Retrophisch

ATPM 15.05

The May issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Reading about Mark’s travails in obtaining faster broadband across the Pond, I’m thankful our step up to fiber optic a couple of years ago was relatively painless. I’m also thankful we’ve never had the sort of printer troubles Mark’s run in to, thought he does aptly highlight how inkjet printers are pretty much a commodity now. In some cases, it’s to the point of, “We need more ink? The new ink costs how much?!? How much was that new printer at Costco?”

Ed updates the master GTD app list for May, while Sylvester walks us through Front Row. Linus’ attempt at making it through the Bible of GTD, David Allen’s Getting Things Done, offered at least inspiration for this month’s Qaptain Qwerty.

I’m especially proud of this month’s desktop pictures selection. Not only were they were shot by Jessica, the teenage daughter of my good friend Rob Leitao, but they were done so not with even a low-end digital SLR, but with a run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot point-and-shoot. We hope you enjoy Jessica’s stunning photos from Yosemite National Park.

Lee works out the combo of Slappa’s PTAC laptop sleeve and shoulder bag, while Chris crisscrosses the country with his iPhone in a Core Case. Rob puts iWeb ‘09 through the wringer as he creates from scratch a new web site. Chris puts two non-case iPhone accessories through their paces: the Pogo Sketch stylus, and the “tuned conical deflection chamber” of the SoundClip. Finally, Ed pours some audio through the interesting Transcriva: dump in the audio, out comes text transcripts. I may have to look into that one myself.

As always, ATPM is available in a variety of formats for your enjoyment:

• Offline Webzine
• Print-optimized PDF
• Screen-optimized PDF

ATPM 15.04

The April issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Mark discovers an unexpected benefit of the iPod nano apparently having a mind of its own, while at the same time dealing with the beta of Safari 4 and problems with paperless billing. As usual, Ed updates the GTD App Master List, while exploring the automation of file management.

Rob brings us photos of the Vasquez Rocks, part of the San Andreas Fault just north of Los Angeles, in this month’s desktop pictures. (Be sure to tune in next month when Rob’s teenage daughter’s photos of Yosemite are featured, and we can all see how much better a photographer she is than dear ol’ Dad. Love ya, Rob!) Linus shows us how Mac users really can be affected by Windows viruses.

Ed expands the capabilities of Photoshop Elements with the extremely capable Elements+, which unlocks big-brother Photoshop features otherwise hidden in the application’s source code. In the quest to protect sensitive data, Linus conducts a little Espionage, while Lee looks at the iPhone app for Facebook, a place where far too many people aren’t sensitive enough with their data.

Frank conducts the Mother of Current Big Three GTD Mac Apps Round-Up™, having a hard time choosing between OmniFocus, TaskPaper, and Things. (I use TaskPaper myself, though I admit I don’t really use it every day, in the way I should be using it. I guess I have trust issues. Which is funny because many times, my brain itself can’t be trusted, so… Oh. Right. This month’s issue. Sorry.)

Chris is a little disappointed with the iFlyz Personal Media Solution Stand, whereas Lee finds KavaServices rather useful. Finally, when he’s not flying the friendly skies, Chris is trying out the Showcase with his iPhone 3G.

As usual, ATPM is available in a variety of formats to suit your reading needs:

• Offline Webzine
• Print-optimized PDF
• Screen-optimized PDF

ATPM 15.03

The March issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Mike ponders a Jobs-less Apple future, especially in light of a certain comment made by a certain Apple fan-baiting hack. After a long hiatus, Mark re-enters the world of book design with a job hunt, and comes away pining for a twenty year-old Mac rather than suffer the slings and arrows of the Windows machines he encounters. Also in the employment hunt, Mark discovers the paperless office and instant communication are still a long way off, especially, and not surprisingly, in the bureaucratic wasteland of government offices.

Sylvester has a wonderful introductory piece on Time Machine. Be sure to read the comments; after submitting the article for publication, Sylvester encountered an error with Time Machine backups, and his solution may prove valuable to some of you in the future.

David Siebecker was kind enough to share some amazing photos from his 2006 safari to Tanzania for this month’s desktop pictures. (Consequently, Tanzania is the home of Emmanuel, the boy our family sponsors through Compassion.) I especially like the shots of the rhino, elephant, and the two sunsets. In this month’s Qaptain Qwerty, Linus shows us how backups have grown up.

Speaking of Linus, he puts ChronoSync, an app I’ve long had on the Eventual To-Try list, through its paces, and finds it worthy. One booth we made sure to stop by at while at Macworld Expo was the Eye-Fi one, and Lee has given the namesake Explore wireless SD card a workout. Finally, Chris determines whether or not the PED3 iPhone Stand is a worthwhile replacement for Apple’s iPhone dock.

As usual, ATPM is available in a variety of formats for your convenience. Thanks for reading About This Particular Macintosh!

ATPM 15.02

The February issue is now available for your reading pleasure.

If you’ve gotten over Wes’ analogy to high-altitude, fiber-producing, spitting camelids in last month’s Bloggable, you’ll be pleased to know he’s now moved on to the blogosphere discussion of appropriate iTunes App Store pricing. Oh, and Steve Jobs’ health. Because the mainstream media will just not. Let. It. Go.

Mark wanders down memory lane so far as Internet connections are concerned, and laments that some employment forms across the Pond are in non-editable PDF form. Why is this a problem? When one such form is 28 pages long, that’s a lot of handwriting. There’s also the testy problem of folks paying for a broadband connection half the speed of which they’re paying for.

For anyone looking to get things done, Ed has updated the master list of applications which might help you to do so. Yours truly, with much help from Lee and Eric, offers a report from our adventure in San Francisco, and Macworld Expo 2009. Speaking of memory lane, Linus takes a stroll about Removable Storage Avenue, with a column title that made me smile nostalgically.

Speaking of San Francisco, one of the things the three ATPM musketeers did while we were there was take lots of photos, and the Bay Area offers lots of opportunities for great shots. Lee shares some of his favorites with us for this month’s desktop pictures. Linus contributed a cartoon complimentary to his column, wherein an old maxim is shown to not be true.

Some of you may think laptop stands are just not cricket, but Frank Wu is impressed with the Cricket Laptop Stand. (What? Too many Britishisms in this month’s ATPM post?) Ed puts MacSpeech Dictate 2.1 through its paces, and the voice recognition tool emerges unscathed and highly recommended.

As usual, ATPM is available in myriad formats for your enjoyment.

ATPM 15.01

About This Particular Macintosh enters its fifteenth year of publishing with the release of our January issue.

Angus found himself doing some iPhone evangelism during the holiday season, even if it was completely unintentional on his part. Wes returns, after many months, with a look at the latest in the Mac blogosphere, notably the latest news regarding lawsuits between Apple and Mac-clone maker Psystar.

Mike is very happy with his iPhone 3G, but is disappointed that it meant his having to leave Sprint. He wonders if we’ll ever have mobile phones and mobile serviced unbundled from one another. As Mike notes, the cable companies don’t tell us what TV to use, and thank Jobs and Woz we aren’t required to use Windows to access content on the Internet. (Well, most content, anyway.) As his next action for 2009, Ed lays out where he’s taking his column, and looks for feedback from the ATPM readership.

Ken Aspeslagh was kind enough to share some photos from around the world for this month’s desktop pictures. Locations include St. John, France, and New England. Linus entertains with this month’s cartoon, related to a review in this same issue.

Speaking of reviews, Ed gets on the, er, Freeway. No, not of love, but of web site design. If you’ve got a ton of URLs you’d like to store for later reference, Paul thinks you can do worse than ShoveBox. For those looking for a hands-free kit to use with their iPhone, Ed thinks highly of the Vizor SUN. (Yeah, I had a line there about shining brightly, or using your car’s sun visor, but I couldn’t make it work, and it’s already past midnight, so this is getting posted on the 2d instead of the 1st. Maybe next year.) Finally, Linus wraps up our first issue of 2009 with a look at WordSoup, and if you’re still trying to figure out the cartoon, hopefully it makes sense now.

As always, this month’s issue is available in multiple formats for your reading enjoyment. Thanks for reading ATPM!

Um, yeah

MacJournals News:

Expert Macintosh users who see “MacWorld” in an article know you don’t know what you’re talking about, just as most technology-literate readers would laugh at “MicroSoft,” “QualComm,” or “LexMark.” Referring to a famous technology event without the correct name or spelling is a quick way to throw away your credibility. Saying “That’s how I always thought it was spelled, and besides, everyone knew what I meant” is saying “I didn’t bother to get the facts about my subject before I wrote my article.” Don’t be that writer.

ATPM 14.12

The December issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

We wrap up our fourteenth year of publishing beginning with some fantastic cover art courtesy of our friend Catherine. Mike ponders Apple’s sales strategy post-Black Friday, given the downturn in the economy, while Mark comments on the oft-overlooked Services menu. GTDers, rejoice, for Ed has another installment, this time focusing on non-typical lists, or, in humanspeak, “things that don’t conveniently fall in to our normal lists or categories”. Ed also updates the application list for the final time this year; if you can’t find an app to help you get things done, well, then you’re just not trying. Or reading ATPM each month.

Our friend Mike Shields returns from a long hiatus with perspective from a Mac user in Hollywood. Mike recently took part in the 168 Project, and discusses how you, too, can use your Mac to shoot an almost no-budget flick. Sylvester offers a guide for everyone who would like to run a second monitor on their Mac. Before I brought my old G4 Cube out of retirement, I was doing this with my 20-inch iMac and an older 19-inch LCD, and I confess, I do miss the extra screen real estate. Lee brings us some gorgeous shots of the Rocky Mountain National Forest in this month’s desktop pictures section, including some widescreen shots. My personal favorite is number three.

Just in time for the holiday buying season, we have a slew of product reviews to assist you in purchasing decisions for the Mac users on your list, or for yourself! Linus takes us through the new version of Art Text, while Ed lugs around Tom Bihn’s Checkpoint Flyer, a bag which allows travelers to keep their laptop in the bag without being hassled by the TSA.

Lee puts the Finder-based FTP client ExpanDrive through its paces, as Paul summarizes the tome, Foundations of Mac OS X Leopard Security. If you’re unable to hit the links on a regular basis, Ed may have found a solution for you with GL Golf. Finally, Lee looks at the iRecord Pro to see if it measures up to its predecessor.

As usual, ATPM is available in a variety of formats for your reading pleasure.

On behalf of the ATPM staff, thank you for reading. Concluding fourteen years of publication is quite a milestone, and we’re looking forward to continuing the standards we’ve set forth as we enter year fifteen. Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

Differences

Michael Gartenberg:

Every time there’s a new OS release from MSFT they talk about the shortfalls of the current OS & how the new version will fix all problems.

Ever hear Apple dis a former version of their OS? Me neither. :)

ATPM 14.11

The November issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Charles returns with another Filemaking column, taking readers through layouts and tables in the book database we’re building. There are lamentations from across the Pond, as Mark bemoans Honda and FireWire neutering, yet we can rejoice and be thankful this month on the American side of the ocean, as Ed has updated the GTD application master list.

Lee breaks down the various file formats available to us in Photoshop, while ATPM reader Zac Stivers was kind enough to share some photos from his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas in our desktop pictures offering. I think the second Quince photo is lovely.

Speaking of photos, and Photoshop, Lee also reviews Mask Pro 4.1.2, which can be helpful for those of without the experience Lee has in building masks from scratch. Chris rocks the Logitech MX Revolution’s world, putting the ergonomically-shaped, wireless mouse through its paces. Ed likes the intriguing PDFPen, while Linus enlisted the help of his wife and son in his review of the game StoneLoops.

We say good-bye to a dear friend this month in the pages of About This Particular Macintosh. Matt Johnson has been drawing his Cortland cartoon for us for six years, and this month, brings the series to a close. Matt has seen a lot of changes in his life of late: new wife (congratulations, you guys!), new job, and a new city. He’s taking a breather from cartooning to get in to the swing of things, but assures us he’ll be back in the near future.

Thanks for six great years, Matt, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with next!

As usual, ATPM is available in a variety of reading formats for your comfort. Thanks for reading!

Worth repeating

From my good friend, Brent:

“[T]he only people who bring up the supposed value of IBM/Windows over Mac are people whose livelihoods depend on it. Those PC vs. Mac commercials are correct, and Jerry Seinfeld can’t fix it.”

(It’s worth noting Brent’s livelihood does not, in fact, depend on the Mac. He’s just a satisfied user of one at home, whereas his work computer is Windows-based.)

ATPM 14.09

The September issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Mark informs us that more ISP chicanery is afoot across the Pond, and how Mac users in the UK might be affected. Ed’s updated the master list of GTD apps with a new item: iPhone Presence. Does the app have an iPhone version, or a web version the iPhone can access? Pretty handy if you’re looking for an application to get things done with that will run on your Mac and your iPhone.

In this month’s Photoshop For the Curious, Lee shows us how to use the Merge tool to stitch together those vacation photos to get those great panoramic shots. Sylvester scratches the surface of Preview’s usability to help us get more out of that handy little app.

This month’s desktop pictures are again courtesy of Julie Ritterskamp, who took these great photos in various national parks throughout the western United States this past July. The identity of Lord Fate, present and past, is revealed, as Cortland’s saga comes to a close. Todd and Angie begin to move their lives forward again, though Angie is having trouble letting Cortland go. But does she have to…?

First Officer Chris Lawson, our nation-trotting staff pilot, pounds around on Das Keyboard Professional, while the Big Boss, Michael Tsai, reviews three hard drive enclosures which allow one to treat hard drives as floppy disks. (For you young’uns, we used to have to store our computer data on this pieces of five-inch discs, which were encased in a floppy plastic material, hence the name, floppy disk, or floppies.)

Lee looks at a pair of headsets from Maximo, while Ed does some recipe filing with MacGourmet Deluxe. Finally, Linus puts Séquence through its paces to see if it can dethrone screen-capture king Snapz Pro.

As always, this issue of ATPM is available in a variety of formats for your reading enjoyment.

ATPM 14.08

The August issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Angus gets us started this month with a look at Microsoft’s latest attempts to market its way out of its Vista doldrums, while he’s very impressed with Microsoft Office: Office 2007 for Windows, that is, and notably the suite’s OneNote slice of software. If you’re wondering what this has to do with the Mac, read the whole column.

Mike goes a bit Billy Shakes on us as he recounts his tale of iPhone 3G acquisition, while storage is on Mark’s mind. As we go through the Great Room Reshuffle of 2008™ here in our home, storage is on my mind as well, but Mark’s thinking in terms of data storage. For Photoshop geeks, Mark also notes how to get the Pxl SmartScale plug-in working on an Intel Mac.

Gedeon Maheux, of the Iconfactory, twittered a couple of months back how he wanted a native to-do list app for his iPhone. He suspected that once the iPhone SDK was available, we’d see a “dev to-do list Thunderdome” of productivity apps. Judging from Ed’s roundup of Getting Things Done (GTD) applications for the iPhone, it looks like Ged’s prediction come true. Lee takes a break from the normal tutorials in this month’s Photoshop for the Curious to talk about when and when not to actually use some of the tips and processes he’s been teaching us on our photos.

This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of Julie Ritterskamp, and features that sleepy little West Coast burb of San Francisco. Also, s the villianous legion regroups and remembers, the shocking truth about Cortland is finally revealed!

Linus has some fun running his photos through Comic Life Magiq, while Eric throws Knapsack over his shoulder for some trip planning. Finally, Lee thoroughly runs SmartMask 2.0, a plug-in for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, through its paces.

As always, ATPM if available in a variety of formats to suit your preferred reading habits.

The release of last month’s issue marked a personal milestone I failed to notice at the time of publication. I’ve now completed my 10th year of working on About This Particular Macintosh, and I’ve worn a variety of hats during that time. I have to thank Michael Tsai, our Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, for giving me the chance ten years ago to be a part of something I believe to be very special. In addition to being the boss, Michael has become a valued friend.

ATPM is a second family of sorts. While staff members come and go, it is amazing how entrenched in one another’s lives we become. We have seen one another through a wedding, the birth of children, a reality television game show, Macworld Expo meet-ups, even one of our own getting out in public to sing the National Anthem at a ball game. Rob’s family, and quite a few of my own, is still amazed that Michael and I showed up for his marriage to Sandy; it was first time any of us had ever met in person. ATPM has delivered my best friend in the online world. Rarely does a day go by that Lee and I are not in touch, mostly by instant message.

Working on the publication has been an honor and a treat, and I extend my thanks to all of the staff members, past and present, for the privilege of working alongside you.

ATPM 14.07

The July issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Kicking things off, Mark gets in touch with his inner “me” as he ponders the news from Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference this year. When the iPhone Software Developer Kit (SDK) was first released, it was theorized in the Twitterverse and throughout the blogosphere that once Apple provided a means to install standalone applications on the iPhone, we would see a raft of to-do list and other task management apps. With the impending release of the iPhone 3G and the iPhone App Store, Ed reflects on these thoughts, along with some on what we might find in the near future.

In this month’s Photoshop For the Curious, Lee shows us how to make the image on a computer monitor or television pop and not appear burned out when the monitor is photographed. Boy, I wish I had had this info back when I did my iPhone review… Sylvester follows up his thoughts from last month on network attached storage drives with some practical advice on playing well with one. Or two. Or three. Maybe four. Heck, you know how it is with NAS drives…

Oh. You don’t? You don’t even know what a network attached storage drive is? You can’t even figure it out from the name?

…

Let’s move along, shall we?

ATPM reader Harry Torres is kind enough to share some of his vehicular art with us in this month’s desktop pictures selection. Cortland’s foes celebrate his vanquishment, and reminisce on how they got to that point…

Paul puts EyeTV 3.0.2 through the ringer, while yours truly reviews Macworld’s iPhone Superguide, a great resource for any iPhone owner. If you’re looking for a spelling-bee game, read Linus’s Spell-Jam review before continuing your search. Finally, Lee takes a look at a potentially handy piece of software for getting your Mac and Wii to play nice together.

As always, this month’s ATPM is available in a variety of formats for your comfort. Thanks for reading, About This Particular Macintosh!

ATPM 14.05

The May issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Wes has a great round-up of the Mac blogosphere’s reaction to the Psystar Mac clone, as well as bits on Adobe Creative Suite, e-mail clients, Apple’s proceeds from Google referrals, profitability of potential iPhone software sales, and user interfaces. Finally, the blog about the column returns as Son of Bloggable. It’s about time, Wes!

Mark’s understandably unhappy with actions of the MBG (Britian’s RIAA), and notes the fallacy of DRM in light of the closing of MSN Music. Ed has a revised list of GTD applications in this month’s Next Action, while Lee dodges and burns up Photoshop for the Curious.

This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of David Siebecker, and are from a six-day hike through New Hampshire’s White Mountains. All seems lost for Cortland and company as Lisa makes a last bid for victory, any way she can take it.

Yours truly pounds out a review on Apple’s latest keyboard, while Linus grills Blue Crab. Sylvester is impressed with Drive Genius 2, while ATPM’s Official Pilot™, Flight Officer Lawson, puts the Flipp Premium Leather Case for his iPod through its paces. ATPM is a labor of love, with no staffer receiving compensation, so we really can’t complain when Paul takes time to play with SpacePig.

As always, About This Particular Macintosh is available in a variety of formats for maximum reader comfort. Thanks for reading!

ATPM 14.04

The April issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Wes kicks things off with a look at what’s been popular in the Mac blogosphere of late, and that’s namely been about a product that isn’t a Mac, but works with your Mac: the iPhone. The announcement of the software development kit (SDK for short) for the iPhone has generated quite a lot of discussion amongst developers and pundits.

Mark talks about chips of all sorts, from his uniquely Brit point of view, as well as the latest DRM nonsense across the Pond. Charles has another Filemaking, and walks through relational databases.

This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of several ATPM readers, and feature views from all around the globe. Thank you, all, for sharing!

Back in meatspace, Todd turns the tables on the enemy with a reprogrammed Lisa. Cortland and Angela arrive safely from the Mudrix, but Cortland has paid a heavy price…

My good friend Tom Bridge returns to the pages of ATPM with a look at The Book of Wireless. Lee rounds up the latest iPhone accessories from Newer Technology, while Ed puts PhotoAcute Studio through its paces. Paul is pleased with Take Control of Permissions in Leopard, and Ellyn closes out the Tome Edition™ of ATPM by digging through Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.

As always, you can read ATPM online, as well as in three other formats of your choosing. Thanks for reading!

Mixed Messages

What is ZDNet trying to tell us, I wonder?

Click to see a larger size

ATPM 14.03

The March issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Wes has analysis and the roundup from the blogosphere on Microsoft’s attempts thus far to acquire Yahoo!, as well as bits on the MacBook Air, a disastrous HP PC (is “disastrous” redundant there?), the iPhone, and Aperture. Mark notes Apple’s approach to design, compared to others. Chuck takes a break from the normal workflow of Filemaking to look at what’s new in FileMaker 9.

Time warp with us back to the 1950s and 60s with ATPM reader Jennifer Curry’s shots of automobiles in and around Havana, Cuba, from a trip she took there in 2006. Sorry, Marty, no De Loreans. Meanwhile, Lisa is history, and the Mudrix code dissolves to nothing as Cortland makes a huge sacrifice to save the woman he loves. But is that sacrifice enough to save Angie from Cortland’s enemies in meatspace?

Lee puts Microtek’s ArtixScan M1 Dual Media Scanner through its paces, while Eric sees if LicenseKeeper can keep track of all those pesky software serial numbers every computer user tends to accumulate. Ellyn shoots a little pool with her Mac, but after finding it really hard to get the chalk off its case, she elected to shoot pool on her Mac, with MacPool. Chris tries to extend the wireless range of his PowerBook with Wi-Fire, while Linus reclaims some space on his hard drive with Xslimmer. As always, we get to the nitty-gritty of Mac and technology products so you don’t have to!

Every month, About This Particular Macintosh is available in a wide variety of formats for your reading pleasure, and this month is no exception: on the web; as an offline webzine; a PDF optimized for reading on your computer screen; or a PDF optimized for printing. On behalf of the entire staff, I hope you enjoy our work.

Little green men

I love the little aliens from the Pizza Planet vending machine in Toy Story. Thanks to my friend Heather, and a long ago giveaway of some kind, I have two of the little guys guarding my favorite Mac, which is a little otherworldly in its own right…

Click on the photo to see the entire set.

ATPM 14.02

The February issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Yes, he’s a month late for such reminiscing, but Wes weighs in on the comings and goings of 2007 in this month’s Bloggable. He also looks at the blogosphere’s rumblings over the new MacBook Air, and other items of interest. From across the pond, Mark offers an Englander’s point of view on Steve Jobs’ Macworld Expo Keynote, while he waits for a CyTV update, due to an incompatibility with Leopard.

Angus offers the pros and cons from this year’s Macworld Expo, as he sees it. Ted offers a progress report for this month’s ATPO, pre-announcing (pre-pre-announcing?) an outlining product he’s endeavoring to build, as well as offering his thoughts on Macworld Expo (anyone else see a theme here?) and an opinion regarding software business models.

Photoshop For the Curious returns from its brief hiatus, as Lee introduces us to Photoshop’s wonderful world of Masks. And, yes, while I didn’t attend Macworld Expo in person, this will not stop yours truly from offering his impressions of Steve Jobs’s keynote address to open the 2008 Macworld Expo, which took place in San Francisco last month. (There it is, again.) This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of ATPM reader Kim Lee, from a November 2007 trip to Manado, Indonesia. Thanks, Kim!

Linus looks at Chameleon 5.0.881M Legacy, a Photoshop plug-in for combining images, while Ellyn plays around with Flip Words 2, something of a combination of Boggle and Hangman. Chris, ATPM’s official pilot, puts the Kinetik 15.4 Backpack through its paces, and Ed puts a few balls in to play with MacPinball 2.6.

As always, this month’s issue is available in a variety of formats for your reading pleasure.

Macworld Keynote impressions

So the big news in the tech world yesterday was what Steve Jobs talked about during his keynote address at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. The annual technology conference geared toward the Mac OS, and all things Apple, Inc., is often used for the announcement of new products from my favorite fruit company. Yesterday was no exception. Here are some of my thoughts on what was announced:

Time Capsule

If I hadn’t bought an Airport Extreme Base Station last year, to replace a router that died, I’d be buying a new 1 TB—yes, that’s a T, for terabyte—Time Capsule right now. Merging an Airport Extreme Base Station with a “server-grade” hard drive, the Time Capsule allows for wireless backups from all of your Leopard-based Macs via Time Machine. Jobs called it a “back-up applicance”.

Backing up your data is very important, and too few people do it, realizing the value of doing so only when it’s too late. Time Capsule is a dead-simple way, for most people, to ensure their Macs are getting backed up. Plug in and power on the Time Capsule, open up Time Machine on your Mac and point it to the Capsule, and you’re done.

Time Capsule comes in two sizes, the 500 GB version for $299, and the aforementioned 1 TB version for $499. That’s an amazing bargain, a terabyte of storage and a full wired/wireless router for five hundred smackers. As I said, if we didn’t already have the AEBS router, my credit card would have already seen one of these charged to it.

iPhone Update

Today was the 200th day the iPhone had been available for purchase, and Apple’s sold 4 million of them, an average of 20,000 iPhones sold per day. This means that in terms of United States smartphone market share, Apple has nearly 20% of the national smartphone market.

The rumors of a 1.1.3 update to the iPhone proved to be true. The home screen can now be customized, and the Maps application—the underrated killer feature of the iPhone in my humble opinion—is now even more super-powered. The new Location feature in Maps is great. Combining data from Google and Skyhook Wireless, your iPhone can now, without GPS on board, triangulate your position within a couple of blocks. It pulled up my location at home with no problem.

You can, finally, send a SMS message to more than one person, something my lowly Motorola v557 was capable of two years ago. The WebClips functionality is pretty neat; you can create a WebClip from any web page or portion of a web page and pop it on to your home screen, so it’s easy to just go to Google, or The New York Times, or whatever web page you wish, with one touch.

I’ve had quite some fun this afternoon playing with all of this new stuff, and it’s almost like getting a new iPhone for free. All in all, it makes the iPhone an even better communication device.

iTunes Movie Rentals

In addition to buying movies through the iTunes Store, you can now rent them as well. Library movies (viz: older titles) are $2.99, and new releases are $3.99. From the time you click “Rent Movie” in the iTunes Store and it downloads, you have 30 days to watch the movie. From the time you click “Play” on the movie, you have 24 hours to watch it. You can also transfer the movie to another device, such as your iPod or iPhone, and watch it there as well, before your 24 hours or 30 days, depending on where you are when you perform the transfer, are up.

The thirty days requirement is pretty decent, but I find the 24 hours one to be a little restrictive. It should be at least 48 hours, and 72 would be better, with 96 being the ideal.

Going hand-in-hand with the new rental service is an updated Apple TV, or as Jobs put it, “Apple TV Take 2”. Whereas the original Apple TV pretty much required you to have a computer to sync it up with, the new version acts as a stand-alone box. You can rent movies from the iTunes Store in HD through the Apple TV, for only $1 more than the standard resolutions. So library titles go to $3.99 and new releases are $4.99, and no trip to the mailbox or corner Blockbuster is required.

I’m still not convinced that we have a real use for this in our house, given our movie viewing habits. For now, Netflix will continue to suffice, but I’ll be keeping my eyes on the Apple TV, and I’m sure I’ll try out the new rentals even without the new box.

MacBook Air

This had all the buzz, and was the announcement I was most looking forward to. I was ready to pounce on ordering Apple’s new subnotebook, provided it met my personal expectations.

Apple has created the world’s thinnest notebook computer. At its thickest point, the MacBook Air is 0.76 of an inch, and it weighs only three pounds. It comes with a full-size keyboard, a 13.3-inch LED backlit display, and a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Two gigabytes of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, 802.11n wireless networking, Bluetooth, and a built-in iSight camera. A pricey option is to ditch the standard hard drive for a 64 GB solid state drive (viz: no moving parts), and when I say pricey, I do mean pricey: $999 on top of the base $1,799 cost.

You won’t find much in the way of ports on it, either: MagSafe power port, a single USB port, headphone jack, and a micro-DVI port which requires adapters to hook up to external displays. That’s it. The trackpad is larger than on previous MacBook versions, and features multitouch, so you can perform some of those pinch, zoom, and rotate gestures you may have seen with the iPhone.

The downsides to this incredible piece of tech? For me, the hard drive size is the first. I put a 160 GB drive in my four year-old 12-inch PowerBook last year, and have gotten quite used to the extra room it gave me. I’d hate to step back down by half. Only two gigabytes of RAM? And no way to upgrade it? My two year-old iMac is maxed out at 2 GB, and some times I bump against that particular ceiling. I’d really prefer a machine that can handle up to four. The battery is also not replaceable by the user. This might be okay on an iPod or iPhone, but in a full-size computing system devoted to the ultimate road warriors?

Ultimately, I decided this was not the next notebook computer for me. It’s a really awesome system, and if someone were to buy one for me, I wouldn’t hesitate to take it, but that’s not happening. I think I’ll be better served ultimately by a MacBook Pro, and with seven and a half months since the latest edition of those came out, they’re due for a refresh, even a “silent” one like we saw with the Mac Pros last week.

Summation

In the end, it was what I would call a typical Steve Jobs Macworld Expo keynote address. There were the requisite ooohs and aaaahs, Apple’s making some evolutionary gains in all facets of its business, and there was a great new product introduced that has the entire tech world talking. It wasn’t a blow-me-away sort of keynote, as was last year’s with the announcement of the iPhone, but then they can’t all be like that. Still better than anything Bill does on stage.

ATPM 14.01

The January 2008 issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available to help you ring in the new Mac year.

Mike Chamberlain looks back at the first of 2007, and how his desire for a “MacPhone” panned out, and surprisingly so, later in the year. Mark notes how smaller cars might not always be a good thing, but smaller iPods are, and wonders what lies ahead for Apple’s music player line. Mark’s also thankful that FileMaker has remained easy to use, lo these many years. ATPM reader Tricia Roach becomes an ATPM contributor, with a Segments piece on how she uses her Mac’s video capabilities to stay involved in the lives of her grandkids.

This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of ATPM reader Jennifer Curry, from her 2006 trip to Cuba. They feature the island nation’s buildings and cityscapes. Meanwhile, Angie flashes back to 1984 as she and Cortland face off against Lisa in the Mudrix for a final showdown.

Linus takes Baseline, a utility which helps you look at file and folder sizes on your Mac, through its paces. Ed uses BusySync to get things done, allowing others to subscribe to or read his iCal calendars, thus assuring everyone’s on the same page. Chris Lawson tries out, and really likes, the Fin Laptop Handle/Stand, while Lee pairs his iSight up with Iris for some fun. Reader Mark Stoneman contributes a review of Mellel, a word processor I’m fond of, and a must-have for those who work with right-to-left languages such as Hebrew or Arabic.

This issue marks the entry in to the fourteenth year of publishing for About This Particular Macintosh, and we hope it’s a great year for our readers, and Mac users everywhere!

ATPM 13.11

The November issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Wes kicks off the month by covering—what else?—the blogosphere’s reaction to Mac OS X Leopard. He also has a choice bit regarding the ZFS file system, which I encourage you to read. I realize that particular topic sounds boring—I teased Wes I was printing out that part to help me get some sleep—but he’s done a stellar job of condensing a boring subject in to easy-to-understand layman’s terms. Our intrepid blog investigator also dishes out the links on the forthcoming iPhone development kit for application programmers, as well as a few other choice bits.

Mark—who seems to have the same attitude toward mobile phones as my parents—talks iPhone from the Brit perspective, while also pondering the Google goings-on in the mobile phone space. Speaking of pondering, Mark’s also beginning the laptop or desktop? dilemma. He gets extra points for using a title from one of my favorite authors. Lee’s taking a break from his great column, Photoshop for the Curious, returning in our February edition. To tide you over until then, he documents some other Photoshop-related links you may be interested in.

Sylvester offers a great how-to on extending iTunes’ abilities with content presets. ATPM reader Graham Lindsay was nice enough to share photos from his native Australia for this month’s desktop pictures. Just as all seems lost, our intrepid hero reenters the Mudrix to save the woman he loves in this month’s Cortland.

Small business owners may be interested in Ed’s review of Billable, whereas many folks may be interested in Paul’s look at Graph Paper Maker. Yours truly makes an appearance this month, as I contribute to the iPhone Case Roundup, with Lee and David. Lee likes XtremeMac’s Luna, and Ed is impressed with Nisus Writer Pro. Finally, Eric puts SuperSync through its paces.

As usual, you can read this month’s issue in a format of your choosing.

ATPM 13.10

The October issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading enjoyment.

If you haven’t gotten enough iPhone news in the past month, or if you’ve just been vacationing in the Eastern Hindu Kush with Osama, Wes has a big round-up in this month’s Bloggable. Speed is on Mark’s mind, as is, um, more speed. Of a sort. And referencing the first in a certain series of science fiction movies many would know by name, but few will recall by the included reference.

Lee delves in to one of Photoshop’s premier features, layers, while Sylvester talks about your Mac’s speed. (Was there a theme for this issue that no one told me about?) Matthew has a how-to for installing a cooling fan in our beloved Cube. (For the record, he installed it in his Cube, which is not the same as my Cube. We don’t share a Cube. I was using “our” in a communal sense, as in all Cube owners everywhere. Oh, never mind…)

Tim Allen—the photographer, not the actor (though that would be pretty cool)—shares with us some shots he’s taken around the United Kingdom, including his home town of Kent, as part of this month’s desktop pictures selection. The Usual Suspects it ain’t, but to paraphrase Bill and Ted, “Strange things are afoot at Wieser Graphics” in this month’s Cortland.

Chris Lawson tries out a pair of iPod cases, the Claro, and the PodFolio, while Linus puzzles the ins and outs of Crossword Forge. Chris Dudar dives in to digital watermarking with iWatermark, while I am underwhelmed by DLO’s TuneStik. Lee hauls around the Velocity Matrix Backpack, and yours truly reviews Apple’s latest game-changing device, the iPhone.

As usual, ATPM is available in a variety of formats, so you can read it however you choose.

So here I am, vocalizing

Jeff Ventura:

What’s interesting about Windows -> Mac switchers is that they typically feel a need to vocalize their experience in one way or another. That’s pretty remarkable, because it means that somehow Apple knows how to make evangelists out of users. I’m not sure any other company on earth does it as effectively. Apple’s installed base isn’t just an installed base: it’s a field marketing department.

[…]

Aside from very specialized computing tasks, there is literally very little reason to own a dedicated Windows machine anymore. I’d proffer that for the great majority of users, a Mac would work just fine if they do a modicum of research and go into the move with an open mind and the understanding that the Mac != Windows and there will be a learning curve. After that, it’s all good.

Apple: The not-so-premium brand after all

Wherein I shamelessly plug my favorite computing platform.

DealMac has a post where they put three systems in a head-to-head-to-head competition for specificationss and price. The systems? The Sony VAIO VGC-LS37E All-In-One Desktop PC, the HP TouchSmart IQ770 Desktop PC, and Apple’s iMac. The verdict? The iMac comes in cheaper than both of the PCs, and it trumps them both in the specs department. Not to mention the iMac is the best-looking of the three, and you get to use the best operating system in the world, instead of Windblows Windows.

So answer me again on why you’d want to use a Windows machine? Avoid the heartache, people—believe me, with a spouse insisting on bringing a new Dull in to our household, for her use, I’m well acquainted with the heartache—and just buy a Mac.

MarsEdit 2

My favorite blogging client has now been revved to version 2. I’ve been using MarsEdit ever since original developer Brent Simmons rolled out the 1.0 product, and I’ve been very happy with it. A couple of months ago, I began beta-testing new owner Daniel Jalkut’s upgrade of the client, and wow, was I ever blown away. Brent never really had the time to devote to MarsEdit, what with the popularity of NetNewsWire, and Daniel has definitely taken MarsEdit to the next level.

One thing I’ve noticed, being on the beta test lists of a few independent and small-shop Mac developers, is the level of responsiveness from those developers. You’re talking directly with the individual responsible for the product, not some project manager or mid-level flunky who really doesn’t get what’s going on with the application. Daniel is no exception, encouraging great participation from those on the beta list, and he always maintains a professional, and very friendly, attitude. It sounds like the the upgrade release is a hit so far, and no wonder, because MarsEdit 2 is a great product.

Great job, Daniel!

ATPM 13.09

The September issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Former staffer, and still good friend, Raena Armitage provided us with a fun cover this month. Thanks again, Raena! If Rob didn’t already have my undying friendship, well, by the power of Greyskull he has it now, managing to work our behind-the-scenes discussion of the new college football season in to this month’s issue. (I confess, this is one reason why you’re not seeing my iPhone review this month.)

Wes covers the big story of the Mac blogosphere from last month, the outing of Fake Steve Jobs, as well as iPhone-related AT&T issues, the iMac refresh, the new Apple keyboard, the latest addition to the iWork suite, and something having to do with brandy and lobster. Regarding that last, maybe our Wes has been sniffing too much newspaper ink at work or something.

Mark laments the Microsoft-blinders of myriad IT professionals, who don’t quite get that not everyone uses Windows, much less Internet Explorer. And speaking of Microsoft, Mark wonders if there might not be some new measurement of time coming forth. If you’ve ever needed a fancy tile graphic, Lee’s got the lowdown for you in this month’s Photoshop For The Curious, so you can knock it out without having to resort to talking to Crunch, the neon-blue mohawked graphic designer with the spike through his cheeks who blasts emo rock from his cubicle.

ATPM reader Jennifer Curry was kind enough to share some shots she took in 2004 from Australia’s Great Ocean Road. These are some breathtaking views of The 12 Apostles and the London Bridge rock formations. Thanks so much, Jennifer! More and more, the swing dance hall offers naught but misery for Cortland, while Todd suffers iPhone temptation. We’re also given a handy guide to online forum denizens.

Matthew explores the under-the-hood utility Cocktail, which, last time we checked, was not a Tom (Maniac) Cruise vehicle. Ed covers Curio 4.0, while Eric dives in to my feed reader of choice, NetNewsWire 3.0. ATPM’s official flight deck officer, Chris Lawson, isn’t suitably impressed with the radioSHARK 2, while Linus puts Snapz Pro X through its screen-capturing paces. Finally, Wes looks at the online, free-form information manager Stikkit, which doesn’t even require a Mac to use, just a web browser. Preferably one which is not from The-Company-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named. (Sorry. I’m currently reading through the Potter series for the first time ever. Apparently, it’s having an effect.)

As usual, this issue of ATPM is available in a variety of formats to suit your wants, desires, and needs.

Today’s head-smacker

Overheard by Jeff Harrell earlier today:

Wouldn’t it be great if the people who made the iPhone also made a computer?

Really? Really?!?

ATPM 13.08

The August issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

In this month’s Bloggable, Wes makes sure to avoid coverage of “the largest technology premiere since the launch of Windows 95”, which would be the debut of the iPhone. Well, he almost avoids it, but does feature a round-up from the blogosphere concerning the WorldWide Developers Conference, the continuing chase to unmask Fake Steve Jobs, and the tale of Photoshop’s birth. Mark, meanwhile, has found a great benefit in the .Mac service over what he’s been getting from his local broadband provider.

Paul delivers a well-rounded meal of web sites for your browsing digestion, including subway maps, fast food ads versus reality, and a digitally-reproduced manuscript of Portuguese sonnets. Part of getting to the next action in GTD is processing. This month, Ed takes a look at processing reference material, which can play an important role in exactly what action you’ll choose. In the latest Photoshop for the Curious, Lee offers a resolution tutorial. (That would be screen resolution. Conflict resolution…well, that’s another publication.)

This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of staffer David Thompson, and feature scenery from a recent motorcycle trip through parts of Texas and Utah. Cortland finds himself in a spot of trouble with the fuzz, while Angie is paid an unexpected visit. Meanwhile, evil plans are afoot to acquire the Cortland OS.

Andrew enjoys some screen time thanks to El Gato’s EyeTV Hybrid, while Frank Wu offers a double-dose of MagSafe adapters—the Portable Power Station from Battery Geek, and Mikegyver’s MagSafe 120w AC/DC Car/Airline Adapter—for MacBooks and MacBooks Pro. Finally, Linus finds learning fun with Travelogue 360 Paris. I kind of wish my son was older so he and I could play this game together.

As usual, this issue of ATPM is available in a variety of formats for your reading pleasure.

ATPM 13.07

The July issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Ellyn kicks things off by noting how the Internet’s managed to let us support our servicemen and women in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in wars past. In this month’s Bloggable, Wes has a round-up of posts on—what else?—the iPhone. Mike laments the pains of the tech upgrade cycle, but looks forward to what the future may bring. Mark offers his “furs thoughts” on Mac OS X Leopard, based on the information recently released at the Worldwide Developers Conference. As he looks forward, Mark also looks back, noting how old technology, while great at the time, may not be so great in the future when we need it once again.

Ted returns with an ATPO of a different sort, comparing past WWDCs, as well as Apples and oranges, with today’s. Lee delves in to some of the cool stuff one can do with Photoshop with layer effects, while offering the acquisition saga of his latest tech toy, a new MacBook Pro. Yours truly has an acquisition saga of his own, as I relate my tale of iPhone hunting.

This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of ATPM reader Forrest Brown, and feature Crowders Mountain, North Carolina. “Uncomfortable” is the word of the day for the Cortland crew: at the office, on the dance floor, or in MySpace. No one is having a good time on this particular night, well, except for maybe Steve. Qaptain Qwerty interviews the guy waiting for One More Thing™.

Linus plays around with Crossword Express, while Frank Wu puts the i-Volution Shell, a carrying case for MacBooks, through its paces. Lee’s impressed with the PocketDock AV, and Paul takes Redline for a test drive, though I think we need to talk about those gas receipts he submitted for reimbursement.

As always, ATPM is available in a variety of formats for your reading pleasure.

ATPM 13.05

The May issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

April showers certainly brought May flowers for Apple, notably the kind that grow from the branches of the money tree. Rob provides a rundown of Apple’s latest financials in this month’s Welcome. Wes has the blogosphere round-up on the latest digital rights hubbub, set off by the open letter by Steve Jobs to end DRM on music. When you’re already using the coolest computing system in the world, where do you go next? If you’re Mark, you start letting a robot clean your carpets.

Lee takes us through Photoshop’s bag of tricks concerning color, hues, saturation, gradients, and all sorts of other goodies you can tweak your photos with. In closing out her series on web accessibility, Miraz looks at the capabilities of Firefox and Opera. Matthew does some hacking on what is still my favorite Mac to have owned, the Cube, shoving a XFX GeForce 6200 graphics card into our beloved lucite box.

Lee shares some great photos he snagged at the 2007 AirFest, held last month at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. And it may look like this month’s Cortland is having a severe case of schizophrenia, but trust us, it hits on several plot points of importance.

Miraz thinks Digital Photography Expert Techniques is pretty good, but badly missnamed, as it is about workflow after the fact of shooting photos, rather than during, the latter of which being what I would have thought from the title. Lee has a double-dose of reviews this month—I guess May turned out to be Lee Bennett theme month—looking at a pair of iPod accessories: the Dock Extender, which I am gear-lusting for; and the PocketDock Line Out USB.

Chris raves about the Elevator, Griffin’s replacement for the iCurve, which I used to use extensively. David uses Pando, which I’ve been following closely, but have not yet had a need to use. Ed closes this month’s issue out with a look at Yep, billed as “iPhoto for PDFs”. Personally, I store a lot of my PDFs in EagleFiler, but Yep certainly does look interesting.

As always, you can read this month’s ATPM online, as an offline webzine, a screen-optimized PDF, or a print-optimized PDF. We offer a variety of flavors for your consumption. Enjoy!

Professional, interesting and well-written and edited

No, the title doesn’t refer to this blog. (Though I’m trying.) It refers to the publication I’m proud to be a part of, About This Particular Macintosh, and comes from Claire Rottenberg’s Quality Mac Websites:

ATPM is a professional, interesting and well-written and edited magazine. It has a large variety of content, ranging from short news bits to in-depth articles and product reviews, so there is something for everyone in each month’s issue. Take a look at the latest issue and I’m sure you’ll find something worthwhile in it and, like me, will become a regular reader of ATPM.

Kudos to the great volunteers we have on staff at ATPM, and thank you, Claire, for the kind words.

ATPM 13.04

The April issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Chris Dudar, the staff’s resident 3D artist, provides us with some great cover art this month. Good work, Chris!

Wes kicks things off by noting the response from a lot of the tech crowd to Windows Vista: yawn. Those that have given a flip have turned on those who don’t care for it, like Chris Pirillo, and prominent switchers think it’s time for Pirillo to get a Mac. This and more in Wes’s monthly blogosphere roundup. Mike notes that while it’s not all all roses all the time with Macs, it still beats the alternative.

Mark notes that there is scientific evidence that size does matter. For display size, you plebeians! Display size! Sheesh… Ed returns with another GTD column, focusing on the hunting/gathering aspects of information collection. Lee continues Photoshop for the Curious, this month exploring levels and curves. Miraz looks at the browser side of things when it comes to web accessibility.

Chris Lawson manages to tie together Billy Madison, blogging, reviews, and business ethics, all in one tidy package. Lee provides us with this month’s desktop pictures, shot in New England in 1997. In this month’s Cortland, our hero finds himself traveling to other dimensions, while persons from other dimensions travel to ours, and the Dark Lord I.T. is trying to travel to other dimensions, or our dimension, or…Heck, there’s just a lot of dimension-traveling going on this month!

Matthew picks apart the open-source sound editor, Audacity, while Lawson pores over an accessory many a business traveler will want to take a look at, the Keynamics Aviator Laptop Stand. Linus plays around with Dodge That Anvil!, and Lee is less than impressed with the new HomeDock Deluxe from DLO. Ed peruses Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Mac OS X Backups 2.0, a tome I heartily recommend. And the man that leads off the April issue closes it out for us, as Chris Dudar reviews the app that helped make this month’s cover art, Wings3D.

As always, ATPM is available in a wide range of choices for your reading pleasure.

The new shirt arrived today

ATPM 13.03

Oh, right. The March issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. You’d think someone on the editorial staff would be more aware…

Angus decides to reward Microsoft’s recent marketing efforts regarding the Zune and Vista by purchasing a brand-new 17-inch MacBook Pro. Yeah, when I first read his column, I had problems with the logic there, too, but someone informed me it has something to do with this thing called “sarcasm”. In this month’s Bloggable, Wes tracks the biggest news making the circuit of the Mac blogosphere, Steve Jobs’ recent condemnation of DRM for music downloads.

Mark has a quick hit on publishing formats, notably the resistance coming against Microsoft’s Office Open XML, because the words “Microsoft” and “open” go so well together, don’t they? (I like this sarcasm thing. Must note to use it more.) Lee continues his fabulous series, Photoshop for the Curious, this month walking us through color calibration. I really could use one of those monitor calibration tools. Miraz has a great column on web accessibility this month, one I can really relate to, given how I am amongst the spectacled crowd. (We also learn Miraz’s age this month, and please note this was volunteered by the author; our mothers taught us well enough to know better than to ever ask that of a lady.)

This month’s desktop pictures are courtesy of ATPM reader Le Anne Brown, and feature the land of Tasmania (coincidentally, the home of ATPM’s own Tasmanian devil, former staffer Raena Armitage). Strange things are afoot for Cortland at the swing dance-hosting lodge, which appears to be more than meets the eye. Staffer Linus Ly doffs his editorial cap for that of an artisté, introducing the ATPM readership to Qaptain Qwerty.

You may notice a striking similarity between Qaptain Qwerty and the review of Art Text. As a member of the editorial team, allow me to reassure you, this is not accidental. Ed got his hands on a piece of tech that’s found its way on to my personal gear lust list, the SnapScan S500M, by Fujitsu.

I never thought I’d have the opportunity to write, “Ellyn lays the smack down with Smack Mahjong”, but you can’t pass up those opportunities when they present themselves. Finally, Lee reviews the intriguing TuneView from Keyspan: leave your iPod connected to your entertainment system, but have its screen in the palm of your hand with the TuneView remote. Sounds sweet.

As always, you can enjoy About This Particular Macintosh online, or in a manner more appropriate for your reading preference.

A signature problem

So I have this email signature. Actually, I have about three. One is the somewhat standard signature I use for all ATPM-related correspondence. The other two are personal sigs which vary only in the email address contained in the signature. One is for the address at this domain, and the other is my Gmail address.

I have set up these signatures with keystroke shortcuts in TypeIt4Me, which I encourage you to check out. Without going in to too much detail, these three signatures are shorthanded “asig”, “gsig”, and “rsig”, and this works very well. For the most part.

I seem to have this memory muscle problem with the last abbreviation. The other two I can rattle off with nary a conscious thought going from my brain to my fingers on the keyboard, but the last has proven to be rather elusive. Instead of typing “rsig” I find myself typing “risg” instead. I even did it in the previous sentence, and had to backspace and fix it.

The obvious and lazy solution is to create a new abbreviation in TypeIt4Me that automagically puts in the proper signature when I mistype the actual abbreviation, because there’s little chance “risg” will ever be a real word in the English language, but that still doesn’t help with why I’m mistyping it in the first place. Bizarre.

That didn’t take long

This post is coming to you from MarsEdit 1.1.3, the first release of my blogging app of choice since Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software acquired it from NewsGator. This update fixes my biggest druther with MarsEdit, where images flicker when you’re previewing your post. Thanks, Daniel!

Speaking of not taking long, Lee and I were chatting via IM last night while he watched the Oscars, and, of course, there was talk regarding the iPhone teaser commercial. I wondered jokingly how long it would be before some post showed up somewhere detailing all of the stars shown in the commercial. Lee provided the answer: two hours. And here I thought I didn’t have a life. I’m sure there’s now a post somewhere detailing each of the movies or shows featured in the commercial, but I’m too lazy to google it.

Jumping on the Bandwagon

Bandwagon, going live in two days, is an iTunes backup for Mac users. They’re offering free one-year subscriptions if you blog about them, and like Eric, I can be a cheap date.

Frenzic

Tired of Tetris™? No good at first-person shooter games? Want something quicker than world-building or war strategy games? Frenzic may be the answer you’re looking for.

A joint release from The Iconfactory and ARTIS Software, Frenzic is an addictive puzzle game that you can play solo or against others online.

Jobs and company should seriously be looking at getting this game on the upcoming iPhone.

Sorry, Windows users need not apply.

Update, 1:00 PM CST: If you decide to register Frenzic, feel free to add me as a friend.

“Shameless Mac OS X imitator”

Julio Ojeda-Zapata, for the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

I praise Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system, and I also curse it.

[…]

But after waiting five years — as in half a decade — for this thing, I think I should get something revolutionary, a PC operating system so astonishing it makes the competition look laughably primitive. The almighty Microsoft made this, right? So Vista—being released to consumers Tuesday—has to be jaw-droppingly superior, right?

Well, it’s not. Vista hardly rocked my world during weeks of testing. It’s a fine Windows upgrade, but it’s also a shameless rip-off (and not quite the equal) of another major operating system, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X.

That begs the question: Why not just use OS X?

Those upgrading from XP likely will have to get a new computer anyway because Vista doesn’t work properly on most older PCs. […] So, instead of purchasing a Windows PC, they could—and typically should—get an Apple Macintosh computer running OS X.

[Emphasis in the original. —R]

ATPM 13.02

The February issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Kudos to Lee for this month’s cover art. He ran the idea by me via IM one night, I thought it was great, and Michael gave it the final thumbs-up. Our thanks to Steven Frank for playing along. In case you missed the link, you can also get the cover art as a desktop picture this month.

Well, well, well, well, well. What’s that? Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld Expo last month? You don’t say. Why, I believe that means Wes has to eat his hat. And given how another ATPM staffer is resident in the city Wes currently calls home, I’m sure we can arrange a photo shoot of the happy event, because let’s face it Wes, tasting is not the same thing as eating. I’m sure we can find a nice Rachel Ray recipe wherein we substitute the meat of choice with the hat. Perhaps former ATPM staffer and amateur chef Tom Bridge can help us out in that regard.

While we hammer out all of those details, Wes does have the blogosphere’s coverage of Apple’s next paradigm-shifting product, as well as weigh-ins on MacHeist and MacZOT. iPhone fever has certainly set in amongst the ATPM staff, as Mike Chamberlain attests to in this month’s Mac About Town. He talks about some other stuff, too. I think. Did I mention the iPhone fever settling amongst the staff? Angus takes us on a safari of the Apple landscape, including, yes, the iPhone, but oh so much more as well.

We welcome Ed Eubanks to the staff as we present Next Actions, a column devoted to to using your Mac to get things done. Lee presents the third chapter in the ongoing saga of Photoshop for the Curious, with a look at the application’s menus and a tutorial on getting better grayscale (viz: “black and white”, even though that’s really a misnomer) photos from your color pics. Chris Dudar has a beginner’s guide to the UPS, and no, he’s not asking what brown can do for you.

Reader David Kettlewell was kind enough to share some photos from Sweden’s “Little Leaf Sea” for this month’s desktop pictures selection. Cortland has junior-high flashbacks after a night of swing dancing with Angie doesn’t go like he planned. Meanwhile, the chameleonesque Agent Smith arrives in town, palming a familiar-looking comm device…

Ellyn isn’t very smitten with Arctic Quest, but David is quite taken with MoRU. Our eastern seaboard surfer, Eric, tries out NetworkLocation, while Frank Wu beats me to a review of Booq’s Python XL System. Matthew wraps up this month’s reviews with a look at Eltima’s SWF Movie Player.

I remarked to Michael that this month’s issue was our most content-packed out of the past few months, and we still had four writers unable to submit this month! (Hey, we have real jobs outside of ATPM, you know?) We’re both very pleased, and our thanks go out to the staff for their efforts.

As usual, this issue is available in a variety of flavors for your reading pleasure.

FinderPop Universal has landed

Turly’s brought out a universal version of the venerable FinderPop, now a preference pane.

I found with earlier builds of the OS X version of FinderPop that I wasn’t using it nearly as much as I did under OS 9, due in large part to my use of Quicksilver. However, I can still find a use for FinderPop in my workflow, and I encourage you to give it a go and see if it has a place in your workflow, too.

Twittering just got easier with Tweet

Scott McNulty noted Tweet in his Twitter feed as well as on TUAW. I downloaded Ted Leung’s Growl-modified version of Coda Hale’s script. Coda has good installation and usage instructions in the original Tweet script, which you can use if you don’t care about Growl support.

Tweet combines the power of AppleScript with that of Quicksilver (you are using Quicksilver, aren’t you?) to make posting to your Twitter account easier and faster than ever. Sorry, Windows users, but all of this, except the Twitter service itself, is Mac-only.

Once again, we learn why they’re called analysts

So let me get this straight:

Apple sets new company records for revenue and profit, beats the Street’s estimates, and ships 28 percent more Macs and 50 percent more iPods than they did this time a year ago, but because a bunch of analysts don’t like future estimates, the stock price takes a dive?

No wonder monkeys do just as good a job at the stock market as analysts.

Tell me again why I should upgrade

Walt Mossberg reviews Windows Vista for the Wall Street Journal:

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple’s operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.

There are some big downsides to this new version of Windows. To get the full benefits of Vista, especially the new look and user interface, which is called Aero, you will need a hefty new computer, or a hefty one that you purchased fairly recently. The vast majority of existing Windows PCs won’t be able to use all of Vista’s features without major hardware upgrades. They will be able to run only a stripped-down version, and even then may run very slowly.

In fact, in my tests, some elements of Vista could be maddeningly slow even on new, well-configured computers.

Something tells me that the only Vista-running PC we’ll see in our home will either be my wife’s company-provided laptop, when their IT department decides the latest version of Windows is “safe” enough with which to conduct business, or if I decide to throw Vista on my Intel-powered iMac. The latter would, at most, be for web site testing, and pure kicks.

I’m pretty much done with Windows PCs at this point. The Mac does everything I want, does it better, does it more intuitively and elegantly, and the Mac is safer. Sure, you can argue this locks me in to a single company, Apple, but then Windows users are pretty much locked in to a single company, too, aren’t they? Oh, you can buy your PC from Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, or build it yourself, but you still have to go to Microsoft for the operating system.

(Linux zealots are not invited to this discussion, so pipe down already. Besides, most of you are fawning over Ubuntu nowadays, which still locks you in to a single distribution/company for that particular flavor of the OS. Or you like SUSE, or Debian, or Red Hat, for whatever your reasons may be. And most people don’t feel like hunting down drivers for their Sony notebook just so it can properly display all available resolutions or connect wirelessly to the Internet, things you still have to do with Linux variants.)

For the record, in his review, Mossberg does acknowledge that as far as Windows itself goes, Vista is the best version yet. Which isn’t surprising, since each version since the original has been successively better, with the exception of Windows ME (what a disaster that beast was).

When the desktop PC I built my wife two years ago outlives its usefulness, it will get replaced with either a hand-me-down iMac, or a Mac mini. It’s one thing to do Windows tech support for a living, but when it comes to home computing, that’s something I’d rather not have to worry about.

DiskWarrior 4 now shipping

I just received my shipment notification from Alsoft that DiskWarrior 4 is on its way.

ATPM 13.01

Welcome to 2007! The January issue issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. With this issue, ATPM enters its thirteenth year of publication! I am very proud to be a part of this staff, and would like to thank all of the staffers for a great 2006. I’m looking forward to the next twelve months of celebrating “the personal computing experience” with all of you!

Our thanks to Charles Anthony for this month’s cover art. We’re always looking for artwork, so if you’re interested, please let the editors know.

Recently, Michael and I had a discussion regarding sponsorships for the publication. ATPM has always been a free, volunteer-staffed magazine. We don’t make a profit, and any monies generated by sponsorships or ad revenue is pumped back in to the publication’s hosting costs. With twelve years of issues hosted online, the potential of high bandwidth costs is always hanging over us, and our parents taught us the value of being prepared for a rainy day. The result of our discussion is that ATPM will no longer accept direct sponsorships or advertising or advertising. The revenue generated by the Google and Yahoo ads you see on the site, coupled with those of our affiliate shopping links, is currently sustaining us. For those former sponsors and direct advertisers, we thank you for your sponsorship and enjoyed the many relationships they enabled. Our best wishes to your respective companies in 2007. If you enjoy reading ATPM, please help us cover our costs by clicking on the ads which may be of interest to you, and using the affiliate shopping links.

As the new year dawns, we welcome two new staffers. Linus Ly will be assisting on the editorial side of the fence, helping lay down the grammatical law in the copy-editing trenches. Chris Dudar is very much in to 3D graphics, and will be covering applications in that realm. We’re glad to have you guys on board!

Mike kicks the new year off by exploring his hopes and dreams in the Macintosh realm for 2007. Lee continues the Photoshop for the Curious tutorial, with Palettemania! He also provides some outstanding fireworks photos for this month’s desktop pictures section. Speaking of outstanding, er, out-stepping, er, stepping out—yeah, that’s it, stepping out—Cortland learns that some times you have to swing in the right direction for the one you love.

Wes reviews Audio Hijack Pro, a tool I’ve found quite useful in making my own MP3 ringtones. (You’re not actually paying three bucks for a ringtone, are you?) I found coconutBattery, examined for the ATPM readership by David Thompson, fit the bill last year (wow, it really was last year) in diagnosing my PowerBook’s failing battery. As noted above, Chris Dudar opens up the 3D realm to the ATPM readership, this month with a review of DAZ/Studio, better known as D/S, and this one’s not from Nintendo. Finally, Lee’s not as impressed with the iTalk Pro as he was with the original iPod recording unit from Griffin.

You can always find ATPM in a flavor of your liking, and we hope we can serve many more appetizing morsels in the coming year.

A buggy musical

If you’ve ever wondered what Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser sounds like when he’s singing, you can find out from viewing the hilarious Buggy Saints Row: The Musical. (Caution: Some adult language in the songs.)

[Wave of the phin to John.]

MacSanta

How would you like 20% off the best spam-killing app for the Mac? Or maybe 20% off the easiest disk image creator? Perhaps 20% off a professional text editor is more to your liking.

Now that you’ve done all of your gift shopping for everyone else, treat yourself to discount savings on numerous Mac applications from top-notch developers with MacSanta.

XP or Vista?

So I purchased a copy of Parallels Desktop a few months back, when they were offering it at a reduced price while still in beta. I haven’t gotten around to installing it since, mostly because I didn’t have a legit copy of Windows to go with it, and I’m not much interested in dinking around with any Linux variants.

Lately, I’ve been intrigued at the prospect of running Windows from a virtual environment on my Intel iMac, mostly for web browser testing. (My sites don’t look nearly as nice in Internet Explorer as they do in, well, pretty much every other browser.) And long ago I promised I’d help out with some of our church’s web stuff, and they use FrontPage (yes, I know—ick!).

The question then is, do I get the latest version of Windows XP, or do I jump in to the exploratory waters of Windows Vista? Let me know what you think.

ATPM 12.12

The December issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

We debut a new column this month, with Lee’s Photoshop for the Curious. As he notes, this is not a “Photoshop for Beginners”-type tutorial, but rather a look at various elements of Photoshop that occasional users would benefit from. If you’re a Photoshop Elements user like myself, you will find that many of the tips translate well.

Mike Chamberlain offers his personal tour of the Macintosh blogosphere in this month’s Mac of All Trades, while Miraz puts SeakMonkey through the web-accessibility wringer. Sylvester continues looking at Activity Monitor, this time using it to plug memory leaks. (Those would be leaks in the Mac’s memory, not Sylvester’s. His memory is just fine. At least it appears that way to the rest of the staff.)

This month’s desktop pictures are brought to us by our Mr. Chamberlain, taken on his European sojourn this past summer. We continue to see the genesis of Cortland’s employment at Wieser Graphics, while dark forces prep their move to the Midwest.

Lee has a double-dose of reviews this month, looking at Rogue Amoeba’s Fission and the media device, iRecord. Matthew pokes around with OpenMenu X, while David notes one of my favorite iTunes utilities, Synergy. Finally, for all you gamers, Andrew rocks on some first-person shooters as he puts the Tankstick through its paces.

As always, this issue of ATPM is available in a variety of reading formats for your enjoyment.

More Get a Mac

There are three new “Get a Mac” commercials: “Gift Exchange”, “Sales Pitch”, and “Meant for Work”. The worst of the three, and probably the worst of all the “Get a Mac” ads, has to be “Sales Pitch”. I really like “Meant for Work”, especially the end when PC wanders off in disgust, saying, “I have got to go…listen to some emo.” I’d probably feel the same way.

When keyboard shortcuts collide

I just tried to mark as read all messages in a Mailsmith mailbox by hitting the K key, which is what you use to mark all messages as read in NetNewsWire. (For what it’s worth, marking a message as read in Mailsmith is accomplished by Cmd-M.)

ATPM 12.11

The November issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Mike Chamberlain notes some of the odds and ends one might take with them for their mobile computing needs, based on his five-week European trip this past summer. Mark Tennent manages to weave together Keats, the MyBook Pro (yes, MyBook, not MacBook), the Honda Civic, and Mac OS X, as he looks at function versus form. Ted delves in to writing environments and their relation to outliners in this month’s ATPO, including the one I’m currently using for NaNoWriMo.

PageSpinner is the latest web development app to go under Miraz’s web accessibility microscope, and Sylvester has a tour of an app on your Mac you may not even realize is there, Activity Monitor. Lee got some great shots at a butterfly garden, which he shares in this month’s Desktop Pictures section. The misery of Cortland’s search for work continues, leading him to Wieser Graphics and his first—and second—embarrassing moments with Angie.

It’s been four years since Lee first reviewed EarthDesk, and a lot has changed in that time, so he took the opportunity to look at this intriguing app again. He also looks at RouteBuddy, a mapping application for your Mac that can work with supported GPS devices that have USB. Finally, while the Spaces virtual desktops feature of Mac OS X is still on the horizon, David Thompson sees if one can get similar functionality now from VirtueDesktops.

We’re still looking for help in the editorial, writing, and art departments. If you would like to contribute cover art to an upcoming issue, have a keen eye for grammar and spelling to edit copy, or have an itch to write about the Mac world, drop us a line. As always, at ATPM we are proud to offer our readers choices in how they consume our product. Enjoy!

Introducing EagleFiler

Once again, I’ve had the pleasure of being “present at the creation” of one of Michael’s software endeavors. EagleFiler is an information collection and management application that’s super easy to use. Dump whatever you want to in to this thing: plain text, rich text, PDFs, web archives, emails, images; pretty much any digital document you can create.

EagleFiler differs from a lot of its competition in that it stores its library in Finder format, so your documents are not locked in to a database or someone’s proprietary storage system. Did you dump a rich text file in to EagleFiler, but you want to do some heavy editing to it? No problem: you can open it in Word, TextEdit, or the word processor of your choice, make your changes, save it, and you’ll see the changes in EagleFiler.

As has been the case with pretty much all of Michael’s software initiatives, this one was born out of his own desire for an app to do something that no other app was currently doing. He and I have talked about an application like EagleFiler for a few years now, mostly because nothing out there satisfied us when it came to email archiving. (Here’s a secret about both Michael and myself: we’re digital pack rats, and he’s worse than I am. He saves every email he sends and receives. Every one.) We’re both Mailsmith users, but the larger the app’s database gets, the more of a performance drag it incurs. Offloading either individual emails, or entire mail boxes, helps, and EagleFiler is the first application I’ve felt safe with to do just that.

I’ve been using EagleFiler full time since mid-August, when the first alpha version was released to the merry little band of testers of which I’m honored to be a part. It’s been rock-solid for me every step of the way, even as the testers suggested, and Michael added, new features through the app’s development. Go download EagleFiler and try it for thirty days, gratis. Then, show your appreciation for Michael’s hard work by registering the app, and support a developer of quality Mac software.

“Just let me lie here and depreciate.”

Maury notes that Apple has posted three new “Get a Mac” ads: “Counselor”; “Better Results”—which will likely get a lot of buzz; and “Self Pity”, my favorite, and the source of this post’s title.

ATPM 12.10

The October issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Wes runs down the blogosphere traffic on the is-it-or-isn’t-it AirPort hack in this month’s Bloggable. Mike Chamberlain is one of two new staffers joining the ATPM ranks this month, and the first of his “Mac of all Trades” is a trip down memory lane. Mark Tennent comes to the realization that size really does matter. (Get your mind out of the gutter; we’re talking about displays.)

Miraz Jordan’s look at web-accessibility capabilities in web development apps continues, and she’s impressed with Nvu. Angus Wong muses on the effect of Microsoft’s Zune on the Apple ecosystem, while Sylvester Roque offers a helpful look at that oh-so-mystifying document, the crash log.

This month’s Desktop Pictures are again courtesy of Robert Reis, and his trip to Germany earlier this year for the World Cup. Speaking of trips down memory lane, Cortland returns with a nostalgic journey from college to employment.

Lee looks at A Better Finder Rename, a utility I’d use if I had a lot of stuff to rename, which I very rarely do. Chris wants to like the iWoofer, really he does, but…well, you’ve have to read the whole review. If you’re thinking of doing music on your Mac, you may want to start with Making Music on the Apple Mac, which is what Sylvester did. Finally, our other new staffer, David Thompson, shows off the darling of PC emulation for the Mac, Parallels Desktop.

As always, you can get your kicks on Route 66, but if you want to read this month’s issue, you’d be better served other ways.

Macbook Egg Frying

Macbook Egg Frying
Originally uploaded by Pieter Pieterse.

You’ve heard the expression, “hot enough to fry an egg”. Pieter Pieterse decided to do exactly that, whipping up a little breakfast poultry with his MacBook Pro.

Are you a Windows user?

Windows has no users…

Warning: adult language on page linked above.

[Via the Fontosaurus.]

No IMAP for Mailsmith

Rich Siegel, CEO of Bare Bones, confirmed earlier this evening on the Mailsmith-Talk email list that Mailsmith will not be seeing IMAP support. In an attempt to lay to rest much oft-repeated rumors about the company’s email client, Siegel said:

Since we released 2.1.5, an enormous amount of work has gone into Mailsmith. Much of that work is underneath the hood, toward supporting new features and improving performance & stability. The version of Mailsmith in which I am typing this message implements a great deal of what has in the past been discussed on this list.

Most of the rework that we’ve completed was started with IMAP support in mind. After several false starts on the whiteboard, however, we put down the pens and carefully backed away. Despite our best desires and intentions and efforts, Mailsmith is not going to support IMAP. (The FAQ has been updated accordingly.)

So if you’re one of those holdouts waiting for the next rev of Mailsmith to support IMAP, so you can switch over, you can stop waiting.

I have never had much need for IMAP, so this is no big loss for me. Mailsmith remains my email client of choice, and despite temptation to switch to Apple Mail, especially with the new Leopard version on the horizon, I look forward to Mailsmith’s next release with enthusiasm.

Inviting the spies to the party

Recall the various pokes of fun Jobs and company took at Microsoft last month during Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference? They’re fresh in my mind, because yesterday I listened to Jobs’ keynote; it was included in Engadget’s podcast line-up, I’m a few episodes behind, and I figured, even though I knew all of the contained info from reading reports on the web, what the hell.

A thought which hit me out of the blue a few moments ago, while I was cleaning dishes, of all things, is this:

More than once, Jobs and company would say something to the effect of “We have other really cool new features coming in Leopard, but we don’t want to share them here because Microsoft may try to copy them in to Vista.” (Vista is, in case you’ve been in a cave with Osama, the next, long-delayed version of Windows. Leopard is the next version of Mac OS X.)

Problem: Who is the largest developer for the Mac OS outside of Apple?

Problem #2: Do you think Microsoft, being the largest developer outside of Apple, didn’t send programmers to WWWDC?

Problem #3: Did not all developers attending WWDC receive the Leopard Developer Preview?

So I guess the jokes are just for those still trapped inside the RDF.

Core 2 Duo 24-inch iMac

The whole downside to Apple switching to Intel-based processors is that my brand-new-this-past-February 20-inch Core Duo iMac now becomes outdated much faster than it previously would have.

Miscellany

• For you baseball aficionados, Tiff has a great story on what happened when she gave tickets to some coworkers, and how they thanked her.

• Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, affectionately known as the MacBU, has its own blog.
  
  Via The Iconfactory

• Someone took the house I, and I’m sure thousands of others, would love to live in—Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater—and put it in Half Life 2.
  
  Via del.icio.us

ATPM 12.09

The September issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

Wes examines the kerfluffle du jour in the Mac blogosphere, that of the supposed Airport wi-fi hack which, as more and more evidence is examined, appears to be a complete fake. It’s a shame that this falsehood had to be propagated at the same time Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference was going on.

In the offering is another double dose from Mark, who looks at the power of the press when it comes to a conflict resolution, and the trickle-down effect of broadband access in the United Kingdom. Ted discusses new business models, as they pertain to the outlining community, holding up Hog Bay’s Mori as an example, in this month’s ATPO.

Chuck takes a break from showing you how to get more out of FileMaker, and instead offers a roundup of what’s new in the newly-released FileMaker Pro 8.5. Miraz Jordan continues her look at development tools that can make pages which meet basic standards for Web accessibility, this time giving RapidWeaver the what-for. If you’re interested in running Classic Mac software on your Intel Mac, Chuck shows you how in this month’s How To section.

This month’s desktop pictures are again brought to us courtesy of Robert Reis. These photos of the rolling German countryside were taken during Robert’s recent trip to Deutschland for the World Cup.

Matthew takes the PowerPC-only Guest PC for a spin, while Ellyn decided to talk to her computer this month. She was reviewing iListen after all. Lee examines the TVMax and TVMicro from Miglia, and Wes looks at the very interesting WriteRoom, which will be getting its own workout on phischbowl computing systems.

As usual, you can read the latest issue of ATPM online, or in one of three other formats. We aim to please.

Miscellany

• The U.S. Army now has podcasts.

• Picture Framer is one of myriad non-productive widgets, but it’s probably the first one of that category that I like.

• There are new Get a Mac ads, and in “Trust Mac”, I swear Justin Long is about to truly crack up every time he has to look at John Hodgman wearing the glasses and fake mustache.
  
  [Via Paul.]

Miscellany

Michael has announced that C-Command now has forums for all of its products.

I helped him do some testing with the forum boards—which means we spent about ten minutes on it—and if you’re a SpamSieve or DropDMG user, I hope to see you around the virtual water cooler.

Messy networks.

Dear God in Heaven.

[Via Firewheel Design.]

Just when I thought there was never going to be anything interesting on Yahoo’s corporate blog, they have races with toy babies triggered by the licking of lollipops.

ATPM 12.08

The August issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Wes kicks things off by noting in this month’s Bloggable that we still really don’t have much to discuss in the Mac blogosphere but the departure of Pilgrim and Doctorow from the Mac-using citizenry. My hunch is that Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference is going to change that very shortly.

The plenteous Mark Tennent is tired of all the beeping in the world, and wishes Apple would turn its interface design skills loose on washers, dryers, and car radios. He’d also like to see a new sort of computer expo, where systems could be tested, real world-style, much like the test drive of an automobile before purchase.

Publisher, editor-in-chief, developer, hiker, and all-around nice guy Michael Tsai returns to the pages of ATPM with a look at Mac OS X’s increasing stability. Miraz Jordan continues her series on web accessiblity, this time putting Sandvox under the microscope. Sylvester is making good use of the summertime, cannonballing in to the world of Automator.

Angus Wong ponders the new Zune music player from Microsoft, and the notion of corporate character. Sylvester uses all of that Automator learning to send automated birthday greetings. ATPM reader Robert Reis traveled to Germany to cheer on Trinidad & Tobago in the FIFA World Cup, and was kind enough to share some of his shots with us for this month’s desktop pictures selection.

Lee spends a good deal of time in InDesign, so he was a shoo-in for the review of O’Reilly’s Adobe InDesign CS2 One On One. Paul upgrades his home entertainment center with the addition of Elgato’s EyeTV 250, and, fittingly enough, the Sylvester Roque edition of ATPM closes with his review of the how-to book, Keep It Simple With GarageBand.

We have several open positions on the ATPM staff, and we’re looking to add regular reviewers to our stable of writers. If you’re interested, please drop us a line.

Miscellany

The federal government is apparently looking at creating a national SMS alert system.

[Via MobileTracker.]

Congratulations to Kyle MacDonald, who, one year and fourteen trades later, bartered a red paper clip for a house.

Making sure you tipped the right amount after the fact doesn’t do your server much good, does it?

Miscellany

John points to a 94x magnification of Velcro being pulled apart. Wicked cool.

You can also see Scotch tape being ripped, more Velcro, still more Velcro, and Equisetum strobilus, all worth a look.

How much do I love Default Folder? Its functionality should be built in to OS X.

(I was just using it quite a bit today, lots of saving in different locales, etc., and I thought a shout-out was in order.)

After months of waiting, I found it. Part of a pint was consumed this evening. It was yummy. Retrophisch™ Recommended!

This is how you remind me

I like iCal’s alarm features, but there is one feature request I have: I’d like to have both an e-mail sent and have an alarm message pop up on screen. For now, it’s an either/or proposition, and which one I select depends on the type of event I need the reminder for, and when said event takes place. Having the option of setting both types of alarms covers all of the bases.

Miscellany

Oh, if true, a tabbed Finder would rock.

(Yes, I am aware Path Finder has this functionality already.)

You may have seen Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte”, not realizing what a masterpiece of impressionist painting it is. My first exposure to it, and I’m betting for lots of children of the ’80s, was thanks to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Now, the famous painting has been recreated by those crazy cheeseheads.

It kind of sucks that the 1.0b1 version of a piece of software has crashed more on me in two days of use than the alpha verisons have in the past year. Update: I guess I wasn’t clear in my above disappointment. For those keeping score, I’ve “downgraded” to Adium X 0.89.1.

Adium 1.0b1

I note with amusement my pal Damien’s post on TUAW regarding the release of the 1.0b1 version of Adium, in which he writes, “Please note that this is still in beta, though I was using it last night without any significant problems presenting themselves.”

I realize TUAW’s audience includes many non-geek types, who are happily using iChat, and haven’t yet discovered Adium, but it still brought a grin to my face to see a somewhat boilerplate beta-warning line for software that, while technically still in development, has been very stable—for me, at least—over the past year I’ve been using it. This is the first version I’ve seen with the 1.0 moniker attached to it in any form.

If you don’t use the voice and video chat features of iChat much, you should check out Adium (new beta). It supports multiple chat protocols (AIM, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, Jabber (Gtalk), ICQ, IRC, and more…), has a logging feature I have found most useful in finding URIs or other bits of info I forgot to note elsewhere, and is open source, so there’s no proprietary lock-in, if that’s something you’re concerned about.

A compliment from MDJ

MacJournals recently released the third installment of its 2005-2006 MDJ Power 25. The Power 25 is a ranking of the twenty-five most influential persons with regard to the Macintosh platform. These persons are voted on by a select group of Apple insiders, developers, and media types.

In the “Unheralded” section of the final installment, MDJ had this to say:

Only writers from TidBITS and Macworld made the list again, blanking out the talented staffs at print publications like MacAddict and at online journals such as About This Particular Macintosh (whose editor, Michael Tsai, is also the author of DropDMG and SpamSieve, two best-of-class shareware products).

I have long thought that we have a fantastic staff working on ATPM, one reason why I continue my involvement with the publication.

Unlike the other publications noted in the MDJ quote, our staff is all-volunteer; we all have “real” jobs. (Well, most of us do, any way.) Each month our writers churn out reviews and how-to columns, as well as opinion pieces, you won’t find anywhere else. We don’t regurgitate product specs and marketing materials, throwing in a few hours of the product use. We live with these items, attempting to integrate them in to our daily workflow or play time. Many a reader has told us how much they like our publication because of that depth. We strive, each issue, to be the “e-zine about the personal computing experience”.

I feel as though this publication is, in a way, an extension of my family, and I always like to see my family’s work recognized and appreciated. Thanks, Matt, for the recognition. Kudos, and thanks, to the staffers of About This Particular Macintosh. You guys and gals rock.

ATPM 12.07

The July issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. Paper or plastic?

Wes ponders the news of Mark Pilgrim’s publicized switch from the Mac OS to Ubuntu Linux, as well as the ensuing conversations around the blogosphere. He also points to items on OS X’s kernel, the Apple v Does case, Apple conspiracy theories, John C. Dvorak’s admission that he trolls for Mac users, and Windows Vista running on a MacBook Pro.

We have another double-dose from the prolific Mark Tennent, who loves Call of Duty, but wonders where Apple’s next design inspiration will be springing from. Ted takes a rabbit trail off the outlining pathway in this month’s ATPO, exploring some of the nature and philosophy behind outlining. Chuck looks at script parameters and results for you FileMaker jocks. Miraz Jordan notes how iWeb’s current incarnation isn’t a friend to web accessibility, and Sylvester gets around to using Automator.

This month’s desktop pictures are of Alaska, and are courtesy of John Lowrey. Some of you may know John from Northern Softworks. I have several of John’s photos in my desktop rotation, and we thank him for sharing his work with our readers.

This month’s Cortland features a radical departure as artist Matt Johnson explores a corner of the web comics universe.

Looking for a solution to his DVD-burning needs, Chuck reviews DiscBlaze, then turns his attention to Dobry Backuper, which, if you failed to infer from its title, is yet another data backup app. Wes wasn’t blown away by Google Map Hacks, while Matthew attempts to find out if he indeed did assassinate the President in XIII.

I hope ATPM offers some cool news as the northern hemisphere slides through the hot days of summer, and as always, we thank our readers for…well, reading.

Miscellany

It’s not a full-scale semi truck, or even a VW Beetle, but it is a real-life Transformer.

[Via Firewheel Design.]

Brent informs us that Mississippi is very dog-friendly at its rest stops.

As Lee said when he pinged me via IM, “What a waste of a Countach.”

For some reason, I can’t believe John blogged iStache.

Miscellany

I must have a Gnome-be-Gone. Must.

[Via Uncrate.]

Why is it I’m learning about Pete’s Famous from Brent, rather than my parents, who have lived in the Birmingham metroplex for a decade? (I can actually answer this one; my parents bring their lunch to work, and don’t go out.) I wonder how far Gus’s place is from their respective offices?

Eric Blair:

Of course, I could see this eating into the PowerMate’s market. I mean, who needs a flashing knob to notify you of email when you can have a flashing keyboard?

One reason I turned off that particular functionality of my PowerMate was the distraction of the blinking light…

Presenting the iCarta. iDon’t think so.

[Via Firewheel Design.]

Killing .Mac, part 1

I renewed my .Mac subscription last year, though I did so with reservations. That was the last time I will renew, and come October, I will be .Mac-less for the first time since the service was the original, free iTools. With every feature “update”, I am finding less and less value in the service for myself. I am not alone in my feelings, and Khoi Vinh sums up a lot of how I feel. Your own mileage may vary.

I thought I would begin the process of replacing the features I use with .Mac, keeping in mind the sum total of the replacements not exceed .Mac’s annual price tag of $99.95. Steven Frank offers alternatives, and I will likely touch on many of those as well.

Anti-Virus
To begin the replacement process, I started with virus protection. When McAfee began to have issues with Virex 7.5, before and after the introduction of Mac OS X Tiger, I went looking for another anti-virus solution. Granted, we have yet to have a serious virus infection of the OS X community, but it never hurts to be prepared.

I now use ClamXav to fend off the nasties. The only downside to ClamXav is a lack of protection from Visual Basic-based macro viruses, which infect Microsoft Office documents. Personally, though I own Office, I use its components rarely, so this isn’t a showstopper for me. If the applications of Office are some of your mainstays, however, you might want to investigate Norton AntiVirus or VirusBarrier.

It should be noted that Apple no longer includes any anti-virus package with .Mac, so even if I were to pay for NAV or VirusBarrier, it wouldn’t be counted against the $99.95 cost of .Mac.

E-mail
Besides the former use of Virex, another feature I’m using with .Mac is the @mac.com e-mail address. At the last revision of the .Mac feature set, Apple increased the default storage limit to one gigabyte. This is shared space; it is utilized by your .Mac e-mail, as well as any files you upload to your account.

Contrast this with Google’s Gmail, which gives you, currently, 2.7 GB of space, and counting. (Google slowly increases the storage amount each day.) My Gmail account has become my main e-mail account, with my account on my own domain coming in second. The Gmail web interface is much faster, for me at least, than the .Mac web interface, though with both accounts I use the POP protocol to route the mail to my local e-mail client.

So for now, I’ve replaced the anti-virus software Apple no longer offers, and I’ve replaced the e-mail service with one that offers more storage and a faster user interface, both at no cost. More on my personal quest to rid myself of .Mac in a future post.

Miscellany

You know, I find it quite amusing, given Al Gore’s connection to Steve Jobs (Gore serves on Apple’s board of directors, in case you didn’t know), that at the same time An Inconvenient Truth is released, so is Cars.

Since Textpander has become TextExpander, and now comes with a thirty-dollar price tag, all of its little quirks may send me back to TypeIt4Me, of which I am a registered user already.

The biggest quirk? If I misstype an abbreviation with Textpander, but backspace and fix the abbreviation’s spelling, it won’t trigger the full text. TypeIt4Me does. With Textpander, I have to delete whatever part of the abbreviation I’ve typed, and start over.

I really like the FIFA World Cup smiley-faced logo. It’s just so cheery.

When you see “Fédération Internationale de Football Association”, does Monty Python and the “Department of Redundancy Department” come to mind, or is it just me?

ATPM 12.06

The June issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Mirko von Berner celebrates the new MacBook in this month’s cover art. Wes Meltzer waxes nostalgic on the Mac blogosphere’s round-up of the MacBook, as well as noting Apple’s new commercials, Microsoft Vista delays, and other blog posts of interest to Mac users.

Mark Tennent has a triple dose of MacMuser for us this month: Mac vs Windows network printing; the value of iDisk; and how black is the new black. In this issue’s FileMaking, Chuck devles in to FileMaker scripting. Sylvester ponders the modern technological conundrum of the digital lifestyle not always being all it’s cracked up to be.

Chris Lawson offers us another dose of photos from last year’s Oshkosh AirVenture event for this month’s desktop pictures section. This set features some of my favorite prop planes: the P-51 Mustang, aptly named “Gunfighter”; the P-40 Warhawk, defender of Chinese airspace in the days before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; the P-47 Thunderbolt; Supermarine’s Spitfire, defender of Britian’s skies; and the venerable DC-3.

In this month’s Cortland, Todd lands a date and a job interview on the same night, but neither is what it seems. Plus, Chad is taken down a notch by the Boss Control Squad.

Paul reviews photo manipulation newcomer PhotoComplete, while Wes has a double-shot look at products from Waterfield Design. If you’re not a briefcase type, such as moi, you may want to give the Racer-X a look; it could change your feelings about briefcases. But if you go with the Racer-X, or any of Waterfield’s other cases, you’ll want to use their SleeveCase in conjunction with the larger bag. My PowerBook rides in a SleeveCase, no matter what other bag I use, and I second Wes’s recommendation, though unlike our Mr. Metlzer, I prefer the full flap on the SleeveCase.

What happens when worms gear up with mil-spec hardware and wage war? Worms 3D, of course, which our Matthew Glidden puts through its paces. Eric runs Yojimbo through the wringer to close out the June issue, available any way you like.

Miscellany

The iPatch.

This likely has made its rounds through the blogosphere already, but I just read in the latest dead-tree edition of Wired that Choose Your Own Adventure books are getting republished, updated for the 21st century.

Though he’s not old enough yet to read on his own and appreciate them, I may have to pick up these titles for my little phisch. I had a great time with them when I was eleven, though I don’t believe I was ever able to successfully navigate The Abominable Snowman without “cheating”.

What happened to all that wreckage from the Twin Towers after 9/11? Twenty-four tons of steel girders ended up in one of the Navy’s latest ships.

Miscellany

Good tip, courtesy of TUAW, on pairing your Apple Remote with its intended system. Very useful in a mutliple Apple-Remote-Mac home. I went ahead and paired my iMac with its remote, even though it’s the only such capable Mac we have. You never know what might be around the corner.

42 Climbers Reach Summit of Mount Everest. Note to self: “May is considered the best month to climb Everest. Climbers in Nepal have to complete their mission by May 31 before the weather deteriorates during monsoon season.”

“Elvis impersonators can relax: No one’s coming after their bespangled jumpsuits.”

Damn.

This story is encouraging me to let the little phisch have a cheap point-and-shoot digital in a few months. He loved using a Fujifilm disposable camera a couple of months back, and even framed a shot or two pretty well.

Miscellany

As is so often the case with video or film, the music totally makes the FedEx pilots drive around thunderstorm short film.

I sincerely hope JPMorgan Chase & Co. realize they just flushed $150 million.

This may have been posited elsewhere, but I think when the Power Mac G5 replacement ships, it will simply be called “Mac Pro”. You have the Pro designation separating the portable models, and they’re not going to call a tower/desktop without a built-in monitor “iMac Pro”. Apple will still want to differentiate the line from the consumer series, so it will just be Mac Pro.

MacBook

So it’s all over the Mac blogosphere and online news world: the iBook replacement has been released, and as many reckoned, it is simply called MacBook.

Available in the snow white we’ve all come to know and love, as well as in black-is-the-new-black black, the new MacBook features either a 1.83 or 2 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, up to 2 GB of RAM, starts with an 60 GB hard drive, going up to 120 GB, comes with the same MagSafe power adapter as the MacBook Pro, has a 13.3-inch screen with a 1280 x 800 resolution, and can be had with either a Combo optical drive, or the DVD-burning SuperDrive. The new MacBook has a built-in iSight, and features integrated Intel graphics which shares the system’s main memory, a deal-killer for me personally.

To the joy of a lot of Mac users, Apple has now released all of its products from mirroring-only on an external monitor, as the MacBook joins the Intel-based iMac in supporting extended desktop on an external display. The MacBook can drive up to a 23-inch display through it’s Mini-DVI port, which requires an adapter for full DVI or VGA compatibility. One FireWire 400 port, two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, Airport Extreme, and built-in Bluetooth round out the package. Just as with the MacBook Pro and iMac, a modem is now optional, external, and costs $49.

It should be noted that the black MacBook is only available with the 2 GHz Core Duo, and features a $200 markup over its white brethren; this gets you a baseline 80 GB hard drive instead of a 60 GB model. Otherwise, you’re paying extra for the alternative color. Still, I believe Apple is going to sell a ton of both, and will be hard pressed to keep black models in stock. Time will tell if the black cases are as susceptible to scratching as their similarly-colored iPod cousins.

I’d love a black MacBook in the future, but I have a problem with integrated graphics and their sharing of the system memory. It may be an irrational dislike, but it keeps my eye on the 15-inch MacBook Pro, with hope that the new MacBook signals a 13.3-inch version in the Pro series.

A pair of Apple miscellany

“Apple simplifies .Mac Web access”. So common sensical, I wonder why they didn’t think of this sooner.

“Apple actively courting the Beatles”. I like the Beatles, but I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to download any of their music from anywhere. For the sake of Apple, I would love for the iTunes Music Store to carry their full catalog; I believe, as one online commentator wrote, that the Beatles could make up any lawsuit-related losses easily through iTMS sales. Unlike myself, there are lots of people, including TUAW’s Dave Caolo, who want individual Beatles albums.

Personally, I have all the Beatles’ songs I could want on my iPod already. It’s called “1”.

ATPM 12.05

The May issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

We welcome Mark Tennent to the ATPM staff this month. Mark’s been providing us plenty of reading material over the past few months, and we felt it only fair to reward him with the glamorous and career-enhancing position of Contributing Editor. Welcome to the team, Mark!

Wes notes the Boot Camp roundup from the Mac blogosphere, while going insane with award…er, awarding. Mark gives us a double-blast of his regular column, MacMuser, raising the concern over data composting, how valuable cultural artifacts might be lost to future generations, as well as hoping that Apple’s dual boot strategy pays off.

Paul scours the web for sites you didn’t know existed, so you don’t have to. Want to discover new music, solve an online puzzle, listen to the U.S. tax code via podcast, learn how to get to a human operator as quickly as possible in a phone tree, or explore the world of cylinder recordings? Paul’s your new hero.

Chuck delves in to text parsing with FileMaker this month. Ted shares his thoughts on using ConceptDraw in your outlining workflow, as well as noting how outlining concepts are showing up in myriad applications we don’t think of as outliners.

This month’s desktop pictures selection is brought to us by ATPM jack-of-all-trades Chris Lawson. A prophead with his sights set higher—and I mean that in all of the best ways—Chris took his Canon digital SLR to Oshkosh last year for the annual EAA AirVenture. Aircraft lovers are sure to appreciate Chris’s efforts.

We learn Cortland is a James Brown fan, and there’s a lot more to Brody than meets the eye. Much more.

Sylvester opens this month’s reviews with a look at Footlights Pro 2.1. Frank Wu chimes in, noting Axio’s Hardsleeve lives up to its name. It’s the Lee and Lawson show on the fifth-generation iPod, the daring duo bringing you the lowdown on Apple’s latest digital media player. Lee also has a solo act this issue, in a look at iTunes Catalog. Finally, yours truly closes out the issue with my analysis of Datadesk’s SmartBoard ergonomic keyboard.

As always, each issue is available online, or in one of three formats for your offline reading pleasure.

Miscellany

Dan Wade has too much time on his hands.

Gavin Shearer:

If I were Sony, or Toshiba, or HP, I’d be freaking out right now.

I cannot begin to express how broken up I am over the fact that Michael Jackson has to restructure his debt. Oh, look, something shiny…

It’s about time. Pooh is certainly more deserving than most of the blithering glitterati that populate the Walk.

[With a wave of the phin to the Firewheel boys and John.]

Boot Camp

When I was in ROTC, our drill instructor told us…

Sorry, wrong boot camp. And we didn’t really have a drill instructor, since the drilling was done by the uppperclassmen. And there was never something called “boot camp” for ROTC. Anyway…

The web is ablaze with the news of Apple’s Boot Camp. (Not to mention Wall Street.) When I first heard the news—from my non-geeky wife, no less—I admit feeling a little sour. It’s one thing for hackers to find a workaround because Apple’s now using the same underlying hardware as the latest and greatest Windows machines, but to actually support it?

Blessedly, reason soon took hold. As I went about my day, mulling this over in the back of my mind, I came to look at this development as a good thing. Yesterday afternoon, looking through some of my feeds in NetNewsWire, I saw I reached conclusions similar to those of people I know and trust.

Michael sums it up perfectly:

[P]eople would have found a way anyway, so it’s better for Apple to make it work right and take the credit than to pretend it isn’t happening.

Amen. This is no third-party hack that could wipe out your entire system. This is a straight-from-the-source solution. (That could wipe out your entire system; but the odds are more in your favor with Boot Camp.)

Tom has a couple of theoretical examples of how the dual-boot nature of Intel Macs can benefit Apple.

I would have to agree with Erik, however, in that if I were to run Windows on my Mac, I would rather have it in the vein of Virtual PC, where I can switch in and out of the different OS environments with a keystroke. As Welch noted on the MacJournals-Talk list, having to quit everything in one environment and boot in to the other one gets old if you have to do it more than two or three times a day. Even then…

As for me, I have a XP box five feet away, on my wife’s desk in our study. It’s the PC I built for her, and I have my own account on it. The reason I have this iMac is so I don’t have to put up with such nonsense such as the USB driver we wrestled with earlier tonight on her machine for an IR receiver. Then again, why would I want to pass up the chance at something like seeing the blue screen of death on my iMac? That’s just aces.

Miscellany

To get back at phishers (as opposed to a phisch), use PhishFighting. It’s certainly a much better use of CPU cycles than looking for aliens that don’t exist.

[Via IM from Lawson.]

Lee has no sense of adventure.

Memo to Skip Bertman, Director of Athletics, Louisiana State University: in the future, Final Four-bound teams are not allowed to come back to Baton Rouge prior to the semi-final game. Apparently, there’s something in the water that results in “chucking”, better known as “the shooting of bricks”.

It was painful enough watching the men’s team lose the game last night due to their inability to put the ball in the basket (as opposed to UCLA’s winning by making it difficult for the Tigers to do so), but the ladies seemed to have the same problem tonight against Duke, a team which was making it difficult for the Tigers to put the ball in the basket.

Two shots at a championship, two shots blown. Kudos to UCLA and Duke. There’s always next year.

And it’s baseball season.

ATPM 12.04

The April issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

You’ll notice (hopefully) a new look to the publication this month. Simon Griffee put in time working on the design, and put in time with my and Michael’s tweaks. Thanks so much, Simon!

As Apple celebrates thirty years as a company, it seems more and more notable online personalities are joining the ranks of the Switchers, and Wes has a complete round-up. He also notes the booting-XP-on-Intel-Mac solutions running around the ‘net, but we’re not going to allow such blasphemy to darken our door, much less come inside for dinner with the family. Reader Heather Isaacson took advantage of an abundance of offline time to concentrate on her art, and now wants to build a web site to sell it from. Alas, her old Mac wasn’t up to the task, but she perseveres in a heartwarming tale of old Mac love lost, and new Mac love found.

We feature a double-shot of Mark Tennent this month, as he first delves in to how “Copyleft” software such as Firefox is changing the world’s perception of copyright, then does a little ego-surfing via Google.

We also have a double-shot farewell from Tom Bridge, who is stepping down as an ATPM Contributing Editor. This would be the part where I’d get all weepy and emotional over a staffer’s departure, but I talk to Tom practically every day, and I don’t see that changing, no matter how much he might like it to.

Tom likes the new calendar creation in iPhoto, and I believe I’ll be utilizing this later in the year for the annual family calendar featuring our little phisch. Tom also reviews the TV Mini HD, a ready-for-primetime (provided you get good antenna reception) “Mac TiVo”.

There are a pair of other reviews, with Paul weighing in on Password Retriever (not impressed), and yours truly getting my backup groove on with SuperDuper! (very much impressed). Consequently I have realized I’m not one of those guys who can really pull off a “getting my groove on” sort of line, but it’s late and I don’t feel like coming up with anything else, since my muse tucked itself in after a nightcap about two hours ago.

Cortland learns there’s no accounting for taste, as desperation sets in for Chad while Angie may find that love is even closer than she thinks. Finally, this month’s desktop pictures are of the English Lake District, courtesy of Mac user Andy Bannister. Andy’s work is remarkable; I spent hours on the site looking through photos. Thanks, Andy, for allowing us to showcase part of your portfolio.

As usual, the new and improved ATPM is available in three fruity flavors for your reading pleasure.

Put AutoPairs to work on your Intel Macs

Late last night, I received an e-mail from AutoPairs developer James Walker. James and I had exchanged some messages previously regarding AutoPairs working on Intel Macs. Now, he has discovered a workaround.

1. If you have a PowerPC Mac, which I do in the form of my PowerBook G4, copy the System Preferences application from that Mac to your Intel Mac. In my case, I copied the AutoPairs pref pane from the PowerBook as well, putting it in ~/Library/PreferencePanes.

2. Rename the copied System Preferences application. I renamed my copied app to “SysPref PPC AP config”, so I would know at a glance what it’s sitting on my desktop for.

3. Launch the renamed application.

4. The AutoPairs pref pane showed up and I was able to click on it to activate it and open its configuration window.

Quitting, I switched to BBEdit, and tried out some parentheses and quotes, and it worked like a charm! Thanks, James!

Miscellany

My favorite band contains big Apple fans apparently. Way cool.

I downloaded the new iChat icons for .Mac members, but I’m fairly certain I won’t use any of them.

Europe at night: a digital composite of archived satellite images.

If you have a Nick-N-Willy’s in your area, and you haven’t tried a pizza from them yet, I encourage you to do so. No, they won’t hold a candle to those from a real NYC- or Chicago-style pizzeria, but the pizzas are way better than any you’ll get from the typical fast-food pizza guys. I’m now discarding all of the Papa John’s coupons we receive each week.

“But Macs are still more expensive…”

Winn Schwartau, on conducting a total cost of ownership (TCO) breakdown comparing a Windows PC to an Intel Macintosh, what he refers to as a “MacTel”:

The results of this TCO astounded me. For my small enterprise, owning a WinTel box for three years costs twice as much as owning a MacTel.

Somehow, this just seemed to go hand-in-hand with my previous post.

The greatest trick

John Gruber:

There’s a line in The Usual Suspects where Kevin Spacey’s character Verbal Kint says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

The greatest trick Microsoft has gotten away with is convincing the public that the Wintel PC platform is open.

I think the familiarity John talks about in his piece is the main reason (coupled with the just-a-year-old PC they have) my parents haven’t switched.

Miscellany

Earlier tonight at Costco, I happened upon the Samuel Adams Brewmaster’s Collection Mix Pack. It’s basically a sampler case of different Sam Adams brews. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a regular drinker, so when I want to have a beer, I want a good one, and a Sam Adams happens to fit that category.

However, I’ve never had any of their brews other than the Boston Lager. So when I saw the Brewmaster’s Collection, I knew I had to give it a try. In addition to the Boston Lager, it features the Boston Ale, the Scotch Ale (one of which is currently chilling), the Black Lager, the Hefeweizen, and the Brown Ale.

Also at Costco, Boylan Bottling Company had a table set up where you could sample their various sodas, and buy mix-and-match cases. I have had Boylan sodas in the past, due to their being sold at a Jersey boardwalk-style deli we frequented. (Sadly, said deli has since closed up.) Our case contains Diet Black Cherry (my favorite), Diet Root Beer (better than Barq’s), and Orange Creme (you will never look at any other orange soda the same).

If you use iCal, you owe it to yourself to download and register Aram Kudurshian’s High Priority. It’s well worth the $6 license.

This afternoon, I finally got around to syncing my new iMac Core Duo with my still somewhat new iPod Video. Only iSync doesn’t recognize the iPod. What?!?!? I’m sure this issue was covered elsewhere on the Mac news and in the blogosphere, but I missed it. You now use iTunes to sync your Address Book and iCal info with your iPod. Thanks, Apple, for making what was once a one-click move now something that takes two applications.

ATPM 12.03

The March issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Ellyn ponders the notion of just because you can do something doesn’t mean you necessarily should do it, especially when it comes to system upgrades. This makes me think about all those people wailing over the new Intel-based Macs; it’s not like your two year-old Mac is suddenly obsolete. Is it still running all the apps you were running on it yesterday? Yes? Fine, carry on, and stop sniveling.

Wes looks at how February appeared to be an iPod month, and also notes the discussions on Smart Crash Reports and dual-core processors that have been making the rounds in the Mac blogosphere. Ted looks at Dossier, a new-to-ATPO outliner, as well as outliner web interaction. His columns continue to simultaneously fascinate and overwhelm me. The “Attractive Futures” section at the end is not to be missed.

Mark Tennent notes Microsoft’s struggles in the European Union, and the potential effect on Mac users. (I wrote the blurb, I can reuse it here.) Sylvester dives in to the world of video extraction, which prompted Lee to note via instant message that he wishes he had this information a couple of years ago. This from a guy who deals with video production on a fairly regular basis, or obviously Sylvester has some enlightening suggestions. Matthew extends the life of his Cube with the installation of a SuperDrive.

This month’s desktop pictures are still shots of Quartz Composer models created by Futurismo Zugakousaku. I’m partial to the fish (not surprising), and I like the Iron Wave shots, too. Definitely check out Futurismo’s work. Frisky Freeware is on a short hiatus, but Cortland finds love with Angie, while Chad ponders life outside of work.

Matthew plays with Chessmaster 9000—do these Feral Interactive guys have a time machine or something? Chessmaster 9000?!?! Does chess change that much in 7,000 years?—while Eric cleans his iPod with Newer’s Clean and Polish Kit.

Paul examines an app that should be in every troubleshooting toolkit, Data Rescue II. Miraz Jordan reviews Path Finder 4.0.2, a Finder replacement I hope to get to know better. Finally, Chris puts the X-Slim EL keyboard through the wringer.

As usual, this month’s issue is available in a variety of flavors.

Note to self re: Command- and Option- commands

Command-Tab switches between applications.
Command-tick (`) switches between windows within an application.
Option-Tab, via Witch, switches between windows and applications.

SpamSieve 2.4.2

My favorite spam-killing application has been updated, and now kills spam better than ever. Michael has been rocking on SpamSieve’s efficiency with each update; I see very, very few false negatives, and no false positives with the app.

One updated feature which should be noted is the improved phish detection. That’s phish, not phisch, got it? We phisch are more sneaky…

Leap-A tutorials

Rob Griffiths has an excellent piece on Macworld regarding the Leap-A malware which could infect your Tiger-based Mac, if, well, if you’re either not paying attention or are just stupid. Mark Allan has what should be the obvious, common-sense approach to not getting infected:

1. Are somehow sent (via email, iChat, etc.) or download the “latestpics.tgz” file
2. Double-click on the file to decompress it
3. Double-click on the resulting file to “open” it

…and even then, most users must also enter their Admin password.

You cannot simply “catch” the virus. Even if someone does send you the “latestpics.tgz” file, you cannot be infected unless you decompress the file, and then open it.

Developers needed for Intel updates

Mark Allan is seeking a Mac developer with an Intel Mac to help with an update to ClamXav so it will run on the the new Intel-based Macintosh systems.

The one utility it seems I cannot live without on my new iMac Core Duo is James Walker’s AutoPairs. A preference pane, AutoPairs will not run on an Intel Mac. I contacted James, and he doesn’t have access to an Intel Mac to do further development and testing. I’ve offered my services as a tester, but if any developers with Intel Macs would like to give James a hand, please contact him.

(From a totally selfish standpoint, if anyone knows of a replacement for AutoPairs that works on Intel Macs, drop me a note.)

The Return of Lemonade Stand

When I was in seventh grade, I began computer programming classes. First it was BASIC, on Radio Shack TRS-80 systems (affectionately known as “Trash-80s”). Then it was more BASIC and Turbo Pascal on Apple II computers. Lemonade Stand was a game, along with Oregon Trail, we spent our free time at the end of class goofing around with.

When my parents bought a used Apple IIe from one of my high school teachers, Lemonade Stand and Oregon Trail came with it, and much joy was had playing them again, as well as in seeing my younger sister happily plugging along on them. Now, Lemonade Stand is back, and ported to Mac OS X.

[Via Erik.]

It’s Official

Camino, which is fast becoming my favorite browser, has finally been officially released.

The RSS auto-detect feature, a la Safari, is what is keeping me from completely switching from Apple’s browser.

[Via Chris.]

I love the International Date Line

I received an e-mail notification from the Apple Store just after midnight this morning. It told me they had transmitted the shipping info to FedEx for the pickup of the iMac Core Duo I had ordered.

At 1:53 PM local time, the iMac was picked up in Shanghai. Thanks to the beauty of the International Date Line, it arrived in Anchorage (that’s Alaska, for the geographically ignorant) at 11:54 AM local time, the same day. It has subsequently departed Anchorage as of 1:13 PM local time, and should arrive here on Friday. Yay!

Open Source Mac

I was actually kind of surprised by the number of applications listed at Open Source Mac I use. I suppose on some level, they are elegant enough that I don’t think of them any differently than the commercial software I use.

Calendar hosting

If you find yourself wishing you could have your very own online calendar to sync with iCal, but

1. Have not the resources available to you, or
2. Have not the desire to learn how to set up PHP iCalendar

then Tom can help you out with his new calendar hosting service. Just be sure to tell him the Retrophisch™ sent you.

Rise of the Core Duo

The 17-inch iMac G5 has been removed from the online Apple Store, leaving only the 20-inch G5 version. If you’re looking for a G5 iMac instead of the new Intel Core Duo version, now would appear to be the time to buy.

[Via Al W. on the MacJournals-Talk list.]

Update: John notes what I missed: the remaining 20-inch iMac G5s have been marked down $200, to $1,499. Apple is definitely clearing out last year’s model.

Printing the day’s schedule in iCal

Since MacHome doesn’t post all of its magazine’s monthly content to the web, I’m archiving for my own use this hint from Editor at Large Chris McVeigh, found in the Q&A section of the February 2006 issue.

You can however print an entire day’s schedule, complete with any notes you may have added to the event. Choose View > Go to Date and enter the date you want, or to see the current day’s events, choose View > Go to Today. Now choose View > Day View to see only that day. Finally, choose File > Print.

You’ll see a preview of the print job, which lists appointments along a timeline at the left and the details of these appointments in a separate column at the right. This is a bit awkward, though. In the Print window, choose View > List. You’ll see that the events are now listed one after another (there is no timeline) and include the event details. Click Continue and then click Print. In a few seconds you’ll have a printed copy of your appointments and notes.

ATPM 12.02

The February issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Ellyn examines Google’s noncompliance of demands by the Justice Department, while Wes has the best of the Mac blogosphere’s reaction to last month’s Macworld Expo. Miraz Jordan, noting his enjoyment of podcasts, chimes in with this month’s Pod People. (We’re looking for readers to share their own iPod experiences. If you would like to write a Pod People column, please e-mail the editors.) Ted looks over two outliners new to the Macintosh sandbox. Speaking of sand, Angus Wong dives in to the waters of the Macintosh life and discovers on the sandy bottom the triumph of the Macintosh revolution.

This issue’s desktop pictures section features numerous reader submissions, ranging from flowers to Mount Baker, St. Louis to Thailand, New Hampshire to the Dominican Republic. Thanks to Torben, Bill, Jerry, Steven, and Grover for sharing!

In this month’s Cortland, Lisa makes peace with her maker, the other Steve steps in to foil plans of world dominance, Chad returns to the throne at Weiser Graphics, and Cortland decides the fringe benefits are worth going in-house again.

Ellyn fools around with Bubblomania, while Tom peers between the sheets of the Cult of iPod. Mark Tennent shares his experience with CyTV, and Chris tests the alliteratory Lapvantage Loft. Finally, Tom asks that if you’re going to delve deeply in to the guts of Mac OS X, you do so with a good manual at your side, kid.

Drive capacity envy

Seagate is now shipping 160 GB laptop drives. These are in the Momentus line, and run at 5400 rpm, with an Ultra ATA/100 interface. The Serial ATA version is coming later in the year. What’s interesting to note is that the drives are shipping, but no pricing is available.

I had thought I would rather a 7200 rpm 100 GB drive, over a 5400 rpm 120 GB drive, should I upgrade my PowerBook. Depending upon pricing, I would gladly run a 5400 rpm 160 GB drive. Lee, who passed on the above link via IM, is hoping this announcement will drive down the cost of 120 GB drives.

Update: Lee, again via IM, points to OWC’s listing, with a price of cough, cough $399.00.

MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro.

MacBook Pro.

MacBook Pro.

MacBook Pro.

How soon do you think it will take for a spoof ad to show up that shows the new Intel-powered Macintosh portable, with the golden arches in place of the Apple logo, and the tagline “Do you want fries with that?”

I realize this may be part of some new marketing scheme by our favorite fruit company to get “Mac” into all of its Macintosh product names. It’s just shocking that Steve and Company would ditch “PowerBook,” which has for so long almost been a brand unto itself, not unlike “iPod”.

Google Apple’s best friend?

Tim Beyers ruminates that if the rumors are true, and Google is set to introduce either a low-priced computer running the “Google OS”, or roll out the Google Pack software package, or a for-pay video download service, or any combination of the above, this could drive more Windows users in to the open arms of Macintosh.

Calendar fun

In my pursuit to not renew my .Mac subscription this year, I decided to install PHP iCalendar. Since we use only SFTP on our box, and none of the the iCal FTP apps out there support that protocol, I was left with publishing from iCal via WebDav.

After I confirmed with him that WebDav was available on our box’s installation, Jim, our sysamdmin, walked me through setting up authentication for publishing and viewing. This was not without its little hiccups.

Being the brilliant guy he is, Jim soon figured out the issue, and now I am happily publishing my calendar to the web. A quick bookmark, named oh so originally “Cal”, in Safari’s Bookmark Bar, and I’m set.

Smooth Guy

Do you want to know why Guy Kawasaki was made the head evangelist by Apple in the mid-1990s? Because Guy’s so smooth:

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector.

Actually, the entire post is about Guy’s optimal PowerPoint presentation. (He sees a lot of them as a venture capitalist.) If you give presentations, it’s a worthwhile read.

ATPM 12.01

About This Particular Macintosh begins its twelfth year of publishing with the release of the January 2006 issue.

Ellyn starts things off by noting something is rotten in the state of Wikipedia. Personally, I try to avoid linking to Wikipedia, and encourage fellow bloggers to do the same. Wes has a round-up of the latest Macworld Expo/Intel-based Mac rumor-mongering, something I simply cannot condone. (The rumor-mongering, not the gathering thereof. I believe it’s important to know, and point out, how badly these rumor sites hurt Apple and rarely help consumers.) Sylvester ponders how even long-time Mac users can encounter newbie moments.

A rare treat for the ATPM readership: publisher Michael Tsai returns with a Personal Computing Paradigm column on coping with Mac OS X’s font rendering. Michael and I share a common Microsoft love: Verdana. It’s my main screen font, too, and the first one I specify in the stylesheets for my blogs. I also like Microsoft’s Georgia, and use it as my main serif font. Look for Georgia to make an appearance in an upcoming redesign I’m working on.

Your humble author again submits some photos from Wyoming as this month’s desktop pictures. These feature the Jenny Lake area of Grand Teton National Park, the part of the vacation I believe I enjoyed more than our time in Yellowstone. This could largely be due to the differences in weather we had between the two parks.

This month’s Cortland, rated PG-13 for violence, attempts to allude to as many science fiction motion pictures as possible, as several plotlines converge.

Tom kicks the reviews off with the software I wish I had the hardware to handle, and that’s turning the digital photography world on its ear, Aperture. Ellyn listens different with Griffin Technology’s EarThumps, while Matthew examines Quicken alternative iCash.

Tom continues to make me jealous with a review of the hardware I hope to be able to run Aperture on in the future, the 20-inch iMac G5. Yours truly got to make a few other staffers jealous with my own product review, that of Tivoli Audio’s iSongBook. While the review was turned in before the Christmas holiday, we did take the iSongBook on the road with us, and it proved its worth for us during our stay at my grandmother’s. It pulled double duty as bedtime lullaby player for our toddler, and alarm clock for us.

Lee, who got plenty of experience with virtual tours last year during his house hunt, looks at an alternative to QuickTime VR for creating virtual tours, Mapwing Creator Pro. Chuck wraps the first reviews of the year up with an examination of the latest version of REALbasic.

Our thanks to our readers who have stuck with us for the past eleven years, and we’re looking forward to the next eleven!

iCalFix

Like Merlin, I have longed for the ability in iCal to have alarms automatically created for new events. Now, thanks to Robert Blum gives us iCalFix, which does exactly that. Robert notes version 0.2 will be out some time in January, but I’ve been using today with no issues. (Note: iCalFix requires the installation of SIMBL.)

Pulling the plug on Info-Mac

Adam Engst details the plan for retiring the Info-Mac Network, noting that it has outlived its usefulness given the Internet’s current climate.

The retirement will not be immediate, though the ceasing of new software acceptance will be. The Info-Mac server will remain online for a few months, as mirror sites make the necessary decisions regarding supporting the now-frozen archive. If you want your very own mirror of the Info-Mac archives, you’ll need a mere seven gigabytes of storage and a simple Unix command.

And the Macworld Eddy goes to…

Given this news, John Gruber makes an excellent point:

This puts Macworld in an awkward spot if they ever again want to review or compare RSS aggregators. If they say NetNewsWire is the best (which it currently is) they’re wide open to accusations of bias; if they say it’s not the best, then they’re stuck admitting that their readers who use the bundled version of NNW are getting something less than the best.

Does anyone else remember when the press, in general, was not burdened by corporate ownership? I just turned 35, and I can recall it being a near-industry standard not that long ago, in my lifetime, where press bodies operated independently.

John is dead-on in his analysis: how are we ever to take seriously any review Macworld conducts of any news reader from this point forward? The fact notwithstanding that a large amount of the Macintosh news reader community, this author included, agrees that NetNewsWire is, in fact, the best news reader out there, on any platform, and, the fact notwithstanding that said Macintosh news reader community likely applauds Macworld’s decision to go with NetNewsWire, given that same would likely ridicule Macworld for choosing what it would perceive to be a lesser application if something other than NetNewsWire was chosen, one has to wonder what the thinking is amongst the editorial staff of Macworld to essentially paint themselves in to a corner when it comes to an ever-increasingly important segment of the software arena.

ATPM mentioned in NYT

I don’t often link to The New York Times, but when the publication I work on gets a mention, well, I have to throw the Times some link love.

James Fallows notes the plethora of Macintosh thought-organization applications (free registration required), and About This Particular Macintosh gets a mention in the last paragraph.

This is due to the incredible work of Ted Goranson, and his About This Particular Outliner series. Thanks, Ted, for all of your hard work!

[From Michael via e-mail.]

ATPM 11.12

The December issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading and downloading pleasure.

Our continued thanks to Bare Bones for their sponsorship of the publication. ATPM is an all-volunteer effort, and any monies made from sponsorships or ads go to support the ever-growing hosting costs for our eleven years’ worth of issues. If you are a hardware or software developer for the Macintosh community, and you would like to become an ATPM sponsor, please contact the editors.

Rob reminds us of December issues past, present, and takes a peek at the future. Ellyn notes how the gadgets of Star Trek are slowly appearing today. As usual, you can depend on Paul for an eclectic mix of sites to explore: tractors, Mac browsers, sudoku, Lowe’s library, and a porcelain throne in a pear tree.

Ted wraps up some loose ends in this month’s ATPO, and puts the call out to the outlining community for users to help out with future ATPO columns, as well as proposing something of a formal gathering of the outlining community: an e-mail list, forum, or web site. If you’re a hard-core outliner, and any of Ted’s proposal strikes you, drop him a note.

Johann delivers a column on how a formerly-derided technology is now changing the way he interacts with his PowerBook and mobile phone. Tom provides a quick how-to on Apple’s PhotoBooth, and Sylvester offers part deux of his music server series.

Tom weighs in on Docktopus, which I’m still trying to figure out if I like or not. Lee convinces me the iFM, in its current state, isn’t for me given my listening habits. Eric reviews a book I will have to take a serious look at, as well as the tome Rob read for this month’s issue. Andrew delivers a double-shot of trackball reviews, with the X-Arcade, and my trackball of choice, the Logitech Trackman Wheel. (I have the corded version.) I’m not a gamer (and if I were, I’d probably use a console), so Andrew’s concerns on using the Logitech for games is moot for me.

Yours truly contributes some shots from the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park, taken this past June on a family vacation, for this month’s desktop pictures section. In this month’s Cortland, the Lisa turns on her creators, while Cortland is rewarded for his forward-thinking when it comes to backups. Frisky talks about one of my favorite media apps, VLC, which I’ve been using to watch those episodes of Joey I’ve missed and had to download from the ‘net, because the TiVo is recording someone else’s shows during that time slot.

As usual, you can download the latest issue in one of three flavors. Just don’t spill the egg nog.

I’ve always said, “If you want to play games…”

John Gruber:

[N]ext-generation consoles seem set to surpass the PC as the premier platforms for gaming, which means anyone who’s resisted switching from Windows because of the lack of games for the Mac will have one less reason not to switch. I think there a lot of guys out there who are starting to think they’d be better off with a new Mac and an Xbox/PS3 than with a new Windows PC.

Years ago, when I was more fanatical about evangelizing the Mac, whenever the gaming argument came up my reply was always along the lines of “If you want to play games, go buy a Nintendo.” (Update the phrase with the console of your choice.)

This is what is known as “hitting the nail on the head”

Jeff Harrell:

It kind of amazes me what shortcomings the people who buy Windows computers are willing to live with. It used to be the case that Macs were more expensive than other kinds of computers, pound for pound. This is no longer true, of course, and hasn’t been for some time, but even if it were, it seems like it would be only proper. It seems like people who buy Windows computers have to spend a lot of time finding and downloading (or buying) programs to make their computers do stuff my computer does all by itself.

“I ain’t missin’ you at all…”

Erik posits he really isn’t missing windowshade functionality in OS X. Neither am I. I began using windowshade less and less in the waning days of OS 9, thanks to LiteSwitch. Like Erik, I have rarely found myself in a situation where windowshade functionality would be necessary with Mac OS X. I hardly ever use Exposé, either.

My extensive use of cool-switching via Command-Tab and Quicksilver has also rendered the usage of multiple desktops as moot. Lee reviewed You Control: Desktops, and I looked at the product, and have experimented with Desktop Manager, but right now multiple desktops don’t fit in to my computing habits.

Michael Hyatt: Judge, Jury, Executioner

Relax, mouth-foamers, we’re talking about software. I like Michael’s system, sequestering apps for a specific amount of time to see if they’re truly needed or not. I need to do something along these lines, though I’ve already pared down to 110 items in the Applications folder from a clearinghouse earlier this year.

TMTOTH

Today’s “Too Much Time On Their Hands” installment is again brought to you by TUAW:

Turn a classic Macintosh SE in to a 3 GHz PC.

What a waste of a SE case.

TMTOTH

Today’s “Too Much Time On Their Hands” episode is brought to by TUAW:

Stick the guts of a modern optical mouse in to a classic Apple ADB mouse.

Dear MacAddict

Thank you so much for the magazines you keep sending, even though we’re coming up on the fifth month since my subscription expired. I don’t really care about the fact that these “teaser” issues do not contain the CD, as I often found the CDs included with MacAddict to be out of date and the original content mostly useless. The only reason I re-subscribed in the first place was because of the $10 off the regular subscription price offer through Apple’s .Mac service. Your magazine hasn’t been worth much more than that for a number of years.

But feel free to keep the teaser issues coming. I can use the laughs.

Today’s miscellany

And thus Apple’s plans at world domination were dashed.

Regarding HTML in e-mail: what Tom said. I’m not even an admin like Tom that has to deal with this crap on a day-to-day basis. E-mail is for text. The Web is for graphics. No co-mingling of the two. I realize I’m in a rapidly dwindling minority on this issue, Jeff, but that’s my area of Ludditism, I guess.

The Tetran doesn’t look too terribly comfortable to be sliding in to one’s front pants pocket. [Via Lee.]

I’ve noticed the severe lack of updates to Apple’s iCal Library section, too. Now I just get whatever I want from iCalShare.

Google continues to intrigue me. Really.

An excellent illustration.

I pronounce it like the peanut butter, with a hard J. [Via John.]

Today’s miscellany

Yeah, it’s been up a few days, but I’m just getting to it, okay? John Gruber has come around, much as I have recently, to the notion of PowerBook-as-main/only-system, a concept Lee has been a proponent of for some time. John also has an in-depth review of the latest 15-inch PowerBook, outfitted just as I would like, with his usual attention to detail.

It’s Monday evening, and I’m still sore from the neighborhood tree planting from Saturday morning. Eleven ten-gallon trees to go in the neighborhood’s greenbelt area. Seventy homes, with an average of two adults per home. Seven people showed up, including myself. Yeah.

An interesting tip I picked up from No Plot? No Problem! shows an innovative use for all that spam that gets collected for me. This one writer keeps a list of names that show up in the From field of spam e-mails, so she always has a pool of character names to pull from. I really like this, since usually when I’m working on fiction, I can come up with two or three good character names, then I start really pulling stuff out of bodily orifices. A simple text document in BBEdit now has 305 names, one per line, and the built-in Kill Duplicates filter ensures I don’t have the same name twice.

Today’s miscellany

I’ve been trying to send some e-mails with attachments via Gmail, from within Safari. Frustrated, I launched the 1.0b1 version of Camino, and it worked the first time I tried.

If Camino could mimic the easy subscribability of Safari when it comes to RSS and Atom feeds, there would be no looking back. Based on my own usage, Camino is consistently faster than Safari at rendering, uses less RAM over time, and remains more stable.

Then Tom has to go and remind me why Safari kicks butt when it comes to designing for standards.

An article in the latest Macworld has prompted me to look seriously at del.icio.us. My personal work habits have evolved to the point where I’m no longer worried about keeping bookmarks synced between two systems, but the prospect of an online backup of my bookmarks, that I could access from any where, is appealing. I’m coming closer all the time to my own personal death knell for .Mac.

Anthro’s eNook is so cool it almost makes me wish I didn’t have enough space to get one. Almost.

A happy belated to Tiffany.

Finally, my thanks to Tom. He knows why.

Widgets smidgets

So Leander posits Apple is prepping a WYSIWYG widget-creation app. TUAW’s David Chartier whines “what took so long?” I can’t help but think, “So what?”

I know I’m not alone in minimal widget use. I see the myriad widgets being created and updated daily fly through my RSS feeds, and I can easily imagine users with 20-30 of these things flying around at once, bogging down their system’s background process time. At least now to create a widget you have to have some Javascript and HTML knowledge, and it helps if you’re design savvy. God help us if “Dashcode” is for real; it will unleash untold useless and ugly widgets on the Mac-using populace.

I do see a lot of widgets where I think, “Hey, that would be cool/convenient to have.” Then I realize that a particular widget wouldn’t be one I would want running all of the time. Then I realize that in the time it takes me to activate Dashboard, go in and make the widget active in the Dashboard environment, and have it refresh, I could just as quickly pull up my web browser and point it to whatever page I needed for the same information.

Ah, you say, but what happens when you’re using your PhischBook some place where you don’t have ‘net access? Granted, this is an instance when widgets would be useful, provided the widget itself doesn’t require an Internet connection to load its information. For my own use, there’s not a non-Internet-using widget out there that I cannot live without. A scenario where such a widget would come in handy when I am without Internet access has not arisen, and even if it had, I believe it would be for something that could just as well keep until I had access again. I probably activate Dashboard between eight and a dozen times a day.

For the record, the widgets I run:

• Dictionary, Phone Book, Stocks, and Weather, all widgets that come with Mac OS X Tiger
• SysStat
• Backpack
• BibleSearch
• DailyVerse
• Scoreboard, during baseball season

I had been using iCal Events, but I’m giving MenuCalendarClock for iCal a try, and am attempting to determine which one I like better for everyday use.

Your thoughts on widgets? What are you running? Drop a note in the comments.

C-Command Blog

Michael now has a dedicated blog for C-Command products. Since the illustrious Mr. Tsai has not yet posted feed links, allow me to help you out: RSS, or if you prefer, Atom.

[Big wave of the phin to Lee for the pointers to the feed links.]

ATPM 11.11

The November issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. I’m wondering if Charles Anthony’s cover art will be the last to feature the Power Mac G5.

Daniel Jalkut, of Red Sweater Blog, was kind enough to contribute this month’s Pod People column. We are actively seeking new iPod stories each month, and if you would like to share yours, please e-mail the editors.

In this month’s FileMaking, Chuck Ross takes a break from the usual how-to to examine the new features of FileMaker 8. Sylvester Roque sets up a Mac music server, while Matthew Glidden upgrades his Cube’s video card. I’ve performed the latter operation myself, though instead of the Radeon Matt uses, I went with a nVidia GeForce2 MX.

Lee Bennett is kind enough to share with us his photos of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis as this month’s desktop pictures selection. I especially like numbers four and eight.

In Cortland, Chad Wieser finds himself beginning a new phase in life, while Cortland collects the last of a client’s bill. Frisky Freeware notes the return of a Classic classic: FinderPop! Turly O’Connor is porting the venerable productivity app to OS X, and I’m looking forward to putting it through its paces. I’ve been thinking that I wouldn’t get as much use out of FinderPop now, since I use Quicksilver, but I’m also thinking of the two apps as compliments rather than competitors. For those times when you’re mousing around, it’s easier to activate FinderPop, rather than going to the keyboard with both hands for Quicksilver.

Yours truly shares the review spotlight with my fellows this month. Lee puts the AirClick and AirClick USB from Griffin Technology through their paces, while Matthew goes behind enemy lines with the Commandos Battle Pack. Tom Bridge examines the third edition of Derrick Story’s excellent Digital Photography Pocket Guide. Eric Blair gives OmniGraffle Professional 4 a workout, while I chime in with a look at RadTech’s Portectorz for the 12-inch PowerBook.

We still have openings on the editorial staff, and we are always looking for new writers, and need new cover art each month. If you are interested in volunteering some time to ATPM in any of these areas, please e-mail the editors.

It is about time…

With thanks to John for the post title and link:

Rich Siegel, of Bare Bones fame, is finally blogging.

As if it weren’t enough that Rich is responsible for two of the applications I use the most each day, he is a fellow scotch and peanut butter lover. Rich, drop me a line when you’re in Dallas; there’s 12-year Glenfiddich Special Reserve in the pantry.

MarsEdit lives!

Brent Simmons announced tonight that development of MarsEdit will continue. w00t!

Apple’s new iron and bits

So yesterday was the latest in a slew of product announcements from Apple. In just over a month, we’ve seen the iPod nano, the iPod with Video, the new iTunes Music Store from whence you can download videos and television shows for your video iPod, and now new Power Macs, PowerBooks, and a new piece of pro software.

Power Macs

The new Power Macs are slower than the ones they replace—from a clock-speed perspective, anyway. And let’s be honest: most people don’t understand how a dual-core 2.5 GHz processor is faster than a non-dual-core 2.7 or 3 GHz processor. They see numbers. They understand numbers. The higher the number, the faster it must be. So Apple has a bit of education to do for users, who aren’t as hip and in-the-know as you or I when it comes to the technobabble, contemplating new Power Macs. Then again, maybe those sorts of people are just better off with an iMac or a Mac mini.

Every gearhead, yours truly included, of course is lusting after the dual-core, dual-processor 2.5 GHz Power Mac. This means there are four cores on two chips, and is why Apple refers to this beast as the “Quad.” Should you care to shell out as much money for two video cards—the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500, with 512 MB of SDRAM—as the Quad costs, you can drive four 30-inch Cinema Displays from a single box. Every gearhead, yours truly included, is also lusting after the funds to accomplish this. I can barely fathom having two of those 30-inch monsters on my desk, much less four, and I would be in happy-happy dream land with only one.

PowerBooks

While it’s fun to have fantasies about high-end desktop hardware, I was realistically focused on the new PowerBooks. The missus mentioned the possibility of new mobile iron after the first of the year, so I was hoping to see some improvements, given that this may be the last revision of PowerPC-based ‘Books before Intel-based hardware ships.

I was disappointed that the line-up didn’t see a speed bump. It would have been nice to get a 1.8 GHz PowerBook. The added pixels in the 15- and 17-inch models are indeed welcome, though the 15-inch’s resolution is now higher than the 19-inch LCD I would normally hook it up to. Right now, my 12-inch PowerBook—with a resolution of 1024x768—drives the 19-inch panel, with its resolution of 1280 x 1024. My normal habit is to run the PowerBook closed, given the extra real estate on the 19-inch LCD. With one of the new PowerBook models, I’m looking at the prospect of reordering my workspace, so the PowerBook could be run in extended-desktop mode with the LCD. This is certainly not a bad thing.

John notes the simplified line-up of the PowerBook models, and I concur this is a good thing. I wonder, though, if the simplified product line-up isn’t so much a result of Apple’s desire for simplification, but rather the aforementioned fact that there are no speed-bumps. Historically, when you saw the different versions of a PowerBook, other than screen size, there was a processor speed difference as well. With yesterday’s announcement, Apple killed the slower-speed model for the 15- and 17-inch PowerBooks.That notwithstanding, again, I agree; the simplified line-up is much better. When I went to price a new 15-inch, I only made one change, the hard drive. (I’ll buy my 2 gigs of RAM elsewhere and save a few hundred bucks, Apple, thanks.)

Aperture

Likely the main reason I’m gear-lusting after a Power Mac G5 Quad is because I’m also lusting after Apple’s latest piece of pro software, Aperture. Think Final Cut Pro for digital photographers. (I know I read that phrase somewhere, but haven’t been able to recall where yet.) I wasn’t crazy about the name at first, thinking Tom had come up with a much better one, but it’s growing on me.

Aperture is a one-stop shop of digital photo post-production, and while it is geared toward—and priced for—professional photographers, as a burgeoning “prosumer,” I can see how much I would gain from Aperture’s abilities. Alas, none of my current hardware can handle the app, and while I know I will begin pushing the limits of iPhoto in the near future, I’m not there yet.

Many see Aperture as a shot across Adobe’s bow, and while I’m sure it will steal some screen time from Photoshop, I see the two applications working in complement with one another rather than competition. Given what Aperture brings to the table, Adobe is going to have to look at something other than just workflow solutions for Photoshop. Their flagship application is already suffering from featuritis, with no real room to grow except through the implementation of workflow solutions, so future development should be interesting to watch.

Regarding the new Apple hardware, Leander Kahney remarked, “I actually don’t like product announcements like this. It makes my 18-month-old PowerBook and G5 look feeble and decrepit.” Leander, I’m plugging along on a 4.5-year old Cube and 2-year old 12-inch PowerBook. How do you think I feel?

Keep your iCal window the same size

King of Mac OS X Hints Rob Griffiths has a great tip for keeping your iCal window the same size no matter which view (Day, Week, Month) you’re using. Very handy.

Why stock analysts are worthless

(Alternative title: There’s an reason the word “anal” is in “analyst”)

Apple quadruples its profit, but the stock takes a ten percent-plus dive because the company “missed” the number of iPod sales stock analysts —who are not employees of Apple, do not sit on the Board of Directors, and who are not Apple executives— said they thought the company should have sold? They sold 6.4 million iPods in a three months. How many Rios did Creative sell in the last three months? Oh, that’s right, they canned that music player.

Hold on, it gets better.

Those same analysts, who are poo-pooing Apple for failing to sell as many iPods as the analysts thought they should have sold, seem to think Delphi is a good buy. No wonder monkeys are just as good at the stock market as these guys.

[With thanks to John Gruber, and Matt Deatherage and W.R. Wing on the MacJournals-Talk list.]

That smart FontExplorer

So like a lot of the Macintosh-using world, I’ve been dinking around with Linotype’s FontExplorer X, and I like it. I used Suitcase when I worked in the graphic design support world, and it was a good app, but always felt cumbersome. Not so with FontExplorer X.

Jon Armstrong notes the use of the app’s Smart Set feature, and I can see myself taking advantage of this quickly. Being able to sort fonts in to their own foundry sets is at the top of my list. I’m curious to see how many Fontosaurus types I still have kicking around. (Go, buy from Dan, support a one-man font shop.)

More on the NetNewsWire acquisition

Tom’s not happy with Brent and Sheila’s sale of NetNewsWire to NewsGator. I’m going to chalk it up to the fact that he’s literally on drugs.

If you’ve spent any time on the Ranchero beta lists, exchanged e-mail with Brent, or read his blog posts on development, you know Mr. Simmons does not go off half-cocked with major business and development decisions. Despite Tom’s dislike of NewsGator, I’m sure Brent and Sheila were quite careful with whom they chose to sell NetNewsWire. After all, this company is Brent’s new employer. He would have to be convinced the company would foster the sort of development environment in which he would have the freedom to make NetNewsWire all it could be.

As he notes, there are things he’s wanted to do with NNW that he has been able to not get to, having to deal with the business and support aspects of being an independent software developer. By going in-house with NewsGator, Brent is now free from those other constraints, absent anything he may wish to do on the side with Ranchero’s other products that NewsGator did not purchase. With regard to NetNewsWire, all Brent has to worry about right now is programming. One would reasonably believe this is a Very Good Thing™.

I have no opinion about NewsGator, as a company or with regard to any of its products. They have never been on my radar before. Perhaps Tom knows something I do not, but again, I believe Brent would have done his research regarding the company before making such a commitment.

With regard to selling out to Apple, I don’t see that ever happening. Apple’s nod to RSS is the feature built in to Safari. I don’t see a standalone news reader in Apple’s future, nor do I see Apple devoting the depth of features you can find in NetNewsWire in to the RSS cabinet of Safari.

In the end, it appears this is a good thing for the Simmons, and a good thing for Mac users. NetNewsWire simply rules the news reader market, on any platform. No doubt this is the number-one reason NewsGator was interested in it, and I don’t see any other product, much less an open-source initiative, knocking it from that perch any time soon.

Brent and Sheila sell out

Gruber points out that Ranchero Software has sold NetNewsWire to NewsGator. Big, big news in the Macintosh community it is. It appears this is a good move for Brent and Sheila Simmons, and will not affect NetNewsWire aficionados, yours truly included. I am a little concerned about MarsEdit, which Brent says, in the above-linked interview, they are searching for a new home for.

I’m sure Brent will take some heat from certain zealots in the Mac blogosphere and beyond, but he will get none from me. He and Sheila have to do what’s best for them, and by throwing in with NewsGator, it would appear the sky is suddenly the limit. Our best wishes to the Simmons, and we eagerly await the next version of NetNewsWire!

Update, 9:35 PM CST: Gruber notes the post in Brent’s blog regarding the acquisition.

ATPM 11.10

The October issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Ellyn ponders the day we watch movies on our mobile phones, while Wes covers the fact that our mobiles are now playing music, thanks to the iTunes-compatible ROKR from Motorola. He also looks at the incredible iPod Nano, file formats, OS X UI, and other bits from the Mac blogosphere.

Ted takes TAO and OmniOutliner Pro head to head, while Chuck’s FileMaking rolls on with Common Functions.

ATPM reader Mark Dickson is gracious in sharing photos from his June trip to Italy as this month’s desktop pictures selection. In this month’s Cortland, the Lisa returns, and Terry is targeted by…well, some people you think you know. Frisky notes backup freeware PsyncX.

On the reviews front, Johann examines Airfoil’s audio hijacking and broadcasting capabilities (when paired with an Airport Express Base Station). Chris Lawson tries out Business Card Composer, and puts the Mercury Elite-AL Pro RAID through its paces. Michael compares two disk catalogers, Catalog and CDFinder. I used to use Disk Tracker, but eventually got out of the disk/CD cataloging habit. Now that my digital photo collection is growing by leaps and bounds, there is a need to pick that habit up again, and this review helped. Finally, Tom tells our readers what he thinks of the new iPod nano.

As always, the publication is available in three fruity flavors for your reading enjoyment.

“Mac” is a no-no for Google AdWords users

Sometimes, Apple can be so stupid.

It must be .Mac renewal time

Matt Deatherage used the above line as the title for an e-mail on the MacJournals-Talk list, and he’s right. You usually don’t see updates and new features added to .Mac until fall arrives.

You can read the gory details, but the gist is .Mac members now get 1 GB of storage, split between mail and data, there’s a new version of Backup, and .Mac members can now congregrate in to groups.

As of five minutes ago, looking at my iDisk space inside the .Mac preference pane, I saw it was still at 200 MB. I logged in to my .Mac Account Settings, and it reflects the 1 GB increase. You will have to click on the Storage Settings button to see the change reflected in your e-mail/iDisk breakdown. Quitting System Preferences, then relaunching and clicking on the .Mac pref pane will have the storage update reflected there.

I have been debating renewing my .Mac subscription, and these updates really don’t change much for me. I’m not ready to transition everything in the next 12 days, when my account is set to renew, so I’ll be a .Mac member for at least another year. Watch for an upcoming post about .Mac value.

Enough said, indeed

The Oz has spoken.

Is there a name for this sort of illness?

I use Safari Enhancer to kill the brushed metal look of Safari. I just used iTunes Unified to change iTunes 5’s Unifed-Metal look to normal Unified.

So why is it my chat client has to have brushed metal? What the hell is wrong with me?

ATPM 11.09

The September issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Wes had a great idea for the cover, and we like how the art turned out. We’re just sorry we couldn’t have run it last month, but that’s the way it is some times.

Speaking of Mr. Meltzer, in this month’s Bloggable, Wes covers the latest Mac-on-Intel musings from the Mac blogosphere, as well as blips on the Mighty Mouse, browsers, and Apple rumors. David Ozab shares a moving tribute to Robert Moog, the man responsible for popularizing the modern synthesizer, which many a Macintosh has played in concert with. Sylvester shares his digital music experiences in this month’s Pod People.

Regarding the Pod People column, we seem to have run through the staffers interested in contributing, and we are seeking future columns from our readership. If you would like to share your iPod experiences, please drop us a line.

Chuck Ross’s critically-acclaimed FileMaking series continues with a look at Fields and Calculations. (I kid not; reader feedback on Chuck’s articles has been incredibly positive. Congrats, Chuck! It’s our pleasure to offer your work to our readers.)

Our own Matthew Glidden shares some photo textures from Louisville, Kentucky, and New Orleans, taken in August of last year, in this month’s desktop pictures section. My good friend Francisco also has a contribution, a picture of what the night sky in Manhattan may have looked like, starting in 1998…

Cortland decodes corporate buzzwords while missing a golden opportunity. Meanwhile, the plan of the evil geniuses is temporarily foiled due to their inability to read a map. Once again, I wrote the blurb (ahem, Lee), so I’m using it here. It took me long enough to come up with that; why reinvent the wheel?

Frisky Freeware notes the Nvu web authoring system. It’s free, and cross-platform to boot, and looks fairly nice. If I wasn’t such a text editor nerd-wannabe, I would probably look in to it more, but most of my web design and development is done inside BBEdit.

David Blumenstein puts the ABSmini one-touch storage system through its paces, while Tom Bridge does the same with Apple’s new Mighty Mouse. (I’m still trying to scrape together funds for a Kensington trackball.) The Dean, Frank Wu, examines the NeoCase from RadTech. I had many a neoprene case for my old PowerBooks, and it’s cool in a retro way to see them still around. Andrew Kator works over the PhoneValet 3.0, while Marcus Albers logs in to Tron 2.0. Light-bike races are still my favorite. Finally, Lee reviews You Control: Desktops, which, for the special price You Software is offering ATPM readers, is worthy of consideration for your multiple desktop needs.

We have some staff vacancies, as you can see on our cover page, we need Pod People authors, as I stated earlier, and we always need cover art each month. If you’d like to contribute to ATPM in any way, please let us know.

About that Safari update

Dear Apple,

Is it really and truly necessary for a x.0.x upgrade of a web browser to force an full-blown system restart? Think of the minutes of productivity lost for this single user. Think of the total hours lost by large corporate entities.

Oh, Safari is closely tied to Mac OS X? How very Microsoft of you, Steve.

Get your act together, gang. It’s a web browser. Updates and upgrades shouldn’t force restarts.

Thanks,

Annoyed Retrophisch™

Quicksilver + Dictionary

Tim Brayshaw has a great tip on combining the use of Quicksilver with Mac OS X 10.4’s Dictionary.

[Via TUAW.]

Giving Adium that iChat-fresh feeling

As I’ve said before, I like the look of iChat. So when I made the switch yesterday to Adium, so I could use both the AIM and Google Talk (viz: Jabber) protocols at the same time, I began a hunt to have Adium replicate the look of iChat. If you feel similarly, I’ll save you some time.

First, don’t download the official Adium client. Instead, download Metal Adium X by Mike Barca. That will give you the metal look for the chat window(s) and the Contacts list, as well as Aqua-y goodness for progress bars, etc. As he explains on the Metal Adium site, Mike updates the app within 24-48 hours of a new release of the official Adium client.

Second, download iChadiumMod, so your message view will have the iChat-style balloons. Next, be sure to change your sound set to “iChat” in the Events preferences. Finally, you’ll need a new Dock icon. There are a few iChat replica icons on Adium Xtras, but I didn’t want an exact duplicate. I’d like to be able to tell my apps apart, thank you, so I went with the iChat Adium derivative.

Looking at my chat setup now, I can’t help but wonder if this is near to what iChat would look like with tabs:

I’m sure Steve would have the tabs at the top, a la Safari, but otherwise, pretty darn close, no?

Accordance Seminar, Dallas

If you’re an Accordance user, and aren’t on the OakTree Software e-mail list, there is a free seminar on getting the most out of the company’s flagship product coming up in September:

Saturday September 24, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Todd Academic Center — Room 114
Dallas Theological Seminary
3909 Swiss Ave., Dallas, TX

Refreshments will be provided, though you’re on your own for lunch. You are encouraged to bring your own laptop to follow along with. E-mail Dr. Helen Brown for further details and to RSVP.

Gtalk

Jon reports that Google Talk has gone live. The IM product builds on Gmail accounts and the open-source Jabber IM service.

I’m already up and running on it with AdiumX, so I guess iChat will be taking a hike, and my fun balloons won’t be used in the future. (Can anyone point me to a reasonable substitute for Adium?) If you want to jaw via Jabber courtesy of Google, use my site name at gmail dot com, but you have to have a Gmail account to play along. Let me know if you’d like an invitation via the e-mail address noted in the previous sentence.

ClamXav

MacDevCenter recently featured an article about ClamXav, a free virus scanner for Mac OS X. ClamXav is based on the open-source, antivirus engine ClamAV.

With the loss of Virex as an incentive for purchasing .Mac, François Joseph de Kermadec’s article convinced me to download ClamXav and give it a whirl. I now have it configured to automatically scan my home account every night at 3 AM, after it checks for the latest updates. It also will scan, in the background, any file that ends up in my downloads folder.

The app is Java-based, so it’s a little slower than I’d like on my 1 GHz PowerBook, but hey, it’s free. It does appear to be put together well, otherwise.

We have very few virii to worry about on the Macintosh side of the fence, but it never hurts to be prepared.

In search of a good web whacker

That’s web whacker, not weed whacker. The latter is taken care of by our Black & Decker Grass Hog.

A friend is looking for a Mac- or Java-based web whacker/sucker program for a project. According to what he’s tried so far:

• Web Dumper doesn’t work
• PageSucker stops working while in use
• Site Orbiter doesn’t save files for browsing offline properly
• Safari’s Web Archive feature isn’t cutting the mustard, either

The project in question is taking a dynamically-generated web site (which does not output HTML files), whacking/sucking it to a local machine in HTML format, then moving it offsite to another web server.

Please leave suggestions in the comments. Thanks!

You learn something new every day

John Gruber, via GUIdebook:

…[Y]ou can use Command-Tab switching when you’re in the middle of a drag. So you can start dragging something in one app, then use Command-Tab to switch to another app, and then complete the drop in the new app. I don’t even know when this happened – it might have been like this on Mac OS X all along, but I don’t think I noticed until sometime during the 10.2 era. This also works with things like Exposé and Dashboard.

It sounds obvious, but doing something like that was completely unheard of on the old Mac OS.

What should they do with the company, Michael?

The company Michael Dell said should be sold off and the money given to its shareholders is kicking his butt:

Overall customer satisfaction with the PC industry is unchanged from a year ago at 74, but changes within the industry give Apple a commanding lead. The PC maker maintains big improvements from 2003 and 2004, holding at 81 for a second year. Apple’s sales are up 33%, net income has grown 300% and its stock price has nearly tripled over the past year. A slew of product innovations and an emphasis on digital technologies and customer service have been very successful for Apple with a high degree of customer loyalty as a result.

Dell is a different story. Based on a strategy of mass customization, the #1 PC maker worldwide has been a leader in customer satisfaction for several years. This quarter, it suffers a sharp drop in ACSI, down 6% to 74. Customer service in particular has become a problem, and service quality lags not only Apple but also the rest of the industry. Customer complaints are up significantly with long wait-times and difficulties with Dell’s call-center abound. Still, competitive pricing as a result of Dell’s direct-sales business model keeps overall customer satisfaction slightly above other competitors, with the exception of Apple. Whether Dell’s declining satisfaction will have a negative impact on the company’s stock performance remains to be seen; however, ACSI history has shown that changes in customer satisfaction often signal similar changes in future financial performance. Apple’s stock price is up 35% for the year-to-date, whereas Dell’s is flat.

[Via MacInTouch, emphasis in quoted text added. —R]

DropDMG 2.7

Michael has released a new version of his disk image creation utility, DropDMG. The big, new features are disc burning and improved progress windows. Very groovy. I may have to revise my own backup procedures in light of this new release.

OS X on non-Apple Intel iron

Jon notes the challenge to get the Intel version of OS X running on non-Apple, Intel-based hardware has been met.

It will be interesting to see how this affects both Macintosh hardware and software development moving forward. It would seem that, since this is a development build of Tiger, it would be relatively easy to pull this off. I’m sure the shipping version of the first for-Intel Mac OS will have appropriate countermeasures in the code to prevent this from happening.

Gmail on Mailsmith

I finally attempted, once again, to set up POP access to my Gmail account in Mailsmith. I used all of the settings found on the Configuring other mail clients page, made sure to check “Leave Mail on Server”, and like any good technology, it all just works.

ATPM 11.08

The August issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available.

Kudos to Lee on the cover art. We were in dire need of cover art, and he stepped up big time. We are always looking for cover art, so if you are graphically inclined, and wish to contribute something, please contact us.

Speaking of contributing, we’re also looking for another copy editor, a publicity manager, and contributing editors to help us with reviews, opinion columns, how-to pieces, and interviews. We’re an all-volunteer publication, but if you’d like to help out in one of these areas, please drop us a line.

Back to the issue at hand, there has been a lot of good news coming out of Apple this past quarter, as Rob reminds us. Wes takes, well, just about everyone involved in the business world to task for underestimating and misunderstanding Apple, as well as sharing bits from all over the Mac blogosphere. Eric, my 3G iPod brother, tells his tale with the little white digital music player in this month’s Pod People.

Ted shares part two of Outlining and Styles in the latest ATPO, discussing, among other things, on-screen readability, font choices, and style sheets. Chuck continues his FileMaking series with Fields and Calculations. If you’re just getting started with FileMaker, be sure to go read his first column, too.

As Managing Editor, part of my job description is to strong-arm columns out of writers subtly hint at a possible column to staffers when they broach interesting technical subjects. Such was the case when Sylvester was having RAM issues with his new G5, and he shares his experiences with memory testing.

Tom has an interview with John Hart, Mac modder extraordinaire. Sorry, John, but I still have severe reservations about embedding my beloved Cube in the middle of a fish tank, no matter how utterly wicked cool that would be. Maybe when I get a G5 we can sacrifice the Cube to the modding gods.

This month’s desktop pictures selection is a melting pot of various submissions from ATPM readers. We thank John, James, Jim, Bill, and William for the privilege of showcasing their work. Frisky Freeware notes App Stop, which is software I’ll have to look in to. Cortland wraps up dinner with his parents and friends, Wieser Graphics rises from the ashes, and Matt pays homage to influential Web comics. Yes, that’s word-for-word from the blurb on the Welcome page and the RSS feed, but I wrote it when the blurber got stuck, so I’m using it. (Michael, take note. I have just created the official staff position of “blurber”.)

Tom and his fiancé, Tiffany, have a review of Backpack, the latest web service from 37signals. I’m really enjoying the free version so far, and my wife and I have used it to track RSVPs for the little phisch’s upcoming birthday party, sharing a page online so both of us can access it. Wes looks at Boswell 4.0, sharing how it helps him keep things straight as he writes reviews about software that helps you keep things organized, like reviews about software that help…

Then there are the reviews which make this “The Issue of Apple Portable Computing Computer Bags.” (See, this is why Michael doesn’t let me declare names for issues.) David hauls around the Brenthaven Pro 12/15, while Lawson bombs about with the MaxSleeve from MaxUpgrades. Frank Wu uses booq’s Vyper XL, and yours truly was underwhelmed with Timbuk2’s Detour.

Savvy readers may notice that Ellyn’s Candy Apple column did not appear this month. Ellyn’s taking a break from the writing gig for awhile, but she continues working tirelessly in the trenches, copy editing for the rest of us. Rest assured, when she has something to say, you’ll read it in ATPM.

Yet another solid issue from the staff. Thanks, gang!

A terabyte for less than a grand

OWC announced today it is now offering 1 Terabyte (TB) of RAID storage for $979.99. Wow.

Arlo’s revenge

What do you do when you perceive a major computer company has totally ripped off your software and tout their version as a major feature of their latest operating system?

Why, you sell out, of course.

MDJ publisher Matt Deatherage, ever the trooper, offers this bit of analysis on the MacJournals-Talk list, even though he’s laid up with an illness:

Kind of a “widget wow” moment. Anyone think there will be about six billion more new Konfabulator widgets in the next 3 months? Apple just got trumped on the “we’re making our widget format available for free to more users” strategy; now Dashboard may be the underdog in the long-term.

(Just for the record, my original notification of the sale came from Matt’s post to the list.)

Types of Windows users and I wish we’d bought a Mac Mini

Wil Shipley, in a DrunkenBlog interview:

The two types of Windows users I’ve identified at my café are:

a. I use Windows to run Word and Excel and browse the web (and read e-mail in my web browser), and b. I’m a programmer and I spend all my time in a Windows IDE or hacking around with my system.

I’m sure there may be a third category of user out there, but this has been my observation as well. My wife and parents clearly are the first type of users, and could just as well be served on a Mac. The SuperToad falls in to the second camp; he makes his living as a Windows programmer, but he does so with a Mac on his desk as well. Plus, he’s still getting mileage out of a decrepit, original orange iBook.

Since my switch to Macintosh over a decade ago, one of the reasons we have kept a PC or two in the house was due to my wife’s work. She’s a corporate attorney, and could always work from home, if need be. After our move to Dallas, the firm she worked for here had a VPN system set up, and she could work on items in the firm’s document management system from home, just as if she was sitting in the office.

Her new employer, however, being tied in to the stock market and the myriad regulations therein regarding insider trading, etc., does not have such a system in place. You work at the office, or you work on a company-provided laptop, or you don’t work. Also, my wife’s position also is not as intensive in outside-normal-business-hours work as her former firm life was. She doesn’t need a PC at home any more.

Last year, when her old desktop PC was giving up the ghost, and I set out to build her a new one, if we had known then she was going to change jobs, I wouldn’t have bothered. I would have milked the old PC until after she moved in to her new career, then replaced it with a Mac Mini. Hindsight is always 20/20.

iChatting

iCal Day

Today is iCal Day. Like Erik, I use iCal for my scheduling needs, because right now anything else is overkill. Plus, it syncs easily with my iPod and Sony Ericsson T616.

Backpack widget

Well, a widget I can actually get some use out of…

Chipt Productions has released a widget for the Backpack service from 37signals.

Darned if Gruber didn’t beat me to it.

iSync 2.1 breaks T616 synchronization, sort of

After reading Colin Robertson’s report that his Sony Ericsson T616 would no longer sync with his PowerBook via iSync, I set out to test this myself, since I have the same phone.

I have a 12-inch, 1 GHz PowerBook running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.1, and I had just installed iSync 2.1 yesterday when it was released by Apple. It was then that I noticed I hadn’t synced my PowerBook with the phone in a while, though the ‘Book had synced with .Mac.

When I attempted to sync the two devices, iSync told me it was unable to do so with the T616. I decided to remove it as a device, then re-add it. iSync picked up the phone during its device scan, but informed me it would be unable to sync with it.

I then turned to my other Mac, a 450 MHz Cube still running 10.3.9. I added the phone to the older version of iSync installed there, and it synchronized with no problem.

About half an hour later, I decided to revisit the PowerBook’s iSync version, and this time, the software recognized the phone, added it as a device, and synchronized with it. Since then, after making minor modifications to some contacts, I have made two more successful syncs with the T616. It would appear one simply needs to remove the device from iSync, wait a bit, then add it again.