Criteria

My criteria for a new vehicle was fairly simple and included:

• High quality and sexy styling
• Great gas mileage for a 50 mile daily commute (round trip)
• iPhone integration (bluetooth handsfree & MIDI connection)
• Fun to drive
• Available in a manual transmission
• Sub 22k price

Competitors

I looked at several car manufacturers online, but only went to look at a few in person.  After reviewing several manufacturers and models online, I checked out the following cars in person, in the order listed below.

• Honda CRZ – Fun two seater hybrid available in a manual transmission. The car was beautifully styled,  moderately fun to drive, acceptable for a hybrid, but with a moderate gas mileage and just a two seater, not the car for me.
• Honda Civic – Lackluster at best, odd interior with subpar materials and average MPG.
• Toyota Prius – Great gas mileage and acceptable quality, but not available in a manual transmission.
• Mazda 5 – Loved the styling, didn’t drive as the price was at the top of my range.
• VW Golf – Loved the styling and was fun to drive, but was a little cramped and the ride was stiff.  Very high quality build.

After viewing and driving all of the vehicles above, and ruling out cars from Hyundai, Ford & Chevy, I fell in love with the Jetta.  With an attractive price point, aggressive styling, and a rewarding driving experience, I was sold.

Purchase and Beyond

I secured a charcoal grey SE with the convenience package while at the dealer, resigning to wait until Christmas for the vehicle to be built and arrive in the USA.  Thankfully, the wait was roughly 3 weeks shorter than expected and I was able to pick the car up in late November.

My experience at the dealership was first rate. The salesman was very easy going, honest, and made appointments when I needed to meet with him.  Overall the experience was great and the car has been wonderful. Gas mileage held up to the EPA estimates, the interior has proven comfortable.

The only problem I’ve had with the vehicle since I picked it up is with a small piece of trim on the front passenger door.  I’m waiting on the dealership to get the part in, but the experience at the service center has been excellent as well.

Bingo.

Before she left the table a few other servers and even a woman from a few tables over were crowded around the table poking and swiping. I was quizzed on the battery life, if it could print wirelessly, if you could share photos easily with the grandkids or do online banking.

All these people who admitted being intimidated of their PC at work or home felt at ease using this device and didn’t once ask me “how” to do something. They just tried whatever seemed natural and smiled or giggled when the device actually did what they expected it to.

If random people at a restaurant, most of which had no clue what brand of PC or even said “I’m running Windows 2004″, knew they wanted this device and could use it, then Apple has hit upon a great market. Oh, and not a single one of them flinched when I responded with the price tag. They all expected a $1000 device, and $500 made them very happy.

The announcement hinged upon seven major features, with well over 100 features for users and thousands of APIs added for developers to bring a richer experience to their applications. I’m not going to go over all the features mentioned during the announcement, you can read about all that on Apple’s website here and here or even watch the keynote coverage itself.

Multitasking

Apple is late to the game with multitasking, but as Jobs said during the keynote: “We might be late to the game, but we’ll be the best”. Being the best is fine by me.

Apple brings multitasking to the iPhone platform by exposing core functionalities to iPhone developers through additional APIs. This means that iPhone applications will have to be written to make use of these new technologies and will most likely be iPhone OS 4 compatible only.

The new APIs expose functionality for background audio, so Pandora radio can continue to play in the background while you use another application for example, Voice over IP, so Skype can receive calls while the application is not in use and even continue a conversation while using another application, and support for task completion, which just let’s a developer schedule a long operation to be completed even after the application exits. A good example of this is uploading photos (or any web related work really) so that closing Flickr doesn’t stop the upload. Some built in applications that make use of this functionality include Mail, as you can quit the application and it will continue to send your emails, and iTunes, as it will continue to downloads purchases even if you quit the application.

If there was a service not exposed for developers to take advantage of, and I’m sure there are plenty, then those applications won’t have the ability to use “multitasking” in the general sense.

I plan to read the technical docs for this release, but have a feeling that the pretty animated dock for switching between applications is just a visual representation of what’s going on – i don’t think the phone is providing anything new in terms of multitasking support here. I wouldn’t even be surprised if developers have to “request” their application have multitasking, so that Apple and the phone know which applications make use of these new technology.

iAd

Apple also introduced a new mobile advertising framework for developers to leverage in their applications. This is a huge deal. Huge.

Imagine if Microsoft had taken the time to bundle an ad framework in Windows, so that anyone could easily push ads to your desktop. How would you feel?

Granted, the ads that Apple demoed were very cool (and all written with HTML5, CSS, & JS). And this will be great for advertisers to get their ads on the 85 million devices available today relatively easily. And developers will even make good money off of it i think. But for the end user, there will be even more ads since developers will have an easy way to integrate the ad framework and get paid.

Is this a big deal for users? Maybe. If you’re too cheap to even buy the full version of the app, then you’ll just have to deal with some cool ads. Surely if you have a paid app, it will be ad free. We’ll just have to wait and see how this one plays out.

Other Announcements

Apple also announced better support for Exchange servers, several enhancements to the built in Mail client, and also announced a social gaming network available to users later this year.

Overall, this was a pretty action packed release for Apple, laying the foundation for another great set of devices and applications to run on them.

So what’s the difference between a Mac and an iPad? It’s that blank slate thing. No matter what you do on a Mac, the keyboard and mouse and window-based operating system make it impossible to ignore the fact that you’re using a Mac, and it’s often equally impossible to ignore the fact that you’re using a particular program.

In contrast, 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.

Read more here.

• Personal and company background
• Talks about the Cinder acquisition
• Talks about transferring an existing app from one company to another
• Rates experience with Apple and the iTunes Store
• Advertising tips
• Gives his favorite Mac and iPhone apps

Read after the break for Patrick’s answers.

“Please provide some general company background information”

I started BitBQ back in August to be my company to create iPhone and Mac software. Since I started it up, I’ve acquired FitnessTrack, Emergency Information and LittleSnapper for iPhone (now Cinder). I did the acquisitions as a sort of kick start, but I have a couple of my own original apps in the works.

“What is your personal expertise? Are you a software developer, business man, or something else entirely?”

I’m a software developer, something I’ve been doing for over 14 years. Ranging from Perl to Java to .NET and of course Cocoa. Writing software is my passion and I love what the iPhone and Mac platforms provide in terms of feeding that passion.

“What prompted the Cinder acquisition from Realmac Software?”

It all started with a chat I was having with the original developer about what updates were planned for LittleSnapper for iPhone and learning they were looking to find someone who wanted to acquire it. As a user who loved LittleSnapper for iPhone, I jumped at the chance. We worked out the terms and as they say, the rest is history.

“Do you personally use the ember web service?”

Yes I do. I own LittleSnapper and now Cinder and use both to upload to Ember. I don’t use it as much as some people do, but I also can’t share a lot of the screenshots and other things I grab due to the sensitive nature of the images.

“What exactly goes into transferring an application to another company, with Apple involved?”

Having done this twice now, the dance is pretty simple: unless you have literally bought the entire company, there’s nothing Apple will do. You are forced to remove the original app and upload a brand new app. It can have the same name, once the original app has been removed. I had to do that with FitnessTrack.

What that means for users is that they have to be aware that the old app is going away and that there will be a new app showing up soon they’ll need to get to continue to receive updates. To alleviate some of the pain from this transition period, I’ve now tried two approaches. For FitnessTrack, I ran the app at 40% off on re-introduction to the app store and for Cinder, I’m running it for free for 2 weeks. The audience for Cinder is a lot larger considering the popularity of LittleSnapper for iPhone, so I wanted to make sure everyone has a chance to get it before I make it a paid app.

“How would you rate your happiness with the iTunes App Store?”

That’s a tough one. There are days I absolutely love it. I have Apple taking care of all the harder parts of software delivery: collecting payment, bandwidth, installation, etc. Then there are the days it’s infuriating. Like the current issue with Cinder not being able to be installed on iPod Touches because of a misconfiguration I can’t change on the back end without Apple’s intervention.

Of late, review times have dropped significantly, so that’s making me and a lot of other developers much happier. It’s still annoying when you have any hiccup in the process because the response delays are hard to put up with.

“What, if any, advertising outlets have you used to promote your applications, and how would you rate those?”

I ran a Fusion Ad for FitnessTrack just after the start of the new year. In conjunction with that ad run, I put FitnessTrack on sale for 40% off. While FitnessTrack certainly saw increased traffic and a slight increase in sales, they did not cover the cost of the ad. Before I did the ad, I got the advice of others that had run Fusion Ads and they warned me that it takes a long and sustained ad campaign to have any effect. I still considered it a net win just for the additional exposure to an larger audience. But I won’t be running any ads any time soon, so I’m going to have to find other ways to get the word out about my apps.

“Are there any other applications you see now that you are thinking of acquiring?”

I’ve been asked this by a few people. To be honest, the LittleSnapper for iPhone acquisition came as a total shock and I certainly wasn’t seeking it out. For my first acquisition, I did reach out to Justin Williams over at Second Gear to see if he was interested in selling his apps since I knew he was very frustrated with the whole App Store situation.

As of now, I don’t see any more app acquisition on the horizon for BitBQ. I’ve got a couple of apps in development, one for the iPhone and one for the Mac, that I’m planning on getting released this year. With that many apps, I’ve got a lot of work to keep me busy.

“How long have you been using a Mac?”

I first started using the Mac in 1992 on a Classic II in my journalism class. I quickly became the system administrator for the room full of Macs ( a mix of Classic IIs and SE/30s ). Those days, I was supporting System 7 and Pagemaker 4 back when it was owed by Aldus.

During my Mac “dark ages” (OS 9 till 10.3), I went off to work on Sun workstations and Windows machines. Once 10.4 Tiger hit, I could no longer resist coming back to the Mac. With my love of Unix and great software, the Mac was the place to be. It also helped that I could do any development I wanted on the machines. That was made even easier with the switch to Intel and the release of VMWare Fusion and Parallels. Now I didn’t even need to have Windows machines around. And I’m happy to say my house went back to Mac only in 2006.

“What is your favorite Mac software application?”

Wow, that’s a hard one to answer, I have so many favorites. How about a short list? MoneyWell from No Thirst Software, MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software, SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket Software, Today from Second Gear, Pulsar from Rouge Amoeba, NetNewsWire from NewsGator, Concentrate from Made By Rocket, Code Collector Pro from MCubed Software, 1Password from Agile Web Solutions, Tweetie from Atebits, Transmit from Panic, and finally BusyCal from BusyMac.

Ok, so not such a short list, but a list of software I use daily outside of Apple’s apps. Every part of my day is made easier because of that list of software.

“What is your favorite iPhone software application?”

My favorite iPhone app is Tweetie 2. It’s so well executed and has introduced so many awesome UI concepts. Beyond Mail, that’s the app I launch the most.

Wrapping Up

I want to thank Patrick for taking time out of his busy schedule to write up some excellent answers detailing a few questions I really was in the dark about.  Be sure to check out Cinder, for publishing to the wonderful web service Ember, now.  You can grab a free copy until March 17, 2010!

Links

Now’s your chance to get great Mac applications, such as:

MacJournal ($39.95)

MacJournal is the perfect app for you if you do any amount of writing, whether it’s blogging, writing a journal, a password-protected private diary, or anything else you can think of.

RipIt ($19.95)

It seems like forever since you were manually popping a CD into a player to listen to music. So why are you still doing this for your DVDs? RipIt makes it virtually effortless to import your DVDs to your Mac…simply pop in a disc and it does all the work for you, automatically.

Clips ($27)

Clips is copy & paste reinvented. Forget about each new copied item erasing your clipboard: copy everything you might want to paste, and paste whatever you’d like when you need it from your clipboard manager.

CoverScout ($39.95)

In a nutshell, CoverScout enables you to get all the missing cover art for your prized music collection within minutes. Make those ugly gray gaps in iTunes a thing of the past.

Flow ($25)

Are you still using Transmit, an app that dates all the way back to MacOS 8? Well, if so, then it’s time to make room for the new kid in town… Flow.

Tales of Monkey Island ($34.95)

Tales of Monkey Island is a five-episode adventure game saga featuring mighty pirate Guybrush Threepwood and his motley crew. The game pulls the legendary franchise thundering and plundering into the modern era with an epic storyline conceived by some of the same team that dreamed up the original LucasArts games.

RapidWeaver ($79)

RapidWeaver is widely regarded as the best website creation app out there. Even better than Apple’s very own iWeb.

Past Reviews & Information

I used to use RapidWeaver to manage this site, a few years ago.  The software is very elegant and powerful, and easy enough to allow people who do not understand the slightest thing about making websites to create stunning websites with ease.  Please check out a few words of my praise for RapidWeaver here.

I have also written a review of Flow FTP back in 2008, which you can catch here.

And most importantly, check out MacHeist.com!

CTO Kevin Lynch wrote a wonderful snippet regarding user choice in technologies:

Engaging with ideas and information also means ensuring there is an open ecosystem and freedom to view and interact with the content and applications a user chooses. This model of open access has proven to be more effective in the long term than a walled approach, where a manufacturer tries to determine what users are able to see or approves and disapproves individual content and applications. We strongly believe the web should remain an open environment with consistent access to content and applications regardless of your viewing device.

While I personally hate developing in Flash and whole heartedly embrace HTML5 and CSS3 as the future of web development, that’s a personal choice.  I love the freedom to make that choice and I’ve mad the decision based on my experiences.

I think that most developers would probably switch to something besides Adobe Flash, if there were solutions available to all users.  I applaud Apple for attempting to make “the world a better place” by removing Flash from its devices, but Apple is making a choice for all users.

It’s a tough decision to make.  Do you as a company restrict users to certain content and limit their ability to do general purpose computing?  Or are you in fact doing them a favor by removing possible headaches down the road?  Only time will tell.

Found via Webmonkey

First, the UI of the application is absolutely superb.  I place it in the top 5 of iPhone apps I have seen that leave no detail unthought, every pixel is used and beautifully designed.  The fact the application actually works like a charm and makes me more productive is merely convenience.

What really prompted this post, however, was the stunning website that accompanies the application.  It just reminds me that the iTunes store and the application aren’t the only places a developer really has to pour resources and soul into.  The simplest and gorgeously architected site really do go a good ways in creating a resoundingly impressive user experience.

Tweetie 2 is a $2.99USD application, there is no upgrade pricing for previous Tweetie users. That being said, it is worth every penny and a significant update. Read more at the Tweetie site: http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/

Cruz is a relative newcome based on Webkit (same as Safari, Konquerer, and other mobile web broswers, incuding the one on the iPhone).  However Cruz attempts to bring plugin support and social networking features to a Webkit based broswer.

Keeping in mind that this software is only v0.2, it’s relatively stable and has a few nice features already.  Personally, I love the MobileMe theme, making the window a dark grey.  Coupled with a slider for window transparency, it makes the browser super sexy.  The ability to have all windows automatically hide when switching away from the application to another is a nice touch as well.  Cruz also ships with a nice plugin for a Cover Flow view of you search results (works with Google).

The broswer has tons of potentional, but is unfortanately not open source.  Some quick things I miss from Safari include trackpad gestures for navigation and better Bookmarks management.

Cruz website

Chill Pill allows you to enjoy Fever’s rich RSS experience while taking advantage of Cocoa and all of the other modern technologies in Mac OS X.

Chill Pill is a Cocoa app that sits in your Dock, complete with an unread icon, ability to set it as the default feed reader on your Mac, keyboard shortcuts and more.

Chill Pill
Fever
Macfanatic Fever Review

Read after the break for a list of UI and usability changes as well as a list of interesting changes for Cocoa developers, including code samples.

User Centric Thoughts

Dock

There were several changes to the Dock, but the one I found the most interesting (and didn’t know before reading) was the “Minimize windows into the application icon” option. Instead of little windows appearing in the Dock, when clicking the application icon you are shown a list of minimized windows. Very reminiscent of Windows and the task bar (as there is no preview, only the window title), but surely useful for those out there who minimize lots of windows.

Finder

The Finder was completely rewritten for Snow Leopard and should provide a strong foundation moving forward. There is heavy use of Core Animation in the new Finder, meaning that it just “looks prettier” most of the time. There are animations when renaming files on your Desktop for instance. And a feature that I personally love:

List view also has a few enhancements—accidental, incidental, or otherwise. The drag area for each list view item now spans the entire line. In Leopard, though the entire line was highlighted, only the file name or icon portion could be dragged. Trying to drag anywhere else just extended the selection to other items in the list view as the cursor was moved. I’m not sure whether this change in behavior is intentional or if it’s just an unexamined consequence of the underlying control used for list view in the new Cocoa Finder. Either way, thumbs up.

Overall the Finder looks very similar to the Leopard version, but is more responsive and has a feature here and there that reminds you that this is a new version.

Radnom Refinements

This is just an assortment of interesting tidbits I picked up while reading.

• Safari runs plugins as separate processes. If a plugin crashes, Safari won’t.
• Menlo is the new default font for Monospaced fonts (See my article here)
• Resolution Independence still sucks
• Core Location support – your Mac can find itself
• Wake from Sleep feature – with a Time Capsule or AirPort Extreme station, you can access contents from a sleeping Mac over the local network at any time. Works great with the “Back to my Mac” feature.
• No ZFS support

Developer Centric Thoughts

File Compression

Snow Leopard introduces per file compression to the HFS+ file system used by Apple.

Resource Forks & Extended File Attributes

To bring file compression to the already fragile HFS+ file system and maintain backwards compatibility, Apple stores the compressed file data in resource forks, and either compressed or uncompressed in extended file attributes. What this means:

And where can the complete contents of a potentially large file be hidden in such a way that pre-Snow Leopard systems can still copy that file without the loss of data? Why, in the resource fork, of course. The Finder has always correctly preserved Mac-specific metadata and both the resource and data forks when moving or duplicating files. In Leopard, even the lowly cp and rsync commands will do the same. So while it may be a little bit spooky to see all those “empty” 0 KB files when looking at a Snow Leopard disk from a pre-Snow Leopard OS, the chance of data loss is small, even if you move or copy one of the files.

Performance Gains

You might first think that all this file compression would either waste space or waste CPU cycles. John from Ars Technica proposes that given the known fact that the physical motions of a hard drive are the slowest part of modern computers, storing the compressed data in resource forks and extended attributes makes sense because that data is stored in one of two locations on the disk. And because these two areas are frequently used, the read/write head of the hard drive is close by and has less moves to make and can be quicker. Also, because the two files are accessed so frequently, caching occurs providing even greater performance benefits.

QuickTime X

Snow Leopard introduced a completely rewritten 64-bit API for QuickTime. The new QuickTime X Player is nice and fancy, but the underlying API has underwent the knife. QuickTime debuted in 1991 and after 18 years has finally seen a significant update.

64 Bit

The interesting part is the new QuickTime X API in QTKit is smart. The API is optimized for playback and is 64 bit only. Transparently, if an application needs features that QTKit (QuickTime X) cannot deliver (and there are many currently), QTKit will revert to the previous QuickTime 7 API. And if a developer writes a 32 bit application and wants to use the newer QuickTime X API, QTkit will just spawn another process that is 64 bit to deliver content back to the 32 bit application, all transparently. The user will get the best experience with the least amount of effort from the developer, which is always a win.

File System API Unification

Briefly, between POSIX functions, CoreFoundation, and Cocoa itself, there are several ways to access data about the filesystem. Currently there is no unified approach to fetch all this data.

When opening a file in Leopard Preview, there are:

• Four conversions of an FSRef to a file path
• Ten conversions of a file path to an FSRef
• Twenty-five calls to getattrlist()
• Eight calls to stat()/lstat()
• Four calls to open()/close()

Snow Leopard will use NSURL for all file system operations, instead of strings representing file paths. To the end user, this means the user could move a file and the application wouldn’t lose track of it as the NSURL has a unique identifier that is not based on file location alone.

Clang and LLVM

Performance Gains

Clang brings with it the two headline attributes you expect in a hot, new compiler: shorter compile times and faster executables. In Apple’s testing with its own applications such as iCal, Address Book, and Xcode itself, plus third-party applications like Adium and Growl, Clang compiles nearly three times faster than GCC 4.2. As for the speed of the finished product, the LLVM back-end, whether used in Clang or in LLVM-GCC, produces executables that are 5-25% faster than those generated by GCC 4.2.

Static Analyzer

The static analyzer is the single best feature in Snow Leopard as far as I’m concerned. Essentially Xcode is smarter and can analyze all ways your code might interact to determine errors in your logic. Unprecedented.

Read more about my thoughts on the static analyzer in Xcode 3.2 here.

Blocks

Blocks are an extension to C based languages, currently only supported by Apple in it’s 4 compilers shipping with Snow Leopard. Essentially, blocks are a way to pass a “block” of code. Not the same as a function, which has it’s own scope.

Example

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FILE *fp = fopen(filename, "r");
 
if (fp == NULL) {
  perror("Unable to open file");
}
else {
  char line[MAX_LINE];
 
  while (fgets(line, MAX_LINE, fp)) {
    work;
    work;
    work;
  }
 
  fclose(fp);
}

The example above is boilerplate code and assumes you want to do some “work;” with the line once you’ve read it in from a file. By using blocks, you could create a function that takes the filename and a block, simplifying moving through the file greatly.

foreach_line(filename, ^ (char *line) {
  work;
  work;
  work;
});

API Use

John informs us that Apple uses blocks in over 100 new API calls that would simply not be possible prior to Snow Leopard.

Threading and Grand Central Dispatch

The age old problem in computing:

This is the enemy: hardware with more computing resources than programmers know what to do with, most of it completely idle, and all the while the user is utterly blocked in his attempts to use the current application.

Grand Central Dispatch makes great progress in helping developers alleviate the headaches in asynchronously executing tasks in their application.

Overview

Essentially, Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is a system level library that manages a global pool of available threads, and grabs tasks from queues your application sets up. The more resources the system has available, the more threads GCD has free and the faster it can grab tasks from your application queues. Since the system is managing the threads, there is no application overhead for thread management and the possibility of too many threads, and yet your application can get the last bit of performance from the system by using all available resources. All automatically.

Let’s say a program has a problem that can be split into eight separate, independent units of work. If this program then creates four threads on an eight-core machine, is this an example of creating too many or too few threads? Trick question! The answer is that it depends on what else is happening on the system.

If six of the eight cores are totally saturated doing some other work, then creating four threads will just require the OS to waste time rotating those four threads through the two available cores. But wait, what if the process that was saturating those six cores finishes? Now there are eight available cores but only four threads, leaving half the cores idle.

There is a performance gain here is as well. If you were managing threads at your application level, you have to create and release threads as you use them. GCD uses a global thread pool, so the threads are always active. Whether or not they are working is the only change. By simply maintaining active threads, the system can pull just a little bit more performance from the system.

First Example

- (IBAction)analyzeDocument:(NSButton *)sender
{
  NSDictionary *stats = [myDoc analyze];
  [myModel setDict:stats];
  [myStatsView setNeedsDisplay:YES];
  [stats release];
}

The above method is a simple action called by a button click that will analyze a document and display the results. Under normal circumstances this would be nearly instantaneous. However, if a user attempted to analyze a very large document, the processing still takes place on the main event processing thread and the application appears to hang. Refactoring this to use threads and avoid race conditions, with callbacks for analyzeComplete would be a mess and most developers would balk at the trouble to make this four line method asynchronous. However, with GCD and Blocks, it becomes trivial.

- (IBAction)analyzeDocument:(NSButton *)sender
{
  dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(0, 0), ^{
    NSDictionary *stats = [myDoc analyze];
    dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
      [myModel setDict:stats];
      [myStatsView setNeedsDisplay:YES];
      [stats release];
    });
  });
}

Now when the user clicks the “Analyze” button, a block is placed on the application queue to be processed as soon as possible. This block analyzes the document, and once that is complete, the block placed onto the event queue with ” dispatch_async()” will be called, therefore updating the UI. Simply wonderful.

Second Example

Here is a truly gorgeous example from John.

for (i = 0; i < count; i++) {
    results[i] = do_work(data, i);
} 
 
total = summarize(results, count);

Taking this simple for() loop and making it execute asynchronously with GCD is actually quite simple.

dispatch_apply(count, dispatch_get_global_queue(0, 0), ^(size_t i) {
    results[i] = do_work(data, i);
});
 
total = summarize(results, count);

I love it.

GCD Conclusion

John sums up the importance and far reaching effects of GCD on the future of Mac OS X.

When I first heard about Grand Central Dispatch, I was extremely skeptical. The greatest minds in computer science have been working for decades on the problem of how best to extract parallelism from computing workloads. Now here was Apple apparently promising to solve this problem. Ridiculous.

But Grand Central Dispatch doesn’t actually address this issue at all. It offers no help whatsoever in deciding how to split your work up into independently executable tasks—that is, deciding what pieces can or should be executed asynchronously or in parallel. That’s still entirely up to the developer (and still a tough problem). What GCD does instead is much more pragmatic. Once a developer has identified something that can be split off into a separate task, GCD makes it as easy and non-invasive as possible to actually do so.

Cocoa Framework Changes of Interest

• The faster shutdown time for Snow Leopard is partly possible due to the system killing your application. You can mark your application as needed to properly shut down and stall the process. However if you don’t, your application will be sent the SIGKILL signal.
• NSCashe class
• NSBlockOperation class
• Hefty work to NSURL
• Gesture and multitouch event support
• Ability to set desktop images
• Block-based sheet APIs
• Block-based enumerations for lines, words, and the like in NSString and NSAttributedString
• New NSPropertyList APIs with better error handling and performance
• Core Data integration with Spotlight
• Read more at the Mac Dev Center from Apple

More Reading

Full Ars Technica Review

Read the complete Snow Leopard Ars Technica review.

Many thanks to John for the very complete review and insight into Snow Leopard. All code examples in my article were taken from his.

Ars Technica Archives

• Five years of Mac OS X, March 24, 2006

• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, October 28, 2007
• Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, April 28, 2005
• Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, November 9, 2003
• Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, September 5, 2002
• Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma), October 15, 2001
• Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah), April 2, 2001

• Mac OS X Public Beta, October 3, 2000
• Mac OS X Q & A, June 20, 2000
• Mac OS X DP4, May 24, 2000
• Mac OS X DP3: Trial by Water, February 28, 2000
• Mac OS X Update: Quartz & Aqua, January 17, 2000
• Mac OS X DP2, December 14, 1999

From the IconFactory and DS Media Labs (IconFactory is behind Twitterific for Mac & iPhone, as well as the wonderful Frenzic for Mac & iPhone) comes Ramp Champ.  The app is essentially a carnival or fair without the warm weather and funnel cakes.  There are 4 different “games” loaded with the app, all of which are based on the simple game of flicking a ball up the ramp to knock something down and get points.  Good old fashioned carnival games.

The levels are all very distinct, with a lot of thought put into each one (and gorgeously designed).  There are goals to meet to earn trophies, and as you rack up points you earn tickets.  Then you can use your tickets to buy souveniers, and there are a ton of fun cute souvenirs to buy.  I personally love the attention to this part of the game – when you view your purchased souveneirs, there is a quaint little description with each.  And the little blurb is hilariously funny most of the time – very reminiscent of buying items in the Sims games.

The level of polish on this game is amazing.  The graphics are stunning, game play is perfect, and the sound is a great touch.  There developers were smart and made the game extensible, as there are currently two additional in-application level packs available, each for $0.99.  I already purchased one, the pack for “Molar Madness” and “Happy Place”.  So far, “Molar Madness” is by far my favorite – I’m hooked.

I highly recommend this app at the $1.99 price point, it could have easily been placed at $3.99 or $4.99 and sold as well I believe, simply because of the high quality.  I use a Mac because the software is usually better and that same philosophy applies to iPhone software – especially because iPhone apps tend to be less quality overall, by sheer volume.  Finding one that is as well put together as this is worth more money.

Check out Ramp Champ today!

Shaun’s motivation for developing Fever:

What if, instead of mentally processing hundreds of headlines your feed reader did that heavy—we’re talking pre-coffee—lifting and just told you what everyone was collectively talking about? And what if it weighted those “hot” topics and aggregated the ensuing discussions in your feeds together?

Fever is very different from any other RSS readers out there for several reasons.  The most interesting (and yet useful) feature of Fever is where the application lives.  To throw a buzz word around, Fever lives in the “Cloud”.  There is a relatively painless install that gets a copy of Fever on your web server.  And because Fever lives in the cloud, it can always be up to date and stay in sync no matter what device you view it on.  I could end my review there, but I’ll continue.

Installation

Installation couldn’t be simpler (unless Shaun could somehow setup a database on your server for you, which he can’t).  You register for an account on http://feedafever.com/, download a couple files and then throw them up on your server.  Then, let Fever connect to your MySQL database and make sure all is good to go before directing you through paypal and installing itself on your server.  Then you’re ready to import feeds in OPML format from your current news reader.  Seamless install for a web app.  30 USD gets you 1.x upgrades, which happen automatically I might add.  Point to take home, Shaun has set a new standard here.  I was impressed by the installation process alone.

Completely New Way of Looking at your News

I have tons and tons of RSS feeds.  And frankly, I don’t get that much out of them anymore because there is just so much to look at and I don’t have enough time in my day.  Shaun’s innovation hit home here.  First, your feeds are essentially organized into two classes, kindling and sparks.  Kindling are the feeds that you are hot about and don’t want to miss any action.  You can easily get unread counts and organize by group if you wish.  Sparks are feeds that essentially throw in duplicate data.

For my Mac news, I subscribe to several sites, which pretty much post the same thing over and over.  Before, this was a huge pain, but with Fever, it’s actually a plus.  If there are 5 sites that have posted almost the same thing, then obviously it’s important.  So it’s “hot”, maybe around 101F.  I’ll see a grouping of those 5 related articles under one heading, and I can view whatever ones I wish for further reading.  Taking that concept, I want to place feeds that “add fire” to my Kindling in Sparks, reinforcing what I really want to see.  So when I look at the “Hot” area, I see related articles grouped by temperature.  The more buzz on the internet over whatever, the hotter it will be and it will be higher on my list.  Truly remarkable thinking.

iPhone

Shaun took the time to make a truly stellar iPhone interface for the Fever app as well.  For me, this was just icing on the cake.  I have tried so many RSS readers on my iPhone and was disappointed time after time.  I mainly wanted something that would keep my read items in sync between my Mac and iPhone.  Since Fever is a hosted application online in the “cloud”, it can just keep chugging away checking for updates and when I launch my bookmarked Fever on my iPhone, I get a nice interface and get the syncing for free.

Extras

Shaun provides a nice bookmarklet that sets in your browser’s bookmarks bar so when visiting a page you want to subscribe to in Fever, just click the bookmarklet and choose a group to add it to (or to your sparks) and off you go.  Clean and simple.

There is also a beautiful icon to go with Fluid.app (now free), an application that basically creates a super simple Safari window with it’s own menu bar and icon that sits in your dock.  Nice thing about this is you get the gorgeous icon in your dock, including amazingly enough, a dock unread count.  Crazy.

And to make sure that Fever is more up to date than you are, Shaun even provides you with a short snippet to add to your server’s cron manager, so you can have your feeds update every 15 minutes with ease.  Fever will keep checking even if you’re not around and when you load the page, you’re all ready to go.  That is the last piece of the puzzle for me, I love it.

For More…

I highly encourage you to check out http://feedafever.com/ for more information.  There is a lot of great information along with a quick demo video to get you running.  This was an exceptional 30 bucks spent on my part and I hope that the web gets wind of this soon.  Shaun has a great product on his hands.

There seems to be a flood of GTD (getting things done) applications available for the Mac lately.  There is OmniFocus from the OmniGroup, which doesn’t seem to fit my needs at all.  A little too professional and over the top.  I need something very flexible and that will get me up and running quickly.  Then there is a new application about to debut from The Potion Factory, entitled The Hit List.  The Hit List takes another unique approach to task management, and I’m sure that I’ll be taking a look at it more closely in the future.  

Ease of Use

I think that one area Things excels in is ease of use.  You can customize the system-wide shortcut to create a new task, no matter what application you’re currently using.  Just hit that keyboard shortcut and a small window pops up, letting me give it a title, pressing a couple keys to tag, drag an email, website, contact or file into the notes area, set a due date if I wish and I’m done and back to working on what I was doing.

Organizing your tasks couldn’t be simpler.  There are a few focus areas: “Today”, “Next”, “Someday”, “Scheduled” and “Projects”.  Today obviously contains what you’ve deemed you should focus on today.  If you set dates on your tasks, they default to automatically showing up in Today on the day they are due.  You can make a task show up several days ahead, if that’s what you wish.  ”Next” just represents what you’re not working on today, but is upcoming in a few days or weeks.  A nice overview of what you’ll be tackling soon.  ”Scheduled” lets you create repeating tasks at your leisure, great for finances, or create a task that you’re just not ready to start on.  Just create that task in scheduled and it’ll show up when you can actually get started on it.  

Projects lets you organize your tasks according to what you’re working on.  Your tasks show up here (and in Today, just separated off by the project).  Just another way to separate your tasks.  Areas follow the same principle, allowing you to group similar tasks according to maybe work, school, or a hobby.

There’s support for People, allowing you to add teammates and keep up with what they’re working on.  If you have Leopard, Things can place your tasks as To-Do items in iCal, which can be handy.  There’s great support for dropping just about anything you can find in the Notes section of a task: drop a webpage to view later, a file that you need, a contact from address book, or an email to view.  Nice way to get everything you need grouped together so when you’re ready to tackle the task, everything is there in one place.

Tasks don’t just die when you’re done, they go to the logbook.  A simple way to look up information about past projects, who completed what, what that website was, etc.

Tagging

What allows Things to offer such great flexibility is its great support for tagging.  I can create a task, and assign it to as many tags as I want.  Then, the smart filter bar at the top lets me quickly see all tasks sharing whatever tags I want.  I can assign a group to a set of tags, so those tasks always show up there, easily manage tags and the hierarchy (for instance, have my classes under “School” and my work projects under “Work”).  

Open up the tag manager to see what shortcuts have been assigned to each tag.  In my case, I can quickly select a group of tasks and press “w” to assign them the “Work” tag.  I have a few of these memorized and it makes creating new tasks much quicker, even though Things already has great auto-complete support built in for your tags. 

Things for iPhone

I think we are starting to see a trend in Mac software: applications that want to take advantage of the Mac and provide a full set of features will undoubtedly provide an iPhone companion.  In this case, the iPhone version of Things is just as full featured as the Mac version, letting you very easily view your tasks for today, upcoming, or someday.  You can quickly enter a new task, great support for quickly tagging, set a due date, etc.  And when your Mac and iPhone are on the same wireless network, Things will automatically sync the two devices.  Overall a great iPhone application that makes using Things just that much more useful for me.  Things for iPhone will set you back $9.99 USD.

Conclusion

Things for Mac and iPhone work wonderfully together.  They provide you with a seamless way to stay on top of everything you need to be tackling in your busy life.  At $60 USD for both apps, it’s a little pricy for some.  But compared to similar offerings already available, the level of fit and finish, and the enthusiasm of the development team, I’m sure there will be plenty of new features and more exciting things to come, making Things the #1 task management and organization application for the Mac.

Links

Things from Cultured Code

Interview with Things Developer

OmniFocus from OmniGroup

The Hit List from Potion Factory

I’ve already touched on the biggest impact for users: interface improvement. 280Slides looks and acts just like a real desktop application. All the standard keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste and undo/redo are supported right within the web app itself. Take a minute to tour the application and see how it compares to other online presentation applications. It feels more like Apple’s own Keynote, right?

Developers have even more reason to be excited. The whole Javascript/HTML/CSS design process to manipulate the DOM is abstracted to a higher layer with the introduction of Objective-J. The Objective-J language allows developers to write code in a style more like writing for traditional desktop applications. The developer doesn’t directly interact with the DOM or style the page with CSS. Instead, Objective-J itself manages all the views and drawing the objects to screen. More so, the Cappuccino framework provides functionality that is traditionally lacking from other Javascript frameworks, such as:

• copy/paste
• undo/redo
• document management and archiving
• vector graphics
• animations

This is a tremendous advantage for developers, allowing focus to be placed on the unique aspects of the web application itself. Cappuccino will be open-source and available soon, so keep a lookout at the Objective-J website. I think that we will see some amazing applications begin to rise in the future and this might possibly fuel a new era of apps on the web.

Also be sure to check out a newer article about SproutCore, a similar Javascript framework already released and in use in Apple's MobileMe platform.

Objective-J website

280Slides Application

Ajaxian Interview with 280 North team

HyperSpaces boasts such features as named spaces, desktop labels, different desktop pictures and desktop tinting. It makes heavy use of Leopards Core Animation and Core Image to beautifully let you organize your work. Currently in a private beta, check out the HyperSpaces website to register for a notification when HyperSpaces comes out in public beta shortly.

Related Links:

CocoaBots Software

Tony Arnold | Lead HyperSpaces Developer

Cocoia Blog | Creating the HyperSpace Icon

Flow is exciting for a few reasons. First, it’s Leopard only. This means that the interface is super slick (lickable as the developer describes it). Views are animated and everything is simply gorgeous and simple to use. Leopard technologies such as Quicklook are also employed in the app. Quicklook files from your servers!

The first thing you’ll notice when launching Flow, is that it just feels right. It’s super responsive and fits in perfectly with the Leopard UI. Complete with tabs and a simplistic and intuitive interface, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Flow provides a built-in editor as well, which is fairly decent. The bottom pane of the window provides you with a live preview of your changes, and the editor actually supports syntax highlighting for HTML, PHP, XML and CSS. However, it seems that Javascript highlighting isn’t available at this time, but hopefully will be in a future release. Note: the image below is while using Quicklook in Flow, not from my Mac.

Bonjour is also available, right in the sidebar. Because I have “Remote Login” (ssh) enabled on my Macbook, my computer showed up under the SFTP folder here. Just double-clicking on my computer and entering my password instantly logged me in and brought up my home folder. If there were more computers on my network, this could be very useful indeed.

Droplets are very useful as well. Simply create a droplet from the “Bookmarks” menu and an icon appears on your Desktop (which you can move then anywhere on your Mac). Then, just drop a file or folder on the droplet, and whether Flow is running or not, the stuff is uploaded to your server.

A few things I’ve noticed. First, If you have a tab open and double-click on a bookmark to log you in, the tab will be used for that bookmark. This is the same behavior that is in Safari. However, I would rather stay logged in to both and have the bookmark be opened in a new tab. If that annoys you, there is an easy set in Preferences to enable. Just a heads up. Second, Bonjour connections seem to be just a bit buggy still. It took me a couple clicks to get the right information to show up in the login pane when clicking on my computer, and once connected, the name of the tab wasn’t updated to the new connection. However, bugs have been filed

This is definitely an exciting new app and is very refreshing as the previous leader in the FTP space, Transmit, was getting long in the tooth. Congrats to Brian from Extended Mac on his first release!

You can download a free 15 day trial from Extended Mac Software here. Flow is 29 USD for all 1.x upgrades.

First off, I was searching for about the cheapest thing with four wheels, while still being stylish and fun to drive. In my quest for my first new car, I seriously looked at the Toyota Yaris and the Honda Fit as about the only other affordable options. The Mazda 3 Hatchback as well as the VW Rabbit are two beautiful pieces of machinery, but were out of my price range.

The 1.8L engine coupled with the 6 speed manual transmission makes the Versa a much more thrilling car than either the Yaris or the Fit. Quick acceleration makes for fun city driving or agility to pass, and 6th gear allows for easy and quiet interstate driving. Gas mileage is rated slightly lower (about 31MPG) than the competitors, but performance and fun was more important in this little car compared to a few extra miles per gallon.

Overall, the Versa has a nice feature set. With a base price around 12,500, features such as air conditioning and a CD player are included. There are of course several options available, but I only opted for the Power package, which included some random items as well as power locks/windows and cruise. The sound system is astounding as far as I’m concerned. The cabin is filled with sound and retains quality even with lots of bass.

I’m not a fan of the sedan version, but I love the hatchback I bought. It’s a thrill to drive and has all the features I wanted in my first car, minus one. I would have liked to have an audio input jack in the car, but that was only available with the SE model.

Nissan Versa Website

Music this week is “Better Than Me” by Hinder.

Yesterday was a very surprising day in the Apple community for several reasons, not the least for the ugly new iPod Nanos. But I’m skipping ahead of myself.

First off, there were tons of new products introduced that fulfilled many of the rumors circulating the event. The biggest announcement of the day was the new iPod Touch. Basically, it’s a stripped down iPhone, but not in a bad way. The iPod Touch has the wonderful multi-touch screen that displays video and all your media beautifully and because of that is the first ‘full-screen’ iPod, even though there have been rumors about this for years now. The new iPod Touch also features Wi-Fi, letting you browse the web with Safari and download music directly from iTunes via the new iTunes Wi-Fi Store. You can grab one in any color you like, as long as it’s black and there are 8GB and 16GB versions with impressive battery life.

There were also new regular iPods released, albeit re-branded under the iPod Classic name. These new iPods feature interface enhancements, such as CoverFlow, longer battery life and a new all-metal enclosure that seems pretty sexy. The updated iPod Nano is sadly enough the “fatty” circulating the web a few weeks ago. It is smaller and slim, but because of a bigger display to allow the Nano to finally play back video, it looks really fat. The colors aren’t that attractive either, but they may appear better in person. There are also new iPod Shuffles, available in four new colors.

iPhone Update

The iPhone didn’t see a new product release, but is still causing a stir because of yesterday’s keynote. Because Apple released the iPod Touch, with it’s sleek design, built-in Wi-Fi and multi-touch display, Apple lowered the price of the iPhone by 200 USD. So instead of a 4GB version at 499 and a 8GB at 599, the iPhone comes in a 8GB version at 399. Very impressive price dive indeed, just to keep it competitive with the new iPod. However, this led to lots of very unhappy early-adopter iPhone customers and Steve Jobs released a letter to the public today on the reasons for the price cuts and offering 100 USD in Apple Store credit in compensation to the loyal Apple customers. Overall, a very nice way to deal with an angry/adoring public Steve!

On the iPhone note, if you’re thinking about buying one, now is still a good time. I just orded a 4GB version (discontinued) for 299USD. That’s a steal as I’m concerned, and brand new from the Apple Store, not refurbished or anything. So, in about 24 hours I’ll have an iPhone and I’ll be reporting back to everyone shortly.

Read Jobs’ letter to iPhone Customers

I went to my local Apple Store and waited for a few minutes so I could get to on of the eight or ten iPhones available on display.  Just picking the phone up from the dock and sliding your finger across the screen to unlock it was a wonderful experience.  The device is superbly made, the screen is gorgeous, and all the flicking and pinching and tapping works like a charm.  I even believe that the keyboard would be easy to get used to after using it for a few more hours.  And it is the perfect video iPod with that gorgeous screen!!

The only thing I would have liked to try out (I played with everything, even the YouTube app) was making an actual call, just to hear how loud and clear the call would be.  Other than that, and the price point, I would have bought one in a second as it was perfect in all respects.

And as a delightful sidenote, the website worked perfectly on the iPhone, though it was a tad slow to load, even on the Wi-Fi at the Apple Store.  If any of you out there have iPHones and would like to share some thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

Multicore Support

This is a major improvement for all Intel Mac users. Even first generation Macbook users and all the early Intel adopters should see performance gains in Leopard. Tiger was designed to run on one-core processors, which was fine at the time. However, all Intel Macs have at least 2 cores, with the high-end Mac Pro having 8 all together. Can you see the reasoning here? With Leopard optimized to make the best use of all those cores, and new ways for developers to further improve their programs (read more about NSOperation and NSOperationQueue ), Leopard should see a significant performance improvement.

Safari 3 for Windows

I’m not sure if Safari 3 for Windows is a secret feature of Leopard or not. I’m actually using the beta on Windows right now to write this article and so far it has behaved itself rather nicely. The attention to detail in making Safari for Windows just like Safari on Mac is incredible. Even the contextual menu (right-click) gives you the same options, such as "Save Image to Desktop". I mean, that’s just crazy.

Boot Camp

Most were hoping for Jobs to announce some amazing virtualization technology built right in to Leopard. I’m rather glad that this approach wasn’t taken for a few reasons. First, there are already two options on the market today: Parallels and VMWare. Parallels has proven they are dedicated to providing new features and constantly improving the software. I love Apple, but if they incorporated virtualization into Leopard, the updates would be few and far between when compared to Parallels. Just check out Parallels new 3.0 release to get what I mean.

What Jobs did tell us is that Boot Camp will allow you to switch between Windows and Leopard faster. Quick example: If you’re in Leopard and need to switch to Windows, be sure to use the Restart in Windows option from the Apple Menu. This will place Leopard into a hibernating state and, if you’ve previously used Windows, should start Windows from where you left off. This will make the process much more relatable to Suspending a virtual machine in Parallels.

New Desktop

The redesigned Desktop is touted as the number one feature for Leopard. However, I don’t see anything revolutionary or amazing about it.

• The Menu Bar has a new look. It’s very comparable to the trashy-translucent taskbar in Vista. I’m not excited, but I’ll put my concerns aside until I see it in person.
• The Dock has seen a facelift. Your icons now sit on a silver background that reflects any window behind it, making it look 3D. Might look cool, but is that really a feature?
• No blue background. I’m very sad. For me, the Mac experience has always included a new, cool Aqua background with every major release. Jobs explicitly stated that no one ever uses these and it’s a waste of time. I like them Steve!
• Anyone else notice that the hard drive icon wasn’t on the Desktop. Very minimalist look.
• Stacks. I’m actually fairly excited about this new feature. Basically, it’s a way to organize your files and preview the contents in a cool new way, without opening a Finder window. This was originally rumored to be included in Panther, then in Tiger, and now in Leopard. Nice to see it finally made it in. All the demos show the stacks being used in the Dock. I wonder if we’ll be able to use them other places. I love the concept, but won’t use it that much if I have to use them only in the Dock.

EA Games

Not really a feature of Leopard itself, but an important announcement for the Mac anyway. Traditionally, game titles were released for console and PC and then ported over to Mac several months later, if at all. EA announced during the keynote that they are committed to delivering new titles to the Mac alongside the console and PC releases. As time progresses, the Mac should shun its reputation as the “non-gaming” platform.

Core Animation

Remember when I said we would are going to see some awesome applications that are built as Leopard-only? The main reason for that is this technology right here. Core Animation let’s developers create very fluid, interactive, and attractive interfaces with ease. There were several demos of the technology at WWDC last year and I’m sure it’s a main focus this year as well. A quick example was given in Monday’s keynote. If you’ve ever seen the AppleTV intro movie, you’re on the right track. Very cool applications will follow.

Improved Developer Tools

The mac is only as strong as its developers and Apple realizes this. So with Leopard, developers get a XCode 3, sporting tons of new features including refactoring (even in nib files) and function collapsing, XRay for seeing exactly what your app is doing at any time, DTrace, Dashcode for creating widgets, and Interface Builder 3. All of those mentioned are huge updates and improvements, and XRay and Dashcode are new applications all together. XRay will make performance tuning your applications so much easier. I love you Apple!

Back to my Mac

Dot Mac didn’t see any other improvements besides this one feature as far as I can tell. Basically, you enable a setting on all your Macs and those computers talk with the dot Mac service. Then, if you’re on the road with your laptop and realize that you need something off any of your other computers, you fire up the Finder and they appear in the sidebar for you. Works just like you’re on your home network. Details haven’t been released about the service working with firewalls or routers. I’d imagine an Airport Base Station update might introduce this functionality at a later time.

New Finder

I think everyone was hoping for a new Finder. I personally feel disappointed however. The Finder does have a new interface, but then again, it’s not new. It’s just iTunes for your files. Coverflow in the Finder looks remotely useful, but I’m not sure just how much I’ll use it. The overall appearance seems a little drab, especially if you’re already not a fan of the iTunes 7 look. That look will be everywhere in Leopard. No hiding. It will find you. Also of note is a report that the new Finder is the first one to be scrapped and written in Cocoa. And because of the multitude of updates to Cocoa, including multicore and 64-bit support, performance is drastically improved. At least that part is welcome.

Spaces

Spaces is just Apple’s incarnation of a virtual desktop manager. Granted it’s a very nice one, but still nothing that wasn’t available before Leopard (see Virtue). Spaces will allow you to group application windows in “spaces” so you can better organize screen clutter. It’s a natural extension to Expose and should be very useful.

Quick Look

This new technology is everywhere in Leopard. If you are in the new Finder and want to quickly preview a Word, Excel, PDF, or some other common file, just tap the spacebar and a black translucent window pops up letting you scroll through the document with ease. It will even let you preview pictures and movies in full screen mode. Which raises the question: Will full-screen mode be enabled without Quicktime Pro in Leopard?

Quick Look is a plug-in architecture so developers can easily add support for their applications, just like Spotlight plugins were everywhere after Tiger’s release. This will also allow these documents to work with the Finder’s Cover Flow view. Therefore if OminGroup releases a Quick Look plugin for OmniOutliner, you will be able to quickly preview the file without opening OmniOutlier from right within the Finder and also be able to scroll through the document in Cover Flow view. Pretty cool stuff.

Time Machine

If you haven’t heard of Time Machine by now, you’ve lived in a hole my friend. Basically, this is Apple’s very pretty way of dealing with backup software. You attach an external disc, Leopard asks if you want to enable Time Machine, and from there you’re all set. If you’re ever missing a file, start Time Machine and you get this spacial 3D view of your files and once you locate the old file, you just “recover” it to the present. Very easy representation and should be accessible to more users as well.

Front Row and DVD Player

These weren’t talked about in the keynote, but are mentioned on the Apple website. Front Row is now like the AppleTV interface. I’m not quite as excited because I find the current Front Row interface to be superior to the one in the AppleTV, but that’s the update. DVD player also sports more HUD style windows and several new features for bookmarking playback and more.

Parental Controls

Parental controls have been beefed up in Leopard as well. Now Leopard can filter out websites based on content and parents can set time limits on the computer. The time limits can be based on usage, say a one hour limit, and also for times the child can use the computer. Useful for setting bedtimes and such. I’m not sure if Vista has anything like this or not.

Photo Booth

If you read the fine print, Photo Booth has seen some updates as well. There are more effects to use on your pictures, backdrops, “burst” pictures, and Photo Booth now does video too. The “burst” pictures are a quick series of 4 pictures in succession which can be made into an animation. And the fact that Photo Booth does video is just cool. Applying all those effects to your video in a snap will be even more fun at parties!

iChat

iChat has seen some major updates, many of those mentioned above in Photo Booth. Backdrops, like sitting in front of a green-screen, are a touted feature. Photo Booth effects are now supported in iChat as well as tabbed chats to clean up window clutter. iChat Theater is a new technology that lets you share photos, presentations and more in a video chat, just like if you were giving a Keynote presentation in person. Also of note is the following text from the Apple website: “Chat works with AIM, the largest instant messaging community in the U.S. You and your buddies can be either AIM or .Mac users. Text, audio, and video chat whether your buddies use a Mac or PC. Sign in with your AIM account and all your buddies appear in your iChat buddy list”. Does the Tiger version of iChat support video and audio chats with PC users? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t and this is a very welcome feature!

Conclusion

There are several other features that I didn’t discuss, such as the new Mail and iCal. You can read more on all the features in Leopard here. The Apple website has finally seen a facelift and looks fairly impressive, so check that out as well. If you’re interested, the WWDC keynote is available online and there are several videos and images showing the new applications and features available in Leopard.

Let me know your impressions about Leopard. With only a few months until the release, we are in the final stretch.

Download AppFresh here.

Read about Pixelmator here.

Read more about Joost and how to get an invite here.

View some screenshots here.

Be sure to participate in the discussion in the Message Boards as well.

Safari is pretty standard stuff. The only thing I’d like to add is that you should certainly check out the plugins available at Pimp My Safari. I also recommend Inquisitor. Inquisitor is what makes Safari so cool right now!

Now, the feature that I have to share about Shiira: View Source. For all the web developers out there, this should amaze you. We are used to the same take on this feature. It’s something cross-platform and built-in to every browser. Some show an unformatted, non-syntax colored (IE!!) view, while others try and clean it up a good bit and do a decent job. Shiira is 10 years ahead of all that.

When you use View Source in Shiira, this is what you’re presented with. Please view the full versions. It’s worth it.

I hope those are enticing. I mean, that is awesome. You can view all the Javascript and CSS files easily from right within this view. View all the images, look at link attributes, view the DOM structure. This is just freaking amazing. Now if you could just easily save a javascript file for later viewing.

Download Shiira here.

Boot Camp is Apple’s own implementation allowing you to either use your computer as a Mac, or turn it off and restart and use it as a Windows PC. Disadvantages include security threats as well as lack of ease of use. Advantage would be playing games at full speed on Windows.

Parallels is a Mac application that allows you to run Windows and any Windows applications on your Mac. It is feature rich including drag-n-drop from Windows and Mac apps, full mouse and keyboard support, iSight support, and the super cool cohernce mode. You can even configure Parallels so that the Windows applications show up in your dock and in Spotlight results. Makes it super easy for me to launch Internet Explorer!

CrossOver is from CodeWeavers and is the smaller utiltiy out of the bunch. While the previous two require a full version of Windows, CrossOver fakes Windows applications into believing that they are running on Windows. Because of this approach, some applications have limited functionaly or refuse to work at all. An example would be Internet Explorer. I was asked which approach would be better for web development. Parallels is best in my opinion because IE6 and IE7 both work, can be just a window, and you can continue to work on the website on your Mac. Boot Camp would require you to restart to preview your work and CrossOver has a few minor issues with IE6 and doesn’t support IE7 at all.

Be sure to check out the discussion about this episode in the Mac Fanatic Message Boards here.

I also mentioned a previous post about using DVD Shrink on a Mac, using CrossOver. You can read there here.

Read more about Boot Camp here.

Read more about Parallels here.

Read more about CrossOver here.

Screenshots (Click to view full-size)

Download Coda here.

Download AppZapper here.

Download CleanApp here.

Download OnyX here.

Download RapidWeaver here.

Be sure to enter to win one of three copies of RapidWeaver on the site here.

RapidWeaver 3.6 should be released early this summer. Check out the RealMac blog for updates on new features and release status.

You can download Schoolhouse 2 here.

You can download Journler 2.5 here.

Listen to the previous review of Schoolhouse 1 here.

Listen to a previous review covering Journler here.

SmartBackup is by far the best backup solution I’ve found for normal backups. The software is a lot like syncing your iPod. The first time you sync your backup, it will take awhile to put everything in the backup. However, subsequent backups take very little time and yet you always have your latest files. There are a lot of options to tweak for saving space and time and recovery is easy. Check out this app today!

Download SmartBackup here.

If you like this software, consider entering the Mac Fanatic Software Giveaway. Contest runs from April 23 until June 1. Read more details here.

Frenzic Screenshot



Little Shop of Treasures Screenshot

Sometimes we just need a way to get on with our day after a long morning of monotonous work. These two games will help get your brain back into working order in no time! Listen to this episode to hear a bit about gameplay and then be sure to download the trial versions or purchase them from the links below!

Download Frenzic

Download Little Shop of Treasures

Previous Quinn Podcast

I first talked about Schoolhouse in a review on December 17, 2006. Even then, the app was a great way to organize class assignments, projects, calculate grades and general good organization and time management that I so desperately need for my classes. After using the app this semester, I’m pretty much hooked.

To my utter delight, the developer released his 2.0 version in the last few days, adding numerous features and polishes. It is certainly worth checking out the new version, even if you didn’t like the original. And remember, this awesome software is still free! With optional donations, of course.

See my Schoolhouse 1.0 Review

Visit the Schoolhouse website to download and read more

Tubular is an application geared to allow you to easily browse, search, and convert videos from YouTube. Very nice piece of software still under development, but worth looking at now. Music this week is Facedown by The Jumpsuit Apparatus.

(Application Main Window)

Tubular Site

In this episode I talk about four major applications for getting the most out of iTunes and your iPod. By all means, there are several more applications available than I could ever cover in this episode, but these are some applications that I really felt were important.

GimmeSomeTune is a very basic notification and playback control application. Visit website here.

TuneBar is unique because of the three playback applications I talk about here, this is the only one I know of that lets you search your library and select songs based upon more than just prev/next keys. Visit website here.

CoverSutra is by far the most beautiful of all of these apps and has a very nice feature set. Visit website here.

Tangerine is a program that lets you generate playlists based upon criteria such as length of the playlist, “generation pattern”, beats per minute, and beat intensity. Perfect for workout or studying playlists. Visit website here.

Also mentioned in this episode:
Widget for creating torrent files
Widget comparable to Billings 2 for project and task time management

Billings 2 is an easy-to-use time and expense billing application for the Mac. With Billings, you can create and send great looking invoices or estimates in less than 5 minutes. Billings time saving features include seamless integration with Apple Address Book for efficient use of existing contact information, quick and simple posting of task information to iCal for project scheduling, beautifully rendered, fully customizable PDF estimates and invoices, customizable fields for capturing and tracking information specific to you and your customers’ businesses, and automated tax calculations for 120 regions globally. A full featured, 21-day demo version of Billings 2 is available at www.billingsapp.com.

Basically, this application lets you easily and professionally keep track of all your tasks associated with projects and clients, and deliver beautiful invoices and estimates. That is a bit of a summary, but this is a powerful application. If you manage your own small business of any sort and don’t have this, you need it. Billings will help you improve your operation’s appearance and give much needed importance and credit as well. Impressions matter!

(Some screenshots provided by MarketCircle)

Be sure to download the fully functional 21 day trial now here.

I run across people all the time who simply aren’t aware of what great software is available for making your instant messaging experience so much better. So, I’ve taken some notes and I’m ready to share a wealth of knowledge with you.

Chat Transcript Manager

This is a cool application which lets you organize, search, and manage your saved conversations from popular IM clients such as iChat, Fire, and Adium. Very useful for looking up stuff from previous conversations and works across all of the clients, so doesn’t matter in which one you last talked to the person in.

Chax

This is a very important addon to iChat. Talk about features you didn’t know you were missing!

Tabbed conversations, disabling picture-in-picture for video conversations, dock icon settings, Growl support and so much more. You have to get this to see everything that Chax adds to iChat.

CallWave SMS Widget

Small widget that lets you send text messages to mobile phones, for free. And you don’t even need a phone yourself. You can have all replies be sent to your phone or to an email address. Very nice little widget, and it’s free!

Links from the Show

I mentioned several links for this episode, so here they are:
I Love My Mac Giveaway from macCompanion
Download Chax
Read the article I wrote about Growl – useful for using Chax
Download Chat Transcript Manager
Download CallWave SMS Widget

Music this week is “Animal I Have Become” by Three Days Grace

Typinator is a simple application that lets you assign abbreviations to be replaced with text or images. For example, I have an abbreviation “sig.”, which when typed, automatically inserts the following text:
Matt Brewer
Mac Fanatic
All Mac, All the Time

http://www.macfanatic.net

matt@macfanatic.net

A nice little application, right? Repetitive typing is now conquered easily and this application has a lot of possibilities. Listen to this episode for more information as well as information about upcoming MacWorld 2007, Viewer 2.1, and the iTunes Promotion.

(Taken from the Typinator website)

Music this week is “Save Me” by Remy Zero.

Read more about Ergonis Software and Typinator here.

Schoolhouse

Schoolhouse is a very nice way to keep up with all of your coursework, simply put. Features include GPA and Final grade calculators, graphing of grades, prioritizing, Classcasting to share your assignments with classmates, sending assignments to iCal and iPod, and much more. The interface is very clean and well laid out. Overall it seems to be a very stable application that the developer has created to deal with his schoolwork himself. Also of note is that a new version, 2.0, is supposedly in the works with an expected release date over this holiday season break, as the developer is away from school and hopes to get it out with the extra time.

Be sure to listen to this episode to get more details!

Download the latest version of Schoolhouse here

Please note that this review was for a 1.x version of Schoolhouse. As of late March 2007, version 2.1 was released. This newer version is leaps and bounds ahead of the one talked about in this review, so please consider trying out the latest version for yourself. Expect an new episode reviewing this software in the near future.

Let me say that again. Wow. This is a breakthrough for Parallels. The software has been great before, letting you run Windows or Linux in a window. Versions after the initial release added some nice features such as better mouse, networking, and USB support. However, all of that is just a memory with the new beta.

Some of the super exciting features for this beta include:
– New look and feel
– A centralized VM Machines Catalogue
– Resizable Main window letting you resize it like any other Mac app, including a live updating screen resolution
– Drag and Drop between Windows and Mac apps
– Read/Write BootCamp partition
– Boot from the BootCamp partition
– Parallels Transporter lets you migrate a Windows PC or more to a VM for Parallels to use
– Coherency. Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS.
– Improved graphic performance. Up to 50% on different applications.
– Connect/disconnect USB devices schema improved. No more “wait 5-10 seconds” message on USB device connecting to Parallels Desktop for Mac.
– Improved networking
– Use Mac key commands in Windows apps ( like Cmd-A for select all)
– Cool visual effects
– Improved Shared folders

This is shaping up to be a huge release and best of all it will be a FREE update to those who have already purchased.

I also wanted to mention that this is an incredibly faster release. Booting my XP VM took less than 10 seconds!
Another cool feature is that you get a preview of you VM in the Dock, just like a mini-QT video. Very cool!

Watch a short clip of the new Parallels Desktop for Mac Beta 3036 here.

You can download the beta here.
Mirror here.

Found via | Michael Verdi Blog

Some of the basic features include wonderful code complete and suggestion, a gorgeous interface that lets you get anything done in one or two clicks, a visual styles editor that makes your life extremely easy and the most significant feature has to be the live preview window. With this you can open up any URL or file and override the stylesheet in use with the one that you are editing, for real-time previewing. From there you have innovative features like the Milestone manager that let you keep track of your progress and easily revert to a previous state and an easy validation window for keeping your code clean. A great app that you can download here and try out for yourself.

The Basic Code-Visual View

Milestones Manager Window

Live Preview Window

I was using my Macbook Friday night when it suddenly just froze up. I waited awhile and couldn’t get any response from the unit, so I held the power button down until it turned off and then tried to restart it. I waited for what seemed forever and didn’t get past the white startup screen (before the Apple logo however) so I powered off and tried again. No luck. I tried one more time, but this time left the unit alone for about 5 minutes. When I came back I had the blinking question mark over the folder. No System folder found. Just great.

I read around on the internet some for suggestions. I tried resetting the PRAM. I tried resetting the PMU. I meditated. Finally I booted off my Restore DVD and went into Disk Utility. The harddrive didn’t even show up there at all, so I couldn’t verify or repair the disk. I used Terminal and didn’t see it mounted at all in /dev, so I was getting wary about the actual health of the disc by then.

I finally got fed up and just went and booted into Leopard off of my external hard drive and messed around more in there. I was hoping to find a way to grab some data off of the drive because I had been coding an application for a class and was at about 600 lines of code when the thing died. I was out of luck as I couldn’t even mount the drive. I was going to try and hook it up some other way (I have a IDE to USB and laptop IDE to USB cable tucked away for just the emergencies) but I forgot that this is a serial drive. So, I just decided to work off of Leopard for the rest of the night and pray I didn’t have a power outage and then go to the Apple Store in the morning.

The guy at the counter was really nice and let me talk first before interrupting me and asking me questions that I was telling him the answers to begin with. He was very knowledgeable and made me feel respected and that is a big thing for me. I spent a lot of time Friday night trying to work the problem out myself. If I had went into the store and the guy had cut me off short and then did all the stuff that I did to come back 45 minutes later and inform me that the drive was physically bad, I would have been upset. Not the case however. The nice Mac Genius listened and then said, “Sure sounds like the drive is bad.” He then offered to try to get the drive to mount in another laptop just to make sure it wasn’t my laptop’s serial connection or anything internally, which pleased me because he wasn’t taking any shortcuts.

After affirming the drive was indeed dead, he offered to replace it if he had one in stock. I was about to get upset at this point because I needed my Macbook back ASAP so I could code that afternoon and couldn’t afford to wait any longer. Thankfully he had another hard drive in stock and replaced it quickly. We then booted the Mac off of a firewire drive with Tiger installed just to make sure my Macbook read the drive okay, I signed a warranty paper, and I was out the door.

Overall this had potential to be a very nasty experience. I wished that I could have retrieved some data off of the drive (I had made a backup of stuff on Monday of that week, so I wasn’t out that much) but the time to get the drive processed wasn’t worth the effort as I wouldn’t need anything off of it by then. I’m also not sure if there would have been a fee involved or not. I wonder…

I’m glad to have my Macbook back up and running and I have to say that I’m very pleased with the service I received at the Apple Store. Too bad I they turned me down for a Mac Specialist position, I would have been very happy working there!

It was just a weeks ago that I had set down with my private beta copy of Disco, the new disc authoring app that has taken the Mac community by storm. Overall the application is very nice and seems to earn its keep. All of the bugs aren’t worked out of it just yet because it is still beta, but it’s a nice piece of software that clearly shows just how much work went into the project and will surely be one of those apps that Mac users keep around in their Applications folder. You can listen to my initial impression of Disco here.

What better way to learn more about Disco then talk to one of the guys from the Disco team, Austin Sarner!

Me: How long have you been using a Mac?

Austin: I’ve actually only been using Macs for about 5 years now.

Me: What was your first Mac?

Austin: A Titanium iBook, 1 Ghz.

Me: What is your current hardware setup?

Austin: MacBook Pro with a 23″ Cinema display

Me: What kind of educational experience have you had?

Austin: I have just finished up high school and I’m looking into going back to school down the road. Not sure what I’ll major in, but definitely something non-computer related.

Me: How long have you been developing on the Mac?

Austin: I’ve been developing since a few months after I got my first Mac, starting with AppleScript, then RealBasic, and now Cocoa.

Me: Do you have any other software that I’ve missed and should know about?

I’ve worked on a handful of other shareware and freeware apps in the past, most of which aren’t worth mentioning. AppZapper is my other significant project alongside Disco.

Me: What are you most excited about in terms of developer technologies to debut in Leopard?

Austin: Without breaking our WWDC NDA, I can safely say that Leopard so far appears to be a very developer centric release. There are plenty of new technologies that will allow us to take advantage of some pretty advanced UI functionality with little effort.

Me: Who is on your team and what is everyone’s main focus?

Austin: Our team is made up of Jasper Hauser, Brian Ball, and I. Brian handles the crazy marketing promotions, Jasper designs the pretty graphics, and I code it up. Together, Jasper and I design the workflow and interaction and also handle the blog.

Me: Who came up with the original idea for the app?

Austin: I originally had the idea to make a simple disc copying app. We started with that and things just kind of evolved.

Me: How long has the project been underway?

Austin: We’ve been working on Disco since late June.

Me: What features are you hoping to put tin the final 1.0 release that we haven’t seen in the beta so far?

Austin: For the most part, the beta is feature complete.

Me: What are your future plans for Disco?

Austin: We have quite a few cool features in the works. Things like Discography and Spandex push the boundaries of what you would associate with a burning app.

Overall, Disco is not a direct Toast competitor. We’re out to make a real disc burning app for real people and appeal to the actual user in every way possible.

Well, there you have it. Seems like Austin and Jasper make an amazing team and I’m excited to see what else they come up with not only with Disco, but for the Mac community in the coming years.

If you are interested in grabbing your own free trial copy of the Disco beta, you can check out the Disco website here for more info with introductory pricing starting at just 14.95 USD.
Also of note is the newly launched website created by theMacNurse called Mac App A Day which promises to have copies of some of Austin Sarner’s apps as part of their giveaway, so be on the lookout for those and more awesome Mac shareware applications for free on that website starting December 1.

I haven’t been able to produce an episode in what seems like ages for various personal reasons, but I’m back this week with all the news to catch you up on the latest in the Mac community as well as a look at an awesome disc burning application called Disco that just saw a public beta released today. Introductory pricing is available at 15 USD.

This application has been talked about so much in the last few months I was just dying to finally get my hands on the private beta a few weeks ago. The public beta that was released today lets everyone get in on the goods and provides many enhancements and bug fixes to the application. This app is simply amazing from an interface perspective. It is absolutely stunningly gorgeous with all the transparent and sexy black used throughout the app. Everything is liquid-smooth with transitions and so much eye candy that I’m looking for excuses to burn discs!

Overview of Features

Disco has a discography feature that keeps track of every file you’ve ever burnt so that if you need to find it later, you can just search through that and Disco will tell you what disc it is on. A very nice feature indeed. Disco easily lets you burn files that span multiple discs, has plenty of advanced features like multi-session support and even supports burning Video_TS folders for those of you that want to make a copy of a DVD that you’ve ripped to your Mac. Stuff like making copies, creating disc images and burning disc images is so simple and elegant that it’s amazing. The one really cool feature that I can’t use because my Macbook doesn’t have a graphics card that supports it, is the smoke effect. When you burn a disc on a supported Mac, the window smokes and is awesome. Burn baby burn!

If you purchase Disco at this introductory price from MacZot today, you are automatically entered to win one of three awesome Lightscribe Dual-Layer DVD burners. A very cool deal indeed.

Head on over here to take a look at the Disco website and download your beta version today.

Purchase from MacZot and enter to win the Lightscribe drive here.

Music this week is “Tush” by ZZ Top.

Instead of just a basic installer, you get a five themes to choose from, including whether you want graphite scroll bars or Aqua ones. Each theme (UNO, Aqua, Default, Brushed Metal, and All Aqua) has it’s own preview window so you can easily see what it is going to do and what will change. Then you can easily specify if you’d like to keep the new icon or change it a bit (green or light blue).

Overall a very cool app and someone spent some time hacking all of those resource files to get it working properly. If you like it and would like to further development and keep the project alive, make sure to make a donation.

Download Aqua4iTunes here.

I run across a lot of applications every day when I’m on the net. I check out all the latest postings on Version Tracker and keep my eye out for new software on Digg as well as some other blogs that I subscribe too. And the last place that I find software is MacZot. This application is one that I purchased as a bundle awhile back, a member of five apps that I got for something outrageous, like 5 dollars. I was a little disappointed when I read what was in the bundle because I hadn’t heard of any of them before and I wasn’t sure what the apps were capable of. Now I’m sharing KIT with you today as another application that you should seriously check into, especially if you want to get even more organized with your Mac.

Features

KIT has a bit role to fill: making your life more organized and productive. That’s a rather large project objective if you ask me. However, KIT goes a good ways to fulfilling that promise right from the start, you just have to let the application help you. KIT is based on a model similar to what all of us are familiar with in iTunes and iPhoto. KIT is based on a library model where you can easily import files of several different types, and then organize, tag, label, shuffle, search and just in general find what you need when you need it.

Upon first glance I wasn’t sure what role this application was supposed to fill since I use Spotlight for almost everything already. I use it as an application launcher and to find 99% of the files that I ever need. My Desktop is clear and I like to keep my dock as clutter free as possible as well. That just leaves me and Spotlight, a god-send in Tiger as far as I’m concerned. Therefore KIT has to do something more than just find your files easily.

After you import files into KIT, you can tag them for better and more efficient searching later. There is a sidebar that lets you easily add comments, just like Spotlight comments, so that when you search it will be easier to find it. You can create and delete categories, and assign colors to those categories so that it’s easier to identify what category a file is in at one glance, similar to what you can do in Mail.app with rules and highlighting (I use that feature a lot). From the sidebar you can quickly assign a category to a file, helping you out later down the road as we’ll see.

Since you can assign so much metadata to your files you’ve imported, cool features like Smart Groups, once again like we’ve seen in Tiger and iTunes, lets you aggregate your files from categories, comments, filenames, names, and much more. Very powerful stuff. There are also static groups that you just drag and drop files into.

Besides just being able to find your files easily, you can preview them right within the application, like a split view that we have in Mail.app This means your text files, movies, audio files, images, PDFs, and a really cool feature with webpages makes it easy for you to see what the file is without having to open up an external application. The Web Archive feature is really cool because it captures the page for you and renders it when you preview it. You can view the page offline and keep it for as long as you need it. You can also refresh and update the page later and there is an easy Action button so that you can open the page in an external browser or copy the address to your system clipboard.

All of this said, I’m sure that I’ve just scratched the surface of this application. Feel free to download a trial copy (regular price $25) and let me know if you find a use for it that I’ve missed. The app has a nice interface and is a cinch to use, so go give it a try today.

Music this week is “I Devise My Own Demise” by Papa Roach. Click on the album art in the site sidebar to go to music store.

Download your free trial copy of KIT here

I talk about the new products that were released this week, briefly go over iTunes 7, and a cool freeware application called LiquidCD that allows you to easily create audio, photo, data, and other DVDs or CDs, including burning Video_TS folders as well as making direct copies of discs. Music this week is “Lips of an Angel” by Hinder.

This is a nice application that allows you to get a lot accomplished and you should check it out for all of your disc-burning needs.

Download here.

To give iTunes 7 a makeover and let all of the aqua goodness back into the application, download AquaT from here and install it.  Note:  Backup your iTunes applicaiton first in case something goes wrong.

The new Nano comes in a very nice little package and reminds me very much of my Mini. Almost too much in fact, I feel like we’ve went backwards in design a bit. But anyway, it’s a nice and solid unit with a great screen and audio quality. Can you tell I like green? Read the rest of the entry to see more than this first pic.

Codeweavers CrossOver for Mac is still a beta release. However, it seems to be a solid beta release and with the promise of new features to be added and more applications to be officially supported by the time we see a final release, this product looks like it will shape up to be a serious contender in the growing Windows virtualization sector of the Mac software community.

Essentially, you can get most of the same basic functionality of this product for free from an open-source project called Darwine, which is a port from the Linux project WINE for Mac OS X. I have tried using Darwine before, including using this same application, but I wasn’t sucsessful in getting it working. So, my experience with CrossOver for Mac was much better, but the open-source alternative (on which CrossOver is based) is available if you’re a tinkerer.

CrossOver and Darwine are described as a Windows API compatibility layer on top of the host OS. What makes this solution different from a complete virtualization solution like Parallels Desktop is that instead of having to run a full OS, like Windows XP, with all it’s services and processes, you are just going to be running the application. CrossOver will fool the application, in our case DVD Shrink, to believe that it is running on a Windows 2000 installation, and with a very few small exceptions, it runs withtout a glitch right beside all of our other Mac OS X applications. That being said, this is the holy grail in some respects, but the worst thing to happen for Mac developers in others (think “Let’s just write Windows software, they can always just run that on a Mac with CrossOver….”).

CrossOver for Mac

So let’s get started using DVD Shrink for Windows on our Mac! Of importance in this tutorial is the fact that you don’t have to have an Intel Mac to get this working as far as I can tell, although I haven’t tested it on a PPC one yet. (I’m not exactly sure what I was thinking here.  Yes, WINE ran just fine on Linux, but it was Linux x86, not Linux for PPC.  Therefore, CrossOver is for Intel Macs only, although I can’t find that on their website easily.  First, you’re going to need to download and copy the CrossOver application to your Applications folder (or where you keep your apps). Download CrossOver Beta 1 here. Now, fire up CrossOver for the first time. You’re going to get a box begging for financing everytime you launch the app, register if you wish to support the effort and get in on lower intro pricing (like what Parallels did). If not, just click “Continue”.

Now we need to install a piece of software. We’re going to be working with a program for Windows called DVD Shrink. This piece of software lets you take a DVD that is larger than the standard 4.7GB and shrink it to fit on that size disc, allowing you to make a backup copy of a commercial DVD. (NOTE: I do not condone or suggest that you use this tuturial as a way to break the law. Only copy or backup DVDs that you own and don’t distribute those). You can download DVD Shrink 3.2 here.

Once you have downloaded DVD Shrink, you need to unzip the zip archive. You will now see a program labeled “dvdshrink32setup.exe” on your Desktop with an icon with some gears and the CrossOver logo. If you double-click this, it should launch CrossOver, even if the program isn’t currently running. However, I recommend (just because I haven’t tested installing something that way) to go through the “Install Software” feature inside of CrossOver. Use the “Configure > Install Software” feature to bring up a window like the one below. The list of supported software isn’t very long (there is an online list as well that you can talk with other people about your experiences with a certain piece of software), so we’re going to use the “Install Unsupported Software” button in the bottom left-hand corner of the window.

Click “Continue” in the next window. The next window is informing you that installing software that isn’t officially supported has a good chance of messing up what you already have installed and working. If you follow the suggestions, then you can create a new “bottle” which is essentially a little container where your application thinks it’s running in Windows. For this tutorial I haven’t installed anything before, so I had to create a new bottle to start with. It’s up to your discretion whether you’d want to keep using different bottles for every program or not. I’m not sure what the effects on hard drive space and the like would be.

The next window that appears lets you choose the installer that you’re going to use. This is the “dvdshrink32setup.exe” file that we unzipped on our Desktop. Choose the left option in the window and then browse to that file and click “Continue”. From there it will launch the actual DVD Shrink install program for you to install with. Use all of the default options until you are finished with the installer.

Once you have that installed, go back into CrossOver and go to your “Programs > DVD Shrink > DVD Shrink” menu to start the program that we just installed. It will launch the program and then we can get started backing up a DVD. I won’t go into much detail here because there are numerous tutorials available on the net about using DVD Shrink. Use Google and find those. I’ll mention just a few quirks with the program here because they are related to CrossOver and the Mac.

You won’t be able to access the disc itself in this program. CrossOver doesn’t let the program see the physical drive itself. This being said, you won’t be able to use the built-in burn functionality either. You’re going to need some free hard drive space to get this accomplished because we’re going to be copying the entire DVD uncompressed to you hard drive (from 4.7 up to almost 9GB in some cases), then we’re going to encode it in DVD Shrink (I’m assuming that takes up some space somewhere) and then we’re going to create another 4.7GB disc image.

To access your DVD, you’re going to need an application that will “rip” the DVD to your hard drive. There are a few solutions available for Mac, the most used being MacTheRipper. (I’m not linking to that here for copyright violation issues. However, you can find it on VersionTracker or MacUpdate). Rip your DVD to your hard drive and it will create a folder with the name of your DVD and in that it will have a “Video_TS” folder. That’s all good. (Recommend placing this on your Desktop as it will make locating it easier later).
Now, back in DVD Shrink, we need to open up the DVD we just ripped to the hard drive. Click the “Open Files” button back in DVD Shrink and we’ll have to browse for the “Video_TS” folder that we just ripped to the drive. If you placed this on your Desktop, you can use the “My Mac Desktop” folder in the file browser for easy access. If not, finding it is going to be a pain. Your hard drive shows up a few different ways in the browser (Your home folder as well as the root of the drive) and if you have stored it on an external disc, you would have to use the “/” and then “Volumes” to be able to find the name of your disc. This is very confusing for some Mac users because they have never seen folders with that name before. If you’re interested in why you are seeing that, read more up on Unix and it’s underpinnings in Mac OS X.

Now that we have sucsessfully opened our DVD, you can change a bunch of settings to tweak the compression on your extras, languages, submenus and more. You want the whole bar across the top to be green, saying that it will fit onto one disc just fine. Once that is done, we’re going to want to “Backup” our DVD. After clicking the “Backup” button, you have a couple options to save our work. You can either save it as a Disc Image which we can later simply burn to a DVD using Disk Utility, or you can save it to a folder, which will create another Video_TS folder, which you would need something like Toast, or LiquidCD (which is very nice and free, I’ll be talking about it in another episode) to be able to burn to DVD.

With whatever option you choose, you now have a working version of the disc you started out with, except that you have it on a smaller, regular DVD now. If you’re confused about how to burn a disc image using Disk Utility, you need to open Disk Utility (Applications/Utlities) and open an image from the “File” menu. Then select that image in the left-hand pane and click the “Burn” button to burn the image. You can also do this with several other applications, but this is an easy way as well.

I hope that everyone has had sucsess with DVD Shrink and can now sit back in wonder at what you’ve accomplished. Be sure to send me emails and talk to me on AIM if you have any questions about the topic and I’ll get back to you shortly. Also, if you found this article helpful, be sure to click the big “Digg This” button at the bottom of the page so that we can share this info with others.

Boot Camp

I was originally going to do an indepth review of Boot Camp here as well, but after looking around the net for awhile, I realized that there is already several hours worth of reading available for people to read. That said, I was pretty impressed with the painlessness of the whole process and I didn’t have any problems getting Windows XP SP2 installed on my Macbook. My whole obsession with this started because I was going to place and boot XP from my external USB drive, but not having time to get this accomplished right now, I settled for trying this out. If you have a need for better video and graphics support (such as games!!) than what Parallels provides, than this is a pretty cool solution. It’s also free and will be bundled in with Leopard itself when that finally launches. Key thing to remember is to just backup your data before you get started, and that you can’t use any disc except a full install, no upgrade discs.

First off, this is going to be a major upgrade from Tiger. There is all kinds of goodies that are under the hood that when applications start rolling out that take advantage of these technologies, end users are just going to be so much happier. Developers are pretty happy right now too.

So for the things that I can talk about, and elaborate on what you’ve heard all about so far.

Time Machine. This is a major innovation when you stop and think about it. Backing up your software and system isn’t a new idea, but the way that Apple has chosen to implement it is quite astounding and revolutionary. Basically, you can use Time Machine to back up your entire system, with some few tweaks for excluding stuff you don’t want backed up. That’s the only thing that Time Machine has in common with regular backup solutions of the past, however. Time Machine provides a really cool interface for locating files that you have deleted in the past. So, if you open a Finder window and see that you’re missing “foo.txt”, you can fire up Time Machine, you enter a cool 3D space view, and you can fly back day by day until you see your file. Then, you just hit the recover button to bring it back into the present, you exit Time Machine, and you’re all set!

Mail 3.0 brings some interesting features, especially if you spend a lot of time in the app. Mail now supports stationary, so you can easily create impressive emails and send out to friends. There is a system-wide To-Do system that both Mail and iCal tie into, allowing developers to be more creative in the future and tie into it as well. Mail is also a decent RSS reader and supports Notes as well.

iChat 4.0 packs quite a punch. This app now provides support for animated buddy icons, sports a new interface, and provides support for goodies such as Photo Booth effects and backgrounds, both video and images.

Spaces is another feature built into the OS this year that will kill yet another small developer. Applications like Virtue and Desktop Manager have been available on the Mac platform to allow users more room to work with. Expose was a step in the right direction a few years ago, but Apple has introduced a full multiple desktop manager into the OS called Spaces. You can configure this for several individual desktops and it works wonderfully. You can use Expose when you zoom out and see all of the spaces, so that you can see all the windows in each desktop and you can even drag windows from one space to another, a very, very cool feature.

There are several other new features demoed in Leopard during Steve Jobs’ Keynote address here at WWDC yesterday, so be sure to head on over to the Apple website and look at the Leopard Preview here to learn more about the technologies!

On a more personal note, this is a beta release and there are a few things that have bothered me enough that I’ll mention them here. First off, the feature that I love most about my Macbook might even be the ability to tap with both fingers and have that act as a ctrl-click. Yep, that’s not working right now. Spotlight is very, very, very fast for launching applications now, thank goodness! However, this will hurt the wonderful app Quicksilver some in the future. It’s not a replacement, but it does cover the basics.

In this episode, I’m taking a look at just what makes Intel Macs different from those that have come before it. To sum it up very briefly, with an Intel Mac you have options to run Windows and other PC related OSes that you didn’t have as a feasible option before. Products such as Parallels Desktop and Boot Camp allow you to easily install and use Windows and Windows applications on your new Intel Mac.

There will be one more podcast before I’m off to WWDC in great San Francisco. Be sure to leave me comments, send emails, keep the human interaction alive!

Also mentioned in this episode was the Ten Minute Mac podcast hosted by James Matarrese. You can look at the podcast in the Music Store at this link, or view his website at this one.

I talked about Daylite 3 awhile back (listen to my review here). This is a truly innovative app for small businesses. Whoever says that Macs aren’t made for business hasn’t used this application, because after using this you would have to argue that PCs aren’t made for business. This application rocks and would be one of the first things I would purchase for my business. Version 3.1 introduces many new features, including Growl support for notifications,new contextual menus that show just the info you need when you need it, better graphs, reports, communication and much more.

If you’re using Daylite 3 already, then be sure to get this update now. If you’re looking for a software app that will help you organize your contacts, appointments, emails, tasks, projects, notes, customers and let you just generally work more productively without missing a single business opportunity, then I strongly encourage you to check out this amazing application from Market Circle Software.

Market Circle Site

Cast Life is a recently released application that allows you to easily create, maintain, organize, and enjoy the power behind RSS. Easily publish a podcast, create a photocast to share your new photos with friends and family instantly, distribute files as they are updated and more. Designed so that your can get started with RSS quickly and have a brilliant feed in no time.

Basic Screenshot of Application (Photocast Shown, click to show full size)

You have many options to publish, including FTP support, .Mac integration as well as the option to export to a folder.

I have created sample feeds so that you can view some simple results when using Cast Life for yourself. You can subscribe to these feeds below to see the outcome.

You can subscribe to the podcast by using the Cmd-U or “Subscribe” under “Advanced” in iTunes and entering the following address.

You can subscribe to this photocast from within iPhoto by using the Cmd-U or “Subscribe to Photocast” feature and entering the following address.

http://www.macfanatic.net/cast_life/photos/Mac%20Fanatic’s%20PhotoCast.rss

You can subscribe to the filecast using a standard RSS reader, or use Safari, with the following address.

http://www.macfanatic.net/cast_life/files/Macfanatic.net%20FileCast.rss

You can subscribe to the newscast using a standard RSS reader or Safari with the following address.

http://www.macfanatic.net/cast_life/newscast/Macfanatic%20Newscast.rss

Technorati Tags: Cast Life, Review, RSS

This is a great, true Mac OS X application. There are amazing transitions, effects, a wonderfully laid out and well implemented interface along with great features. Sad thing is that the Tetris company just contacted the developer (only took them a few years, no doubt) saying that they were infringing on copyright laws and all that. So, while the developer figures all this stuff out, there’s not an official release available.
This program has many unique features including:

• Single Player Mode
• Dual Player Mode and Tournament Play
• Tons of features with Network Play such as Bonjour support, built in chat, score tracking for all players and a webpage listing servers available over the net.
• 10 Levels to choose from, fully customizable keyboard settings, and it’s freeware!

Main Window

Bonjour Networking

Network Chatting

All in all, this is a wonderful application and a good implementation on the original game, so be sure to head over to the developer’s site here.

Technorati Tags: Quinn, Review

(Click Image above to go to download page)

I wanted everyone to know that a new version of Yahoo Messenger for Mac has finally been released. This is a major deal for a few reasons. First off, Yahoo is about the easiest way for Mac users to be able to use a webcam with PC users. iChat does support webcams wonderfully, but you can’t use it with AIM or any other messenger, so it’s only good for use with other Mac users. Also, this version introduces support for Windows Live messaging, so that you can now talk to your MSN contacts through Yahoo messenger. I haven’t got a change to set this up yet, or even see how for that matter, but you can supposedly do this. I’ll get back with more info once I figure that out.
The interface has underwent some much needed changes. The current stable version (2.5.3) was released into the wild back in 2003, if I’ve got my years correct. Therefore, the interface is brought up to snuff, there are awesome Growl like notifications, new icons and support for the latest iSight cams in the Macbooks, even letting you take snapshots just like if you’re in Photo Booth and use that directly as your display image in the messenger itself.

This version also adds a “Current Playing iTunes Track” as a status option, features an almost iChat like chat window with large prominent photos displayed on the sides and chat bubbles containing the messages, full Address Book integration so that you can add a contact from a Contact Card already in your Address Book and tons of other cool features. I’ve included some basic screenshots to get everyone started.

Initial Signon Window

Address Book Integration

Current iTunes Track

Click on the thumbnails below to see larger versions.

Setting Display Image

Choosing a Display Image

Technorati Tags: Review, Yahoo Messenger

Flock builds on Firefox’s features. This browser adds native support for:

• Posting to many different types of blogs
  Flickr and Photobuck integration that includes uploading and viewing photos
  A great RSS reader
  A “snippet” clipboard for keeping snippets of info around (hence the name)
  Spotlight-like searching with Yahoo instant search results
  Delicious bookmark sharing between multiple computers, advanced bookmark tagging and searching, as well as support for multiple bookmark toolbars, so you’ll always have access to your important bookmarks right there on the toolbar

This is an amazing browser with huge potential in the marketplace. While it still may only be a Beta 1 (0.7) release, it is very stable and I highly recommend downloading it and trying it out for yourself.

Technorati Tags: Review, Browser, Flock

• Improved Spotlight
• Revised Handling of Applications
• Integrated iCal, Address Book, and Mail
• Front Row on Steroids
• Better built in RSS Support
• More Eye Candy
• Better Dashboard Implementation
• To Quit or Not To Quit?
• iTunes: for Movies
• Death of Plastic

Technorati Tags: Apple, Leopard, RSS

Implementing RSS using Rapidweaver

I imagine that the majority of the listeners of this are going to be Rapidweaver users, since I get a lot of feedback asking for stuff dealing with Rapidweaver. So, I’ll spend most of my time focusing on this. Rapidweaver only has one type of page that supports RSS, that being the “Blog” page. You use this type of page for creating blog entries, as well as if you were going to produce and distribute a podcast.
First add a blog style page. Then click on the “Setup” button and view the “RSS Feed” options to get your feed setup for use.

In Rapidweaver 3.5, you can add text in the “Summary” field. Adding text here lets you summarize what is displayed when people view your feed. They would only see this text and then your readers would have to view the full article to get the text in the “Main Entry” area.

Once you click on the “Setup…” button, you get the following window where you can customize your RSS feed even more. Most of the fields are self explanatory and I briefly talked about them in the podcast as well.

Now that you have all of that setup, you just need to publish and view your site in a browser and there will be a little blue icon with RSS in it or the orange feed icon if you’re using something besides Safari. Congratulations, that wasn’t hard, was it?

Implementing RSS using iWeb

iWeb is actually a lot easier to get up and running with RSS. You have to have either a “Blog” or “Podcast” style page, and there are options for both of them under the “RSS” tab in the Inspector window. It’s already enabled for you, all you have to do is to add entries to your blog and you’re all set!

All you have to do is add entries. To do that just make sure that you’re viewing the “Entries” part of your blog page.





The “Blog” part of the Inspector gives you options for your blog page while the “Podcast” part gives you more control over your podcast, while using iWeb.

Anyone should be able to get all this setup pretty easy if they wanted to. The key thing is to figure out if you really need RSS for your site. If you’re going to podcast, then it’s a must. If you add a lot of stuff to your site, or blog, then it’s a must. If you just have a website that you change once a month, you probably don’t need the trouble of setting this up.

Read more about Rapidweaver, the awesome website creation and management application from RealMac Software here.

Read about Apple’s own iWeb here.

Read about Newsfire, the killer RSS aggregator for Mac OS X here.

Technorati Tags: Rapidweaver, iWeb, RSS

As a preface, I have had 4 months of immersion in C. We’re talking reading the textbook as leisure reading kinda thing. A real page turner. I’ve had my “Programming in Objective-C” book by Kochran for about the past year, but couldn’t get very far into it because I had no programming experience at all, and I don’t care what the author says, you need some to keep up with the stuff in the book.

With my free time I’ve caught up my reading on Cocoa. Cocoa is object oriented where C is procedural, so there were some fundamental design changes that I had to get my head around, but in general, objects rock! I’ve worked out a half dozen normal starter programs involving manipulating fractions, but I wanted to really learn something new and work with a GUI.

In this tutorial, you are talked through the steps of creating a currency converter application. This is pretty easy to follow and understand and I highly recommend it if you’re just wanting to learn what programming is like. It will give you a deeper appreciation for the applications you use everyday, and if you’re a developer, will give you a profound appreciation for Cocoa.

I added some stuff to this project not found in the tutorial.

• NSNumberFormatter (Formatting the numbers in the text field to show up like dollars and cents)
• Adding Help Documentation to your application
• Adding “Scrolling Credits” to show more info in the “About MyApplication” area
• Quitting when last window closed (aka new app style, like iPhoto, Photo Booth, etc)
• Launching a URL (If you click “Help” and then “Visit Developer’s Website” it launches the site)

You can download a disk image that has the compiled program (Universal) and the source project for you. Grab that here or off the downloads page.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Cocoa, XCode

First off, if you wish you can open up the XCode project and just play around in there to see what is happening. The tutorial does a good job explaining a lot of stuff, so I’m not going to repeat that here.

Adding a URL Object to launch a website
If you want to add this functionality to your application, you can get it very easily actually. While you’re in Interface Builder, click on the “NSObject” in the “Classes” area of the window and create a new object. Name it whatever you want, but we’re calling it “URLController”. Create the files for that object, add a target/action called “goToUrl” and then initiate that object. Now select what interface element you want to use this controller (the “Visit Developer’s Site” in this case) and ctrl-click and drag from that object to the controller we just created. Connect the element to the “goToUrl” target/action we created. Save your .nib file.

Back in XCode, your ‘URLController.h’ file should look like this:

@interface URLController : NSObject
{
}

//This is the action called by the “Visit Developer’s Website” in the “Help” Menu
- (IBAction)goToURL:(id)sender;

@end

Now that you’ve done that, you need to add the code to actually launch the site. We do this by calling a method ‘openUrl’ of NSWorkspace which takes a “NSURL” as an argument. You can simply assign your URL to the NSURL and then you’re all set. The following tidbit of code will launch the site, place it in your ‘URLController.m’

- (IBAction)goToURL:(id)sender
{

//Every app has access to a “NSWorkspace”. We call the method “openURL” which takes an NSURL as an
//argument to open up our webpage.

[[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.macfanatic.net/blog/"]];

}

Now that you’ve got that setup, save, build and run your app. You should have that working right. If you don’t, don’t go on until you have that up and running. As always, email me with questions!

Adding Help to your Application
This is actually quite simple, especially if you have some HTML and CSS behind you already. You’re just going to create some HTML files and have them all working in a directory called ‘YourAppName Help’. (The Help Viewer window is around 500px wide, for your info). Once you have that all up and running, just drag that folder into your XCode project, choosing the options to copy the stuff into your project as well as the bottom option of recursively add the folders. Now you need to add a little bit of stuff to your ‘info.plist’ that you edited earlier in the tutorial. Add the following lines to your file, replacing ‘Currency Converter’ with your app name.

<key>CFBundleHelpBookFolder</key>
<string>Currency Converter Help</string>
<key>CFBundleHelpBookName</key>
<string>Currency Converter Help</string>

Formatting your NSTextFields
This is actually a very broad topic that I can’t even possibly get into today, but a very basic explanation follows. If you’ve ever used C, then you’re familiar with all of the ways you can ‘format’ messages to the shell, via spaces, etc. There is a lot to be said for ‘%.3f’. So, how do you get that same functionality with a GUI in Cocoa? Just drag and drop of course!

You just need to fire up Interface Builder and drag the little field with some numbers on it ONTO the NSTextField that you already have in your app. This will add a ‘Formatting’ item if you view the Inspector window, and here you can change the actual formatting options.

Scrolling Credits
Now that you have that setup, you just need to add your scrolling credits and we’re almost done. Create a ‘credits.rtf’ in your project (or create it with your text editor of choice and add it to your project, doesn’t matter). Whatever this file says will show up in the “About MyApp” menu item.

Quitting after last window closed
Finally, since this little application only has one window and no way to open a new one, we’ll just go ahead and let it quit the program once the window is closed. To do this we just need to add a simple method to one of our controllers and add that in Interface Builder.

- (BOOL)applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:(NSApplication *)theApplication
{
return YES;
}

Adding the above code to the ‘URLController.m’ file lets us close the app when the last window is closed. We need to fire up Interface Builder and select the “delegate” option first off to make our ‘File’s Owner’ connect to the ‘URLController’ so that it will use the code we just put in the ‘URLController’

After you build and run this last time, everything should work. Help for your app, credits, ways to launch a URL as well as quitting after closing the last window. Pat yourself on the back, you just did what it took me a full 8 hours to research and implement

This beats anything that I have ever seen in my entire life. I thought that people were responsible with messing with DNA and that the government had some kind of restriction on it. This proves that whole theory wrong.

A friend pointed out this website where the company is getting ready to launch a full lineup of 7 bioengineered “buddies” for kids to have as a pet. You can pick their color that corresponds with it’s personality, as well as a few other features. The poor things are actually ALIVE in a package. Yep, alive, on a shelf in a retail store. They are “hibernating”, bound to the package, strapped in with a feeding tube, a heart monitor and a “freshness strip” just so you don’t buy one that has been on the shelf for too long.

This is wrong on several levels. I find it deeply disturbing that parents would even think about buying one of these creatures and give it to a child just because it is “low maintenance” and would save some time. Oh, and it won’t shed on the couch because it’s hairless. If I saw one of these things in real life I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t get sick or scream.

These might be engineered pets, but they are still living, breathing animals (according to the site). Please help raise awareness of this issue is all I ask. And if they actually make it to market, I’d like to see the videos on YouTube and pictures of the things, in “flesh” of course.

(*Genpet™ life may vary depending on temperature and Genpet ™ freshness)

Technorati Tags: GenPets

Searching around on the net turned up some good resources for getting plugins for Safari. You can grab a lot of good stuff at Pimp my Safari. I also encourage web developers to take a look at WebKit as well.

Some plugins that I highly recommend are the Safari Stand and Safari Teflon plugins. If anyone has used Saft, please let me know about your experiences.

Music this week is “Born to Lead” by Hoobastank.

I love the awesome screen on my new Macbook. The quality and lighting is stunning, absolutely wonderful. Far surpasses even the nice 20.1″ widescreen LCD I bought a month or more back. I have quickly fallen for the widescreen format. DVDs look great. Garageband is made for widescreen, as well as several other iLife 06 and iWork 06 apps.

So, what better way to enjoy all this screen space than to add another view to Mail? With this plugin, Mail turns into an almost Entourage style view (setup of panes) with your mailboxes and folders on the left, your list of messages in the middle and message previews in the far right. I personally like this view as I can see more of my message at a glance, but it does need a widescreen monitor for it to truly shine.

Note: When you install this little application, it changes your layout in Mail. To revert, you need to uninstall the bundle itself. The developer has listed a preference pane that would allow you to change this a little easier as a feature on a wishlist, but it hasn’t been implemented yet. Therefore, if you feel queasy about installing this, I would stay back. It shouldn’t mess your Mail up, but if you plan on switching back and forth (between widescreen and normal view) quite often, then this isn’t a solution for you.

You can view the developer’s site here.

You can download the plugin from the developer here or from our downloads page.

Technorati Tags: Apple

I just mentioned yesterday about the very cool web browser called Flock. I have been using it exclusively for the past day or so and plan on continue using it. I love the interface, all of the features and just can’t imagine living without it.

So, to get everyone started, I found this nice review highlighting some of the features for Flock. I most likely will make an episode on Flock here in the upcoming weeks, but I figured that for those who like to read stuff online, this would be good for you.

Read the review from Paul Stamatiou.com here.

After getting my account setup, I first have to say that the web design is extremely incredible. I was just awed at the use of colors, rounded edges, gradients…it was just so beautifully crafted, you could tell that people put so much time into this, and to then think that it’s free. I’m contemplating upgrading just to give them some money for such a superb product.

So, the uses of this are pretty limitless in some respects. I have been using the Macfanatic.net server as a way to share files with friends for awhile now, just uploading stuff and then they download it. However, most of my friends aren’t technical enough to use an FTP client to upload stuff back to the server, so that we could share. I wouldn’t want to have to setup more FTP user accounts either.

Box.net is a great way to share stuff then. You can have public files and folders, or make some of them strictly private. With that thought, you can simply share all kinds of stuff easily between users. Another use that is pretty cool and is almost strictly reserved to .Mac users is iCal Publishing.

I’ve never used .Mac and don’t plan on it, even though I get in moods every now and then where I want to buy a subscription and play around with the features. Being able to easily share your iCal calendars is a major plus. Basically, you need to head on over to www.box.net and setup a free account, keeping in mind that if you want to share stuff with people, they’ll need to login and they will require your email (username) and password. Choose something unimportant.

Once you have the account setup, you simply select the calendar you want to share in iCal, select “Publish” and enter the server address of “https://www.box.net/dav” with your username and password. You might have to try using just “http”, but play around with it until you find a way that works. You can read a better set of instructions from the site I found over here.

Since then, I’ve used this application mainly as a toy when I’ve been bored and wanted a playful and cool interface (remember, I’m all about the interface..) However, a new version has just been released and I downloaded that to see what has changed.

I must say, a lot has changed! The toolbar has seen some minor changes, the blogging part of the program has been overhauled and then there is a new feature called “News”. To start out with, I really enjoy the “News” feature. It’s basically a web interface to several RSS feeds grouped in categories, but it is done EXTREMELY well (forgive my shouting). I can’t stress just how amazingly well implemented this is and is causing Safari to look slightly outdated at the moment.

The blog has sadly been moved out of a tab and into it’s own window. I don’t like the floating window because I’m in love with tabs. I want to blog in a tab. I would also like to see a feature to blog a specific page. If I’m viewing a page, if I hit “Blog” I’d like to have that text and link to it placed in a new post. That’s the whole reason you would blog from a browser, right?

Flickr, Delicious support….there is a lot of features packed into this. While it might be Mozilla code at heart, the Flock team has put a lot of effort into making this a distincitve browsing expereince.

Visit the Flock Page.

Blogged with Flock

However, if you’re not sure just what solution is right for you, then you might want to read this article.  It explains the differences between just dual booting and running a virtual machine like Parallels.

My recommendation on that matter?  If you’re going to want to game, then using Boot Camp might be for you.  I can’t comment much more on that besides the fact that I’m not sure about driver availability for some things.  I know that Boot Camp provides many of the drivers, but stuff like your built-in iSight isn’t going to work.

If you decided that Parallels is easier, then go for it.  There is currently a free trial for you to get your feet wet.  It generally takes up less hard drive space and makes switching between Windows and Mac applications a breeze.  You will need a lot of Ram with this solution though.

Basically, just try it out and see what is best for you.  I would try Parallels first as it is easiest to remove from your system and will do less damage to your Mac if you mess something up.

Blogged with Flock

I went to see Cars this past weekend with high hopes that it would be a good movie. I’ve got used to seeing top notch stuff come out of Pixar Studio here in the last few years. This movie was no let down.

I won’t go into all the details of the movie, but I absolutely LOVED it. That’s saying a lot since I was the oldest person there (that wasn’t a parent with screaming kids..from excitement). The plot was wonderfully crafted, the characters were well rounded, Tow-mater (Larry the Cable Guy) added tons and tons of comedy and it was just a great movie. I highly recommend seeing it.

As Pixar does with it’s movies though, they have a short film at the beginning. So, I was almost as excited about the short film (I’ve bought all of them from the iTMS already) as I was about the picture itself. Sure enough, I wasn’t let down.

One Man Band is a short film where these two hilarious paupers are playing instruments to get the one coin from this little girl. I just like her facial expression once she drops her coin and demands that the paupers pay her back. (The picture above…hint hint).

You can buy this short film from the iTMS already, so be sure to head on over here and check it out. And go see Cars in theaters now, it’s worth it!

Hard drive size.

There are more options, including getting a drive up to 120Gb with the new Macbooks. I opted for the stock 80Gb with my black one because I didn’t wanna wait for a custom built one and I figured that since I didn’t run out of room with 80Gb on my iBook G4, that I’d be all set. Major mistake.

There is so much more to do with an Intel Mac that you need the extra space. If you fall into the Parallels Workstation category, you’ll most likely have a couple virtual machines. We’re talking around 5gigs per one no most cases and that is just basic stuff in the OS, not storing any files, etc.

If you opt for Bootcamp, that’s 10Gb gone from the start. No getting it back.

With all the horsepower at your fingertips (I also highly recommend maxing out a 2Gb of ram, the perfomance is amazing and you’ll love the 2Gb if you want to run Parallels and still use your Mac like you’ve become accustomed to) you are more likely to do stuff that you wouldn’t have done with a PPC Mac.

Some examples of that are go crazy with video. Having a built-in iSight and all this power enables me to play around with iMovie a lot more than I ever thought I would in the past. Result? I now have around 20Gb of video footage, and that’s growing fast.

More power means more fun with Garageband. Simple as that. This holds true for several other apps as well.

Bottom line here? Take the time and think about how you’re going to use your new computer. If you even have a small thought that you might like to use Parallels or try out Bootcamp, then I strongly recommend going with at least the 80Gb, if not something higher. I only wish now that I’d chosen the 120Gb. My only hope is that upgrading the HDD seems to be fairly simple now. Now just to get up the money and do it.

However, you can run into folders that the system won’t let you make aliases. After searching on the net for a bit, I found a nice little tip that lets you not only make aliases to any folder from the finder, but is also a nicer way of doing it that the “Cmd-L” mentioned above.

All you do is select the folder or item that you want to link to, and hold down the “Option-Cmd” buttons as you drag the item to a new location. It will show a little alias arrow as your drag it, and when you drop it, you have an alias where you wanted it anyway, without the “alias” stuck the end name too. Pretty useful tip, huh?

I downloaded the new version to play with last night and have got to use it for about an hour so far. Overall, it’s a nice change from the previous version.

The blog page has seen the most improvements from what I gather, including the introduction of permalinks. While I won’t be using this for any real-time production, I’ll most certainly use if for testing purposes a little later.

There are some nice new themes included with this release as well. The interface has seen a nice change and some things have been simplified. To get the full effect, head on over here and download the beta to try it out.

The battery life is on par with the previous 14″ iBook G4 I had. However, I think there is a difference when you put the computer to sleep. I don’t have hard numbers for this, but I’m 99% sure that I could leave my iBook in sleep for a few days at least, without it draining the battery. However, after about 24 hours in sleep, my Macbook will have drained a full battery and be dead.

Just a word to the wise, if you’re not going to be using your Macbook, shut it down.

PodPress – A must have plugin if you’re going to use your WordPress install for podcasting. Gives you all the options you need to make your podcast work right.

Spam Karma 2 – This is the ultimate spam killing plugin. There are tons of options so that you can fine tune just how much spam you want blocked. Has saved me a lot of time from sorting through a few hundred comments every week that were just spam.

WordPress Database Backup – This plugin is installed with WordPress by default, but you have to enable it. It gives you a nice little “Backup” option so that you can backup all your entries, etc. Also lets you backup your Spam Karma lists, very nice.

Tiger Style Administration – The default admin look for WordPress is kinda outdated. This plugin gives you a nice and clean Tiger look. Highly recommend.

Talk about using the new black Macbook for a little over a week, all the pros and cons to the system.

Music this week is “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers.

There is no podcast next week, I will be on vacation.

Can grab the download at:

http://www.macfanatic.net/downloads/temp-loader-v10.dmg

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So, being the good user that I am, I decided to use this as my only way of taking notes for the class that I’m taking this summer.  So, I set down and tried to learn a little about it right before I headed off for my first class and was pleasantly surprised.  After using it for three days (counting time I’ve spent studying and outlining at home, that equals about 18 hours in this one document….) I’m very happy with this view of Word.

I exclusively use Pages for everything that I do word processing wise, but after using this view, I think I’ll be firing up Word a little more.  Basically, you have a document that has a title at the top.  The page scrolls underneath that title, so that it’s always visible.  The paper itself looks like notebook paper, and you can add and rename tabs on the right hand side, just like you would have divider tabs in a real notebook.  So, this is a nice way to organize indeed.  Add in the fact that you can record audio (haven’t tried this in class yet) right into the document on certain lines, you have highlighting and markup tools at your fingertips, and it’s easy to outline with and you’ve got a very powerful note-taking app indeed.  It’s always nice to find a new application to brag about (though I never thought MS Word would be the one).

So, I ended up buying an off-brand 200GB networked drive and that along with a new monitor arrived today.  First off, the drive is a bit of a pain to get setup.  Sadly enough, it showed right up in Windows XP in the Network Neighborhood area, but I can’t get it to show up no way, no how on a Mac.  I am able to connect to it via samba, but I had to do the Command-K for connect to server and just enter “smb://192.168.x.x” for it’s internal IP address, which I was only able to find by looking at the DHCP client list in my router’s control stuff.  I am able to administer the drive by going to the internal IP address, and was able to get it finished setup that way where we could connect to it and add users for FTP and all that stuff.  But, it still won’t show up on a Mac in the Network area like it should.  I’m a little baffled by this, I must admit.

The monitor that I bought is a real beauty.  After getting tipped off on the Screen Spanner (read post here) I hooked up an old CRT monitor and was thrilled with the extra screenspace (even though it was just 1024×768 resolution on the CRT.  So, I decided to get a new LCD monitor that would take up less space.  I first looked at the last generation of Apple Studio Displays on eBay, seriously considering a 17″ one.  However, I feel in love with the 22″ one and just couldn’t resign myself to a 17″ display with 1280×980 or something similar resolution.  So, I started looking at Dell displays because I’ve heard such good things about them.  After falling in love with a 20″ widescreen and bidding on it briefly, I decided to look elsewhere for a cheaper model or make.

That led me to www.newegg.com where I found a BenQ Senseye FP202W monitor for $299 plus tax (with free shipping).  It was still a tad expensive, but looked wonderful on the website and I decided to take the plunge.  I’m sitting here amazed, like a child Christmas morning as I type this.  First off, I just realized that I can have two different desktop backgrounds, one for each monitor.  Second, the stock Apple images are amazing on this huge screen, and the quality is simply stunning.  I could sit here and stare at my translucent windows and gorgeous OS X eye candy all day on this monitor.

I have to say that the monitor is fairly nice, especially for the price.  It arrived with no dead pixels and a few different cables to get you started.  It’s also VESA mountable, although I don’t plan on putting it on my wall anytime soon.

I will certainly use this monitor more in the next few days and mention it on the podcast this weekend, but I’m pretty sure that I can recommend this to someone who is in the market for a new display.  It’s even more wonderful and amazing to have so much space to work with Garageband, be able to type this blog post, have an eye on my email, use Adium to chat with friends, and browse the web all at the same time.  What a wonderful world we live in.

My problem was that I use Newsfire for all of my RSS reading and love it. It supports Spotlight just fine, but when I search, the results would show up for a few seconds under the “Documents” category, and then just disappear to somewhere where I couldn’t use the results. I was going to contact the developer about this, but then it dawned on me that it probably wasn’t specifically that guy’s fault (Newsfire is another great Mac application) but more inline with the way that Spotlight categorizes results.

So, after searching for a few minutes, I ran across BSP “Configurable Categories for Spotlight”. Sounds like it’s exactly what I wanted. So, after reading the usual “it might self-destruct” warnings from the developer, I downloaded the zip archive and ran the package. Behold, a new icon in my System Preferences called “BSP” (imagine that).

So, clicking on that gives you some interesting options. First off, if you’re really desperate to limit your returned results, you can simply remove document types that appear in categories. You can remove whole categories in the Spotlight Preferences area, but with BSP you could just remove Mail, Address Book, and all related iCal items from showing up in the appropriate list if you use Entourage for example.

So, to add my Newsfire articles (the individual RSS entries in this case) to my Spotlight search results, I first added another category because that made sense to me. You could add them where ever you wanted, but having their own category made sense to me. From there, I searched for something that would give me some Newsfire articles for that split second and when it briefly appeared I was quick enough to Apple-Enter to bring up the enclosing window. From there I used the method of holding down command “Apple” and clicking on the title part of the Finder window to see just where I was finding these little things Turns out they were stored in /Users/user_name/caches/metadata/Newsfire/

To add the articles into my newly created category using BSP, I clicked on the “Choose” button in the right-hand window and navigated and clicked on one of these newsfire articles. I just clicked “Apply Now”, watched in horror as the right side of my menubar disappeared, and then in amazement as it reappeared and I was able to search with ease with my new “Newsfire Articles” category I created.

At this point I was feeling a little creative and had already liked the Google Importer that I had installed a few days ago, so I played around with those settings for the first time. Turns out if you set the delayed time that the importer waits before it even starts searching (supposedly to help people who make a lot of typos) down, then it speeds up soooo much and makes it a wonderful experience.

I wasn’t happy with the search results showing up under “Bookmarks” even though that’s technically the file type that it is, and your Safari bookmarks would show up under this category also. I just changed the name of this category to “Google” and moved some of the categories around to my personal preference, and that is what appears in the screenshots below.

Overall, I think that an average user can do this, but it might be a little intimidating. I definitely recommend the Google Importer as a must have tool for Spotlight and think that the BSP is another feature that adds even more depth and usefulness to this key technology of Tiger.

You can check out the Google Importer site here.

You can check out the BSP site for organizing categories in Spotlight here.

As someone just mentioned in the previous post’s comments, you can easily search with Google if you know some easy key commands to open yourself a new tab, “tab” over to the searchbar and then enter your info into that and hit enter.

However, I was looking on the Apple Downloads page today and saw a feature that I have been wanting since I first booted into Tiger and got to use Spotlight: Integrated Google Search. If you use Google Desktop for Windows, you get this functionality built-in, and I’ve been very jealous as of late because of that. However, with this simple installer, when you search using Spotlight, Google search items are displayed right there in your list. Clicking on them brings up Safari or your browser to the page right-away.

It seems like it slows down Spotlight just a tad, but not anything too incredible. As well, I’m sure that it will be just a tad confusing for some users at first, even though there are separate icons for the Google items. As such, the items show up under a “Bookmarks” subtitle, just like “Images” or “Documents” and so forth.

I’m very excited about this plug-in because it’s something that I’ve been wanting for forever now.

You can grab a copy of Google Importer (requires Spotlight and Tiger) from Apple here.

So, I was able to install this very easily, then all I had to do was restart my computer and plug in a monitor. Voila! After unchecking a box that said something like “Mirror Desktops” I was able to drag around my displays to get them setup the way I wanted (external on left) etc, just like it was from the factory! Best of all, I’m hooked up to a 17″ CRT right now (one I had lying around) that supports 1280X1024, so I have a very cool resolution on that monitor, while I still have my stock 1024X768 on my main iBook screen. Very, very nice!

Expose is just a tad sluggish with this setup, but it works none the less. Supposedly this script also enabled a “clamshell mode” so that you can shut your main display, wake the computer with the lid still shut, and then use the external that way. Although, it warns you several times that it won’t vent properly and may overheat, so I don’t think that I’ll be trying this feature out for long periods of time.

However, I can’t thank the person enough who submitted the link for this script, I will be playing with this for awhile now!

You can grab the AppleScript that enables this wonderful feature for iBooks and more Mac computers here.

Head on on over here for the reduced price.

Check out Button Builder on the Realmac Software Site here.

I’ve been a strong advocate of Apple’s Mail since I switched over to Tiger last summer. However, after delving into Daylite 3 here in the last few days, I really started to appreciate all of the comforts of having an integrated application for my calendar, contacts, email, notes and appointments. So, I think I’ve finished making the switch to Entourage, even though my stomach turns at the thought of endorsing a Microsoft product.

Quick take on this one: You need to give Entourage for Mac a try, even if you’ve messed with Outlook for Windows or previous versions for Mac.

I enjoy trying out new software all the time, so I frequent sites like VersionTracker all day long. I ran across this application the other day and have fallen in love with it from the beginning. It’s another one of those applications that just makes me stand back in awe and amazement, especially when I think of it’s elegance and ease of use when compared to any applications that you could find on Windows.

Daylite from Market Circle is a complex data organization tool, as best as I can describe it. It’s designed for small businesses that use Macs. It’s the most amazing way to organize and link emails, calendars, contacts, appointments, tasks, projects, notes, organizations, groups, and more. You can see how every person interacts with each other, whether they’re working on a project together, collaboration through email or phone calls, and so much more.

I played around with this application using the sample database that was provided, so that I could see how everything worked from the start. Then I decided to import all of my own data and start using it for real. (It imports from iCal and Address Book, plus many others). There are several features that I’m just now uncovering that I’ll want to talk about in depth, and I’m taking screen shots of everything as I go along.

Expect this to be a two part of greater series of podcast episodes in the future, and I’ll be recruiting help to get a full review online so that we can make use of all the photos that I have.

If you’re interested in helping me undertake this large and complex review, be sure to contact me and let me know. Also, you can grab a free 30 day demo from the website above, so check that out for yourself.

This application lets you create a disk image of files or folders just by dragging them into the application’s window. It shows a progress circle as it creates your image on your desktop and you’re all set. A nice utility to have after all, especially if you make content for the web often.

You can check out a copy of this cool freeware utility from VersionTracker here.

So, this great piece of software is on sale. And a good sale. So, if you haven’t tried it yet, try it, you’ll be hooked. If you have tried it and never got around to dropping the dough, then you’re in luck. For about 22 bucks (instead of 35 I think) RW can be yours.

Head over here to read more about RW and it’s great features, get a free trial download, or purchase RW at a discounted price.

Virtue is a desktop manager. This is standard equipment in almost all Linux distributions that I’m aware of. It was a feature that I didn’t use that heavily because it was implemented poorly in my opinion, but a nice idea. However, Virtue is a true Mac application and shines in usability. It integrates up top with your Menubar and lets you customize quite a lot of features, including creating more desktops as you need them, adding names, labels, different backgrounds and more.

As I play around with this app more, I’ll let everyone know what my verdict is. However, it’s a free application, so be sure to check it out on VersionTracker.

Grab the widget from Apple here.

I want to say that I’ve mentioned this site on here before, but it needs mentioning again. I refer to this site because I caught this off the RW forums and loved the way it looked, causing me to buy the theme that it was based off of. Anyway, the author has added a nice quicktime intro to the site. I just wanted to mention it and get everyone to head on over and check it out. It’s a pretty cool site altogether.

This is an application that I have heard so much about but haven’t played around with that much. I downloaded a demo today to look at it, and I have to say that I’m very impressed with it so far. I think that I might look into seriously using it once I get myself a new Intel Mac with a built-in iSight Until then however, I don’t see myself entering everything by the keyboard.

If you want to check it out for yourself, click the image above.

I won’t go over a lot of features here because I plan to do a podcast episode on this soon (or an actual online review if I get the time, *cough, cough*), but check this out in the mean time. It integrates really well with Flickr, blogging services, etc. It just looks really awesome and handles the extra stuff besides basic browsing really well. I would switch to this in a second if it just had better RSS support. This is another good example of building a product on top of the mozilla codebase.

As a quick side note, I got motivated when playing with all the extras in the browser and setup a blog API (WordPress) on my server, to try out the browser. Works very well and you can check out the resulting effort here.

I’m also posting some screenshots of using Flock here, so check those out to view the cool features I’m talking about.

Who said dog was man’s best friend? They obviously hadn’t used OmniOutliner. I plan on doing a better review on this app that I discovered today a little bit in the future. I guess that I need to finish my reviews of iLife 06 and iWork 06 before I move on to bigger and better things. Don’t lose sight of this app though, I HIGLY recommend it if you need a way to organize thoughts, or any type of information really. It is also great for making outlines (imagine that). So, head on over here to get a free trial license and a copy of the app.

The list of shows is reported to include America’s Funniest Home Videos and School House Rock.

The article went on to say that the content providers (such as Disney) make around 70% of the 1.99 price on iTunes (about 1.39). That is comparable to what they make off of a show on a DVD supposedly. Doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me.

I’m sure more will be coming to iTunes in the next few weeks, especially with Macworld being next week.