O'Reilly Digital Media Blog - Mac

Send iPhone/iPod touch Users Directly to iTunes

2009-04-09T22:22:07Z

I have what may be a radical suggestion for the “always control you content” types, you should consider making a change to your show’s site: instead of providing an “iPhone friendly” version of your site, send iPhone and iPod touch browsers right to your iTunes listing. This accomplishes two things: it keeps you from having to find (or make) a good mobile version of your site, and it gives your visitors the ability to add your podcast to their device immediately and start listening right away. For those of you who missed it, the most recent set of new features for the iPhone included the ability to download podcasts directly to your device’s iPod app without connecting to the computer. Essentially, they have provided a pre-formatted list of all of your available episodes — accompanied by “download” buttons that add those files right to the official player app on the iPhone and iPod touch. That’s way more functionality than you can provide in a mobile version, and it’s all set up for you already. As an iPhone user, this is great: it allows me to add a new podcast directly to my phone as soon as I hear about it — not to just start streaming it, but to actually store it for later listening, which duplicates the while “timeshifting” part of podcasting that you used to need the computer for. It also lets me add the latest episodes of a show to my phone without making a trip to my desk. When I’m traveling, this is essential, as my iPhone is synced with the iTunes library on my desktop computer, not my laptop. As a podcast producer, it gets my content exactly where I want it: on the device that a potential listener is carrying with them right now, exactly when they are in the mood to listen to it. It removes the “I’ll listen later” mental excuse that people so often forget about, and it also provides the “media instant gratification” that iPhone users are now used to (for better or for worse). I’ve set up Boston Behind the Scenes to do this, at least partially. I don’t have a browser-detection redirect set up, but I do have an “iPhone” link at the top of the page. I also have a mobile-friendly URL set up: http://bostonbts.com/iphone (on a computer, this link will just take you to the iTunes store — try it on your iPod or iPhone). Both lead directly to the iTunes app when clicked. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, do you like this setup? Would you prefer to have producers do this, make a mobile-specific site, or just leave their sites alone?

PayPerNote 1.0 - an advanced note management program

2009-04-01T08:00:00Z

CONTACT Earl Vickers The Sound Guy, Inc. http://www.sfxmachine.com PayPerNote 1.0 Saratoga, CA - April 1, 2009 The Sound Guy, Inc. has announced the release of PayPerNote 1.0, an advanced note management program. PayPerNote analyzes audio or MIDI inputs and allows performers to view exactly how much they're getting paid on a per-note basis. "Musicians are very generous and often get caught up in the moment, not realizing how little they're getting for their music," said Sound Guy CEO Earl Vickers. "Throughout history, recording artists have been taken advantage of by record companies, club owners, and even their own fans. Without some kind of visual cue, it's easy for a performer's mind to wander toward chord progressions or song meanings instead of focusing on the bottom line. "During the Great Depression, musicians made less than a penny a note, and they had to keep a running tally in their head if they wanted to calculate their average return. Unfortunately, many performers still make less than a penny a note; however, with PayPerNote software, they can see at a glance if they're overplaying and need to dial it back." PayPerNote lets artists set measurable goals for each performance. Given information about ticket prices, artist's percentage, attendance and show duration, PayPerNote displays a running estimate of per-note income. At the same time, artificial intelligence software computes the optimal note rate and flashes the screen if the performer plays too rapidly. In a pay-to-play situation, musicians can see exactly how much they're paying for the privilege of helping the club make money. PayPerNote can also track online peer-to-peer networks and estimate how much money would have been made for each note of a given album if customers had actually paid for their music instead of stealing it. PayPerNote's Audience Mode helps give concertgoers a deeper appreciation of the performance. Listeners often take blazing displays of virtuosity for granted and rarely have any idea how many notes were heard for each dollar of ticket price. In these challenging economic times, a band's survival may depend on making sure that customers understand they're getting their money's worth. By directing PayPerNote's display toward the audience, musicians can provide a subtle reminder of how much the fans are receiving - sometimes thousands of notes - for each ticket dollar. PayPerNote works with Macintosh OS X and Windows XP and Vista. The Sound Guy, Inc. is the manufacturer of Backwards Machine, ReSpatializer, and the award-winning SFX Machine family of audio effects plug-ins, including the new SFX Machine Pro for RTAS. For more information, visit http://sfxmachine.com . Previous press releases may be found at http://www.sfxmachine.com/presskit/press_releases/more_press_releases.html . # # #

CS-4U - Creative Stimulus For You!

2009-03-06T23:09:40Z

No doubt these are tough times - times that can get one down, emotionally and creatively. But heck, are you going to let a tanking stock market sink your digital imaging creativity? Hope not! However, if the winds have been knocked out of your creative sails, here are a few ideas that may stimulate the creative artist within. At the very least, I hope they distract your from the stock market chart, which looks like a bad - a very bad - histogram. 1) Make an on-line book. I just made one with Mpix that I’ve been planning to make for about two years: Life Lessons We Can Learn From Mother Nature. What fun, not only making the book, but learning the software. Come up with a theme, pick your best shots, and get published! 2) Test-drive a plug-in. Hundreds of plug-ins are available via the Web that expand the capability and creativity of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Aperture and Lightroom. Most are available for a free trail. Download a few and stay up to midnight creating one-of-a-kind effects. To get started, check out the Plug-in Experience - a site I started just for fun. Send me a plug-in picture and I’ll help to make your more famous! 3) Go on a one-lens adventure. Challenge yourself. Go on-location with only one lens and see what kind of magic you can create in camera. You may be pleasantly surprised. 4) Paint with light. Sit someone down in a completely dark room. Set your camera on a tripod. Set the ISO to 400 and the shutter speed to 10 seconds. Release the shutter with the camera’s self-timer. Now, with a flashlight, paint the subject with light. You’ll have to experiment to get your timing and painting techniques down - but when you do, you’ll love the creative results. 5) Team up. Go on a shoot with a friend. From the same spot, try to take two totally different photographs. 6) Go wireless. On-camera flashes are okay for snapshot. For more creative flash photography, get a wireless remote, which allows you to fire an off-camera flash placed in a much more creative position - for more dramatic lighting. 7) Slow it down. Indoors, outdoors, during the day and at night, set your camera to a slow shutter speed and see how you can use motion to add a sense of movement to a still photograph. 8) Break the Rules. For an entire day, break every photographic rule that you have ever heard about. Open your mind. 9) Play with custom functions and picture styles. If you are like me, you probably don’t take advantage of the custom functions and picture styles on your camera. Well, guess what? They can actually help you take more creative images. 10) Switch styles. If you usually take landscapes with a wide-angle lens, take a few shots with a telephoto lens - which will isolates the elements in the scene. If you usually take people and pet pictures with a telephoto lens, take a few shots with a wide-angle lens for more of an environmental photograph. Hey, if you have a few CS-4U ideas, please post them! Best, Rick P.S. If you have Photoshop CS4 (Creative Suite 4)Extended, play around with the 3-D effects. Now that's a CS-4U (Creative Stimulus for you) tip that is totally cool and totally fun! Also, immediately after applying a filter, fade the filter for additional creative effects (Filter > Fade Filter).

A Quicker Search of Almost Everything

2009-02-09T20:00:00Z

_Please take a moment to read this [short announcement][]. Thanks!_ [short announcement]: #announcement Mid-January, yet another interesting software project was introduced by the Google labs: the Google Quick Search Box. According to its project page, Google Quick Search Box -- or "QSB" for short -- "is an open source search box that allows you to search data on your computer and across the web". That is a _big_ understatement. The lead developers of the Quick Search Box project are Nicholas Jitkoff and Dave MacLachlan, and not a single blog post I have read about QSB so far fails to point out that Jitkoff is the mastermind behind Quicksilver, one of the most ingenious productivity utilities available. The current version of QSB is still "just" a developer preview, but it already gives a good idea of where this project is headed, and where its differences to, and similarities with, Quicksilver lie. This article explains in detail how Quick Search Box works. Hence, if you are already familiar with Quicksilver or its cousins -- Objective Development's _LaunchBar_ or Many Tricks's _Butler_ --, you may wish to skip ahead to the [comparison between QSB and Quicksilver][]. [comparison between QSB and Quicksilver]: #comparison ### Finding stuff: basic searching with the Quick Search Box QSB's basic operation is similar to that of Spotlight: you summon the Quick Search Box with a keyboard shortcut, and as soon as you start typing your search term, QSB starts displaying what it considers the best matches for that search in real time, hinting at the top match in gray letters inside the text entry field.

A fresh search in Google Quick Search Box: the five best matches plus a related Google search are listed; the top match is selected and hinted at in gray type in the search entry field; more matches are accessible via the "More" item; and the path to the selected item is shown at the bottom of the window (which window, unfortunately, cannot be resized).

Via a preference setting you can choose to see the three, five, or ten best matches. If QSB finds more matches, it says so at the bottom of the list, detailing what it has found, e.g., "More[:] 6 Apps, 1 Docs, 1 Other, 2 Webpages". This being an official Google application, the list of best matches always includes an item that queries google.com for the term you have entered and then brings up the standard Google results page in your browser. On a side note: as I found out when I started using QSB, I often "park" my thumbs on my Mac's Command keys before completing a keyboard shortcut to trigger a command. As a result, QSB often came up even when I didn't want it to, because the default trigger for summoning it is tapping the Command key twice. This problem was easily solved by changing this shortcut, though: I'm using Command-Space now, which I had used previously as my Quicksilver trigger key combo (just in case you're wondering, I've now set Quicksilver to Option-Space, the Spotlight menu to Control-Space, and the Spotlight window to Control-Shift-Space). Back to using the Google Quick Search Box: via the up and down arrow keys, you can select any of the top matches, or -- by moving the selection downwards beyond the "More..." line -- bring up the complete list of results, which -- again just as in Spotlight -- are sorts neatly by the type of objects found. Even in that list, some search results may be hidden, and by selecting the "Show all [...] ..." line and hitting Return, those hidden items are displayed as well.

Showing 'all' search results, sorted by type.

To open an item, you just hit the Return key: this launches an application, opens a file, visits a URL in the browser, sends a search query to google.com, plays an iTunes track, etc. As a handy navigation aid, at the bottom of the window QSB displays the path to the currently selected item. Clicking on any of this path's segments takes you to that location. Part of GQSB's core functionality is that it learns what you mean when typing in a search term: whenever you open Mail after searching for "m", that increases the search rank for "Mail" for that search term. After using QSB for a while, the software will, thus, have learned your preferred abbreviations for certain applications, contacts, files, what have you, so that the search results are in line with what _you_ think should be the best-matching for a specific search term. ### Selecting search targets: searching in all the right places QSB lets you choose which types of objects to include in the searches, and in which areas of your hard it should search for files. As examples, the list of Searchable Items in the preferences include your Address Book contacts, your Home Folder, your Documents and Downloads folders, your iChat Buddies, etc. Interestingly, Spotlight Results are also included on that list, so you need only use QSB as your single interface to query both search "engines".

The Searchable Items preferences let you select where to search and which types of data to search for.

The key difference between how the Google Quick Search Box and Spotlight look for matches is that only the latter searches _inside_ files. Which is why I have _not_ activated the Spotlight Results option in QSB, because Spotlight usually finds way too many matches for my searches to be useful. Instead, I use QSB to search by file name, and only if I really need to search the contents of files to find a choice morsel of data do I resort to Spotlight. In addition to the list of searchable items, QSB offers two additional search-related options, named "Show website suggestions from Google.com" and "Show search suggestions from Google.com". When checked, QSB gathers website and search suggestions for your search term live from google.com and displays them inline with the other search results.

Google website and search suggestions shown inline with other search results.

Just like the google.com website, QSB supports some "special search" features: for example, typing in a U.S. zip code and hitting Return displays the current weather for that location, and there's a built-in calculator that displays the result of a mathematical equation right inside the search field.

The calculator in Quick Search Box: the result is updated live while you type and edit your equation.

### Digging for information: refining your search results A key feature of the Google Quick Search Box, and its most prominent advantage over Spotlight, is that you can easily refine your search by "drilling into" the data. Here's an example: when, after selecting a folder in a search result, you hit Tab (or right-arrow), the results list changes to display the files and folders contained in that folder. Shift-Tab (or left-arrow or Escape) take you back "up" one level, enabling efficient navigation along the whole folder hierarchy. This also works in a similar fashion for other types of data like music tracks stored in iTunes's library: search for an artist's name, select it in the search results, and hit Tab to see all albums by that artist. Select one of these albums, hit Tab again, and you will see all tracks on that album. When refining your search this way, QSB essentially changes your search context. Thanks to the Quick Search Box always displaying the previous context -- i.e., the search result that you are "digging into" -- in a lozenge-style box in the text entry field, you always know where you are (see the blue box around "QuickTime Player" in the text entry field in the next screenshot below). As mentioned earlier, hitting Return will open the selected item in the search results list. However, what makes the Quick Search Box really shine is that, just like Quicksilver, it lets you apply many more actions to the selected search result than just opening it. ### Now do something with what you found: applying data-type-dependent actions When using Spotlight, there are exactly three actions you can apply to an object in the list of search results: open it, reveal it in the Finder, or show its Info box (triggered via clicking / Return, Command-clicking / Command-Return, and Command-I, respectively). The Google Quick Search Box is more flexible in this regard by offering a much broader choice of what to do with the items found during a search. It does so by maintaining "action objects" which appear in red in the search results. Which actions are available depends on the selected item's type. For files including applications, there are four core actions: Show in Finder, (open in) Quick Look, Get Info, and Open. To apply any of these, hit Tab after selecting a file, and choose the desired action. The real gain in productivity, however, comes from actions that go well beyond this "application launcher" functionality.

Quick Search Box's four core actions for files. Like all actions, they are displayed in red.

Imagine you would like to call a friend of yours at work. That phone number is in your Address Book and you decide to display it in large type on your Mac so you can see it from across the room where your phone is located (for this example's sake, please bear with me for a second here…). With OS X's on-board tools, you would likely search for that contact's name in Spotlight, open the contact in Address Book from Spotlight's search results, grab the mouse and select "Large Type" from the work phone number's context menu (if you haven't stumbled over these menus yet, just left-click on the "home", "work", "mobile", etc. tags in Address Book). Here's how to achieve the same result with the Quick Search Box: search for the contact's name in QSB, display that contact's details by "drilling down" via the Tab key, select the desired phone number, and apply the "Show Large Type" action. All without ever opening the Address Book application and without taking your hands off the keyboard. That is a very simple example, so here's one from Quicksilver (that, as of now, is not yet possible with QSB): let's assume you want to email a file to someone. You would open your email client of choice, create an empty email, type in the recipient's name, attach the file, possibly via dragging-and-dropping it from the Finder, and send off that email. How about this: search for the file in Quicksilver (or, in future, in QSB), search and apply the "Email to..." action, search for the recipient, and up pops a fresh email with the file already attached and the recipient entered in the address field. Takes less time, is more effective, feels more streamlined. Oh, and if you want to attach more than one file, just append your file searches with commas: this works flawlessly even when finding files in different folders.

Actions to adjust the Mac speaker's and iTunes's volume. These are examples for stand-alone actions that are not applied to a search result.

### There's more to come: Quick Search Box's support for plug-ins A key aspect of the Quick Search Box's architecture is that it is based on plug-ins, which allow expanding both QSB's search capabilities as well as adding new actions. Currently stashed away on a Debug pane in the software's preferences, you can browse the list of plug-ins that are included in QSB by default.

The list of plug-ins is displayed on the Debug preferences pane. As of now, there is no way yet, to install additional plug-ins.

Since the code to the Google Quick Search Box is open-source, anyone will be able to write such plug-ins for QSB, and the programmers' imagination is the only limit to what QSB will be able to do with the data on your computer. Just while I was preparing this post for publication, a new release of QSB showed up in Google Software Update, and a new feature, among others, is support for Twitter: if you have a Twitter account, you can add it on the Accounts preferences pane, and send status updates right from within QSB. While that won't replace a dedicated Twitter client anytime soon, it is a nice proof-of-concept to show in what ways the Quick Search Box can be expanded via just popping in a plug-in. ### Father and son: how the Quick Search Box compares to Quicksilver As mentioned in the intro, one of the two lead developers of the Google Quick Search Box was the person behind Quicksilver. While both share the same core philosophy, there are some key differences between the two -- some of which are very welcome, some not so much.

Quicksilver's search panel features two separate panes for objects (like files, contacts, etc.) and actions. In some cases -- e.g., for the "Open with..." action -- it will display a third pane. Unlike QSB, Quicksilver does not sort the search results by type.

Compared to Quick Search Box, **Quicksilver offers...:** **More powerful search** -- The one difference that Quicksilver users (including myself) will likely consider a major step backwards, is that, in its current implementation, QSB only supports literal searches, and it always starts searching at the beginning of a word. Quicksilver is much more flexible in that it searches inside of words, and it even searches for the individual letters in the search term as long as they occur in the order they were typed in. Here's what that means in real life: when searching for "cal", QSB might find "__cal__endar" and "too many __cal__ories", i.e., any object whose name contains words that start with the literal string "cal". Quicksilver, however, would also find any object whose name contains the individual characters "c", "a", and "l" anywhere in that name, as long as the characters are contained in the name in that order. Thus, in addition to what QSB would find, Quicksilver would _also_ find, say, "i__Cal__", "my name is __ca__r__l__", or even "ba__c__kup of m__a__ster image fi__l__es", as well. (You can see another example in the Quicksilver screenshot above.) I find Quicksilver's search capabilities extremely handy for using intuitive abbreviations for applications, say "c" for iCal, "du" for Disk Utility or "sd" for SuperDuper!, and I sincerely hope that, eventually, QSB's capabilities will equal Quicksilver's in this regard. **Separate panes for objects and actions** -- While QSB combines both objects and actions in a single list, Quicksilver uses dedicated panes for objects and for actions. Thanks to actions showing in red in QSB's results list, they are easy to distinguish from objects, but it remains to be seen if this setup works as well as Quicksilver's separate panes once Quick Search Box supports as many actions as Quicksilver does already. **More flexible search targets** -- What parts of hard disk QSB will search are determined by the pre-defined options in the Searchable Items preferences, whereas Quicksilver lets you freely add folders to its catalog of search targets. As a result, QSB cannot search folders located outside your Home folder, because these are not included in the list of Searchable Items. If, for whatever reason, you store important and/or often-used files in the Shared user folder or in non-Mac OS-standard folders, this will be a problem. It would be nice if QSB would eventually support custom definitions as options for the Searchable Items, ideally in a format that could be easily shared. **Triggers** -- Quicksilver supports a selection of triggers like keyboard shortcuts or mouse gestures, which you can use to execute custom actions. This makes some tasks even faster than Quicksilver or QSB already make them, and it is great approach to creating system-wide keyboard shortcuts, for example for [launching AppleScripts][]. This is something I definitely would love to see in QSB. [launching AppleScripts]: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2007/06/08/hit-and-run-launching-applescripts-with-keyboard-shortcuts.html?page=4 **More complex and complicated preferences** -- Quicksilver is a very flexible utility for power users, and this is reflected in the complexity and sheer number of preferences, which easily overwhelms not only new users, but often also stumps seasoned Quicksilver veterans.

Just for triggering and basic search functionality alone, Quicksilver lets you configure all of these settings, making them much more difficult to grasp than the few options Quick Search Box offers.

Jitkoff and MacLachlan have succeeded in massively simplifying the preferences panes in Quick Search Box, and at least to me it does not feel that anything of major importance is missing. If giving up gratuitous configurability -- configuring the exact behavior of how the search field is summoned, what QSB looks like, etc. -- results in making the application simpler to use and also more accessible to new users, I'm all for it. **Downloading plug-ins from within the application** -- Quicksilver has a built-in "plug-in store", so downloading and installing plug-ins to expand Quicksilver's feature set is as easy as clicking a check box to activate the respective plug-in: if it is not installed yet when it is activated, Quicksilver just does all the heavy lifting in the background and informs the user as soon as the plug-in is ready for use. It is probably too early to lament the lack of this feature in the Quick Search Box, but I'm hoping it, too will make it into the release candidate. ### Reaching a first-impression verdict: Quick Search Box is something to get excited about Quick Search Box is still at development preview status: it is not feature-complete, some search results don't make any sense, it crashes, it freezes, and sometimes it just refuses to leave the screen. And yet, I am already very excited about the Google Quick Search Box: its user interface is much cleaner than Quicksilver's, it adds useful new features like central accounts support, and, unlike Quicksilver, it is simple enough to appeal to non-power users. As a result, QSB could bring the productivity promise of Quicksilver to the masses of Mac users. Considering the differences between both utilities, I hope to see Quicksilver's more flexible search algorithm, keyboard triggers, and "plug-in store" to eventually find their way into QSB without making the user interface, including the preferences panes, any less simple and tidy than they are now. Additionally, and this is an important point, the user documentation for Quick Search Box definitely must be more complete and easier-to-grasp than Quicksilver's, especially for the plug-ins. True, the basics of using the Google Quick Search Box are very simple and straight-forward. But its true power lies in the functionality offered by the plug-ins, so every single one of them should come with a well-written explanation (that is easy to understand even for an entry-level user) of which types of data supports and which actions it offers. Simply listing how many search interfaces and/or actions a plug-in adds (as shown on the Debug prefs pane in the current version) simply is not enough. Despite all these things that QSB does _not_ offer just yet, it has already replaced Quicksilver as my primary search UI, and I can't wait to see what the developers will come up with next. ### What QSB's future holds: install it, try it, contribute to it To get started with the Google Quick Search Box, visit [its project page][] on Google Code. In the related wiki, you can get information about [first steps][] with the software. If you feel like contributing to the project, or at least providing constructive feedback, join the [GQSB discussion group][]. [its project page]: http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/ [first steps]: http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/wiki/GettingStarted [GQSB discussion group]: http://groups.google.com/group/qsb-mac-discuss

_And now for something completely different..._ In recent weeks, news about [changes at O'Reilly Media][] have been making the rounds. As part of these changes, all blogs published by O'Reilly will be combined into one [central blogging hub][]. To select posts that cover topics which interest you, you will no longer (have to) visit dedicated sub-sites, but filter a single blog stream via a [tag cloud][]. [changes at O'Reilly Media]: http://fyi.oreilly.com/2009/01/changes-at-oreilly.html [central blogging hub]: http://oreilly.com/blogs/ [tag cloud]: http://oreilly.com/blogs/tags.csp Consequently, this post has been my last one for the blog on the Digital Media > Macintosh website Writing for this site has been a lot of fun, and I sincerely hope you found (at least some of) what I wrote worth reading. Having said that, I will use this opportunity to make a personal change as well: while I will keep writing for O'Reilly -- you'll most likely find my posts under the "mac", "audio", or "iphone" tags --, I will no longer blog on a weekly basis, but publish less regularly in favor of more comprehensive and in-depth posts. Maybe I'll see you [there][]? [there]: http://oreilly.com/blogs/ What will I be up to beyond blogging for O'Reilly? Probably the best way to find that out is to [follow me on Twitter][]. Well, at least until I have taken the dust shields off [my personal website][] again, that is. [follow me on Twitter]: http://twitter.com/jochenwolters [my personal website]: http://polytropia.com Thanks again for stopping by, valued reader. Here's hoping that we'll be seeing each other again in some other corner of the 'Net. Jump back to the [beginning of the main article][]. [beginning of the main article]: #top

One Year Later: Which Mac Apps Do I Still Use?

2009-01-28T12:00:00Z

I've been writing weekly (sometimes more often) about Mac applications for a full year on this site. So, I thought this would be a good time to look back at my 50+ items here and let you know which of the apps I wrote about that I still use. Before launching into my lists, I want to point out a very important point: If I wrote about an app here it is because I thought it was interesting and good. I did not write about products that didn't interest me or didn't work well (for the most part :-). So, everything listed below is "good" regardless of whether I use it frequently or not today. I should also point out that I changed jobs last summer (2008). So, my personal workflow and app needs changed a bit too. For example, I used to frequently make PowerPoint presentations in my old job. I also used to work with a lot of Linux servers and frequently used virtualization hypervisors like VMware, Parallels, and VirtualBox for testing installations and updates. Neither is the case these days. The same holds true for the awesome R-Project open source statistics platform. It is simply something I don't need much of in my current work. Some apps aren't used much or at all because they are just too much fun and would kill all productivity. You can probably guess which ones those are. Then, there are apps that aren't needed frequently, but like a spare tire are a must have when they are needed. NTFS-3G andn uTorrent Mac come to mind as examples for this category. FREQUENTLY USED APPS - Adobe AIR & twhirl: Must have Twitter client for my Mac - Evernote - (The) GIMP - Pixelmator - Rogue Amoeba Audio Hijack Pro - Smultron text editor - TrueCrypt INFREQUENTLY USED BUT USEFUL APPS - Flip video software - Griffen iTalkSync - Mariner Software MacJournal: I actually like this app a lot and wish I had time to actually use it - Microsoft Silverlight: Some sites' videos require it - NTFS-3G - Parallels Desktop - uTorrent Mac - VirtualBox - VMware Fusion APPS I ALMOST NEVER USE - Filemaker Bento - iSquint (discontinued) - iStopMotion 2 Home Edition - Komodo Edit - Lego Mindstorms NXT - LightZone Basic Edition - Microsoft Messenger for Mac - Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 - Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) - OpenOffice.org 3.0 - R-Project - TaskPaper - VectorDesigner You may have read about the various changes taking place at O'Reilly Media. I am not an O'Reilly employee. But, the changes in their website structure means that this will be the last of my long-form blog items about Mac OS X applications. I will, however, drop a note from time to time in O'Reilly's current blog infrastructure. I hope you've found some of the items I wrote here interesting and, maybe, even useful. I've had a great time writing a weekly item about software for the Mac. You can find my non-Mac writing at MobileAppsToday.com (I do talk about iPhones there a lot though). And, I'll probably revive my dormant MacsAndStuff.com personal website. And, stay tuned for a possible Mac-ish podcast too! You can find me on Twitter at: toddogasawara

Macintosh Still Wisecracking at 25

2009-01-24T22:35:00Z

Shazam. Today is the Mac's 25^th birthday. Watching this YouTube video of Steve Jobs pulling it out of the bag in 1984, I was amused to see how sound has been part of this computer from the beginning. The speech synthesizer comes in around 2:51. It sounds like FM synthesis; anyone have more details? NPR recently aired another Apple fun-with-audio story, "Playful Pranks from Apple's Founder."

Why Obama gives geeks hope

2009-01-23T09:36:11Z

For the first time in years, the Mac has been widely publicised as being used in a governmental setting. For the Mac community, this can only mean great things are afoot, regardless of the technology choices made by the new administration in the long run. Indeed, while it is no secret that governments and governmental agencies have dabbled in Mac OS X for years, few users would have thought the system capable of managing confidential information at such a level, not so much because the platform is incapable of it, but because it "wasn't done." Over the past few months, we have seen a presidential candidate successfully use Mac OS X to run a sensitive operation, all the way to the White House. It's a shame they did not use iPhones while they were at it, but, after all, one shouldn't dream too much. That, in itself, sent a strong message that no advertising campaign could ever have sent. With Macs in the White House, Mac OS X becomes a much more interesting platform to attack and overthrow. After all, who wouldn't like a peek at the president's emails? Certainly, the choice of platform is still apparently in the balance, but, if the buzz around the web is to be believed, Macs hold a serious chance of making a rather noted entry within the walls of power. Were it to be the case — fingers crossed —, I have high hopes for our platform. Indeed, while Apple can blissfully ignore the cries of millions of users clamouring for security improvements, they can hardly ignore governmental institutions asking for the same thing. Well, yes, they could, but it would make very little sense, especially now that the company has shown, discretely but unmistakably, that they are, in fact, serious about security, despite their pretending not to care at all for some obscure and maddening reason. This is also good news for third-party vendors, like PGP, who have an extra incentive to release security tools for our platform. While I doubt FileVault could secure the president's computer, something like PGP Whole Disk Encryption seems to be more appropriate. When an administration adopts a technology, its providers tend to do so, trickling down the chain into the enterprise market, PGP's sweet love. Will Mac OS X hold the future of the United States in its hands? Maybe not just yet. It is, however, a serious contender for what seems to be the first time ever. That, alone, give me Hope. As an aside, please do not see this message as a political statement. All that matters to me here is the technology aspect, regardless of the President's ideas or doings, the discussion of which does not belong on this particular blog.

How do you like them Apples? Apple's Earnings Rock!

2009-01-22T02:34:42Z

“Apple beats Street in holiday quarter; shares soar” (AP) “Apple trounces Wall Street estimates” (CNN Money) “Apple Understates The Insanely Great” (Forbes)
In a very tough environment, where consumers (supposedly) aren’t spending and high-end products don’t get bought, Apple took industry analysts’ projections out to the woodshed and gave them a good old fashioned whupping (see detailed projections chart put together by Andy Zaks HERE). How much of a whupping? Well, on average, analysts were projecting for Apple a profit of $1.39 per share on $9.75 billion in sales, and the company instead delivered $1.78 per share and $10.2 billion in sales, respectively. But that doesn't tell the real story since it does not take into account Apple's adjusted earnings when you factor out a quirky decision (by Apple) to spread revenue recognition on iPhone and Apple TV sales over two years, based on subscription-accounting revenue recognition. Add those numbers in, and the real sales are actually $11.8 billion -- $1.6B HIGHER! All of this dropped an additional $3.6 billion in cash to Apple’s coffers during the quarter, and the company now sits with a $28B war chest. Why should you care? As noted in my recent post, ‘Punishing the Wizard: On Apple and Steve Jobs,’ most people give analysts and business media way too much credit for parsing the salient details that separate the wheat from the chaff in the investing universe. This is compounded by the fact that we all look for the simple story, meaning that the complexities of different revenue recognition across product lines, relativity to industry peers and aggregate versus relative growth metrics across product lines, are thus lost. Net it out, and the one company that actually seems to have a differentiated strategy, instead, looks like a laggard, and not surprisingly, ends up trading at a discount to its so-called peers. On a personal level, I am simply left wondering, "Who looks better against the template that Apple has put together; namely, differentiated products, diverse revenue lines, a deep product pipeline, stellar management team, huge profits, high operating margins, massive cash reserves and ungodly cashflow?" After all, shouldn’t any analysis of how Apple's strategy is working fit within the larger context of who's doing better at delivering technical, marketing and cash generating wizardry? (Disclosure: I sold Me.com to Apple last year, so I have a vested interest in being right on my analysis.) Other notes of interest from the earnings call: 1. 22.7M iPods sold in the quarter: this is a jaw-dropping number considering how the device is a logical step path into iPod touch (a subset of the overall iPod sales numbers) and iPhone (a different unit count bucket), and increasingly part of one unified ecosystem. 2. Apple will continue to invest in Apple TV: The company noted that it has received a tremendous uptick in sales performance, thanks in part to iTunes rentals, and that unit sales, though unpublished, are three times higher than they were last year. While they continue to refer to the device as a "hobby," I think that the tea leaves are clear on this one (also, see my posts on the Apple-centered media center universe: 'Apple, TV and the Smart Connected Living Room' and 'What it Means to be a Social Media Center: Boxee, Apple TV and Square Connect'). 3. Apple sent a clear warning shot to competitors that it is going on offense to protect its intellectual property, something that I blogged about in 'Upward Mobility, Land Grabs and the iPhone Universe.' Palm Pre, which is the first device to incorporate multi-touch functionality, feels like a lawsuit in the offing. Related Posts of Note:

Holy Sh-t! Apple's Halo Effect: how Apple has turned gravity into its friend
Ringing Up Apple's Earnings Call: analysis of last quarter's earnings call
iPhone 2.0 - What it Means to be Mobile: a detailed summary of my experience to date with the iPhone 2.0 platform
Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard

ClamXav Follow-up: Test with Live Malware

2009-01-21T12:00:00Z

I took a look at the freeware ClamXav anti-virus software for the Mac (based on the Open Source ClamAV project) last month. ClamXav: Free Anti-Virus for Your Mac - Help Protect Your PC Friends I commented then that: I didn't have any Windows XP malware samples to test against (I used to keep some on my Linux box to test ClamAV there but stopped doing that a few years ago).. Live malware is the sort of thing I leave lying around on a hard drive. But, after a bit of hunting I found my collection. As you can see from the first couple of test results, I have a variety of old malware in Microsoft EXE (executable), SCR (screensaver executable), ZIP (compressed archive), and other file types that hid the malware. I also have some uninfected files and files that generate false positives in the collection. I think ClamXav missed a couple of infected files. But, this, unfortunately, is not unusual even when working with an old batch of malware that should be identifiable at 100% by now. As I said in my previous blog item about ClamXav, this exercise is more about protecting our Windows using friends and co-workers. All of the test malware I have targets that platform and not OS X.

An AppleJack a Day…

2009-01-20T13:00:00Z

In the comments to my [near-desaster story][] of last week, several readers suggested I should have a look at a utility called AppleJack. In hindsight, I cannot tell whether AppleJack would have been able to fix the problems that caused my Mac to refuse me access to my main user account. I sure wish, though, that I had it installed so I could at least have given it a try. [near-desaster story]: http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2009/01/apple-genius-saved-my-expo.html AppleJack is a shell script that provides command line access to the following tasks * Repair disks * Repair permissions * Clean up cache files * Validate preferences files (and move corrupted ones to a separate quarantine folder) * Remove swap files There is also an automatic mode which will perform all five tasks successively without requiring further user interaction. As a nice touch, AppleJack can also shut down or restart the Mac as soon as it has completed this automatic cycle. In addition to AppleJack itself, the installer can optionally also install `memtest`, a useful command line utility for testing your machine's RAM. Very importantly, the package also includes extensive documentation in the form of a very well-written Read Me file, as well as UNIX `man` files for either utility. AppleJack comes in handy in all those cases where you cannot access your usual arsenal of trouble-shooting tools, e.g., when you cannot log into your user account (sounds familiar, I'm afraid...): just hold down Command-S when restarting the Mac to boot into Single User Mode, and run AppleJack and/or memtest. Either program only runs when launched -- there are no daemons installed. Hence, installing both utilities as part of your Macintosh emergency toolset does not pose any threat of its own to your Mac's wellbeing. In fact, you will surely regret it if you do _not_ install AppleJack when that moment comes in which you realize that something isn't quite right with how your Mac behaves. For an in-depth review of AppleJack, plus some additional information on general Mac OS X maintenance and trouble-shooting procedures, have a look [this MacFixit article][] by Dan Frakes. [this MacFixit article]: http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=2005041817191411 AppleJack is a 332kB download from the [project's website][] and is distributed as donationware. [project's website]: http://applejack.sourceforge.net/

Punishing the Wizard: On Apple and Steve Jobs

2009-01-15T20:12:55Z

John Paczkowski of All Things Digital nails it in 'Apple Investors Are Wusses.' He wonders aloud how Apple investors can be so faithless in a company that in the last quarter reported earnings of $1.14 billion on sales of $7.9 billion, all the while growing their cash hoard to nearly $25 billion in cash. Yeah, I get it. Consumer company with high-end products in a bad economy with a seemingly irreplaceable leader who is ill, and a less than transparent corporate culture. Heck, I will go a step further and say that for planning purposes, investors should assume that what's gone from "common bug" to "hormone imbalance" which was easily fixed to something more "complex," and a formal medical leave, probably suggests that Steve Jobs isn’t coming back - at least not in a full time capacity. Run for the hills! But you know what; I think that something else is at play in the battering of Apple's stock (it’s lost ~60% of its value since peaking out at around $200 late last year). For lack of a better term, let’s just call it the Yin-Yang of Apple's Reality Distortion Field. On the one hand, Jobs & Co have taught us to expect magic, and when they deliver (iPod, Mac, iPhone), it's what we expect because there is no company like Apple. Yet, when they merely execute, we hammer them because we expect magic. It's almost as if they've lost their premium for wizardry, which is ironic since isn't the whole moral of the re-pricing of our financial markets about a return to quality? And who looks better than Apple on a long-term basis in terms of differentiated products, diversified revenue sources, depth of product pipeline, quality/depth of management team, operating margins, profits, cashflow, cash reserves and absence of debt? So go ahead, punish the wizard, but remember: who looks better against the "quality" template? Related Posts:

iPhone 2.0 - What it Means to be Mobile: a detailed summary of my experience to date with the iPhone 2.0 platform.
Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
Holy Sh-t! Apple's Halo Effect: how Apple has turned gravity into its friend.
The Chess Masters - Google versus Apple: why partners Apple and Google are without peers, and (seemingly) destined to become frien-emies.
Ringing Up Apple's Earnings Call: analysis of last quarter's earnings call.

Networked Printers and Speakers with AirPort WiFi

2009-01-14T22:16:37Z

Home networks continue to become easier to set up and more powerful once running. Last spring I wrote about using a Drobo Robotic Disk Array and AirPort Extreme for archiving files over a WiFi network. I've also documented my network printing setup in my studio. Since then, I've relocated my photography studio to a two-story townhouse, and basically had to start all over again. But that's OK, because in this latest installment of WiFi wonderfulness, I've incorporated audio into the equation.

The Goal: To Have Printing and Music Throughout the Premises

I have one work area downstairs, and a recording studio upstairs. I get lots of exercise jogging up and down the steps between the two work areas. I wanted printing capability and access to my iTunes library in both spaces. Plus, since my printers are so big (all print up to 13"x19"), I needed to spread them around the studio so I didn't end up with a wall of printers in one room.

I was also tired of having one type of music system in one room, and another in the next. I have my entire iTunes library on an external hard drive connected to my main computer. So why not just pipe the tunes where I need them?

Required Equipment

My equipment list looks fairly extensive, but remember, I rarely get rid of something that still works. Instead, I just find a way to incorporate it into my workflow. Much of this older equipment is now serving me in this network configuration.

HP B8350 document printer downstairs networked via and AirPort Extreme 802.11g access point. I use this for plain paper printing and color layout comps. (Sunleaf2)
Epson R2400 photo printer upstairs networked via an AirPort Express 802.11n access point. I also have a compact Sony SRS-T77 4 watt speaker system plugged into the Express for piped in music. (Sunleaf 3)
HP Photosmart A626 compact printer plugged into my main WiFi access point, an AirPort Extreme 802.11n. The cable modem is plugged into this AirPort. (Sunleaf1)
HP B8850 Fine Art printer plugged directly into the main computer via USB 2.0
Various hard drives and a Drobo connected to MacBook Pro 17" with 4 GBs Ram and a Cinema Display.

When I open up my AirPort Utility, I see this (the top illustration).

Sunleaf1 is connected to the cable modem and creates the WiFi network. Sunleaf2 and Sunleaf 3 are set in "Join a wireless network" mode and serve as printing and music nodes. The network is encrypted with WPA/WPA2 Personal security. I administer the network (including initial set up) with the AirPort Utility included with Mac OS X 10.5.6.

Setting Up the Printers

Once the network was up and running, I added the printers by plugging them into the USB port on each of the AirPort access points, turning them on, then configuring via the Print & Fax pane in System Preferences. Each printer was added by clicking on the "+" button and choosing it from the list of Bonjour devices. Keep in mind that you have to have the printer driver software loaded on your computer for proper configuration. I also like to create a descriptive title, such as "HP A620 WiFi" so I can tell the networked printers from those plugged directly into a USB port on the computer.

Once all the printers are connected and configured, I can send a print job to any one of them from any computer that has access to the network.

Adding Music to the Environment

iTunes makes this next step very easy. My entire music library is on an external drive connected to the main computer. I have speakers connected to Sunleaf 3 upstairs (the Sony SRS-T77), and directly to the Mac downstairs (Logitech Z-10). I open iTunes, choose Multiple Speakers from the speakers popup menu, and hit the play button. Music is streamed to every connected set of speakers.

If I'm upstairs working and I want to adjust the volume or change the track, I use the free "Remote" application for my iPhone. Plus, the iPhone displays the album cover and metadata for the song in case I forget who the artist is or the album it's from. The iPhone Remote was really the missing piece of the equation. Without it, I did have music streaming throughout the studio, but no way to control it unless I went back to the main computer.

Final Thoughts

Once the WiFi network is set up, you can do just about anything you want with it. If I want to play music from another Mac or the Apple TV, I can do so with just a few menu changes. By the same token, I can easily add or remove printers from any of the networked nodes.

I had kept my AirPort Extreme base station 802.11g when I upgraded to the more powerful 802.11n version. I was happy to have it stashed neatly in a box in the closet when it came time to set up this network. It works great for the document printer node that mainly handles text documents.

Using Windows 7 Beta on a Mac with VMware Fusion

2009-01-14T12:00:00Z

Based on the continued sales and popularity of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, it looks like Mac users have, for one reason or another, the need to run Microsoft Windows now and then. The problem is that Windows Vista runs very slowly as a Guest OS in a hypervisor (unless you have a really fast Mac and can give it 2GB RAM). So, those of us running Windows on a Mac usually run Windows XP instead. The problem with this that XP is now over 8 years old. Microsoft has extended its general support status at least twice now because of customer demand and the rising popularity of low-cost netbooks (which also have performance problems with Windows Vista). But, the fact is that it will probably feel very unconfortable to be running Windows XP in 2011 when it turns 10 years old. People who need to use some critical Windows-only application on a Mac (an accounting system for example) would probably be better served by having a more current version of Windows to use as a Guest OS. And, Windows Vista is not it. The word is that Windows 7 will be less of a resource hog than Windows Vista. And, its beta release became available last week. So, it seemed like a good idea to see if this claim/rumor is true. As a long-time beta tester, I was able to get a download before the masses crashed Microsoft's download servers last week when they headed over to the site for the... Windows 7 Beta Customer Preview Program The first thing I did was to install Windows 7 Beta as a Guest OS using the freeware VirtualBox. However, VirtualBox has two big problems related to Windows 7 Beta. 1. Its Guest Additions does not work with Windows 7 Beta. This means that I had to press a special key to get out of the window containing Windows 7 to get back to OS X. 2. Its shared folders feature did not work with Windows 7 Beta. So, I decided to use VMWare Fusion 2.0.1 instead. The installation went very smoothly. VMware's additions to help make Windows more useable worked unlike VirtualBox. And, its shared folders features also worked. This meant I could read and write files stored in the OS X disk area from within Windows 7 Beta. My secondary reason for running Windows 7 Beta in a virtual machine was to see if it could run with as little as 512MB RAM. The reason why this interests me is because I want to run Windows 7 on a netbook which generally come configured with 512MB or 1GB RAM. I'm happy to say that Windows 7 Beta runs comfortably in 512MB RAM. It runs as well or better than Windows XP with the same VMware Fusion resources allocated. I'll guess that most of you will get the little joke on the initial Windows 7 Beta screen. But, just in case. That's a Siamese Fighting Fish also known as "Betta splendens". Get it? Well, it amused me when I saw it on the screen :-) I installed a couple of "must have" software products right away after running Windows Update. This included Avast! Anti-Virus Free Edition (free for personal use), Mozilla Firefox, Adobe AIR (for Tweetdeck and Twhirl). I read elsewhere that Google Chrome does not work with the beta. So, I skipped that one. However, I ran into a little problem with McAfee SiteAdvisor. McAfee SiteAdvisor is a free add-on for Firefox that warns you about websites that may be dangerous by noting safe, suspect, and dangerous sites in Google search results lists. The SiteAdvisor version for Firefox on a Mac is a simple XPI (Cross Platform Install pronounced "zippy"). The version for Microsoft Windows, however, appears to be a binary executable (EXE) file. For some reason, McAfee's platform detector sees the 32-bit Windows 7 Beta installed in Fusion as the 64-bit version and gives you that version to download. It, of course, does not work with the 32-bit Windows 7 Beta I'm running. The workaround is to download the file from a PC running a 32-bit version of Windows. It would be nice, however, if McAfee simply let the end-user choose an alternate download. If you have some critical software that only runs under Windows, you should download a copy of Windows 7 Beta (free) now to test with it for future planning. Although I'm going to stay with VMware Fusion for my Mac-based Windows 7 Beta testing, you can use the free VirtualBox for your testing to save a few dollars. Note, though, that a lot of convience is lost by using VirtualBox.

Freeware for networkers

2009-01-13T14:52:25Z

Reader Petra Hildebrandt recently suggested that I share with you a few of my favourite freeware applications. Since yesterday's post was about networking and troubleshooting, it seems only appropriate to continue in the same vein and look at a few tools that can neatly assist the budding trouble-shooter. Much like yesterday, none of it may be earth-shattering, but I find these tools work nicely together. TextWrangler Networking and troubleshooting means editing lots of text files. For those of us who do not yet feel comfortable wrestling with vim, Bare Bones software offers TextWrangler, the lesser-known sibling of the excellently excellent BBEdit. It may not be pretty but, like its bigger brother, it's nearly impossible to crash, comes with convenient command-line tools and won't twitch at the thought of live-editing your /etc/hosts file. Cyberduck My passion for Transmit and Coda may be akin to a cult, but many of my clients find it difficult to pay for casual FTP or SFTP-ing. Cyberduck does not quite please my sense of aesthetics but it is a full-featured, robust, frequently updated (S)FTP client that beats the Finder's own FTP capabilities hands down. If you ever need to fetch router firmware files from these clunky official FTP sites or remotely troubleshoot a computer through SSH, CyberDuck will fit the bill nicely. (Don't forget that SFTP is SSH and that you can, therefore, use an SFTP application as a great remote browser when helping users from afar.) SSHKeychain If you have ever had to explain the concept of secure passwords for remote login to newcomers, you know how difficult it is to convince them that "remote1" is hardly cracker-proof. However, you can both please them and appease your conscience by implementing strong key-based authentication on their machines. Since not everybody shares my SSH fetish, I often rely on SSHKeychain to manage passwords on client computers. The security implications of storing key passwords in the keychain has been debated by some (and I do not feel qualified to judge) but it works as advertised and it's certainly safer than creating password-less key pairs. MacFuse Would I entrust my mainframe management to a MacFuse connection? Certainly not, at least not with the current setup that involves a feeble file manager, the Finder, browsing drives mounted through experimental code. However, MacFuse is remarkably stable for causal use, and nothing beats turning SSH connections into regular network drives. Be sure, however, to prevent Mac OS X from creating .DS_Store files on remote volumes or your server will soon become the virtual equivalent of City of London public convenience on a late Saturday evening. Finally, MacFuse allows you to create encrypted virtual "file chutes" between networked computers on a small network, which can come in handy. You could certainly use other forms of file sharing, but I find SSH to be a robust multi-tasker, and sometimes prefer to leave only SSH open instead of enabling it along with file sharing. Nessus security scanner Nessus is not exactly freeware in that the free version has somewhat limited functionality. I do, however, find it incredibly useful when giving a network the occasional once-over. On a network of properly set up Macs, comprising maybe a router, and AirPort base station and a USB printer hooked up to it — a very typical home and small business setup —, Nessus shouldn't find much. Throw in a Linux or Windows server in the mix, however, and it becomes a wonderful help in identifying harder to spot issues. Running Nessus on your own router will also probably shatter any illusions you may have about its ability to secure your network — but it's a whole other story altogether. Chicken of the VNC If you feel screen sharing in iChat does not bring you the security and convenience you need, nothing beats running VNC over an SSH tunnel. Luckily, Mac OS X ships with a VNC server of sorts, and the assorted wizardry required to share screens can be performed through open-source and freeware components exclusively. To accompany VNC, something simple like SSH Tunnel manager should work beautifully. You could, of course, create your tunnel in the Terminal, which is akin to the ultimate freeware package.

A personal note from FJ — I appreciate your stopping by today and invite you to voice your own views in the comment thread below. Please provide a name (any name will do) with your message in order to facilitate the conversation. Should wish to suggest a topic for an upcoming post, or view current suggestions, you can use my handy suggestion page.

A Solid Macworld Expo Keynote Presentation

2009-01-13T13:00:00Z

Once the news was out that Apple would pull out of Macworld Expo after this year's show, and that it was Phil Schiller, and not Steve Jobs, who would present the keynote speech, many assumed that there were no major announcements to be expected from Apple at this event. And still, I was surprised to overhear discussions about how "underwhelming," "boring," or simply "weird" the presentation was. After all, what Apple did announce were solid upgrades to existing products and even a bit more. Let me highlight three cool things presented last Tuesday. ### When, where, and who? Taking digital photos is cheap: a battery charge every now and then, and that's about all the running costs you'd incur while capturing memories with your digicam. In fact, the real cost is in the time it takes to organize all those pictures once you've imported them onto your computer's hard drive. The new Faces and Places features in iPhoto '09 nicely complement the already existing Events folder to make this process much easier. "Faces" uses automatic face detection and recognition to not only find faces in photos, but also to find the other photos in your library that show the same person. "Places" displays photos on a map based on geo tags included in the photos, and you can also manually assign pictures to a location. So, now you can automatically sort and find photos based on _when_ they were shot, _where_ they were taken, and _who_ is in them, and all this with a lot less effort than if you used another approach like manually maintained keywords. ### Making that Magic Move Unlike iLife, there are quit a few areas in which Apple's iWork office suite is lacking, and the '09 update addresses some of them. Full-screen viewing of a text document you are editing as well as outlining a document are found in many word processors, and both are welcome additions to Pages, as are many new cell functions that have been added to Numbers. Among the new features in Keynote are very powerful, yet easy-to-use animations, including the "Magic Move," which smoothly animates an object from one slide to the next by automatically scaling, rotating, and moving it. Recently, I held a talk on internet security and presented the method of using the first letters of the words in a sentence to build a secure password (e.g., "Remember this sentence" becomes "Rt$"), and used an animation to illustrate just how to do this. Creating that animation with discretely animated letters took a lot of time, and it broke when I had to change the slide resolution. Magic Move would have been just the thing to (re)create that animation quickly and easily. ### Wanna share? All three applications in the iWork '09 now support sharing documents online via a new service called iWork.com. Sharing and accessing documents is seamlessly built into the applications: just click the "iWork.com" toolbar icon, enter the recipients' names, include a little comment, and click "Share." Once uploaded, the recipients can download the document in several formats including MS Office, as well as view and annotate it in a browser. I have never liked online applications like Google Docs, because, compared to a well-designed native application, the user experience is just awful. Instead of editing documents online, I have always preferred to do the editing in a native application and then share the resulting document online. iWork.com offers just that, and the integration into the iWork applications is so clean and seamless that I can't wait to try this out. ### And there was more In addition to many more new interesting features in both iLife '09 and iWork '09, Apple announced the new 17" MacBook Pro with a new, non-removable battery that is claimed to last for eight hours and to survive up to 1,000 recharge cycles. And almost as an aside, Schiller mentioned that all songs in the iTunes Store will be available DRM-free by the end of this quarter. The price Apple had to pay for getting the record companies onboard for this is a new pricing structure -- three pricing tiers at $0.69, $0.99, and $1.29 will be replacing the "all tracks for 99 cents" model --, but compared to the huge impact this will have on the industry as a whole, this is a ridiculously low price to pay (no pun intended). To round off the keynote, Apple had invited Tony Bennett to perform "The Best is Yet to Come" and "I Left my Heart in San Francisco," and one could almost assume that there is some special meaning in both song titles for Apple here. More importantly, though, it was fantastic and unexpected to see this Jazz legend live on stage. So, let's recap: three solid product upgrades, a new "cloud" service, a strategic shift to (at least partially) get rid of DRM in the iTunes Store, and a mini concert by one of the greatest Jazz singers of our times. If this qualifies as "underwhelming," "boring," or "weird," then that says more about people's unrealistic expectations (and music taste) than about what Apple showed off at Macworld Expo and Conference 2009.