Mac
Synergy
Michael turned me on to Synergy, a menu-bar utility for controlling iTunes, and it freaking rocks! Well worth the $5 shareware fee. One feature is the transparent floater that pops up when tracks change. Click on the thumbnail below for detail, then cruise to Wincent's site, download, and register!
iPod 1.3 software
While I'm very glad Apple provided us old iPod users with a way to sync and listen to AAC-encoded files, the one other feature I'm envious of, in the iPod 2.0 software on the new Pods, has to be the text notes. If I had that, my Palm handheld usage would likely drop off by fifty percent or more. (Thanks to Lee for the link.)
Apple's music Fortune
My lovely bride pointed me to this Fortune article on the new iTunes Music Service. Obviously written for publication before the service was officially announced, it provides a great look at Jobs' vision behind the service, and the inadequacy of the music industry in its previous and current efforts at online distribution. A few items I'd like to address:
One thing's for sure: If ever there was an industry in need of transformation, it's the music business. U.S. music sales plunged 8.2% last year, largely because songs are being distributed free on the Internet through illicit file-sharing destinations like KaZaA.
I take issue with this statement, since it's impossible to prove that illegal file sharing has had this much impact on the U.S. music biz. There is a ton of physical piracy (blanket CD copying) going on overseas, especially in Asia, that eats in to the music industry more than a bunch of geeks swapping songs online. I have downloaded a lot of music from peer-to-peer networks, as well as some centralized sites I have access to. Some of it was digital copies of CDs and cassettes I already own. The rest was stuff I wanted to listen to before I went out and bought it. A lot of that got trashed when I realized it wasn't for me. I know I'm not the only one who probably spent more on music (albeit looking for sales and good prices online) because I was pulling music off the net. Second, it seems as though hardly anyone in the music business thinks that the problem with falling sales may be attributed to the product itself. Elsewhere in the article:
For years they have been able to get away with releasing albums with two or three potential hits bundled with ho-hum filler cuts. That has been wonderful for the industry, but it has made a generation of consumers who pay $18.99 for CDs very cynical. "People are sick and tired of that," says singer-songwriter Seal. "That's why people are stealing music."
Amen. That's it right there. And we see further evidence of the music industry's slow-to-catch-on attitude:
But MusicNet users still can't download songs onto portable players. "These devices haven't caught on yet," insists MusicNet CEO Alan McGlade. Never mind that U.S. sales of portable MP3 players soared from 724,000 in 2001 to 1.6 million last year.
Hmmm. I would think a better-than-two-times annual growth, in a year, in any segment of the tech economy would be cause for consideration of said segment. As for the service itself, I think it's great. I haven't actually bought and downloaded any music yet, but that'll change any day. I've spent quite a bit of time searching through it and listening to samples. It's going to change the way I buy music. It's going to change the music business.
iTunes Music Store pricing
Lee notes David Pogue's column on the individual song pricing structures at Apple's new online music store. Good points all around.
No more Safari-ing for me
So after three crashes in a row today, I've decided to dump Safari as my main browser. Despite this being v73, aka, Public Beta 2, and fairly rock solid, and despite disabling the cache, known cause of myriad problems, it's still not stable enough for my liking. Granted, Safari doesn't crash every day for me normally. More like once a week or so. It's just that it chooses to crash at the most inopportune times! So I downloaded Safari Bookmark Exporter, and got my Safari bookmarks into Camino. I've noticed that Camino consumes less RAM than Safari, and doesn't seem to get bogged down as usage is extended day after day after day. We'll see where this goes, and wait for Safari 1.0.
Back off, you Rebel scum!
Thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner, my TiBook has gone from four partitions to three, without missing a beat. Well, there was obviously some downtime, but no muss, no fuss! The new desktop pic is courtesy of my new Canon PowerShot G3.
DropDMG 2.1
Michael has quietly updated DropDMG to version 2.1. Enhancements include the ability to create Internet-enabled disk images, and the ability to encode .dmg images with MacBinary. Numerous other improvements abound.
Photoshop 7 tip
I'm a complete Photoshop novice, often getting FranX or Lee to walk me through stuff. One observation I thought I would share about Photoshop 7 running in OS X: when working on a JPG (and maybe any file), be sure to not have that file selected in the Finder. I had clicked on the JPG in question in the Finder (column view), and the Finder was previewing the pic. Photoshop no likee this. As soon as I clicked to another pic in the Finder, Photoshop saved my changes to the JPG.
Slide show screensavers
Looking for a little help from the retrophisch readership (all 3 of you): I'd like to create a slide show-style screensaver, like those that come pre-installed with OS X, but I don't want to use the .Mac Slides Publisher to do it. I know I can just point the Screen Effects pane to a folder of pics, but it tends to limit the number of pics to five. And I'd like to provide the screen saver as a download to other OS X users. Of course, I'm looking to do this cheap and easy, so recommendation on products such as iScreensaver Designer, PhotoCircus, or any others would be appreciated.
USB 2.0 already on new Macs?
Hyok Ki Chung thinks so. Quoted on Macintouch, Chung analyzes a Korean news article:
While browsing a Korean Mac magazine site, I found this interesting article. It's about the USB 2.0 controller chipset on [Power Mac] MDD 1.25 and 1.4 motherboards. According to this article, the controller is made by NEC, model number uPD720101. The article is in Korean, but basically what it describes is the NEC USB 2.0 controller. It also mentions the driver, saying that Mac version is not available yet. It looks like we already have USB 2.0 built-in. I guess it's just matter of time. Hopefully Apple will add the driver to an updater soon.
Obviously, Apple doesn't want to really push USB 2.0 right now, not when its own FireWire technology is picking up more steam, and the second iteration of that technology, FireWire 800, has hit the market on just-released systems. Perhaps I have just bought the Apple line, but USB for me is for small peripheral usage: keyboards, mice, my CF card reader, my little Canon scanner that barely gets used. For the "heavy lifting"--my external drives, tape backup, iPod--FireWire is the way to go. Not to mention that you can't use USB, 1.1 or 2.0, to boot a Mac as an external drive to another Mac, better known as FireWire Target Disk Mode. UPDATE, 9:50 pm: Ric updated with follow-up from Kevin Purcell:
But examining the Apple Hardware Developer notes [Power Mac G4 Developer Note], you can see that these PowerMacs only expose two USB ports which means the USB 2.0 port in the chip is not connected to any PHY or external connector on the Power Macs. Only the low-speed/full-speed ports are connected. I don't expect to see a software update. Apple probably just bought these because they meet their spec (an OHCI controller) and they needed a 2 or 3 port USB solution.
So, maybe wishful thinking...
Macintouch does XML
Ric Ford notes that he is experimenting with a XML feed for his renowned Macintouch site. Plug this in to NNW, boys and girls:
[www.macintouch.com/rss.xml](http://www.macintouch.com/rss.xml)
Tax Day Desktop
Not sure what compelled me to suddenly share what my desktop looks like, but here it is:
Daring Fireball Double Whammy
Gruber's last two posts are right on the money. First is his PR-speak to English translation of Quark's press release about QuarkXPress 6. Of note:
We are plowing full steam ahead under the delusion that our users want to use a print-oriented page-layout program for web design. By placing extra emphasis on these unwanted web features, we hope to distract your attention from a certain upstart page layout application, which is focused squarely and solely on page layout.
He really lays in to John C. Dvorak, though, on Dvorak's latest rants regarding Apple and Intel.
This point cannot be emphasized strongly enough. Apple is a computer hardware company. Selling hardware is how Apple generates most of its revenue. Their operating system software may well be the best aspect of their computers, but that does not make them a software company. Anyone who claims that Apple could simply switch to being a software company and make up for lost hardware revenue by selling additional software doesn't understand how the company operates. During the brief period of time when Apple licensed the Mac OS to other manufacturers, their revenue tanked. Too many people bought cheap clones from PowerComputing and Umax instead of higher-priced Macs from Apple, and the licensing revenue didn't compensate for the lost hardware revenue. The situation may well have been good for Mac users, but it was terrible for Apple's bottom line. No matter how badly people clamor for it, Apple is never going to release a version of Mac OS X that runs on standard Wintel PC hardware. Whether it's possible or not, it isn't going to happen. A frequent comment regarding this rumor is something like "I'd love a version of Mac OS X that ran on my PC." Sure you would, you cheap bastard. Apple's Switch campaign is an attempt to get PC users to buy thousands of dollars of Apple hardware, not hundreds of dollars of Apple software.
In addition, pay attention to the fact that Microsoft and Apple are indeed separate companies with separate goals, and thus should not be lumped in to the same industry "group" that analysts and reporters always lump the two in to.
Embedded PowerBook
Thanks to Mark for the pointer to this photo gallery of USA Today photography Jack Gruber, who is using his PowerBook G4 12" to send pictures to the main office. I still want one!
iBox
Wired reports on John Fraser's attempt to build a new pizza-box, or "headless" Mac, using replacement parts for older systems. Good luck getting past Apple Legal, John.
ATPM 9.04
The April issue of About This Particular Macintosh has been released. Check out Eric's review of NetNewsWire, Lee & Darryl's review of Studio MX, and Bob's continuing saga on using your Mac to record your vinyl albums to CD.
New BBEdit pricing option
Bare Bones continues to push the envelope of customer service with this new pricing option for their flagship product, BBEdit. (via Gruber)
Gruber interviews Simmons
John Gruber recently interviewed Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire. "Interview" might be stretching it a tad; it comes off more like the two of them are yakking over a cup of coffee. Great stuff here.
I worked on the Windows version also. I wrote a fair amount of Windows-specific code, even. And I learned that I don't really like developing for Windows very much. I suspect that many Mac users are like me, that they're driven in part by aesthetics. And they want to use software written by people who are driven by aesthetics. Windows is not aesthetic.