about the personal computing experience. · bye, bye boot camp beta just in time for holiday...
TRANSCRIPT
ATPM13.12 / December 2007 Volume 13, Number 12
About This Particular Macintosh: About the personal computing experience.™
ATPM 13.12 1 Cover
Cover ArtCopyright © 2007 Catherine von Dennefeld1. We need new cover art each month. Write2 to us!
The ATPM Staff
Publisher/Editor Michael Tsai3
Managing Editor Christopher Turner4
Reviews Editor Paul Fatula5
Web Editor Lee Bennett6
Copy Editors Chris Lawson7
Linus Ly8
Ellyn Ritterskamp9
Brooke SmithVacant
Webmaster Michael Tsai10
Beta Testers The Staff11
Contributing Editors Eric Blair12
Mike Chamberlain13
Chris Dudar14
Ed Eubanks, Jr.Matthew Glidden15
Ted Goranson16
Andrew Kator17
Robert Paul Leitao18
Wes Meltzer19
Sylvester Roque20
Charles Ross21
Mark Tennent22
David B. Thompson23
1http://www.eternalrings.com/2mailto:[email protected]://mjtsai.com4http://www.retrophisch.com5mailto:[email protected]://www.secondinitial.com7http://chrislawson.net8http://qaptainqwerty.blogspot.com/9http://www.ritterskoop.org
10http://mjtsai.com11mailto:[email protected]://www.raoli.com13mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.sirius-beta.com17http://andrew.katorlegaz.com18mailto:[email protected]://www.wesmeltzer.com20mailto:[email protected]://www.chivalrysoftware.com22http://www.tennent.co.uk23http://drdbthompson.net
ATPM 13.12 2 Cover
Evan Trent24
Vacant
Artwork & Design
Layout and Design Michael Tsai25
Web Design Simon Griffee26
Cartoonist Matt Johnson27
Blue Apple Icons Mark RobinsonOther Art RD NovoGraphics Director Vacant
EmeritusRD Novo, Robert Madill, Belinda Wagner, Ja-mal Ghandour, Edward Goss, Tom Iovino, DanielChvatik, Grant Osborne, Gregory Tetrault, RaenaArmitage, Johann Campbell, David Ozab.
ContributorsLee Bennett, Mike Chamberlain, Richard W. Dill-man, Ed Eubanks, Jr., Matthew Glidden, Matt John-son, Chris Lawson, Robert Paul Leitao, Linus Ly,Wes Meltzer, Mark Tennent, Angus Wong, Macin-tosh users like you.
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Thanks for reading atpm.
24http://www.symphonysound.com25http://mjtsai.com26http://hypertexthero.com27http://www.cornstalker.com28http://www.atpm.com/subscribe/29http://www.atpm.com
ATPM 13.12 3 Cover
ATPM 13.12 4 Cover
SponsorsAbout This Particular Macintosh has been free since 1995, and we intend to keep it that way. Our editorsand staff are volunteers with real jobs who believe in the Macintosh way of computing. We don’t make aprofit, nor do we plan to. Our aim is to produce a fiercely independent magazine, with multiple formatsdesigned for easy reading rather than showing ads. The views expressed in these pages have always beenour own, and to help prove it we do not accept direct sponsorships or advertising. We do, however, need topay for our Web site and other expenses, so we rely on minimal advertising, sold indirectly via Google andYahoo, as well as the support of atpm readers who shop using our links1.
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ATPM 13.12 5 Sponsors
Welcomeby Robert Paul Leitao, [email protected]
Welcome to the December issue of About This Par-ticular Macintosh! We wish you a happy holiday sea-son and memorable moments with family and friends.May the season of lights pierce the late autumn dark-ness, and may the joy of the holidays bring you peaceand gladness.
There and Back Again!November served up a thrill ride for Apple investors.The first week of November saw AAPL reach all-time highs only to plummet about forty points bythe end of the second week of the month. EndingNovember trading at $182.22, the stock price is nowclose to where it began the month. The folks at SixFlags couldn’t have developed a more extreme expe-rience for Apple thrill seekers but should consider themonth’s price chart as a model for their next roller-coaster design. Some rather white-knuckled investorswere happy to see this high-speed ride come to anend.
It’s Not Burnt. . .. It’s Crispy!This might be the best way to describe the approachof Dell’s management to explain the PC maker’s mostrecent quarterly results and market position. Dell iscontinuing to lose market share to PC rivals HP andApple and has changed its sales strategy to embracesales through high-volume discount retailers.
Growing at a turtle’s pace compared to the globalPC industry in general, Dell’s profit margin on PCsales has slimmed, and Wall Street was decidedly un-happy with the results. While there seems to be a bitof smoke surrounding Dell’s results, the company’sproducts don’t seem to be setting the world on fire.
Aren’t You Orange. . .?That’s the start of the tag line for one of the world’smost often told knock-knock jokes.
Orange is also name of Apple’s iPhone servicepartner in France. No joke intended, early reports in-dicate the French are “going bananas” for the iPhone,while Apple’s exclusive carrier arrangements are driv-ing some EU regulators nuts. Apple’s monthly rev-enue arrangements with its carriers are making theiPhone less of a profit center for its service partnersand more of a market gain opportunity, as a high per-
centage of iPhone buyers are migrating from othercarriers when they purchase and activate their newphones. Competitors don’t like the sound of oppor-tunity knocking only on Apple’s door.
Christmas Shopping in AmericaMedia reports indicate that Americans approachedthe annual Black Friday shopping event as if it werean Olympic-scale competitive sport. Rising beforedawn to compete for pole positions at entrances toearly-opening stores, Americans sprinted through thedoors to grab heavily discounted items ahead of thecompetition.
Cyber Monday has apparently became a holidaysport for office chair potatoes, as Internet shoppingactivity a week ago set new records for visits to manyretail sites. Meanwhile, anecdotal reports indicatethat Apple retail stores are experiencing record-setting foot traffic as eager consumers satisfy theircuriosity about the Apple iPhone and the recentlyrevamped iPod line of products.
Watch for record-setting iPod sales this season,with increasing demand for Apple products as wemove closer to Christmas. Absent discounts and withno worries about supplies, the Apple stores will beamong the last stops for consumers this holiday sea-son. For yet another Christmas season, the iPod willtop the lists of most desired and most received holi-day gifts.
Bye, Bye Boot Camp BetaJust in time for holiday shopping, Apple is advisingusers of Apple’s Boot Camp beta that their licenseexpires on December 31, 2007. While this previouslyannounced deadline should come as no surprise, thosewho have enjoyed its use may be surprised at howquickly time has passed since its release. A com-mercial version of Boot Camp is incorporated intoLeopard, the latest release of Mac OS X. To receiveBoot Camp updates and support, Mac users desiringto run Windows on their Macs will need to upgradeto Leopard before year-end.
Home For the HolidaysNo matter the cost of fuel or the threat of inclementweather, Americans will hit the road this season to
ATPM 13.12 6 Welcome
make it home for the holidays. Perhaps the mosttraveled time of the year, the familiar sights of home,the aroma of old-fashioned holiday meals, and thecomfort of family and long-remembered holiday tra-ditions draw people “home” from near and from far.
During your travels, bring along a copy of thelatest issue of atpm. It makes for easy reading in themoments between special moments.
Our December issue includes:
Bloggable: Would You Like a Cup of Cof-fee With That?Mac OS X 10.5 was delivered a little under-roasted—a very light New England roast, perhaps, rather thanthe French roast some developers in Californiawanted. Oh, you mean that’s “Java” with a capital“J”? And they’re annoyed because they wantedthe new version of the Java runtime to ship withLeopard? Wes Meltzer’s going to have to put a littlemore Kindling and links on the fire to keep warmwhile he rewrites this month’s Bloggable.
Mac About Town: Visions of Sugar PlumsSometimes its hard to know what to wish for forChristmas—or for Macworld Expo for that matter.Mike Chamberlain ruminates about his list as he pre-pares to settle down for a “long winter’s night.
MacMuser: And Here’s Another ThingAbout LeopardMark Tennent theorizes that FireWire support hasbeen improved in Leopard, then notes that auto-maintenance scripts are now stored as plain text filesand are easy to tweak.
MacMuser: Wonky Web Sites“How come if I go to a Web site and it doesn’t workin my browser when millions of others sites do, it’smy fault for the failure?”
Next Actions: What Leopard Means ForGetting Things DoneEd Eubanks, Jr. looks at Leopard’s updated applica-tions and what they mean for Getting Things Done.
Apple Talk: “Think Different”From Angus Wong’s point of view, Windows Vistaand Microsoft are already doing everything possibleto ensure that Apple continues to be a resoundingsuccess.
Desktop Pictures: Artmaticatpm reader Richard W. Dillman shares his Artmaticcreations for this month’s desktop pictures.
Cartoon: CortlandIs this the end for Cortland? He faces a massivelyupgraded Lisa in the Mudrix in the fight of his young,graphic-designing life.
Review: HyperImage 1.0Find yourself clicking and saving pictures from a Website over and over again? HyperImage bills itself as anindustrial-strength downloader of Web images thatsaves both time and your mouse-click finger. Thisreview covers how well the application fulfills thatpromise.
Review: Photoshop CS3 One-on-OneDeke McClelland’s name has become synonymouswith his splendid series of “One-on-One” train-ing books for graphic design. The latest offering,covering Adobe Photoshop CS3, is no exception.
Review: SignalWith Signal, you can turn your iPhone or iPod touchinto an über iTunes remote control.
Review: SmartChargeA great idea for iPods that is fatally flawed in itsexecution.
Review: TuneView USBOffering the same navigation functionality asits cousin1, the TuneView USB provides directaccess to your iTunes library instead of using aniPod.
Review: Videator 4.2.1Feature-laden nonlinear video editor could use bettertext effects.
1http://www.atpm.com/13.03/tuneview.shtml
ATPM 13.12 7 Welcome
E-MailNisus Writer Pro 1.0.11
Nice review. You mention that some of the optionsare not easily accessible in full screen view and thatthe text is too small; however, if you move the mousecursor to the top of the screen (while in full screenview) and wait for a second, the menu bar will pop upand you can make any changes you need, including ahigher text zoom percentage. The bar will fade awayas soon as you click anywhere in your document.
—Byron
• • •
Lovely review. Your conclusion is spot-on, that NisusWriter Pro is the perfect word processor for those ofus who need power in our text tools but don’t wantall the clutter and crap of Word’s feature-bloat oreven Pages’ layout tools.
One thing this review neglected was the profes-sional and classy support from the Nisus people.They are both personable and utterly helpful.
Nisus is a class act, and NWP deserves your ac-colades.
—Ryan MiglavsI appreciate your mentioning that. I haven’thad occasion to contact support for NWP, butif your experience is the norm then I do offerthem my accolades. Support is a key part of agood product, and you’re right to mention it.
—Ed Eubanks Jr.
• • •
I’m glad Nisus Writer lives on, but still need a fewthings it used to have (pre–OS X) but hasn’t addedback yet.
Can anyone tell me which apps do have commentsthat are somehow anchored to the text they refer to?
—Cynthia Cheney
Pages (part of Apple’s iWork) handles com-menting and “tracking changes” admirably. Iunderstand that the OpenOffice variants (bothOpenOffice and NeoOffice) offer tracking ofchanges as well, but I don’t have experiencewith them in that area. Apart from these,I don’t know of any non-Microsoft products
1http://www.atpm.com/13.11/nisus-writer-pro.shtml
that support this. Perhaps another reader maysuggest one, but if not I think Pages is thebest alternative for this particular feature.
—Ed Eubanks Jr.
A Leopard Can Always Change Its Spots2
I’m surprised you wrote so much about ZFS withouteven mentioning the basics about Leopard’s supportfor it.
For those who are interested, ZFS support doesship with Leopard (type “man zfs” in the terminalif you’re interested; all the command line tools arethere, including “zpool,” etc.), but you have to down-load the technology preview from Apple’s Developersite to get write access or create ZFS volumes.
The documentation is currently unclear on thetwo things I’m most interested in: whether ZFSvolumes can be used as Time Machine targets, andwhether ZFS volumes can be root (early betas didn’tsupport this, but I don’t know what the final wordis).
Make no mistake, ZFS is a big deal, if only fordata integrity. With current hard drive densities, youget about 1 bit wrong for every 40GB you read. Thatmay not sound like much, but the potential for rotis there. That’s why I’m interested in investigatingwhether or not ZFS volumes can be used as TimeMachine targets (even as sparse bundles on top ofZFS is fine with me). You don’t get any feature ben-efits, but ZFS’ volume scrubbing does increase dataintegrity in the real world, right now.
—Alan Yeung
Phone Junkie Says iPhone Clunky3
I commented here a few months ago that the monthlyexpense of being tied to an account with AT&T wascost prohibitive, and I see that point of view was notmine alone.
I opted for a new iPod touch instead, and al-though it has some limitations, it was the far bet-ter choice for my pocket. People like to own thingsoutright, not be tied to a “vig” every month.
I can buy a cheap Motorola Razr phone unlockedon eBay, buy a prepaid SIM card, and make cheap
2http://www.atpm.com/13.11/bloggable.shtml3http://www.atpm.com/13.11/macmuser-iphone.shtml
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calls all over the world without a dreaded monthlybill waiting for me in Denver.
But this is Apple, Inc., and I’m dying with cu-riosity to see what the next generation of iPhone willlook like. Apple can only go up from here.
—Grover Watson
Graph Paper Maker 1.6.14
Unless you need all of the features of Graph PaperMaker, may I suggest this site5. From the way I readwhat you needed the graph paper for, this would alsomeet your needs—and it’s $20 cheaper.
—Dennis VanWormer
Coping With Mac OS X’s Font Rendering6
The biggest problem with the Mac OS X font render-ing system is not in fact the anti-aliasing, as you maybelieve, but rather the hinting. There is a mistakenbelief that hinting is only needed for non-anti-aliasedfonts.
This is very wrong. With hinting, most fontsneed less anti-aliasing, making them crisper, andsmoother. This is why people who have minor visualproblems (such as the inability to focus on the blackpixels, because of the near presence of the non-blackpixels), have such a problem with OS X. For themajority of people it isn’t a problem. Though theywould notice the difference if shown a better im-plementation. Which is the reason Apple doesn’tcare—it is good enough for the majority of users.
As an example I have found that with the rightsettings on a modern GNOME system (such asUbuntu), the clarity is far better than either non-anti-aliased OS 9 or the merely smoothed OS X. IfApple were to simply implement a proper font hint-ing and smoothing system, most of the complaintswould go away.
—Andrew
We’d love to hear your thoughts about our publication. Wealways welcome your comments, criticisms, suggestions, andpraise. Or, if you have an opinion or announcement aboutthe Macintosh platform in general, that’s OK too. Send youre-mail to [email protected]. All mail becomes the propertyof atpm and may be edited for publication.
4http://www.atpm.com/13.11/graph-paper-maker.shtml5http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/multiwidth/6http://www.atpm.com/12.01/paradigm.shtml
ATPM 13.12 9 E-Mail
Bloggableby Wes Meltzer, [email protected]
Would You Like a Cup of Coffee With That?You can’t go to a tech-related conference withoutwandering through a thicket of Apple portables ofall different sizes and shapes: MacBooks, Power-Books, iBooks, even the old black-and-white WallStreet PowerBooks occasionally. Just about everycomputer geek I know uses a Mac, which is amazingfor those of us who remember being pariahs. Andevery time I turn around, someone new is replacinga PC with a Mac.
But some nasty invective about Java on OS Xposed the question: is the honeymoon over for Apple?
At Javalobby, Michael Urban put the kindling inthe fireplace with a post telling Apple to buzz off.The absence of version 6 of Java on Leopard is a mor-tal wound, Urban says, and Apple doesn’t care aboutdevelopers and is dragging its feet on Java becauseit’s being distracted by other things. He’s giving upMacs to prove the point:
Apple has basically spit in our face1. Notonly did Leopard not ship with Java 6,but Apple, in typical fashion, apparentlythinks it has no obligation to its cus-tomers to inform them about why theplans changed, and when (or even if atthis point?) Apple will ever have a work-ing copy of Java 6. Apparently, Applehas even been just deleting threads intheir forums where people are complain-ing that Java 6 doesn’t exist, rather thanactually respond to them and let themknow if there is any kind of time line forJava 6. But wait. . . It gets worse. . .As most know by now, Apple has yankedthe Java 6 developer previews. No sign ortrace of them left on the ADC site. Ap-ple gave no indication as to why it yankedthem, if and when there would be newones, etc. So effectively, we are currentlyleft with Leopard having NO fully work-ing version of Java available for it. Youcan’t get Java 6, and Java 5 is so brokenthat parts of it are flat out unusable on
1http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t102936.html
Leopard. As a Java developer, this is asituation I obviously cannot live with.
Urban says that he’s going to use his MacBookPro as a dual-boot machine for the time being, spend-ing most of his time in Windows. I’m not sure whyanyone would volunteer for that kind of torture, butI guess you have to prove a point somehow, especiallywhen you’re slinging harsh words about the “unprece-dented arrogance of Steve Jobs.”
James Gosling has another idea for someone likeUrban: just don’t use a Mac at all. He says thathe’s been using Solaris on his laptop2, a Sony VAIO,and he has a whole laundry list of benefits that itprovides, like network auto-configuration and someof the cool ZFS features. (Apparently he didn’t readlast month’s column3, or he would know—Q.E.D.!—that HFS+ is vastly superior.) He notes, in a follow-up post, that he knows he’s not really Apple’s targetdemographic and is OK with that4.
But before we get too far afield, some ask, isthis Java 5 so broken in Leopard? Adrian Suttondoesn’t think so5, and isn’t afraid to say it. He evencalls it “a significant improvement” over the 10.4 im-plementation. That’s pretty stiff.
Then there’s the timing issue. John Gruber andEric Burke both did a double-take at the assertionthat Apple had been dragging their feet on Java 6for Leopard. Burke looked up the history of Javaon OS X and put together a nice little graphical timeline showing the gap between the releases of Java, OSX, and OS X implementations of Java. His conclu-sion is that the 11-month gap he anticipates betweenthe release of Leopard and the release of Java 6 isin character for6 previous OS X releases. So far, it’sbeen a month and I haven’t seen Java 6 for Leopard,but I’m not in the Conspiracy Against Java Develop-ers camp either.
2http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/solaris_and_os_x3http://www.atpm.com/13.11/bloggable.shtml4http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/solaris_and_os_x_co
ntinued5http://www.symphonious.net/2007/10/31/java-5-on-le
opard/6http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2007/10/28/os-x-j
ava-definitive-timeline/
ATPM 13.12 10 Bloggable: Would You Like a Cup of Coffee?
But Gruber went straight for the jugular. He com-mented, in a link to Urban’s first post, that the onlypeople who would care about the absence of Java 6on Leopard were Java developers, and in a very nar-row sense that’s true, since I can’t think of a singlemajor OS X application written in Java. This hit anerve, so he posted a full-length follow-up:
The only way to ship software is to pri-oritize, and prioritizing means droppingthings that are less essential in exchangefor things that are more essential. Obvi-ously, for Apple, Java 6 is not a priority.And, judging by reports that even Java 5support is worse on Leopard than it wason Tiger, Java as a whole is not a priorityfor Apple.But it’s not like Apple is sitting ona top-notch Java-6-for-Mac-OS-X andwithholding it out of spite. They simplydecided to allocate engineering resourceselsewhere. In the case of Java, I don’tthink it was even a close call. Whatshould they have done? Delayed Leop-ard even further? Pulled engineeringresources from something that did shipwith Leopard for Java? Java simply isn’trelevant to the Mac7.Several irritated Java developers sug-gested that I’d feel differently if it werea developer runtime that I personallycared about—that I’d be irate if, say,Perl or Ruby or Python were droppedor degraded in Leopard. But that’s nota good comparison; Perl, Python, andRuby pretty much compile out of thebox on Mac OS X. Apple doesn’t haveto do much at all—at least relative toJava—to include them on Mac OS X.Why? Because that’s how these tools aredesigned and engineered—they’re madeto “just build” on any Unix-like OS. It’snot Apple’s responsibility that Java isn’tlike that—it’s Sun’s.
Now Gruber’s schtick is often to find the polemicwhere I didn’t think there was one, and insisting thatJava is basically irrelevant to the Mac is surely ig-noring plenty of Java-based enterprise software he’s
7http://daringfireball.net/2007/10/shipping_means_prioritizing
never had the misfortune of using. (I have, on theother hand, and I can safely say that if you thinkJava is bad on modern Mac hardware in OS X, imag-ine using it on a 600MHz Celeron in Windows XP.I was never so glad to have my work computer re-placed.)
The compromise position belongs to Ted Leung.He writes that a lot of developers started to buyMacs, and push to be able to use them at work, basedon the influence of Java developers, who had theluxury of switching before many tech people could.They’re the ones who are being hung out to dry, Le-ung notes. One of the issues is that, although it’strue that Java doesn’t compile without any problemson OS X, the hang-up is when Java has to talk tothe Mac parts (like Carbon) rather than the Unixback-end.
But the real meat of Leung’s post is at the veryend. He says Java’s second-rate status has a lotto do with its licensing. The big improvementsto Python and Ruby in Leopard, Leung writes,came from outside Apple, and that was made pos-sible by open-source licensing. (The inference isthat Apple has better things to care about.) ButJava’s not open source8, and more to the point, mostJava developers don’t seem to care. If Java were anopen-source product, he says, it might have broughtJava 6 to Leopard already.
As Leung says, we’ll have to wait and see. ButGruber’s still right on one thing: if a Java releasefalls behind in the release-timeline forest and no onebut enterprise users are around to hear it (and thoseenterprise users are still going to be using 10.4 or even10.3 for another six to nine months), does it make asound?
Throw Some of That on the FireEvery so often, a non-Apple product strikes a nervein this little corner of the blogworld. We Mac usersmay be the Shire, just a sliver of Middle-Earth—butJ.R.R. Tolkien made Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’ Shirevery important for a reason, too.
Late in November, Amazon released its Kindle.It’s an e-book reader using E Ink technology, whichI’ll explain in a moment, and which downloads booksformatted specially for it (not PDFs, pointedly) us-ing Sprint’s EV-DO data network. The screen isabout the size of a paperback novel, and the wholedevice close to an undersized hardcover book. Ama-
8http://www.sauria.com/blog/2007/10/30/leopard-java-and-open-source/
ATPM 13.12 11 Bloggable: Would You Like a Cup of Coffee?
zon claims there are about 90,000 books available forpurchase in their library, mostly back-catalogue itemsthat publishing houses aren’t marketing anymore.
The device is a little like Sony’s Reader, in thatthe two devices share similar sizes and similar screens,but the Reader uses PDFs with digital rights manage-ment. And, of course, that limits the available num-ber of books for sale to about 20,000. Life is worthliving, and the Sony interface looks a lot more user-friendly, but I should disclaim that I have not usedeither device. It’s also worth note that the Readerhas to be synchronized with a computer, like an iPod,whereas the Kindle uses a cellular data connection toreach the outside world. (The iPod touch and iPhonecan use WiFi to connect to the iTunes Store, but notcellular data.)
What first intrigued me about the Kindle wasthat it seemed like it could be what the SonyReader ought to have been. E Ink, the leading (bywhich I mean only) commercial purveyor of so-called“electronic ink” displays, is the vendor of someastonishingly cool technology (which I’ve actuallywritten about before9). The display uses completelypassive technology, using very small bubbles filledwith black and white toner chips with opposingelectrical charges. Using the same principles as anLCD, the display driver applies a charge to specificbubbles, making them either white or black, andthey stay that way until you flip them over again.The result is a high-resolution, high-contrast displaythat reads with a resolution approaching that of aconsumer-grade laser printer and requires very littleelectricity and no backlighting.
But I could write a book about what could’vebeen with the Kindle. Maybe someday, someone willmake a device this revolutionary without the Kin-dle’s limitations, or maybe the Kindle 2 will comealong someday and fix its flaws.
Many of the choices that Amazon made in thetechnology behind the product are sound. EV-DO is a good choice for data connectivity; E Inkdisplays look astonishingly like paper (well, paperbehind glass, but still); and harnessing the deviceto Amazon’s good relationships with publishers isa no-brainer. They’re the perfect vendors for thisdevice. BusinessWeek thinks the Kindle will bethe iPod of books10.
9http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/1716862.html?page=4
10http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2007/11/buy_amazon_-_ki.html
But what everyone seems to be talking about,other than its clearly revolutionary potential11 (po-tential), is its dreadful user interface. I alluded tothat earlier, and it’s painful to see a device thatsounds so crippled by a couple of flaws. The devicejust doesn’t look like a book; it looks like my dad’sTablet PC convertible laptop or an oversized Treomore than anything else. There are buttons every-where, including a keyboard, and the device is whiteand does not match the grayish tint of the E Inkscreen. (E Ink screens are about as white as papertowels, at 40%, about half the 80% of typical copierpaper, much less the extra-extra-extra-extra white ofinkjet paper.)
Now, I have not used the device, and I’d like to be-fore I say anything too dramatic. But I’m not hearinganything positive about the usability of the Kindle,suffice it to say. Thibaut Sailly, who writes Well. . ., isa product designer who is pretty hard on12 the Kin-dle’s form factor and some of the hardware decisionsthat Amazon made. He strikes, again and again, theone important question about hardware design: whatpurpose does this serve? The Kindle looks vaguelylike a book, but not very much; some elements aresymmetrical and some are not; some of the buttonsare duplicated; and there’s a curious white strip sep-arating the scroll indicator from the face of the book,reminiscent of that odd triangle of black plastic onthe rear passenger windows of the Ford 500.
Craig Hunter, too, notices one particular interfacefoible that the Kindle suffers from. He’s not sure itneeds a physical keyboard at all, since its interfacedoesn’t rely very heavily on a keyboard. If the Kindlewants to be the iPod of books, he says, it needs totake a cue from the iPhone13. He asks us to imaginea Kindle with no hardware buttons and a gesture-based interface. (I doubt that’s possible with currentE Ink technology, but perhaps someday.) What adevice that would be!
I leave it to TidBITS’ Glenn Fleishman to find theother big flaws the Kindle suffers from. He enumer-ates a few: no PDF support; limited Web browsing;and an unbelievably high price for a single-purposedevice.
Not everyone thinks the Kindle’s flaws are tech-nological. Steven Poole wants his ideal device tobe a book, for all intents and purposes14, since his
11http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/11/26/kindle/index.php?lsrc=mwrss
12http://well.thsy.org/2007/11/bookishness.html13http://hunter.pairsite.com/blogs/blog20071121.html14http://stevenpoole.net/blog/e-book-the-letter/
ATPM 13.12 12 Bloggable: Would You Like a Cup of Coffee?
list of requirements includes certain stipulations onlyprinted paper can meet. And Cracked.com’s DanielO’Brien puts the contrarian view best when he says,“You know what else feels like real paper and doesn’trequire cables or monthly bills? Fucking books.15”
If you want to know what I want to see fromthe Kindle 2, I want the hardware buttons limitedto four: next page; previous page; menu; select. Iwant more than 4 shades of gray, because I know EInk has 8 shades of grey working on the Sony Reader,and because I’m sure they’re working on even higher-performance displays. I want higher resolution. AndI want the device to look and feel like a book, whichmeans it should be about the size of a trade paper-back when closed, and have a 30mm physical bezeland a half-inch book “margins” built into the dis-play, and PDF display supporting either embeddedfonts or EPS outlines so the book designer is stillin charge. After all, he or she knows better than acomputer what makes a book easy to read, and thebest books are set in typefaces that are both legibleand match the book. And most important of all, asArs Technica’s Jon Stokes also noticed16, the deviceshould flip open, like a book, to show two side-by-sidepages at a time, and, when closed, it should have theprofile of a closed book, preferably with a little dis-play on the front, showing the title of the currentbook, like a cell phone.
(An aside: Too many reviewers are hung up onthe lack of typeface choices on the Kindle. It doesn’tmatter. If I ran a publishing house, pretty much ev-ery book would be typeset in either Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Mercury Text17, which is about as readable a9pt serif there ever were and which will stand up onvirtually any kind of printing. What matters is theplacement of text on the page, the right combinationof leading and point size, the consideration of marginsand justification and tracking to make the page meltaway and the words pop. But computer users havesubstituted typeface changes for good type manage-ment for so long that even technology reviewers areconfused.)
But if Amazon wants to send me a Kindle and seewhat I think, I’d be happy to offer my thoughts. Doyou have one? Comment, or send me an e-mail at
15http://www.cracked.com/blog/2007/11/21/so-book-like-youd-think-it-was-a-book-but-its-not/
16http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071125-books-vs-documents-whats-wrong-with-so-called-ebooks.h tml
17http://typography.com/fonts/font_overview.php?productLineID=100017
[email protected], and I’ll make note of it for mynext column.
Fire Starters• Michael S. Kaplan, who apparently works for
Microsoft, has a nice post on usability andPlug-and-Play keyboards. I’ve never triedto do this with Windows, since all of myWindows keyboards have been PS/2 mod-els, but he has some neat screen-captures ofhow Windows and OS X deal with the prob-lem of identifying unidentified keyboards18. Iwouldn’t want to try to do it the Windowsway, and that’s not just a personal preference.
• Bryan Bell, he of the gorgeous icon work19, no-ticed that Aperture has a solid menu bar20 eventhough the rest of Leopard does not. I cheatedby putting a white stripe on top of my back-ground image, but it’s a good question: I wasn’taware that there was a preference that changedlive. Hm. Apple, please share.
• On the theme of neat odds and ends in 10.5,Jens Ayton uncovers how Apple makes theiCal icon show the current date in the Dock21.Remember that22?
• TidBITS’ Matt Neuberg has a fantastic round-up of all of the new features in Leopard’sSpotlight. The long and short of it is thatit’s much more usable23 than in 10.4. Withsomething like Spotlight, “more usable” means“more useful.” I find myself using it a wholelot more than in 10.4, myself.
• John C. Welch realized, and wrote a Macworldcolumn about, the death of NetInfo in Leop-ard. Ding dong, the witch is dead, I say. Godonly knows how many times I found myself frus-trated by NetInfo, in the early days of using OSX, when simple tasks that I could perform fromthe command line didn’t work because I had to
18http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2007/11/05/5892994.aspx
19http://www.atpm.com/11.01/marsedit.shtml20http://bell.tumblr.com/post/1883400121http://jens.ayton.se/blag/the-mysteries-of-ical-re
vealed/22http://www.atpm.com/13.08/bloggable.shtml#tinker-
to-evers-to-chan23http://db.tidbits.com/article/9283
ATPM 13.12 13 Bloggable: Would You Like a Cup of Coffee?
make NetInfo changes. But it is no more24, hesays.
• ZDNet’s David Berlind thinks Apple is going tobe forced to license OS X25 by hacked copies ofthe OS floating around on the Internet, whichbypass the software locks on installing OS X onnon-Macintosh computers. I doubt they everwould, but even if they did, my anecdotal expe-rience is that most non-technically inclined Macusers use whatever version of OS X is on theircomputers pretty much until they’re forced toupgrade for one reason or another. The per-centage of computer users who might use thesecracks to use OS X on their PC is so microscopicI doubt Apple’s worried about it at all, becausethe percentage of computer users who wouldbuy OS X to run on their non-Macintosh com-puter is smaller than tech bloggers like DavidBerlind think.
Copyright © 2007 Wes Meltzer, [email protected].
24http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/11/16/netinfo/index.php?pf=1
25http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=897&tag=nl.e622
ATPM 13.12 14 Bloggable: Would You Like a Cup of Coffee?
Mac About Townby Mike Chamberlain, [email protected]
Visions of Sugar PlumsI’ve been away for a while, though not from myMac of course. Now the calendar is again creep-ing up on the holidays, and gifts and new yearsand, well. . .what the calendar is always creeping upon—tomorrow. What would the current season be,however, without a wish list for old Saint Nick. Sohere it goes. . .are you listening Uncle Steve? Weknow the Christmas at Cupertino comes in Jan-uary at the Moscone Center, so we promise to bepatient.
1. An iPhone that can go head-to-head witha Treo or a Blackberry in functionality.I know it’s the most beautiful piece oftechnology in the world. I know it’s reallya mobile computer that also happens tobe a phone. I know that third-party appsare coming with the SDK in February,but can’t we have a phone that doesthe minimum tasks that come standardin every Palm device sold in the so-phisticated way that professionals need?Can’t we have a to-do list? Following anaborted four miserable weeks trying towork with a BlackBerry, I know that theuser interface that we get from Apple isa sometimes-underappreciated blessing,but it’s not the only thing that we need.Isn’t there a way to bring some of theslick new Mail functionality and iCalinterface to the iPhone party? Please?
2. Some clarity around Apple TV. The pastsix months of my techno year have beenfocused on AV in the house. Now thatI have finally pulled the trigger on HDand swapped out most of my equipment,I am stymied trying to decide if Apple isreally serious about TV. Rumors and in-dications seem to suggest movie rentals(surely you don’t think you are going togo toe-to-toe with Netflix!?!), and thereis ongoing speculation about an HD of-fering from the iTunes store. So whatis Apple going to do? Continue to sell
SD quality, DRM’ed movies in the iTunesstore? The Ethernet ports on the backside of my TiVo and HD DVD player tellme that things are moving forward andthat if Apple is going to be involved, weought to be seeing something soon. Al-ternatively, there might be a great after-Christmas sale on Apple TVs.
3. Uncle Steve, while you’re playing Santa,can you do something for a friend of mine?He’s convinced that you have all the tech-nology in hand that you need to producea first-rate compact notebook and won-ders why you haven’t added something tothe product line that so many people areasking for.
4. And what’s Christmas, Uncle Steve, with-out some stocking stuffers? A little flashmemory to speed things up in the lap-top department? Some more work on Sa-fari which, as lovely as it is, continues tobe an issue on a number of Web sites?Some tweaks of Leopard? (I’d settle for away to absolutely disable Spaces so thatit doesn’t activate in the middle of a dun-geon fight in the Outlands!) More DRM-free music at the iTunes store?
But seriously, Uncle Steve, I know that no matterwhat I put on my list, you’ll come up with somethingI didn’t realize I needed but suddenly can’t live with-out. In fact, that’s the reason that it will be easyto get to sleep on Macworld Eve. Sweet dreams—I’llleave the cookies and milk on the mantle.
Copyright © 2007 Mike Chamberlain, [email protected].
ATPM 13.12 15 Mac About Town: Visions of Sugar Plums
MacMuserby Mark Tennent, [email protected]
And Here’s Another Thing About LeopardOur Leopard family has started to have cubs as theupdates come in thick and fast. But one changethat was unexpected and definitely for the better isFireWire handling.
As far as we are concerned this fast connectioninterface has always been better than the SCSI it re-placed, One of our office drawers is full of cables andinevitably half a dozen SCSI terminators of differenttypes, dating back to the old black ones that onlyQuadras used. The memories of SCSI are not pleas-ant: of getting the correct ID and which devices ina chain prefer to be in which order. No, SCSI wasnever a favorite here.
Stirring PolentaFireWire, on the other hand, is simple to connect up,even to a live Mac. The newer 800 version makes USB2 seem like stirring polenta, especially for sustaineddisk writing when FireWire 800 is so much faster.We have a couple of Western Digital My Book Pros1,with triple interfaces for both FireWire 400 and 800as well as USB 2, and we have tried them all. Butthe first drive we bought kept dropping its FireWireconnection and needed the rigid digit treatment andpulling its cables to get it to mount again. WesternDigital sent a replacement, but that did the same. Sothey sent another and let us keep the first as well.
While the third My Book has worked flawlessly,under Mac OS X 10.4 the second was always flakey.However, since installing Leopard, both drives haveperformed trouble-free. Whatever was wrong withFireWire in Tiger has been fixed in Leopard.
Periodic DancesThe same can also be said of the automatic mainte-nance scripts. They are still set to trigger in the earlyhours of the morning when most Macs are dead to theworld. However, they’re now scheduled by launchd2,which is smart enough to adjust the schedule if your
1http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=242
2http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071129113753285
Mac happens to be asleep or shutdown at the ap-pointed time.
There’s no easy GUI route to changing their de-fault time. Or is there? They are now stored as plaintext files:
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-X.plist
The X is either “daily,” “weekly,” or “monthly.”In the past, editing the times meant a trip to Termi-nal and Pico or using a tool such as Onyx. But nowany plain text editor will do the task.
Above is the daily script with the time it runschanged to 9:05—a lot easier to do rather than doingthe pseudo-periodic daily, weekly, monthly dance inTerminal. And if you screw things up and didn’tmake a backup before altering the script, just go toTime Machine and retrieve the old one.
You are using Time Machine, aren’t you?
Copyright © 2007 Mark Tennent, [email protected].
ATPM 13.12 16 MacMuser: Another Thing About Leopard
MacMuserby Mark Tennent, [email protected]
Wonky Web SitesHow come if I go to a Web site and it doesn’t work inmy browser when millions of others sites do, it’s myfault for the failure?
That was basically the response I got from newhome selling site House Simple1 here. On my Mac’sscreen, the site looks like the image below. I reportedit to their team and was told:
This is happening because you have in-creased the text size on your browser andthis throws the design out. There’s littlewe can do to stop this as it does the sameon all sites with HTML text on it.
House Simple
Whose Mac Is It Anyway?Now excuse me, but I thought that I was in con-trol of my computer and in any case I had only setthe display to Verdana 13pt so I can actually seethe darned 23′′ screen at arm’s length. If their Webmonkeys had used CSS they would have overriddenmy settings, and what about all the other gazillionsites I visit? Perhaps House Simple’s precious design(which, let’s face it, is nothing very wonderful) shouldbe rethought?
1http://housesimple.co.uk
But They’re Not the Only OneHouse Simple is not the only company who tell meit’s my fault their Web site doesn’t work. ScottishPower put us through all manner of hoops to run ouronline account, as shown below. All requests for achange go unheeded.
Scottish Power
Why do these sites insist on turning off the tool-bar? It’s my browser, on my computer, if I want tosee the toolbar I blinking well will. Especially as inSafari it shows the progress of the page loading.
ListenSome companies listen, eventually. HSBC changedtheir online banking Web site, and it ceased to workon Macs. On contacting their Web team, I spoke tothe actual programmer who fixed the glitch withinan hour and telephoned to get me to check that itworked.
Do-It-Yourself chain B&Q re-designed their site awhile ago, and it refused point blank to work on ourMacs. We reported this to their team who ignored uscompletely. As we dabble in a bit of property devel-opment, we have spent many thousands of pounds atB&Q’s site. Their delivery trucks have worn a pairof grooves in our drive, so when we stopped buying
ATPM 13.12 17 MacMuser: Wonky Web Sites
from them it was noticed. A nice lady rang to inquirewhy.
We explained the problem, which she promised tolook into, but nothing happened for months. Even-tually the Web designers changed and someone whoknew their job fixed the problem. But hard luck,B&Q, because we’ve found different suppliers.
Even Mac Friendly SitesI just haven’t got the heart to tackle Waitrose fortheir new “improved” site which doesn’t display cor-rectly no matter what size I set my fonts.
Waitrose
Copyright © 2007 Mark Tennent, [email protected].
ATPM 13.12 18 MacMuser: Wonky Web Sites
Next Actionsby Ed Eubanks, Jr.
What Leopard Means For Getting Things DoneApple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was one of the mostanticipated upgrades for Apple’s operating systemever. With many new features and improvements toold features (more than 3001, Apple reports), com-bined with a renewed interest out of response to Mi-crosoft’s Vista and a record 30-month interval sincethe last major upgrade, Leopard’s reception was avirtual lock. More than two million copies sold inthe first weekend confirmed it: Mac users are excitedabout Leopard.
Now that it has been out for over a month, manyof the features and improvements are becoming famil-iar. Yet, many people (especially those still decidingwhether to upgrade) may be asking, What does Leop-ard offer me for better exercising my Getting ThingsDone (GTD) fu?
I had a column halfway finished when I bought myupgrade to Leopard; it was only a day or two before Irealized the other column would have to wait. I’m go-ing to take a break from working through the GTDprinciples and take a look at Leopard’s GTD-esquefeatures. I’ll break them down by application or fea-ture and try to reflect on what may be an advantageto some users. Let me first make these disclaimers:your GTD workflow may or may not receive any ben-efit from some or all of these; also, there may be GTDaspects that I’ve failed to consider or recognize. (I’dlove to receive helpful feedback on this if you haveany.)
MailApple’s e-mail client, Mail, got a pretty substantialupgrade with Leopard, adding a number of features.GTD users will be especially interested in the ad-dition of to-dos. Mail now allows the easy creationof a to-do or task, which automatically synchronizeswith tasks in iCal. In short, you don’t have tochange applications from Mail to iCal to create,edit, or check off tasks. Any field that appears iniCal can be viewed and edited in Mail (though bydefault some are hidden); choose View . Columnsto add or remove columns that you want to view inMail. If the task-management list found in iCal is
1http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html
sufficient for your GTD needs, or if it co-operatesin some way with your GTD application (throughsynchronization, for example), then Mail will extendyour GTD workflow nicely.
Notes is another new feature in Mail, and whileit is more limited in its GTD application, I can seehow some might decide to make heavy use of it. Theconcept is pretty simple: think of Notes as a digi-tal notepad built into Mail. The difference betweenNotes and, say, Stickies is that a Mail Note can beeasily converted into an e-mail or a to-do with a sin-gle mouse click. And a Mail Note can have metadataappended to it (via Indev’s MailTags2). Of course,another major difference is that they live in Mail;you don’t have to open another application to see orwork with them.
Mail also can handle RSS feeds now and has afunction called Data Detectors built in. The RSSfeed handler is fairly bare bones, much like the one inSafari. Data Detectors recognize information withinthe body of e-mails such as addresses, phone num-bers, and date or appointment references, and it al-lows you to easily create new entries in iCal or Ad-dress Book with that data. Neither of these is, bydefault, GTD-specific, but they can save you timeand streamline your workflow.
I like Mail’s additions for better GTD implemen-tation, because it’s consistent with David Allen’s ownprinciple when it comes to collection tools: “Give meas many buckets as I need, and not one more.” Itmay well be that these tools expand the already ex-isting features of iCal to make it entirely sufficientfor your GTD needs. Or it might simply prevent youfrom needing to change applications as frequently toreference your task list, or streamline your data col-lection when using e-mail and RSS. Regardless, theseare nice additions and point Mail in a direction thatI like to see it going. Even if they aren’t enough foryou as is, it may be that the tweak or adjustmentthat you miss will be added in a future update.
2http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html
ATPM 13.12 19 Next Actions: What Leopard Means For GTD
iCalWhile iCal didn’t receive as much attention in termsof new features, it did get a number of nice additions.A few of these offer further streamlining for the GTD-minded user.
Events in iCal now have a drop box, where youcan attach files for each event as needed. URLs, doc-uments, photos, videos—attach them all and keepthem readily accessible for the event. What is more,they will be distributed to attendees automaticallyas well. This will save many of us a lot of time andheadaches keeping up with which docs are needed andwho has received them.
A long-awaited feature for iCal is group calen-daring, and iCal’s introduction of CalDAV calendarsharing opens this door wide. It’s easy to set up ac-cess to existing CalDAV server accounts, and CalDAVgroup calendars have access to a number of featuresfor scheduling events, such as the Availability windowand Auto-pick for discovering the best time for meet-ing, published office hours, and delegation of calendarcontrol to other users. Of course, you’ll need a Cal-DAV server to utilize these tools, and getting accessto one is not an easy endeavor. My guess, though, isthat over time, more and more Web-hosting serviceswill offer CalDAV as a part of their products.
Another feature that many users have longed for isthe ability to automatically add alarms to new events,and the Leopard-updated iCal offers this as well.
It’s easy to focus on tasks and to-do lists as theprimary function of GTD while forgetting that cal-endaring is a key part of the GTD equation. Theimprovements to iCal offer some strong changes toan already great calendaring application.
Finder ImprovementsOutside of Mail, iCal, and GTD-specific apps, mostof us spend a lot of time in Finder. Naturally, anyimprovements to navigating or organizing Finder arewelcomed because they save time and attention—orboth.
Quick Look and Cover Flow are two such im-provements, and they are both nice features. Theupgrades for Spotlight are also great. If you followSteve Jobs’s recommendations (back from when heintroduced Spotlight as a forthcoming feature for OSX 10.4 Tiger), you throw all of your files into one bigfolder and archive that way. Both Quick Look andCover Flow offer new ways to find the particular filesyou’re seeking, and they do it in very different ways:Cover Flow allows you to skim through many files
quickly, while Quick Look gives you a way to peekinto a specific file.
What makes these especially powerful is usingthem together. Use the improved Spotlight to finda set of documents that file a particular keywordor search term, then view them in Cover Flow tonarrow your search more quickly, finally utilizingQuick Look to verify that you’ve found the file youwant.
Two other Finder improvements make a differ-ence for productivity: Stacks and Spaces. If youlike Exposé, or if you’re frustrated by the lack ofscreen real estate that you have (and who isn’t?),then Spaces may offer you a solution to organize yourworkspace(s) more efficiently. Stacks jump out of theDock to give you fast access to the contents of certainfolders very quickly.
Many of the features and improvements in Finderare subtle, but in combination they offer a collectiveboost in efficiency.
Other Areas of GTD InterestThere are a handful of other Leopard tools and fea-tures that may contribute to your GTD productivity.If you use more than one Mac—and you’re a .Macsubscriber—then Back to My Mac will surely be awelcome feature. Automator’s new capacities makescripting (and—duh—automating) your Mac easierthan ever. Time Machine will all but remove the has-sle of backup routines for a lot of us. Even Dashcodeand Dashboard Web clips will be very useful.
The bottom line: Leopard doesn’t simply bringenhancements to the appearance of the OS, easierbackups, and Boot Camp as standard. It offerssystem-wide advances that will serve as lubricationto the fine machine that is your Mac. If you’reconsidering the upgrade, think of Leopard as a smallinvestment that will pay for itself many times overin hours saved, thanks to the many refinements itoffers to a productive worker.
The ListAh, the list. So much has happened since my lastupdated list in the June issue3. As I mentioned in mylast column4, I’ve been working on a new, easier-to-read, and more attractive version of my list. I’ve alsobeen moving and starting a new job, so unfortunatelythe list has gotten short shrift in my priorities.
3http://www.atpm.com/13.06/next-actions.shtml4http://www.atpm.com/13.08/next-actions.shtml
ATPM 13.12 20 Next Actions: What Leopard Means For GTD
As of now, the new and improved list is abouttwo-thirds complete, and I anticipate finishing it upin December. (Once it is finished, by the way, itwill also be much easier for me to keep it updated—another benefit of the new and improved version.)Assuming I stay on track for this, I’ll post it in theJanuary issue, even though I won’t publish my nextfull Next Actions column until February. Thanks foryour patience.
Meanwhile, if you know of any GTD-oriented ap-plications that aren’t on the June list (and weren’tmentioned in the comments5 then), please let meknow!
Copyright © 2007 Ed Eubanks, Jr.
5http://www.atpm.com/13.06/next-actions.shtml#comments
ATPM 13.12 21 Next Actions: What Leopard Means For GTD
Apple Talkby Angus Wong, [email protected]
“Think Different”Just to start things off this month, I feel obliged toremind everyone that, yes, the Zune is still being soldin stores. Anyway, it’s only been a year or so, and wecan’t expect it to die off so quickly. After all, Win-dows CE is still around, having transmogrified1 intovarious mutations including the most recent WindowsMobile (append year of beta testing) manifestation.The Zune is assuredly being kicked in the ass by theiPod but, as with other blattodea2, is probably stillgoing to be around for a while longer.
Now, I know, I know, it is entirely unfair to com-pare the Zune with the iPod. After all, Microsoft isnot targeting the same demographics with the Zune.While the iPod was designed for, well, everyone, it ap-pears the Zune was made for Microsoft staffers. OK,so not all of them use the Zune, but internal market-share numbers at Microsoft are very impressive. I canalmost guarantee that the iPod holds only a niche po-sition within that sliver of a slice of a segment of theworld market, and that’s even including the iPods inthe disposal bins around campus. So stop comparingapples and orangutans. These are totally separatemarket segments.
Now, another comparison people like to make isbetween Vista and Leopard. Doh! Hello, people?When will you learn? Comparing what is essentiallyWindows NT 2006 with what is essentially Mac OSX 10.5 is just ridiculous. As I mentioned before,the whole point of Leopard is to make computingfaster, easier, more productive, and safer for human-ity. Vista, on the other hand, is Microsoft helpingto pass on that message to the market. It’s all donevery subtly. There won’t be a “Go buy a Mac” stickeron the Vista box, but it’s pretty much saying thatwithout being overtly direct. With its big footprinton the computing industry, Microsoft simply cannotbe seen in “collusion” with Apple to expand OS Xmarket share. Forget antitrust regulations—the Mi-crosoft shareholders would riot. No, no, no. Thecompany is already doing everything possible to en-sure that Apple continues to be a resounding success:
1http://www.shaunofthedeadmovie.com2http://www.museums.org.za/bio/insects/cockroaches/
• Making sure anyone who wants to run Vista hasto consider buying a whole new computer.
• Making sure anyone who is willing to buy awhole new computer for Vista has to think longand hard about which “edition” of Vista hewants to install.
• Making sure anyone who has actually bought anew computer, actually installed Vista, and isactually running it, wonder what the differenceis between it and XP.
• And, of course, making very sure that anyonewho is actually using Vista on a brand spankingnew computer can fully enjoy his favorite kindsof malware3, which is the uncontested corner-stone of the Windows experience.
And it’s not just Microsoft that’s doing this. ThePC vendors are also in on the game, everyone workingextremely hard to increase Macintosh market sharequarter after quarter. I have my hunches (e.g., allthese CEOs have huge AAPL positions or something)but, really, I don’t know why they are doing it. It justboggles my mind. But whatever the reason is, “goodon ’em!”
Let me give you an example of what I’m talkingabout.
A few months ago, at the day job, I got assigneda ThinkPad X60 (now produced by Lenovo). I no-ticed an annoying Message Center alert among vari-ous other annoying Task Tray icons. After trying toignore the little bugger for about three restarts (i.e.,on the first day I used this brand new PC), I finallyclicked on it.
Because I really have a lot of spare time and zeronew messages in my proper e-mail inbox, I was happyto see two mysterious messages I had to read. (Not!)
One of them cheerily suggested that I “Learn howto achieve all-day computing.”
“Do more, save more, and spend more time un-plugged with ThinkPad batteries,” it said.
3http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/17/vista_hit_by_stoned_angelina/
ATPM 13.12 22 Apple Talk: “Think Different”
I wanted to just delete it without reading, but be-ing guilty of RTFM4 non-compliance in recent years,I decided to check out whatever hot tips Lenovo (orwhoever had canned these messages) offered, espe-cially since I wasn’t completely familiar with this par-ticular PC’s shade of monochrome (to be fair, therewas a fingerprint authentication doodad that I wasitching to configure).
So I clicked on the friendly “Learn more. . .” hy-perlink.
Bam! My Web browser launched (thankfully,Firefox was already installed) and loaded up. . .anE-commerce page on Lenovo’s server where I couldpurchase a “ThinkPad 56W Ultraportable ACAdapter” (part number 02K6880) or a “ThinkPad72W Slim AC/DC Combo Adapter” (part number73P4485).
Scrolling down the page, I noticed there were al-most a dozen other screens that I could click on, os-tensibly for more great power products I could buyto “Learn how to achieve all-day computing.”
I finally understood: Lenovo’s idea of “all-daycomputing” was to spend all day mucking aroundwith this crap, and then spend “all night computing”just to catch up on real work. If that’s not puttingyour PC and Windows to work, I don’t know whatis. More bang for the buck, right? Why turn off yourcomputer and spend time with your family and enjoylife, when you can burn the midnight oil with Vista?Isn’t there some kind of metric that says the moreyou use something the less it actually costs for you?I guess that’s what the PC guys mean when they talkabout Total Cost of Ownership. With the Mac, youjust do whatever you have to do and turn it off. Noopportunity to muck around and waste cycles. Evil!
The most intriguing thing about the “total PCuser experience” fiasco is wondering exactly whomasterminded it. I am sure the PC vendors (a.k.a.Original Equipment Manufacturers in industry-speak) learn somewhat from Microsoft’s example,but inquiring minds want to know if there’s a secret“black ops” team in Redmond that designs thesehorrendous hurdles for Windows users to jump.Or maybe there’s no team at all, and the OEMsjust naturally and instinctively mimic the “industryleader.”
Contrast all this with the Apple experience andyou can see why I say the entire industry is incollusion to ensure that only Apple will prevail.The high-level strategy is working, too. Reports
4http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM
are in that Mac OS X has taken over half of theJapanese OS market5. But it’s not a completelyfair pilot test because Microsoft skewed results byincreasing already-outrageous Vista prices. Unless itintends to do this in other markets to ensure Apple’ssuccess, the Redmond AppleCare master plan mightbe a bit slower to execute in, say, North America andEurope.
But mark my words. The entire PC industry,spearheaded by Microsoft, is very seriously “thinkingdifferent.” So different that I have no idea what it isdoing. I just know that people are buying a wholelotta Macs and telling their friends to do the same.
So the next time you add an Apple product toyour shopping cart, don’t forget to thank the Win-dows guys for pointing the way.
[At the time of writing this article, the new Zunes6
had apparently just shipped7.]
Copyright © 2007 Angus Wong. Angus is a long-timeApple user and technology business professional. HisMacintosh e-mail client can most likely be reached [email protected]
5http://www.electronista.com/articles/07/11/13/mac.up.win.down.in.japan/
6http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/651607,CST-FIN-Andy15.article
7http://www.electronista.com/articles/07/11/13/new.zune.ships/
ATPM 13.12 23 Apple Talk: “Think Different”
Desktop Picturesby Richard W. Dillman
We need new desktop pictures each month. Write1
to us!
This Month’s Desktop Pictures2
This month’s pictures were created by atpm readerRichard W. Dillman3 using Artmatic4 and Photo-shop.
View Picturesa
ahttp://www.atpm.com/13.12/artmatic/
Previous Months’ Desktop PicturesPictures from previous months are listed in the desk-top pictures archives5.
Downloading All the Pictures at OnceSome browsers can download an entire set of desktoppictures at once.iCab Use the Download command to download “Get
all files in same path.”
OmniWeb Choose “Save Linked . Images. . .” fromthe File menu.
Safari Use this Automator workflow6.
Contributing Your Own Desktop PicturesIf you have a picture, whether a small series or justone fabulous or funny shot, feel free to send it [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing it innext month’s issue. Have a regular print but no scan-ner? Don’t worry. E-mail us, and we tell you whereto send it so we can scan it for you. Note that wecannot return the original print, so send us a copy.
1mailto:[email protected]://www.atpm.com/13.12/artmatic/3http://www.ticopa.com/cyberynth/downloads/index.ht
ml4http://www.artmatic.com5http://www.atpm.com/Back/desktop-pictures.shtml6http://automator.us/examples-02.html
Placing Desktop PicturesMac OS X 10.3.x through 10.5.xChoose “System Preferences. . .” from the Applemenu, click the “Desktop & Screen Saver” button,then choose the Desktop tab. In the left-side menu,select the desktop pictures folder you want to use.
You can also use the pictures with Mac OS X’sbuilt-in screen saver. Select the Screen Saver tabwhich is also in the “Desktop & Screen Saver” Sys-tem Preferences pane. If you put the atpm picturesin your Pictures folder, click on the Pictures Folderin the list of screen savers. Otherwise, click ChooseFolder to tell the screen saver which pictures to use.
Mac OS X 10.1.x and 10.2.xChoose “System Preferences. . .” from the Applemenu and click the Desktop button. With the pop-up menu, select the desktop pictures folder you wantto use.
You can also use the pictures with Mac OS X’sbuilt-in screen saver. Choose “System Preferences. . .”from the Apple menu. Click the Screen Saver (10.1.x)or Screen Effects (10.2.x) button. Then click on Cus-tom Slide Show in the list of screen savers. If youput the atpm pictures in your Pictures folder, you’reall set. Otherwise, click Configure to tell the screensaver which pictures to use.
Mac OS X 10.0.xSwitch to the Finder. Choose “Preferences. . .” fromthe “Finder” menu. Click on the “Select Picture. . .”button on the right. In the Open Panel, select thedesktop picture you want to use. The panel defaultsto your ~/Library/Desktop Pictures folder. Closethe “Finder Preferences” window when you are done.
ATPM 13.12 24 Desktop Pictures: Artmatic
ATPM 13.12 26 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 27 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 28 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 29 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 30 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 31 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 32 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 33 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 34 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 35 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 36 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 13.12 37 Cartoon: Cortland
Software Reviewby Matthew Glidden, [email protected]
HyperImage 1.0Developer: KavaSoft1
Price: $30Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.
Universal2.Trial: Feature-limited (adds a watermark
to downloaded images)
HyperImage downloads pictures posted and linkedthroughout a Web site’s structure and presents themfor slideshow or directory viewing. As a reviewerof music and software, this helps me find specificscreenshots, concert pictures, and so on. Rather thanpick through Google’s image search one-by-one, I canbuild an expansive review of pictures available awayfrom the Web. An application that can take a seriesof site URLs, download them over lunch, and presentthe contents at my leisure definitely wins over thetime and mental effort of clicky-clicky-click.
InstallationIt doesn’t take much to get HyperImage going.Download the DMG, mount it, and drag it into yourApplications folder.
Feature ExplorationEnter a Web site’s URL in the address bar and chooseDownload to start the cascade of data to your Mac.The pictures (and directory structure) from a site ap-pear below the address bar as they arrive.
1http://www.kavasoft.com/HyperImage/index.php2http://www.apple.com/universal/
The download and browsing layout.
If you’re looking at sites with a wide-ranging goal,like my interest in a good concert picture, the defaultoptions capture just about everything for picking andchoosing. If too much dross gets through, the pref-erences pane helps you cut down the total numberreturned.
Limiting images by domain, type, and size.
I found this most useful to eliminate thumbnailsand other small pictures, since they don’t look goodposted with an article. Other users, especially thoseon dial-up, might prefer only pictures below a certainsize to reduce download time.
Slideshows work much like iPhoto or other imagepresentation software. You can look at a big platter
ATPM 13.12 39 Review: HyperImage 1.0
of images within a window or toggle the full-screenviewer to absorb the whole screen.
The full-screen viewer works both during and after imagedownloads.
Some sites number their images sequentially, like001.jpg, 002.jpg, and so on. Target one of these spe-cific groups by enclosing the desired image range inbrackets as part of your URL.
While HyperImage does include features like asite “mirror” that downloads everything or checksthe pages for broken links, it rightly focuses on im-age capture and presentation. (The link-checker, forexample, probably matters most to image-site Webmasters, and they should already have one of those.)
Most Useful FeatureHyperImage targets image collection so directly, it’shard to pick out a single “best” element. I guess thefact that everything runs in the background and youcan queue up several sites for sequential downloadserves as my favorite feature.
Bugs and NitpicksAfter using HyperImage on-and-off for a few weeks,my usage patterns changed. Instead of entering oneURL and watching the images arrive, I let everythingfinish prior to review. If I changed my mind partwaythrough, it took quite a while for the “stop down-loading” command to take effect. To avoid that irri-tation, I’d just wait for the download to finish, browsea few results, set new “filters” for the site that elim-inated a category of useless images, and run every-thing again. The application would be more efficient(and feel more like a Web browser) with a very re-sponsive “stop” button.
I only ran into one stability problem using Hyper-Image. While working on a music review, I checkedout the ThomasDolby.com site for suitable artistpictures. Unfortunately, something about the sitecaused the application to crash and close. I re-openedit and tried again with the same result. I rebootedmy Mac and tried again with the same result. Thisproved the only crash-causing site I found during mymonth-long review usage. (Of course, actually tryingto break the program might have found more issues.)
Is It Worth the Money?I definitely see the value in HyperImage, given theamount of time you can spend clicking around (andaround) on image sites. Almost every URL I “vis-ited” provided a nice list of pictures that tell thesite’s story without all that bothersome text. Forversion 1.0 software, it follows through well on deliv-ering a complete site’s images. If a software updatecorrected my issues with the interaction delay andcrash-causing sites, the whole package would be evenmore useful.
SummaryPeople who like to work with big caches of imagesshould get a lot of utility out of HyperImage. Atfirst glance, it looked like a cousin to Google’s imagesearch, but with more comprehensive results. Aftersome use, it seems the two really go hand-in-hand.Search first for image sites that match a desired term(say, “lolcats”) and then let HyperImage plumb thedepths of the URLs you find.
Copyright © 2007 Matthew Glidden, [email protected] in atpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested,write to us at [email protected].
ATPM 13.12 40 Review: HyperImage 1.0
Book Reviewby Lee Bennett, [email protected]
Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-OneAuthor: Deke McClellandPublisher: O’Reilly1
Price: $50Trial: Web site includes a link to sample
chapter, but there is no content onthe sample page as of this writing.
Graphic design trainer extraordinaire Deke McClel-land is back with a new, 544-page edition of his One-on-One series. This edition takes you through AdobePhotoshop CS3 and is filled with material suitable foramateurs and professionals, alike.
If you read my book review last year for McClel-land’s Adobe InDesign CS2 One-on-One2, I’m afraidyou’re going to start having a sense of déjà vu. Mc-Clelland has nailed a wonderful format for trainingwith this series and continues that format in AdobePhotoshop CS3 One-on-One.
1http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529758/2http://www.atpm.com/12.08/indesign.shtml
Many of you know that I have been providing amonthly series for atpm titled Photoshop For the Curious3.While I cannot claim to offer the same marvelousformat found in the One-on-One series, I was pleasedto realize that some of my basic descriptions ofPhotoshop functions echo McClelland’s own expla-nations.
Like the InDesign CS2 book, Adobe PhotoshopCS3 One-on-One is formatted into 12 chapters, eachrepresenting a detailed lesson on Photoshop CS3.The lessons include such topics as adjusting withLevels and Curves, color correction, image size andresolution, masks, and print output. Each begins byoutlining what you are going to learn and concludeswith a quiz to help you retain what you learned. Youcan follow at your own pace and perform the samesteps described in the book on your own computer.The book encourages a hands-on approach with eachlesson.
There are hundreds of full-color illustrations andscreen shots to guide you. Plus, it wouldn’t be a One-on-One book without the frequent “Pearl of Wisdom”and “Extra Credit” sections.
As before, a DVD-ROM is included with thebook. This time around, the videos are produced bylynda.com4. Book buyers are offered seven days offree trial to all the training videos available on thelynda.com Web site.
The DVD videos play on your computer—not ahome DVD player. This format allows for large-sizevideos in which you can see every screen detail duringMcClelland’s explanations. They are presented vialinks in a simple Web document. For the true geek,you can even find the basic QuickTime movie files ina folder on the DVD.
While the book lessons are hands-on, McClellandspecifically informs the viewer that the videos are in-tended to be hands-off. The viewer is encouraged tosit back, watch the video, soak in the information,then return to the lesson to try things for yourself.
Like McClelland’s other books on the AdobeCreative Suite applications, you’ll find advice to
3http://www.atpm.com/Back/photoshop.shtml4http://www.lynda.com/
ATPM 13.12 41 Review: Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One
use the keyboard shortcut adjustments and colorworkflow profiles that are included on the DVD-ROM. While the keyboard shortcuts no doubt makecertain Photoshop tasks a bit simpler, I would stillprefer lessons that offered training instruction usingAdobe’s default commands for Photoshop. As forthe color workflow, the provided profiles will likelyimprove things for amateurs, but professionals whoalready have a color workflow will probably want toskip this step.
Something that struck me as a bit odd is the waynearly all of the first lesson doesn’t even talk aboutPhotoshop. Rather, it covers Adobe Bridge and thetopic of organization. This is not a bad thing sinceBridge is definitely something you’ll want to use alongwith Photoshop if you’re working with lots of images.I’m only saying that it seemed strange to start out aPhotoshop book with a lesson on Adobe Bridge.
A paraphrase of my closing from the Adobe InDe-sign CS2 One-on-One review is appropriate for thisAdobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One review: O’Reilly’sreputation for quality books is well-known, and thislatest of more than 20 Photoshop books authored byMcClelland is a welcome addition.
Copyright © 2007 Lee Bennett, [email protected]. Re-viewing in atpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested,write to us at [email protected].
ATPM 13.12 42 Review: Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One
Software Reviewby Lee Bennett, [email protected]
SignalDeveloper: Alloysoft1
Price: $30Requirements: iPhone or iPod touch. (A
version compatible with Pocket PCdevices is also available.)
Trial: Feature limited (one-third of yourlibrary is inaccessible).
As if I didn’t think my iPhone was already coolenough, I now have a new party trick. Let me set upthe scenario: you walk into my home to join a fewfriends for an evening of food, fun, and listening tosome great music. Everyone is seated and someoneblurts out, “Hey, have you heard the new songs fromMatchbox Twenty?”
At this point, you might imagine that I’d get up,pick up the new CD, stop the currently playing music,change CDs, and start playing the new album. Aneven better case would be that I’d add the CD to amulti-disc changer and then switch to it.
Better still is the fact that, instead of CDs, I’mplaying music wirelessly from iTunes through an Ap-ple AirPort Express connected to my entertainmentsystem. So, I might only need to walk to my com-puter, locate the desired album, and double-click atrack to start it playing out in the living room.
Here’s where Alloysoft’s Signal enters the picture.Rather than getting up to my computer, I insteadwhip out my iPhone and, with a couple of taps, startplaying Matchbox Twenty’s new album, Exile OnMainstream.
In the words of Steve Jobs, just like the iPhoneitself, “it works like magic.”
Admittedly, there are some rough edges. Signal ispretty new and, at version 1.0.3, Alloysoft has onlyjust recently fixed a bug that prevented access to anyitem in an iTunes library that contained quotes or ex-tended characters such as accents. There are also lit-tle “grr” moments with the user interface, but they’reall very minor and, because Signal is just a Web appli-cation from the iPhone’s point of view, I’m confidentthe interface will only get better and better.
Signal requires absolutely no configuration to op-erate. There isn’t even a preferences window. Simply
1http://www.alloysoft.com
launch Signal on your computer, and it basically op-erates as a standalone Web server. When Signal isrunning, a window appears with your computer’s lo-cal IP address plus a port number. It’s presentedas a URL and it’s the address to which you connectwith MobileSafari on your iPhone or iPod touch. Ifyour local IP stays consistent, it’s perfectly fine tobookmark this address.
On the iPhone or iPod touch, when you first con-nect to the address specified by Signal, you’ll see thedefault screen that shows while a song is playing. Ifno song is already playing in iTunes, it’ll just be amostly dark screen. Nothing’s wrong here—just tapthe browser button (with the white musical note) inthe upper left corner.
ATPM 13.12 43 Review: Signal
If iTunes is already playing a song when you activate theSignal Web interface, Signal will dutifully display the track’s
playback information.
When you enter the browser for the first time,you’ll be presented with links to access Music, Videos(including video podcasts), or TV programs. Thelatter of those two unfortunately do not have anyfurther categorization and simply provide a full listof all videos or all TV programs. This is especiallyunfortunate if you have saved a lot of episodes fromseveral podcasts or several television shows. Alloysoftshould add one or more layers of categorization tothe Videos and TV menus. I would like to be able toselect Podcasts inside of the Videos menu, and thenhave a listing of all podcast subscriptions, and thenaccess only the episodes of that podcast.
Fortunately, however, the familiar breakdown ofGenres, Artists, Albums, audio Podcasts, Playlists,and individual Tracks are offered in the Music portionof the Signal Web interface. To play an album, I cansimply tap Music from the top level of the browser,then Albums, then scroll through to find the album.
Navigating Signal’s Music menu. From here, I can navigateto my music much the same way as an iPod.
A much-appreciated extra touch is the searchfunction. The Signal Web interface only displays afew dozen items per page plus Next and Previouslinks to move back and forth. It would take a verylong time to scan through a full library containingthousands of songs. Instead, if I know the name ofwhat I want to play, I’ll just tap the Search button
ATPM 13.12 44 Review: Signal
and start typing the first word of what I’m lookingfor. When the results appear, I can either tap theitem to see what’s inside, or tap the + button nextto the item to add it to the active playlist.
Also nifty is that, while music is playing, I cankeep browsing and add even more songs to the activeplaylist, queueing them up just like a jukebox. WhenI’m all done, I just tap the title bar (between theBack and Search buttons) to return to the defaultplayback screen.
From the playback screen, you’ll see the currentlyplaying track’s cover art, the name of the song, artist,and album, buttons to pause or move to the next orprevious track, the aforementioned browser buttonin the upper left corner, and the playlist navigator inthe upper right corner. The playlist navigator showsevery track you’ve queued in the active playlist andlets you immediately skip to any track in that playlistby tapping the track.
Note that the active playlist is sometimes a rep-resentation of a literal playlist in iTunes. You’ll see itnamed as Signal Queue, and it is used whenever youadd tracks to the queue. Conversely, this playlist isnot used if you select an existing playlist in iTunes.
To reveal adjustment controls for changing thevolume, assigning a rating, and toggling repeat andshuffle options, just tap the album art from the basicplayback screen.
The Signal playback controls shouldn’t be unfamiliar toanyone who’s used iTunes or an iPod.
It would be nice if there were a way to access aplayer widget to scan forward and backward withinthe currently playing track. This may be a great dealof wishful thinking, however. Dynamically updatingsuch a slider via the Web interface is, I’d suspect, nota simple feat.
A behavior of the browser interface that could beimproved is when, for example, you tap an albumname and decide you want to play everything in thatalbum. To do so, you either have to tap the + buttonnext to every song to add them to the queue, or backup one level and tap the album’s + button. Thelatter isn’t really that bad, but including an “AddAll” and a “Play All” link would seem more intuitive.
ATPM 13.12 45 Review: Signal
The former would add all the tracks while keepingeverything already in the queue. The latter wouldwipe out the active queue in favor of immediatelyplaying the selected album.
I encountered a few situations where the basicplayback screen didn’t refresh itself when I changedout the active playlist queue to a new album. It’s eas-ily remedied by tapping MobileSafari’s refresh but-ton, but it’s still a condition that should be checkedout and corrected.
Elsewhere in this issue, you’ll find my review ofKeyspan’s TuneView USB2, which is a product youmay want to consider if you do not have an iPhone oriPod touch. However, at only $30 (on sale for $25 atthis writing), you’ll definitely want to choose Signalif you do have an iPhone or iPod touch.
Copyright © 2007 Lee Bennett, [email protected]. Re-viewing in atpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested,write to us at [email protected].
2http://www.atpm.com/13.12/tuneview.shtml
ATPM 13.12 46 Review: Signal
Accessory Reviewby Chris Lawson
SmartChargeDeveloper: SendStation1
Price: $25Requirements: iPod with Dock Connec-
tor (except 3G) or iPod shuffle (1Gonly)
Trial: None
Back in December 2006, Playlist magazine ran a story2
stating that some 60 percent of 2007 model-year ve-hicles sold in the US featured at least an auxiliaryinput allowing iPods to be played through the carstereo. With that in mind, all those iPod listenersspending hours a day in their cars would need someway to keep the iPod juiced and ready to go.
Just your typical generic shot of the SmartCharge.
Enter the various car chargers, of which per-haps the most elegant-looking is SendStation’sSmartCharge. The $25 power adapter includes a12-volt plug and a special USB cable that taps intoa Dock Connector-equipped iPod’s line-level outputfor a clean music signal. Second-generation iPodshuffle and third-generation iPod users need notapply, however; SendStation specifically excludesthese models from the compatibility list.
1http://www.sendstation.com/us/products/smartcharge/
2http://playlistmag.com/news/2006/12/19/autoipod/
The SmartCharge is adjustable for tilt, enabling it to fit intotighter spaces that other power adapters miss out on.
The SmartCharge does a fine job of charging theiPod and a fine job of feeding the stereo a clean sig-nal from the iPod’s output, but could not do bothat the same time in any vehicle-cable combinationtested. Playing music while charging the iPod resultsin a variable high-pitched whine and static throughthe stereo, which makes listening to the music nearlyimpossible. To this writer’s ear, it sounds like there’sa bad ground somewhere, which is why multiple ve-hicles and cables were tested (all with identical re-sults). SendStation’s technical support team concurswith this assessment:
What you describe clearly seems to be agrounding issue, which is beyond our con-trol. Unfortunately some cars have that,others don’t.
I’d be willing to accept this explanation had Itested exclusively in older cars or cars with aftermar-ket stereo systems that weren’t installed by a profes-sional, but one of the test vehicles was my brand-new2007 Mazda 3 with its factory stereo, a combinationthat seems like it ought to be free of any odd “ground-ing issues.”
ATPM 13.12 47 Review: SmartCharge
The Mazda 3 has an ideally designed center console thatallows for a clean hookup with the SmartCharge Dockconnector in a compartment sized just right for iPods.
It’s a shame, really, because there isn’t a wholelot to the device, and it’s about as nice-looking assomething that shoves into a cigarette lighter plugcan be. Without any way to know ahead of time ifyour vehicle is one of the ones that has a “groundingissue”—and without any way to know whether or notthe “grounding issue” can be fixed by a mechanic—it’s pretty difficult to give the SmartCharge a positiverecommendation.
That center console also includes a 12V power plug and theauxiliary input jack, shown to the right of the SmartCharge.
Copyright © 2007 Chris Lawson. Reviewing in atpmis open to anyone. If you’re interested, write to us [email protected].
ATPM 13.12 48 Review: SmartCharge
Accessory Reviewby Lee Bennett, [email protected]
TuneView USBDeveloper: Keyspan1
Price: $150Requirements: USB port, Mac OS X
10.3.9, iTunes 7.1.1. Universal2.Trial: NoneIn March, I reviewed Keyspan’s TuneView3—an iPod Dock and RF remote control combo thatallows your iPod to connect to a stereo system via itsline level output and navigation with a remote thatsports its own LCD display for browsing the iPod’smenu. I mentioned in that review that Keyspanwould soon release the TuneView USB to be useddirectly with iTunes instead of an iPod.
Though the product names have been floppeda little bit (the original TuneView is now calledTuneView for iPod, and the TuneView USB is nowsimply called TuneView), the USB version is nowavailable.
The TuneView (originally named the TuneView USB) remotecontrol is the same as the one used for the TuneView foriPod. The receiver is a device a bit larger than most USBthumb drives and attaches to a computer with a standard
USB type A to type B cable.1http://www.keyspan.com/products/tvu200c/homepage.s
pml2http://www.apple.com/universal/3http://www.atpm.com/13.03/tuneview.shtml
This review is really more of an update toMarch’s review4 because the TuneView USB is func-tionally identical to the iPod version. Thus, allowme to point you to that review for a refresher.
Having now tried both the versions of theTuneView, I must stress that there are some dis-tinct factors to consider when choosing which is bestfor your needs. Obviously, if you do not have a4G or 5G iPod, a 1G or 2G iPod nano, or an iPodmini, there’s no point in choosing the iPod version.Because I do not have access to a 6G iPod classic,iPod touch, or 3G iPod nano, I can’t confirm whetherline level audio output will work from these devices,but most people are aware by now that video outputfrom these models only works with Apple’s A/Vcables that contain the decoder chip. It could bethat Apple’s cables can be used with the TuneViewDock just the same as an Apple Dock. I just have noway to test this.
If, however, you are using a compatible iPod, theTuneView for iPod might be the better way to eas-ily get video to your television. With the TuneViewUSB, either your computer has to be in the vicinityof your home entertainment system, or you’ll need alength of quality cable to send both audio and videoto the system.
In my situation, the only videos I manage withiTunes are podcasts that I generally watch right onmy computer. So my needs were limited to sendingmusic tracks to my living room. Rather than runninglong cables from the den, I instead use my AppleAirPort Express to stream music wirelessly. Once it’sset up, the small remote is all I need to browse andplay any track from my library of more than 7,700tracks.
In order to communicate with your iTunes library,the TuneView USB remote control must be pairedwith your computer. This is accomplished with a re-ceiver that attaches to your computer’s USB port,and a fairly light footprint background application tomanage the connection. Once you pair the remotecontrol to the computer and let the software per-form a snapshot of your iTunes library, it’s rare that
4http://www.atpm.com/13.03/tuneview.shtml
ATPM 13.12 49 Review: TuneView USB
you’ll have to open the utility panel again. In the rarecase the remote isn’t seeing your most recently addedtracks, you need only update the snapshot, and youcan do so from the remote’s Wizard screen.
On the topic of snapshotting your library, therewas a time during the beta testing period that insaneamounts of time were required to process a library asbig as mine, but Keyspan worked on this problem.By the time the TuneView USB was released, it wascapable of running the snapshot of my entire libraryin about 45 seconds.
I have a few minor points of contention about theTuneView USB. While it’s $30 cheaper than its iPod-loving cousin, it really isn’t an inexpensive solutionfor remote control of your music. However, I continueto acknowledge, as I did with the TuneView for iPod,that the cost to integrate the two-way RF communi-cation and the LCD screen for the interface probablycomes at a premium. With that in mind, I don’tthink either TuneView model is unfairly priced, andI’ve not seen a comparable hardware product avail-able any cheaper.
Another issue would be easily remedied witha firmware update to the remote control—theTuneView USB lacks the feature to jump to thebeginning of a specific letter in a library list. Itdoes allow jumping to the beginning, middle, or endof a list, but that’s not enough for large libraries.The TuneView for iPod firmware already has thealphabet jump capability, so I see no excuse why theUSB version does not.
From a pure aesthetic point of view, I wish theUSB receiver were a self-contained dongle. Currently,it ships as a module as wide as my four fingers, andit must be attached with a standard USB cable (oneis included with the TuneView). I suppose, in somesituations, the cable attachment might be the betterchoice, but I’d rather be able to plug the whole re-ceiver as a dongle directly into a USB port withouta cable. A USB extension could instead be bundledfor cases where positioning the receiver elsewhere isdesired.
When you set up a batch of songs to be played,via the remote, the TuneView software automaticallyplaces all the desired tracks in a new iTunes playlistcalled TuneView. I’m not entirely certain why thisis necessary, but it’s not generally something that’sa problem unless you choose an existing playlist thathas many songs in it. When you do, it’ll take a fewmoments to populate the TuneView playlist with allthe tracks.
In the course of the past two months of using theTuneView USB, there were a couple of instances whenthe TuneView system apparently froze up when thisplaylist population step took place. I had to resetthe remote’s pairing with the TuneView software toregain access. It is this scenario alone that confirmedmy decision to rate the TuneView as Good instead ofVery Nice.
If you happen to own an iPhone or iPod touch,you already have a much more sophisticated remotecontrol and would only require Alloysoft’s Signal5software to take control of your iTunes library.
Otherwise, the TuneView USB functions ade-quately to provide a high level of iTunes controlwhen your situation does not allow you to see anduse the iTunes or Front Row interface.
Copyright © 2007 Lee Bennett, [email protected]. Re-viewing in atpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested,write to us at [email protected].
5http://www.atpm.com/13.12/signal.shtml
ATPM 13.12 50 Review: TuneView USB
Software Reviewby Linus Ly, [email protected]
Videator 4.2.1Developer: Stone Design1
Price: $49; free upgrades for lifeRequirements: Mac OS X 10.4.
Universal2.Trial: Fully-featured (30 days)I became seriously interested in com-puters in the late ’80s. Going with my best friend’srecommendations, I got an Amiga 1000 computer andstayed with the Amiga platform through two moreupgrades. Desktop video (DTV) was the Amiga’sforté, and I had my share of exposure to it. Thepower to create movies on a computer in one’s home,for relatively little money, was just so tempting. I didnot make any money out of the experience, but theDTV bug stayed with me years later. When I cameacross Stone Design’s Videator, I became intriguedby it. If, years ago, I had had all those special effectsfound in Videator, would my DTV experience haveturned out differently?
Videator’s startup screen describes itself as“Movie Magic for Mere Mortals,” and this is prettymuch true. Open a recorded video or a live feed fromiSight camera, click on an effect (fx) on the rightside of the screen to instant overlay the effect on thevideo, tweak the effect’s settings or its duration toyour heart’s content, perhaps add some audio, thenexport the resulting product to a movie.
Movies can be saved for viewing from a local disk,over the Web, or on an iPod. You can add more thanone effect and have them either overlapping or not.There are many effects to choose from, but there aretwo I find to be of greater importance. The PaintLayer effect lets you draw freely on top of the video.If you have artistic talent, with the Paint Layer effectyou can basically create your own effect. The otherimportant effect is Text. Although it sounds boring,text is tremendously helpful in getting the messageto your viewers. You can find a sample video3 thatI made with a few of Videator’s many effects. Thevideo is supposed to be a news report by the fictitiousWAFN TV station. I tried not to get carried away
1http://www.stone.com/Videator/2http://www.apple.com/universal/3http://homepage.mac.com/linusly/iMovieTheater13.ht
ml
by adding too many effects but couldn’t help usingsome of the flashy ones.
Load a movie, add some effects, and tweak theirparameters—then you have yourself a better-looking movie.
There are over one hundred effects to work with,and there are many ways to apply them. The de-fault way is to choose the effect from the left side ofthe Videator screen, also known as the Library area.With the default way, you see a sample picture ofwhat the effect does, plus the effect’s various param-eters that you can alter. You can also add effectsfrom the top menu, perhaps because you prefer tohide the Library area to have a bigger work space.Lastly, you can select effects from the Instant Effectsitem in the toolbar. The nice thing with Instant Ef-fects is that you get to see what your video looks likebefore the effect is applied. However you add an ef-fect to your video, undoing is easy with Command-Zor by clicking the effect’s close widget.
ATPM 13.12 51 Review: Videator 4.2.1
At a glance, you see what the eight effects in the set makeyour video look like. Pick one of them or click the center to
cancel.
To fine-tune the various effects you have used, se-lect the Time Lines item from the menu bar. TheTime Lines give you a nice overview of all the effectsand audio tracks in use. As you drag the various slid-ers, the video is updated to let you know where youare.
Exercise more control over the various effects you haveselected.
Aside from adding effects to videos, you can alsoslice and dice them. You can drop one video into an-other video, somewhere between the beginning andthe end, or append one to another. I like the fact thatwhen Videator combines videos of different sizes, thedifferent videos keep their different sizes, instead ofbeing reduced or enlarged. Unlike iMovie, once twovideo clips are combined, they are no longer sepa-rate clips, so iMovie users will have to adjust to theVideator way. You can also cut and paste segments ofclips, but making the perfect selection can be tricky.You will need to rely a lot on the time line below the
video. There are keyboard controls to finely make aselection, but I wish there were an option to zoom inon the selection or a visual search, both of which areimplemented in SimpleMovieX4.
Videator handles still images pretty well, too.Making a slideshow is as easy as picking the photosand leaving the transition effects on random. Youcan always pick different effects after the movie hasbeen composed. You can also insert pictures intomovies or overlay them. However, I find it hard toadjust the size of overlaid pictures. Using the Scaleslider, from the smallest size, I cannot make thepicture grow slightly larger but rather in big jumps.
Video editing is not an easy thing to learn, butVideator comes with very good documentation.Within the program help is just a click away. Youcan also download the help PDF separately. Thedocumentation covers both the basic tasks and ex-pert tips, such as how to change the various defaultsettings. The Effects Catalog nicely lists all theeffects with pictures to illustrate what they do. Lastbut not least, the tutorial5 is very helpful for thosewho don’t like to read manuals.
Stone Design boasts that Videator can make theeffects so fast thanks to Apple’s Core Image, CoreVideo, and Quartz Extreme. However, Stone alsoacknowledges that Videator is on the bleeding edgeof technology and encourages Videator users to reportany crashes to Apple. While my Videator experiencehas been relatively trouble-free, I have discovered afew consistent, annoying bugs.
The QuickTime-style go-to-beginning and go-to-the-end buttons don’t work the way I think theyshould. Once they are clicked, the video should beupdated to show the beginning or end of the video.You actually have to click these buttons twice.
Another more serious bug involves adding audioto videos. Lately I have been doing a lot of videorecording using a digital camera. The movies aresaved in QuickTime format and look good on thecomputer or on TV. It seems that whenever I loadthese movies into Videator and then add sound clipsto them, the sound clips don’t play at all. On theTime Lines, their start and end points would be atthe exact same point. But if I copy from the moviesinto a new Videator window, then all is well. I don’tknow if it is a bug with QuickTime or Videator, butthe end result is that I cannot directly add soundsthe videos I recorded with the digital camera.
4http://www.atpm.com/13.06/simplemoviex.shtml5http://www.stone.com/Videator/Quick_Start.html
ATPM 13.12 52 Review: Videator 4.2.1
Lastly, and perhaps most dangerous, of the bugsthat I found is the Revert To Saved menu option.Sometimes I like to use this option instead of execut-ing many undos. While dealing with the audio prob-lem described earlier, I thought perhaps it was nec-essary to first remove the video’s original soundtrackbefore new soundtracks could be properly added. Itmade no difference, and I thought simply selectingRevert To Saved would put me back to square one. Igot the expected warning that the changes would belost, but then after I supposedly reverted to a savedversion of the video, the Time Lines would still showthat my video had no soundtrack, and playing it con-firmed the finding. Had I gone ahead and made morechanges then saved, I would have lost the originalsoundtrack.
Bugs aside, there are a few features I wishVideator would have, even though it does have manyfeatures already. Flashy effects are nice to see butthey get old really quickly. I would like to see moreuseful text effects like credit roll, crawling text, andclose caption. It would be fun to be able to do textthat recedes into the background, such as that madefamous by Star Wars. iMovie has this text effect,and it is even appropriately named Far, Far Away(“A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away. . .”)
Which brings us to the question: can Videator re-place iMovie altogether? After all, iMovie is the non-linear video editor that comes with every new Mac.The answer is no. If, like me, you have iMovie 5.0.2,or iMovie ’06, then you will still want to use iMoviealong with Videator. It is true that Videator loadsmovies quickly whereas iMovie imports movies witha noticeable delay. Also, Videator’s effects happeninstantly while iMovie has to render its limited num-ber of effects. Still, iMovie 5 and ’06 beat Videatordecisively in the area of text effects. Text may beboring compared to flashy effects, but they are veryuseful and cannot be ignored.
It may be hard to believe, but there are cer-tain effects iMovie has that Videator sorely lacks.The Fast/Slow/Reverse effect can be comical ordramatic, whereas Rain can be useful in many sit-uations. Maybe Stone Design purposely avoidedmaking effects that are already in iMovie, but forme, I find more useful effects in iMovie’s limitednumber than Videator’s many.
I think for now Videator can be used for mostof the work, then the result brought into iMovie forbetter text touchup or to have some special effectsapplied, if applicable.
If you have just iMovie ’08 then, from what I read,the advantages described above may not apply. In ’08the effects are fewer in than previous iMovie versions.However, effects are no longer rendered but insteadget generated instantly. What’s more, titling is stillthere, so in the end, iMovie still has the upper handin one area.
Back to my wish list for Videator. Some of theflashy effects could use some improvements. Many ofthem only work on the entire frame of the video. Iwould like to be able to adjust the effects to work ona certain area. For example, in my demo movie, Iwanted to pixellate just the face of the people whowalked the horse but there is no way to do that.
Despite the few bugs I found and my wish list,I still think Videator a great addition to a videog-rapher’s toolbox, but not to totally replace iMovie.If I had had it back in the late 80's, I could havesaved so much time. With over one hundred effectsto choose from, many ways to access them, supportfor non-linear editing, great handling of still images,good documentation, the inexpensive Videator is aVery Nice application to have.
Copyright © 2007 Linus Ly, [email protected]. Reviewing inatpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested, write to us [email protected].
ATPM 13.12 53 Review: Videator 4.2.1
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