★ Notes and Observations Regarding Yesterday’s ‘Let’s Rock’ Apple Special Event
Overall Scope The overall takeaway from yesterday’s news is that Apple’s music and iPod business is right on track. There was nothing exceptional or particularly surprising, but the incremental improvements and changes were significant. A solid year’s worth of progress. One thing that wasn’t mentioned, though, and which has figured prominently in past music-related special events, was growth. In past events, the overview of iPod sales has included charts showing...
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★ The iPad
Back in December, here’s how I concluded my piece on what I expected from Apple’s then-still-unannounced tablet: If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing. After the iPad was announced, I got two types of emails from readers. The first group saying they were disappointed, because they had been hoping I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing. The second group wrote to tell me how excited they were because I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing. Count me in with the second group. Apple hasn’t thought of everything with iPad, but what they’ve thought about, they’ve thought about very deeply. I got mine Saturday morning, and I’ve been using it since — or at least as often as I could get it away from my son. Here are my thoughts. The Big Picture The whole thing feels fast fast fast. The only thing that feels slow overall, so far, is web page rendering. Not because it’s slower than the iPhone — it’s not, it’s definitely much faster — but because it’s so much slower than my MacBook Pro. It’s easy to forget on modern PC-class hardware just how computationally expensive HTML rendering is. The funny thing is, the iPad, in raw CPU terms, is a far slower machine than a modern Mac. But the iPad is running a lightweight OS and lightweight apps. It’s like a slower runner with a lighter backpack who can win a race against a faster runner wearing a heavier backpack. Thus, many of the things you do are faster, or at least feel faster (which is what matters), on the iPad than the Mac. Like, for example, launching applications. The built-in apps, and many of the third-party apps I’ve been using the most, are ready to use within a moment of launching them. (Games tend not to load instantly, but that’s true on high-power consoles like Xbox and PS3, too.) There’s something fundamentally strange about how fast the iPad feels considering how underpowered it is versus a modern PC or Mac. How can a computer with so much less CPU speed feel faster? What Apple has done is re-think several fundamental aspects. The iPad was designed from the ground up with a different set of priorities. I think Tim Bray summarizes it well: For a 1Ghz device with limited memory, the iPad is unreasonably fast. I suspect this accounts for a whole bunch of the “Wow!” reaction the iPad obviously provokes. Since there’s no free lunch, I think it’s really important that we understand what they sacrificed to get that performance. My bet would be on some combination of windowing and virtual memory. I tend to work on lots of things at once, but in fact I look at things in rapid succession, my eyes can really only focus on one thing at one time. Given sufficiently fast switching, maybe we all ought to be getting less WIMPy. The iPad (and iPhone OS across all devices) does indeed lack virtual memory. The only memory is honest-to-god RAM. RAM is fast, virtual memory is slow. The tradeoff is that without virtual memory, the iPad can do far less at once, but what it does do is never going to require hitting virtual memory. Without a windowing system, drawing is simpler and faster. Apple has made other significantly different tradeoffs as well. Battery life on the iPad is simply stunning. Reviewers across the board are getting real-life results that beat Apple’s promise of 10 hours of battery life. This is a function both of software (which does less and works hard to keep the CPU from drawing power while the iPad is being used) and hardware — iFixit’s teardown shows that, internally, the iPad looks more like a battery with a computer than a computer with a battery. The iPad, so far, never gets warm. Browse a bunch of web sites. Play some video. Play a game. It still feels as cool to the touch as when it’s turned off. It is also dead quiet — no fan, no humming, nada. This is the future of computing. The iPad was designed with an entirely different set of priorities than Macs or PCs. Someone may well produce a worthy iPad rival in the next year, but it’s not going to be something like HP’s Slate that runs Windows 7, an operating system that epitomizes the traditional set of computer design priorities. The iPad is also eminently affordable. $500 for this thing seems hard to believe. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it at double the price. But clearly there were tradeoffs involved to hit this price point. Build quality is not one — the thing feels perfect in hand. But it only has 256 MB of RAM — perhaps the single biggest hardware weakness of the device (see the section on Safari below). It is super high-quality, but clearly designed for the mass market. Anyone who thinks Apple only makes high-priced products has completely lost sense of reality. “Affordable luxury” is the sweet spot for mass market success today, and Apple keeps shooting bulls eyes. In fact, the only thing that makes my heart ache regarding the iPad is when I start imagining a hypothetical Pro model — imagine what Apple could put in an iPad that cost as much as a MacBook Pro. (My dream iPad Pro: double the display’s pixel resolution and include a gigabyte or two of RAM.) Affordability presents itself in other ways, too. Nothing is included in the box other than the power adaptor. The dock and case are separate SKUs, and it doesn’t even come with headphones. It’s like buying a Honda, not an Acura — the base model is not “well-equipped”. $500 is affordable but not cheap, and the iPad does not feel cheap in any regard. The build quality is outstanding. The brushed aluminum back makes my plastic iPhone 3GS feel cheap. The iPad takes more cues from the current iMacs than it does from the iPhone. The seam between the glass and the aluminum is nearly perfect. It’s just one piece of aluminum and a piece of glass — there is no superfluous chrome bezel between the glass and the backing as there is on all iPhones and iPod Touches to date. Even without turning it on it looks and feels a step beyond the iPhones and iPod Touches we’ve seen to date. The Killer App One thing that’s making it hard for some people to grasp the purpose of the iPad is that no one has an answer to what precisely it is for. This was not so for the iPhone. The answer to the question of what the original 2007 iPhone was meant for was right there at the bottom of the iPhone home screen, in the “dock”: phone, email, web, music and video. The other apps were icing on the cake. The four apps in the dock were what Apple designed the iPhone to do. The iPad also has a “dock” on the home screen, and the default apps in that dock are clearly important: Safari, Mail, Photos, iPod (which, on the iPad, is only for audio). But some are treating the iPad as, fundamentally, an e-reader. Others as a gaming device. Others as a movie player. None of those things are represented in the iPad’s default dock apps. The truth is that the App Store is the killer app. The iPad is meant for anything that can be represented on a 10-inch color touchscreen. Back in January when we were playing the “What’s Apple going to name the tablet?” game, my favorite, by far, was “Canvas”. I’m not saying here that Canvas would have been a better name than iPad, but the word conveys perfectly what the iPad is. Adam Engst captured this: The iPad becomes the app you’re using. That’s part of the magic. The hardware is so understated - it’s just a screen, really - and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. As did Cultured Code’s Jürgen Schweizer: Steve Jobs said about the iPod that “it is all about the music”. With the iPad, Apple has done the same for personal computing as it has done before with the iPod: it made technology go away. But if the device is gone, and the operating system is gone, what is left? The iPad is an empty canvas that invites us to imagine what is possible. It inspires our imagination and it makes us want to create, because never before were we able to create software that was so close to the user. The iPad hardware and OS are profoundly humble — they put all the focus on whatever app it is that is open. Out of Box Experience One thing that is very iPhone-like about iPad is that when you first take it out of the box, it wants to be plugged into your Mac or PC via USB and sync with iTunes. In some ways, that’s understandable. USB syncing is how you load your iPad with music and videos and transfer over stuff like your email accounts, and, if you’re not using MobileMe, your contacts and calendars. But, on the whole, it feels retrograde. It’s creates an impression that the iPad does not stand on its own. It’s a child that still needs a parent. But it’s not a young child. It’s more like a teenager. It’s close. So close that it feels like it ought to be able to stand on its own. Android devices do not have this problem. You can sync an Android device with a desktop computer via USB, for transferring things like music and videos, but you don’t have to. Out of the box, a Nexus One is ready to go. Google’s big advantage here is that they’re using online services as primary data stores. The Google Way is to use Gmail for email and contacts, and Google Calendar for events. You just tell your Android device your Google ID and password, and your email, contacts, and calendars start syncing over the air. Apple has MobileMe, but because it’s a paid service, they can’t (or at least won’t) assume that all iPad owners are going to use it. But then even those of us who do use MobileMe get stuck with a first-run iPad experience that involves a tethered USB connection to a computer. The Apple Way is to assume that your primary data stores for these things are locally stored on your Mac or PC — Address Book, iCal. At the very least, these things ought to be able to sync between iTunes (on your Mac or PC) and your iPad over your Wi-Fi network. Third-party iPhone OS apps like Things do a great job with this — there’s no reason iTunes and the iPhone OS shouldn’t too. Those Heart-Stopping ‘Scratches’ On the iPhone (and iPod Touch; assume from here out that when I say “iPhone” I’m referring to both), app icons on the home screen sit atop a plain black background. On the iPad, they’re spaced further apart, which is why I think Apple has added wallpaper — making the iPad home screen look a lot more like a Mac or Windows desktop. The default wallpaper shows a sunset skyline of a mountain range in front of a like. There’s a meteor shower in the sky. And the streaking meteors look, at a glance, like a series of severe scratches on the display. It’s a curious choice. The Touchscreen Keyboard It’s a lot like the iPhone’s, but, it’s different. Because it’s bigger, there are no pop-up indicators showing which key you hit as you type. They’re not necessary. The feel, overall, is pretty much like typing on a really big iPhone. If you’re in a position where you can set the iPad down on your lap or a table top, it’s not too hard at all to type with all your fingers when the iPad is in landscape (horizontal) orientation. Now, to me, it’s nowhere near as good as even the worst full- or nearly-full-size hardware keyboard I’ve ever used. You can’t just rest all eight of your fingers on the home row keys, and you can’t feel where the key cap edges are. You have to look at the keyboard a fair amount as you type. On a hardware keyboard, I hardly ever look at the keys. But for a touchscreen, it’s good. In portrait (vertical) orientation, I can type on the iPad using just my two thumbs, as I do on my iPhone. I have relatively large hands, though — I don’t think most people can do it. The keyboard in this layout is way too small for me to type with all of my fingers, though. In portrait orientation most people will type using one finger, I expect. Now, the funny thing is, in general, bigger keyboards are easier to type on than smaller ones. That’s why big laptops are easier to type on than compact ones, and, indeed, that’s why the landscape iPad keyboard on the iPad is easier to type on than the portrait one. But at a certain point, the curve flips around and smaller becomes faster. I type much faster on my iPhone using the smaller portrait orientation keyboard than the wider landscape keyboard. In both modes, I use just my two thumbs. With the smaller iPhone keyboard, my thumbs have to travel less from one key to the next. People who aren’t very proficient at the iPhone keyboard, or who have very large thumbs and therefore have trouble precisely tapping the smaller keys, may well prefer the iPhone’s wider landscape keyboard. But for me it’s not even close. I never type in landscape on my iPhone. And in fact (and this is the aforereferenced “funny part”), I type faster on my iPhone than I do on the iPad. That’s especially true for when the iPad is in portrait mode, which puts the keyboard size in a no-man’s land — too small to eight-finger-type, too big to thumb-type. But it’s also true for when the iPad is in landscape mode. I’m hopeful that this is just a factor of experience and muscle memory — I have nearly three years of experience typing on the iPhone, and only two days experience with the iPad. Last Friday I watched Andy Ihnatko eight-finger-type on his iPad — which he’d been using for over a week — and he was typing pretty goddamn fast. One problem I’ve run into is that Apple has subtly changed the layout of the keyboard from the iPhone’s. On the iPhone, the Delete key is on the lower right, above the Return key. On the iPad, it’s in the upper right corner, and the Return key is next to the L key. The iPad adds a right-side Shift key. The iPad layout makes perfect sense — both these keys are now where they reside on traditional hardware keyboards. Their weird positions on the iPhone are a compromise forced by the extreme lack of space on the iPhone display. Apple has also added a new key to the iPad keyboard’s numeric/punctuation mode: Undo. It’s a good idea — I have the feeling most iPhone users don’t know about the system-wide shake-to-undo gesture, and even for users who do, the iPad is harder to shake (and, when docked, downright silly to shake). But this new Undo key moves the period and comma keys over to the right by two positions. The iPhone keyboard layout is so firmly ingrained in my mind that these changes are problems for me — I keep hitting the (new to the iPad) right-side Shift key when I mean to hit Delete, and I keep hitting Undo when I mean to type a period. I’ll get used to it soon, I’m sure, but I find it interesting that my iPad typing muscle memory is based on the iPhone keyboard, not regular keyboards. I think this is because, overall, it really does feel like a big iPhone keyboard. Hardware Keyboard Support I don’t have (and did not order) the iPad keyboard dock, but I have been using an Apple Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, I’m using it to type this entire review. It works great. Pairing (via the iPad Settings app) is easy and quick. And it works great. Several essential text-editing shortcuts from the Mac OS work system-wide on the iPad: Command-Z, -X, -C, and -V work for Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste. Command-A works for Select All. You can use the arrow keys to move the insertion point. Option-Arrow keys work to move the insertion point one word at a time. Command-Left/Right moves the insertion point the beginning/end of the current line; Command-Up/Down moves the insertion point the start/end of the current text field — which, in the case of something like Pages, is the beginning/end of the entire document. Holding down Shift extends the selection range, and works in conjunction with the Option and Command keys as expected. (Certain of Cocoa’s long-standing Emacs-style text editing shortcuts work too: like Control-K (kill) and Control-H (backspace).) Certain of the function keys on the Bluetooth keyboard are useful on the iPad. The brightness keys control the iPad’s display brightness. The volume (and mute) keys work. The playback buttons — play/pause, next, previous — all work to control the iPod app. By default, once you’ve started using a hardware keyboard, the on-screen keyboard no longer appears, which is great, because the full display is now available for displaying content. But if you want to use the on-screen keyboard while a hardware keyboard is active, you can toggle it using the hardware keyboard’s Eject key. The Esc key dismisses the auto-complete suggestion — it’s like tapping the little “x” next to the suggestion under the current word you’re typing. While a keyboard is connected, you can wake up the iPad by hitting any key — completely bypassing the iPad’s slide-to-unlock screen. Very nice. The iPad is fundamentally a touchscreen device. You absolutely do not need a hardware keyboard for it. But if you’re hoping to do any amount of serious writing with it (and, for obvious vocational reasons, I plan to), you’re going to want one. There are a few places in the iPad UI where I really wish the keyboard was useful but it isn’t. For example, Safari location field suggestions. On the Mac, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move through the list of suggestions. On the iPad, you must use touch to select from the list. Since you’re already typing if you’re entering a URL, this is just begging for arrow key support. (Ditto for suggested results from the Google search field in Safari.) The Esc key does not dismiss popovers, but that’s probably OK. It’s only possible to invoke popovers via touch, so it seems OK that you must dismiss them via touch as well. The Tab key can be used to switch between text fields; Shift-Tab goes in reverse order. (When using the hardware keyboard, I do find myself hitting Command-Tab, without thinking about it, when I want to switch to another app; it does nothing on the iPad.) Display The iPad display is, overall, wonderful. Colors are bright and (unlike the Nexus One’s OLED display) accurate. Photos and videos looks great. Touches seem precisely accurate. The glass feels good. Viewing angles are shockingly good. You can lay the iPad flat on a table while you eat or drink and it looks just fine at a decidedly skew angle — far more so than with the iPhone. This IPS stuff is the real deal; here’s to hoping for an IPS display in this year’s new iPhones. The only complaint I have about the display is that the pixel resolution isn’t all that dense. The iPad’s 1024  768 display has a resolution of 132 pixels per inch. The iPhone’s 640  320 display has a resolution of 163 pixels per inch. The difference isn’t huge, but it’s definitely noticeable. Type looks crisper on the iPhone than the iPad, and type rendering falls far short of even newspaper-caliber resolution, let alone glossy-magazine caliber. (Those of you who doubt that the pixels-per-inch resolution isn’t high enough, just wait until you see the type rendering on this summer’s new iPhones.) Safari The iPad is so good as a web reader, that, if you’re a web junkie, everything else the iPad does is just gravy. It’s good. I’m so used to Safari on the iPhone, though, where the toolbar is at the bottom, that I’m having a hard time getting adjusted to the toolbar at the top. I’m not saying it’s a bad decision on Apple’s part. In fact, the iPad HIG is quite explicit that iPad toolbars should go at the top, not bottom — which makes me think Apple thought about and tested this and has concluded that the top works better for the iPad form factor. It’s just that I use Safari on my iPhone a lot, and I am really used to the button placement. When you create a new page in Safari on iPad, text focus goes to the Google search field by default, rather than the URL location field. That’s a change from both desktop and iPhone Safari. I’m finding this hard to get used to, but I can see how this might be a better design for typical users. It makes the default search engine all the more essential to the web browsing experience, though. Zooming and flicking are essential to the experience, just like on the iPhone. Flicking is how you scroll, no surprise. The zooming, though, may come as a surprise. It wasn’t too long ago when 1024  768 was considered a large display for full-size web browsing. But: what matters on the iPad (and iPhone) is not the pixel count of the display, but the physical size. 9.7 inches diagonally is a bit small for non-zoomed web browser. But the action of zooming — whether through double-tapping or pinching — is so smooth, fast, and natural that it feels better, not worse, than old-school desktop web browsing. There’s one severe problem in Safari for iPad, though: memory crapping out. MobileSafari for iPhone has always allowed you to open up to eight pages at a time. It tries to keep them all truly open, in RAM, so that you can quickly switch between them. But when it runs out of memory it starts flushing some of the pages. It doesn’t forget the URL for those pages, and, in recent versions, it saves a static thumbnail image of the rendered page, but when you switch back to those purged pages, MobileSafari must reload the page — thus, you must wait both for the contents of the page to download and for the page to actually render (which — the rendering — often takes longer than the downloading). It’s very noticeable. Switching between unpurged Safari pages is instantaneous. Switching to a purged page takes as long as opening it from scratch. Wolf Rentzsch, linking to this complaint from Peter-Paul Koch, wrote a brief technical overview of why Apple might have designed MobileSafari this way. (Keep in mind that iPhone OS does not use virtual memory; thus RAM is severely constrained.) This purging problem got a lot better with the iPhone 3GS. The original iPhone and iPhone 3G only had 128 MB of RAM. The 3GS has 256. MobileSafari’s ability to keep more pages in memory is probably my single favorite aspect of the 3GS. The iPad also has 256 MB of RAM. But, in my use, iPad’s Safari isn’t able to keep nearly as many pages open as I can on my 3GS. In fact, sometimes it seems I can only have one, and every page I switch to gets completely reloaded. This is more than just annoying — it can lead to data loss if you have unsubmitted form data sitting in an “open” iPad Safari page. I’ve run into this posting items to DF from the iPad — my posting interface is a web page form. When I want to link to the current page, I invoke a bookmarklet which opens a new page with the title and URL fields of the posting form set to the title and URL of the page from which I invoked the bookmarklet. Often, though, I want to switch back to the page I’m linking to copy another URL or a bit of text to quote. Twice so far, when going back to the posting form, it’s been purged and must reload from scratch — in which case I lose anything I’ve already written. I never run into this problem on my iPhone 3GS when switching between just two open Safari pages. The problem is also severe for AJAX web apps, which tend not to be designed with full page refreshes in mind. I hope this can be improved significantly in an iPad software update, but I worry that it’s endemic — that because the iPad screen is so much larger than the iPhone’s, that MobileSafari must allocate significantly more memory per page for the framebuffers. 256 MB of RAM simply may not be enough for MobileSafari to keep more than two or three pages in memory. If so, Apple really needs to consider some sort of caching or serialization scheme rather than completely flushing away purged pages. Pages I wrote the entire 4,828-word first draft of this piece on my iPad using Pages.1 I didn’t use any of the formatting or layout tools — I used it as a text editor rather than a word processor. It’s quite serviceable. What I like best is that it opens very quickly. Switching between, say, Pages and Safari and back to copy-and-paste a URL feels more like switching than quitting, launching, quitting, relaunching. You don’t need to (and can’t) save manually. Whatever you do in a document simply persists automatically. When you go back to the list of documents, they’re presented as big thumbnails — very much like the list of open web pages in Safari. Pages’s toolbar and ruler are only visible when in portrait mode. In landscape mode, all of the chrome disappears. It’s just a full-screen editing view, a la WriteRoom. I’m writing this piece in this full-screen (landscape) mode, with my iPad propped up on a table in Apple’s iPad case. It’s a nice setup, and I can genuinely imagine leaving my MacBook at home for trips in the future, with the addition of few missing iPad apps (like, say, a good SFTP client). But when I say there’s no chrome in the landscape mode, I mean none. Pages has a decent simple little find and replace feature, but it’s only possible to invoke it in portrait mode. (I must have hit Command-F a dozen times so far, to no avail.) There are already complaints piling up that the iWork apps don’t support the complete feature set of their current Mac counterparts — open a file created in a Mac version of Pages/Numbers/Keynote on your iPad and certain document features may be removed. (The iPad apps prompt you with an alert telling you which aspects of the document have been changed or removed.) Another way of looking at it though, is that the iPad iWork apps are to their Mac counterparts what the iPad as a whole is to the Mac — simpler, more focused, but in some ways faster. Pages launches and is ready for input far quicker on my iPad than on my MacBook Pro. Writing this review, I’ve been switching back and forth between Pages and Safari. It doesn’t feel like quitting Pages, launching Safari, copying a URL, quitting Safari, and re-launching Pages. It feels more like switching — it only takes a moment after tapping the Pages icon on the home screen to be back where I was in my open document. (My only complaint is that you lose the insertion point when leaving and coming back to Pages — the document re-opens to where you left off, but you must tap the screen to place the insertion point. When switching several times, that becomes slightly tedious.) This is obviously not even close to a full review of Pages, but I can say without hesitation that it’s easily worth $10. Syncing There is, however, a severe shortcoming inherent to the iWork suite of iPad apps: document syncing between Mac and iPad. It’s a convoluted mess. In short, the only way to edit a document on your iPad that was created on your Mac, or vice versa, is to go through a convoluted multi-step process of exporting, copying, syncing or downloading, and importing. Ted Landau has copiously documented the entire situation in this article at The Mac Observer. Read it and weep. What it boils down to is that there is no syncing really. Real syncing is something like IMAP for email, or the way MobileMe handles calendars and contacts. When I read a bunch of new email messages using my iPad or iPhone, when I next sit down at my Mac, those messages are marked as read in my inbox. I don’t have to do anything on the Mac for that to happen. That’s just how IMAP works. I can add a new calendar event on my Mac, then walk away from my computer, take my iPhone out of my pocket, and the event is there. I can add a note to that event using my iPhone and a few moments later the note will be synced to the event on my Mac. Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients. The data flow with these iWork apps isn’t like that at all, and needs to be for them to be truly useful. It doesn’t matter how good the user interface for viewing and editing spreadsheets is in Numbers for iPad if my spreadsheets aren’t there. Here’s an example. I keep the schedule for Daring Fireball RSS sponsorships in a Numbers document. What I’d like to be able to do on my iPad is launch Numbers and access the current version of that spreadsheet. But the only way I could possibly do that today would be if I went through the following steps every single time I made a change to the document on my Mac: Before opening the current version of the file on my Mac, check to make sure there isn’t a more recent version of it on my iPad. Open the file on my Mac and make changes. Save. Dock my iPad to my Mac via USB. Switch to iTunes and go to the Apps tab for my iPad. Add the newly-saved revision of the document to the file sharing list for the iPad’s Numbers app. Sync. Even after going through all of this, when I do want to open this file on my iPad, I have to remember not to open the last revision of it listed in the iPad Numbers app’s “My Documents” list, but instead remember first to import the latest revision from Numbers’s file sharing list to Numbers’ “My Documents”. And, again, it’s effectively up to me to keep track of which machine, Mac or iPad, has the most recent revision of the file. To say the least, this is a recipe for disaster, and even if you don’t make a mistake and inadvertantly make significant changes to an out-of-date version of the document on one of the two machines, you’re stuck with a preposterously, mind-bogglingly convoluted workflow each and every time you make a change to the document. The bottom line, obviously, is that there is no way that anyone is going to use these iPad apps in the way I describe above. As-is they’re only useful to me in two ways. First, I can imagine using Pages on the iPad to compose original new documents — posts for Daring Fireball — while I’m using my iPad. I’ll either finish them there and then copy-and-paste the result into the web-based posting interface for DF, or, I’ll send the draft to my Mac for further editing (which is what I did for the piece you’re reading right now). I can also imagine creating finished Keynote decks on my Mac and then moving them, once, to my iPad, and taking only my iPad with me to the presentation — i.e. using Keynote, Numbers, and Pages on the iPad as viewers for finished documents. (And, conveniently, they’re viewers that can make edits if you notice a mistake or want to make a last-minute change or addition.) But there’s no possible way to use these apps as clients alongside their Mac counterparts on an ongoing basis. The sort of over-the-air syncing I’m imagining for iWork is, admittedly, a difficult problem to solve. But the bad news for Apple is that their top competitor in this space has a solution: Google Documents. With Google Documents, there’s no making copies, importing/exporting, manually invoked syncing, or USB tethering involved if you want to edit a single instance of a spreadsheet from multiple machines. You just make changes on one machine, and when you next look at that document from another machine the changes are there. The workflow for iWork is downright antediluvian. It’s not just pre-Cloud, it’s pre-network. It’s effectively the “Who’s got the latest revision of this file?” workflow of the days when we moved files from one machine to another via floppy disks. What in the world is iWork.com for if not for solving this problem? At least iWork.com lets you avoid having to physically tether the two machines via USB to get a document from the Mac to the iPad (or vice versa), but it’s no better than file sharing through iTunes conceptually. When you send a file to iWork.com (from either Mac or iPad) you’re pushing a copy, a snapshot of the document from that moment. After making subsequent changes, you’ve got to push those changes to iWork.com all over again. And to get them on the other device, you must manually import — making just another copy. What you ought to be able to do is specify iWork.com as the canonical shared storage location for an iWork document. iWork.com doesn’t serve as any such purpose today. iPhone Apps I predicted it’d be crummy to run non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps on the iPad — like Classic apps running on Mac OS X — and I was right. It’s OK for games — they look jaggy, but jaggy games aren’t that uncommon. But regular (non-game) apps just look and feel weird. When you run them pixel-doubled text doesn’t scale dynamically — everything is pixel doubled. It’s a good way of proving that the iPad is not “just a big iPhone”, though. The only iPhone app I find myself using on my iPad is Simplenote, for copying and pasting bits of text to and from my Mac and iPhone. Needless to say, I’d love an iPad-optimized version of Simplenote. iBooks and Kindle The iBooks app is free, but doesn’t ship with the iPad by default — you have to download it from the App Store. Apple hasn’t explained why this is so, but there are several reasons I can think of. For one thing, e-book rights are managed on a country-by-country basis — it seems likely that the iBooks store won’t be available in every country where the iPad will soon be sold. Making it an App Store app will also allow Apple to update the app on its own schedule — built-in system apps only get updates along with the entire system. So in some ways, the iBooks app is on equal footing with other e-book readers available in the App Store, particularly Amazon’s Kindle app. But iBooks does get some special treatment — the first time I launched the App Store app on my iPad, it prompted me with a dialog box asking if I’d like to down the free iBooks app. It’s impossible to miss. The iBooks app also has display brightness controls that are not availble through public APIs. Winnie the Pooh is included as a free sample, and the choice is genius — it’s a beloved story, a good read, and best of all (from Apple’s perspective) it can’t be read properly on the Kindle because the color illustrations are a big part of the experience. No book on the Kindle will ever look this good. The Kindle has its own advantages — its books are generally cheaper, its selection bigger, and e-ink works better in bright sunlight — but Winnie the Pooh epitomizes the iPad’s advantages. iBooks’s page-turning animation is delightful — it doesn’t just track your finger-swipe precisely, but even renders the type faintly in reverse on the other side of the “sheet”. The practical minded can simply tap the right and left edges of the screen to turn pages. Amazon’s iPad-native Kindle app is good, too. Oddly, to my mind, it is superior to their recent Mac app in every way. It looks better, feels better, renders text better, and has more features. I say this is odd because the iPad was announced just two months ago; Mac OS X was announced over a decade ago. I suspect part of the reason the Mac version is so crippled is that they were more worried about keeping Mac users from un-DRMing Kindle content than they were about making the Mac app an actual good-to-use app. The Kindle doesn’t do animated page-turning, but that’s not a big deal. Reading is great. And the Kindle’s ace-in-the-hole, of course, is the far larger selection of e-books in its store — hundreds of thousands versus Apple’s tens of thousands. I bought When the Game Was Ours, a new book by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. It is not available in the iBooks store. So Kindle’s advantage is library size (and, secondarily, price per title). iBooks’s advantage is the color display. I’d be shocked if every single piece of advertising Apple produces for iBooks doesn’t focus entirely on screenshots of books with color illustrations, photos, and video. I think it’s going to be easier for Apple to improve the iBooks store library than it will be for Amazon to create a Kindle hardware model with a color display. I think Amazon would do well to add color support to Kindle e-books for use on iPads and iPhones. Kindle has a better chance of long-term success as a software platform than a hardware one. Third-Party Apps in General Given that most iPad-native apps in the store right now were developed using only the simulator by developers without access to actual iPads, you might expect apps to be buggy and UIs to be awkward. I’ve found the bugginess to be true, but the UIs are actually good. I think the physical prototypes developers jury-rigged for themselves paid off, design-wise. There’s no question that UIs are going change rapidly in the coming weeks now that developers have the real deal to measure the feel of their apps against, but for the apps I’ve been using the most, they’re pretty damn good already. As for the bugginess, I’m not saying it’s inexcusable or even surprising — the SDK simulator is not a perfect simulation. Several of the bugs I’ve reported are only present when the apps are running on actual iPad hardware. On the whole, though, the quality of iPad apps on day one is better, by far, than I had expected considering that developers had to build them in the dark, as it were. Prices, so far, are significantly higher than for iPhone apps — but still far cheaper than category equivalent Mac apps. For example, NetNewsWire is $10 (and going to $15 in May); Things is $20; and OmniGraffle is $50. No doubt there are going to be wildly popular 99-cent iPad apps, but it’s also shaping up as serious platform for serious tools. Games are a bit more expensive, too, but, to me, reasonably so. The final word count is just short of 7,300, so admittedly I wound up writing quite a good chunk of it in BBEdit on my Mac.↩
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50 of the Most Burning Apple Questions Answered
You asked for help with the thorniest problems facing Mac, iPhone, and iPad owners, and we answered, providing 50 foolproof solutions that’ll come in handy for anyone who uses Apple gear.For months now, we’ve been asking you to send us your most burning Apple questions, and to put it mildly, you came through. The queue in our inbox looked longer than the lines that curled around NYC’s 5th Avenue Apple Store for the launch of the very first iPhone. And when we dug into the meat and potatoes of your queries, we could only marvel at the insightful list of vexing technical issues and twinkle-in-your-eye trivia tidbits that you challenged us with. We distilled all those inquiries down to the 50 best, most burning questions about Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple itself. Then we put our crack team of experts on the job of coming up with this ultimate answers guide for all things Apple. Struggling with iTunes syncing? iPhone backups? RAID cards? iPad printing? Or just wondering exactly what Steve actually wears every day? The answers await, backstopped and bulletproofed by the pros at Mac|Life.1. Duplicates in iPhotoI can’t find any options in iPhoto for removing all duplicate pictures in one fell swoop, and I don’t want to find and delete them all myself. Any ideas?iPhoto lacks iTunes’ duplicate-deleting prowess, but the shareware app Duplicate Annihilator can fill this gap and free your photo library of clutter. Despite the name, it identifies and tags duplicate pictures with a keyword so you can collect them in a Smart Folder to review and annihilate at your leisure.2. Wi-Fi DropoutsSince upgrading to Snow Leopard, my Wi-Fi connection randomly drops for no reason. I still get Wi-Fi reliably on my iPhone, and my wife gets it on her PC. Any advice?This problem seems to be affecting many Snow Leopard users, so we’ve come up with a series of steps that should resolve it. Start with the first and work down until the problem goes away:» Update to Mac OS X 10.6.3 or later.» Restart your modem and router.» Upgrade your router’s firmware to the latest version, particularly if it’s a non-Apple router.» Turn AirPort off then on again from your menu bar.» In your Network System Preference, create a new location and delete all of the previous locations.One of our best tips for troubleshooting Wi-Fi connection problems is to create one brand-new location and then delete all of your previous locations.» Within your new location, drag AirPort to the top of the service order by clicking on the gear icon and choosing “Set Service Order.”» Delete all of your preferred networks. To see your preferred networks, click on AirPort in the left margin, then the Advanced button, then the AirPort tab.» Within that Advanced area, click on the TCP/IP tab and turn off IPv6. Then, go into the DNS tab and make sure that your DNS servers are correct. If in doubt, try Google’s DNS servers of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.» Run Keychain First Aid in Keychain Access, which is located in your Utilities folder.» Manually change your router’s wireless channel to another channel to avoid interference with other wireless networks. See which channels are being used by other networks with a utility like AirRadar ($20, koingosw.com).» Turn off 802.11n mode on your router, leaving it in 802.11b/g mode only.» Change the security settings on your router from WEP to WPA/WPA2.» Zap the PRAM on your Mac (get instructions here).3. Multitouch GesturesWhy can’t I do the one-finger double-tap to open documents in Snow Leopard?You can absolutely use the one-finger double-tap on your Multi-Touch trackpad to open documents in Snow Leopard. Simply go into your Trackpad System Preference and make sure that “Tap to Click” is checked. Your confusion may also stem from the fact that your Multi-Touch trackpad is capable of understanding many gestures. So if you’ve enabled “Dragging” or “Drag Lock,” you might be holding down your finger too long after the second tap. If you’ve enabled “Secondary Click,” you might be tapping in the wrong area of your trackpad.4. Syncing iPhone PhotosWhen I sync my iPhone, all 6,000 of my MacBook Pro’s photos move to the iPhone--very uncool! How do I remove them from the phone and ensure one-way photo transfers to the Mac in the future?That’s at least 5,950 pictures too many. Just connect your iPhone to your MacBook, then select the iPhone in the iTunes sidebar. Click the Photos tab, where you can choose to transfer none of your pictures or just specific iPhoto Albums, Faces, and Events to your iPhone. Re-sync to apply your new settings and get back a few gigabytes on your iPhone.5. UninstallingMy Mac still runs processes from a program I deleted. How do I delete an application entirely and prevent this from happening?Unfortunately, there’s no standard way to remove a program from your Mac, but some developers simplify the job by including an uninstaller with their application. It may lurk in the main folder of the app you want to terminate--check those subfolders!--or it might be in the original installer itself. Launch the installer and proceed through it carefully. An uninstall feature may be obvious, or it could be hidden among options to customize the installation process. Be sure to quit the program you want to delete before uninstalling it.If an application didn’t come with an uninstaller, then the only way to delete it is to drag it to the Trash. However, this won’t remove preferences and other support files left behind on your Mac. You can use Spotlight to search for the deleted application’s name to find these strays, but if you have a lot of applications to remove, consider investing in a dedicated uninstaller like CleanApp, AppZapper, or AppCleaner. These programs automate the process of zapping unwanted programs--and their stuff--off your drive for good.6. File CompressionI’d like to save hard drive space with the Finder’s Compress command, but I’m not getting useful results. I recently compressed a 117.4MB file to just 116.7MB. Am I doing something wrong?Not all file types can be compressed with the same space-saving results. For example, compressing a ZIP archive won’t make a significantly smaller ZIP file. Some files, such as JPEGs, MP3s, and other media formats, have a certain level of compression already built in, but the sizes of text files and uncompressed image file formats can be dramatically reduced with ZIP compression.7. Remote ControlWhen I use my iPod touch as a remote for my Apple TV, it appears to only give me access to the Apple TV’s library as if it were an iPod. Is there a way to use the iPod touch like the traditional Apple remote? For example, can I use the touch to navigate to the YouTube app and search for videos, or to browse the movie rentals?Apple’s Remote app for the iPhone and iPod touch lets you control the playback of media that you’ve already purchased or downloaded. But for content that doesn’t live on your Apple TV, such as YouTube videos or the iTunes Store, you’ll still need your traditional Apple remote to navigate to those screens. However, the good news is that whenever an onscreen keyboard appears on your Apple TV, the Remote app will display its own keyboard, which lets you quickly type what you’re searching for.8. Photo MigrationCan Faces and Places data in iPhoto ‘09 be moved to another Mac, or do I have to click on all those faces and enter all those locations again?All your vacation sites and friendly faces will transfer to another Mac with OS X’s Migration Assistant, or you can drag your iPhoto library file from your Pictures folder to the same location on a new Mac. When you launch iPhoto on the new machine, you’ll be told the locations of pictures containing GPS data must be retrieved again, but custom locations you’ve entered yourself (for pictures taken with older cameras, say) will remain intact.9. Gmail, Behave!I sync Gmail with OS X’s Mail, but when I delete a message from Mail, it remains in Gmail’s All Mail folder in the sidebar. What’s the right mailbox setting to move a message deleted in Mail to Gmail’s Trash?All your Gmail goes into the All Mail folder, whether or not it’s been recently deleted and no matter which Gmail folder label is attached to the message. Google’s default IMAP Mail settings (available here) are correct, but to send a Mail message directly to Gmail’s Trash, you’ll have to drag it to the [Gmail]/Trash folder in Mail’s sidebar.10. Crash-TasticIt always happens at the worst possible time: I’ll be using my PowerBook G4 when the screen suddenly dims and shows a Rosetta Stone’s worth of languages telling me to restart the computer. Why does this keep happening, and how can I stop it?Ouch. What you’re describing is a kernel panic, a cute name for a not-so-cute problem. An operating system’s kernel acts as a bridge between applications and the computer’s hardware, and kernel panics are the last-ditch efforts of the operating system to recover from serious conflicts between them. The chief causes of kernel panics are faulty RAM and software incompatible with the operating system you’re running. Unfortunately, that range could include any number of bad things that may be happening on your poor PowerBook.Happily, even a kernel panic isn’t the end of the world, and we can offer some pointers to help you figure out what’s wrong. The first step is to look at your Mac’s history. Was there a time when it didn’t get kernel panics? Think back to any (and we mean any) new hardware or software you installed before the panics began. Update or uninstall them one item at a time to isolate the panics’ cause until you narrow down the trouble. Also note which hardware and software you’re using just before they strike--there may be a pattern. Whatever the issue, your Mac isn’t happy, so be sure to back up important files and verify your hard drive with Disk Utility regularly.Next page: Answers Guide continued >>11. Get Zippy iPhone BackupsHow can I speed up iPhone backups so I’ll never have to cancel mid-backup again? They seem to take forever when a couple minutes really should do it.A. First off, keep your iOS software current. Not only will the latest updates squash bugs and add features, they can improve backup times. To update, sync your iPhone, select it in the iTunes sidebar, then go to the Summary tab.B. Pare down the number of applications on your iPhone. Application data like in-app purchases, saved games, and new documents are all backed up when you sync, and that can add up to a long wait while the backup progress bar creeps by. To start cleaning house, connect to iTunes, select the Apps tab, then delete your most infrequently used applications. You’ll lose the data saved in these apps, but you’ll gain speedier backups.Ask yourself this: Are those apps you never use on your iPhone really worth slowing down your backups?C. Sync often. If you sync at least once or twice a day, fewer applications will have new data to back up when you reconnect to iTunes. If you can’t bear to part with any of the applications on your Home Screen, making multiple faster backups will let you keep all your favorite apps at your fingertips.D. Keep Camera Roll clean. While the contents of your iPhone’s photo library aren’t backed up during a sync, the photos, movies, and screenshots in Camera Roll are. Transfer this media to iPhoto as soon as you begin a sync, and delete the files from Camera Roll when the transfer is complete to get this data copied onto your Mac while excluding it from being backed up in iTunes.More photos = slower backups.E. Connect to a USB port on your Mac instead of an external USB hub. Not all USB ports are created equal, and connecting to a powered, full-speed USB port that’s built into your Mac will ensure the fastest possible transfer speeds during backups. That means you can be off to your next port of call quickly, secure in the knowledge that your iPhone data is safe on your computer.F. Before you sync to iTunes, purge unnecessary SMS messages, old call histories, and non-essential files downloaded by apps that store data on your iPhone. For example, if you regularly copy files to your iDisk app or productivity apps like DocsToGo, make sure you’re only carrying what you need before a backup. Odds are these files live elsewhere on your Mac or iDisk, so there’s no need to back them up again.Junk your old, unused files, too.12. Time TravelI’ve been running Time Machine for months in Mac OS 10.6.3, but I’ve never seen instructions about how to go back in time and retrieve information. Help!Mount your backup drive, then launch Time Machine from your Mac’s Applications folder. Your desktop will be replaced by a timeline and Finder windows showing your Mac’s contents as they were in the past. Just click a Finder window (or click within the timeline) to return to a specific date. You can also search within Finder windows for specific filenames, and more. When you find a missing file, select it and click Restore to return to the present with your document.13. Rip Encrypted MoviesI want an easy way to download a DVD to my computer so I can put it on my iPod or iPad. I used to use HandBrake, but that no longer works for encrypted DVDs.HandBrake (free, handbrake.fr) is still the quickest and most reliable tool for directly converting DVDs into video files that will play on your iPod or iPad. But you’ll also need to install VLC (free, videolan.org) if you want to decrypt commercial DVDs. Place both HandBrake and VLC into your Applications folder, and you’ll be able to convert encrypted DVDs with HandBrake once again.14. Dump DiscsI want to go disc-free on my MacBook, but a few of my games require a CD or DVD to play. Is there any way to make OS X think the disc is in the drive when it’s not?OS X’s Disk Utility can make a duplicate of your game’s CD or DVD and save it to your Mac as a file called a disk image. Once created, disk images can be double-clicked to open and mount on your desktop just like a conventional disc (you’ve already seen them in software installers downloaded from the internet). But there are two things to remember: copy-protection schemes on the disc may prevent duplication, and you should have plenty of room on your MacBook’s hard drive before you begin. A DVD’s disk image will take up several gigabytes.To get started, insert the disc you want to dupe, then launch Disk Utility from your Utilities folder. Select the disc in the sidebar, then click New Image in the Disk Utility toolbar, set the image format to DVD/CD Master in the resulting sheet, and save the disk image to your Mac. Next time you want to play your game, double-click the image file, then launch your game normally once the virtual game disc mounts. When you’re finished, you can drag the mounted disc to the Trash to eject like any conventional media, leaving the disk image on your Mac for the next time you want to get your game on.15. Branching OutWhich operating systems—and I mean all of them, not just Mac versions—will run on a PowerPC-based Mac?The PowerPC processor has become something of a museum piece since Apple abandoned it for Intel’s chips, but these Linux distributions can help you breathe new life into G5- and G4-powered Macs. Ubuntu, Yellow Dog, and Fedora all maintain builds that run on PowerPC hardware. When you’re looking to run a worthwhile alternate operating system on older Mac hardware, the penguin has you covered.16. The $1M QuestionWhen will Adobe Flash content be viewable on iPhones and iPads?Never. In April, Steve Jobs had this to say about Flash on Apple’s website: “Flash was created during the PC era--for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low-power devices, touch interfaces, and open web standards--all areas where Flash falls short.”17. iLife OopsI accidentally deleted iMovie and the Apple Loops that came with GarageBand. Can I reload them from the original disc without losing all my other iLife files?Sure! First, launch the iLife ‘09 installer from your disc. At the bottom of the final screen is a Customize button that lets you install iLife components individually. Click it, then select the items you want to reinstall. The installer will insist on installing GarageBand along with your missing loops, but your missing applications and files will return to your Mac without affecting other iLife applications and documents, including GarageBand preferences. Just remember to run Software Update afterward to ensure that everything’s up to date.18. iPad PrintingWhat are the best ways to print from the iPad?Until Apple decides to build printing into iOS, there unfortunately isn’t a “best” way--although there are several apps in the App Store that might meet your needs.Canon’s Easy-PhotoPrint for iPhone runs on the iPad and will print photos to certain Canon printers. And the App Store is full of plenty of third-party apps that promise printing from your iPad, although in our experience the results are decidedly mixed. PrintBureau ($12.99) searches your network for shared printers. It reliably printed to one--but not another--of the printers on our home network without any intervention. There’s an optional free helper application you can run on a Mac to give PrintBureau access to your printers (a solution common to several iPad printing apps), but we’d hardly call that true iPad printing.We also had success with Air Sharing HD ($9.99), which is packed with features for moving and sharing files with your iPad. It didn’t work immediately with our Wi-Fi–enabled printer, but turning on Printer Sharing on our Mac made all our printers visible to the app. But--like using a companion app--that also requires that you have a Mac running. Ultimately, the least fiddly solution often ends up being emailing yourself a document and printing from a computer. Hopefully Apple has something better in the pipeline…19. Tame BookmarksI have tons of Safari bookmarks on my Mac. I don’t want them all on my iPhone, but Apple only allows syncing of all or none. Is there a fix?It’s almost elegant. Xmarks (xmarks.com) syncs bookmarks across multiple browsers, and its profiles let you decide which bookmarks appear on specific devices, including your iPhone. Best of all, you can view (and even search) them in a layout formatted for Mobile Safari. Just sign up for Xmarks, follow their instructions, and disable iPhone bookmark syncing in iTunes. Unfortunately, Xmarks doesn’t sync new bookmarks made on your iPhone back to your Mac. Like we said…almost elegant.Next page: Answers Guide continued >>20. Stay SafeHow can I tell if someone is using my Wi-Fi?Elementary, my dear Wi-Fi user! The mystery’s solution lies in MAC (Media Access Control) addresses, which are unique codes that identify network devices. Different routers have different ways of showing which addresses (and thus, devices) are accessing your network. If you have an AirPort router, launch AirPort Utility from your Utilities folder, double-click your router’s icon, then click the Advanced icon in the resulting window. Click Logging and Statistics, then Logs and Statistics. In the Wireless Clients section, you’ll see a graph showing the address of each device connecting to your network. The list will include your Mac, the AirPort router itself, and any other computers, iPhones, game consoles, or other devices using your Wi-Fi connection. Next, match the MAC addresses to your network devices. We’ll get you started: your computer’s address can be found in the Network section of System Profiler. When you’re finished, you’ll know the addresses of devices you want on your network, so you can tell when something with a foreign address is using your Wi-Fi. Then the game’s afoot!21. Sim-plifyI have a 1G iPhone that I want to use as a simple iPod touch, leaving aside the phone features entirely, but I don’t have the original SIM card. What are my options?Your options are slim. Unlike later models, the 1G iPhone requires a SIM card to operate as a basic iPod, even after AT&T service has been terminated or transferred to another phone. You can get a new SIM card from AT&T, but this will require signing up for a new phone service contract. Unfortunately, there’s no way around this limitation besides jailbreaking your iPhone with one of the methods floating around on the internet.22. Merge PartitionsIs there any way to un-partition a non-boot hard drive in OS 10.6 without wiping the data?You’re in luck. Since 10.5, OS X’s Disk Utility has been able to add and remove partitions from disks without affecting other data on the drive. However, Disk Utility won’t merge data from the deleted partition to another partition on the drive, so back up all your data--especially files on the partition you’ll be removing--before you begin.Once all your data’s securely backed up, launch Disk Utility from your Mac’s Utilities folder, then select the drive in the sidebar (be sure to choose the icon noting the drive’s capacity, not just its name). Click the Partition button, then in the shaded box showing the drive’s Volume Scheme, select the partition you want to remove. Click the minus button below the Volume Scheme chart to remove the partition (don’t worry, it won’t disappear right away). Click and drag other partitions to resize them and fill the empty space that will be left behind by the deleted partition. You can also click the plus button to add a new partition that can also be resized. Click Apply to commit your changes and begin Operation: Un-partition.23. No ScratchingI just bought a new 21.5” iMac (late 2009 model) and found a serious design flaw: the CD slot has sharp aluminum edges that can inflict permanent, irreversible scratches to valuable CDs. Help!These days, Apple’s really into razor-sharp edges. For example, the unibody MacBooks also famously have sharp edges where users rest their wrists, and those very same sharp edges have made it onto the slot on the side of the iMac where CDs are loaded. Luckily, those sharp edges are just on the outside, not on the internal drive itself. So if you carefully and slowly slide in your CD without touching the outside edges, you may avoid scratching your CD. But here’s a more practical solution: Put electrical tape around the edges of the slot. This isn’t the most beautiful thing to look at, but it’s almost guaranteed to keep scratches at bay. Another option would be to purchase an external CD drive to either use as your primary CD drive or to make copies of your valuable CDs. That way, if a CD gets scratched, at least it’s not the original.24. Font FixesWhen using Mail, any font that I use in my outgoing email always shows up on recipient PCs as Courier--that archaic, typewriter style font. How can I get my Mac fonts to translate onto PCs?In order for a font to be successfully seen on somebody’s computer, they need to already have that particular font installed on their machine. If your recipient doesn’t have the same exact font as you, their computer will substitute your font with a font that is already installed on their system. This applies to emails, websites, Word documents, almost anything. If maintaining the integrity of fonts is important to you, you’ll need to create PDF files or images and attach them to your outgoing email message.25. App-Update ErrorsWhen I try to update apps from my iPhone, I get a “Cannot Connect to iTunes Store” error, yet I have no problem downloading new apps, and no problem updating them in iTunes on my computer. What gives?Assuming the problem is reoccurring and not a freaky networking accident, it sounds like your iPhone (or the problematic apps themselves) may be confused about the status of your iTunes account. This could be because a different user has logged into your iPhone, because you have multiple usernames or passwords tied to your iTunes account, or even because your billing information was recently changed on another device. The easiest place to start is by navigating to Settings, tapping Store, and confirming that yours is the currently active account on your iPhone. If it is, try signing out and signing back in with your most recent iTunes account information, then verify that your address and billing information are correct. If the problem persists, the apps may the culprit. Try updating them in iTunes, then deleting them from your iPhone. Reconnect your iPhone to your computer to sync the updated apps back to the phone. If, down the road, these same applications refuse to update from your iPhone again, deleting them from your Mac and re-downloading them from the iTunes Store may fix this.26. Make Windows BehaveI have various finder windows set to appear in different views depending on their content. But certain windows stubbornly--and randomly--refuse to remember my preferences. Is it a bug, or am I missing a setting?Setting a specific folder to open in a particular view (such as columns, icons, or lists) can make browsing files in the Finder a lot easier. Just open and set each folder to your preferred view, then select View > Show View Options in the menu bar and check the topmost button in the resulting window to force the Finder window to always open in that view. Unfortunately, the Finder has ignored these helpful preferences since the earliest days of OS X. Your stubborn folders aren’t the first!Your folders may be confused by corrupt .DS_Store files, the invisible files created by the Finder to store icon sizes, window backgrounds, and more. System utility apps like TinkerTool and Cocktail can reveal or delete these files for you, or you can use the Terminal to delete them yourself if your UNIX Fu is strong.If those options don’t do the trick, your Mac may think you don’t have permission to reset the view options of certain folders. Some, like the Applications folder, don’t technically “belong” to any user except the system itself, and only the system (also known as the root user) can make permanent changes to these directories. What looks like random stubbornness may be OS X remembering that it’s in charge of these folders, not you.To show your Mac who’s boss, log in as the root user, then set uncooperative folders to the view setting you prefer. Just be careful, and remember to log back into your normal user account and disable root access when the job is done. Moving or deleting the wrong files while logged in as root can have serious consequences for your Mac. Apple explains how to log in as root here.27. Just Open!I used to double-click any photo, and it would open in Photoshop. When I installed 10.6, this feature disappeared. Now I have to drop the photos onto the Photoshop icon.Snow Leopard ignores “creator codes,” which changed its file-opening behavior--it’s all about file extensions now. Right-click a JPG, choose Get Info, and under Open With, choose Photoshop, and click Change All. Do this again for PNG, PSD, TIF, and any other photo file types you want Photoshop to get first dibs on.28. iPads Kill Wi-FiWhen enough of us use iPads on the office Wi-Fi, it can crash the Wi-Fi itself! I’ve heard this is a common problem--is there a fix?You’ve heard right, and it’ll take an OS and/or firmware update from Apple to vanquish this annoying glitch. Until then, know that the issue is caused because an iPad can stop renewing its DHCP lease when it goes to sleep, so if you set your iPad to never sleep (Settings > General > Auto-Lock > Never), you’re good. That’s hardly ideal, and at Mac|Life HQ, we set up an iPad-only Wi-Fi network, which creates a smaller pool of DHCP leases and keeps the main Wi-Fi network safe. Interestingly, iPads are also prone to other Wi-Fi glitches, like sketchy signal strength, frequent drops, and slow speeds. Bizarrely, one of the first things you should do is increase the brightness upward and turn off the Auto Brightness option (Settings > Brightness & Wallpaper). We can only guess that something’s screwy with iPad power management…29. Mac Pros Are HotI just wanted to bring to your attention a widespread, frustrating issue that exists with all 2009 Mac Pros. Whenever you play any audio, the CPU rapidly heats up (core temperatures as high as 90ºC, CPU heat sink 60ºC). This problem exists in 10.5 and 10.6, but does not happen in Windows running in Boot Camp, so it appears to be a Mac OS X bug. And after spending $8,000 on Apple’s top machine, I feel like I have been had.Yes, this seems to be a prevalent problem with the 2009 Mac Pros. Playing any type of audio heats up the Pro precariously close to--but not quite at--dangerous heat levels. If your Mac actually reached dangerous heat levels, it would shut itself down. This increased heat also causes decreased performance. Unfortunately, we don’t have any solutions for you, but we’re publishing your letter in the hopes that greater publicity on this issue will help get a speedy resolution from Apple.Next page: Answers Guide continued >>30. What a Mess!One of my co-workers spilled juice on his older MacBook Pro, and now the keys are sticky (when pressed down, they don’t pop up right away). What’s the best way to clean up?Sounds nasty! Although this particular spill has long dried, we’ll start these cleanup instructions from the moment right after spillage to make them more widely useful. So: Immediately power down, disconnect the power cord from the MacBook, and remove the battery (if it’s removable). After doing as much as you can with paper or cloth towels, turn the machine over with the lid partly open to allow the liquid to drain, making sure that the laptop doesn’t close all the way. Give it about 72 hours to completely air dry and then take apart the machine to thoroughly clean the innards. The website iFixIt.com has great step-by-step guides to taking the keys off and getting your MacBook back to normal. When dabbing at disassembled keys and other parts, we recommend a bit of gauze lightly dampened with rubbing alcohol.31. Airport FizzlesI stream my music from iTunes to an AirPort router, but it frequently cuts out. What can I do?First, make sure your iTunes and AirPort software are up to date. If the problem persists, move your router away from possible sources of interference. Wi-Fi is convenient, but it’s not an exact science. Signals can be impeded by microwaves, wireless phones, thick masonry, and more. If dropouts continue, try changing the channel on which your AirPort broadcasts in the Wireless tab of the AirPort section of AirPort Utility.32. Family PlanningMy wife and I have our own iPhones and iTunes accounts, and we’re adding an iPad to the happy family. Can we sync both iPhones and the iPad (plus our Apple TV) to a single iTunes account, and share our apps on all devices without affecting our current library and future purchases?Bad news first: there’s no way to merge multiple iTunes accounts into one, so your family will have to keep juggling separate accounts and purchases from your iPhones, Apple TV, and bouncing baby iPad. The good news is that apps, like DRM-protected movies and TV shows, can be used on up to five authorized computers and the iDevices that sync to them. Just open iTunes, select Apps in the sidebar, then drag iPhone applications you want to share from iTunes to a networked computer or removable hard drive. Select File > Add to Library in iTunes on the second authorized computer, then choose the exported apps to load them into that computer’s library. These apps won’t retain saved data from the original computer, but otherwise they’ll be fully operational and can be updated normally. Apple TV purchases, however, will still be tethered to one of your computers. But even these files can be synced and transferred to multiple computers and iDevices.Here’s the better news: Home Sharing, introduced in iTunes 9, simplifies this process by allowing users to drag and drop media to shared computers within iTunes. Activate Home Sharing by selecting Advanced > Turn On Home Sharing. Repeat this step on all your computers, entering one iTunes account username and password on each. Then you can drag media from shared libraries in iTunes’ sidebar into a computer’s local library at will. Future purchases can be shared automatically by clicking the Settings button at the bottom of Home Sharing iTunes library, then selecting which media you’d like to share. Once you set up all computers on your network, syncing works automatically, zapping new media off to each machine.33. Double the AddressesWhy do I have duplicate Contact entries on my iPhone but not on my Mac?Odds are your iPhone has gained multiple groups of contacts after syncing them both wirelessly through MobileMe and through iTunes when you connected your iPhone to your Mac. Whatever the cause, check your iPhone Contact app’s Groups. If you see a group named From My Mac in addition to groups you’ve created in OS X’s Address Book, it’s a sign your iPhone thinks you have two distinct sets of friends.It's hard enough to find the contact you're looking for--who needs duplicate entries?To fix the problem, first back up your Mac’s contact data. Connect your iPhone to iTunes, uncheck Sync Address Book Contacts in the Info tab, then re-sync. If that doesn’t remove the extra contacts, turn off MobileMe contact syncing in Settings on your iPhone, choosing to delete the existing contacts on your phone. Next, turn Contact syncing back on, and choose to merge MobileMe’s data onto your iPhone if asked. Now you should have just one set of contacts shared between your iPhone and Mac. You’ll have half the friends, but half the hassles.34. Conquer SyncingWhat's the most elegant way to sync iTunes libraries between work and home computers?We use SuperSync, a program that lets you sync your iTunes library among multiple computers on local networks or over the Internet. SuperSync’s busy interface can seem a little daunting, but in just a few quick steps, you can start copying music from your crib to your cubicle and back again. Casual Fridays will never be the same.A. Buy the SoftwareSuperSync looks and feels kinda like iTunes, but is a whole different beast.To get started, you’ll need a copy of SuperSync running on both your home and work computers. Two licenses will set you back $24, or you can snag ten for $34 and give one to your manager for Boss’s Day.B. Make the ConnectionsWhen you first launch SuperSync on your home Mac, it loads and displays your iTunes library in an iTunes-alike window organized by genre, artist, and playlist. While SuperSync may look a little like iTunes (and it can even play some unprotected audio files), it’s really a conduit and control panel for syncing, not a jukebox. Your DRM-protected files must still be played by an authorized copy of iTunes, although SuperSync will transfer them just fine.SuperSync can even keep metadata updated across different Macs.If your music collection doesn’t live in your Mac’s Home folder, you can point SuperSync to a library stored on a remote or network drive and share from there. To set up sharing, just check the obvious boxes and enter a password in the application’s Network preferences. While you’re there, you can fine-tune what you sync and how. For instance, you can keep specific media types--all videos, for instance--out of your shared library and pick which metadata changes will be synced back to your home machine. Whether you simply want to copy files or meticulously update their play counts, ratings, and more across your computers, SuperSync has your back.C. Start the SyncTo sync your library, install and launch SuperSync on your work machine, then turn on sharing and connect to your home computer. This is easiest (and fastest) on a local network, but you can sync your music over the internet by manually forwarding ports on your home router, or by using a UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) router and letting SuperSync do the work for you.When the syncing starts, SuperSync's interface gets pretty busy.Once you get both computers talking to each other, you can synchronize your entire library in one go, sync individual files, or transfer albums, artists, and whole genres at once. You can even sync your playlists--both their music files and the lists themselves in the iTunes sidebar. Naturally, files added to iTunes on your work computer can be synced back to your home Mac. Just finish your download in iTunes, then phone home with SuperSync. New files will be noted automatically and can be transferred with a click.35. Hot FlashMy MacBook Pro has been acting strangely. It will become sluggish, get hot, and the fans will come on at full speed. Activity Monitor shows that a process called “PTMD” is taking over 60 percent of my CPU. How do I prevent PTMD from taking over my Mac?This may not be a common question, but it certainly is a burning one! According to Apple’s Mac OS X Reference Library, PTMD stands for “platform thermal monitor daemon,” and it communicates any OS notifications effecting thermal conditions to your hardware. This daemon is supposed to automatically quit itself when it’s done communicating, but apparently your Mac erroneously thinks that its thermal conditions are continuously changing, so it’s trying to let your hardware continuously know this incorrect information.This seems to be a new problem that has cropped up for some users in Mac OS 10.6.3, so hopefully it will be fixed in a future update to the operating system. In the meantime, you can manually quit out of PTMD in Activity Monitor (launch it from your Utilities folder) whenever it starts acting up. You may also try resetting your Mac’s System Management Controller, which is responsible for thermal management (follow the directions here).36. It's a RAIDI have Apple’s RAID card in my Mac Pro, and it always pops up this error message: “Write cache disabled due to insufficient battery charge.” But...what is a RAID card, and what should I do?Apple's Mac Pro RAID Card improves RAID performance and reliability.RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks, and it’s a tech that lets you combine multiple hard drives so they appear as one. RAIDs can either be mirrored or striped--in the first, each drive is an exact copy (or mirror) of the other drives, so if one fails, you’ll still have all of your data intact on another (known as redundancy). If you configure your drives as a striped RAID, the storage space of all of your drives is added together into one larger drive. This will give you increased performance and increased storage space, but no redundancy unless you’ve configured your RAID with parity handling (which uses a portion of each drive to hold identical copies of data from one of the other drives). RAIDs can be controlled by software like Apple’s Disk Utility or the excellent SoftRAID ($129, softraid.com), or they can be controlled by hardware like your RAID card. The main advantages of a hardware-controlled RAID are increased performance and reliability. With the error message you’re receiving, it sounds like the battery on your RAID card has died, so take it into Apple to get replaced.37. iPad 2What upgrades will we see in the next version of the iPad? (We emailed a trio of well-known tech experts for their predictions.)Daniel LyonsNewsweek"I'd guess the following:» Front-facing camera for videoconferencing» Multitasking (duh, already announced)» Higher-resolution screen» No Flash» Gorgeous ads that will change your life» Unicorn tears"Christopher NullYahoo! News, Technology"Dual cameras--a front-facing camera for videoconferencing will be huge for opening up a whole new market for the iPad."Dylan TweneyWired"One of the things most obviously missing from the current iPad is a webcam. This would instantly transform the iPad into a videophone, and its size—just slightly bigger than the human face—would be perfect for face-to-face video chats. It’s also likely that the next iPad will have more memory and a faster processor. If we’re lucky, it might have an HDMI port too, so you can hook it up to a TV to show off photos, videos, and apps. One thing it definitely won’t have, though, is support for Adobe Flash. That door is closed, probably forever."38. Mac Van WinkleWhen I wake my MacBook Pro from sleep, it doesn’t connect to my Wi-Fi. Sometimes it even forgets the Wi-Fi password. How the heck do I get it to remember?First, check out the extensive troubleshooting steps that we gave in Question #2 to see if any of those ideas solve your problem. Beyond that, your problem may be caused by one of the following issues:» Two Wi-Fi networks with the same SSID (wireless network name). For example, do you connect to one wireless router that’s named “Linksys” at work and then another router that’s named “Linksys” at home? If so, your Mac may be trying to apply the password from one router to the other router. Rename one of the wireless networks.» Keychain problems. Launch Keychain Access (in Utilities) and delete any AirPort Network password entries for the wireless networks that are giving you problems.» Preferred Networks problem. Go into your Network System Preference, click on AirPort, then the Advanced button, then the AirPort tab. Delete any unused networks, and drag your current network to the top of the list.» Corrupt preference file. Trash the file located at Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist and restart your Mac.» Security incompatibilities. Try changing the type of wireless security on your router (for example, WPA instead of WEP).» Wireless interference. Turn on interference robustness on your router or change the wireless channel.» Your system may need a general maintenance. Run Disk Warrior on your machine, repair permissions with Disk Utility, empty the caches, and run the UNIX maintenance scripts with Cocktail.39. Style ManualWhat exactly does Steve wear on a daily basis?We asked our team of fashion experts, and they said, “The same dang thing no matter what.” So we made them stalk the streets of Cupertino and watch hours of keynote footage to bring you the scoop on Steve’s sartorial secrets. That’ll show ’em.Next page: Answers Guide continued >>40. Sad MacMy iMac flat-out freezes when I try to wake it from sleep. I ran DiskTools Pro, which verified and repaired my hard drive, but it still hangs after waking from sleep.This is often a symptom of a failing graphics card or a failing logic board inside your Mac, in which case you would need to take your Mac into an Apple Authorized Service Provider for repair. However, before assuming the worst, you can perform a series of basic troubleshooting steps to rule out other variables that may be causing this symptom.» External devices: When your Mac fails to wake from sleep, try unplugging any external hard drives or peripherals to see if doing so makes your Mac suddenly wake from sleep. If so, those external devices may be to blame. » RAM: You may also have bad RAM inside your machine. You can try to pinpoint bad RAM by either removing one of your RAM chips and see if the problem continues, or by running the Apple Hardware Test to see if it can identify any bad RAM. To run the Apple Hardware Test, take a look at the DVDs that came with your Mac; one of them will say that the Apple Hardware Test is on it. Insert that DVD and restart your Mac while holding down the D key on your keyboard. » Reset your Mac’s System Management Controller (get instructions here).Next, try to rule out the software problems: » Trash the following files and then restart your Mac: Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist and Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist » Reboot your Mac in single-user mode and run fsck (file system check)--get instructions here. » Back up your Mac, then erase and install Mac OS X.If all of these steps fail, it's time, sadly, to bring your Mac into an Apple Authorized Service Provider.41. Stop TimeWhen Time Machine is running, my Mac virtually comes to a stop. What is happening, and what should I do?Any time an application such as Time Machine is actively reading or writing to a hard drive, you may notice a tiny bit of a speed loss if you’re also trying to access your hard drive as well because the read/write heads take time to physically move to different locations on the hard drive platter.However, the key phrase is “a tiny bit of a speed loss,” meaning that the speed loss should be negligible to most computer users. Time Machine is designed to be fast and extremely lightweight, so if your computer is actually coming to a standstill, then something else is going on. The best way to troubleshoot this is by eliminating variables. First, make sure that you do not have any virus software scanning your backup drive. This is a known factor that could slow down your Time Machine backups to a crawl and that may affect your computer’s overall speed as well.Then, eliminate the possibility that your backup drive has a hardware problem by swapping it out with a different backup drive. If you don’t have another drive handy, a utility such as Drive Genius ($99, prosofteng.com) or Disk Warrior ($99, alsoft.com) can help you sniff out failing hard drives. Your backup drive must also be partitioned properly, as explained at tinyurl.com/3zne68.Next, use a different backup program like ChronoSync to see if the slowdowns continue. If they do, ChronoSync will let you see which file is actively being backed up while the problem is happening. It could indicate a problem with that particular file or with your internal hard drive.Other than that, you can try some general tips to speed up your Mac overall: Upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard; purchase faster internal and external drives (7200 RPM or SSD); use a faster connection interface (eSATA or FireWire 800); add more RAM to your Mac; and turn off hard disk sleep in the Energy Saver System Preference (this last one has a huge impact if your hard drive is powered via USB only and has no separate AC power).42. Display DespairWhy has Apple used so many display interfaces recently, and is the current Mini DisplayPort standard the best tech for the job?Mini DisplayPort meets VGA with this adapter.Apple’s flirtation with different video interfaces makes it seem like a puppet of the International Dongle Cartel, but it’s really all about doing more with ever-shrinking video ports. That includes today’s Mini DisplayPort, which can carry video and audio and connects to VGA, DVI, or HDMI displays at resolutions up to 2560x1600. We’re not sure if that makes it the best technology, but if it lets us carry just one small adapter that works on both MacBooks and iMacs, we’re happy.43. Feelin' SocialDoes Apple have a Twitter account or Facebook page of any sort whatsoever?YouTube has your favorite Apple commercials.Steve may be cool with answering emails, but the company isn’t too keen on Twitter. There is no official Apple Twitter account. Facebook is a bit more complicated. While Apple hasn’t set up an official company page, it has created an App Store Facebook page: facebook.com/AppStore. Our preferred destination, though, is the Apple YouTube channel, which lets us check out all of our favorite Apple commercials: youtube.com/apple.44. Feelin' BluWhen will Apple include USB 3.0 and Blu-ray in Macs? What’s taking so long?USB 3.0 gear is already trickling onto the market, so it’s probably just a matter of time before the first computers sporting the blazing new standard roll out of Cupertino. Unfortunately, Blu-ray is another story. Apple’s interest in promoting its HD iTunes movie downloads and Steve’s declaration that bringing Blu-ray to the Mac is “a bag of hurt” don’t bode well for Blu’s chances on the Mac.45. Photo DownloadsThere seems to be no way to download my photos from my iPhone directly to my Mac without using iPhoto. Even then, I have to drill down through some crazy iPhoto directories in the Finder just to copy the photos somewhere else. Can’t I just pull these photos off my iPhone and put them wherever I want?Any photos that are in iPhoto can be easily and quickly copied somewhere else on your Mac simply by dragging and dropping them out of iPhoto. For even more control over the size, format, and name of your photos, use the File > Export command in iPhoto. You don’t need to--and you really shouldn’t--be drilling down into any iPhoto directories on your Mac.Now, onto your next question of bypassing iPhoto altogether. In Mac OS 10.6, the Image Capture application gives you a significant amount of control over what happens when you connect your iPhone. If you have multiple cameras or iPhones, Image Capture even lets you set different preferences for each individual camera.Image Capture is the place to go to directly download photos from your cameras or to set what happens whenever you connect your cameras.You could have your iPhone launch Image Capture itself, which lets you manually download your photos into the directories of your choice and then delete those photos from the iPhone. You could have your iPhone launch Preview, which lets you import iPhone photos from the File menu. You could have your iPhone run an AppleScript.But perhaps best of all, your iPhone could launch AutoImporter, a hidden application that automatically imports photos to the directory of your choice, without you intervening at all. It’s located at Macintosh HD/System/Library/Image Capture/Support/Application/AutoImporter, and you can set this application’s preferences by choosing AutoImporter > Preferences.46. Tame MobileMeI have four Apple devices: two MacBooks, an iPhone, and an iPad. It would be wonderful if MobileMe would do its job and sync all of my calendar and contact information, but I continually have glitches. One of the devices will often stop syncing, and then I have to wipe out data and start all over again. Is there any way to alleviate these problems?We’ve heard from an Apple support representative that syncing problems with MobileMe are very common because the MobileMe servers are not yet robust enough to handle more than 1,000 synchronizations before everything needs to be reset from scratch again. While 1,000 synchronizations might sound like a lot, consider that a sync takes place every single time you make a change to a contact or a calendar. The good news, however, is that this same representative told us that Apple is aware of its MobileMe syncing shortcomings and is continuously working to increase the competency of its servers.In the meantime, if you want to stick with MobileMe syncing, your best bet for solving the glitches you’re experiencing would be to follow our extensive guide from our November 2009 issue (or find it online here--scroll down to #37) on how to reset your MobileMe syncing from scratch on all of your devices.Alternatively, you may want to ditch MobileMe altogether and explore alternatives such as the web-based calendaring and contact solutions from Google, which can synchronize to your iPhone and iPad using Google Sync (google.com/mobile/sync). On your Mac, you can synchronize to Google using Spanning Sync ($25 for one year, spanningsync.com) or use the built-in (but more limited) syncing tools within Snow Leopard’s Address Book and iCal.If you have an extra Mac that you can use as a server machine, you can even take syncing into your own hands by using a product like Apple’s Snow Leopard Server ($499, apple.com) or the outstanding Kerio Connect ($540, kerio.com).47. The Other TeamI’m running Windows 7 on my Mac using Boot Camp. How do I maintain my computer so both the Mac and Windows platforms stay healthy? And how can I make a clone of my computer that captures both?For tips on how to keep your Windows 7 partition healthy, you’ll want to turn to our sister magazine Maximum PC (this is a good place to start), where you’ll find the experts on all things PC-related. Although conventional wisdom about PCs dictates that you’ll want to defragment your Windows hard drive regularly and immediately install antivirus software on your Windows partition, those are two things that Mac users are not required to do.Your Mac will continue to maintain its health as long as all those hundreds of thousands of Windows viruses can’t reach your Mac files from within the Windows 7 environment. And they won’t be able to since Boot Camp only allows you to read your Mac partition but not write to it.If you gotta run Windows 7, Boot Camp can get it done on your Mac.However, if you install a program like MacDrive 8 ($49, mediafour.com), you’ll have full read and write access to your Mac partition...and so will all those Windows viruses. So be doubly sure to have antivirus software on your PC side.To clone your entire computer, you’ll need to make two clones: one for your Mac partition and one for your Windows partition. For the Mac partition, use a tool like SuperDuper ($28, shirt-pocket.com) or Carbon Copy Cloner (donations requested, bombich.com). For your Windows partition, we recommend Winclone (donations requested, twocanoes.com).48. Log Me OutMy iMac has separate user accounts for my wife and me, plus a Guest Account for when we have parties and people are drawn to the 27-inch screen to play. Can the Mac automatically return to the login screen after some period of inactivity? I don’t want guests to have access to our accounts, and I don’t want my wife to have to remember to log out when she’s finished. I just want it to go back to the login screen to force the next person to log in as a user or guest.No problem--head to System Preferences > Security and check the box for Log Out After X Minutes of Activity, setting X to be any number you like. While you’re there, make sure Disable Automatic Login is checked too. That way, the login screen always appears when you start up, instead of a default administrator account.The auto-logout option is in System Preferences > Security.It’s also easy to lock down the Guest Account with System Preferences > Parental Controls, which lets you select which applications will be available. By default any files in a Guest Account’s Home folder are deleted when they log out, but you could park an alias in the Dock to a shared folder on your hard drive, called, say, “Save Stuff Here.” While you’re sprucing up the Dock, add some big, pretty icons for party-startin’ apps like Photo Booth and Camera Bag.Set up a Guest Account with System Preferences > Accounts, then manage--or spy on--it with Parental Controls.49. SilenceHow do I disable voice control on my iPhone 3GS? I never use it, and it's annoying when it's in my pocket and accidentally activates.Good news: You can shut off Voice Control dialing. Bad news: Voice Control everything else stays on. To shut down Voice Control dialing, you need to turn on the Passcode Lock option for your iPhone. To do this and turn off Voice Control Dialing, navigate to Settings > General > Passcode Lock. Once you turn on Passcode Lock, you can turn off Voice Dial.50. Behind the Black ShirtWhat does it take to become a Genius Bar technician?There are fewer great occupations in life than working at the Genius Bar. Think about it: When someone asks you what you do for a living, you get to tell them that you’re a Genius. On top of that, you get to manhandle Apple computers all day long, dealing with situations like figuring out what in the heck is going on with a MacBook that a carpenter impaled with his drill (remember to tell him it’s no longer under warranty). Check out our handy chart to see what it takes to become a Genius Bar employee.A. Get Smart!First things first: You gotta have plenty of knowledge about past and present Apple products. Geniuses must know hardware ranging across entire generations of Apple products, as well as software offered for all of the latest operating systems. After all, you never know what to expect when you work at the bar. For all you know, a customer might bring in their Performa 460 and ask you to transfer their hard drive data to one of those newfangled Mac Pros.B. Be Happy--and DiscreetEmployees at the Apple Store must be like employees at Disneyland--you’re in the Happiest Place on Earth, so smile…and keep your lips zipped tight about any advance knowledge of upcoming Apple products you might have. Or else.C. Magic HandsBefore you can get your hands on customers’ gear, you need to get trained. A lot. Applying to be a Genius begins with a battery of tech questions--and we’re not talking the ins and outs of GarageBand, either. Applicants are expected to have deep knowledge about how to diagnose and fix serious hardware and software issues--after all, most of their job involves coping with damaged or seriously broken gear. Survive that hurdle, and it’s off to Cupertino for four weeks of sessions that include acquiring three Apple certifications (OS, Desktop, and Portable) and practice time with fake customers who are really good at being a pain in your backside. After that, the apprenticeship continues in a real live Apple Store for as much as another month before you become true blue Genius material.D. Black is BossThe shirt color is an essential part of working in the Apple store. The shirt depicts what department you work in and makes it so that customers know who exactly the Geniuses are who can help them with their waterlogged iPhone.E. Load-BearingCan you diagnose a problem and solve it within 15 minutes? The Geniuses at the Bar can. Appointments taken at the back of the store are only supposed to take as long as it takes to get you halfway through your favorite sitcom, which ensures that even stores with heavy traffic volumes have a chance to help everyone out.
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50 Killer Mac Apps For Under $50
Who doesn't need more for less? We present 50 Mac|Life-approved applications--many free, all under $50--that'll guarantee you get the most from your Mac without traumatizing your wallet.The Internet is full of noise--countless different applications for every occasion, with reviews everywhere that love and hate them at the same time. While that’s hardly news, it’s still a hassle that isn’t going away. Say you picked up a spiffy new MacBook Pro, and it’s time to kit it out with the leanest, meanest software. After all, Macs have that rich history of garage-roots development, of a few folks in a basement brewing up quality software that smokes the big-name stuff. So you’ve got a feeling there’s great, affordable software just waiting for you to find it--and you’re right. But how do you sift through the zillion calendar apps and jillion media players to find the gems worthy of your hard drive space? And more importantly, your time and money?We’re here to help with a compendium of essential software. It didn’t come easily--we debated, argued, haggled, and even pleaded to secure a prized position on this list for our favorite, most useful applications. But by limiting the software we’re highlighting to 50, we’ve guaranteed you the best of the best--no Internet spew here. And by capping the cost of the software we’ve selected at $50, we’ve made sure you can reasonably buy what you need. You may love your Mac already, but you’re not gonna believe how much it can do once you load up even a few of these choice applications. EntertainmentSure, iPods and iTunes make music and movies easier to enjoy, but they're not without headaches of their own. That's where these awesome apps come in. They take the pain out of kicking back with your favorite flicks and tunes.Simplify MediaShare & stream your iTunes library over the Internet.The iPod has made several portable music formats obsolete, and we sure don’t miss schlepping around fragile cassette tapes or heavy wallets full of CDs. But even the mighty iPod has its limits--namely capacity. That’s where Simplify Media (free, Simplify Media, simplifymedia.com) comes in handy. It guarantees that the size of your music library doesn’t matter by letting you stream music between computers via the Internet. Yup, this app will play your entire library on any computer (as long as the one that has your library is powered up and online).Stream your tunes from home or the next cube.Once installed, a simple login fires up your music. Simplify Media works with iTunes just like the built-in LAN sharing does, and the remote libraries appear under Shared, alongside any local shared libraries. Even better, you can add up to 30 friends’ shared libraries, and an iPhone app ($5.99) lets you pipe your music to your iPhone or iPod touch.SuperSyncSuperSync keeps multiple iTunes collections in sync.Speaking of iTunes libraries--streaming is great, but what if you want to sync libraries across multiple Macs? SuperSync ($22, SuperSync, supersync.com) makes it so. Sure, Apple introduced limited music-transfer capabilities with Home Sharing in iTunes 9, but that feature requires computers to be on the same local network. SuperSync one-ups iTunes by syncing iTunes libraries over the Internet. It’s perfect for anyone who uses multiple Macs, and SuperSync also has a bunch of other tricked-out features. In deference to the record companies, Apple makes transferring music from an iPod to a computer unnecessarily difficult. SuperSync handles the task with ease, making it a bacon-saver when the hard drive in your Mac kicks the bucket. SuperSync will even allow you to sync libraries cross-platform.SuperSync's color-coded interface helps you synchronize your iTunes tracks across multiple Macs.VLC Media PlayerNever worry about video file types again. If most of your Mac video-watching happens in the form of DVDs or QuickTime movies, you probably don’t think too much about player software. But move beyond the most basic video types, and you’re asking for trouble. With the myriad formats, containers, and encoding parameters available, the simple act of playing back a cat video can become incredibly frustrating. VLC Media Player (free, VideoLAN, www.videolan.org) is like a Swiss Army knife for digital media. It’s open source and cross-platform, and the app will play back practically any audio or video file you throw at it. VLC also handles file conversions with ease, so you can use it to convert audio and video for use online or on portable devices.It plays, it converts, it makes toast (okay, maybe not that last one.)RipItBackup & convert DVDs with RipIt.There are plenty of legit reasons to rip a DVD. Backup copies of kids’ movies for the minivan, watching Glee on your iPod touch while you’re on the bus, or even just saving battery power on your laptop (playing back a file from a hard drive is much more efficient than spinning a DVD).RipIt's simple interface makes ripping DVDs seamless and easy.Once the domain of übernerds, DVD ripping is a one-click affair thanks to RipIt ($19.95, The Little App Factory, ripitapp.com). And since it makes full rips, all of the menus, bonus features, and subtitles remain intact. You can play back the resulting files with DVD Player on your Mac or use a freeware tool like Handbrake to convert your rips into iPod-friendly formats. Delicious LibraryWe love the iTunes Store, but we still end up accumulating books, DVDs, console games, and, yes, even CDs. Delicious Library ($40, Delicious Monster Software, www.delicious-monster.com) helps catalog your collections by--get this--taking snaps of UPCs via your webcam and then automatically organizing your meatspace content onto virtual shelves for easy sorting and browsing. You can track loans to friends, post items for sale on Amazon, and publish Web catalogs formatted for your iPhone. That way, you can avoid buying another copy of John Hodgman’s More Information Than You Require. Connect360We’re Apple-faithful, but that doesn’t stop us from engaging in a little Modern Warfare 2 on our Xbox 360. And since the 360 is much more than a simple gaming machine, we also use it to stream iTunes tracks to our entertainment center and view pictures from our iPhoto library on our HDTV--with the help of Connect360 ($20, Nullriver Inc, www.nullriver.com), that is. It works over wired or wireless networks, and it even streams H.264 video straight from our MacBook. Sweet! PeelPack rats, beware: Peel ($14.95, Hjalti Jakobsson, www.getpeel.com) can get really overwhelming, really fast. But if you’re an avid follower of music blogs, Peel can automagically grab new tracks as they’re posted. So forget all that pesky right-clicking and manually adding to iTunes. Just feed Peel a list of your favorite music blogs, and then kick back as tons of new, free tunes get downloaded straight to your Mac. You may never have to buy (or pirate) music again. CoverScoutCover Flow is one of those features that looks great in a demo but doesn’t quite translate at home. iTunes can attempt to find the album art that makes Cover Flow actually useful, but it’s limited in scope and can’t make fuzzy matches. CoverScout ($39.95, equinox USA, www.equinux.com) scours the Internet to find your missing album art and presents you with multiple options to let you choose the best images. Don’t Cover Flow without it. TuneUpFor all of those untitled and mistitled tracks in your music library, there’s TuneUp ($19.95/one year, $29.95/lifetime; TuneUp Media; www.tuneupmedia.com). Like CoverScout, TuneUp can find and download missing album art, but its best trick is cleaning up your ID3 tags--the artist, title, and album info displayed in iTunes. A quick search is all it takes to clear up all those Track 1s and Unknown Artists in your library. It sure beats cleaning up metadata by hand.Next Page: Productivity Apps >> ProductivityTakin' care of business, every day. Takin' care of business, every way. Workin' on a Mac, it's all right. This productivity software is workin' overtime.WriteRoomBlocks distractions so you can write in peace.Proving the tired adage that “less is more,” WriteRoom ($24.95, Hog Bay Software, www.hogbaysoftware.com) is a light text editor with a full-screen mode. Start a new document, and everything else fades away--your Dock, your menubar, and other windows on your Desktop. You’re left with a black screen and friendly green text for a clutter- and distraction-free experience. The Escape key toggles between full-screen mode and windowed mode, which resembles TextEdit with a live word count.WriteRoom can save your work as plain text, rich text, or Microsoft Word’s .doc format. The preferences offer tons of customization: auto-save, character counts, the appearance of text in full-screen mode, and more. But WriteRoom’s real magic is how it gets out of your way and lets you focus on what you’re doing.BusyCalOne calendar application to rule them all.BusyCal ($40, BusyMac, www.busymac.com) is iCal on steroids. It dances circles around iCal, chanting, “Everything you can do, I can do better.” And it’s right. Sharing is a snap: You can set up two-way syncing with your Google Calendar or with other BusyCal calendars on your local network or the wide-open Internet. But even aside from sharing, BusyCal offers tons of calendaring bells and whistles: customizable views, sticky notes, weather forecasts, moon phases, graphical icons, a to-do list, notes, tags, and much more. And since it uses the Sync Services built into Mac OS X, your BusyCal calendars can sync with MobileMe and your iPhone. You can even switch back to iCal anytime without losing any of the events or to-dos you entered in BusyCal.So what if iCal is free? BusyCal is better.ThingsFlexible to-do list syncs with iCal and the iPhone. For busy people like us, a good to-do list is beyond essential. But some that we’ve tried are so complicated that just managing your tasks becomes a chore in itself. So the light, easy-to-understand Things ($49.95, Cultured Code, www.culturedcode.com) is a breath of fresh air. You can go the full Getting Things Done route, adding contexts, priority levels, a tickler file, and so on. Or you can keep it simple, with one-off and repeating tasks and multistep projects. iCal syncing can get your deadlines on your calendar, and Things on the Mac can sync wirelessly with Things on the iPhone ($9.99 in the App Store). We’ve tried multiple task-managment systems, from Web-based ToodleDo to iPhone apps like ToDo to Mail’s built-in To-Do list to good old paper and pencil. Things is the cream of the crop for its good looks, quick entry, and easy syncing.Things uses tags to organize your projects in a million ways--or you can ignore the tags altogether and just work.Express ScribeTranscriptions made easy... well, easier.Transcribing an interview, lecture, or other recording is hard enough, just with the listening and typing. Toss in the extra arm movement as you frantically click from your text editor to your audio-playback application every time you want to pause the recording or rewind a few seconds, and your transcribing job just got tougher and more frustrating. Express Scribe (free, NCH Software, www.nch.com.au/scribe) lets you set system-wide hotkeys for audio playback so you can stay in your text editor, fully control the audio, and never need to reach for your mouse.Express Scribe can also slow down your audio without changing the pitch, supports video, works with lots of file types, loads recordings from analog or digital audio recorders, and more. Plus, it’s completely free. Wahoo!NoteBookThe Mac is silly with note-taking applications (Evernote, Yojimbo, ShoveBox, MacJournal…shall we go on?), but Circus Ponies’ NoteBook ($49.95, Circus Ponies, www.circusponies.com) is a standout. If you subscribe to “a place for everything, and everything in its place,” NoteBook can be the place for notes, Web clippings, bookmarks, documents, voice memos, photos, and more. It struts its flexibility with ready-made templates for planning a trip, writing a research paper, collecting recipes, keeping a journal, and so on, while its fun spiral-notebook interface is a nice touch. TextExpanderA thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters could produce Hamlet a lot faster if they knew how to use TextExpander ($29.95, SmileOnMyMac, www.smileonmymac.com). This wonder app installs as a System Preferences pane and lets you define shortcuts for your most commonly used words and phrases. Abbreviate long URLs, your email signoff, even your own photo or scanned signature file. Then as you type those shortcuts, they’re automagically expanded to what you really wanted to say. Brilliant. iFinance 3Sure, Quicken is popular and Mint.com is free, but iFinance 3 ($29, Synium Software GmbH, www.synium.de) was built from the ground up just for Macs, and it shows. The intuitive interface makes it a cinch--dare we say a pleasure?--to track your accounts, keep an eye on your cash flow, set up a budget, and graph your expenses. It can also import from CSV and QIF files for easier data entry. Plus, a companion iPhone app lets you enter transactions on the go.FlexTimeThis charming timer app ($18.95, Red Sweater Software, www.red-sweater.com) lets you set up multistep routines that run once or repeat ad nauseam. Each step can be marked by a sound, spoken text, or even running a script. Once your routine is perfect, you can export the audio to iTunes--great for following a recipe’s carefully timed steps or taking your favorite yoga routines on the road. DEVONthink PersonalAnother great catch-all for storing, sorting, organizing, and searching information, DEVONthink ($49.95, DEVONtechnologies, www.devon-technologies.com) can take almost anything you can throw at it. Documents, PDFs, photos, multimedia files, bookmarks, webpages, iChat logs--all of those can be imported, sorted, and read right in DEVONthink. Searching is easy, and you can cobble together a brand-new document from items in your DEVONthink database and export it to your favorite text editor for printing or as HTML for posting. Next Page: Internet Apps >> InternetIt's a wild place, that Interweb, so there's nothing like a few primo apps to tame everything from blogging to FTPs to Twitter and Flash banners.TransmitTraveling the two-lane FTP highway.FTP has been around forever. Social networking and cloud computing may come and go, but FTP is in it for the long hall. Fortunately, there are a wealth of great FTP clients for the Mac, and the best of those is Transmit ($29.95, Panic, www.panic.com/transmit). The client utilizes a split directory window that shows the path on your computer and the path on the FTP site. With in-app search and the ability to sync folders on your Mac and on the FTP site, Transmit helps alleviate the search and drag-and-drop blues of other clients. The sync feature is especially helpful for Web developers and designers. You can even create desktop droplets for quick uploads to heavily used sites.Two-window FTP FTW.Mac-JournalWeb-based apps suck.Blogging about your life is a faux pas. Blogging about anything else that people actually care about is the proper way of utilizing of the blogging systems available out there. The ongoing problem is that most blogging platforms are bit of a pain to use because they’re Web-based. Plus, if you’re somewhere without Internet access, you can’t start laying out your blog posts for your site. MacJournal ($39.95, Mariner Software, www.marinersoftware.com) solves that problem with an easy-to-use multiplatform blogging client. Lay out your articles offline with images, video, and audio, then save them for later posting. The app includes the ability to both write in full-screen mode so you won’t be interrupted by your Twitter friends, and to record an audio podcast in the client.Create blog posts quickly and without browser issues.TweetieMulti-account Twitter action.After wowing the world with its iPhone Twitter app, atebits decided to release a desktop version of Tweetie ($19.95, atebits, www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/). The app can handle multiple Twitter accounts, compose tweets in a separate window, allow you to change the account you’re sending a tweet from on the fly, and let you drag and drop pics and videos right into the Compose window. Don’t have the perfect media on your Mac for a tweet? Record a video or shoot a pic from your iSight camera directly in Tweetie. And since Twitter conversations can be difficult to follow, Tweetie displays the conversation you’re having in a timeline if you just double-click one of the pertinent tweets. The Tweetie bookmarklet in Safari also allows you to share links quickly from your browser.Have an actual conversation on Twitter with Tweetie.DropboxStop, drop, and roll on home.Transferring large files can be a huge pain. Where the hell did you leave that thumb drive? External hard drives leave an unsightly bulge in your pocket, and all those cables are always getting tangled in your shoes. That’s a safety hazard, son. Dropbox (2GB storage for free, 50GB for $9.99/month; Dropbox; www.dropbox.com) is a cloud-based storage drive that you can access from any computer or iPhone. Just pop files into the Dropbox folder on your Mac, and it automatically syncs up with the online disk (which you can view on Dropbox’s website) and with any other machines you have the application installed on. You can even share folders and files with other Dropbox users. If the free 2GB box doesn’t cut it, you can upgrade to 50GB for $10 a month.Access your files from anywhere in the universe (with an Internet connection).LogMeInIf you need to remotely access a Mac or (gasp) a PC with Windows on it, LogMeIn (free, LogMeIn, logmein.com) allows you to peer into your remote computer from anywhere. You can launch apps, move files, and adjust your preferences via a Web-based interface, as if you were sitting at that computer. For $29.99, you can get your iPhone in on the action too. TweetDeckIf you’re a Twitter power user, TweetDeck (free, TweetDeck, www.tweetdeck.com) should be in your arsenal of Twitter apps. The interface is a series of columns that displays info like your friends’ feeds, saved searches, mentions, direct mentions, and Facebook updates. You can also keep up with trending topics with just a quick glance. If there’s something you need to track on Twitter, TweetDeck can make a column for it. VuzeAllegedly, BitTorrent steals medication from senior citizens, but isn’t it time to forget about all the evil things it supposedly does? Instead, focus on the greatness of Vuze (free, Vuze, www.vuze.com) and its ability to download legally available video files. After you’ve done the downloading, Vuze can convert your files for use on the iPhone, Apple TV, iPod, Xbox 360, TiVo, and PlayStation 3. It’ll even stream videos to your set-top boxes. Nice! BannerZestCreating Flash banners is difficult, especially when you don’t know or own Flash. BannerZest ($49, Aquafadas, www.aquafadas.com) takes the pain out the process and gives you a simple way to create quick, beautiful Flash banners. From a standard gallery to an interactive experience, BannerZest comes with a collection of themes for different uses, and it uploads your banners to your FTP or MobileMe disk. FileChuteSending large files over email can result in the dreaded bounced email. FileChute ($17.95, Yellow Mug Software, www.yellowmug.com) works with your MobileMe-, FTP-, or WebDAV-accessible Web server. Drop your file into the app, and it uploads it to your online server of choice and then creates a URL to add to your email. If you drop more than one file, you get an archive uploaded to your server. Adios, bounced emails! Next Page: Content Creation Apps >>Content CreationSure, Adobe's stuff is the gold standard, but you don't want to have to count on a good night at the poker table to pay for it, right? Cue these killer applications, which let you effectively draw, edit photos, render, animate, and even scratch for a very fair price.djay 3Budgeted beats to grow on.You want to spin phat beats, but your slim bank keeps you from purchasing the high-end DJ equipment and software. That’s okay, young DJ-in-training, djay 3 ($49.95, algoriddim, www.djay-software.com) gives you everything you need to rock the house without losing your shirt. This surprisingly robust audio-mixing software integrates with your iTunes library and puts all the usual mixing and scratching right on your desktop. The application supports multitouch trackpad scratching and fading between tracks, so it’s especially perfect for the last few generations of MacBooks. And as you grow as a DJ, the application will grow with you thanks to its support for MIDI controllers. That means when you get the cash for those fancy digital mixers and turntables, djay will be right there with you.With your iTunes catalog at your fingertips, you'll find some pretty interesting mashups.AudacityFree audio editor extraordinaire.Audio editing seems simple at first. Then suddenly, you’re knee-deep in samples, frequencies, and bitrates. Sound editing really is part science, part black magic, so we’re thankful that Audacity (free, SourceForge, audacity.sourceforge.net) removes one of the biggest obstacles: choosing a quality application and figuring out how you’re going to pay for it. Audacity is both terrific and free, which is kinda hard to beat. An audio-recording and -editing application, it captures up to 16 channels at once from multiple sources, features noise removal, includes a metadata editor, and supplies unlimited undos. It can handle most of the audio files out there, and it’ll work with multiple files types in the same project. Audacity is also is cross-platform, so if you’re a recent Mac arrival, you may already know about its awesome power.So many features, you'll second-guess the price: free.SketchUp3D for you and me.Maya, 3D Studio Max, and SketchUp--all of these will let you create magical 3D worlds. Only one will do it for free, and you probably nailed it in one--it’s Google’s SketchUp software (free, Google, sketchup.google.com) that brings the world of 3D to the average Joe. You can create your own items or utilize Google’s 3D warehouse to find models created by other SketchUp users. With all those models at your fingertips, you can create floor plans for your home, build a level for your favorite FPS, or export the files to animation software or Photoshop. The application includes tutorials that’ll get you up and rendering in no time at all… so now nothing stands between you and virtual-world domination!Build a virtual man-cave for you and your stuff.RingerWham-bam ringtone, ma'am.We get tons of people asking us, “How do I make a ringtone for my iPhone?” Until recently, we told them to launch GarageBand, cut a ringtone, and export it to iTunes. Now we recommend Ringer ($15, Pixel Research Labs, pixelresearchlabs.com/ringer) as the quickest and easiest way to create ringtones from your favorite songs and audio files. Ringer has access to your entire iTunes library and works with MP3, AAC, MOV, MP4, M4V, and QuickTime files. Yeah, you can make a ringtone from a video file. A super-simple editor with waveform information makes it a snap to select the perfect section of audio, and you can fade in and out of the file and preview the ringtone before cropping it and sending it to iTunes for a sync with your iPhone. AcornUsing an image editor doesn’t have to cost you hundreds of dollars. In fact, with Acorn ($49.95, Flying Meat, www.flyingmeat.com/acorn), you’ll get features like layers, AppleScript support, 64-bit support, drawing, and filters in a package that’s easy on the wallet. This easy-to-use software strips away most of the features most people don’t use and gives you a clean image-editing tool. InkscapeWhile raster-based image editors like Photoshop are great at pushing pixels around, the vector-based drawing programs are where all the real action happens. The open-source application Inkscape (free, Inkscape, www.inkscape.org) is similar to powerhouses like Illustrator and CorelDraw, but with one important difference--it’s free. The app utilizes the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format and includes a nice 3D drawing tool that allows you to set your vanishing points. ScreenflickWith Snow Leopard, Apple introduced screen-capture into QuickTime, and it’s a nice feature if you’re looking to make a quick full-screen screencast. But if you want something that has features like fixed location output at up to 60 fps, Screenflick ($25, Araelium Group, www.araelium.com/screenflick) is an application you can get behind. It’ll highlight mouse clicks and keyboard events, adding a nifty visual cue into your screencasts that highlights what you’re doing. BracketeerWhile your eye can take in an amazing range of light to dark, your camera cannot. In order to help create images that include a tonal range that the average camera can’t capture, HDR applications and plug-ins have appeared on the market. These applications take a series of images that have been bracketed from dark to light and combine them to include the darkest darks to the lightest lights in one HDR image. Bracketeer ($29.95, Pangea Software, pangeasoft.net/pano/bracketeer) is a standalone application that does just that. Adjust the saturation, the contrast, and exposure from within the application. The application will even auto-align your images in case you got the hiccups while taking your pics. iStopMotion 2 HomeMost animators’ first animation was probably a stop-motion piece with Star Wars action figures. And whether those childhood lightsaber battles have you hoping to become the next Brad Bird, or you just love the look of stop-motion, iStopMotion ($49, Boinx Software, www.boinx.com/istopmotion/overview) is a quick, easy way to create simple stop-motion animations. Use your iSight or connect a camera to your Mac and start making your own Wallace and Gromit short. You’ll feel the Force, Lu… sorry. Next Page: Utility Apps >>UtilitiesSlick utilities can add crucial functionality to your Mac, so we've selected the best options for everything from secure password managers and system-troubleshooting tools to an app that will let you play Windows games on your Mac... without Windows!AppZapperCompletely trash applications.Unlike using Windoze, installing and uninstalling apps on a Mac is painless. Drag an application’s icon into your Applications folder, and you’re pretty much good to go. Deleting them is just as simple--just grab them and toss them into the Trash. But if you’ve ever dug around Library or System folders on your Mac, you’ll see that even after you Trash an app, many of them leave crumbs in different parts of your machine. For cleaning up those last little bits, AppZapper ($12.95, Austin Sarner and Brian Ball, www.appzapper.com) is a must-have utility that’s also great for troubleshooting problems. Wiping out all of an application’s preferences and other random files can often turn a troublesome app into a perfectly behaved one after a clean reinstall. Completely remove unwanted applications with a simple drag and drop.HazelClean and organize your Mac--automatically.Hazel ($21.95, NoodleSoft, www.noodlesoft.com) is kind of like Rosie the Robot for your Mac. Or it’s like OS X’s Folder Actions… if they were super-awesome, easy to use, and perfect for helping you keep your Mac’s folders and files organized. Hazel installs as a pane in System Preferences, monitoring locations that you choose, and performs actions on files based on your criteria. By creating simple rules, you can delegate repetitive and annoying file-management tasks to Hazel--for example, automatically add downloaded MP3s to iTunes or move DMGs to an archive on an external drive. Hazel can delve deep into metadata for complex actions like copying images into subfolders by ISO settings or reorganizing music files according to bitrate. You can even set up simple rules for auto-deleting items that have been in the Trash longer than a certain amount of time.1PasswordKeep all your confidential info on lockdown.You’ve heard it before--secure, unique passwords are the way to go. Yet there you are, still using the same password for everything from your maclife.com login to your Gmail and your bank account. Do we even have to tell you again why that’s a colossally bad idea? 1Password ($39.95, Agile Web Solutions, agilewebsolutions.com) can help clean up your online act, creating and managing complex passwords for every online account and then logging you in with a keyboard shortcut. The app can also be used to securely store personal information like credit card numbers and addresses for use in Web forms. And since all of your passwords are unique, you won’t have to worry about your banking info being compromised because of a data breach at that sketchy Russian website you used to download MP3s for a penny.1Password securely stores Web passwords, logins, software licenses, and other important information.iPhone ExplorerStore & browse files on your iPhone.Breaking tradition with the iPods of yore, Apple doesn’t provide the ability to use your iPhone as a USB drive. iPhone Explorer (free, myPod Apps, www.mypodapps.com) is a simple app that will let you drag and drop files onto your phone for easy portability. The app itself is lightweight, and all it takes is a USB cable to view your iPhone’s folder structure. In addition to storing files, iPhone Explorer can be used to restore iTunes tracks from your iPod to a Mac or to rescue photographs from the depths of your iPhone’s memory. No jailbreaking is required, but more adventurous users with jailbroken phones can also recover contacts, messages, email, and other data. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s simple to use for the careful novice.AppleJackAppleJack (free, The Apotek, applejack.sourceforge.net) is one of those things you’ll install once and never think about again—if everything goes right. But if, god forbid, your Mac starts acting weird one day--or stops acting, period--it’ll be AppleJack to the rescue. It’s a command-line utility for diagnosing and repairing problems with your computer. Use the menu-driven system to repair permissions, validate preferences files, and remove screwy cache files.SuperDuperWith Time Machine built into OS X, there’s really no good reason not to have an automatic backup. But Time Machine has its limits--a big one being the lack of bootable backups. SuperDuper ($27.95, Shirt Pocket, www.shirt-pocket.com) easily handles creating and updating bootable clones of your Mac’s hard drive so you’ll be ready to go when disaster strikes. Just plug in your clone, restart, and you’re up and running again. CrossOver GamesPC fanboys like to slag the Mac for having fewer games, but with CrossOver Games ($39.95, CodeWeavers, www.codeweavers.com), Mac users--and Linux fans too--can easily play games coded for Windows machines. The list of officially supported games is hundreds deep, and since CrossOver is based on Wine, you don’t even need a copy of Windows just to play Team Fortress 2. Clean My MacHard drives are never big enough. Whether you have a MacBook Air or a Mac Pro, there always comes a point when there’s just not enough space on your internal disks. Clean My Mac ($29.95, MacPaw, macpaw.com) can help with that problem, scouring your Mac’s drive and tossing out all sorts of gunk you don’t need. Use it to toss unneeded language files, scrub extraneous code from universal binaries, and thoroughly clean up after deleted applications. rooSwitchOS X’s Fast User Switching is handy for juggling multiple user accounts and their corresponding settings, but rooSwitch ($19, Rocket, rooswitch.com) allows you to maintain different settings on a per-application basis. Use it to manage Home and Work browser profiles, for example, or to have different profiles in your word processor for writing or editing documents. rooSwitch works with nearly any application, and it supports Automator and AppleScript for the ultimate in customizability. Next Page: Wild Card Apps & Staff Picks >> Wild CardsNot all Mac apps fall into your neat little categories. These five break the mold and completely deserve a place on your hard drive.BricksmithVirtual bricks you can't lose or step on? Sold!Legos are the official plastic brick of Mac|Life--we’ve had many discussions about the empires we built in our childhood bedrooms and how much we miss “playing Legos” as the soulless adults we are today. Bricksmith (free, donations accepted; Allen Smith; bricksmith.sourceforge.net) lets you recapture the magic in a highly geeky way. It’s a 3D Lego-model creator, offering drag-and-drop construction using thousands of parts in every color of Lego’s rainbow. Tutorials and the one finished model that’s included show you the ropes, and once you’re done with your virtual creation, you can export step-by-step instructions to build it for real. There’s even a mini figure generator where you can design and outfit a matching Lego man and insert him into your model. This software couldn’t be cooler.We can't believe an application this sweet is donationware.CameraBag DesktopGive your photos a new identity or some old-timey charm.We named the iPhone version of CameraBag one of our “101 Essential Apps for 2008,” and now the same fun can be had on your Mac, thanks to CameraBag Desktop ($19, Nevercenter, www.nevercenter.com). You drag in a digital image, and the app re-creates the look of a real film photograph--choose from Helga, Lolo, Mono, 1962, 1974, Instant, Magazine, Cinema, or Colorcross.For more variations, click the Reprocess button, and all the options will change their look and coloring just slightly. Or check the Multi-filter box and experiment with adding multiple filters to a single photo. Of course, you can export your altered images back to your hard drive without affecting the original file. The novelty of taking an everyday digital snapshot and making it look like a Polaroid image or washed-out 1974 photograph never gets old.Your digital photos, plus extra personality.SousChefRecipe database + shopping list + cooking assistant = one kitchen lifesaver.SousChef ($30, Acacia Tree Software, acaciatreesoftware.com) edges out MacGourmet ($49.95, www.marinersoftware.com) in the cooking-assistant category for its cloud database of recipes. Every time a SousChef user enters a recipe (133,000-plus at press time), it’s synced to the cloud, and you can search those and import them into your own library. You can also opt out of sharing your own recipes so Aunt Erma’s secret matzo ball soup stays in the family.Once a recipe’s in your library, you can edit, print, email, or blog it--or even add its ingredients to your grocery list. Click the Cook button for a full-screen view of the instructions that you can read from across the room, keeping your Mac out of the splatter zone. The Mac’s built-in speech recognition lets you advance the recipe’s steps with your own voice, or you can use the Apple Remote or a Keyspan Front Row Remote.TemporisAttractive, drag-and-drop timelines make it easy to "show, don't tell."Everyone loves a good infographic, or at least geeky types like us do. (And the geeks shall inherit the earth, don’cha know?) Temporis ($24.99, Bartas Technologies, www.bartastechnologies.com) makes it easy to create neat-looking timelines on your Mac, which you can then print or export as PDF or TIFF files that are ready for importing into your presentation software, word processor, or page-layout app.Adding new events is just a Command-click away, and it’s a snap to drag the start and end dates around on the timeline. The Arrange button will automatically stagger your timeline’s events into the most logical and easy-to-read order, and the Inspector lets you tweak fonts, colors, titles, labels, and your timeline’s span and intervals. You can even export the event data separately as an XML or CSV file.Manga Studio Debut 4Create your own comics and manga, and even manga-fy your photos.Manga Studio Debut 4 ($49.99, Smith Micro, my.smithmicro.com) is a must-have for fans of Japanese manga or anyone who wants to make their own comic books. Its ingenious Beginner’s Assistant groups together the tools by processes so you can intuitively wind your way through a typical manga workflow: sketch, panel, draw, tone, and add character dialogue.You can scan or draw your own art (graphics tablets supported, natch), play with the included samples, purchase manga content from www.contentparadise.com, or even import your own digital photos and watch Manga Studio make them all comicky-looking. Draw speed lines, add dialogue bubbles, move your pages around, and then print or export your finished comic book. Manga Studio Debut 4 is the younger brother to professional-level Manga Studio EX 4 ($299.99), but Debut has plenty of advanced features too, including layers, templates, customizable patterns, and more.Mac|Life Staff PicksBass TunerI’m a beginning bass player--like, very beginning. So it’s a huge help that I don’t have to worry about staying in key. This terrific, simple, and streamlined little app ($9, www.rustykat.com) lets me quickly get in tune in front of my MacBook using the built-in mic. With that necessity sorted, I can fire up some tracks and tablature and focus on struggling to play along.MultiwiniaMultiwinia ($19, www.ambrosiasw.com) offers crazy replayability. You devise a strategy for your stick-figure army, then watch them take on up to four other teams in six game types on 40 vector-graphic maps. Online multiplayer against Mac and Windows players works flawlessly and keeps me coming back for more. No Napoleon complex necessary. MetaXIf you need to tag a large amount of MP4 files, you could use iTunes’ painfully slow process. Instead I found MetaX (free, www.kerstetter.net) for all my tagging needs. The app will search the IMDB catalog and plug the information into the appropriate fields, then share that info via tagChimp. You can even scan DVD barcodes via iSight! BeanFor a word dork like me, word processors are a big deal. Bean (free, www.bean-osx.com) is a lightweight, open-source word processor. It’s missing many of the blinky lights and thingamajigs of the big boys, and that’s exactly the point. Fewer distractions equals better writing, faster. And for anyone who needs to hit a certain length, the live word count rocks. FluidI often find that Firefox has the tendency to crash when I have too many Web applications running. But Fluid (free, fluidapp.com) lets me create a site-specific browser out of my most essential websites, like Google Docs and Flickr. Simply plug in the URL, and voilà! You have a separate application running that won’t go down if something else does. Next Page: More Gaming Bang for 50 Bucks >> More Bang for 50 BucksSome of the Mac's best games are also its cheapest? Sweet!Fifty bones won’t buy you even one new Xbox 360 or PS3 game, but on the Mac, you can snap up a stack of premier games for less than that. Or at least, that was our theory when we gave Florence, our new associate online editor, 50 whole American dollars and asked her to max out her Mac with the best gaming that short stack of money could buy. Man, did she score--check out the results of her diligent “research.”Plants Vs. Zombies$16, amazon.comLine up perilous peashooters and sun-soaking sunflowers against an abominable horde of zombies in Plants vs. Zombies.This animated tower-defense favorite pits you against a horde of zombies with one thing on their (decaying) minds--invading your home for brains! Pit your arsenal of zombie-fighting plants, each with their own spectacular organic weaponry, against 26 zombies and 50 levels of adventure. Fair warning: Once you start playing this excellent game, it’s incredibly hard to stop. World of Goo$10, amazon.comStack up adorable globs of goo to build structures and watch them band together as you help transport them across various levels.World of Goo is another addictive and totally adorable puzzle game. Created around the idea that circular goo balls make adequate building materials (naturally), the game has you solving puzzles by dragging and dropping goo to create all kinds of crazy structures that enable you to transport your goo across the level. The oh-so-cute googly-eyed blobs pack the game with charm, and you can also connect online and play against other Goo architects around the world.Braid$15, playgreenhouse.comBraid's aesthetically appealing backdrop and profound storyline will keep you engrossed until the very end.Some games defy description, and Braid might be easy to pass over because it appears to be just a mix of platforming and time control set against a gorgeous backdrop. But it subverts and transcends those two well-worn clichés with brilliant design and an absorbing story that packs a twist that you’ll never see coming. Watch the YouTube videos if you need help solving its puzzles, but just make sure you see this masterpiece through to the end.Balcassa$8, openplanetsoftware.comBalcassa has a mountain of exciting brainteasers for the puzzle fiend.Balcassa feeds off those nightmares you still have about attempting to master that archaic, rainbow-colored Rubik’s cube. And while most of you probably never cracked the damn thing (we didn’t!), Balcassa gives you a second chance. The objective of the game is to slide the cubes into a specific sequence, pattern, or orientation. It may sound like a simple task, but much like fiddling with a Rubik’s cube, figuring it all out is the real reward.Freeware FunIf you’re interested in first-person shooters and MMORPGs, Quake Live and Second Life can give you hours of entertainment at our favorite price: $0.00. Both games perform smoothly on Mac OS 10.4 or later. Quake Live doesn’t require beefy hardware because it runs through your Web browser. But that doesn’t stop it from delivering all the fast-paced action of the classic first-person shooter. Second Life, while not as packed with storyline as World of Warcraft, offers a similar massively multiplayer world where you can meet people, customize your character’s look, and participate in a virtual world that’s just like our own. You don’t even have to watch the clock to make sure you’re on time for a player-versus-player raid!You don't need fancy computer hardware to frag your way through this beloved shooter.Vital Statistics on Our 50 Killer AppsTotal cost if you bought all 50 apps: $1219.83Number of apps that are free: 13Apps that have an iPhone counterpart: 15Whaddaya waiting for? (apps that have a free demo): 39Number of countries these apps were born in: 7Apps named "iSomething": shockingly... just 3!Apps that require Snow Leopard: 1Apps that require Leopard: 14Apps that promise "iLife integration!": 9
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★ Observations, Complaints, Quibbles, and Suggestions Regarding the Safari 4 Public Beta Released One Week Ago, Roughly in Order of Importance
Performance The Safari 4 public beta is faster than Safari 3 and every other browser available for the Mac. (CNet’s Crave backs up Apple’s claim that Safari 4 is the fastest browser available for Windows as well.) One thing to keep in mind — and I’ll return to this distinction again — is that Safari, the browser application, and WebKit, the open source HTML/CSS/JavaScript rendering engine, are separate things. There are several web browsers that use WebKit, but not all WebKit-based browsers exhibit identical performance. Safari itself seems to be responsible for eking out some measure of the new performance gains — but, for the obvious reason that the rendering engine is responsible for the majority of the CPU-intensive work, WebKit is the source for most of the improvements. From its inception over 6 years ago, the WebKit team has adhered to an interesting policy regarding performance: The way to make a program faster is to never let it get slower. We have a zero-tolerance policy for performance regressions. If a patch lands that regresses performance according to our benchmarks, then the person responsible must either back the patch out of the tree or drop everything immediately and fix the regression. Common excuses people give when they regress performance are, “But the new way is cleaner!” or “The new way is more correct.” We don’t care. No performance regressions are allowed, regardless of the reason. There is no justification for regressing performance. None. This may sound like common sense, but anyone who’s ever worked on large software products will tell you that many teams, if not most, do not adhere to such a policy. The most common excuse is one that the WebKit policy doesn’t list: “We’ll fix the performance issues later.” The truth is that sometimes, later never comes. Safari started life in 2003 as a fast browser, at least by the then-low standards of Mac OS X web browsing, and it has gotten nothing but faster since. I fully expect other high-quality browsers like Firefox and Chrome to leapfrog ahead as they reach future milestones. What really matters isn’t whether Safari is the fastest web browser in the world, but simply that its performance, in actual use, is state-of-the-art. Prior to Safari, this just wasn’t true for any Mac web browser. The difference Safari and WebKit have wrought to web browsing (and HTML web view rendering system-wide) simply cannot be overstated. And so in a nut, the latest version of WebKit deserves nothing but accolades; but Safari 4? Well, we have some issues. Progress Even more so than the new style of tabs, Safari’s new progress indicator is the change I’m having the most trouble adjusting to. Every previous release of Safari, starting with the initial 1.0 public beta, displayed page load progress with a horizontal meter in the location field: Now, in the Safari 4 public beta, page load progress is indicated only by an subtle spinner at the far left of the location field: Most of what I wrote in my review of the original Safari 1.0 public beta in 2003 stands up remarkably well. But I was very wrong about the progress meter. I wrote: Progress Bar Behind Location Field Hideous. It looks like partially-selected text. Please scrap it. But I quickly grew accustomed to it, and soon grew to miss it when using other browsers. It was, I soon decided, a damn clever way to show progress in a way that was prominent while the page was actually loading, and without taking up any additional space on the screen after loading was complete. For sites that load quickly — and some sites do load nearly instantly in Safari 4, with a good network connection — it doesn’t make much difference. But not all web sites load quickly, and not all network connections are good. It’s not just that the new spinner is subtle, but that it is indeterminate — a simple spinner only indicates “not done yet”, with no indication as to how far along it is at the moment. This has nothing to do with WebKit’s rendering performance, just simple bandwidth and latency. A typical multi-megabyte PDF file might take a minute or more to load from a busy server or on a slow network, but the only feedback you get in the new Safari 4 is a small indeterminate spinner. Almost done? Not even close? You have no idea until the download is complete. It’s hard to see this as anything but a loss. So: Why? Safari’s designers aren’t talking, so we’re left to speculate. Estimating the progress of a page load is not an exact science — a determinate progress bar is at best an estimate. But Safari’s progress indicator seemed very accurate to me. At least it felt accurate, and that’s the entire point. Perhaps the idea is that Apple sees the modern browser as more than just a simple HTML document viewer — that it’s an entire software environment and runtime. But I still can’t see this as anything but a regression in the experience. A determinate progress meter has the psychological effect of making a wait seem shorter. That’s why the iWork suite shows a progress meter when you open documents. Yes, what you really want is for the web page to be finished loading, but in the mean time, it’s nice to know it’s a third of the way — no, now half, now two-thirds — done. The new progress spinner doesn’t make Safari slower, but it does make it feel slower. This time I really mean it: Please scrap it. The Tabs Safari’s new tab layout, placing the tabs directly in the window title bar, is a radical change. There’s no use addressing the specific details — good and bad — of this new arrangement, without first trying to figure out why Apple did this. Again, the designers are behind Apple’s wall of silence, so we’re left to speculate. Rule out the notion that Safari’s designers undertook this change lightly. This is a major change to an important feature that many users feel strongly about. My guess is that this is an attempt to bring tabbed browsing to the masses. The biggest and most important change is that the interface for the tabs is now far more prominent. In fact, previously, the entire interface for tabbed browsing was not visible in Safari by default — in a window with just one tab, Safari’s default settings were such that the tab bar was not shown. In Safari 4, there’s a prominent and unique “+” button that is always visible in the top right corner of every window (and the standard tic-tac button for toggling the display of the toolbar is gone).1 Because the interface to create new tabs is now obvious, I can only assume that the point of this redesign is to encourage more people to use, or at least try, tabbed browsing. But the problems with this new tab layout are significant. Conceptually, the basic idea is sound. Browser tabs are, effectively, a collection of separate browser windows grouped together in a single parent window. Safari’s new tab layout makes this a tab is like a sub-window metaphor more explicit. The anchor, the conceptual root, of a standard Mac OS window is the title bar, and in Safari 4, the tabs aren’t just in the title bar, they are the title bar. The placement atop all other window content is, yes, following the lead of Google Chrome. But Safari takes it one step further, and, I think, also one step too far. Chrome’s tab are still contained within a window title bar — they are obviously things contained within a window, rather than in Safari, where they’re more like multiple windows snapped together. Aesthetic comments aside (although by the standards of Windows software, I personally think Chrome looks good), the relationship between Chrome’s tabs and their parent window are more thoroughly thought-out than Safari 4’s. Safari 4’s tabs bring to mind the tab-style window title bars of the old BeOS. In Be’s system, title bars were only as wide as the name of the window, rather than stretching across the entire width of the window itself — reminiscent of the tabs on real-world folders. (Apple played with such an idea in 1980 while developing the graphical user interface for the Lisa and Mac.) Be’s windows could not be snapped together to create a single window containing multiple tabbed windows, but by holding down the Shift key, you could slide the title bar horizontally across the top of any window, the point of which was to allow you to manually arrange windows in a tabbed style. This movie demonstrates how it worked:2 Safari 4’s tabs are visually similar to the Be concept, except they are snapped together. But, conceptually and visually, Safari’s current implementation is a bit muddled. Tabs are their own thing, but when snapped together, the window as a whole is its own thing as well. But there’s now very little chrome (in the lowercase c sense) devoted the window as whole — pretty much just the triumvirate of buttons for closing / minimizing / zooming the window. Visually there’s no border between these buttons and the first (left-most) tab: Damien Molokai, in an overall defense of Safari’s new tabs, suggests simply adding a left border to the first tab and leaving some room to the right of the window controls, leaving a clear area intended for dragging the window itself: Molokai’s mockup is visually cleaner, but doesn’t go far enough to fix the conceptual mushiness. Sean Sperte suggests a more Chrome-like layout, leaving a border atop the window belonging to the parent window itself: That’s not perfect, but it’s clearly better than the actual tab bar design in the Safari 4 public beta. Consider: with the previous tab design, if you wanted to move a window you dragged the window, and if you wanted to move a tab, you dragged the tab. Now in Safari 4, if you want to move the window you drag a tab, and if you want to move a tab you drag the small grippy strip at the far right edge of a tab. This is more abstract, indirect, and worse. Chrome’s tab design suffers none of these problems. Yes, it saves 20 pixels of space to consolidate the title bar and tab bar into the same area. But design is always about trade-offs. Whitespace can serve a purpose. Take for example the margins in a book, which aid in readability and usability (by giving you a place to put your thumbs without obscuring the text). Safari 4’s tabs-in-the-title-bar arrangement is like a book with text set right to the very edge of the paper — it saves space at the expense of something useful. There’s also something unpleasant about the width of the tabs in Safari 4. In most other tabbed document UIs, including Safari’s old one, tabs don’t change their width or position dynamically until they need to shrink in order to fit an additional tab in the window — in a typical window, generally after the fifth or sixth tab. In Safari 4, the entire tab bar (which is to say most of the window title bar) is divided equally between all tabs. The old way, tabs only move and shrink a little, and only when you have many tabs in the window. The new way, tabs move and shrink a lot until you reach the point where there are many tabs in the window, making it harder to keep track of where a particular tab is. Consider a window with five tabs: the title of the second tab is on the left side of the title bar. Now close the third, fourth, and fifth tabs, leaving just the first two. The name of the second tab has moved all the way over to the right side of the title bar. When you do the same exercise in Safari 3 the second tab never moves. My guess is that space consolidation, combined with the desire to encourage tab use by typical users, is what drove this design. Most users only use what they see. They never saw tabs because there was no visual tab interface until after a second tab had been added to a window. And the tab bar was hidden when there was just one tab open because it looks like a lot of wasted space to have an entire tab bar containing just one tab, and if the tab bar isn’t shown by default in a new window, there’s no good place to put an obvious “+” button for creating new tabs, which button is necessary so that typical users see how to create new tabs. Hence the decision to combine the tab bar with the window title bar: always visible, no wasted space. But I think Safari’s designers over-thought the problem. It would have been better simply to turn on the “Always show tab bar” setting by default, add the new tab “+” button to the now-visible-by-default tab bar, and let users who are annoyed by the “wasted space” turn it off in Safari’s preferences. That’s pretty much how Panic’s Coda handles document tabs (except that Coda has no option to hide the tab bar, 20 pixels of space be damned): Tab Click-Through Click-through problems with Safari 4’s new tabs abound. You get it when you don’t want it: accidentally activating — or worse, closing — a tab when you simply wanted to bring a window forward. And you don’t get it when you do want it: for dragging a tab out of a background window and into another window. As a general rule you’re less likely to want click-through for clicking but more likely to want it for dragging — in Safari 4 you get the worst of both. Consider the common scenario where you want to drag a file from a Finder window in the background into your current frontmost window (regardless what app you’re currently in). You can just click-and-drag on the file in the background Finder window and drag it — the background Finder window does not activate when you click in it to start a drag. With the Safari 4 public beta, that doesn’t work. Say you have a frontmost Safari window wherein you are collecting several related tabs. You see a tab in a background window that you want to move to the front one. But as soon as you click on the grippy strip to commence dragging the tab from the background window, that tab’s entire window is brought forward, and, if the two windows overlapped significantly, now obscures the previously frontmost window such that you can no longer see the intended destination of the drag. When you drag something out of a background window, the window should not pop forward. When you click (not drag) in the title bar area to bring a background Safari window forward, in addition to the window activating, whichever tab you clicked on activates as well. So the more tabs you have open in a window, the smaller the region is within the title bar where you can click to activate the window without changing that window’s current tab. In every other app in Mac OS X, you can click anywhere on a window title bar to bring that window forward without changing the context of the window. But, if you click and drag on a background tab in a background window in Safari 4, the window activates but the tab does not. Even worse, click-through is in effect for the close buttons on background tabs in background windows, even though these close buttons are only visible when the mouse is hovering over them. Twice in the past week I’ve accidentally closed a tab when trying to activate a background Safari window. My guess is that Apple chose to make background tabs’ close buttons and grippy strips only visible when the mouse is hovering over a tab to reduce the appearance of clutter. But hiding the controls doesn’t eliminate the actual clutter — a Safari 4 title bar containing five or six tabs is littered with dangerous spots on which to click or drag. Because of click-through, you must now be careful about where and how you click in the title bar of a background Safari window; that’s not the case for any other app on the Mac. Tab Colors One of the best things Apple introduced in Leopard was a consistent, single style for regular windows, with increased contrast between the frontmost window (dark) and background windows (light). Safari 4 uses the wrong colors both for active and inactive windows. The following table compares the top left corner of active (foreground) and inactive (background) windows in Safari 3 and 4 on Mac OS X 10.5.6. Safari 3 uses the system-standard colors for both states. Safari 4 is shown both with the leftmost tab active and inactive.3 The toolbar/title bar in a standard, frontmost Leopard window is a gray gradient that goes from 77% brightness at the top to 59% at the bottom; for background windows, the standard gradient goes from 91–81%. (100% would be pure white, 0% pure black.) Safari 4 displays four different title bar states, for active and inactive tabs in both foreground and background windows. In none of these four states does Safari 4 use the standard gradient colors. Safari 3 Safari 4, Active Tab Safari 4, Inactive Tab Foreground 77–59 88–69 73–61 Background 91–81 95–86 83–77 In the above table, colors are expressed as a range of two grayscale percentages, the first from the top of the window, the second from the bottom of the gradient. The usability advantage to Leopard’s consistent system-wide window colors is that it is easy to pick out the current frontmost window at a glance, regardless of the contents of the window, by glancing the at the title/toolbar areas at the top of your screen. All background windows are very light; the frontmost window is dark, so to find the active window just look for the dark one. Safari 4’s non-standard colors ruin this simplicity, particularly in two cases: A foreground window containing a single tab. A background window containing several tabs, and where the rightmost tab is the active one. The problem with #1 is that in an active Safari 4 window with just one tab, the color is nearly as bright as that of a standard background window, especially at the very top of the window — there should be a 14 percent difference in brightness but the difference is only 3 percent. The problem with #2 is that inactive tabs in a background Safari 4 window are nearly as dark as the active tab in the frontmost Safari 4 window — there’s only a 6 percent difference in brightness at the top of the window. In both cases there simply isn’t enough contrast. A significant Leopard usability improvement has been ignored for no benefit whatsoever. Other Things That Are Wrong With Safari 4’s Tabs Add to the aforementioned problems: In order to fit more text in each tab, Apple is drawing Safari 4 tab titles in a different font size and weight (11px Lucida Grande Bold) than the title bar text in every other window in the entire system (13px Lucida Grande Regular). This makes the title bar area look particularly strange when a window contains just one tab. Prior to Safari 4, you could Command-click the title of a window to get a pop-up menu showing a hierarchical path listing for the current URL. This feature is now gone. I can’t say it was that big of a deal, but it seems to me Apple could bring it back when you Command-click on a tab title. The triangular grippy strip that indicates the draggable region of a tab is a poor choice. It looks almost exactly like the standard drag-to-resize indicator in the bottom right corner of a window, but serves a completely different purpose. Things that look similar should behave similarly; things that behave differently should look different. In Safari 3 (and prior), you could drag a URL from any app and drop it into the empty space at the right side of the tab bar to create a new tab in that window displaying the contents of the dropped URL. It is very tricky to do this in the Safari 4 public beta. The obvious destination for such a drop is the “+” button in the top right corner, but that doesn’t work unless you hit just the right sliver — maybe 4 or 5 pixels horizontally between the “+” button and the rightmost tab. (You can drop a URL on Safari’s Dock icon to open it in a new tab, but only if you change Safari’s preference setting regarding how to “Open links from applications”.) I assume this is a bug in the public beta, and that the entire “+” button should work as a drop target. The Good News: Tab Dragging No Longer Modal In April last year, I documented Safari 3’s two different modes for moving tabs with drag-and-drop, which I called inter-window (moving a tab from one window to another) and intra-window (rearranging the order of tabs within one window). The mode was determined by the direction in which you initially began moving a tab. The problem was that once you entered a mode, you couldn’t switch to the other without stopping and starting over. Good news: Safari 4 no longer locks you into a dragging mode. Regardless which direction you start dragging, you can change directions and drag the tab wherever you want. Even better news: the locked-in dragging modes are also gone in Safari 4 even when you diddle the defaults preferences to revert to the old-style tabs underneath the toolbar. Cinematic Experience The first time you launch it, Safari 4 opens a browser window that displays a logo and animation, replete with sound, reminiscent of the startup screen for Apple TV. I find it oddly captivating. It’s an example of the “cinematic experience” that Apple has been pushing for at recent WWDCs — the idea being that the production value and feel of Mac software should be of similar caliber to that of popular TV shows and movies. What’s interesting about this splash screen technically is that it isn’t a QuickTime or Flash movie. It’s implemented entirely using HTML 5 and JavaScript. The new Top Sites feature — the most prominent feature on Apple’s “What’s new in Safari” page — is another example. From a practical standpoint it’s a neat idea, and pretty much identical to the “new tab page” feature Google introduced in Chrome — a visual matrix of your most-visited web sites, created and updated automatically based on your browsing history. But where Chrome’s presentation is a flat rectangle of thumbnails, Safari’s is a three-dimensional fan against a black background, complete with a glossy reflective foreground. Safari uses RSS to check for updated content on the pages in your Top Sites list; when there’s a change, it marks the page with a peeled-down corner and a star. It’s nice. One thing that’s not at all obvious, however, is how you can customize the top sites list. When you enter the edit mode, you can drag to rearrange, pin a site to a specific spot in the grid, and delete a site from the list. But when you delete a site, it’s replaced by another site chosen automatically based on your history. You can customize the listing, though — when in edit mode, just drag-and-drop a URL from another Safari window to the spot where you want it in the Top Sites grid. (Nerdier tip: the list of top sites is stored in a plist file at ~/Library/Safari/TopSites.plist; you can edit it by hand when Safari isn’t running.) The other visual-effects-powered feature is the addition of Cover Flow for your browsing history. I seldom use Cover Flow mode in iTunes and never in the Finder, but for web page history, it strikes me as downright useful — perfect for finding a page when you don’t remember the name or URL, but you do remember what it looked like. Improved Location Field and Google Search Auto-Completion Both the location field (a.k.a. address field) and Google search field feature much improved auto-completion. The biggest improvement to the location field auto-completion is that it feels way faster. Previously, if I typed fast enough, I could hit return intending to engage the default suggested completion, but in fact hit return before the completion menu had even appeared, in which case Safari would take whatever few characters I’d typed and tack “.com” at the end, loading the wrong web site. The completion menu now seems to appear instantaneously. It also looks better, with a clear separation between page titles and URLs, and separate sections for matches from your history and bookmarks. In Safari 3, the completion menu only showed URLs (no titles), and there was no separation between matches from your bookmarks and history. My only gripe is that it currently shows the history section above the bookmarks section — I’d prefer it the other way around. The Google search field now populates the suggestion menu as you type with results from Google’s Suggest feature. For me at least, the suggestions are remarkably, almost spookily, good. Note, though, that it doesn’t offer suggested results, but rather offers suggested terms to search for. If you choose a suggestion from the menu, you still go to a Google search results listing, not immediately to a destination page. That’s OK with me, but it’s not going to satisfy those of you who prefer input manager hacks like Inquisitor. Minor Observations The “Save as Web Application” feature in previous Safari 4 betas (which were available only to ADC developers) is gone. It was a command in the File menu that let you turn any web page into a site-specific browser — like Fluid, but built into Safari. No idea what happened to it. I enjoy Mobile Me’s automatic bookmark syncing between my Mac and iPhone versions of Safari. But I’d like to see history syncing, too. Imagine having location field auto-completion on your Mac work for sites which you visited using your iPhone. Zoom is now page zoom, not just text zoom — when you zoom in or out, the entire page, including layout and graphics, scales. But there’s an option in the View menu, off by default, to do text zoom only. SnapBack is now only available for search results — the orange SnapBack button in the location field and manual “Mark Page for SnapBack” features from Safari 3 are gone. The only remaining SnapBack feature is the “Search Results SnapBack” command in the History menu. I never used it, and I don’t know anyone who does, so I suspect this was a good feature to cut. I’m sure some people used it, but if you never remove lesser-used features, you can’t add new features without letting the overall complexity blow up. Yes, yes, there are command-line defaults preferences you can diddle to revert the tabs (and the progress bar) to the old style, but those may not be here for long, and they certainly won’t help the millions of users who have never even heard of Terminal, let alone launched it.↩ My thanks to Chris Liscio for the movie.↩ These screenshots also demonstrate how in Safari 3 the toolbar buttons are vertically centered between the close/minimize/zoom buttons and the bottom of the toolbar. In Safari 4 they are not, which I find visually unpleasing.↩
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★ Reading Between the iPhone OS 4.0 Lines
A few months ago, I heard suggestions that Apple had tentative plans to release a developer beta of Mac OS X 10.7 at WWDC this June. That is no longer the case. Mac OS X 10.7 development continues, but with a reduced team and an unknown schedule. It’s my educated guess that there will be no 10.7 news at WWDC this year, and probably none until WWDC 2011. Apple’s company-wide focus has since been focused intensely on one thing: iPhone OS 4.1 The number one priority at Apple is to grow mobile market share faster than Android. Anything that is not directly competitive with Android is on the back burner. Several of the “tent-pole”2 features in iPhone OS 4 that Apple promoted at yesterday’s event are directly related to this. Multitasking “Multitasking” is a catchall term that, in the context of iPhone OS 4, encompasses several different things. On an OS like Mac OS X it’s simpler to understand — multiple apps (and faceless background-only processes) operate simultaneously. On an OS like iPhone OS, that’s not how it’s going to work, and for good reason. Memory and CPU are severely constrained on mobile devices compared to regular PC hardware. Apps don’t run in windows, they run on the full screen. So when you leave one app and switch to another in iPhone OS 4, the GUI — the visual interface — is not going to continue updating in the background. What will happen, if the app is updated to support the new OS 4 APIs (which, I expect, all actively-maintained apps will be), is that the app will stay in memory but stop processing. Switch back and it’ll start processing again, right where it left off. Think pause/resume, as opposed to the current iPhone OS model of quit/relaunch. The VOIP and background audio processing examples do not involve the full app continuing to run in the background. The way these things work in iPhone OS 4 is, more or less, that the app registers with the system for what specific things it wants to do in the background. When the user leaves one app for another, the app that is being put into the background receives an event from the OS telling it that it is about to be paused, and at this point it has a chance to store its state, ask for time in the background to complete a task like a file upload, and register specific threads that will continue performing specific lightweight tasks like audio playback. Take Pandora for example. When in the background, what will be running is a faceless (no UI) thread that just streams audio. Only when you re-activate Pandora — tap its icon to open the full app — will the entire app start running again. When the system is running low on memory, it will automatically quit the least-recently used app that is paused in the background. Users should not notice this, except that when next they go back to such an app that has been reaped by the system to reclaim its memory, it might take a few moments longer for the app to be ready, and it will be like today, where the app itself will be responsible for restoring context. And, thus, apps still must be written in a way that assumes they might be shut down by the system with only a few moments notice. The result is that switching between two or three recently used apps will feel very snappy. Users do not have to think about or even be aware of concepts like launching and quitting. Those are implementation details. They just have to think about opening, or perhaps better put, going to one app at a time that will take up the full screen. Sort of like how you go to a web site — you go to apps on the iPhone. And, now, for apps like Skype and Pandora, users can think about apps that can continue to do stuff (play audio, receive incoming VOIP calls) even when they’re not open. There is nothing about the new iPhone OS 4 multitasking that a user must learn. They might just notice that “switching back” to recently used apps, via the same old home screen icons, is snappier. For the most part, using background-capable third-party apps will be just like using the background-capable system apps from Apple. It’s an efficient, clever way of making switching more useful and quicker. It’s also very much like the “multitasking” system Android has had in place all along. My understanding of how multitasking works on Android is that it’s pretty much like what I described above for iPhone OS 4: GUIs do not continue to update (and consume CPU time) in the background, but apps stay in memory when you switch from one to another, until the system runs low on memory, at which point it starts automatically and silently quitting the least-recently used ones. Background Android apps can register faceless threads to “do stuff”, like play audio. I don’t think such background threads on Android are limited to specific things like audio playback and VOIP as they are on iPhone OS 4.0, but Android’s multitasking model is far more like what Apple just announced for iPhone OS 4 than it is to a traditional PC OS like Mac OS X or Windows. One neat feature of Android is a listing in its Settings app that shows you where your battery life has been consumed since your last charge. In my use of a Nexus One, very little is consumed by apps in the background. Battery life on the Nexus One is consumed mostly by the display and by the wireless networking. I suspect that’s largely true for the iPhone from version 1-3, and will continue to be true with iPhone OS 4. Like copy-and-paste, it was inevitable that Apple would add multitasking to iPhone OS eventually. Whether it was always planned for this year I do not know, but once Android became Apple enemy number one, multitasking became a must-have catch-up feature. Adding it now takes away the first item on the Android-vs.-iPhone talking points list. (And despite its similarities to Android’s model, Apple is, of course, pitching it as original and innovative.) As for why the iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod Touch don’t get multitasking with iPhone OS 4, that’s easy — those machines only have 128 MB of RAM. The 3GS and third-generation Touch both have 256. (The 8 GB iPod Touch still being sold today is like the iPhone 3GS — second-generation hardware. It will not get multitasking with iPhone OS 4.) “Paused” apps on iPhone OS 4 are still resident in memory, so there’s just no way it would work with only 128 MB total (some of which, remember, goes to the system itself). The CPUs in the 3GS and latest iPod Touch are faster too, and that’s a factor, but I believe RAM is the central reason. iAds and Google Ever since the Apple-Google rivalry turned into a war, there’s been increased speculation that Apple might launch its own search engine. The thinking is simple. If Apple wants to go to war with Google, then they’ll be tempted to go after Google’s crown jewels — search. Search is still and may well always remain Google’s most popular service. But Google doesn’t make money from search. They make money from advertising. If you want to fuck with Google, you go after advertising revenue.3 Now, it’s true that much — most? — of Google’s ad revenue comes from ads that are displayed alongside search results. Google search generates a tremendous amount of ad revenue. But that’s last decade’s battle. It doesn’t make much sense for Apple to take on Google in search, given Google’s tremendous lead in the space and Apple’s utter lack of expertise in the field. It takes longer for Mac OS X’s Spotlight to search my MacBook Pro’s hard disk than for Google to search its index of the entire web. The war for search is old. Where’s the next battlefield for advertising? Mobile devices is one guess — a guess shared by Google and Apple. And here’s a field where Apple is ahead, not behind. Again, just like with multitasking, the idea that Apple would build support for advertising into iPhone OS is obvious, something that I suspect they might have pursued sooner or later even if Android did not exist. There’s a tremendous amount of money at stake. Now that Android is considered the number one threat to the iPhone, though, mobile advertising became an immediate priority. Jobs’s pitch for iAds during the event yesterday wasn’t even coy about it being a fuck-you to Google. He emphasized first the idea that on mobile, unlike the desktop, search is not a good venue for advertising. The idea being that on the iPhone, people aren’t searching, they’re using apps, and therefore the prime space for ads on mobile devices is right there inside apps. I’m not arguing whether Jobs is correct about search not being good for ads on mobile — I don’t know — but clearly, when he says “search”, he means “Google search”. So that’s knock one against Google. Jobs then showed examples of iAds — rich, cinematic, interactive software ads. They look like native iPhone software, but they’re written in straight HTML5 (so it’s a bonus fuck-you, to Adobe). The word Jobs used repeatedly was emotion. They’re intended to be about design and feeling. It’s about a venue for advertising that can feel like good TV commercials and full-page magazine ads. That’s knock two against Google. Google ads may well be effective, but they are not emotional. Consider the Toy Story 3 iAd Jobs demoed. What kind of ad through Google could compare to that? There’s a solid slice of the DF audience that firmly believes that all advertising is contemptible bullshit. They’ve already skipped to the end of this article. Some advertising, no matter the medium — TV, newspaper, magazine — is junk. But some is art. Commercial art, of course, but art nonetheless. Online advertising — mobile or not — has been largely devoid of this caliber of advertising. iAds is Apple’s attempt to create high-caliber ads for mobile. Jobs seemed more enthusiastic about iAds than anything else in the show yesterday. So the anti-Google message with iAds was two-fold: first, search isn’t good for mobile ads; and second, Google — logical, engineering-driven Google — will never provide an ad platform for emotional advertising like design-driven Apple can. Jobs’s iAds pitch was not directed to consumers. It was directed to creatives in the ad industry — and creative developers who want something better than text ads inside their apps. Miscellany I detected one other veiled insult against Google during the event — Jobs’s emphasis during the multitasking segment about how seriously Apple values the privacy of iPhone users, with regard to data and location information. In the way that the standard knock against Apple is that they maintain too much control over the App Store, the standard knock against Google is that they don’t value user privacy. Jobs’s message: You can trust Apple. At the outset Jobs claimed Apple has sold 50 million iPhones to date and 35 million iPod Touches. They don’t reveal updates to those numbers all that often. Game Center is not about Google, since Google doesn’t have a gaming social network. (Yet?) But it sure seems like a shot against Facebook. Want to play Scrabble or compare your scores against your friends? Game Center aims to supplant Facebook for that sort of thing. iBooks for iPhone is not surprising. (At the press event for the iPad debut in January, someone asked Phil Schiller whether there’d be an iBooks app for the iPhone, and he paused, smiled real big, and said something like “That’s an interesting idea.”) Just like with the Kindle, metadata for bookmarks and your current page sync wirelessly between iBooks on different client devices. If only the iPad’s iWork apps had this sort of wireless syncing. Next question: where’s the Mac client? Or will they build it into iTunes for the Mac and Windows? Shipping the iPad, of course, was a major priority, but like any new project at Apple, it was shipped by a team working in secret. Most of the company found out the details of the iPad when the rest of us did, and that’s why the iPad won’t get an iPhone OS 4 update until version 4.1 later this year — the plans for 4.0 were set and long in development before the iPad was revealed.↩ “Tent pole” is Apple company lingo for major features in a product that can be promoted to customers. I hear it frequently from friends at the company, but can’t recall it being used in a keynote address before.↩ If Microsoft still had the set of balls it had in the 90s, Internet Explorer would have been updated years ago to block web ads by default, including those from Google.↩
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The Complete iTunes History -- SoundJam MP to iTunes 9
Watching Steve take the stage and roll out a new version of iTunes got us all nostalgic for the old days, when iTunes logos changed color and our jukebox looked like it could withstand a bomb blast. Below is the history of the application that is running more than any other on our Macs. It spawned the iPod, iPhone, Apple TV and gave us an excuse to throw out those ugly CD towers that resided in the corners of our houses in the 90s. The ever present, iTunes. THE STARTSoundJam MP Somewhere around the time Metallica began suing Napster over the leak of its "Mission: Impossible II" track, "I Disappear," in 2000, a light bulb appeared over Steve Jobs’ head. Ever the innovator, Apple’s iCEO saw the peer-to-peer network as more than an illegal nuisance and began to develop a way to leverage the Napster revolution into the next killer Mac app. Audio players such as Audion and SoundApp had already exposed the inadequacies of QuickTime, and Apple knew it needed to build its solution from the ground up.After being rebuffed by Panic, which was already in negotiations with AOL over use of its Audion code, Steve Jobs approached Robin Casady and Michael Greene to discuss their SoundJam MP app, a powerful digital encoding program that looked a lot like Apple’s QuickTime player. After a series of short negotiations, Casady & Greene sold the rights for SoundJam to Apple for an undisclosed sum, and Apple immediately set to work on the app that would forever change the digital landscape.While the terms of the contract were top secret (Casady and Greene discontinued their app on June 1, 2001, but were barred from discussing the Apple deal for two years), Apple certainly wasn’t shy about ransacking SoundJam as it incorporated many of its signature features into iTunes, including visualizers, plug-ins, online retrieval of album data and drag-and-drop playlist creation. Much to the dismay of Jelly fans, however, Apple opted to leave SoundJam’s skins on the cutting-room floor. iTunes 1 (Jan. 9, 2001-Oct. 23, 2001) About 10 months later, at Macworld San Francisco in 2001, Apple debuted iTunes alongside iDVD and the CD-RW-enabled Power Macs. While it wasn’t exactly a show-stopper (though 275,000 copies were downloaded in the first week), the "world’s best and easiest to use ‘jukebox’ software" definitely raised the bar for music players on the Mac, which were relatively sparse and rather pricey (SoundJam cost $40). By offering iTunes as a free download and installing it on every new Mac, Apple essentially cut down the competition at the pass--or at least put a good scare into them. "Apple has done what Apple does best--make complex applications easy, and make them even more powerful in the process," said Steve Jobs at the time. "iTunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution."For many Mac users, iTunes was an introduction to digital music, and Apple strived to create a straightforward jukebox that needed little or no instruction to get started. Popping a music CD into your Mac automatically launched iTunes, which loaded the disc, collected track data from Gracenote and added them to your library. A clean interface split into boxes kept everything neat and always within reach of a mouse click.Conspicuously missing from iTunes 1 was the ability to burn a CD on an external drive, a deficiency compounded by Apple’s mostly CD-RW-less line of Macs. Apple answered the cries a month later at Macworld Tokyo with the introduction of new iMacs and Cubes with write-able drives, a 1.1 update that added third-party support, and the launch of the controversial "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign. iTunes 2 (Oct. 23, 2001-July 17, 2002) After racking up more than a million downloads in just a few short months, it quickly became clear that iTunes was every bit as revolutionary as Apple hoped. What all those users didn't know, however, was that the music player was merely the first part of a strategy that would redefine the company as more than a Mac maker. in October 2001, Steve Jobs showed us the next piece of Apple's digital hub in the form of an oddly named, undeniably sexy hand-held device. Built exclusively to leverage the popularity of Apple's music app, iPod came bundled with a brand-new version of iTunes that allowed it to seamlessly integrate with the songs and playlists stored on our Macs.Along with a considerable ratcheting of burn time, Apple also added "the three most requested features" into iTunes 2: MP3 CD burning, a 10-band equalizer and cross fading. A holdover from SoundJam, iTunes’ overdue equalizer came preloaded with more than 20 presets and brought robust, receiver-style tweaking to the desktop. The new crossfader eliminated the annoying gaps between songs and paved the way for a new generation of laptop DJs, and a sound enhancer appealed to audiophiles by adding depth and richness to tracks.But the real reason for iTunes 2 was iPod support, offering an unparalleled experience that transferred a few days’ worth of music from your Mac to your pocket in just about 10 minutes. iTunes 3 (July 17, 2002-April 28, 2003) Introduced at the final Macworld New York keynote as a companion to the first “solid-state touch wheel” iPod, iTunes 3 was a mostly incremental update with few dramatic changes. In the 18 months since its inception, some 14 million copies had been downloaded, so Apple had little reason to change the formula; rather it added just enough new features and enhancements to keep the iPod + iTunes revolution rolling.With iTunes 3, however, Apple threw down another gauntlet. Reduced prices, greater capacities and slimmer enclosures made the second-generation iPod even more desirable, but the addition of Windows support was the big change, opening up the popular player to millions of new music lovers. But Apple wisely kept iTunes tied to the Mac, forcing Windows users to sync their iPods with MUSICMATCH, a sub-par jukebox that basically served as an advertisement for iTunes’ sleek interface and finer points.As if to drive the point home, iTunes 3 added a few dozen new features, including track ratings, Sound Check for consistent volume playback, support for Audible audiobooks and Smart Playlists, which streamlined and automated the creation of digital mixes based on a series of predetermined rules. A few other enhancements--new track tags, library consolidation, playlist importing/exporting and track joining--added to the experience and widened the gap between iTunes and every other jukebox on the market. Click to embiggenTHE STOREiTunes 4 (April 28, 2003-Sept. 7, 2005) If iTunes 1 was a revolution, iTunes 4 was a bloody coup. What otherwise would have been a point update with a few minor playback improvements, AAC encoding and network sharing, iTunes 4 would have barely been noticeable without the addition of a new member to the "Source" sidebar: Music Store. A first-of-its-kind shopping experience that blew the roof off the industry and turned a thorn into a rose, the iTunes Music Store brought 200,000 high-quality songs from BMG, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal and Warner under one fully searchable, completely legal roof.Album artwork, one-click purchasing, in-apps video and a mostly unrestrictive DRM all for less than $1 a track. A million tracks were sold in the first week; four months later it surpassed 10 million. Along the road to the milestone 100 millionth download, however, Apple took iTunes 4 in a decidedly different direction when it rolled out the second generation of its store. Determined not to duplicate its prior proprietary mistakes, Apple didn’t renege on its promise to deliver the iTunes Music Store to Windows users by year’s end--and certainly didn’t skimp on the goods. A near-identical port of its award-winning iApp made its way onto PCs in October 2003 with a streamlined, expanded store (Mac users called it iTunes 4.1).With a 28-month upgrade path, version 4 stayed on desktops longer than any other iTunes release, gaining a slew of new features before retiring to digital graveyard: iMix, Party Shuffle, Apple Lossless, Podcasting, AirTunes, iPod photo and shuffle, and the European and Asian Music Stores all made their debuts under the iTunes 4 umbrella. Half a billion songs and 10 updates later, Apple had established itself as the undisputed king of the digital music domain. iTunes 5 (Sept. 7, 2005-Oct. 12, 2005) Where iTunes 4 was a lengthy, meandering release, the next version came and went in just five weeks. Introduced in tandem with the iPod nano at what would become an annual September digital music event, iTunes 5 packed an overall peppiness and a refined, cleaner mini player, but was surprisingly light on new features--and fittingly was the first numbered upgrade that didn’t come with a new color for the music note in its icon.Sadly, the highlight of the pack was a new Search Bar that made quick work of rummaging through the store’s two million songs, rounded out by Smart Shuffle, playlist folders, parental controls, AAC VBR importing and Outlook syncing. Ultimately, though, it was the bug-ridden app’s dark platinum makeover that got the most attention. iTunes 5 ditched the outdated brushed-metal skin of its predecessors, and the thinner, sexier look filled many a forum with praise and criticism.Better known as iTunes 4.10, the fifth version of iTunes was mostly a disappointment. Rumors about TV show purchases and movie rentals that had swirled in the days leading up to the event failed to materialize, and even Steve struggled to come up with something nice to say: "We are constantly improving iTunes with new features like... better searching because we love music ourselves and want to surprise and delight music fans around the world." iTunes 6 (Oct. 12, 2005-Sept. 12, 2006) What a difference 35 days make. At an unexpected "One More Thing" event in early October, Steve kicked iTunes 5 to the curb and rolled out the red carpet for the next generation of the digital jukebox. Arriving in tow with new iMacs and video iPods, iTunes 6 brought serious changes to the store, adding online gift options, customer reviews, "Just For You" recommendations and some 2,000 music videos and Pixar shorts, all priced at $1.99 and formatted for new iPod’s 2.5-inch color screen.But that wasn’t all. Never content to rest on his laurels, Steve rolled out TV show downloads with iTunes 6, priced at the same $1.99 as the far-shorter music videos. Just five Disney shows were available at launch--"Lost," "Desperate Housewives," "Night Stalker," "That's So Raven" and "The Suite Life" --but when more than a million videos were purchased inside of three weeks, it didn’t take long before other networks came knocking. Before the end of the year, NBC Universal had signed up, followed shortly by MTV, Showtime, Fox and CBS, and soon iTunes 6 had done for TV what iTunes 4 did for music, cramming more than 220 shows onto its shelves within 12 months.iTunes 6’s TV Store didn’t make quite as much noise as the Music Store, but its 11-month tenure marked the start of an exciting time for Apple, as momentum began to build toward something huge on the horizon. Click to embiggenTHE SYNERGYiTunes 7 (Sept. 12, 2006-Sept. 9, 2008) Billed as the "most significant enhancement to the world’s most popular music jukebox and online music and video store since it debuted," iTunes 7 was indeed a dramatic reinvention of the five-and-a-half-year-old iApp, with sweeping interface changes, speed boosts and a renewed focus on the jukebox.Packing two new navigation views--a list mode dotted with album artwork and an officially sanctioned version of Steel Skies’ Cover Flow--iTunes 7 put the emphasis back on iTunes as a music player, starting with the debut of the MiniStore, which strengthened the marriage between the two segments. Everything from the Source list to iPod integration received an overdue makeover, and Apple even fixed the age-old microsecond of silence that iTunes stubbornly inserted between joined tracks. Of course, it wouldn’t be an iTunes update without a new addition to the store, and Apple didn’t disappoint here, either. With users already downloading more than a million videos and TV episodes each week, iTunes 7 made the logical leap to movies, adding some 75 near-DVD quality titles from Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar, Touchstone Pictures and Miramax Films at launch and growing to more than 2,500 films from nearly every studio over the course of its two-year upgrade cycle. What made the seventh version so significant, however, was its versatility. By the time it had run its course, iTunes 7 had well grown into its role as the center of the digital hub, with iPhone, iPod touch Apple TV, movie rentals, the App Store, and a slew of nanos and shuffles all landing on its watch. Through it all, iTunes 7 never felt stale, bloated or sluggish, smoothly adapting to the new demands with little more than a software patch. iTunes 8 (Sept. 9, 2008-Sept. 9, 2009) After 19 software updates to iTunes 7, it was time for the next whole number, and Apple finally delivered iTunes 8 at its annual music event in 2008. Following such a tremendous update was no easy task, and Apple could easily have packaged the new stuff into iTunes 7.8, if not for the super-smart technology hiding within.The centerpiece of iTunes 8 was the Genius feature, an underrated playlist tool that combined the controlled randomness of Smart Shuffle with the queue capabilities of Party Shuffle (iTunes DJ after 8.1) to transform your Library into a personalized radio station. Adding to the fun was the optional Genius Sidebar, a mildly intrusive strip of song recommendations culled from a mix of your favorite songs (and in later versions, TV shows and movies) and "anonymously-gathered knowledge from millions of other iTunes users," all crunched by a series of Apple algorithms, neatly packaged and beamed back to your computer.Minor tweaks elsewhere improved upon the broad refinements introduced in the prior release, and Apple dumped the Search Bar in favor of a return to field-specific exploring. An enhanced grid mode replaced album view with an iPhoto Events-like scheme that grouped albums and artists into interactive mini widgets. Taking a break from its relentless tide of upgrades, the store was mostly left out this round of enhancements, but iTunes 8 did usher in high-definition content (despite Steve’s previous declaration of 2005 as the year of HD).iTunes 9 (Sept. 9, 2009) Exactly a year after iTunes 8 meekly landed on desktops, Apple welcomed Steve Jobs back to the main stage by dropping a bombshell of a release that overhauled the store, made iPhone syncing effortless and updated the classic vinyl jacket for the 21st century.Open iTunes 9 and you’re immediately smacked by a new white background, giving the grid a clean, bright look that makes your album art pop and beckons you inside. Speed improvements are noticeable throughout, particularly when using Cover Flow, which can now handle speedy scrolling with only the slightest bit of lag. Delving further into the latest version of Apple’s nearly nine-year-old jukebox reveals hipper icons, a few extra curves and whistles, and a new Home Sharing feature that finally lets your trade music with friends and family members.Flip to the store and you’ll find a host of newness, beginning with a personalized welcome note, sensible layout, enhanced album pages with quick view windows and previews that borrow cues from the mobile iTunes Store. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find iTunes Extras (think DVD bonus features for digital movies) and iTunes LPs, the greatest thing to happen to music since, well, iTunes. A far greater thing than the digital PDF booklets bundled with album purchases, iTunes LP--while currently limited to just 12 albums and saddled with nonuniform pricing (Jay-Z’s pre-order costs $16.99 while Pearl Jam’s costs $9.99)--is poised to rekindle the creativity and connection that’s all but been stripped away by MP3s. With iTunes X most likely slated for a September 2010 release, we can only wonder what new features are being realized in a secret bunker in Cupertino. Only time, and Steve Jobs, will tell. What has been your favorite feature over the years? Share in the comments.
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How to Use Your Mac and Your iPhone to Completely Automate Your Home
Modernize your home and simplify your life with these painless products and strategies that automate your house, apartment, castle, or whatever keeps the roof over your head. Illustrations by Hanoch Piven Still using jagged little strips of metal to unlock your front door? Paying someone to feed your pets while you’re away for a weekend? Then it’s time to truly enter the second decade of the 21st century. Setting up home-control automation that runs from your Mac and iPhone is surprisingly simple, and the results can feel like magic. We kick things off with a primer that takes the hassle and jargon out of home control, then dive straight into showing you the best possibilities for managing your home’s lights, entertainment, security, and loads more. Just wait until you check out the washing machine that tweets when it’s finished a load…What Exactly is Home Control?You might’ve also heard it called “home automation,” and you might be a bit reluctant to slog through all the jargon and devices that the phrase brings to mind. But really, it’s simple. There are two types of home-control systems: the fantasy technology you see at Disney’s Tomorrowland and the gear you can actually deploy in the real world. Unfortunately, manufacturers of home-control systems have overpromised and under-delivered for so many years that many people have just stopped listening.Good news: It’s safe to start listening again. There’s still a yawning chasm between fantasy and reality--we’re a long way from having a robot butler greet us with our smoking jacket and a perfectly muddled mojito as we step out of our flying car. But we can manage nearly every system in and around the home: lighting, heating and cooling, home theater, security, even irrigation.Why bother? Home-control systems are appealing for many reasons: They deliver unparalleled convenience and efficiency, they add value to your home, they strengthen your home’s physical security, and they help reduce your impact on the environment. With the right tools, you can monitor and manage all your home systems whether you’re on the couch, in the car, or at work. We’ll discuss those specific applications in the following pages, but first, it’s important to begin with an overview of the basics. Which home-control standard do you want to use? There are four major ecosystems to choose from, and naturally, they’re mutually exclusive (at least for the time being)…X10/InsteonIntroduced by Pico Electronics way back in the 1970s, X10 is the granddaddy of home-control technology. The passage of time and the long absence of significant competition helped X10 amass the largest installed base of any home-control technology, despite a reputation for being as reliable as a British sports car from the same era.X10 devices use a primitive form of power-line networking, meaning commands travel over your home’s existing electrical wiring. The X10 protocol doesn’t include a feedback loop, so there’s no way for devices sending commands to know whether those commands have been received and executed. The technology is also highly susceptible to electrical noise, which X10 devices sometimes interpret as valid commands. This can result not only in false negatives (a light or an appliance doesn’t turn on or off in response to a command), but also false positives (turning on or off in the absence of a command).Insteon, developed by SmartLabs (a major distributor of X10 products) in 2001, builds and improves on the X10 protocol without rendering X10 devices obsolete. Like the ZigBee and Z-Wave standards we’ll discuss next, every node on the Insteon network is capable of receiving information and passing on the command to the next node if it’s not the intended target. Unlike those two standards, Insteon devices use both radio frequencies (RF) and power lines to communicate (this retains X10 compatibility and reaches devices where radio waves can’t penetrate).SmartLabs' Insteon uses radio frequencies and power lines to communicate.SmartLabs maintains its own online retail operation and sells directly to the do-it-yourself market. The Insteon ecosystem is extremely robust in terms of the systems it can manage. You can buy plug-in and in-the-wall lighting controls; thermostats; motion, door, and window sensors; irrigation controllers; and more. Third-party support is very good in some respects and surprisingly limited in others. For instance, you’ll find a number of Mac software controllers (see below), but none of the major lighting-control manufacturers in the U.S. (Cooper Wiring Devices, GE, Intermatic, or Leviton) build Insteon-compatible switches, dimmers, or receptacles.Insteon’s failure to gain support from other manufacturers will likely limit its long-term prospects. The development of a bridge (a device capable of translating commands from one standard to another) would save Insteon customers from getting hosed if the market ultimately embraces one of the other competing standards. ZigBeeZigBee is the only home-control specification based on an IEEE standard (IEEE is the leading standards organization for device manufacturers; you’ve likely heard of its 802.11 standard for wireless networking). And you might think ZigBee’s designation as an international standard would automatically render it the marketplace winner (after all, how many wireless-networking products buck 802.11?), but far fewer ZigBee products are available to the do-it-yourself crowd than either Insteon or Z-Wave.Part of the problem is that early versions of the ZigBee standard didn’t guarantee interoperability; companies were allowed to develop products that worked only within their own proprietary systems. ZigBee does have a strong presence in the energy-consumption and -management market, where it’s embedded in thermostats inside the home and in utility smart meters outside it. One of the largest home-control manufacturers, Control4, builds complete ZigBee-based systems; but you must acquire it from a contractor who will handle the installation (charging you handsomely and limiting your expansion options in the process).Few ZigBee devices are sold at retail today, and none of the Mac home-control software programs we looked at are capable of operating a ZigBee network yet. Still, ZigBee’s status as an IEEE standard carries a lot of weight, and that could make it a major contender down the road.Z-WaveZ-Wave is a proprietary wireless home-control standard developed by Zensys, and it enjoys robust support from more third-party manufacturers than either Insteon or ZigBee. Cooper, GE, Intermatic, and Leviton offer comprehensive Z-Wave lighting controls; Wayne-Dalton builds garage-door openers; Schlage manufactures door locks; and so on.Control your home's temperature with this Z-Wave thermostat from Trane. You can buy nearly all these products at retail, but Wayne-Dalton’s HousePort and TrickleStar’s Z-Wave widget are the only Mac-compatible home-control programs we’re aware of, and they’re both very rudimentary. But Z-Wave has gathered more industry-wide momentum than either Insteon or ZigBee (including a critical endorsement from Intel), which could help it become the eventual home-control standard. Hybrid ZigBee/Z-Wave systems are also an option--Control4, for instance, introduced a bridge device late last year that enables its ZigBee system to control Z-Wave devices. Handy.The Future Awaits… Even more good news: There’s no need to make a decision just yet. In the next few pages, we’ll outline the most useful automation options for everything from automatically turning on your lights to amazingly simple webcam security to streaming video servers. Once you decide what’s right for your home, refer back to this primer to decide which hardware standard and corresponding software is right for you. Then it’s time to get your DIY on… even if doing it yourself amounts to Googling “professional home automation installers.”Home-Control SoftwareYou'll need to manage your entire home-control system by running software on your Mac that "talks" to your various interfaced devices. The major software players are:Indigo: Perceptive Automation’s Indigo Lite ($89.95) is compatible with Insteon and X10 modules, but not ZigBee or Z-Wave. It includes both a built-in web server and client/server architecture, so you can control the entire system locally or remotely. You can also schedule events (turn on the outside lights at dusk), set up triggers (send an email message if a door sensor is activated; monitor and program your Insteon thermostat), and more. Indigo Pro ($179.95) adds a host of advanced features, such as voice-command response. You can also control Indigo with your iPhone using the free app Indigo Touch.Indigo's software enables you to control your system remotely.XTension: Sand Hill Engineering’s XTension ($149.95) is compatible with X10 devices, several RF and niche interfaces, and certain wireless weather-monitoring products manufactured by Oregon Scientific. A technically savvy audience--even home automation contractors--will find a lot to like, but the software doesn’t support ZigBee, Z-Wave, or Insteon modules, which is… odd.Thinking Home: Always Thinking’s Thinking Home ($79) works with X10 and Insteon modules, but not ZigBee or Z-Wave devices. It’s not as sophisticated as Indigo, but it covers the basics and boasts an easy-to-learn user interface. Next Page: Lights, Power, Heating, Actions! >>Utilities: Lights, Power, Heating, Actions!Play puppetmaster with your home's utilities from your Mac and iPhone, and reap the benefits of convenience and efficiency.Light Your WayLighting automation puts the “utilitarian” into home-utility automation. These upgrades are flashy only on a literal level; you probably won’t go bragging to coworkers about how your House of the Future can turn its lights on and off. But these techniques form the foundation of home automation and make a great place to kick things off.For starters, try teaching your house to turn on the lights as you pull into the driveway. In addition to a basic home-control setup with Mac software and a hardware interface, you can add driveway-sensor modules ($169.99) or an automation-savvy garage-door retrofit ($71.99). Or just get a new garage-door opener ($189) with a Z-Wave interface to both control and monitor the door. With your Mac software, you can then build an if-then script that ties into your home lighting. If a car pulls into the driveway, activate the exterior house lighting. If you open the garage door, turn on the entryway lights inside.XTension lets you graphically assign icons that match your home setting.More sensors can create additional options. An outdoor motion sensor with floodlights ($54.88) can turn on when someone passes by. Your Mac could then log the time it happened and snap a webcam picture of your yard.You can take the process indoors, activating room lighting based on a motion sensor ($34.99). Full indoor automation can be harder since you might want to lounge around, but sitting without moving would turn the lights off. Still, it can work well in certain situations, such as lighting up a party as it moves around into different rooms.Control Utilities and Devices Over the InternetMost home automation software can connect online, letting you control devices from anywhere. Cancel your sprinkler schedule on a rainy day, open the shades in your teenager’s room at noon, adjust your thermostat when away, and otherwise tap into your setup over the Internet. Indigo and Thinking Home (see above for details) enable a web server within the automation interface. XTension uses an optional plug-in, X2Web ($39.95), to connect online.Indigo Touch, a free iPhone app, lets you change home-heating conditions from wherever you are. You could also remotely connect to an online Mac and control the whole computer as if you were sitting at home, directly using the automation software of your choice. Several remote-access tools enable this approach, including GoToMyPC ($19.95/month) and LogMeIn Free (free). LogMeIn even offers an iPhone version of the app, LogMeIn Ignition ($29.99). Or if you’re on MobileMe ($99/year), the Back to My Mac feature does the same thing. These tools might also be easier alternatives to setting up online components in the automation software because you shouldn’t have to make special network configurations on your home router to allow access.Open-ended plugs, such as the EZ102X4 (top) and the ApplianceLink V2, let you connect any device to your automation network.And many iPhone apps offer another way to connect to your hardware over the Internet. Indigo Touch (free) is a companion for that desktop software. Otherwise, just search for “X10,” “Insteon,” or “home automation” to browse the App Store. Be sure to read the requirements closely--some interface with software on your home Mac, while others talk directly to certain Internet-enabled automation controllers.Create Your Own Animal HouseYou can more easily take good care of your pets in an automated house, especially if you’re coming home late or taking a short vacation. Some hardware ties directly into your setup, while you might have to creatively hack other devices.For occasional meals, consider an internet-connected device, such as the Petwatch feeder ($269.99). The hardware includes a webcam so you can view your pet wherever you are.With this Petwatch feeder, you can watch and feed your pets remotely.If you’re technically minded--or you can draft someone who is--get creative with other home automation devices for great pet combinations. Some pet doors unlock when Fido or Whiskers get close; their collars hold a key. For one option, try a Solo Pet Door ($395 and up). This device retracts when it senses a magnet that your pet wears.We couldn’t track down any pet doors that talk to home automation systems, but you can combine a door like this with your own sensors. Add a proximity sensor and webcam to track and record your pet movement; you could even have your Mac email or SMS a picture. If you add a power relay to the mix, such as the EZIO2X4 ($134.99) or Insteon ApplianceLink V2 ($34.99), you can lock the door remotely. Maybe you want to give your pets access depending on the time of day. Or you could lock the door after a cat returns from a night of carousing. (There’re loads of creative options out there; for a few more, see Top Ten Wonders of the Home Automation World below.)Use Home Control To Live GreenerA home-control system can also help you to reduce your carbon footprint and use previous resources more efficiently. Here are six ways to get started:>> Rather than leaving your exterior lights on all day so your home isn’t dark when you get home, retrofit your light switches and use home-control software to turn them on when the sun sets.>> Conserve water by installing programmable sprinkler controllers that can adjust their irrigation schedules in response to weather conditions and forecasts.>> Create a vacation “scene” that turns your HVAC system off while you’re away. The system can also turn various lights on in the evening and off at night, using a randomized pattern that will fool prospective thieves into thinking the house is occupied.>> Install a programmable thermostat that turns your climate-control system off 30 minutes before you leave and 30 minutes before you’re scheduled to return home. Use your iPhone to remotely update the routine should your plans change.>> Reduce your electrical consumption and improve your media-room ambience by installing a dimmer that brings down the lights when you press Play on your remote control.>> Add an Insteon-enabled 220-volt control to your current high-voltage electrical appliances, such as a water heater (a notorious energy-waster), and conserve money and power by shutting them down during the day or when you’re away from home for extended periods.Next Page: Become Master of All You Survey >> Security: Become Master of All You SurveyYou install software updates to keep your Mac and iPhone secure. Let them return the favor by keeping tabs on your home while you're away.Keep an iSight on ThingsMac has a built-in iSight--or almost any QuickTime-compatible camera attached--you’re one step away from a surveillance system. All you need is software like Security Spy ($50) or EvoCam ($30), and you’re in the counterespionage business. Each application records pictures and video to your Mac continuously, according to schedules you define, or when it detects motion in a camera’s field of view. Just launch the app, point your iSight where you expect snoops to sneak (like a doorway or maybe the desk holding your plans for world domination), then leave your computer running. When the camera picks up movement, the software can start recording, email you a photo of the suspicious event, or alert the Mac running your home automation system to trigger a larger security plan. If you’re more curious than concerned, both applications can upload pictures to an FTP site and serve video to the internet, letting you view your camera’s feed from a browser. You can even log in remotely and tweak your security camera’s settings.EvoCam's surveillance system indulges your counterespionage fantasies.An iSight or webcam is fine for a small room, but Security Spy and EvoCam can monitor and control multiple video sources simultaneously. If your need to know extends to several rooms or even outdoors, you’ll want to weave a larger web of spies... er, cameras.Expand Your HorizonsStepping up from a single-camera system doesn’t have to be difficult. The same software and principles apply; you’ll just add additional cameras, video servers, or network cameras to view and control it all from a central Mac. Video servers send footage from multiple cameras to your wired or wireless network. If your cameras are digital, other Macs running surveillance software can do the job of the server. But if you’re using analog cameras like Q-See’s night-vision-capable QSC48030 ($199.99), you’ll want a dedicated server like Axis’ 240Q ($499.99) to digitize the signals so they can be seen by your Mac.Monitor from afar with Axis's 214 PTZ camera.Network cameras have built-in web servers that can join networks without the need for extra gear. A wide range of network cameras is available for every budget, from Panasonic’s webcam-style, 802.11g-enabled BL-C131A ($299.95) to the Axis 214 PTZ ($1299.00), which wouldn’t look out of place in a villain’s lair (or on a department-store ceiling). These and many other network cameras also sport lenses that can remotely pan, tilt, or zoom in to give you a better view of the action.There are endless varieties of hardware to consider, but the good news is there’s plenty of gear out there to fit your needs. Both Security Spy and EvoCam’s sites offer lists of compatible equipment that make good starting points for building a home-surveillance network.Sensor YourselfHandy as video surveillance is, it probably won’t be a good fit for every room in your house. For places where cameras are impractical, obtrusive, or just plain weird, Insteon motion sensors and magnetic door switches can keep tabs on who goes there when you’ve gone out.SmartLabs Design’s battery-powered Wireless Motion/Occupancy Sensor ($34.99) installs almost anywhere to detect motion in a 110-degree arc at a range of 40 feet. When an intruder is discovered, the Mac running your Insteon system can send you an email, turn on lights, or release the hounds. Because these motion detectors work by sensing heat, you’ll want to install yours in places without extreme fluctuations in temperature. That includes areas near heating grates, fireplaces, or large windows that get lots of sun.SmartLabs' wireless motion sensor alerts you to intruders.If motion detectors won’t do the job, guard your perimeter with SmartLabs’ TriggerLinc Wireless Open/Close Sensor ($34.99). Half the sensor attaches to a door, and the other half installs beside it on the door frame. Opening the door breaks the magnetic contact between the halves, letting your network know a would-be 007 has entered the room or found the hidden compartment in your desk. Since the TriggerLinc is compact and wireless, it installs on just about anything that opens: windows, drawers, server closets, you name it. You’ll never wonder if the babysitter has raided your liquor cabinet again.Unlock the PossibilitiesSecurity isn’t just about keeping people out. It’s also about letting the right people in, and the internet can help. The web lets you access secure information... why can’t it open your front door? For a monthly fee of $12.99, that’s just what Schlage’s LiNK Starter Kit ($299) can do. Its lever lock (also available in a dead bolt model) replaces the one already installed in your door, and ten buttons above its traditional keyhole allow entry with a programmable access code. But the lock also sports a battery-powered transmitter that talks to the included Bridge, a base station that connects to the internet and creates a wireless network for other LiNK devices, like the lamp controller that rounds out the kit.Schlange's LiNK Starter Kit remotely opens your front door.Once you’re a LiNK subscriber, you can log in to Schlage’s site and control your lock from anywhere. Need a friend to check your house while you’re away? No problem--remotely program your lock with a custom access code. The in-laws arrived while you’re stuck at work? Just open the door for ’em (or don’t, we won’t judge). You can even use the free Schlage LiNK iPhone app to manage access while you’re on the go. If you’re worried about being locked out when the internet is down, Schlage claims its locks’ batteries will last up to three years... but keeping a spare key on hand never hurt anybody.Put Professional Security a Touch AwaySchlage’s LiNK is one of several commercial packages that combine home security, automation, and the iPhone to monitor and control your home without fuss. Even if you’re not the DIY type, you can bring your peace of mind into this century.Commercial security companies offer plans and products designed to work together seamlessly. Products can include motion detectors, cameras, and other sensors run from a central control panel on a wall instead of your computer. While the basic idea is the same as a home-built system--devices monitor your house and warn you in case of trouble--commercial systems can offer integrated fire detection and alerts to personnel who will contact the authorities in an emergency. Plans cost anywhere from $30 to $50 a month (plus installation fees), but their features and simplicity may be worth the expense.For a monthly fee, commercial security companies can provide more than peace of mind.Alarm.com, CPI Security Systems, and Platinum Protection each offer free applications that let iPhone users control their security systems. These apps let you arm and disarm your system, monitor camera feeds, receive notifications when sensors detect something, and view a history of recent security events. Want to know what time your teenager really got home from his friend’s house? There’s an app for that.Next Page: Just Stream It >> Entertainment: Just Stream ItYour entertainment wants to be set free... and you want it to be too. These four easy setups will help you get the most out of your music, movies, and TV.Enjoy Your Music EverywhereSetting up a streaming audio system for the first time is like that day when you switched to a DVR to watch TV--you’ll wonder how you ever enjoyed your tunes without it. Once all your music’s on a home network, you can listen to your songs from any computer or standalone music-playing device. Whether you’re unwinding, waking up in the morning, or broadcasting beats throughout your house for a party, you don’t have to fuss with issues like which Mac has which MP3 or where that blasted CD got to--all your music is where you want it to be.Mac fans typically choose between three major music-streaming systems: Apple AirPort Express ($99), Sonos hardware ($349 and up), or Logitech Squeezebox devices ($149 and up). Each system has its own infrastructure, including ways to control everything from an iPhone or iPod touch. And each one has benefits and drawbacks in certain situations.Apple's AirPort Express wirelessly connects your Mac to your stereo.As expected, Apple’s AirPort Express is the best match for iTunes… and little else. These little boxes connect to a small set of computer-style speakers or into a home stereo, so factor those costs into your budgeting. You’ll need one AirPort Express and speaker set for each room you want to play music in. An Apple TV ($229) can also do double duty, streaming music even when your TV is off.While AirPort Express scores with simplicity, there are a few drawbacks. One or more Macs will have to be left on to play music, and extra features that the other systems pack--such as alarms and online services beyond basic streaming radio--don’t work without additional software.Next up: the Logitech Squeezebox devices. They work well once set up, but they feel more complicated than the other choices. Their server software runs off one of your Macs, telling Squeezeboxes where to find your songs. Like the AirPort Express, you’ll have to have a Mac running to access home audio.Sonos Bundle--along with the Sonos app--turns your iPhone or iPod into a remote control.Unlike Apple’s option, Squeezebox devices can play back more internet choices, including Rhapsody and Napster subscriptions. And you won’t have to keep a Mac running when playing online sources--woot! Logitech also offers several Squeezebox devices, from a clock radio–style box with a built-in speaker to hardware that connects to an entertainment center. Consider the Squeezebox if you can sacrifice some of the AirPort Express’s simplicity for better internet features.Last but not least, Sonos rules high-end audio streaming because of the care put into its hardware and interfaces. And audiophiles can really hear the difference between a Sonos device and its competitors. Like Logitech, Sonos hardware comes in a few packages, some designed to attach to a home stereo, one with built-in speakers, and some that connect to speakers. Sonos devices lack an interface beyond volume/mute buttons, so you’ll typically control everything with the excellent standalone remote ($349) or iPhone app. Sonos’ internet streaming choices match the Squeezebox, but unlike either competitor, Sonos hardware can play music directly from a network hard drive, so you don’t need to keep a Mac running. But Sonos might K.O. your budget as much as it does its competitors. You can pick and choose which gear you want, but plan for roughly $500 or more per room. Yowza.Share a Single iTunes Library with Multiple MacsYou’re probably thinking, wait… iTunes works well to share libraries and stream audio over a network. And if you’re happy with that method, there’s no harm in sticking with it. But iTunes sharing doesn’t let you sync music from any system to an iPod or compile ripped songs in a single location--and again, your main Mac needs to be left on for it to work. Fortunately, you can show your music who’s boss and let all of your Macs access a consolidated iTunes library.Before you begin, consider using TuneRanger ($29.99) to sync different libraries together into one master audio source. Then transfer that combined music folder to a network server or always-on Mac that everyone can reach. Launch iTunes on one Mac while holding Option, pick Choose Library, and navigate to the library file on your network.This time, the dreaded can't-find-library box is a good thing.On the other Macs, hold Option when launching iTunes, but make a new library on the local hard drive when prompted. On those systems, change the media folder location in the advanced iTunes preferences to point to the music shared on the network. Within the advanced iTunes preferences on all Macs, be sure to enable the checkbox to copy files to the media folder when adding to the library.Now install Syncopation ($24.95) on each Mac to keep the iTunes libraries synced. Check the setup documents for details, but be sure to click the option to Import Tracks Without Copying in the Advanced preferences.Breathe Music into Old Macs and iPodsIf you’ve got an old Mac sitting around, you can dust it off and turn it into an audio client. Translation: You’ll be able to control it from another computer, pushing songs over your network as if it were Squeezebox or AirPort Express hardware.You’ll never have to turn on--or even connect--a display, either. Try Airfoil on your host computer ($25) with Airfoil Speakers for Mac (free) on the old-Mac-turned-audio-client. You can even duplicate results on an iPhone or iPod touch with Airfoil Speakers for Touch (free).Stream MP3s and internet radio to your stereo with Softsqueeze.Even if you have no Squeezebox hardware, you can install the basic Squeezebox Server (free) software on your main computer to stream audio. Then add Softsqueeze (free) to your old networked Mac, and the Squeezebox software will treat it just like standalone hardware from Logitech.Get Started on Streaming VideoYes, your screen-viewing time can get better. Instead of sharing videos directly between various Macs, you can streamline your consumption of movies and TV by creating a central server that holds all your video. With this method, you’ll leave the server running instead of having to keep various Macs online. You’ll be better organized too.Don’t overthink the biggest piece of hardware in this process: the server. Just repurpose nearly any Mac sitting around. Even a five-year-old laptop or iMac will do the trick. Or for bonus points, turn an old PC into a Linux server.Once you scrounge up an old computer, consider its drives. For a moderate video collection, you’ll want about 60GB of free space. If you gobble down video like Wimpy takes to cheeseburgers, plan for 120GB or even more. Also aim for a speedy drive interface; essentially, just avoid connecting over original USB, which you might find on old systems. And be sure you’ve got a DVD drive if you’re going to transfer over movies. Check out this article for tips.Your network makes up the other biggest factor for streaming success. 100BASE-T is a must; if you have any old 10BASE-T devices between the server and clients, video will stutter. Ideally, consider gigabit (1000BASE-T) devices. If you must have a wireless client or server, get at least 802.11g or 802.11n Wi-Fi, and keep 802.11b devices--the original AirPort standard--off the network. In many situations, old devices slow down the network to maintain compatibility. That said, more than 10 years after Apple introduced AirPort, we still prefer an all-wired connection because it’s more reliable and faster than most wireless networks.Once you connect everything, you’ll just store all video files on the server and play them from client Macs or other devices. Again, iTunes provides the simplest way to manage everything: Run it on both systems, and use shared libraries to stream the video.iTunes can also help you get started with video streaming.But several other software options deliver fine alternatives. Bundled with OS X, Front Row’s big interface is ideal for watching shows across the room. Plex (free) and Boxee (free) are also built around long-distance interfaces and add more internet features than Apple’s software. Check out this article for even more tips, including additional TV-connected devices that can stream shows and directions to hack an AppleTV to run Boxee. Have fun!Next Page: Top Ten Wonders of the Home Automation World >> Top Ten Wonders of the Home Automation WorldYou've seen home automation by the book--now check out home automation off the hook. These labors of love take the good life to a level even the Jetsons never imagined.10. Grass Has a New Enemy We’re all about using the right tool to make a job easier, especially when that job is mowing the lawn in the summer heat. Terry Creer must agree--his remote-controlled lawn mower grafts an electric lawn mower to the wheels of a motorized wheelchair operated with a hobby-store radio controller. Swapping out the wheelchair’s original joystick for a wireless receiver keeps the mow-bot on the right path, and a fail-safe mechanism kills the motor if the controller’s signal is ever lost. Total cost for the project was less than $500. Sipping a cold drink while the lawn mower does all the work? Priceless.9. Tweets, Shoots, and LeavesWant to make the world a greener place? The Botanicalls tweeting plant monitor lets you do just that, one plant at a time. It’s a $99.99 kit that, along with a soldering iron and a little patience, lets you build a leaf-shaped moisture sensor that you stick into a plant’s soil. Once installed in your plant’s pot, the Botanicalls runs on AC power and plugs into your router’s Ethernet port to tweet when your leafy friend is feeling a little dry. With Botanicalls, you can embrace the DIY spirit, expand your techie know-how, and keep the flora in your life happy. What could be better?8. "Alcohol? Why, It's My Primary Function, Sir."When you sense the need to party, Jamie Price’s Bar2D2 is definitely the droid you’re looking for. Built in eight months from plywood, polycarbonate, and a used electric scooter, Bar2 works the room by remote control, serving drinks wherever he’s needed. A beer elevator brings cold bottles to any partygoer’s reach, and six onboard mixers let Bar2 make a galaxy of cocktails with the push of a button. And when the music starts, his sound-activated neon lights help make the party fully armed and operational. Maybe the Empire would have been cooler about that whole rebellion thing with a few of these guys scooting around the Death Star.7. Dryer Sheets and Washer TweetsGetting clothes dirty is fun, but washing ’em is a drag. Who needs the stress of waiting for the spin cycle to end? That’s why we wish we had Ryan Rose’s tweeting washing machine. The limit switch installed on its timer lets a simple microcontroller know when the washer is on or off. Red LEDs added to the washer’s controls show when it’s waiting for a wash to start, and a green LED shows when a wash has begun. When the load is finished, the washer tweets an update and displays an alert on a wall-mounted screen. It’s the coolest thing to happen to cleanliness since the bubble bath!6. The World Will Tweet a Path To Your Door You might think a wireless doorbell would be convenient enough, but not Roo Reynolds. His tweeting doorbell transforms an everyday wireless doorbell and ringer into an internet-connected chatterbox that gets two alerts for the price of one. The doorbell works like any other, but the ringer mechanism--squeezed into an Altoids can carefully cut to expose the ringer’s wireless antenna--sports a tiny circuit board that’s attached by a USB cable to a nearby computer. When visitors drop by and ring the doorbell, the computer tweets a simultaneous alert. Now that’s a curiously refreshing idea!5. Just the Cats, Ma'am When the neighborhood critters started sneaking through Ioan Ghip’s cat door for free meals, he took matters into his own hands, DIY-style, to make a tweeting cat door. First he outfitted the collars of his cats Gus and Penny with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. Then he added an RFID reader and computer-controlled servo to the cat door so it would recognize only his two cats--no squirrels, raccoons, or bears allowed. Now when the spare laptop that monitors the cat door detects the lucky kitties nearby, it opens the door and tweets an update, while a webcam snaps a shot of them coming or going. Say cheese, guys!4. And We Thought Kernel Panics Were Scary Who says all automated homes have to be convenient and relaxing? Not automation contractor Jeffrey Lehman. Years ago he teamed with Halloween Park, a haunted-house attraction in Strinestown, Pennsylvania, to turn the spook show into a fully interactive, living videogame. Fiendishly clever use of motion detectors and other sensors guides victi… er, visitors through 26 rooms of creepy interactive puzzles that must be solved to escape the park… alive! Doors creak, lights flicker, and the terrifying Dead Fred leaps out of nowhere--all in response to people’s actions. Amazing what you can do with the right gear, ingenuity, and a healthy desire to scare the crap out of folks.3. "Incoming Romulan Ship! Fire Blu-ray!" Maybe it’s the big screen, but doesn’t it seem natural to mix Star Trek with a home theater? Yet that’s only half of what’s so cool about Gary Reighn’s entertainment command station, The Bridge. Sure, it’s packed with a starfleet of gear: a video projector, media players, and X10-powered lights--all under remote control. But what makes The Bridge so appealing isn’t its slick final-frontier technology--it’s that it looks like a fun place to hang out, just like the original Enterprise. Gary didn’t forget the home when he set out to build himself the ultimate home entertainment center on a budget, and it sure looks like he got his money’s worth.2. Now U Can Automate Cheezburger? The problem: feeding Mathew Newton’s cats Frankie and Elmo while he’s away. The solution: the internet-controlled cat feeder. A cereal dispenser stores the cat food, and a motor turns a flap to drop food into a splitter that sends the kibble to each kitty’s bowl in roughly the same portions. Here’s the trick: The feeder is controlled by the port status lights in an old Ethernet switch. Remote commands from a browser activate the lights, and their signals tell the feeder when to let Frankie and Elmo get their nom-nom on. Wow. No one can say these cats don’t have a well-trained owner.1. Push-Button Party Palace Each Wonder uses home automation in cool, creative ways, but the sheer excess of Zack Anderson’s MIDAS--ahem… that’s a Multifunction In-Dorm Automation System--deserves special notice. Made from a mini ITX motherboard and a battery of X10-controlled sensors, appliances, and displays, MIDAS transforms the room with the tap of a touchscreen (or even voice commands). There’s a work mode for studying and a relax mode for chilling, but when it’s time to party, swatting a big red panic button dims the lights, draws shades that serve as projection screens, and kicks out the techno jams. Sound-activated strobes, laser lights, and a fog machine do the rest. Surveillance cameras and a fingerprint-scanning security system keep everything safe while Zack’s away, but we have to wonder--why leave?
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50 Common Mac Problems Solved
We present the Ultimate Mac Troubleshooting Guide, so you can banish the peskiest problems once and for all. Mac problems? Isn’t that an oxymoron? If you just switched to the Mac from Windows, you might be thinking that you accidentally picked up one of your old PC magazines--and, by the way, we’ve got solutions to the seven most common problems switchers encounter, too. If you’re a longtime Mac user, you could even be wondering where we get off accusing the Mac platform of being problematic.Using a Mac is generally painless and trouble free, but things can go wrong. Usually they’re not catastrophic (for solutions to true Mac disasters, click here). Sometimes the things that go wrong are those little annoying things that you just shrug off--over and over, until you finally have to deal with them.We’re here to help you tackle the 50 most common problems in eight different categories, once and for all. If your problem isn’t covered here, email us at ask@maclife.com, and we’ll try to solve it in a future issue.General Mac ProblemsThe Mac OS is, fundamentally, as trouble-free as operating systems get. But nothing's perfect. Here's what to do when you hit a snag.1. I want a tabbed finder.Download the incredibly versatile Path Finder ($40, www.cocoatech.com), which gives you all sorts of features that are missing from the Finder, such as tabs, stacks, bookmarks, and panes. Sounds like fun to us!Now THIS is the Finder we've always dreamed of. Thanks, Path Finder!2. I can't print anymore.This could be caused by a variety of different issues relating to your printer hardware or printer drivers, so you may need to contact the printer manufacturer for more help. But if your Mac is causing the problem, it’s always a good idea to reset your entire printing system by going into your Print & Fax System Preference, right-clicking in the printer list, and choosing Reset Printing System.3. I travel all over town with my MacBook, and I’m sick of reconfiguring my settings every time I show up at a location I’ve been to before. Why can’t my Mac remember various location settings for me--my default printer, mounted servers, iChat screen name, Bluetooth settings, everything? Try NetworkLocation ($29, www.networklocationapp.com), which can perform dozens of actions on your Mac whenever you switch to a new location. Best of all, its AutoLocate feature will determine where you are, using the same SkyHook Wireless Wi-Fi Positioning System that your iPhone uses, and it will automatically change all of your settings for you. If you frequently switch physical locations, NetworkLocation can save you both time and headaches changing your Mac's settings.4. I forgot my OS X password.After retyping your password very carefully at least twice to make sure you just didn’t mistype it, you’ll need to haul out your OS X install disk, insert it into your Mac and restart holding down the C button. After selecting your language of choice, in the menubar, select Utilities > Reset Password. Follow the directions and there you go. Just try not to get a lobotomy after resetting it!5. My CD or DVD is stuck in the optical drive and won’t come out when I press Eject.After holding down the eject button for several seconds to no avail, restart your Mac and hold down the primary button on your mouse--the trackpad button will work as well if you’re on a MacBook--and during startup the disk should eject.6. My Mac is not recognizing devices plugged in to one of my USB ports.First, make sure your Mac’s firmware is up to date--check Software Update and the Apple Support Downloads page (support.apple.com/downloads/) and install any firmware updates you find for your machine.If nothing happens, turn off your Mac, unplug the power cable, disconnect all peripherals, and let it sit for five minutes. Plug it back in, reconnect the keyboard and mouse, turn it back on, and try the USB ports again.Check the Support Downloads page for firmware updates for your Mac.If they’re still unresponsive, you will need to reset the PRAM (parameter RAM) and NVRAM (nonvolatile RAM), which stores some system and device settings that your Mac accesses on startup. Shut your Mac down. Then position your fingers above the Command, Option, P, and R keys on your keyboard. Turn the Mac on, then immediately press and hold those four keys before you see the gray screen. Keep them pressed until the Mac restarts again and you hear the startup chime for the second time. Then let ’em go. When your Mac is finished starting up, check those pesky USB ports.If they’re still not behaving, there’s one more thing you can try before making a Genius Bar appointment: resetting the SMC, or system management controller. Directions for resetting the SMC on your MacBook Pro are found at support.apple.com/kb/HT1411. Instructions for all other Macs are linked from support.apple.com/kb/HT1894.In Search Of...Search SolutionsLeopard makes finding files and data on your Mac relatively trouble-free, but when it comes to search, there are improvements and tricks you can apply to make it even better. Here are two solutions to common search problems we hear about from a fair number of Mac users.7. My Spotlight results have stopped working reliably.If it’s a single non-Apple program that isn’t showing up properly in your Spotlight results, try turning off and on the Spotlight indexing in that particular app.If you’re still getting Spotlight results for an app that you got rid of a while ago, you may not have completely deleted all of the data or databases that are associated with that program.Spotless gives you a nice GUI for managing, deleting, and rebuilding your Spotlight indexes.If it’s an Apple program--or your entire Mac--that isn’t working properly in Spotlight, try re-indexing your whole hard drive by going into the Spotlight System Preference, clicking on the Privacy tab, then dragging your hard drive into the list. Wait a moment, and then remove your hard drive from the list again.If you’re still having problems, you may need to bring out the big guns by using Spotless ($17, www.fixamac.net), a Spotlight index-management tool that can help fix most Spotlight problems.8. I need more power, flexibility, and customizability with my Spotlight searches and Spotlight results.Get HoudahSpot ($25, www.houdah.com), which lets you create extremely detailed search requests and customize the results to your liking.HoudahSpot handles Spotlight searches with much more flexability than Apple's built-in Spotlight search. 3 Essential UtilitiesThree more Mac problems solved--before they happen!9. Disk Warrior($100, www.alsoft.com) This is a great preventative maintenance tool for rebuilding your Mac's directory and keeping your mac running quickly and smoothly. It's also a great emergency tool for repairing disks that have missing files or will no longer mount.10. Cocktail($15, www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php). This general all-purpose utility will clean the caches on your machine, run the UNIX maintenance scripts, unlock hidden features of your Mac, and much more.11. SuperDuper($28, www.shirt-pocket.com). This disk cloning utility is great for backing up or transferring all the data on your entire computer to a fully bootable state.Next Page: Email and Web Problems...Email and Web Problems We know you spend most of your time in front of a Mac online or pounding out email. Here's how to answer when trouble comes knocking.12. I use a webmail client to check email, but every time I click on an email link, it launches Apple Mail instead.You can set up Apple Mail to access your webmail account using IMAP or POP (check with your webmail provider for instructions on how to do this; some charge a fee for this service), or you can install the program Webmailer (free, www.belkadan.com/webmailer), which lets you set any webmail site as your default email program.We set up Webmailer to take us to Yahoo's webmail system whenever we click on an email link.If you use Gmail, you have a few additional choices: You can install Google Notifier (free, toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper) and set that to your default email client in Mail’s preferences. Or you can use the outstanding Mailplane ($25, www.mailplaneapp.com), which provides many more features than the Gmail website.13. I can receive but not send email messages.Outgoing email messages are typically sent over the Internet using TCP port numbers 25, 465, or 587. However, in an effort to reduce spam, some ISPs and firewalls are set up to severely restrict the use of those ports. For example, AT&T is notorious for blocking port 25 for its DSL customers, unless you’re sending email with the AT&T email address assigned to your DSL modem. If you’re using AT&T (or another service provider that has similar restrictions), call the technical support number and request that they unblock port 25 for you. If you don’t control the Internet access where you are located, contact your email host to see if they have an alternate port that you can send email on. You can specify alternate port numbers in your email app’s account settings. If all else fails, you should be able to send email through your webmail system until you can physically get yourself to a different location that has no restrictions.Our Web-hosting company, hostbaby.com, allows us to send email messages over alternate port 2525, which typically bypasses any firewall restrictions that have been put in place.14. When I reply to or forward an email, the original message isn't entirely quoted in my reply--sometimes just the header and a few characters are quoted.If you used your mouse to highlight some text in the original email, and then you clicked on forward or reply, only the words that you selected will be quoted in your new email. To override this behavior in Mail (it can’t be overridden in Entourage), go into Mail’s Preferences, click on the Composing button, and you can set it to include all of the original message. If the problem still happens after this, your Mail preferences might be corrupt. Quit Mail, and trash the file located at yourhomefolder/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist. Also try upgrading to Snow Leopard, which makes Mail more reliable in general.The Composing preference in Mail ensures that your replies and forwards will always quote the original email message in their entirety.15. I want to send an email later, not now.Each email client handles this slightly differently.In Entourage, choose Message > Send Message Later or click on the Send Later button. (In Entourage 2008, you’ll need to add the Send Later button to your toolbar by choosing View > Customize Toolbar from any outgoing message.) Your messages will queue up in your outbox, and then you can send them all at once by creating an Entourage schedule (Tools > Schedules) or by clicking the Send & Receive button.In Thunderbird, choose File > Send Later. Your messages will queue up in the Unsent folder until you choose File > Send Unsent Messages.The Send Later Extension lets you schedule your outgoing messages in Thunderbird.The Send Later Extension for Thunderbird (free, www.unsignedbyte.com/?page_id=4) lets you schedule an exact date and time in the future to send your message.Surprisingly, Mail provides no ability to send messages later. You could take all your accounts offline (Mailbox > Take All Accounts Offline) before clicking on the Send button, in which case your messages disappear until you quit and relaunch Mail to find a temporary outbox with your messages sitting in them. Or, to schedule emails for a later delivery time that you specify, install the Schedule Delivery script which is a part of Mail Scripts (donations requested, homepage.mac.com/aamann/).Finally, LetterMeLater (free, www.lettermelater.com) offers another way to schedule emails to be sent at a later time.16. I have multiple folders entitled Drafts, Sent, Junk, or Trash for my IMAP email account.Setting up an IMAP account can be a little tricky. After typing your valid account settings into your email program, there are two additional steps:First, you’ll need to set the proper IMAP path prefix (sometimes called the “root folder” or IMAP server directory) in your account settings. For example, Gmail’s IMAP Path Prefix is [Gmail].Defining your IMAP server's root folder is an often-forgotten step when setting up an IMAP email account.In Entourage, you set this on the Options tab of your IMAP’s account settings. In Thunderbird, click the Advanced button on the Server Settings tab. In Mail, this is on the Advanced tab of your IMAP’s account settings.Then you’ll need to designate which folders on the server should be used for storing your drafts, sent messages, trash, and junk. In Entourage, you set this on the Advanced tab of your IMAP’s account settings. In Thunderbird, this is done in the Copies & Folders section of your account settings. In Mail, go out to your main viewer window and select a folder on the server (in the left-hand margin, underneath the IMAP account name), then choose Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For.17. Whenever I address an outgoing email, I get unwanted email addresses for people who aren't in my address book.Most email clients keep track of addresses that you’ve emailed to in the past and will suggest those addresses to you in the future when you start to type the same characters. You can turn off this feature in Entourage and Thunderbird by going into their preferences. In Entourage, this is found on the Compose tab. In Thunderbird, this is on the Composition > Addressing tab. You can’t turn off this feature in Mail, but you can clear the list from time-to-time by selecting Window > Previous Recipients, selecting the names and clicking Remove from List.In Mail, you have complete control over your Previous Recipients list.18. When I email long Web links to others, they sometimes get broken up onto multiple lines and don't work correctly.Try putting angle brackets () around long URLs to help them travel safely across the Internet without “breaking.” Or you turn to TinyURL (free, www.tinyurl.com), which will turn those long URLs into, well, tiny URLs!19. I wish Safari's built-in search field worked with more websites than just Google.You may want to switch to Firefox, which has the built-in ability to customize its search field with any number of search engines that you specify. Otherwise, check out the Safari plug-ins Saft ($12, haoli.dnsalias.com) or Glims (free, machangout.com), both of which let you customize Safari’s Google search field. And one of our favorite utilities, iSeek ($15, www.ambrosiasw.com) lets you add a global customizable search field to your Mac’s menubar that works with any Web browser.iSeek places a fully customizable search field in our menubar at all times.20. I want to filter inappropriate websites so my kids can't access them.Although Mac OS X has built-in parental controls that you can turn on for individual accounts, you can gain more control by purchasing software like ContentBarrier ($50, www.intego.com) or Net Nanny ($39.99 a year, www.netnanny.com). Even better, we’ve discovered that one of the quickest, easiest, and most effective ways of filtering all the computers in your entire household is to switch your DNS servers to the free OpenDNS servers (free, www.opendns.com).ContentBarrier is one of many options you have for blocking websites on your Mac.21. My Internet connection is slow.That’s a tricky one. A sluggish Net connection could be caused by any number of things, so here are a few troubleshooting tips to start with:Try resetting Safari (Safari > Reset Safari). Then, try a different Web browser to see if the problem happens there as well. You may also want to uninstall any Internet plug-ins that you have installed recently.Next, check your upload and download speeds at www.speakeasy.net/speedtest and see if you’re getting the speeds you’re paying for. If not, try power cycling both your modem and router, such as your Airport Extreme. Turn off or unplug the device, let it sit powered off for several minutes, then plug it in or switch it on again.Our latest speed test from Speakeasy.net shows us that we're not currently getting the full upload speeds for which we've been paying the big bucks!If these methods don’t address the slowdown, try plugging your modem directly into your Mac using an Ethernet cable to see if the problem goes away. If so, your router may be the problem. If you’re using an Airport Extreme or Airport Express, launch Airport Utility to see if there is a firmware upgrade available. If so, install the firmware upgrade and see if that helps.If not, your Mac could be the problem--you may need to perform an Archive and Install of your operating system, which is one of your options on the Mac OS X Leopard Installation DVD.And it’s always possible that your modem or Internet line is the problem too, in which case you should call your ISP’s technical support number.Next Page: Photo and Office/iWork Problems...Photo ProblemsThese solutions to common photo issues will make you want to say "cheese." 22. I need to quickly resize an image and make some color corrections to it, but I can't afford Photoshop and don't really want to learn how to use it.Preview has the built-in ability to resize images and adjust colors. Open up your image in Preview and select Tools > Adjust Size or Adjust Color.This image-size adjustment dialog box is from Preview, not Photoshop!23. I want to email photos from iPhoto through my webmail account by clicking on iPhoto's Email button.Even if you’ve installed Webmailer, as mentioned in problem #12, the email button in iPhoto will only work with four email clients: AOL, Eudora, Entourage, and Mail.However, if you use Gmail, you’re in luck because Mailplane ($25, www.mailplaneapp.com) installs an iPhoto plug-in that lets you click on iPhoto’s Email button and send your messages through your Gmail account.In any dialog box, you can activate QuickLook when browsing your iPhoto Library by selecting a photo and pressing the spacebar.Otherwise, go into your webmail program, and attach photos using the standard method. Leopard’s dialog boxes give you the ability to browse through your iPhoto library, and they even let you use QuickLook by clicking on a photo and pressing the spacebar.24. I want to use iPhoto '09 to export photos to Facebook, but there are too many problems with it.Forget about using iPhoto ’09’s poorly implemented Facebook “integration.” Instead, use the outstanding Facebook Exporter for iPhoto (free, developers.facebook.com/iphoto).Use Facebook Exporter for iPhoto to tag, add captions to, and upload your Facebook photos right from within iPhoto.25. I created a PDF file with lots of embedded photos in it, but now the file is way too large to email.Open up the large PDF file in Preview and select File > Save As. Where it says Quartz Filter, choose Reduce File Size, then click Save. Voilà! You’ve now saved a much smaller version of your PDF file, which will be easier to email.Choose this Quartz Filter in Preview to reduce the size (and quality) of large PDF files so you can email them without choking your email server.For even more control over the resulting quality of PDF size reduction--and to batch-process multiple PDF files at once--try PDFshrink ($35, www.apago.com).If you still can’t get the file small enough for your needs, try a file-sending service such as YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com).26. Somebody emailed me a PDF file with lots of embedded photos in it, and I need to extract the photos from the file.File Juicer ($18, www.echoone.com) will extract images, sounds, and more from any filetype.File Juicer can extract all these types of files out of other files.Office/iWork ProblemsWork smarter not harder with these troubleshooting tips for common productivity apps.27. I created an awesome slide show in Keynote, but I have to present it on a PC. I tried exporting it to Microsoft PowerPoint format, but I lost my transitions, effects, transparencies, gradients, and more--basically, all the cool stuff.Export your Keynote file to a QuickTime movie instead. As long as the PC has QuickTime installed on it (which it should, if it has iTunes installed), you’ll be able to play back your presentation with all of its awesomeness intact. If the PC doesn’t have QuickTime, download it for free from www.apple.com/quicktime.With the "Fixed Timing" option, we can set our QuickTime movie to automatically advance to the next slide on a regular interval.When you export your movie, you have several options for how it should advance from one slide to the next. For example, if you set it to manually advance, you simply have to press the spacebar on the PC to move to the next slide.28. I’ve included presenter notes (View > Show Presenter Notes) in a Keynote slide show, but when I play or rehearse the slide show, the notes don’t show up onscreen.In Keynote’s preferences, click on the Presenter Display button, and check the boxes for Notes and “Use alternate display to view presenter information.” Now your notes will show up when you play or rehearse your slide show.This checkbox lets you toggle between mirrored displays and dual displays.However, if you start seeing your notes on both your computer screen and the projector’s screen, your computer is set to mirrored (instead of dual) displays. You can toggle these display modes while the projector is connected to your Mac by launching System Preferences, choosing Display > Arrangement, and deselecting the Mirror Displays checkbox.29. I use Office 2008 to create Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files, but my Mac-using colleagues can’t open the files because they’re using Office 2004.TextEdit can open and edit Word 2008 files. And if your colleagues have iWork ’09 installed, they can work with all of your Office 2008 files in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote.Otherwise, you’ll need to save the file in an earlier file format. Choose File > Save As and select the format that corresponds to Office 97–2004. You can also set this older format as the default in your preferences for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.Choose the .doc format to avoid compatibility issues with people using earlier versions of Microsoft Word.Alternatively, your colleagues can install Microsoft’s Open XML File Format Converter (free, www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads), which will convert your Office 2008 files into a format that Office 2004 can read.Next Page: Syncing Problems... Syncing ProblemsData syncing can be particularly stressful since we need access to info anywhere these days. We've got solutions.30. I want to sync some--but not all--of my iCal calendars across my Macs.Don’t use MobileMe to sync, which always synchronizes all of your calendars. Instead, use BusySync ($25, www.busymac.com) or BusyCal ($40, www.busymac.com), which both give you an incredible amount of syncing options.BusyMac's products are true champions when it comes to publishing and subscribing selected calendars without any dedicated servers.31. I want to synchronize my iCal calendars and Address Book on my Mac to Outlook on a PC.Sign up for MobileMe ($99 a year, www.apple.com), which will keep all of your Macs and PCs (and iPhones!) in sync with each other.Spanning Sync effortlessly syncs your calendars and contacts to Google.Or, you can use Google Calendar and Google Contacts as a conduit. On the Mac side, you’ll need Spanning Sync ($25/year or $65/one-time purchase, spanningsync.com). On the PC side, you’ll need Google Apps Sync ($50/year, tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync).32. I keep getting duplicate entries on my iCal calendar.Sounds like you’re trying to sync your Entourage calendar with iCal. There’s a known bug with Entourage that causes repeating events to multiply out of control in iCal. We don’t know of any long-term solution at this time except to ditch Entourage’s calendar and stick to iCal for your calendaring needs. To do this, uncheck the box for syncing events in Entourage’s Preferences (on the Sync Services pane). To erase iCal dupes, try iCal Cleaner (free, www.busymac.com).33. I’m getting two of each calendar entry on my iPhone.You may be trying to sync your calendars through both iTunes and MobileMe. You’ll need to choose one method or the other, not both. If you’re syncing wirelessly through MobileMe, then go into your iPhone settings within iTunes and uncheck all of your calendars there.The exception to this rule is iCal’s Birthdays calendar (enabled in iCal’s preferences, this calendar pulls birthdays from your Address Book), which can only be synced through iTunes, so it must remain checked in iTunes.34. My U.S. Holidays and other Internet-subscribed iCal calendars are not syncing between my Mac and my iPhone.Any Internet-subscribed calendars must be resubscribed to directly from your iPhone. You can manually set up the server on your iPhone by going to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account > Other > Calendars.You must resubscribe to your iCal holiday calendars on your iPhone all over again.Or, you can automatically subscribe to a calendar by using Safari on your iPhone to choose from Apple’s extensive selection of calendars at www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/calendars.35. iTunes no longer launches automatically when I attach my iPod or iPhone to my computer.If your iPhone or iPod is very low on power or if the battery is fully depleted, it can take up to 10 minutes to appear under Devices in iTunes.Otherwise, you may have unchecked the box in iTunes for your device that says “Automatically sync when this iPhone/iPod is connected” or “Open iTunes when this iPod is attached.”You may have also removed the iTunesHelper application from your Login Items in your Account System Preferences, which is required to automatically launch iTunes. You can get this back by reinstalling iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes) or by manually dragging iTunesHelper into the Login Items. iTunesHelper can be found by right-clicking on iTunes in the Finder and choosing Show Package Contents, then going to Contents > Resources.36. I want to synchronize files between two computers.There are many different programs available to help you with this task, but our favorite is ChronoSync ($40, www.econtechnologies.com). ChronoSync can automatically mount remote servers, wake your local Mac from sleep, schedule your synchronizations, archive backup copies of your files before syncing, and even give you a list of proposed changes before it makes any of them.Synchronizing files between two different computers is as simple as drag-and-drop with ChronoSync.While you can use ChronoSync to synchronize to any type of volume or folder, if you specifically want to sync to another computer, you may want to additionally purchase ChronoAgent for an extra $10. ChronoAgent lets you communicate directly with a remote Mac faster than using AFP or SMB, and you gain full root access, so you can copy anything without any restrictions.37. I turned on MobileMe syncing on my iPhone, but nothing is syncing to my Mac or Me.com.It’s possible that the MobileMe servers aren’t communicating properly with your iPhone. An Apple support rep recently admitted to us that this is an extremely common problem that MobileMe users may experience every few months until Apple increases the reliability of its MobileMe syncing servers. So you may want to keep these instructions handy for future reference.First, find out if MobileMe sees your iPhone at all. Activate Find My iPhone on your iPhone (Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > your me.com account > Find My iPhone). Then, from a computer (not your iPhone), go to your MobileMe account page at https://secure.me.com/yourusername. Click on Find My iPhone to see if the MobileMe website sees your phone. If not, try turning off your iPhone and turning it back on again. If the MobileMe site still doesn’t see your phone, try deleting your MobileMe account on your iPhone and re-creating it again.We feel like Big Brother is watching us with Find My iPhone's crosshairs centered directly on our house!Once Me.com sees your iPhone, try adding an event or a contact to your phone and see if the change shows up on your MobileMe calendar (www.me.com/calendar) or address book (www.me.com/contacts) within a few minutes.If not, you will probably have to reset all of your sync data on Me.com with information from your Mac’s iCal and Address Book. Make a mental note of any recent unsynced changes you’ve made on your iPhone, because you’re going to lose them in this process. Also, sign out of Me.com. Go into the MobileMe System Preference on your Mac, select the Sync tab, click on Advanced, and then click Reset Sync Data. Click on the right arrow so that you are replacing all sync info on MobileMe with “info from this computer.”Log back into Me.com and verify that it now has your current information for contacts and calendars. If not, you will have to reset the SyncServices database on your Mac. Apple has instructions on this process at support.apple.com/kb/TS1627.But before following those instructions, be sure to do two things on your Mac: First, repair your permissions using Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities), and, second, repair your keychain using Keychain Access (in Disk Utility, pull down from the Keychain Access menu and select Keychain First Aid). After that, try syncing again from the MobileMe System Preference pane.This is how it should look when you're about to overwrite information on the MobileMe website with information from your Mac.Once Me.com has your current information, you are ready to go back to your iPhone. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data. Turn Push off, then completely turn off your phone for 30 seconds. Turn your phone back on and re-enable push. Then, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > your Me.com account and turn off and on each one of the sliders for the information that you’re trying to sync (Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, etc).Wait several minutes, and hopefully all your current information will reappear in your calendar and contacts on your iPhone.If not, you will probably need to have a live chat with a MobileMe support agent. Go to www.apple.com/support/mobileme. Choose any of the troubleshooting options underneath Syncing with MobileMe in the left-hand margin, and a Chat Now button will appear.Next Page: Video, Music, and Backup Problems... Video ProblemsThese tips address problems you might encounter trying to play video files on your Mac.38. I’m trying to use my Apple Remote on my Mac to watch movies through Front Row, but the other computers in the room--along with my Apple TV--are inadvertently responding to my remote’s button presses.You need to pair each one of your Apple Remotes to a particular device. Apple has instructions on how to do this at support.apple.com/kb/HT1619.39. Sometimes I can't play Web videos.Out of the box, your Mac can only play Flash and QuickTime videos. To play other video formats, you’ll need to install one or more of the following free apps:>> Flip4Mac Windows Media Components for QuickTime (www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx)>> Perian (www.perian.org)>> Microsoft Silverlight (www.microsoft.com/silverlight/)>> RealPlayer (www.real.com)>> VLC (www.videolan.org)40. I want to convert video files to other formats, particularly those that will work on my iPod or iPhone.To convert your video files into many different formats--including iPhone and iPod compatible formats--try Video Monkey (free, videomonkey.org), VideoDrive (7.99 euros, www.aroona.net), or CosmoPod (8.90 euros, www.cocoamug.com). To convert DVDs, try HandBrake (free, www.handbrake.fr).41. I want to download a Flash video from the Web.There’s a little-known trick in Safari that lets you download Flash videos that are embedded in webpages. Bring up the Activity Viewer (Window > Activity) and look for a file that appears that it may be your video file, perhaps based on its large size or the fact that it is so large that it is still loading. When it‘s finished loading, hold down the Option key and double-click on the video file. Safari will download the file into your Downloads folder for you, and you can monitor the progress through the Downloads window.Little-known Safari secret: You can download Flash vids, like Funny or Die's famous "The Landlord" starring Will Ferrell, to your Desktop to watch at your leisure.If you’d like an easier way to download Flash videos, try TubeTV (donations requested, www.chimoosoft.com), Videobox ($15, www.tastyapps.com), or TubeSock ($15, www.stinkbot.com).42. I want to download a QuickTime video from the Web to my Mac, so I can watch it later.If you’ve purchased QuickTime Pro ($30, www.apple.com/quicktime), you can download many QuickTime videos right from the Web by clicking on the triangle in the lower right-hand corner of the video and choosing Save As QuickTime Movie.However, some QuickTime videos, including those on Apple’s website, don’t let you download them directly. To download these devious videos--with or without QuickTime Pro--view the source of the webpage in Safari (View > View Source) or Firefox (View > Page Source). Do a search for .mov (the file extension for QuickTime videos) to find the full URL of the video file. When you find it, copy the entire URL of the video file. Then, launch QuickTime Player on your Mac and select File > Open URL and paste in the URL. Now you can save the video file onto your computer.43. I bought an external USB webcam, but my Mac laptop isn’t recognizing it.If your Mac is running Mac OS 10.4.11 or later, it can recognize almost any USB webcam on the market, usually without installing any drivers.If you’re running the latest version of OS X but still having problems, the iUSBCam (www.ecamm.com/mac/iusbcam) and macam (webcam-osx.sourceforge.net) websites provide helpful tips and driver downloads.Note that Mac programs like iChat and Skype will first try to use your built-in internal camera before using any external webcams. To change this, you’ll need to go into the preferences of those programs to change your video input source.If you’re unsuccessfully trying to use your external webcam in Photo Booth, you have to switch back to the internal camera in iChat’s preferences before launching Photo Booth.Music ProblemsHow to keep rocking in the free world.44. I want to make iPhone ringtones from a song that I didn’t purchase (or isn’t available for purchase) from the iTunes Store.If you have a track in iTunes that you own on CD and that you’ve ripped to iTunes, you can make a ringtone from it for free in GarageBand ’09. Click here for instructions and scroll down to “Roll Your Own iPhone Ringtones,” which also provides instructions for doing the same thing in QuickTime Pro).45. My iTunes library is full of duplicates.For smaller libraries, use iTunes’ Show Duplicates feature (File > Show Duplicates) and manually remove the extra files. iTunes only matches on Artist and Title information though, so be careful not to delete legit alternate versions of tracks--live versions, for example. For better duplicate control, try Dupin or some of the iTunes scripts available at www.dougscripts.com.46. One of the rubber tips from a pair of third-party earbuds got stuck in my ear--help!Believe it or not, this has happened to us too--more than once. We recommend keeping a pair of tweezers handy, just in case a tip come off in your ear canal, which can sometimes happen if you pull the ’bud out too quickly. It’s happened to two Mac|Life editors, both of whom agree that having something small and unreachable lodged in your ear can be pretty traumatic.47. My iTunes library is spread across multiple Macs. How can I keep two iTunes libraries synchronized?If all you want to do is listen to iTunes music housed on another local Mac (i.e. connected to the local network), just turn on iTunes’ sharing feature (Preferences > Sharing and check “Look for shared libraries”). To share your own tracks, also check “Share my library on my local network.” You can also store libraries on a network drive that supports iTunes sharing, to share tunes without needing another Mac up and running all the time. To keep two libraries in step for syncing iPods, use a utility like TuneRanger ($29.99, my.smithmicro.com) or SuperSync ($29, www.supersync.com).You don't have to share all your iTunes content--and you can password-protect it if you want, too.Backup ProblemsDon't tell us you don't back up--especially since Time Machine makes it so easy! Here's what to do when you run into problems.48. I want to restore a file from a Time Machine backup of a different Mac or an older backup of my main Mac that Time Machine no longer recognizes (due to a new backup drive, a new logic board, or a new internal hard drive).You can restore any Time Machine backup onto any Mac, if you know a few tricks involved with restoring.The first one is related to an odd decision by Apple: You can only browse other Time Machine volumes by adding the Time Machine icon to your dock, then right-clicking on the icon and selecting Browse Other Time Machine Disks.There's our hidden option to browse other Time Machine disks!But even if you do that, it won’t see your Time Capsule or other external Time Machine drives, even if they’re mounted on your Desktop. In Finder, you actually have to manually choose the .sparsebundle file that represents the computer that was backed up, double-click on this file, let it mount on your Desktop, and then Time Machine will let you choose the resulting mounted disk image to restore from.49. Time Machine is giving me an error message that’s too vague for me to interpret.The programs TM Error Logger (donations requested, www.carnationsoftware.com) and Time Machine Buddy (free, www.bluedog.com.au) can help you interpret what has gone wrong with your Time Machine backup.50. I’d like Time Machine to back up to multiple external hard drives, so I can keep one backup drive offsite and one backup drive onsite.Time Machine can correctly keep track of backups on multiple external hard drives. Just give your hard drives different names, and whenever you connect the other drive, you’ll need to manually make a trip to Time Machine’s System Preference and change the disk there.
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★ Macworld Expo 2009 Predictions
As required by the FCC, all Mac-related web sites must publish pre-Macworld Expo predictions regarding what Apple may announce at the show. Remember: these are predictions based on little more than my own speculation and tea-leaf reading, so hold your applause until the end, and, please, no wagering. New 17-Inch MacBook Pro — Seems like a sure thing. The lack of new 17-inch hardware was a glaring omission from October’s new MacBook line-up. Expect something that looks pretty much exactly like a bigger version of the new 15-inch MacBook Pro. Last-minute rumors claim that the new 17-inch MacBook Pro will have a sealed (non-user-replaceable) battery. Sounds odd, and if true, will surely generate complaints that it’s stupid move on Apple’s part, but given Apple’s recent penchant for sealed batteries, it wouldn’t surprise me. New Mac Mini — Yes. The current Mac Mini lineup is unchanged since August 2007, almost a year and a half ago. Overdue for an update, to say the least. I don’t think there’s any great enthusiasm for the Mac Mini at Apple, but it’s a strong seller. New 30-Inch Cinema Display — Yes. Much like with the 17-inch MacBook Pro, the existing 30-inch Cinema Display just looks old next to the new 24-inch model. As for a 20-inch model, I’m going to say no. 20-inch displays are the new 17-inch displays: too small. Speed Bump iMac Revisions — I’m not sure where the rumors started about there being significant changes to the iMac, but I expect what we’ll actually see will look the same as the current iMacs but offer slightly faster processors, slightly bigger hard drives, etc. Speed bump revisions don’t make for good demos, so while I expect updated iMacs this week, I don’t expect them to be announced during the keynote itself. iLife and iWork ’09 — Yes, nearly a sure thing. These suites are both profitable and popular, and the current ’08 suites were released in August 2007. They’re both due for updates, and they both make for good keynote demo material. At the top of my personal wish list: improvements to iMovie and Pages. I see the logic behind Apple’s decision to scrap the old iMovie and start over from the ground up with iMovie ’08. But I find iMovie ’08 downright confusing. The difference between “events” and “projects” seems muddled, and it’s a clumsy tool when it comes to actually editing clips together to make a movie. As for Pages, I would love to see it gain additional professional-caliber typographic controls (including better support for OpenType fonts). Snow Leopard — I expect a demo, and maybe a loose release date (like, say, “first half of 2009”). As Apple emphasized when Snow Leopard was announced at WWDC last year, Snow Leopard is mainly about low-level under-the-hood improvements and optimizations to Mac OS X, not about new user-visible features. But the new Exchange integration for Mail and iCal is certainly demo-able. What I expect is for Apple to make old features look new, by updating the system-wide appearance theme. I’ve made this prediction several times in the past and been wrong, but eventually I’ll be right: it’s time for the last vestiges of the original Mac OS X 10.0 “Aqua” theme to go. Scrollbars and push buttons, for example, remain largely unchanged since the Mac OS X public beta in 2000. My bet says iTunes-style scrollbars everywhere, darker window chrome, and a light-text-on-dark-background menu bar. (The name I’ve heard for the new theme: Marble. Make of that what you will.) Updated Apple TV — Yes. I expect new hardware, but probably nothing radically new other than increased storage space. But it’ll be in the keynote as a signal that Apple is serious about this market. There’s been a lot of supposedly expert speculation that Apple is going to abandon Apple TV because it’s not a hit. But while it’s not a hit, it’s not a failure, either, and, more importantly, there is no dominant player in this field, where by “this field” I mean that for consumer-level digital media management for the living room. I’m not going to say that Blu-ray is dead because it isn’t. But if DVD isn’t the last mainstream physical medium for home movie distribution, Blu-ray will be. The future, obviously and inevitably, is in downloads. I’m already there, and you, dear DF reader, probably are too, but for the mass market, downloadable movies for the living room remain in the future. The iPhone was an instant hit, but the iPod wasn’t. Apple grew the iPod from a Mac-only peripheral into a cultural sensation slowly but steadily over three or four years. I think they have a similar long-term plan for Apple TV. And in large part Apple — along with every other hardware maker — is hobbled by the limitations of what content the movie studios will allow them to distribute. The iTunes Store’s movie library has grown significantly over the past year, but it’s still far smaller than what your neighborhood video store has to offer. And while iTunes has high definition movies available to rent, the only movies you can buy are in standard definition. That’s a studio-imposed limitation, and it’s one that works in Blu-ray’s favor, and against Apple TV’s. (Wishful thinking on my part: I’d love for Apple to announce some Boxee-like features built-in as standard Apple TV features. The TV networks seem more willing to play ball with digital distribution than the movie studios, so, maybe.) There are rumors that Apple might release software that allows any Mac to serve as an Apple TV. I know nothing about such software, but if you think of it more as the unification of Front Row and Apple TV, it makes perfect sense. But I don’t expect Apple to abandon selling dedicated Apple TV hardware soon — even the cheapest Mac Mini costs a few hundred bucks more than an Apple TV. iPhone Nano — No. Frankly, I just don’t get these rumors. The only way this makes sense is if it’s a replacement for the iPhone 3G — i.e. a slightly smaller form factor for the existing iPhone 3G’s features. But why now, just six months after iPhone 3G debuted? The pattern seems to be for Apple to release new iPhone hardware every summer, much like who they’ve usually released new iPod hardware in the fall. (And why “nano” rather than “mini” for something that, according to the purported third-party case designs that the rumor is founded upon, is only a little bit smaller? With iPods, “nano” is used for models that are way smaller and thinner.) iPhone Tethering — No, but I would love to be wrong. The longer I use my iPhone, the more frustrating it feels that my MacBook doesn’t have the same sort of nearly-ubiquitous network access. I’m one of the lucky few to have scored a copy of NetShare during its brief availability on the App Store, and there are other solutions for jailbroken iPhones, but I want Apple-style integration. I can’t see any way that this could happen without having to pay an extra monthly fee to AT&T, but if the price is even just semi-reasonable, I’d pay it in a heartbeat. iPhone OS 3.0 Demo — My wildcard prediction, which, I will reiterate, is based on nothing more than my own speculation and wishful thinking. One thing I’m nearly certain of is that the next iPhone OS release will be 3.0, not 2.3, if for no other reason than that there have been no developer betas since the release of version 2.2. To my nose, that smells like a major release with significant new features is in the oven. I fully expect iPhone OS 3.0 to be announced and demoed at least a few months before it is released. Third-party developers need to time to adapt to any changes, add support for new features, and to bang away on beta releases to shake out the bugs. But assuming there will be significant new features, Apple will want to unveil them at a high-profile event. If I had to wager, I’d bet on a special event around March, much like last year’s event to unveil the iPhone SDK. But if it’s going to be ready for developer betas sooner than later, it’d be a nice surprise to see Phil Schiller call Scott Forstall on stage to demo it now. As for what might appear in iPhone OS 3.0, here’s my wish list. First, a new home screen app (a.k.a. SpringBoard), designed from the ground up for a system where users have a few dozen or more extra apps installed. Managing dozens of apps on the iPhone today is simply a pain in the ass. Second, maybe an answer to the question of where the background notification API is — you know, the one we were told at WWDC to expect a few months ago, but which we haven’t heard a word about since. And maybe — pretty please, Mr. Forstall, with sugar on top — copy and paste.
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★ Macworld Expo Predictions
Predictions and advance commentary for tomorrow’s Macworld keynote, some based on consensus rumors, some based on no more than wishful thinking on the part of yours truly. This is all conjecture and tea-leaf-reading (well, mostly), so, please, no wagering. I keep two questions in mind when evaluating Apple product ideas: Would people run out to stand in line to buy this immediately? If not, is there a long-term strategic reason for Apple to start selling this now? If the answer to both questions is “no”, then Apple isn’t going to do it. The iPhone is a perfect example of a #1; the Apple TV is a #2. New Sub-Notebook MacBook: Yes Apple hasn’t had a small notebook in its lineup since the 12-inch PowerBook G4, which I still see in wide use. If you’re using a portable as a portable, smaller size and lighter weight make a tremendous difference. The demand for a good notebook smaller and lighter than standard MacBooks is strong; I think it’s a sure thing that Apple is set to announce one. (Of course, I said so before last year’s Macworld, too.) I say the consensus rumors are right: super-thin, no built-in optical drive, widescreen 12-inch display. It will use a hard drive, not flash memory, for storage. (Look no further than the iPod Classic to see how hard drives don’t keep a device from being super-thin). Rumors are already running strong that it’ll be called MacBook Air. (I like it, not sure though if Nike would.) Newton-y Tablet Thing: No I am nearly convinced that this product exists, at least as a project in development. My hunch is that AppleInsider has it spot-on: it’s in development, but not yet ready to launch, and, perhaps, never will if Apple can’t get it right. (Recall Steve Jobs’s statement to Walter Mossberg that he’s as proud of some of the products Apple decided not to ship as he is of the ones they did.) Like the iPhone, it runs “OS X” but not Mac OS X, does not run Mac apps, and will not be called a “Mac”. The big problem with a “tablet” computer of any sort is that 15 years of industry history indicate that people do not want to buy tablet computers. But the iPhone, arguably, is a tablet computer — a sub-tablet, if you will. The key mistake with failed efforts like Microsoft’s Tablet PC (and even Apple’s own Newton) was that these devices attempt to do too much. It’s seen as a feature that Tablet PCs run the full version of Windows. But why force software UI’s designed for traditional hardware form factors upon a totally different device? A successful tablet-like device from Apple, I think, would clearly be designed as a secondary computing device — a satellite attached and synched to a Mac or PC (probably, of course, through iTunes). There’s still the “what would I use it for?” factor. It seems to me it would need to be something more than just an iPod Touch with a larger screen — if that’s all it is, then what’s the point of buying one instead of a smaller, poctetable, iPod Touch or iPhone? I simply lack the cleverness to imagine what that hook might be — but I can’t imagine Apple releasing such a product without an obvious “Oh I gotta buy that” hook. Anyway: I do think something like this is in the works, but I don’t think it’s coming out now. I’d love to be wrong. Ubiquitous Wireless Networking for MacBooks: Please After using my iPhone for a few months, it started feeling weird that my PowerBook doesn’t have ubiquitous wireless networking: Wi-Fi when available, and seamless, instant switchover to something else when it isn’t. Just what that “something else” is, I don’t know. EVDO? WiMax? A Bluetooth connection to share an iPhone’s EDGE connection? I don’t care. But I’d pay for it. Ubiquitous networking is certainly the most intriguing thing about Amazon’s Kindle. It just feels crippled that I can’t get a network connection — even a slow one — once I’m outside the range of Wi-Fi. Wireless Time Machine Backups: Yes Time Machine is very cool; the first backup that qualifies as “you don’t have to do anything, it just works”. But currently it only works using a storage device connected via USB or FireWire. Tethered backups are irritating with notebooks — and MacBooks are the fastest-growing segment of Apple’s Mac hardware sales. The problem is that when you want to use your portable away from your desk, it’s a pain to disconnect mounted USB and FireWire drives. You can’t just pulled the plugs — you’ve got to unmount them in the Finder first. And, once you do so, to get Time Machine backups running again, you’ve got to re-tether your storage drive. Leopard developer seeds all supported network backups to USB drives connected to an AirPort base station. The feature was also demoed at WWDC. It was removed (or, better said, disabled) very late in Leopard’s development, supposedly because of a security problem that was discovered, but I expect the feature to return, perhaps in 10.5.2. It’s a terrific idea, perfect for multi-Mac homes and small offices. But so why not sell a device as a dedicated product — a big 500 GB or larger hard drive (or array of them) with built-in AirPort networking. No need to attach it to a separate AirPort base station, no temptation to use the device for anything other than one purpose: backing up via Time Machine. Just plug it into a power outlet, run through a simply configuration tool a la AirPort Utility, and it’s ready. When it first appears on your network, your (Leopard-running) Mac could prompt to ask if you’d like to use it for Time Machine, the same way it prompts when you first plug in a new USB or FireWire drive. iTunes Movie Rentals: Yes This one seems like such a done deal that it barely qualifies as a rumor. It seems obvious: Unlike with music, there’s been a strong market for movie rentals for as long as there’s been a home video market. Most movies aren’t worth watching more than once. Reports (based on leaks from studio executives) indicate rentals will cost $3-5, and will expire after 24 hours. If true, presumably that means they’ll expire 24 hours after you beginning playing them, not 24 hours after downloading. It’d be nice if the terms were a bit more flexible than that. One of the best things about Netflix, and something which makes it far more appealing than traditional brick-and-mortar Blockbuster-style rentals, is that you can watch movies on your own terms. A Netflix-style iTunes movie subscription service that lets you keep a certain number of unlocked movies open at the same time would be killer. Apple TV 2.0: Yes Jobs has called Apple TV a “hobby” for Apple. I think they have high hopes for it, but calling it a hobby is a practical way to buy time for it. What Apple did with the iPod was start as small and simple as they could — one device, in one configuration, only for the Mac, and all it did was play recorded audio — and then build the platform slowly from there. Things like Windows support, color screens, video playback, and expanding to a range of form factors all came incrementally. I think that’s the plan with Apple TV. Start simple and humble, and build from there, year after year. One obvious improvement (albeit contingent upon another rumor) would be to allow us to buy (or rent) movies and TV shows directly from the iTunes Store, right from the Apple TV. If the iPhone can do it, the Apple TV should too. I still think it’d be good business for Apple to sell their own HDTV sets with Apple TV built-in — more money for Apple, one fewer device spewing cables behind the display. DRM-Free iTunes Plus Music From the Other Major Music Labels: No I think Apple would love to have this, but it seems pretty clear that the major labels — other than EMI, of course — are convinced that it’s in their interest to withhold DRM-free music from Apple, in the hopes of helping Amazon gain market share. It actually agree that it’s in the music labels’ interest for Amazon’s music store to succeed. I’m not sure, though, that withholding DRM-free music from Apple is spiting anyone other than iTunes customers. I suspect the vast majority — an overwhelming majority — of iTunes music purchases are made by people who have at best only a vague inkling of what “DRM” is. If there’s any actual logic to it, it’s PR — withholding DRM-free music from Apple makes it easier to paint Apple as a company bent on using iTunes as a competitive cudgel to lock customers in to iPod hardware. Only a hack reporter would buy into that line, given Steve Jobs’s unequivocol “Thoughts on Music” open letter last year. One thing that would dispel any negative stories on the state of the iTunes empire, of course, would be the long-awaited debut of The Beatles catalog, exclusively at iTunes, perhaps with an on-stage visit from Paul McCartney. New iPhone Hardware: No, With a Minor Exception Apple announced the original iPhone a year ago, but they didn’t ship it until six months ago. They’re not going to announce new iPhones six months in advance again. (It was to their advantage last year to cause people to postpone phone purchases until the iPhone appeared; that’s not the case now that the iPhone is on the market.) If anything, I don’t expect new iPhones to appear until next fall, at the yearly iPod/iTunes pre-holiday season special event, leaving the original iPhone on the market for over a year. Why revise hardware for a product that, by all accounts, is selling remarkably well as-is? The only exception I could see would be a 16 GB iPhone that’s otherwise unchanged from the current 8 GB model. iPhone SDK News: No I can see the upcoming iPhone SDK getting a mention from Jobs on stage, a reminder that it’s coming and that’s it’s going to be great, but Macworld isn’t WWDC, and SDKs don’t make for splashy presentations. If I’m wrong, it’ll be because they have a demo queued up from a third-party developer with early access to the SDK. Actual third-party software (written against the actual official SDK) is demoable. Games, perhaps? The apparently-leaked 1.1.3 firmware might make for a good demo, what with the jiggly icons and whatnot. Cinema Displays With Better Resolution, Brighter Screens, and Built-In Cameras: Yes If I keep predicting it, eventually I’ll be right.