ATPMezineVolume12

ATPM 12.06 / June 2006 Volume 12, Number 6 About This Particular Macintosh: About the personal computing experience.™ ATPM 12.06 z Cover Cover Art Copyright © 2006 Mirko von Berner’. The ATPM Staff Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Associate Editor/Reviews Copy Editors Web Editor Webmaster Beta Testers Contributing Editors We need new c! Michael Tsai? Christopher Turner* Paul Fatula® Eric Blair!? Matthew Glidden! Wes Meltze Sylve: Charles Ro: Mark Tennent?! Evan Trent?” Vacant lhttp://direcciondearte.com/ °mailto:cover-art@atpm.com Smailto:mtsai@atpm.com 4mailto:cturner@atpm.com Smailto:pfatula@atpm.com °mailto:clawson@atpm.com Tmailto:eritterskamp@atpm.com Smailto:bsmith@atpm.com °mailto:1bennett@atpm.com 10nailto:mtsai@atpm.com 1nailto:editor@atpm.com }2mailto:eblair@atpm.com 13mailto:mglidden@atpm.com 14nailto:tgoranson@atpm. com 1°mailto:akator@atpm.com 16mailto:rleitao@atpm.com 17mailto:wmeltzer@atpm.com 18mailto:dozab@atpm.com 19°mailto:sroque@atpm.com 20mailto:cross@atpm.com 21mailto:mtennent@atpm.com ?2mailto:etrent@atpm.com ATPM 12.06 wer art cach month. Write? to us! Cover Artwork & Design Layout and Design Web Design Cartoonist Michael Tsai Simon Griffee”4 Matt Johnson?> Blue Apple Icon De- Mark Robinson signs Other Art Graphics Director RD Novo Vacant Emeritus RD Novo, Robert Madill, Belinda Wagner, Ja- mal Ghandour, Edward Goss, Tom Iovino, Daniel Chvatik, Grant Osborne, Gregory Tetrault, Raena Amnitage, Johann Campbell. Contributors Eric Blair, Paul Fatula, Matthew Glidden, Matt Johnson, Chris Lawson, Robert Paul Leitao, Wes Meltzer, Sylvester Roque, Charles Ross, Mark Ten- nent, Evan Trent Macintosh users like you. Subscriptions Sign up for free subscriptions using the Web form?®. Where to Find ATPM Online and downloadable issues are available at the ATPM Web Site?’. aTPM is a product of ATPM, Inc. © 1995-2006. All Rights Reserved. ISSN: 1093-2909. Production Tools Apache, AppleScript, BBEdit, Cocoa, tils, DropDMG, FileMaker Pro, GraphicConverter, IXTEX, Mesh, make, Mailman, Mojo Mail, MySQL, Perl, Photoshop Elements, PyObjC, Python, rsync, Snapz Pro X, ssh, Subversion, Super Get Info. Docu- Reprints Articles, original art, and desktop picture be reproduced without the express permission of the may not 23mailto:mtsai@atpm.com °4nttp://hypertexthero.com ttp://www.cornstalker.com 2http://www.atpm.com/subscribe/ "http://www. atpm.com ATPM 12.06 author or artist, unless otherwi: however, print or distribute ATPM as a whole, provided that it is not modified in any way. Authors may be contacted through ATPM’s noted. You may, editori: aff, or at their e-mail addresses, when pro- vided. 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 une tered, but all other rights are reserved. All informa- tion contained in this issue i rrect 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 respective companies. Thank you for reading this far, and we hope that the rest of the magazine is more interesting than this. Thanks for reading ATPM. ® 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. You can 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 are also accepting inquiries from interested spons' available to tailor to your needs. Please contact us at adver s and advertisers. We have a variety of programs n for more information. lhttp://www.atpm.com/about/support. shtml ATPM 12.06 4 Sponsors Welcome by Robert Paul Leitao, rleitao@atpm.com Welcome to the June issue of About This Particular Macintosh! We begin this year’s summertime series with a quick look at the MacBook and other recent news. The New Apple MacBook In May, Apple Computer released the long-awaited replacement for the popular iBook laptop computer. To the surprise of many, the MacBook is shipping with the same chip found in the MacBook Pro. To the surprise of many more, the new MacBook is very competitively priced compared to other laptops with the Intel Duo Core chip. It will come as no surprise if Apple sees a big jump in Mac CPU shipments this quarter due to the debut of the iBook’s successor. This is the month for Dads and grads, and the Mac- Book will be a very popular gift this season. Apple Sells PowerSchool School is moving out of session for the year, and Pow- erSchool is moving out of the Apple product line. Ap- ple purchased the PowerSchool Student Information System from its developers in March of 2001. Now, five years later, Apple has sold its award-winning SIS to Pearson Education, a global publisher of educa- tional content. PowerSchool opened many doors in the educa- tional community for Apple. Doors that just years earlier had been closed to the Mac maker as the com- pany’s market share plummeted and schools, once the foundation for Apple’s sales efforts, turned to Windows-based products. Due to the success of Pow- erSchool and its popularity among educators and par- ents, the Apple logo was seen by millions of people as parents and students logged onto a PowerSchool server each day to check homework assignments and class grades. Apple is first and foremost a hardware company. PowerSchool provided the company with renewed exposure in the education market, but that exposure didn’t necessarily lead to more school-wide CPU Nonetheless, Apple made PowerSchool a suc- s, and that success has enhanced the company’s product reputation in the education market. Watch for Apple to gain market share in education as the MacBook becomes available for students, teachers, sales. cess ATPM 12.06 and school district buyers this summer and in the second stage of the education buying season this fall. Apple Store Fifth Avenue Remember the Cube? No matter that Apple put the product on ice, the new Apple retail store on Fifth Avenue in New York gives the cube a cool new look. Gracing the entry to Apple's first 24/365 retail loca- tion, a cube-shaped enclosure greets visitors to what is now the company’s flagship retail store. Dell Goes Retail Is imitation the greatest form of flattery? Or, are the folks at Dell just green with Apple envy? In an odd departure from the PC leader’s sales model, Dell Computer has announced it will be opening two re- tail locations. The stores will not carry product in- ventory, but will showease the company’s PC prod- ucts. Yogi Berra comes to mind. Is this “déja vu all over again”? Gateway began its disastrous move into company-owned retail operations with Country Stores that at first did not carry inventory for sale. Retail stores are again becoming popular with retail buyers in the US thanks in part to Apple’s retail store presence and the preference of many buyers to see a computer first-hand before they buy it. Gateway, the successor company of the Gateway/eMachines combination, is gaining mar- ket share in the US through sales at thousands of non-company owned retail outlets after closing its hundreds of Country Stores. HP is regaining lost market share from Dell as Dell’s competitors become increasing efficient and are able to match Dell on price with better quality produc will tell whether or not Dell can regain its lost sales momentum while seeking to protect what’s left of its average gross sales margin. However, opening company-owned stores that don’t carry product inventory may not prove to be the way to go. Time iPod Refresh? There’s no news at this time, but a refresh to the iPod line of digital music players is widely expected. Sales have begun to slow, and new competitors in the market the iPod currently dominates are emerg- ing almost every day. The iPod has provided Apple Welcome Computer with strong revenue and earnings while the company completes the Mac’s transition to the Intel architecture. Make no mistake: the Mac is Apple’s past and the Mac is very much Apple’s future. But the iPod has put the Apple logo inside tens of millions of homes and in the pockets of tens of millions of iPod An iPod refresh is needed before the start of use the Christmas shopping s iPod models are released, the sooner the slowdown in sales will be reversed. eason, and the sooner new Vista Delayed Again? Microsoft is sending subtle signals that the consumer next generation operating system will be delayed again beyond the publicly stated January 2007 target date. Absent the availability of Vista for the Christmas season, PC makers have little in- centive to build inventory of PCs capable of using Vista's much-hyped but hardware hungry new fea- tures before the start of the new year. Ironically, for Christmas Apple may be the only personal computer maker with a full line of Vista-capable products avail- able for sale. version of it But It’s Summertime We have a few more months before we focus on this year’s Christmas season. A new hurricane just begun, and the editors of ATPM are busy cre- ating big storms of our own. Each month we bring you the latest news and thoughtful product reviews in our easy-to-read and popular monthly format. Please join us throughout the summer as we continue to chronicle the personal computing experience in a de- cidedly Macintosh kind of way. Our June issue includes: season has Bloggable: Don’t Look Back The iBook is dead. Long live the MacBook! Apple’s new product lineup may be on the verge of an Ab- bott and Costello routine, but the computers are so hot you might burn your lap with one! Wes Meltzer has MacBook reviews and comments, a little gloating over Windows users, zen dialog boxes, and more in this month’s Bloggable. MacMuser: Bombed Out Take two PC engineers and two Mac engineers, make them rendezvous with a load of computers at a grand hotel in Cheshire’s country, and see which pair wins. ATPM 12.06 MacMuser: iDisk Ennui ng of weariness and di: that sums up iDisk. ennui: a feel tisfaction. Yes, MacMuser: Make Mine Black Bond takes his shaken, not stirred. The Rolling Stones painted thei Tl just take mine black. FileMaking: FileMaker This month, FileMaking looks at scripting. “Real” Programming with Segments: Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Media Revolution Just because we can create an integrated digital lifestyle doesn’t mean we are doing it well. Desktop Pictures: EAA AirVenture Chris Lawson offers part two of his desktop photo images featuring planes being shown and flown at the 2005 Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture event. Cortland Uh oh—Todd thinks he’s landed a girl and a job in- terview the same night, but he might be headed for trouble. Also this month, the Boss Control Squad infomercial. Review: PhotoComplete 1.1 PhotoComplete is a new image-editing program which wraps the usual basic editing actions into an unusual interface, making it easy to tweak digital pictures to make them look their best. Review: Racer-X Wes Meltzer finds the Racer-X to be a champion bag—a briefcase for those who thought they’d never carry a brie! Review: SleeveCase Even though laptop sleeves do not have a long list of things they’re supposed to do, Wes Meltzer discovers not all sleeves are alike. Review: Worms 3D Feral Interactive rele a game where teams of gar- ch other away with military and ATPM is there. Check out this latest installment in the Worms puzzle and action series. den worms try to blow e ordinance Welcome Review: Yojimbo 1.1 Yojimbo is one of the newest entries into the informa- tion management space. ATPM looks at how well the Bare Bones approach work in this crowded market. ATPM 12.06 Welcome Switched I have been a Mac user for just over 18 months now, after years of fighting Windows each day. I am not sure why I resisted so long; it must be my persistent nature! The viruses and spyware won in the end. I could never go back now. My Mac just works, some- thing I was so unused to with my PC and the network of 300 of them that I used to support. As soon as I got the Mac PowerBook, I started to read the Mac magazines, subscribing to Macworld eventually. The subscription has run out now, and I have just found ATPM. It looks like ATPM is just another reason not to renew my subscription to Macworld. Thank you for all of your hard work, guys. —Andy Hayes Switching to Intel I have been a Apple addict from my Apple Ile to my 17” G4 PowerBook. I would love to move up to the new MacBook Pro but probably will have diffi- culty getting approval. I have justified my previous purchases of Macs in a PC-only work environment because of the large library of molecular analysis ap- plications that I purchased over the years or have accumulated from open-source suppliers. The cost of upgrading to (or sometimes even finding) the PC version was always significantly more than the dif- ference between the Mac and the PC. That is, until now. Someone should sponsor a contest for adapting Classic to run on the new Intel-based Ma can continue to run some of the old class have a solution? —Dr. Lester M. Shulman Perhaps the SheepShaver! emulator will help you. —Michael Tsai Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw” Interesting and comprehensive review. I have been an outlining freak ever since KAMAS, Out'Think, and MindWrite (remember them?). I now use a combination of Tinderbox and No- vaMind. If I want to start with built-in branching structure and visuals right off the bat, I start with No- vaMind, export it to OPML, then import the OPML lhttp://www.gibix.net/projects/sheepshaver/ °http://www.atpm.com/12.05/atpo.shtml ATPM 12.06 into Tinderbox. I lose the visuals in the import, but I can import screenshots of the NovaMind structures as JPEG notes into Tinderbox. T also have a Tinderbox brainstorming template from which I open a new file. After adding a bunch of notes, I organize it in Map View, export it as a text file or HTML file, import it into OmniOutliner to convert it to OPML, then open the OPML file in NovaMind. I can reorganize the Tinderbox map many times, resulting in different NovaMind maps for the same notes. I have tried unsuccessfully to export Tinderbox directly to OPML according to their wiki, but I have never been able to make this work. A high-functioning Tinderbox OPML export template, with finishing touches in NovaMind, would be a great boon to mankind. —Jonathan D. Leavitt I recently discovered your column and today finished reading every single one from the archi Just wanted to thank you for the wonderful work and hope you keep writing them. In one of the car- lier columns you suggested: “For instance, should we look at little known outliners and use of unex- pected applications (like Mailsmith) as outliners?” I would very much appreciate this, as it focus the concept of outlining rather than on application review. son By the way, if you are from Germany you can get a free version of ConceptDraw Mindmap 3.5 in the MacLife magazine of this month. I prefer OmniOut- liner and DEVONthink. —Anonymous Synchronizing Windows Mobile Devices* Tve tried (and tried, and tried...) to get my Windows Mobile devices to synchronize with my Mac. In frus- tration, partly with the devices (it is Windows and does crash) and partly with the lack of synchroniza- tion, I recently started using my Tungsten T3 again. Then I went out and bought (on trial) a Blackberr I have PocketMac synchronization working re: sonably well. It’s not as good as the Mark/Space Shttp: //www.atpm.com/Back/atpo.shtm1 4nttp: //www.atpm.com/12.05/bloggable.shtml E-Mail tool with Palm OS, but it’s workable. It isn’t trivial nor for the faint of heart. T really want a convergent device, and the Bk berry is the closest I’ve come to date. I should have looked at them before, but didn’t. —Dave Thompson I'm fortunate that | don’t need to synchronize the device right now, because the calendar function isn’t that important right now. But it will be once | have a Real Job, instead of just being a college student. Hopefully either Mark/Space or PocketMac will support WM5 by the end of the summer. My experience—after buying my Axim—is that it’s a fantastic way to surf the Internet from my living room couch, or to use Skype, but it’s a terrible multipurpose device, espe- cially without a QWERTY keyboard. So far, | think I'm going to avoid a Black- berry: the forthcoming Treo 700p will have un- limited EV-DO service for $25-$40 a month plus voice, which is a lot more multipurpose than just unlimited e-mail, and there are al- ready Palm OS push-e-mail solutions. Plus, it'll syne. Good luck with your Blackberry! I'm still open to the idea. —Wes Meltzer iPod 5G° T love my 5G, but I humbly offer these comments. If you will be using your iPod to transfer photos from a digital camera, by all means get the larger unit. The bigger battery in it is better-suited to transferring photos. I have a 1 GB SD card, and by the time all the photos transfer to my 30 GB iPod the battery is nearly drained. (This for a battery in perfect con- dition. I shudder to think what will happen when the battery is less than perfect.) As of now, there is no pass-through dock connector that will allow you to transfer photos whilst powered from a wall outlet. Also, iPods do not preflight memory cards, so any a complete transfer of every- every time. transfer from a card is thing on the card —Randy B. skeptical about watching video on a 2.5” itp: //www. atpm.com/12.05/ipod. shtml ATPM 12.06 now I’m hooked. I keep 25 full length movies and I'm able to copy movies from my home DVD collection using Handbrake® to make small 320 x 144 500 MB files the play well on the New iPod. I also download Suicide Girls’ and Battlestar Galactica’ from iTunes. Lalso have 1,500 songs onboard. This device needs at least a 3.5 improved battery life in the next generation of the coolest player on the planet. —Grover Watson aw en and SmartBoard USB5000° Or just remember to switch the Command and Op- tion keys when starting up with the Microsoft key- boards. The Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 that I started using two weeks ago is fantastic. I just wish they would give you replacement keys to replace the Start and Alt keys on the keyboard with Mac equivalents (yeah right, dream on). Microsoft has made great keyboards and mi reasonable prices for years. —Bytan Bernet PC and Mac Networking'® Firstly, although I've assiduously read through pre- vious Q&As to make sure I'm not troubling you with a question that’s already been asked, I might have issed it, so apologi Secondly, the qu the dark side, and just bought a PC to supplement the iBook that I share with my fiancée. I crudely un- plugged the broadband modem cable from the Mac, and plugged it into the PC—with no configuring at all, it worked just fine. Unfortunately, this patented unplug-and-plug technique did not work in revel and now my wedding is in jeopardy as my better half can’t access the Internet from the Mac. (We keep get- ting a “Specified server cannot be found” error mes- sage.) Any ideas what might be causing this, and whether it might interfere with my plan to set up a router to avoid having to unplug/replug all the time? Many, many thanks in advance—remember: there’s a marriage at stake here! —Al Goodwin Snttp: //handbrake .mOk.org Thttp://phobos . apple. com/Web0bjects/MZSearch.woa/wa /DirectAction/search?submit=edit&term=suicide20gi rls Shttp://phobos. apple. com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/ viewTVShow?id=102790326 °nttp: //www.atpm.com/12.05/smartboard. shtml ://waw.atpm.com/8.02/networking.shtm1 if so! ions themselves: I’ve joined ‘se, E-Mail Many—though not all—cable modems or DSL modems tend to lock on to the MAC address’ of whatever is connected to the Ethernet jack. Consequently if you unplug from the modem and plug in a new machine, typically the mo- dem will not recognize the new machine be- cause it has a different MAC address. Usually the solution is to power down the modem, plug it into the machine you wish to use, and power it back up so you reset the MAC address it is assigned to. This is one of several reasons why a router makes life easier. It shows the same MAC address (its own—or if you want, most routers these days can present a MAC address you specify) to the cable modem regardless of what is then plugged into the router. It's one of the ways in which it facilitates using multiple machines on one broadband connection. Get a router and save your marriage. —Evan Trent Boswell!” [ve tried out plenty of programs in the last year or so and presently I’m settled on DEVONnote (I may upgrade to DEVONthink Pro, but DN does the job for now). One of the programs I tested briefly was Boswell, and I loved the thinking behind the program—namely the reliance on metadata for ving/finding files, as opposed to using a hier- archy of folders. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to be the main principle behind Boswell. Anyway, I almost registered until it occurred to me that I could more or | DEVONnote. (I have one single ‘archive’ folder for all my writings, with no subgroups. Each file has own metadata—I add keywords to the ‘Comments’ pane and assign a color label too. By searching ‘Com- ments’ I can retrieve any file, or grouping of files, in an instant. use folders only as workspaces for cur- rent projects. When I’m done with a project, all the files get dumped into the archive. If I want to re- trieve them all again, I simply search ‘Comments’ for the keyword(s) then throw the results back in a tem- porary folder. ..you get the drift.) The point finding it really liberating to have done away with my old complicated hierarchy of folders; everything now is in one place, and it is easier than ever to retrieve files if I need them. On to my que al ion... Unttp: //www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/MAC_address html 12http://www.atpm.com/11.08/boswell.shtml ATPM 12.06 10 What essentially is the difference between my setup and the idea behind Boswell? Surely any program that is good at handling metadata can work along the same lines as Boswell? Obviously there are plenty of differences between the way DEVONthink and Boswell work, but it seems to me that DEVON- think can be bent to do what Boswell does, pl whole lot more (if you need it). Or am I missing something important about Boswell? (Thanks for the great review, by the way.) Jim Alexander Disclaimer: I am an avid user of Boswell. The appli- cation fits with my personal philosophy of document So add that as storage in a nearly perfect manner. salt. You ask some good qu across Boswell, I almost immediately shunned it. The © put me off, frankly. This was back when it was in its version 3 cycle. A while later, I saw that it had gone through a new version, and I had grown a bit as far as my information needs went, so I decided to give it another try. It took a while to understand the philosophies, but once it all clicked, I bought it immediately and have been using it ever since. My initial response, before the “click,” was pre- cisely what you said: st emulate Boswell using Tinderbox (which I already own). A reason- able assumption, after-all, as Tinderbox is uniquely outfitted to create systems tailored to your way of thought. However, it is not actually possible with- out a lot of run-around, because Boswell does a lot of things which are unusual in the digital information management world. By themselves, they are little, and can be sometimes ignored, but all together they sate a symphony of philosophy that no other appli- cation I’ve come across possesses Let’s look at one fundamental problem with your setup (and perhaps you have even discovered this by now). DEVONthink is very heavily invested in group hierarchies. It relies upon them to establish connec- tions between word pairing structures in your doct ments. In other words, if you have 15 documents on fruit, five of which are about apples, it would help DTP to group those five documents into an Apple sub-group. If you put every single document into one group, then you are losing a very vital part of the DTP’s AI equation, and given that this is DTP’s pri- mary asset, you are losing quite a bit to do that. interfa cl E-Mail The fundamental problem I ran into is that there is no analogue for Boswell’s Notebook idea. This is the same for DEVONthink. There is a way, using AppleScript and the comments field, to hack together “smart groups,” in DTP. These operate as an extremely limited version of what Tinderbox can do with Agents. But while the searching mecha- nism is vastly superior in TB, both produce nearly identical results. They contain a fully dynamic alias/replicant set based on the results of the : TB does this continually in the background (based upon the Agent’s priority setting), and DTP does this whenever you click on the group. So, at first glance, you could emulate Boswell’s auto-archive function. Boswell just uses filters based on simple text matching to do that. Any contains based match in content or metadata will cause Boswell to pla a copy of the document in the directed Notebook, upon auto-archival. Now, if you ignore the fa that both TB and DTP have no “journal/archive” metaphor, the act of searching for a text string and adding documents which match this text string to imple enough with Smart Groups and a group, i Agents. But this ignores an extremely important aspect of Boswell’s Notebook metaphor. It is semi-dynamic; in other words, it is generated automatically (or man- ually), but remains static and adjustable after that point. In other words, if I remove a filter down the road, the entries that it placed in the Notebook do not disappear from that notebook. They have become a permanent part of it. In either TB or DTP, removing the search term will destroy the dynamically created copies in the group. Even more important is the post- creation aspect of the Notebook. Say you have had a Notebook collecting written articles for a while. You long and notice a few errors in the automatic Some documents did not get added, and a few got put in by error. Simply delete the ones you don’t want, add the ones you do, and move on. Write another article, and it will get automatically added to the Notebook; your pruning remains. So you have an organization unit which is dynamically created, but remains fully editable during the creation process. There is nothing like that in either TB or DTP. You are not allowed to do any pruning in TB. Delet- ing or adding notes to an Agent will result in their re-addition or removal in a matter of seconds. In DTP, any pruning you do will be lost the next time you ‘k on the smart group. Of course, you can “freeze” the results. Make a standard group or con- ATPM 12.06 11 arch results to it. Now tainer, and copy the current it is “frozen,” and you can remove and add items to that group all you want—but of course now it is no longer dynamic. New documents will not get added to this group, requiring you to do manual labour to get new results in, periodically. If you have several dozen of these, that can get to be a real waste of time. I would not use the “Smart Folder” analogy at all in trying to explain how Boswell works. The only thing that comes close is Gmail's labeling sys- tem. Labels can be somewhat viewed as Noteboo and both use filters to automatically assign inbound messages/documents to labels. Of course, you can manually change which labels a note has, too. So the dynamic portion of the equation is all on the in- bound end of things. Actually, Gmail’s original con- s very much along Boswell’s line of phi- rosophy. Originally, you couldn’t delete anything. Sorting was a semi-dynamic process that w: hierarchal. Things have changed since then, however. The immutability of archived documents is not something that comes automatically in either applica- tions, though it can be emulated to a certain extant. In TB, I can create an Archive container which au- s the ReadOnly attribute on inbound This will not lock the metadata, and I will still be able to delete it, but document contents will be locked. If I duplicate the note and move it back to Journal, another trigger can reset ReadOnly and make it editable again. In DTP, there is of course the Locking function, which does not protect meta- data, and cannot be activated automatically except with, what would become a very expensive, Apple- Script sitting on the Archive Group. Locking a file mouse usage, and making a new version re- everal mouse actions: duplication, moving, and unlocking. So here we start getting into what makes Boswell ial. It is not that its features cannot be “some- what” copied by other applications, it is the ease in which it allows you to use them. To make a new ver- sion in Boswell—I hit a custom shortcut, Command- D. The d sferred to the Journal, and the application foc: itches to it. I can begin typ- ing immediately. No mouse movement; no menus; no fuss. Notebooks accumulate new document cording to sp: pecified, for years without any freezing/un-freezing rituals. As common search terms, they exist until you are done with them. Using a simple name hack, when you are done with $s non- tomatically notes. rules you have E-Mail it you can just sort it to the bottom of the list and forget about it. Delete only when ne Boswell’s Manager is an extreme Ary. y powerful tool which allows you to do bulk actions on large groups of documents (or just collect them into various Not books if that is all you want). It also gives you access to everything it is not currently in a Notebook. And there is another often overlooked feature of Boswell that is radically different than most anything else. The basic id that much of your collection has no need to be visible. If a document is not in a Note- a ii book, there is no way to run into it without using the Manager. The Notebooks then, are not the summa- tion of the collection, but more like portals in which you can see into the Archive. That might scem like a bit of a down-side to some people, but consider this: it is a very simple search away if you want to actually view every single document in the Archive. Secondly, Boswell is designed for scope. If you put truly everything into it, that Archive is going to be- come fairly massive. 25,000 items—50,000 why not? T honestly wouldn’t trust either DTP or TB to open a group/container of that scale without becoming a performance hog. I know for a fact that TB’s format slows down considerable with a semi-large amount of data in it. I kept my diary in it for a few years— probably 230,000 words in 500 notes. It was getting to be very slow to load and save. I have that di- ary, along with another ten years worth, several nov- els, five large collections of short stories, e-mail, fo- rum discussions (like this one), and so forth. Boswell opens before I'm even done clicking the icon. No de- lay. I’ve never put quite so much in DTP, but I have heard of performance problems with large databases. Many people have left DT for that very reason. DTP is supposedly much better, but still. I have no idea what DEVONnote with 50,000 items in it would be like. Anyway. The manner in which you are using De- vonNote is very Boswellian. You treat Notebooks as temporary working areas, or permanent collections of documents, whatever. If you destroy one and ever need it back again—just use the Manager to recon- struct it. The problem is, you are not using DE- VONnote the way it was intended to be used. The AI will be hampered by this method. If you never need the Al—then the need for any of the DEVON line of products shrinks dramatically. Beyond the AI and document collection functions, the user interface of the DEVON products is quite a bit behind other applications, such as Mori. ATPM 12.06 It all comes down to what application fe in your workflow. DTP is a powerful applic and I really wish that I could have gained some sort of affinity with it. However, I just really do not jive with the heavy reliance on AI. Tam always going to be more familiar with my own work than the computer is, so why waste time supervising its assumptions? And I really do not jive with hierarchies. I do believe the tag-+collection system will be the organization method of the future. Dynamic tag clouds, such as seen on Flickr, and De combined with semi- dynamic working areas like Boswell’s Notebooks, is far more powerful and flexible than any hierarchy could ever hope to be. So forcing me to use nested groups to get the full potential of the program felt wrong. If I wasn’t going to use that system, and didn’t like AI, then I found a plethora of other appli- cations which had far better UIs that could do nearly everything DTP could do (sans AI of course). One could argue that user-created filters and AI- created filters are both going to produce moderate errors, so there is actually little difference between them, practically. I disagree. An AI requires a lot of prior data to make any sort of reasonable guess about classification. In terms of DTP, this means spending a lot of time loading it up with a vast quantity of very carefully arranged data, before it will even start working. With Boswell, you can be up and running from the very start. The background data necessary to form a smart filter is already in your head. Sec- ondly, depending on how you use your filters, you might have a close to zero error rate. I never have Auto-archival in Boswell is errors. for me. Write and forget. And it’s been that way since I started using it. I only have 2,000 documents in my library right now. From everything I’ve read, that would barely be enough for DTP to get a grip on classification. In other words, the program would only now began to be of use to me in the Write-and- Forget way of doing things. In the end, Boswell matched me perfectly. I have some serious issues with the aesthetic. The UI itself 1ally not that bad. The manner in which you move data around is pretty smart. But the presenta- tion of that UI is lacking by about ten years of Apple innovation. There is one thing to be said though, it does disappear. Once you get familiar with Boswell, everything is so minimal that using it is not at all like using an application. It is simply “there.” DE- VONthink is always getting in my way. Tinderbox truly automatic 12 E-Mail is even worse. The only application I have used that disappears in this fashion is Ul So, these are all of the things you pay for with Boswell. A unified philosophy where each feature supports that philosophy. There are no superfluous features outside of it. Everything in the application suits the method. With a little keyboard shortcut customization, accessing these functions is ond- nature. Now, throw a Cocoa interface, and all of the nice things that come along with it, into Boswell—and it would be nearly perfect. —Amber Vaesca 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. ATPM 12.06 13 E-Mail Bloggable by Wes Meltzer, wmeltzer@atpm.com Don’t Look Back ‘A remarkable thing happened this month: We have now all but severed our ties to the past. When Apple removed the Happy Mac from the OS X boot sequence in the Jaguar release, I lamented the loss of a close friend. The Happy Mac, along with the smiley Mac face on the “Welcome to Mac OS” logo, had been my first introduction to the Macin- tosh world. To have it taken away was a powerful experience. Not long before, they had started taking away the fonts. First, the OS X interface uses Lucida Grande for all its labels, where OS 9 used Charcoal. And the old rainbow Apple with a bite taken out of it was re- placed with a monochrome-gradient Apple in the OS X interface. In 2003, Apple replaced its Apple Gara- mond signage and product logo types with Myriad, a sans-serif font. We Mac users are a nostalgic bunch, so there are hacks that allow you to return to any or all of these things, up to and including a Platinum interface for OS X, although I doubt anyone has repainted his PowerBook to use Adobe Garamond for the product label on lid—that would be a seriously committed act of fandom. But all this year we've been losing our beloved product lines. The “PowerBook” is now the “Mac- Book Pro,” after 15 years with the moniker!, and as of this month, the iBook is now the “MacBook.” (More later.) Apparently Apple filed a trademark on the name “Mac Pro?,” which would mark the loss of the long-lived “Power Mac” line. Will the iMac be renamed the “Mac”? It would be consistent with the current naming scheme for Ap- ple’s computers, and finally unify the pre- and post- Steve Jobs product lines (the ‘Power’ and ‘i’ lines). On the other hand, the entire country would break out in a modern-day “Who’s On First”: Me: I’m buying a Mac. You: Which Mac? Me: A Inttp://www. engadget .com/2006/05/16/rip-powerbook-1 991-2006/ °http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?7id=1768 Shttp://www.baseball-almanac.com/humor4. shtml ATPM 12.06 You: Mac? Me: Well, I should. You: Well, then, what Mac are you buy- ing? Me: Yes. You mean you don’t know what So here’s to hoping that little ‘i’ stays. All this nostalgia for a couple of adjectives, right? This month, we cordially welcome the MacBook* to the Apple lineup. The newcomer, in lieu of the iBook, splits the difference between the old 12” and 14” sizes (and there is no 12” model® anymore), with a 13.3! widescreen display and 1280 x 800 resolution. For reference’s sake, my 15” Titanium PowerBook has a 1280 x 854 display, which means that the new iBook—err, MacBook—has virtually the same num- ber of pixels, in a smaller space. This seems to me to be a good trend, but it may dismay some people with poor vision, for whom the 14” iBook must have been a godsend. Early reviews of the MacBook seem to make two points in particular: They're really fast, and they're really hot. Macworld and Engadget both liked putting their hands on them, in spite of the warmth: Macworld calls them “more powerful® and full-featured than the [iBooks].” Engadget is hung up on the keys’, which are curiously raised out of the surface of the computer, rather than the old removable keyboard platform; they say they’re much less mushy, but that they take some getting used to. Ars Technica was not thrilled about the glossy screen, however. They, too, got a review model, and note that while it’s great to go to widescreen, if the cost is a glossy, super-reflective screen, it might not be worth it’. Of course, it’s still a really, really powerful machine (and hot), as Ars Tech- 4nttp: //www.apple.com/macbook Shttp: //yourtech. typepad. com/main/2006/05/its_offic ial_no.html Shttp: //waw.macworld. com/2006/05/firstlooks/macbook first Thttp: //www. engadget . com/2006/05/17/hands-on-with-t he-apple-macbook/ Shttp: //arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook.ar s Bloggable: Don't Look Back nica’s Clint Ecker writes: “The leap from an iBook to the new MacBook is quite dramatic.” Even PC users seem to appreciate what a remarkable computer it is, as Notebook Review took a look at it and concluded that, other than the heat, it’s one hell of a computer®. (Hint: if you are in the market for a graduation present for me, or maybe someone else you love. . this would be a good time to consider placing an order. Just a thought.) This heat problem is, well, a real problem for MacBook and MacBook Pro buyers. However, there’s good news and there’s bad news, as James Duncan Davidson noted at O'Reilly's MacDevCen- Word had been floating around the Internet!° ter. it’s true or not, the fact that we can make the comparison is all the more interesting. And in case you know some fence-sitters, folks, remember that the MacBook will run Windows, too. The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s Dave Caolo reports that he got two potential buyers to buy Macs! just by telling them that they can run Windows on them. Congratulations, Dave! Hope you got a commission. Last but not least, Apple just rolled out a new cial campaign to get PC users to buy Mac: h ends with a shot of the new MacBook. They aren’t using the “it runs Windows” line, but they're entertaining nevertheless. | Watch them yourself!®, then read what John Siracusa!’ and my _ bo: Michael Tsai!® think of them. I find myself laugh- commer whi that a less hurried application of thermal paste had resulted in huge surface and internal temperature in the computers. Davidson cracked his computer open and did just that, and found a d of just 2°F. On the other hand, he accidentally disconnected the temperature sensor, which sent his (fairly quiet) fans into overdrive and transformed his MacBook Pro from a griddle into a computer that was actually cool to the touch. He thinks that’s how others on the Internet got their “better application of thermal paste” results. Good news: Your MacBook (Pro) has great fans. Bad news: Apple has configured the computer to run hot, and therefore quieter. Tanya Klowden at Ars Technica thinks Apple’s latest MacBook Pro firmware update hifting the balance!? toward lower temperature What about the strategy of producing a black model with a price premium? (If you're interested, it’s about $150 after the other associated upgrades.) Julio Ojeda-Zapata at Your Tech Weblog cites anec- dotal evidence that they’re selling out faster!? than the white models. On the other hand, under at st one possible interpretation these MacBooks are cheaper than similarly configured Dells; whether decre However, pas lee °http: //www.notebookreview.com/default .asp?newsID=2 946 \Onttp: //forums . somethingawful .com/showthread. php?s= uthreadid=1864582 Unttp: //www.macdevcenter .com/pub/a/mac/2006/05/23/t hermal-paste-question. html 12http: //arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/5/2 4/4100 1Snttp: //yourtech. typepad.com/main/2006/05/apples_ma cbooks html Mnttp: //waffle.wootest .net/2006/05/16/macbook-cheap er-than-dell/ ATPM 12.06 15 ing, especially with the commercial involving the Japanese woman. Far Away and Left Behind * While we Mac users enjoy the excitement of a newly rejuvenated product line and an upcom- ing OS, we should take a few moments to pon- der the plight of the Windows user. He’s been using the same OS since 2001, and Microsoft keeps pushing back the release date on Vista and taking features away from it. Bad news jus keeps getting worse. Now, even Paul Thurrott (!!) has soured on the whole megillah!?—he says all he hopes is that when Vista do finally arrive, it'll be worth it. What’s next, come out as lukewarm on his ct? Brian Tiemann thinks Vista may be Microsoft’s Copland?°; and Coding Old New Thing Sat what a train- turning into. It’s almost painful to watch...and this is speaking as a Mac user. wrec 1°nttp: //waw.tuaw.com/2006/05/19/how-i-sold-two-macs -this-week/ 1Shttp://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ ‘http: //arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/5/2/ 3816 ‘Shttp://mjtsai.com/blog/2006/05/02/get-a-mac/ http://www. winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_5308_ 05.asp nttp: //grottol1.com/blog/archive/1145491975. shtml 2lnttp: //www.codinghorror .com/blog/archives/000571.h tm 22nttp: //west-wind . com/weblog/posts/4678. aspx °Shttp: //blogs .msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/ 01/54734. aspx Bloggable: Don't Look Back + Apple is building a second campus in Cup This one will have 50 acres, and apparently Apple paid $160 million, which is money they didn’t want to spend on it, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Anyway, they're flush with cash, and it seems they may as well use it to build a campus that could cost us as $500 million. as much. + To put it mildly, the universe contains some mind-numbingly bad error messages. Un- fortunately, Unsanity’s Rosyna found one in connection with the PowerPC-to-Intel migra- tion which doesn’t bode well for all those MacBook (Pro) buyers: one that reads, “You cannot open FontCard preferences on this computer. Contact the developer of this soft- ware for a newer version.” This one of the worst error messag' it doesn’t even explain the problem. And Rosyna agrees”, obviou But nothing is quite so bad as the ultimate Zen dialog box Matthias Thorn at Thornography got... -you have to see it to believe it?®. Here’s to hoping we haven't jinxed you, Matthias! I have ever seen, because + Have you ever felt ripped off? Imagine how Panic Software feels, since they have some of the best graphics and UI work in the busi- ness. They put together a whole gallery of all the painful rip-offs?” of their work they've seen. Sorry, guys...If it makes you feel any better, Samsung ripped off Apple?®, of all on some of their cell phones. compani In iPod news, longtime iPod CPU-maker Por- talPlayer will not be supplying the chip in forthcoming flash models with screens?®. Be- the universe hi of humor, and I do not, Samsung will be the supplier®°. Also, SanDisk arting an “iDon’T*!” anti-iPod a sel *4http://www.mercurynews .com/mld/mercurynews/busines s/technology/14422699.htm http://www. unsanity .org/archives/000456.php http: //www2.thornography .net :8080/archives/000745. html "http: //www.panic.com/extras/ripoff/ °Shttp: //www.reghardware .co.uk/2006/05/08/samsung_sk in_mac_graphics/ 2°nttp://www. engadget .com/2006/04/20/apple-snubbing- portalplayer-for-next-gen-ipods/ S°nttp://www.eetimes .com/news/latest/showArticle. jht m1; jsessionid=SJEZRWCL2MVUUQSNDBESKHA? art icleID=18 6701236 Slnttp://www.idont .com/ ATPM 12.06 tino” 4 campaign, in the hopes that they can use guerilla marketing tactics to convince people that the iPod is too trendy*?. Um, good luck with that, guys. Since I’ve been down on the idea** of Apple en- tering the mobile world before, and in March I gave away my JFK Shot By LBJ Award to a writer who believes that Apple will market an iPhone as an MVNO, I feel obligated to link to Rui Carmo’s timeline of iPhone rumors**, Talk about fascinating. * Speaking of awards, I have another to an- the Dave Winer Award, which the dumbest thing Dave Winer s in any given month. (Yes, this means I have to keep an even cl This month, as every month, the award goes to Dave him locked into*® Apple appli a photo of a grain silo—a is an appli tion that locks your data into it. Why does this merit a Dave Winer Award? Les Posen notes that it’s actually quite to get your data out of those Apple applications. ..But then again, unless an application uses OPML or his officially sanctioned RSS, Dave Winer will happily blast it. So, congrats, Dave. nounc ebrates ser eye on Dave Winer. ca- Copyright © 2006 Wes Meltzer, wmeltzer@atpm.com. ‘/waw. ilounge .com/index.php/news/conments/san disk-launches-idont-anti-ipod-campaign/ 16 ‘/www.atpm.com/11.01/bloggable. shtml ‘/the .taoofmac.com/space/iPhone (/wwa. scripting. com/2006/05/03.htm1#When: 10: 38nttp: //homepage .mac. com/lesposen/blogwavestudio/LH 20040820224513/LHA20060504140054/index. html Bloggable: Don't Look Back MacMuser by Mark Tennent, mtennent@atpm.com Bombed Out Back in 2000 I stood facing a man holding a loaded and cocked Heckler and Koch submachine gun. His finger was on the trigger and the barrel was pointed directly at me. This was a definite brown trouser moment. For us Brits, guns are still something the A-Team! shoots the baddies with. Lots of bangs from weapons that hold an unlimited supply of bullets, and then the baddies hold up their hands and give in. Nobody gets hurt, naturally, except Mr T, who has to be drugged to get him into the helicopter. In general, we don’t see or hear guns in real life in the UK other than perhaps the occasional distant sound of a shotgun, or after 9 PM in some of our city centers such as Manchester. From what we see on TV, it seems the reverse is true in the US. Policemen carry guns by default, and it seems every kid in middle America is given an automatic weapon as soon as she is able to walk. Luckily for me, the gun-toting man was a special policeman on duty at the venue I was trying to enter. It was the Grand Hotel in Brighton? where 16 years earlier the Provisional IRA tried to blow up Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at her political party conference. In those days, my home was less that a mile away. The explosion woke me up, and later I saw its dreadful consequences. In fact, I actually did quite well from the bombing, because I salvaged for my antiques shop many of the fine fixtures and fittings thrown away as builders rebuilt the hotel. The policeman confronting me was checking my entry pass for the Grand Hotel where our present government was holding its Millennium Labour Party conference. My colleague and I had been contracted to supply and install a large network of over 20 compute As the Labour Party's color is red, we naturally got a lorry load of strawberry iMacs, plus a couple of G4 desktop computers, both of which came home with me after the event. lhttp://www. imdb. com/title/tt0084967/ °nttp: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombin Shttp://www. berltd.co.uk/hiresales.html ATPM 12.06 17 Once the policeman let me through and the bomb detectors decided there was no Semtex! in my under- pants, we got down to the installation. All the Macs were brand new. Installing them meant opening their boxes, fixing up the keyboards and mice, adding ex- tra RAM to each Mac, and installing Mac OS 9 and software before getting them physically networked to- gether via a heavyweight Buffalo switching hub that also came home afterwards. By lunchtime we com- pleted the job, tested each computer, set up ISDN, and tidied all the boxes away. In the room next door were a couple of PC gineers who had three or four computers to install. They had arrived before us and were hard at it even as the gun had been thrust in my face. When we returned to check the Maes the next day, the two PC experts were still completing the job. They had got the computers networked but hadn’t managed to get them all talking to the printer, let alone connected to the outside world. It is no wonder then, that CNET® runs so many free online courses for computer users. Nearly all are geared to the needs of Windows users, but there are some concerning cross-platform appli Photoshop or digital photography. Looking at the list, one wonders why anyone would ever use Win- dows if they need a course to tell them how to make a tions such as how to update their iPod or build a photo library. We Mac users have life easy because all of the above are very simple point-and-click affairs. Net- working at most involves plugging the wires into the right sockets and turning on file sharing for each Mac. Updating iPods is usually done automatically by Software Update when the iPod is connected for charging or reloading with tunes. Photo libraries are almost too simple to build and share with iPhoto. There are times when specific images on a digital camera are not intended for long term storage, yet iPhoto will happily download them if one isn’t care- ful. Apple’s latest computers come with a camera. built in, so video conferencing is poised to take 4nttp: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semtex Shttp://directory .help.com/all-courses/ MacMuser: Bombed Out over from standard voice-only telephones, and iChat makes it easy to accomplish. Moreover, Apple has progressively made things even easier. Bonjour® was first included as Ren- dezvous in Mac OS X 10.2. It supplies an automatic, zero configuration network without special servers and was devised by Englishman Stuart Cheshire’. He had earlier written, amongst other things, addictive computer game called Bolo’, a multiplayer networked tank game. There are still versions around for Mac OS X including XBolo? and nuBolo!. Stuart is now “Wizard Without Portfolio” at Apple. This! is a video of Stuart describing his zero configuration networks to engineers at Google. Zero configuration was pioncered by Apple and adopted in its move from AppleTalk to IP (Inter- net Protocol) networking. It automatically identifies each networked device (computer, printer, etc.), gives each its own numeric address and name, and works out where to get services such as printing. Apple has made Bonjour open source. The purpose of zero configuration isn’t just to make it easy to network computers together, which it does already. It has a much longer term goal to create new kinds of net- worked products that are not available today because they would cost too much or would be too difficult or inconvenient to set up. What these will actually be is unknown, but in- triguing to think about. We've already got networked telephones, fax machines, printers, cam- : and video devices. So what’s next? Dis tributed, Bluetooth washing machines perhaps, all sharing the washload? an eras, mus Copyright © 2006 Mark Tennent, mtennent@atpm.com. Snttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Bonjour Thttp://www.stuartcheshire.org/ Shttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_/28computer_game 29 °http://www.xbolo.net/ \Onttp://www.nubolo.net/ ‘nttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-739868010 3951126462 ATPM 12.06 18 MacMuser: Bombed Out MacMuser by Mark Tennent, mtennent@atpn iDisk Ennui At last! The weather in England has shaken off win- ter’s gloom, and spring has started for real. The longer days and shorter evenings mean that we can sit in the garden watching the sun disappear into the horizon rather than behind rain clouds. It was such an warm evening recently that found me sitting in the evening sun, listening to bell-ringers practice in the distant church tower while I nursed a glass of chilled English bacchus wine from my local vineyard. So few of my fellow countrymen know we produce superb wines and some that beat even the best in the world. After all, we share the same soil and climate as the Champagne region of France, and the Romans knew a thing or two when they planted vines here a couple of thousand years ago. It was a Dutchman and German I met at a party who told me about English wine. A quick scan of Yellow Pages proved I am surrounded by vineyards, all of which have to be visited...regularly. In the name of re- search, naturally. As I sat sipping, the bush next to me was hum- ming to itself. It isn’t much of a plant, comfrey, a Russian infiltrator that grows wild. But bees love comfrey, and it was these causing the humming. Most jars of honey name the type of plants the bees have fed on, but I h: never seen one advertising it was from comfrey. Maybe they have it in the Ukraine? Comfrey flowers don’t share the same intense smell ciates with Austra one a Mexican orange blossom, but obviously bees can find some attraction. ian leatherwood honey or ATPM 12.06 Humming Bush Unfortunately, the bees also describe how I feel about Apple’s .Mac service the attraction?. I let Apple’s previous attempts at presenting an online experience—AppleLink and eWorld—pass me by. Apple had originally used AppleLink' as a support service for dealers and developers, but it was expensive to run. They decided to expand it to consumers, to switch suppliers, and lower run- ning ci The new AppleLink Personal Edition, started in 1987, was supplied by Quantum Computer Services who renamed in 1991 to America Online. Apple licensed the original AppleLink software and anged its name to eWorld”. Apple introduced eWorld in 1994 and for two years supplied e-mail, news, and a bulletin board ystem in return for large amounts of their clients’ wealth. eWorld never took off, probably because Apple kept it proprietary and closed to the bur- “hmmmmmm, where’s cl lnttp: //apple2history.org/history/ah22.htm1#07 °http: //members. shaw. ca/raykamvr/eworld/index3. html MacMuser: iDisk Ennui geoning Windows community. Plus, it was in direct competition with America Online, who supplied eWorld. eWorld had been devised in the days when the only Web browser available was Tim Berners-Lee’s imaginatively named WorldWideWeb*. Tim wrote this for NEXTSTEP, which a decade later became Mac OS X. Where, in 1991, no-one had a Web site other than the boffins at CERN, by 1993 other browsers such as NCSA/Mosaic* had been devised by clever people who were to go on to found Netscape, among others. The new cross-platform browsers took off and left online communities such as eWorld behind. Apple’s latest online offering grew from iTools*, originally a free part of Mac OS 9 and the new Mac OS X. Included were HomePage, a free Web hosting service; iDisk online storage; mac.com, a free e-mail service; and iCards, free greetings cards. B iDisk ate Modes 1/10/2006 623 Pt 12/7/2005 103 PM 12/16/2008 7:31 9730/2005 401 Pw 5/9/2006 1:18 Pe 12/7/2005 103 Pw 12/7/2005 103 1/20)2006 5:45 em 4/25/2006 3:41 1/20/2006 $46 Pu 372972006 321 PM sed 0% 1.8 avaiable iDisk & mtr accom =a ( HomePage Shttp://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/s creensnap2_24c.gif 4nttp://www.livingInternet .com/w/wi_mosaic.htm http://www. apple.com/pr/library/2000/jan/OSnetstra tegy.html ATPM 12.06 20 ee Spengler uty ic Aime Titans Con ills teen” sags Dawe N'Y iag= Ba Gore: Move Message To a rE ‘Ther are no messages to dnp. Delete | Reply | Reply All| Forward ‘marktennenti@mac.com mac.com Mail MacMuser: iDisk Ennui conymeicarn ere Ga Se a] ‘2, ch ‘Sead fo crn ted eo pn Ma mob vse sto oon ata fom pr Db rt ato ad VOLPUS recor Set Abbe oo ck Cooly as Seasonal Cards wa | Lrd Catpenie © Greate Your oun es Eure W & A Baz \ Se 2 &s Ceeemare — Top Cards Sent ‘Seng Seven Yous Kayan Fw Years Reaoot iCards To get around disk storage limitations, users cre- ated two or more accounts. Recognising a revenue- earner when they saw one, in 2002 Apple renamed iTools to .Mac in parody of Microsoft’s .Net service, and started to charge for it. To sweeten the blow to users, Apple threw in free software including McAfee’s Virex virus scanner. I was an early adopter of OS X and iTools but decided to pass on the paid-for version, only to change my mind a little later, resulting in the numeral 1 being added to my old mac.com e-mail address. In the four years since then, .Mac has changed a little and not all for the better. Account holders no longer get a copy of Virex, for example. Nowadays the iDisk limit is 1 GB with more available at ex- tra cost, and mac.com e-mail has a few more tricks up its sleeve. HomePage, the free Web site host and generator, has also gained some features, including more templates, and Groups—a way to create your own online community to share information, calen- dars, announcements and files. These online tools are tightly integrated with Apple’s free desktop software including iPhoto, Backup, and iSync. ATPM 12.06 Create agroup Spi tare ep SSchan & Saori 2. Make an SaTimere hor [slormaton Ey posting = 3. Share a group, Groups -Mac is based on the WebDav® and IMAP’ pro- tocols. The former is an extension for HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol the Internet uses to share information and publish Web pages. The latter is one of the standard ways to exchange e-mail mes- sages across the Internet. Together they make .Mac available to any computer able to access the Inter- net, and one would think they would work reliably and efficiently. Not so in my experience. The main reason I have kept my .Mac subscrip- tion, apart from stopping my namesakes from grab- bing my name, is so I can upload large files. My son lives in Chicago, I have friends around the world, and we like to swap photographs, movies, and so on. As a designer, I need to make huge files available to printers, repro-houses, and other professionals. So an iDisk with a gigabyte of storage space seems ideal. It means we should not need to connect computer-to- computer to exchange files, especially when our local time zones may be 12 hours apart. I have never been able to upload a file of more than a few tens of megabytes to my iDisk. Every- thing seems to be working correctly, and then the lights on my ADSL-router stop blinking. On screen, Snttp: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV Thttp://www.imap.org/ 21 MacMuser: iDisk Ennui the little beachball is still spinning but nothing hap- pens. I’ve even left things like that for hours before canceling the whole transfer. Usually this leaves an incomplete file that until recently I had to send a beg- ging e-mail to the Apple technicians asking them to delete it for me. There is a free WebDAV applica- tion called Goliath® that should be more reliable at sending files to iDisk but it suffers the same fate— terminal ennui. At least Goliath lets me delete the failures, but I cannot recommend it after suffering more than a crash or two. To send files of up to 100 MB and more there are various free services such as Dropload? and SendThisFile!? (also search Google for “related: www.dropload.com”). They all work in a similar you send the file to them via a Web browser, way and they send an e-mail to the intended recipients with a link to download the file. In my experience these free services are one hundred percent. better than iDisk because they actually achieve the transfer, where iDisk has refused to accept the file in the first place. Send A File From: mark@tennent.co.uk To: (erevous) File: (Choose File) no file selected Note: (Groot) - NEWS: 4/5/06: Dropload Newst Freietefelter gan | Bownlonduusias.terge BBR en sel ike rs, Baan oN since 1999, es, M Bownidading Fees. Dropload Shttp://www.webdav.org/goliath/ °http://www.dropload.com Mnttp: //www5.sendthisfile.com ATPM 12.06 Copyright © 2003-2008 Layerz, Ine. Al rights reserved SendThisFile The remaining parts of .Mac work reasonably well. There have been times when I made simple Web sites as a fast and dirty way to get information across, using the templates Apple provide for Home- Page. As the site is generated, HomePage is able to automatically announce the location by sending an eCard to the people you want to know about it. Often the link on the eCard refuses to work for some unknown reason. The site is exactly where the link says it is, but it only generates an error message. On the other hand, HomePage and its close inte- gration with iPhoto enabled me to take on a builder with whom I was in dispute. I simply took photos of the bad materials and workmanship the builder ex- pected me to pay for, let iPhoto generate the Web site for me, and announced it to his e-mail address. No matter that all the Web site’s hits measured by the on-screen counter were actually generated by my friends and family. When the builder saw a Web site saying “Look at what this cowboy did to my house” with indisputable photos, he immediately caved in. Nowadays, there are many alternatives to the tools offered by .Mac and easily integrated with the other Mac applications such as iPhoto. RapidWeaver!!, for example, can create and upload photo slide shows, movies, and file transfer sites as easily as HomePage. Backup and syncing software, another part of the .Mac experience, is freely avail- able, such as LaCie’s SilverKeeper!?. ClamXav!s is a free anti-virus application. As for the remainder of .Mac, it seems over-priced and for a UK user. It Unttp://wiw.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/index.p hp 2nttp://waw.lacie.com/silverkeeper/ ‘http: //www.markallan.co.uk/clamXav/ 22 MacMuser: iDisk Ennui may be that distance is the cause of file transfers not working or that lengthy transfers get “forgotten” by -Mac and are left to fester incomplete. For no-brainer, point-and-click Web site creation, e-mail and file storage, .Mac could be the answer for you, but I’m less than happy with it and wonder whether to keep my subscription. Hmmmmmm. Copyright © 2006 Mark Tennent, mtennent@atpm.com. ® ATPM 12.06 23 MacMuser: iDisk Ennui MacMuser by Mark Tennent, mtennent@atpm.com Make Mine Black It has come as a great relief that one of those life- changing d ions has been settled. This was one that I'd avoided, put aside as “more important” things got in the way. And now it’s finally decided that part of my life is behind me, allowing me to move on. The next car for me just has to be a Mercedes Benz 320CLK. It has to be in black so it looks like the one Agents J and K drove in Men in Black 2'. A black suit and shades will complete the ensemble, but not a hat, as that would be too Blues Brotherish?. The Mere was in the supermarket car park the other day. And just like a sad bozo, I had to drive round again to get a second look and see what model There is one little problem. Online road it was. tests quite clearly it’s a car beyond the limits of my pocket money. Plus, my wife says it looks very similar to my black Honda Accord, so what’s the point of swapping? She just doesn’t understand. Sigh! Never mind, at least my next car is decided. And a new laptop. I Need both desperately, and that is Need with a capital N. My old laptop was bought, as the last of the late, great G3 Pismo PowerBoo! even though the white iBooks were in the shops. The G3 PowerBooks were the first laptops able to run Mac OS X—which conveniently arrived the day after my PowerBook. So it ran OS 9 for only a single day. It has never crashed or caused problems, and it has been running non-stop since March 2001. At the time I bought it, my legs had fresh, meter-long scars running down each, courtesy of England’s superb National Health Service, which probably saved my life. Walking was near impos- sible, and a desktop Mac completely out of reach. The PowerBook became a window on the world for nearly a year, along with 50 meters of Ethernet: cable and a half-megabit ADSL connection to help it: along. Since then, it has doubled as a DVD player, a TV set (with CyTV4 and EyeTV), a cookbook, and a general-purpose second computer. It gets - imdb. com/title/tt0120912/ - imdb. com/title/tt0080455/ -powerbookcentral . com/reviews/pismorevie w.shtml 4nttp://www.atpm.com/12.02/cytv.shtml ATPM 12.06 24 lugged from room to room and spends most summer weekends in the garden showing Michael Schumacher demonstrating his driving prowess each Grand Prix. Thankfully, it now has a wireless connection. Drag- ging a mess of 50 meters of Cat 5 wrapped around an old cable drum was definitely uncool and a hassle to deal with. I Need a new laptop just like I will Need a new desktop Mac when the Intel ones arrive sometime later this year. What matters, in all this needful- there is no use for any extra speed. In the se of my PowerBook, it already does everything asked of it and more besides, seldom showing the spinning beach ball. The desktop Mac was ordered the minute after Steve Jobs announced the first of the twin processor G5s. Then he made me wait while “my” Mac was diverted to make the world’s third fastest supercomputer®. That was OK because the bragging rights were worth every day extra it took to arrive. My wife has an even faster G5. Hers is liquid- cooled. So when it arrived, I stoked it up with lots of hard-to-do tasks and sat with ear pressed to its case, trying to hear if it gurgled. It doesn’t, just like it doesn’t do anything different from my OM slow dual 2 GHz G5 that I Need to upgrade. About the only time it shows a turn of speed is when iTunes rips MP3 tracks from CDs. My wife’s does it at a gazillion times playback speed, while mine is a mere million, give or take a complete overestimation or two. Then the new black MacBooks® arrived in Apple’s shops. One would go very nicely with a new Mercedes and, come to think of it, my iPod is a bit long in the tooth, being of the first generation. It weighs so much that if someone tried to mug me I could swing the iPod like a shot put and hit him on the head. Except that a mugger probably wouldn’t want it and might even leave a better one behind out of sympathy. However, a black iPod would make a matching set. Is black Apple’s new white? Will it make desktop Macs available in black? It all seems a bit retro Shttp://waw.wired.com/news/technology/0, 1282, 61252, 00.html Shttp: //www.apple.com/macbook/ MacMuser: Make Mine Black and away from the company’s more modernist pure whites. Is it coincidence that Apple’s head of in- dustrial de Commander of the British Empire’ by the Queen of England, started out as a ceramic bathroom igner and now only appears to wear black ign, Jonathan Ive’, who was made a suite des T-shirts? Copyright © 2006 Mark Tennent, mtennent@atpm.com. Thttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive Shttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year_Honours_2006 #Commanders_of_the British Empire_.28C.B.E.29 ATPM 12.06 25 MacMuser: Make Mine Black FileMaking by Charles Ross, cross@atpm.com “Real” Programming with FileMaker Welcome back to FileMaking, where this month we'll take a look at scripting in FileMaker, which allows you to turn a FileMaker database into a FileMaker application. FileMaker can be used on two levels: first, it’s a simple database management system. You define tables, fields, and relationships, and FileMaker pro- vides a structured way to store and retrieve data. Even though I’ve created some very large and com- plex systems with FileMaker, I have often used it in this manner to create simple databases that are basically glorified list managers, such as the Serial Numbers database we’ve worked on in past columns. Used in this mode, manipulating data in the database is a matter of using FileMaker’s built-in interface el- ements, such as Command-N to create a new record, View > Find Mode to search for records, etc. File- Maker is very useful at this level. Anyone can create a simple database with a couple of tables and a few fields and begin storing data in it within minutes. Here is an example of a simple database like this: Femater ro Advanced file dk View Insert Format JETZEIZTM Scriots Toots _windor ‘Duplicate Record Delete Record xe Delete All Records. oto Record > ete The other level that FileMaker can be used at is as a cross-platform application development environ- ment, which basically means that you create a com- plete application within FileMaker that will run on either Mac OS X or Windows. In such applications, the built-in interface elements of FileMaker will of- ten be disabled, and all interaction with the database happens through scripts. Layout tools are used to build a custom interface, and the user clicks buttons ATPM 12.06 26 or chooses custom menus that execute these scripts. The application can then be hosted on a server, to be accessed by multiple users, or possibly bound as a double-clickable file that doesn’t even need the File- Maker application in order to run. An example of such a database application is shown here: The interface you see above was drawn completely with FileMaker’s layout tools (which we will cover in a future column). The functionality of the system is provided via buttons that are linked to scripts. What Are Scripts? Scripts are small programs within FileMaker. If you've ever done any programming in AppleScript! or another programming language, you'll be right at home with FileMaker scripts. They are simply named sets of instructions that FileMaker can exe- cute in response to a button being clicked, a menu item being chosen, or a call from another script. Pretty much anything you can do manually in FileMaker can be done with a script. If there’s an operation that you perform repeatedly in FileMaker, it’s a good candidate for automation with a script. For example, let’s say that you often perform the following manual steps in FileMaker (using our Serial Number database as an example): L. Go to the SerialNumbers layout. ‘http://www. atpm.com/Back/roll. shtml FileMaking: “Real” Programming with FileMaker 2. Switch to Table view. 3. Sort the records by publisher name and product name. 4. Print the layout. If you perform this action on a regular basis, doing so manually will get tedious, so you create a script to perform the actions for you. Creating Your First Script First navigate to the Products layout of our database?. The layout you are on when editing scripts has a bearing on which options are set by default for some script steps, so if you're going to be scripting with regards to a particular layout, it’s usually a good idea to manually navigate to that layout before you begin writing your script. Then, open ScriptMaker by choosing Scripts > Script- Maker or pressing Command-Shift-S. You'll following window. Define Scripts for “SeriaiNumberstjew" Perform Import Edit. Duplicate Delete Copy Paste include in menu (Caneel) (__ 0K The Define Scripts window is where you edit the scripts available in your file, as well as which appear in the Scripts menu. Go ahead and click the New button to create a new script, and you'll be presented with the Edit Script window. http://www. atpm.com/12.06/SerialNumbersOld.fp7 ATPM 12.06 ka ert View (alloy catagory TB) Serie Name: ar i Sere pees ham sero wat al access prveges Here is where you add the steps to your script. The list box on the left displays available script steps (individual instructions to FileMaker). The larger area to the right shows the steps that are included in your script. Above this is where you give your script aname. Go ahead and enter “Print All Products” for the Script Name. You add steps to your script by double-clicking ed in the available steps section. Find ipt step named Go to Layout (under the Navigation sub-heading) and double-click it. It will be added to the list of steps that will be executed and will have a default option of original layout (the original layout is the layout that was active when the script began execution). beled “Script Step Options,” cho the menu. The script step changes Layout ["Products" (Products)]. The parenthet- ical Products is to indicate that the “Products” In the box la- layout is linked to the “Products” table occurrence (created in our first column in the series). If you’re using FileMaker Pro (rather than File- Maker Pro Advanced 8 or FileMaker Developer 7), your window may look slightly different from the sereen shots you will see below. In my screen shots, there is a grey bar to the left of the script steps my script. This is where breakpoints are defined when debugging scripts. The Pro versions of File- Maker don’t have this debugging capabili but everything should work identically. Let’s use a different method to add the second in step. From the View menu, select Windows. The list of available script steps now shows only those script ste] dealing with the control of windows. Find the ript step View As and double-click it. Specify menu select “View as List.” From the Shttp://waw.atpm.com/11.07/filemaking. shtml 7 FileMaking: “Real” Programming with FileMaker rtm oer _se_rots_vmers_9 ‘aby rare’ san sotet onto! Nangation Sort Records Current Table (Products?) 1) Sort Order Soucy, (iew as Unt Gear) (Wooieate) (Disab) Sindeate web comoutty Run seot wah fl acess areges Now that I’ve shown you two ways to find the script step you want, I'll show you how I actually tend to select script steps. Go back to the View menu and select “all by category.” Press the Tab key until the available script steps highlights. If you are perform- ing the exact steps I’ve outlined and had just added the View As script step, pressing Tab once will take you to the Script Name field, and pressing it again will take you to the script step list. The list box should have a blue outline. Type the word “Sort” and the Sort Records script step should highlight. Wait about half a second (so that FileMaker knows you're no longer typing to highlight a script step, since some script steps have spaces in their names) and press the space bar. The Sort Records step should be added to your script, and the focus ring (that blue outline) should now be around the script definition box with the added script step highlighted. You can now specify the sort options in one of three ways: either double-click the newly added script step, click the “Specify” button, or press the space bar. We want to sort by the publisher’s name and then by the product name. Click the menu above the field list and select Publishers and then double-click “::PublisherName” (the field name begins with two colons to indicate that it’s a related field). Choose “Current Table” to return to the original field list, and double-click “Product Name.” Then click OK. ATPM 12.06 28 Productib ProductName Publisheri’ ‘Publishers: Publishe.. of ProductName al Clear Ail Move Custom order based on value list [ <unknown> Reorder Specify summary field Override feld’s language for sort [English el) DQ In your script listing, the Sort Records step now says Sort Records [Restore] (you are restoring a sort order that you just specified). So that this hap- pens automatically without any input from you when s, click the checkbox for “Perform Using whichever method works for you, add the Print Setup script to the script and specify the op- tions to print to any printer on US Letter paper in portrait mode at 100% scale (the default options, in all likelihood). Also specify that the step should be performed without a dialog. Add the Print script step and set the specified options to their default. This time, don’t suppres the dialog box so that you can change these options when the script is run. You may have noticed that there’s an operation that we listed as being manually performed which isn’t yet performed by our script. The script doesn’t yet find all records in the table. I'll show you two ways to insert a script step in the middle of a script. First, find the Show All Records script step and add it to your script. It should be added to the end of the script, just as the previous additions were. To the left of the added script step is an icon showing up and down arrows. Click this and drag the script step so that it is third in the list, just above Sort Records. FileMaking: “Real” Programming with FileMaker a ert TB Seige ame: Pint rode Desicate ) (sabe) Sindcate web compattiity Run ert wth fallaccessprveges To see the other method for inserting a script step into the middle of a script (and to see how to remove a script step), click the added Show All Records step and press the Delete key on your keyboard. Sort Records should now be highlighted. Press the up arrow key to select View As and again add the Show All Records step. It should be added below View As. If no step is selected, a new script step is added to the end of the script. If a step is selected, a new step is added after the selected step. Click OK to save the script and you should see it listed in the Define Scripts window. Click OK here also to actually save the script to your file. If you now click the Scripts menu, you'll addition to it, “Print All Products.” You can execute the script by selecting it from this menu or by pressing Command-1. When you do so, you should see the layout change to table view, and a print dialog box should appear. Click Preview to view the printout in the Preview application. e anew Preview of “SerialNumbers".pdf (1 page) Proaicio Procuctame Pibieid —_| Pibtabetione | Seatac i Gusxtare Prot Vople Comter—(ABCY29 b Feettacr Devlopar¢ Factor 5 Pishianer ro ie Faaner ‘onrass Editing the Script There is at least one problem with the script. The user may not have been viewing the layout in table view. Let’s edit the script to correct this. Return to ScriptMaker by pressing Command-Shift-S. Like most programming languages, ScriptMaker includes the ability to store temporary information in variables. Add the Set Variable script step just after the Go to Layout step in your script. For the specify options, set the name of the variable to $0riginalView (the dollar sign specifies that you're ATPM 12.06 29 referring to a variable in later calculations, rather than a field) and the value to Get ( LayoutViewState ). This will store the view state the user already has for later use. The Get( LayoutViewState ) function will return 0 if the view state is in form view, 1 if it’s in list view, and 2 if it’s in table view. Also like most programming languages, Script- Maker has flow control steps. Normally a script sim- ply executes from top to bottom, but there may be cases where you wish some steps to only execute con- ditionally or repeatedly. For this, we want to return the view state to the original state. Unfortunately, the View As script step doesn't work with the values returned by Get ( LayoutViewState ) so we need to use If and Else If steps to return the state to the original state. Select the Print step in your script (the last one) and add the If step. Notice that in addition to If, the End If step was also added. Whenever you have an If step, you must have an End If step, so both are added at once (although if you ever accidentally delete an End If step, you can add it manually). Edit the options for the If step to read $0riginalView "0", Then add a View As step with the option set to View as Form. Add an Else If step with the op- tions set to $0riginalView "41". Click the View As step above it and click Duplicate, moving the du- plicated step below the Else If step and changing the option to View as List. We don’t need to check for the original view being a table view, since if it is, we are already in that state. Click OK to save your changes. ew (ally category it Name: Piet B x Spec (View a ust ro) ‘ Gear) Oasis) Oinbie Cer) Cresta indicate web compatbty Ran srt wah fl acess prveges el) SD Executing Scripts You've already seen that you can execute a script by selecting it from the Scripts menu. Scripts only ap- pear in this menu if they have the “Include in menu” FileMaking: “Real” Programming with FileMaker checkbox checked in the Define Scripts window. The first ten scripts (as seen in Define Scripts) that have this checkbox checked will also have keyboard equiv- alents of Command-1 through Command-0. As you might imagine, in a file with dozens or even hundreds of scripts, including them all in the menu will not be very helpful. You may have noticed that the Define Scripts window has a Perform button, and scripts can also be executed by selecting them here and clicking that button, but that generally seem very useful (al- though it can be while you're creating and testing a script). The primary method for executing scripts is with buttons. Uncheck the “Include in menu” checkbox for the “Print All Products” script and click OK to save your changes (note that the script no longer appears in the Scripts menu). Enter layout mode b: Command-L. In the toolbar on the left i tool, which looks like a small button with a hand pointer over it. y pressing a button AIN O|O pial = Click this and move your pointer over the body section of your layout. The pointer is now a set of crosshairs. Click and drag to draw a button on the layout. The Button Setup window will appear. You ign any individual script step to a button, but the only one I ever use is Perform Script. Select this script step and click “Specify” to select the “Print All Products” script. Click OK for each of the two windows. You should see a blinking cursor in the button allowing you to name it. Type “Print” and press the Enter key. (Enter will end the editing of the script name, while Return will insert a carriage return into the name.) can a ATPM 12.06 Enter Browse mode by pressing Command-B and try clicking your new button. If you'd like to view the finished file, you can download* my copy of it. Conclusion Congratulations! You've learned quite a bit this month. Scripts are a source of much of the power of FileMaker, and since they are a deep topic, we'll be taking the next few columns to cover them. Try creating a few scripts of your own. For instance, see if you can edit the script to return the us the original layout after the script finishes executing. (Hint: you don’t need to store the original layout in a variable.) Then see if you can make it so that er to if there are no records in the table, rather than printing, a dialog box appears alerting the user (see the Show Custom Dialog script step). Until next month, happy FileMaking! Copyright © 2006 Charles Ross, cross@atpm.com. Charles Ross is a Certified FileMaker 7 Developer and the Chief Tech- nology Officer of Chivalry Software, LLC®, a company spe- cializing in custom database, web and automation software and publisher of Function Helper®, a FileMaker calculation debugging tool, He was a contributing writer and the techni- cal editor for The Book of FileMaker 6" and has contributed to ISO FileMaker Magazine® and Macworld’ in addition to his series on AppleScript” for ATPM. ® -atpm.com/12.06/SerialNumbersNew.fp7 .chivalrysoftware.com Shttp: //www.chivalrysoftware.com/home/functionhelpe x. php Thttp://www.nostarch.com/frameset .php?startat=filem aker Shttp: //www.filemakermagazine.com °nttp://www.macworld.com http://www. atpm.com/Back/roll. shtml 30 FileMaking: “Real” Programming with FileMaker Segments: Slices from the Macintosh Life by Sylvester Roque, sroque@atpm.com Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Media Revo- lution My Road to the Digital Lifestyle I purchased an Apple IIGS in the late 1980s. There wasn’t much of a learning curve since I had used other Apple Is in high school. The quest to integrate this remarkable device into my daily life began almost immediately. It quickly became apparent that some tasks were going to be e and other tasks would prove more difficult. I purchased the computer primarily for its graphics capabilities and word processing. Graduate school saw to it that word processing got integrated into my digital life quickly. Balancing my checkbook never made that transition. It took longer to do that on the computer than it did on paper because I still had to take time entering the information into a paper check register. It wasn’t long before I gave that task up. A few years later, I talked my future wife into trying a Mac. She wanted to do some writing that required combining text and graphics. You could do that at the time on a PC but not very intuitively or very well. She settled on a Mac LC II for bud- get reasons. In short order we were word processing, drawing, and running spreadsheets with the best of them. The LC II was an integral part of our daily digital life and remained so for several years. Fast-forward a few decades. Apple had replaced the LC II with numerous models, each faster and more powerful than its predecessor. Now people weren't just interested in word processing. The extra computing power and speed had given rise to the desire to “Rip, Mix Burn.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were witnessing the beginning of the digital media frenzy. In no time at all, MP3s weren't just for geeks, and every other computer manufacturer was following Apple’s lead encour aging customers to let the computer become the centerpiece of their digital lifestyle. Just as we have come to expect, Apple has often been leading the way in this digital transforma- tion. Customers on all computing platforms were taking the “Rip, Mix, Burn” concept to heart. In what seems like the blink of an eye, the mix tape ATPM 12.06 gave way to the mix CD, and home movies started giving way to the home DVD. Give someone a Mac, iLife, the occasional doodad or accessory, and amazing things start happening!. You can also do this on a PC, but it’s just not the same. For me personally, the digital media lifestyle was spurred on almost two years ago when I purchased a dual 2 GHz G5. Since then I have ripped mos music to MP3s, integrated the computer and and experimented with one method of video extract: Along the way, I have been paying attention to some things that work and some things that could work better. The Digital Lifestyle at Its Best Some things are being done better due to the digital media revolution. Turn on your television almost any day of the week, and you will sce excellent examples of the digital lifestyle at work. Sports programs, for example, use digitally produced statistics to illustrate points being made by the announcers. Race fans can, in most cases, not only get statistical information but also in-car audio, race team communications, and a host of other information. There’s often a fee involved for thes s, but for some fans that’s a small price to pay for the enhanced viewing experience. If you're not a big race fan, maybe you're ready to “Play Ball.” Barring blackout restrictions, you may be able to get your favorite team’s out-of-market games. All it takes is a broadband connection, the right software this one yet, but the key element here is the abil- ity to get content that might not otherwise be avail- able. No matter what you are interested in, some- one is probably out there in the digital ether pro- viding content that can enhance your listening and viewing experiences. Background information, par- ticipant interviews—you name it and it’s probably servi and a fee, of course. I haven’t tried ‘http://www. apple.com/dotmac/profiles/havens.html http://www. atpm.com/11.11/music-server.shtml Shttp: //www.atpm.com/12.03/howto.shtm1 31Segments: Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Media Revolution out there. I’m sure each of us h of the best aspects of the digital i We could probably spend several days arguing about what constitutes good digital integration. There have probably been thousands of lines of text written about achieving good usability and best practices in content creation and integration. What does good digital integration mean, and how do we know it when we see it? For me, the the hallmark of good digital inte- gration is that the primary content is enhanced and doesn’t get relegated to secondary status. Additional information is there if and when you want it but doesn’t get in the way otherwise. I think that’s true for all types of media and all operating s perfect world, the content you want goes where you want with a minimum of fuss, bother, and user inter- a favorite example ystems. In a vention. The Digital Lifestyle at Its Worst Just because some things are working well doesn’t mean there aren’t a few detours and dead ends along the way. Sometimes this digital media concept hasn't worked as well as it should. I haven’t decided what’s worse: having digital media integration almost work well or having it not work at all. s ago, I got my first clue that maybe this digital media integration was going in a direction I wasn’t going to like. Television networks started putting their logos in one corner of the screen. It seemed to me that some of them were huge. I find these things annoying but for the most part have learned to ignore them. Having company logos on the screen was bad enough—then companies stopped making the logos transparent and started adding the URLs for their Web sit These things have finally gotten out of hand. Sometimes text that is relevant to the current program is obscured by graphics promoting upcoming programs. I think I have even se letterboxed programs recently that contain adver- tisements at the bottom of the screen during the main program. I know that advertising pays the development costs of these programs, but this is ridiculous. Under the heading of “things that almost work well,” we have the TiVo. My network-enabled TiVo almost works well with my Mac. It joined our AirPort-based network almost effortlessly. Since the unit is Bonjour-aware, it appears in my Safari book- marks. That’s the good news. The bad news is that A few yea en. some ATPM 12.06 I want to hack the TiVo, this feature won’t ion of TiVoToGo is unl be very useful until the Mac ed. If I know the TiV ss and Media s Code, I can view a list of the recordings stored on the unit. I can even download these recordings to the Mac’s hard drive, but that’s about the best you can do without hacking the unit. If you are a TiVo owner, you have probably heard about the TiVo Desktop software. It allows you to play your iTunes Music Library or iPhoto picture li- brary on your TiVo. Sounds like a great idea, right? Well I can tell you from experience it works—almost. Until recently, the TiVo software couldn’t play AAC files. Now it can play AAC files as long as they are not protected files. For me, that means that almost 750 of the songs in my iTunes musi played back through my TiVo unit. Some of you may comment on this article, telling me that the TiVo-related s are partly the re- sults of digital rights management schemes and the problems they present. I'll concede in advance that you are right about that. All that does is demon- strate that things are not being handled well. The understandable effort to ensure that content isn’t distributed illegally creates a situation where legit- imate users are sometimes unable to put purchased content on the device they want to use. For me, this means that the NCAA basketball game between Northwestern State University of Louisianat and ibrary can’t be that I purchased from the iTunes Music Store can’t be played back on my TV. I have to resort. to watching the game on my computer or connecting a multimedia projector into my computer. For me, that’s not that difficult a hurdle, but it a hurdle than many users want to put up with on a regular bas I know this article doesn’t present any answers to the issues raised, but perhaps it will spur you to think a bit about some of them. As users, we are going to be paying the costs. When the content providers digital rights software manufacturers, lawyers, makers, and others sit down to settle these iss ould be right there with them participating in the decision-making proc more of users Copyright © 2006 Sylvester Roque, sroque@atpm.com. The Segments section is open to anyone. If you have something interesting to say about life with your Mac, write us. ‘nttp://www.nsula.edu/ http://www. uiowa.edu 32Segments: Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Media Revolution ATPM 12.06 33Segments: Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Media Revolution Desktop Pictures EAA AirVenture This Month’s Desktop Pictures! 3 were taken by Chris Lawson at the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) AirVenture? 2005 event held in Oshkosh, WI. He used a Canon Digital Rebel XT and Canon 100-300mm zoom lens. A couple of the nose art photos may have been taken with a Canon 18-55mm lens. Like last month?, these phot Goulian—Mike Goulian does a knife-edge fly-by in his CAP 232. Gunfighter (P-51D) Profile—perhaps the best- known of all the WWILera fighters, the North American P-51 (in this case, a D model) was very well represented at Oshkosh. Gunfighter (P-51D) Static—another shot of “Gunfighter” on display. Gunfighter (P-51D) Taxing —“Gunfighter” taxiing past show center after the Heritage Flight. Hiperbipe—a very nicely finished Hiperbipe kit plane. Junkers Ju-52—a common bomber and troop carrier of World War II, the German Ju-52° was easy prey for opposing fighters because of its slow speed. Mis-Stress Marie (T-28C)—North American’s © was introduced just after WWII and was an advanced trainer aircraft for a gen- eration of Navy and Air Force pilots. This one is a C model, now in private hands. Navy SNJ—the Navy version of what most peo- ple know as a T-6 Texan” or Harvard, the SNJ was the US military’s most common advanced trainer during the World War II era. -atpm.com/12.06/eea-airventure/ -atpm.com/12.05/desktop-pictures. shtml -atpm.com/12.06/eea-airventure/ .airventure.org/ ‘/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-28_Trojan http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-28_Trojan ATPM 12.06 34 Oracle Challenger Engine—Sean Tucker’: Oracle® Challenger competition biplane has a monster Lycoming six-cylinder engine. Note the “Flux Capacitor” just ahead of the firewall. other side of Tucke: Challenger. This aircraft was destroyed in a crash in early April, 2006. Tucker bailed out safely. P-38 Shell Hjection—the shell ejection on the left side of the nose of “Glacier Girl!!,” P-38 Lightning”? fighter. Though it looks like a close-up, this shot was actually taken from about 30 feet away at full zoom on a Canon Digital Rebel XT with a Canon 100-300mm zoom lens. P-40 Warhawk—the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk" was made famous by Clare Chennault’s “Flying Tigers!” in early World War IL It also made an appearance as the main US fighter aircraft during the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the recent Jerry Bruckheimer movie. P-47 Thunderbolt—popularly known as the “Jug,” P-47s'® were amazingly rugged and were produced in great numbers. Only a few are still flying, however. model, takes the runway at Oshkosh for a demonstration flight. POw- opening to the airshow cach afternoon included parachuters dropped from a DC-3. Pi a (DC-3)—another DC-3. Shttp: //www.poweraerobatics.com/ °nttp: //waw.oracle.com/cluboracle/teamoracle/index. html http: //avweb.com/newswire/12_14b/briefs/191930-1.h tm Unttp://www.thelostsquadron.com/ “attp: //en.wikipedia. org/wiki/P-38_Lightning ‘Shttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_P-40 “Mnvtp://en. ipedia.org/wiki/Flying Tigers http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/P-47_Thunderbolt Desktop Pictures: EAA AirVenture PT-17 Stearman Front—another major pri- mary trainer (like the PT-23 and similar planes) was the sic Boeing St Model 75, known as the PT-17 in mi usage. Along with the Piper J-3!7 Cub, epitomizes 1930s American aviation for most people. PT-17 Stearman—another shot of the above Stearman. Red Bull Edge 540—Kirby 540 doing a bit of aerobatics maneuver he was doing) at Oshkosh. Red Stearman—a Stearman in red paint with a closely cowled engine, probably an upgrade from the original's 220-hp Conti- nental W-670 radial. (Pratt and Whitney R-985 radials were a popular upgrade for the Stearman and are used on the aircraft of the Red Baron Squadron’®.) Scat VI (P-51D)—another P-51D. Senior Aero Sport PJ-260—a kit plane design loosely based on the Great Lakes acrobatic bi- s of the 1950s, this Senior Aero Sport PJ- 260 is a beautiful piece of work. Sentimental Journey (B-17) Nose—a close-up shot of the nose of a B-17. Note the four .50-caliber machine guns in the nose; there's a reason the B-17 was nicknamed the “Flying Fortre Sentimental Journey Nose Art—nose art from the B-17 “Sentimental Journey Stinson—not actually a Stinson. Britain’s Supermarine Spitfire World ‘ar II fighter, the Supermarine Spitfire?°, on static display at Oshkosh. T-28C Nose—the nose on another T-28C. T-6 Texan—a T-6 Texan, similar to the Navy SNJ mentioned earlier. http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing Stearman ‘http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_J-3 ‘Shttp: //www. chamblissaerobatics.com/ 1°nttp: //www.redbaron.com/publish/squadron.htm 20nttp: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine Spitfire ATPM 12.06 USA Flag Parachuter—another parachuter in the airshow-opening drop. Warbird—if anyone knows what th a holler. s, give me Zorro’s Mistress (T-28D)—a T-28D. Zorro’s Mistress Nose Art—nose art from the above. Previous Months’ Desktop Pictures Pictures from previous months are listed in the desktop pictures archives”. Downloading All the Pictures at Once iCab and Interarchy can download an entire set of desktop pictures