and presen- tation, provides standard parts for knowledge work. While that’s true, it doe: reason for the iPod’s suc "t explain the real s, which is, large °http: //waw. fastcompany . com/magazine/95/fast-talk-e xtra.html Shttp: //www.fastcompany.com/subscr/97/open_essay .ht nl Bloggable: Get a Clue sales numbers notwithstanding, not the iTunes Music Store. It’s user experience, Apple’s forte. Someone at Apple send John Sviokla an iPod, and let him play with it, and see if he still thinks in numbers. « Let’s theory user experience. The latest instant-classic pend more time looking at economic s non-comprehension of the iPod and example? Free Napster. A student survey at the University of Rochester found that even when students have Napster service for free apparently they still choose the iTunes Music Store—at 99 a track. How many, do you ask? Yes, that’s right. 70 percent. The survey sample who had purchased songs from Napster to put in their also found no students permanent collection; for that, they turned to Apple. So much for brand loyalty. And, yes, it defies Economics 101. Why would you use Napster’s service but then buy the tracks outright from Apple? Oh, that’s right, the part of Econ they always forget, that people won't pay for substandard products. + If you’ve been keeping up with this column, ught that Apple has been having a hard time getting Motorola’s iTunes phone into the hands of consumers everywhere. (If I were Jack Miller at As the Apple Turns®, I would be joking about how this is just the Motorola curse. But I am not funny.) Since economists and pundits don’t think Apple can sell a $500 luxury device—they should ask HP about the $600 iPAQ hx4700—Forbes thinks Steve Jobs is be planning an end-run around the carriers. Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, et al., have balked at the idea that consumers might prefer not to you've pay again for their music. Jobs, their vision , could beat them by making Apple into a mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO. They would lease time® from one of the major carriers, just like Virgin Wireless or ESPN. And you'd get the iTunes phone. I’m not holding my breath, though; Steve Jobs seems like too much of a control freak to put the Apple brand on an infrastructure as dis of the major cell networks’. now?) Si trously spotty as any (Can you hear me ‘http://www. ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/44531.html Shttp://www.appleturns.com/ Shttp://www. forbes. com/home/technology/2005/07/08/a pple-cellphone-service-cx_de_0708apple.htm1 ATPM 11.08 « Any busine: sultant can tell you it doesn’t make ease a Mac version of your s ware; it’s only 5 percent of the market, after all, on a good day. Om Malik had a marvelous say in Business 2.0 in March on why, in of that, it’s better to develop for the Mac’. I d it in the springtime, but now it’s here. He says: I think these companies are focusing too much on the numbers and mi: ing the more promising opportunity. Why? Because rolling out a prod- uct for the Mac platform ensures a certain buzz and élan, which begets more buzz, which begets sales. Let me explain. According to Apple, there are about 12 million active Mac users. Not a lot, that’s for sure. But among them are most of the influencers—high-profile bloggers, most (if not all) technology journal- ists, and, of course, the hipsters. And just now, he follows up with the ple of The Gizmo Project, which he 30 percent® of its downloads for Mac out of proportion for their numbers it'll only help The Gizmo Project. am- ays see way 3 Malik * Mac shipments rose in 2005. The sky must be falling in Rob Enderle’s office! (Though, to be fair, so did almost every other PC manu- facturer’s.) But Apple's almost 35 percent. This has been interpreted, by Needham & Co.°, for instance, as meaning many Windows wu 10 fingers “the halo effect on new » which they say means many iPod owne ’s numbers rose sharply, CG are switching to Macs. end a5 buying Macs"! as their first computers. The Big Switch, in the News As I said before, I’m sure you've heard all about the upcoming switch to Intel CPUs in Mac: But now, we ‘/waw.business2.com/b2/Web/articles/0,17863,1 037957 ,00.htm. Shttp: //gigaom.com/2005/07/14/gizmo-project-hit-wit h-mac-users/ °nttp: //www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsI D=12117 http: //www.arstechnica.com/ ‘http: //arstechnica.com/news .ars/post/20050720-5120 -btml 13 Bloggable: Get a Clue know that Apple and IBM are really getting divor and there’s lots of interesting news on that front. « The broken 3 GHz promise may pretext for the big Apple switch, acc to Hannibal at Ars Tech does he think the real reason is? Hannibal fingers Apple’s shifting focus: [W]hat Jobs is really doing is shifting the focus of Apple from a PC-era “performance” paradigm [the Mac] to a post-PC-era “features and func- tionality” paradigm [the iPod]. Basically, they’ve taken away the ability to win on the performance front, since they were losing it, and now they're going to compete on features alone. too. I'm sure Intel’s huge d ¢ Hannibal at Ars Technica! de ple is starting the trai x86 at the bottom of the why they chose Intel o chological impact of losing the PowerPC. + In a nation of no-fault divorce, Apple and Oh, no, Apple is insistent that IBM has been IBM are not taking the easy route. cheating on them with Sony and Micros and now IBM retorts that Apple’s ph landering with Freescale, née Motorola what cost them a deeper G5 line!®, I kid you president of development for the group that makes the POWER chips, not, Rod Adkins, vic si They had Freescale primarily for the low-end and mobile solutions, and they really had IBM focu on PowerBook, xServe and iMac. That’s where we collaborated deeply more http: //www.arstechnica.com/ ‘Shttp: //arstechnica.com/columns/mac/mac-20050710.ar s M4nttp://arstechnica.com/ http: //arstechnica.com/columns/mac/mac-20050608. ar s 1Shttp: //www. eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1833126,00.as P ATPM 11.08 be just a ording (In fact, he notes that the technical people at IBM didn’t want to promise Apple 3 GHz anyway, since it couldn't be done on 90nm fabrication without changing the architecture of the CPU.) What cribes why Ap- sition from PowerPC to sir line-up!®, as well as + AMD and the psy- The with Apple...[tJhere’s really nothing in the architecture that prevents having an end-to-end line that can serve [all of] their needs. Makes me wonder, you know, why they didn’t tell Apple that. And whether it’s occurred to them that 3 GHz was a little bit important to Steve Jobs. Hmm. Let bygones be bygones, Rod; you have Sony’s and Microsoft’s vastly more lucrative contracts now. Julio Ojeda-Zapata, the St. Paul Pioneer Press’ tech writer extraordinaire, reports that St. Paul, Minn.-based CodeWeavers wants to bring their toolkit for Windows software emu- lation in Linux to OS X!7. They've already got ful product, CrossOver Office, that runs Microsoft Office applications in Linux without WINE, and there’s talk, Julio writes, of supporting games with their technology. a suc iPod Keeps Making Headlines Batten down the hatches, readers! It’s time for rampant iPod chatter and speculation! John Gruber notes, calmly, the change in the iPod lincup. Oh, the usual: iPods, no more 40GB model, price changes on the iPod shuffle. The worst rub, though? He reminds us there’s no more Chice color screens on all and offers up acorrection!? on the s Mac rumors today. iPod news, of course, HP announced that it will be rebranding the Shuffle? as well, for the cor- porate consumer who just can’t get enough sereenless goodness. In other CNet reports”? that the Wall Street Journal (which got in ahead of the crowd on the In- tel transition, FYI) is reporting that Apple is getting into the business of selling videos. Mu- sic videos, that is. For $1.99 apiece. arly as ptember. Business 2.0?? adds that they have ine ‘/waw twincities.com/mld/twincities/business/ 11970799. htm ‘http: //daringfireball.net/2005/06/shuffling http: //daringfireball.net/2005/07/plugged_leaks 20nttp: //home. businesswire.com/portal/site/google/in dex. jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20050701005107& newsLang=en 2lnttp: //news .com. com/2061-10793_3-5792393.htm1?part 792393ksubj=news 22nttp://business2.blogs.com/ 14 Bloggable: Get a Clue to an internal Disney e-mail which sug- incoming Disney CEO Bob Iger wants Ap- ple to licens ntent?3 for a video iPod. * The Economist fingers Apple for turning an- other small-time product into a mainstream product. Look at their track record: USB, FireWire, MP3s, iCal files, and now podcasts. They write: So far, any confusion about the term or the process has not mattered much, because podcasting tended to be almost exclusively for the young, geeky, or both. Last week, however, that changed?4. * Sean Rozekrans”® thinks the iTunes interface has gone stale. With the addition of podcasts (and, I'd add, the iTunes Music Store), it seems clear that Apple is just running out of useful space. It’s called clutter?®, folks, and it’s a prob- lem. Twelve-step programs and all. Poor Sean, though, he still thinks Apple cares about iTunes’ UL: , a new name around here, It’s terface and I don’t get it why Apple hasn’t thought of it yet. They are one of the most interface orientated developers I know. all just minor tweaks to the in- My Sister Got Bitten by a Moose Once There are always odds and ends lying around the Bloggable HQ (i.c., Wes’ database), but I feel like I should share them with you all. Enjoy! Gur” menu bar*> Microsoft * So we all know about, you know, the Microsoft stole, the stole, and the desktop layout?’ Microsoft stole. Now Jens Alfke finds they appear to have lifted his implementation of RSS in Safari and itp: //business2. blogs . com/business2blog/2005/07/s coop_disney_co.htm1 ://www. economist .com/business/displayStory.cfm 4157673 //waw.srozekrans.n1/ ://www. srozekrans .n1/2005/07/iface/ ://lawcrawler.findlaw.com/MAD/lawsuit htm ://www.mackido.com/Interface/ui_history.html ://www.theapplecollection.com/various/why_pref er_mac. htm1#20 ATPM 11.08 15 8° the UI into IE7 (original has been deleted, but it was cached by areader*!), Naturally, these sorts of things are difficult to prove, because it could have been intuition; but Jens doesn’t think so. Anyway, check the photos of screen shots he links to. , not + Congratulations! Mike Matas, 18 (ie. even as old as yours truly), makes some of the most beautiful and sublime icons on Earth. He just accepted a job He’s been working with W: J Delicious Monster**, and before that did gor- geous work at Omni Group*4. What a résumé. Good luck, Mike! Copyright © 2005 Wes Meltzer, wmeltzer@atpm.com. ® S°nttp: //www.crawlspacemedia.com/weblog/article/57/r etractor Slhttp: //www.crawlspacemedia.com/weblog/ S2http: //www.mikematas .com/blog/2005/07/moving-to-ap ple.html ‘/waw.delicious-monster.com/ S¢http://www.omnigroup.com/ Bloggable: Get a Clue Pod People by Eric Blair, eblairGatpm.com I admit it. Back in October, 2001, I was one of the haters. Before Apple’s much-hyped announcement of what would eventually be known as the iPod, I made the following statement on the ATPM staff mailing list as to why I wasn’t expecting any sort of PDA or portable music player: Maybe it’s me, but I don’t think that Ap- ple tosses around the word “revolution- ary” lightly—the iBook and TiBook revs weren’t revolutionary, for instance. I'm almost expecting something entirely new or a radically different way of doing some- thing that already exists. Once we learned the details of the iPod, I still wasn’t convinced. An overpriced MP3 players that worked with less than 5% of the computer market was supposed to be revolutionary? Personally, I thought the biggest impact of the iPod’s release would be that the press stopped salivating whenever Apple issued a vaguely-worded press release. Within a few months, it was clear that 'd been mistaken. For the record, I like my crow grilled, with a hint of mesquite. Joining the In Crowd Although I was wrong about the iPod’s high price preventing it from taking over the portable music player market, it did prevent my from joining the revolution until May of 2003. Around the same time I started to feel like I could afford the world’s best portable music player (and why buy anything but the best?), I started to hear rumblings about the im- minent release of a revised iPod. On Monday, April 28th, Steve Jobs announced the 3G iPod. On Friday, May 2, the new models went on sale and I headed to the Apple Store at the Rocking- ham Mall. Half an hour after arriving, I walked out of the store, the proud owner of a 30 GB iPod. Once I had my own iPod, I went rather iPod- crazy. If there was something I could do with my iPod, then I did it. Naturally, my music almost im- mediately found it’s way onto my new toy. Since ’'d recently been burned by laundering my cell phone, all my contacts were added to Address Book and synced to my iPod. A “Soccer” category was added to iCal so I could track the games I was scheduled to referee, ATPM 11.08 16 and these events were also copied to my iPod. I even spent a good deal of time writing an application to work with the iPod’s Notes feature, but that sort of fell by the wayside, though I do still keep the code handy. Lately, my iPod usage has been mostly limited to playing back my music collection, though the contact feature comes in handy for those occasions when I forget my cell phone. Listening Habits It would be fair to say that I'm a packrat with spo- radic organizational skills. Typically, my CD collec- tion is organized alphabetically by artist, then sorted by release date. My iTunes collection, however, lacks anything resembling this level of organization. My permanent playlists are limited to songs I’ve recently added to iTunes without playing, TMS tracks that I haven’t backed-up, and MP3s that I haven't re-ripped as AAC files. Basically, I use my iPod as a large- capacity shuffle, though I occasionally get the urge to hear a particular album or build an On-The-Go playlist. As I've ripped pretty much every CD I've ever owned, this has led to some interesting reactions. Plenty of times, a particular track has come up and forced me to think “Wait, I paid for this crap?!?” Other times, friends have looked through my music collection and stopped when they stumbled acro: particular artist—no, I don’t particularly like Ramm- stein or Jamiroquai, their tracks just came on CDs that I bought, so stop giving me that look. For the record, I more of a rock-type guy, both classic and modern, though iTunes wants to classify some of of my favorite artists as “Alternative.” Per- sonally, I thought Alternative stopped being alterna- tive back in the late-90s, but what do I know? “Accessorize” I’ve almost never liked earbuds, so I was somewhat surprised when I regularly used the the iPod’s bun- dled headphones for almost a year and a half, I ac- tually started to phase-out the earbuds after the first time I tried running with my iPod—the buds kept falling out of my ears. Pod People To address this, I picked up a pair of Sony MDR- G52 behind-the-neck headphones. These headphone have served me fairly well over the the past few years finding use both while I exercise and in quieter en- vironments. I’ve beat on the headphones a decent amount, regularly tossing them in my gym bag, but they've held up quite well. My only complaint about the Sony headphon that they don’t work particularly well with the MDR-G52’s ear clips sit in basic: ‘ame place as the temples on many gl: se the Sony headphones while wearing my I'm faced with the choice of wearing glasses incorrectly or having the temples pushed into the side of my head. My sunglass different temple d For louder environmen nheiser PXC 250! headphones. These canceling headphones feature the same folding design as the PX 100? reviewed in our last Having used both the PXC 250 and a variant of the Bose Noise Canceling headphones an airplan Tl admit that the open-air Sennheisers do not block as much noise the ear-covering models that are avail- able. However, they do an admirable job of blocking out the sound of equipment and polite coworkers at my office (persistent coworkers will be able to over- come any noise canceling technology, however). The sound quality on the PXC 250 is quite good, and I actually think they sound better with the noi the music just sounds ric in this mode, though I clearly don’t have the same ear as some of my acquaintance: The PXC 250s include a soft case and adapters for connecting to the headphones to .5" stereo jacks and airplane headphone jacks. Additionally, the tains sufficient room to hold my iPod Remote, which I often use when blindly shuffling through my mus collection. My only concern about the Sennhei durability. The metal and plastic styling looks like something my father would have used in the 80s, and Ihave a hard time believing that the PXC 250s could withstand the same beating as my Sony headphones. A number of my other other accessories have already made appearances in the pages of ATPM, including two of the s I've tried, the Marware ertain eyeglasses the I've switched to the noise- ner on- ors is their lhttp: //www. sennheiser .com/sennheiser/icm_eng.nsf/r 00t/04924 °http://www.atpm.com/11.07/headphones .shtm1 ATPM 11.08 17 SportSuit Convertible? and the Contour Showease!. Around the end of last year, I added an iPod Sock to my collection and was, until recently, switching my iPod between the Showcase and the Sock, depending on where I was heading. Sadly, as of this writing, my green Sock has gone missing. Somewhat stretching the definition of an iPod c, I've also used a BOOQ BP3 backpack® when I've been on the road and needed to supplies. Sadly, the BP3’s headphone passthrough isn’t large enough to accommodate the plastic connector on the ci there’s my big iPod case—my Honda s, 'm officially pushing it here). For a while, I experimented with a Griffin iTrip®, but I ble tation in the grew tired of trying to find a re Boston area, tuning sev ourse of longer trips. Sir have a cassette player, I decided to install a Dension ice>Link? so I could control my iPod through my CD Changer controls. ; not to mention re ral times over the car didn’t my I was a bit apprehensive about the prospect of pulling apart the front of my car, but I found some decent instructions for dealing with Accords. After Shttp://waw. Anttp://waw. Shttp://waw. Shttp: //waw. Thttp://waw. atpm.com/9.09/sportsuit. shtml atpm.com/10.01/showcase. shtml atpm.com/10.07/bp3. shtml atpm.com/9.11/itrip. shtml densionusa.com/icelink_info.htm Pod People a bit of prying, some drilling, and the application of Velcro, my iPod was almost completely integrated with my car stereo and safely stashed in my center console. Even better, there were no unintentional spare parts. What's Next? Tadmit, I’ve been casting an envious eye towards both the new color iPods and the iPod shuffle. I don’t feel an overwhelming need to carry all my photos in my pocket, but I like the idea backing up photos from my digital camera without needing a computer. Also, I wouldn’t mind having an iPod model that’s seeing active development from Apple. When I think about the Shuffle, however, I see it as something that would augment my current iPod instead of replacing it. Essentially, the Shuffle could become my exercise iPod and my current one would keep the remainder of the music-playing duties. Of course, I'm really holding out hope for a carrier-subsidized, non-crippled iTunes phone—I’d at least like to see what Motorola and Apple have developed si nership over a year ago. I don’t know about the carrier-subsidized and non-crippled parts, but ac- cording to iLounge’, Motorola’s CEO Ed Zander read a statement from Apple that the iTunes phone “will be unveiled at a separate music event within the next 66 days, and shipped this quarter” while he was speaking at the MOTONOW media event. © they first announced their part- Copyright © 2005 Eric Blair, eblair@atpm.com. ® Shttp://ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/motorol a-motonow-event-begins-itunes-phone-not-being-show n/ ATPM 11.08 18 Pod People About This Particular Outliner by Ted Goranson, tgoranson@atpm.com Outlining and Styles, Part 2 Desktop Publishing and Readability When I mention styles, you probably think I mean the stuff of page layout, the visual magic that makes a page attractive and readable. I don’t mean that at all in this column, but let’s not ingloriously abandon that notion without comment. It is worth books in its own right; some of these books describe principles that all writers should know. The problem is that at a certain point, several philosophies of design converge and battle for your allegiance. Working out which ones to adopt is a worthwhile exercise. Font selection and careful design have great power, power to enhance what you're trying to communicate. So please don’t avoid the incidental message that your work flow for published items should end with the capability to do this as well as you can. Screen Appearance But this column is about working on the screen, well before you produce something for others. In a pre umn!, I’ve noted some things about font design: nearly all the meaning of words is conveyed in the top half of the line. Nearly all the readability is in the bottom half. You can think of the top as the melody and the bottom as the rhythm. A huge amount of effort has gone into type design using effects you should know. All type these days is based on readability metrics derived for the printed page. Some fonts are optimized for screen viewing, but their design heritage still comes from the old rules developed for the printed page. Chicago, Charcoal, Geneva, Monaco, and Vera are all examples of this approach. Chances are that you use one of them for much of your screen work. littp://www.atpm.com/10.08/atpo.shtm1 ATPM 11.08 Charcoal: uprights: dbhgMH Chicago: uprights: dbhgMH Geneva uprights: dbhgMH Monaco uprights: dbhgMH Vera uprights: bdhgMH But there is a growing understanding of cognitive principles for screen fonts, and you may see a new generation of designs for screen use within a year. They’d be used by people who want the very best readability and functionality on screen. This would send WYSIWYG writing to the dustbin. Good practice for many will be to use one set of fonts and styles for writing and another for pub! ing. The needs are just different. Some unfamiliar needs for screen styles will be covered below, Apple sponsored the first efforts at antialiasing fonts (a notion first developed at MIT’ ia Lab? in the eighties). It is my opinion that with some attention to selecting the right font and size, Ap- ple’s antialiasing algorithms do far better than what Microsoft offers in ClearType. What we are talking about in this case are fonts not specifically designed for screen display. A problem is that Apple keeps tweaking the an- tialiasing routines. They are different depending on your hardware and operating system, and different folks react differently, with far greater variance of preference than with printed fonts. That means that the result of one person’s research isn’t portable to another. Also, once you exhaustively test all your fonts to determine the best one for you and your equipment, you'll have to start all over again with a major operating system update. Guess what? Not all applications render text the same way even using the same settings. As it hap- pens, applications that use straight Quartz text ren- °http://wiw.media.mit.edu/ Outliners: Outlining and Styles dering give you colors in the sub-pixels instead of mere grayscale (if the Font Smoothing option is set to LCD in System Preferences). In effect, colors al- lows for millions more perceptual options, and Apple knows how to leverage them. But some applications just don’t use color, even though they clearly use Quartz. OmniOutliner ren- ders text using grays, for instance, although the text in its dialogs has lors. OmniGraffle antialiases text with gray pixels unless it is actively being edited. Pages and Keynote both render with gray, as does InDesign. Even programs that use colored sub-pixels switch to gray when shadowed text is used. (In Keynote you can even control the color of hadow.) The ATPM staff has come up with some credible theories for why this is, but we won’t go into the details here. & Humanist fon out in spots, which flies in the face of pre-antial screen font design. The old model was to have strong, ght uprights. Apple’s (but not Microsoft's iasing routines do very well with subtle flares pro- ducing a more liquid feel. It makes words more read- able because the letters (with well kerned fonts) form subtly identifiable assembli an- Oregon Oregon Bold Optima Optima Bold Chianti Chianti Bold Humanist Examples ATPM 11.08 On my machine, I use near-blacks instead of the default black for the text color. If you have a setup and application that already uses colored sub-pixels, the use of color as the base has wonderful effects on the sub-pixel coloring routines. And this is amplified when the flare serif effect comes into play. Chianti 13 Chianti 13 This image shows many of the effects we just discussed. The two examples have the same everything (font, size, color) but are rendered radically different. The top example is from TextEdit; the bottom is from Pages. Have fun experimenting. One more aside: in some respects we still haven’t reached the height of the old operating system regard- ing font display, and we may not again in my lifetime. For a brief period, we had TrueType GX fonts and display technology. GX fonts were scriptable to an amazing degree, using an obscure language. The most common scripts were to detect context and swap characters; for instance, you might have one type of “Y” in the middle of a word and another at the end. But you could do a lot more, including all sorts of animated effects. You could, for instance, add iridescence in the flare-serif of a drop cap, so subtle that you couldn’t see it, but only feel it. We ran experiments that tracked eye movement and slightly changed a word’s display as it was read, actually just before it was read. GX fonts made this possible. Styles as Metadata Now on to our real topic. For our purposes here, to “style” text means to assign an attribute to a block of text, to mark it with meaning. The visual display of styles in some way is a separate related of course. If you are an outline user, you already have ac- cepted the notion of one sort of attribute: the as- signing of a text block as a “child” of another. You Ie 20 Outliners: Outlining and Styles probably also are familiar with the assigning of at- tributes to the containers of text blocks, attributes like “high priority” or “this was written on such and such a date.” OmniOutliner® allows assignment of tags through columns. Most of our power outliners have tagging or marking strategies for containers as well. Some like NoteBook* use “stickers,” which are graphical tags. But just about all of them let you mark or tag containers. Together with linking and nesting we have the meat and potatoes of relating containers In this column, we look at attributes assigned to text blocks that are the type of text block that can be selected by a cursor drag, for instance. You already use two styles frequently: emphasis and links. The most mundane style is for emphasis. There’s no reason we should be limited to 300-year-old print technology for the emphasis palette: bold, italic, un- derlined, quoted, or punctuated. Why should I use the same style for laughter that I do for question em- phasis? It might not change the way you write, but now that I have let you know the barrier wasn’t really there, you feel better, right? The real reason we're interested is that styles are a good way to mark text bloc adding metadata. Outlining is all about structure. All our power outliners assume the structure stops at the envelope of the note or section. But why? Making a hyperlink is a matter of adding meta- data, metadata that says: s with the intent of Spring from this text block to this place here. Don’t bother to show me the des nation until I get there, but show me that this is a link by underlining and turning blue. is Putting a text block in quotes is also a matter of adding metadata. Some day, Spotlight might even recognize text marked in this way (and others). Highlighting a text block adds an attribute, one that some of our power outliners recognize as such. Let’s r what we can do today and then spec- ulate on what should demand in the future. Shttp://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner /pro/ 4nttp://www.circusponies.com ATPM 11.08 21 ATPO Power Outliners and Styling The high watermark for named styles in existing Mac text-oriented programs was the old Ni riter®, which only runs in Classic and is still sold at the original, now-too-high price. You could set named styles easily enough, and any inline graphic (even graphical text) could have a style applied as well. But the cool thing was that it had an amazingly powerful scripting language that recognized styles. So you could write a macro that said something like: Find all the text styled with “mild bold” that is in paragraphs marked “done” and that don’t have dates in them, select them all, mark them with style “OK” (which may modify visibility differently), and make a copy of only those paragraphs in a new document with the following new styles... I wrote the most extraordinarily complex style management and outliner system using Nisus and its macro system as a base. There’s nothing like it on Mac OS X, certainly not Nisus Writer Express®. If we had something like this today, we could splice on all sorts of cool analyses that used facili- ties like we mention in the comment on DEVONthink below. Clearly, the ideal minimal behavior would be that when we ass ign a style, the application recognizes it and helps us do something about it. We should be able to see the style or not at our option. In this section, we'll review what the existing state of support is from our ATPO power outliner list, run- ning through it in alphabetical order. No outliner does a good enough job, but we'll show you what you can do today, then suggest ca- pabilities for the future. Circus Ponies NoteBook" NoteBook supports text styles in two ways. One way concerns “favorites.” The simplest way for this to be supported is for the outliner to let use the built-in Favorites list in Apple’s font panel, which all good application citizens do. NoteBook uses a system service to go one better (but not much better). Instead of forcing you to go through Apple’s font panel, you can work with similar Shttp://www.atpm.com/8.03/nisus.shtml Shttp://www.atpm.com/10.11/nisus.shtml Thttp://waw.circusponies.com Outliners: Outlining and Styles capabilities via built-in style management. You use Format menu commands to determine your styles in a document. You can alternatively use the font panel, but NoteBook provides better access to kerning con- trol and alternative characters like ligatures through the menus. Once you create a style, you open the Style Sheet nshot. shown in the ee untitled ATPO Test Style pst Out! — Bitstream Chianti Plain 12.0 Ithasa notebo Sowey ss a - Ted's Red © Docu —Ted’s Red Bold 1 (Remove het Se Circus Ponies NoteBook Style Sheet Then by clicking the next or previous buttons, you browse through every style you've set. If you hit one that you'd like to save in the application’s memory, click Favorite Styles and enter a name for it. You can save “ruler” information such as justification in the style. It’s nice, but there’s no way to apply these fa- vorites without going through the sheet again. Much more interesting is the support for high- lighting. You can set six different highlight colors and easily highlight text blocks. NoteBook automat- ically builds an index of all highlighted text collected by color. That’s very nice, since you don’t even have to think about it: go there and find it. But more powerful is the Super-Find search fea- ture. ATPM 11.08 Super-Find i) st e =o WH Text | ‘y 7) Keywords & Stickers M Date (creared 18) (= 169 [7/25/05 © Priority —) Action Item Status Incomplete +! @ Highlighting Circus Ponies NoteBook Super-Find You cannot do Boolean queries like finding stuff that has “this or that” or “this but not that.” It is just an “and” search. But the ability to search on factors that mix cell and text metadata is a powerful idea. The report page where the results are shown is particularly elegant. I think that with a little noise from users, Circus Ponies will beef this up to include making highlight- ing invisible, allowing highlight types to be named, and adding Boolean searches and regular expressions (which is a complete way to search for text patterns). Hog Bay Notebook® Hog Bay Notebook has a lot of things to recommend it, but support for styles is not one of them. The only thing that could be said of HBN is that it has the same Favorites sheet as Circus Ponies Note- Book, as provided by the system. Bach page is saved internally as an RTF document that you could (if Shttp: //www.hogbaysoftware.com/ 22 Outliners: Outlining and Styles you want) open and edit in another application with styles intact. That's a big advantage. 0686 0010 @ Name | ATPO Styles.hbnk35 — My Folder Style 2 aitstream Chianti Bold 18.0 (I) (<)>) >) © Document Styles (Aad To Favorites) O Favorite Styles (ex) Style 1 Style 2 style 3 Hog Bay Notebook Style Sheet Hog Bay Software is highly attuned to user feed- back. I bet it would consider better style support if asked. HBN has a pretty sophisticated ble” feature that “flattens” an internally hyperlinked outline with clones m- into a linear document. This is effectively a translation. Wouldn’t it be cool if that translation operated on styles in a user-settable way? (Hog Bay, incidentally, is the only power outliner that mentions the competition by name and features in its documentation. The next version may change the name.) NoteTaker® NoteTaker has a favorite style selector, like some of the other power outliners. But its selection is in the That matters because any menu item can ated with it. menus. have a key command °http://www.aquaminds.com/ ATPM 11.08 Font Text Colors... Favorite Styles ATPO Test Style Remove All Highlighting Entry Default Ted's Red Page Break = Ted's Red Bold Multi-Line ®°O Test Style Entry Numbering > Page Style > Tabs = Background Image > Background Color > Cover Title > NoteTaker Style Menu In NoteTaker, you highlight text by Command- dragging text blocks. Colors are easily set or changed; there is no small selection as with, say Finder labels. NoteTaker has a feature like Circus Ponies’ Super-Find. It is called Highlight and Summarize but doesn’t search for marked or styled text. Note- Taker’s AppleScript support is pretty good, but scripts cannot “see” styles or highlights. Of all the power outliners, NoteTaker seems to be adding major features the fastest. Users should get on AquaMinds’ case because they are behind the curve on style support. They should start with mak- ing things visible to scripters who can add their own features. OmniOutliner'° OmniOutliner has a complex system for setting and managing styles. It is mainly applicable to header styles. Header styles aren’t of much interest to us in this column. ‘The idea with header styles is that you set a style that is adopted for all headers of a partie- ular level. If you demote a header then it takes on the style of the lower level. TAO! and Inspiration!? also have settings for this. In the OmniOutliner world, you use the same con- trols to override the defaults for both headers and notes. The user interface makes sense, but it is hard to grasp at first because it is unlike anything you have http://www. omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner /pro/ ‘http: //blue-beach-systems .com/Products/Software/TA o/ http://www. inspiration.com 23 Outliners: Outlining and Styles seen. The screenshot shows the major elements: a style inspector where you can see and set attributes for the selected header or text, a similar display in the lower left that shows info about the documents’ styles, and a toggled overlay on the right that gives some indication of what is applied where so far as headers. a) ‘Wi Ooceer GD Mote (Coun 1) Teoe came 2 Cota en iter Bh Ati? coe Bi Aimer OmniOutliner Header Styles Another screenshot shows the “note” area, which is what we really care about. Things are much weaker there. ATPM 11.08 eee Topic y Header 1 Y Header 2 + Header3 (ms is the (lat we are most concerned with as itis a “note.” — # ATPO.003 } OmniOutliner Note Styles ‘You can cut and paste styles, which is very nice, but there is no system to name styles. For instance, you cannot set up a style as “mild bold,” which would take whatever the style was and lighten the color a bit and darken the shadow, both based on what was there. OmniOutliner has terrific AppleScript support, but scripts cannot see styles, so you can’t do any- thing with them. I’m willing to bet that with enough requests, Omni Group will give us named styles in the note field and the ability of AppleScripts to see and modify them. Tao! Tao is a purist’s outliner with the best developed fa- cility for outline manipulation among our power out- liners. It has a “style sheet” feature that sets default styles for the outline. And among its many palettes is the one shown below. ‘\Shttp: //blue-beach-systems .com/Products/Software/TA o/ 24 Outliners: Outlining and Styles Favorite Fonts LucidaGrande-Bold Chianti8T-Bold (13 Monaco (18 pt) HoeflerText-Blackl Impact (18 pt) ArialMT (11 pt) Copperplate (12 pt) BigCaslon-Medium Courier (12 pt) Tao Favorites Palette You can store ten Favorite Fonts on this palette, no more and no fewer. You use this palette by select- ing text in notes or headers then clicking the button you want. It isn’t quite named fonts, since you can- not assign names. The descriptions, as you can see, don’t include information other than font name and size. And you cannot see the whole line. I think Tao is positioning itself as a writer’s tool. In that case, the support for named styles that retain their identity on export to Word and Pages certainly is in the future. But remind Blue Beach Systems, won't you? Tinderbox" Tinderbox allows text to be marked in an indirect way. You can select a text block and assign a link to it. Tinderbox links are named, and you can create any number of custom-named links. Links can over- lap; and. text blockscan: have. any number. of links assigned. All links, regardless of name, look the same apeatancewisé: Uhey anita Coley SebaANhS preter ences. The default is blue. You can use these links as ° marker, with only the blue visible indicator, at least in the text view. Each link type does have Mnttp: //www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ ATPM 11.08 25 a color assignment that shows in the map view. It is handy in that view but not helpful for our topic here. The good thing about these “styles” is that they are scriptable to some extent. Tinderbox has agents and rules that are little scripts. You can do the ob- vious: collect all notes that have a link type (and perhaps other attributes in a complex combination) and do something useful with them, perhaps gather them all in a clone (which Tinderbox calls an agent). I'll bet that with a little reminder, Eastgate will give us the ability to have typed links that have assignable text attributes. The screenshot shows the Tinderbox link type se- lector. Note One Note One Assimple note with a marked iter in the last three words Tinderbox Link Type Selector Stuff That Would Be Cool Well, that’s the rather dismal state of affairs in our power outliner community so far as style awareness and management. But then again, our computing platform is still young as are all these applications. I believe the future in this regard is up to the intel- lectual marketplace. But we have something the Win- dows users don’t, a vital competitive environment in that intellectual economy and a more sophisticated user base. My contribution is to suggest a few things you might consider demanding. We need to have support for arbitrary styles in notes. Styles should be nameable and inherit proper- ties or attributes from previously applied styles, for Outliners: Outlining and Styles you might have an “emphasize” style that lightens and emboldens what was there. They should be overlappable so that multiple character styles can be applied to the same text block or overlapping text blocks. Styles should have assignable appearances that ly turned off or viewed independently. Some styles should be “invisible” or conditional text. In- are ¢ visible means it is as though the marked text wasn’t there unless made visible. Conditional means that the marked text only appears under certain condi- tions. This is often used in technical manuals, which cite commands that exist in different languages. Many OS X applications already have language “styles” so you can mix different languages, even right-to-left and left-to-right languages, in the same paragraph. These should be integrated into the general style management system so that behaviors can be controlled under different conditions. Styles must be visible to all the appropriate ap- plication services. This includes search of course, but could include indexing, bookmarking, linking, and gathering. Styles should also be visible to system ser- vices, for instance Spotlight. Scripts and Automator actions need to see, reason about, and change styles. A standard specification of styles should be built into whatever XML standard the industry comes up with to complement the sparse OPML. Named styles should convey to common workflow targets like Word, InDesign, and Pages. Styles should be typeable and capable of hold- ing metadata. The typeable notion means that in addition to inheritance trees (like our embolden e: ample), in the tre les can have different behavior specified . An simple example might be a class of »s that behave differently than “permanent” one: The metadata concept is a little different. Some common metadata for a style might be when it was applied and by whom, and in the case of multiple styles in what order. A more advanced notion con- cerns the class of tags a reader remarked on! in a comment to our last column concerning quantitative data analysis (QDA). QDA allows assigned and com- puted information to be added to text so that asso- ciated text can be linked in some way. QDA is one example of a larger class of techniques that analyze text, add information, possibly make inferences, and may alter the text as a result. http://www. atpm.com/11.06/atpo.shtm1#18072 ATPM 11.08 26 This is often done by maintaining a separate metadata file that points to locations in the target text. It is much, much better to attach the relevant metadata directly to the text block as an attribute or annotation of the style. Supp: for instance, that we had a DEVONthink-like service that scanned a collection of text and assigned weights to text blocks based on desired affinities. Word already does this in a simple sense when it identifies and styles what it thinks are grammatical errors. Imagine if the DEVON-like service deposited this affinity data on top of the text blocks as it did different things. Sup- pose it wasn’t a DEVON-like thing but something that actually teased out meaning and suggested a “gather” operation for collection of clones in a location. For instance, “scan this document and collec linked copies of all the hate speech in an appendix. Other types of metadata would be functions. Sim- ple functions would be links of the type we have today and others that are not common, like transclusion or metaclusion, which we mentioned in an earlier col- umn. Or it could be scripts or actions that would do something. An extremely simple action might be a date script. If a date in the note has this style and it is in a paragraph or cell with certain words that de- note an event like a meeting then it triggers an alarm one hour before the time in the marked text. Naturally there are a gazillion ideas clever people could come up with around this idea. We need to have a relationship between layers and styles. I’ve already mentioned one simple style layer notion, the notion of several parallel texts on top of cach other in several languages. When you want a tech manual with some text in French, only that layer is visible. But layers can be enormously helpful in other ways. In program code, uses are obvious, but we f here on writer’s tools. Word has a layered style concept in its Track Changes feature. When I had layers, I used them for source notes layered on draft text, layered on rewritten text. Illustrators have had layers for years. They are natural for text editing if you have robust style support. You might think it silly, but consider styles that control animated behavior in display. Consider styles that convey selfish behavior on the text block so that it would use harvested metadata to better place itself in context to convey the idea it contains. Think about the future. Think Different. Outliners: Outlining and Styles The ATPO Tracker NoteTaker'® If you haven’t looked at NoteTaker recently, give it a revisit. It used to be the conventional wisdom that Gi Ponies NoteBook" was the one with the ele- gant interface, and its competitor NoteTaker was the clunky one, albeit with more features. That’s changed. NoteTaker has piled on ev more features recently, some not available elsewhere. I suppose we'll have to have a detailed look at some of our power outliners soon, including NoteTaker. Along the way of adding features, AquaMinds started using their own product to deliver some of their documentation. But what we’ll mention here are two user interface-related items that appeared in recent updates: a good drag strategy and great links. NoteTaker is a coherent collection of pages, each of which is a discrete outline. These are stacked one on top of another, so that if you are viewing one you can’t see another. A strategy of stacking has lots of advantages, which include several types of integration across outlines. But it is annoying not to use “the Mac way” to distribute pages and views all over the place. So the question is how to handle problems like navigation and dragging from one outline to another. NoteTaker and NoteBook use the metaphor of tabs for pages and sections. These are optional and Clicking on one takes you to that page or section divider (which contains a table of contents for that section). Now NoteTaker tabs are spring- loaded; drag a selection to a tab, hover a bit, and it tailorable. opens that page. Then you can continue your drag to wherever you wish. Along the way, you are dragging a small image of the dragged material. Very nice. The screenshot shows a three-level structure grabbed from a page in Section 1. Our target page in Section 3 didn’t have its own tab, so we dragged to the Section 3 divider. It popped up the contents page, which you see in the shot. We'll then continue the drag to the “Page 3-2” entry which will pop up that page. We'll then drop the structure wherever we want on that page. One motion to target. 1Shttp: //www.aquaminds.com/ ‘http: //www.circusponies.com ATPM 11.08 e fa) a) ATPO Example.ntx Section 3 @ Page 3-1. @ Page 3-2. : 13} NoteTaker Drag Regular readers may recall my account!® of a legacy outliner called Palimpsest. It was a wonderful program with links that were even better than Tin- derbox’s in some ways. You could specify a link with a trackable named type, make it two-way or make it a sort of halfway where it pops up an annotation window, rather like a note. Tinderbox supports the first. NoteTaker now sup- ports the latter two. An annotation can be a text note or a spoken recording. All annotations are col- lected in a special section, so you could consider them hyperlinked endnotes if you wish. A link can trigger a URL or an AppleScript, or you can link to an entry in Apple’s Address Book. ‘http://www. atpm.com/10.03/atpo.shtml 7 Outliners: Outlining and Styles © 6 6 MRbampen 5 Section 1 Page 1-1 YY An example Level One ¥_Aneample Level Two [+ [Ateve! Three reveY=) Create Hyperlink From: ATPO Example, Section 1, Page 1-1, entry #3 Tox —{GSeleetion] URL | Annotation | voice Memo r [Resection ] Select a destination page, entry, or text selection in any notebook & Bidirectional Fi ES iz ‘AppleScript }— (Cancel) Remove Unk To Selection NoteTaker Links This is well thought out, and all these disparate linking functions are handled consistently. You can’t create a link by dragging as in Tinderbox, but it is < job well done nonetheless. DEVONthink Pro‘ After what seems like a two-year delay, DEVONtech- nologies released their DEVONthink Pro version. Al- most. The current version is in beta as I write this, but it seems extremely stable. ATPO has always inclided DEVONthink in its list of power outliners, but that’s not because it particularly good outliner. It is a knowledgebase— to outlining as Tiger’s Spotlight technology is to the Finder. Spotlight has a lot of buzz at the moment, so the appearance of DEVONthink Pro gives an oppor- tunity to reflect on search technology in information managers. First a description. DEVONthink now has three versions with possibly a fourth to come. They all have the same design. At the core is a document database. I don’t know the proprietary technology they use, but it handles huge databases well. Onto that are grafted three services my term. The first is an import and indexing service. This is still the most capable of any of our ATPO power outliners in terms of the number of document types it handles. Also, you can initiate the importing or past- ing by an impressive variety of ways. It indexes PDFs that have text layers (which nearly all do). Excel and some QuickTime formats don’t work yet. °nttp: //www.devon-technologies .com/products/devonth ink/overview.php ATPM 11.08 28 s why the thing exists: a com- bination of associative search technologies using tech- niques loosely called “artificial intelligence.” This also sets the thing apart from other commercial pro- grams available to the Mac. It appears to index by word and build “fuzzy sets” from combinations of words. That means that when you search by a cou- ple words, you'll get the documents that have those words, as you would with Google and Spotlight. But if you open a document and click the See Also but- ton, something unique happens. DEVON takes all the patterns in the current document and looks for matches in every document in the database. Then it produces a ranked list of all the documents with similar word patterns. Alternatively, you could have clicked a Suggest button and it would have given a ranked listing of all the “groups” to which you might assign the document. This is cool stuff, and the big- ger the database and the messier, the better this fuzzy search works. That notion of “group” brings us to the third vice that: is bolted on. It’s an outliner. Groups are what ATPO calls “headers,” but in this case the out- line view shows them as folders because they can only contain. The screenshot shows an experiment with a very The See Also ranking is in the drawer on the right. The outline of groups is on the left. technical database. DEVONthink Pro This outliner “service” was the last of the three to appear. It is pretty mature in some ways. ily supports clones, since a document can be in many groups. These are true clones in the sense that they are equal pointers to the same document; eliminating any one pointer doesn’t disturb the other. That's in contrast to the Finder where a document seems to Outliners: Outlining and Styles be in only one “pla spread around. Killing the original leaves the pointing to dead air. DEVON supports links from text blocks to doc- uments and groups within the database, “wiki” type links where any phrase links to a group with that phrase as its name, and links to files and URLs. This latest version adds a lot of ni the most impor- tant to ATPO are AppleScriptability and the ability to export. DEVONthink in the past has been easy to get stuff into and work with, but hell to get. struc- tured document groups out. That contrasted it to Tinderbox”, in which it is easy to build structure and get things out, but difficult to get things in. Now you can export DEVONthink files to HTML, OPML, and OmniOutliner. Good deal. Now to the controversy. Many ATPO readers use outlines as a part of a workflow or reference resource. The idea is that over time you may add stuff, but you are also modifying what you have and restructuring it to make it better. This is the use that the collected conventions of outlining support the best. The Finder is an outliner—has been for the longest time. That’s how most of us use it and why most Finder-related tools evolved as they have. With iTunes, Apple made smart folders a key clement of what has become an interface standard. (Smart folders have been a part of the Unix world for twenty years, and Microsoft, IBM, Taligent, and Apple toyed with them long ago. Only recently has Apple added them as a mainstream addition to the Finder outlining paradigm.) Tinderbox is entirely conso- nant with this notion that when you add structure, it matters. Spotlight at the moment is a potential dis both functionally and in terms of what it implies when the usually insightful Steve Job: the Finder could be replaced. The idea, I suppose, is that the structure will appear only when you want it and then in as much detail as you want. Why sort your laun- dry if a robot will hand you a red sock when you need it? Because it doesn’t work, that’s why. The: to documents than looking for words; you need to look for meaning. For a search engine to work well, it would need to know what a document says or infers, or denies. And—more importantly—it would need to know what you need, even if you can’t express it or logically work it out. ster more °nttp: //www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ ATPM 11.08 29 DEVONthink’s value for me is that it has a tremendous tool to suggest structure by its fuzzy sociations that I can then use to build groups. The trick is, then, how do I take advantage of that new structure I’ve added? And this is where I think DEVONthink has a long way to go. It won't tell me what its search algo- rithms are or how they are weighted. I’m someone— admittedly an atypical user—who could understand that and wish to tinker with the settings. In fact, I believe that the settings could be exposed in such a way that many users would understand the controls. Since I can’t understand nor control how it as- sociates, I will always mistrust it. And Dll want to build or purchase my own modules. I’m pretty sure DEVONthink is set up do this; DEVON has a new investor that does intelligence work who will likely be adding its own modules, almost certainly based on n-grams. (About n-grams: Since you're not actually index- ing the meaning of words, why bother to index the whole word? After all, there are vastly fewer combi- as nations of two or three letters than there are whole words in all languages. As it turns out, you can get just as good patterns with these as with whole words, but with vastly fewer resources, and allowing incred- ibly more efficient pattern matching techniques. The spy guys like this because they could be dealing with tens of millions of unindexed items at a whack.) Incidentally, DEVONthink’s likely competitor will be a company backed by In-Q-Tel?! (the CIA- linked venture capital fund) that claims not only to index words but also the “meaning” of them. (Dis I was on the panel that helped set up In-Q-Tel and am an outspoken critic of how it turned Whatever they can actually do, I guarantee it than the hype. ck to my heartburn with DEVONthink. After I add structure by links and gathering things in groups, I want the search engine to heavily weight that new structure. DEVON says it does, but my experiments show otherwise Worse, I can’t export all the structure, which means I can’t use it in my workflow. If I select OPML or OmniOutliner export, I export the nesting structure I’ve built, but all links are lost. If I HTML export, all the links are there but not the tediously performed grouping! imer: sel 2lnttp://www.ingtel.com Outliners: Outlining and Styles ahead of Spotlight, which I find totally us clearly the best we have so far, but it still has a way to go. Tinderbox” Tinderbox is now at version 2.5. The latest version, as always, has a long list of new stuff which you review on the site. Three features are worth mention- ing in the tracker context. The first is trivial in a way but makes me feel warm. ATPO may have been influential in getting Eastgate to change their System 7-style disclosure triangles to modern, antialiased ones. Who says we haven’t got clout? eaxAA Outline: FF to a wide variety of possibilities. Rules allow such transformations without the ne y of collecting. Rules have turned out to be popular, but it slows things down to have hundreds of scripts con- stantly working on perhaps tens of thousands of entities these scripts trigger less frequently. difference. What else? Tinderbox now imports OPML! This is good for the obvious reason: now you can get stuff into it from your other tools, for in- stance NovaMind?3, But as we mentioned before in our XML column™*, OPML doesn’t transmit all the structure from any of our power outliners. I think this puts Tinderbox on a path to be- ing able to leverage what Dave Winer is now cooking up with OPML?°. He has something called Now you can set a priority so that some of Makes all the > oO > VY ©] types of Folding vo Draft Notes Introductory Stuff Simple Folding Movies with Dance Movies with Dreams or Visio Movies with Movies Movies with Music Movies with Myths Movies with Painting Movies with Photography Movies with Movies 2 Movies with Plays Movies with Sex “Performan OWT WOOO ao Movies with Sports Performa} Tinderbox Arrows More directly useful is what they did to header styles in the last upgrade a couple of months back. ‘As we mentioned above, they now have header styles that are individually controllable, mamually or by a script. They They've always had these in associ they call “agents.” Agents find notes according to criteria you specify, collect them in new outline en- and additionally transform the notes according introduced “rules” time around. ation with what ttp: //waw. eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ ATPM 11.08 30 Instant Outlining, which is something like an entry- level “transclusion,” which we’ve described before. Transclusion is a simple notion that a part of a document can consist of content imported live from another document to which it is hot-linked. If instant outlining works as described, the master document will be a Web-published outline where the content is from many different sources. New sources can start at any level and interpolate content be- tween existing children. We'll see. Half of his stuff becomes important parts of the landscape, both as tools and impediments to doing things more power- fully, depending on your notions of what’s possible. Copyright © 2005 Ted Goranson, tgoranson@atpm.com. Ted Goranson is an older guy living in Virginia Beach. He is a writer and consultant always open to and currently looking for opportunities. ‘/webservices .xml.com/1pt/a/ws/2002/04/01/out lining html Outliners: Outlining and Styles FileMaking by Charles Ross, chuck@chivalrysoftware.com Of Fields, Calculations, and Other Things In last month’s article, we provided a quick introduc- tion to FileMaker Pro 7 by creating a simple rela- tional database to track serial numbers. As the arti- cle proved fairly popular given the feedback received from readers, we're going to make this FileMaker tu- torial into a regular feature. This month, we'll con- tinue to work with our SerialNumbers.fp7' file, aug- menting its capabilities a little bit at a time. If you didn’t read last month’s article?, I would highly rec- ommend that you do so before continuing, as I will assume that you know how to do what was covered there. Field Types One item you may have noticed last month is that all of the fields we used were text fields. That is, they stored textual information. FileMaker provides other types of fields when you wish to store other types of information. If you'll take a look below, you'll see that the field types include Text, Number, Date, Time, Timestamp, Container, Calculation, and Sum- mary. Detine Database for “SerialNumbers” Tables Fields Relatonshins Table: Produets Bs tees cetines ‘View by (creation order ns a a 1 reseai Test These. Ast Se Ca HST Aas Snare Text Inenes Fed Name: ion Comment CD Come) Com ===) ://www.atpm.com/11.08/SerialNumbers.fp7 °http://www.atpm.com/11.07/filemaking. shtml ATPM 11.08 31 The first four are probably self explanatory. Text will store any text, up to 2 GB of data (a massive up- grade from the 64K that could be stored in FileMaker 6), allowing you to store pretty much any kind of text information you can conceive. Number fields store, um, numbers. Unlike many programming languages, FileMaker doesn’t differentiate between integers and reals. Both of them are simply numbers. Date fields can store any date between 1/1/0001 and 12/31/3000. Dates are stored as numbers inter- nally, which means that the range of values is 1 to 1,095,727 (December 31, 3000 is the 1,095,727th day when counting from January 1, 0001 with the Gre- gorian calendar). Since dates are just numbers, you can use addition and subtraction on date fields to al- ter them. For instance, you can add 7 to a date field to get the date one week from the original. Time fields work similarly, storing the number of seconds since midnight, and therefore have a range of 0 (for midnight itself) to 86399 (for one second before midnight). For instance, I'm writing this at 11:45:53 AM, which FileMaker would store internally as 42,353 because there have been 42,353 seconds since mid- night. Time fields can have fractional portions up to six decimal places, allowing you to track fractions of a second to the nearest millionth. Timestamps are a combination of a date and a time, and are stored internally as the number of sec- onds since January 1, 0001, giving a range between 1 and 94,670,812,799. The above time (11:45:53 AM) for today (July 25, 2005) is stored internally as 63,257,888,753. Container fields are generic holders for all kinds of binary data. You can store pictures, movies, or files of any type in a Container field, allowing you to create a database of images, videos, or files associated with a project that is tracked in FileMaker. Container field contents are limited to 2 GB in size, which should be sufficient for all but the largest video files. Calculation fields are those that take existing data, perform a calculation, and return a result of any of the above types. For instance, using our Date field example above, we could have a date field called InvoiceDate. We could then create a calculation FileMaking: Fields and Calculations field with a date result called DueDate where the calculation is InvoiceDate + 30 and DueDate would provide the date that is 30 days after the InvoiceDate. FileMaker 7 provides a rich library of functions to apply to field data, and although we will create a Calculation field today, we'll cover Calculation fields in much greater det: article. Calculation fields are limited in that they can only reference data within the current record or records related to the What if you have a database of invoices and want to know the total of records? A Calculation field won't do the job for you because it can only reference data within a single record, but a Summary field can ref erence data across records, allowing you to create a field for a report that will calculate the total of val. ues in a field across records. Like Calculation fields, Summary fields are a complex topic, and we'll cover them more fully in a future article. date in il in a future urrent record. all of the invoice Field Options In addition to giving a field a name and a type, you can provide other information to increase the integrity of your database system. For instance, last month we saw how you can have FileMaker auto- matically enter an auto-incrementing serial number. In addition to this and other auto-enter options, you can have a field validated to has we only certain kinds of values. We'll see this in practice in a few moments. You can also specify options for how the field is stored. Your first option is to store a field as a Global field. A Global field has the same value regardless of which record in the table is being viewed. Global fields are often used as variables within scripts and as holders of interface elements. For instance, if you have a script (a small program that performs a se- ries of automatic steps) and need to take information from one record to another record, you could store that information temporarily in a global field. A field can also have repetitions. For the most part, this is a hold-over from the days when File- Maker wasn’t relational, but it can still be useful when storing interface graphics for a s is pretty much the only time I use repeating fields. Finally, you can specify how a field is indexed. FileMaker can create an index of a field’s contents for faster searching, using the index to find records that match search criteria rather than manually searching every record. Indexes are also needed for fields that are used in relationships. Usually, you don’t need to tem, which ATPM 11.08 32 manually set the index options, although you can if you know that a field will be searched by users or will be used as a match field in a relationship. The reason you don’t usually need to set the indexing options manually is that FileMaker will index a field (if it can) as soon as you perform an operation that needs to have the field indexed. For instance, if you look at the field options for any of the foreign key fields (such as the ProductID field in the SerialNumbers table), you'll see that FileMaker has turned indexing on for cause for such a relationship to work properly, the field needs to be indexed. A similar automatic indexing will occur if you perform a find on a field. you be Set a Preference Before we take all this theory and apply it, there's a preference you will need to set if your experience with FileMaker is to be exactly like what I describe. FileMaker, by default, adds new fiel