Category: Mac

The Omni Group announced a public beta of OmniOutliner, the indispensable Mac outlining tool, over the weekend. The new features, including styles, attachments, inline comments, and incremental typing search, all look pretty cool.

If I have one gripe, it’s with the new icons. Don’t get me wrong—it’s really cool. But I kind of liked the easter-egg-like nature of the old icons, which rewarded close scrutiny with some pretty funny lists. The document icon, for instance:

becomes

For those with poor eyesight, the old icon reads:

• In AD 2181, war was beginning.
  • What happen? Somebody set us up the bomb.
• How are you gentlemen?
  • All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction.
  • You have no chance to survive make your time.

Ah, 2000–2001. I remember it well… But with a new file extension (.OO3) for the new document format, Omni clearly decided to go with a slightly more professional icon. Has anyone been able to read the writing on the new icon?

Not shopping today? Here’s a bunch of stuff that you can do to feel productive. (Me, I’ll be agonizing over the design of this year’s Christmas card.)

• Publish a PC Outlook Calendar to .Mac
• Try out Autocompleter, software that works in every Cocoa text view to finish words and expand shortcuts.
• Or i-Search, another Cocoa plug-in that makes an Emacs style incremental search available in all NSTextViews. (Ignore the technobabble. Just try it out.)
• And if you’re really brave, try out Markdown. Apparently Merlin Mann uses it for things other than just a blog on OS X, though I’m not sure how.

I think that’s enough to keep me busy today, aside from the tryptophan coma…

I received an email this morning letting me know that it would be a “Perfect Day” to shop at the Apple Store either at retail or online on Friday the 26th, the day after Thanksgiving, to get “the perfect gift on the perfect day at the perfect price.” What’s interesting is the price match part, which is good only against authorized Apple resellers—the people Apple has traditionally alternately supported and undercut:

…if you’ve seen any Apple hardware or software at a better price elsewhere, we’ll match that price.*

*If you see Apple hardware or software for less at an authorized Apple reseller, we will match that price up to 10 percent off the current Apple Store regular price (excluding sales tax, shipping, and all other fees, costs and services).

Time to stuff your stockings…

Apple Downloads: R for Mac OS X 2.0.1. I hadn’t seen this one before: a Mac OS X implementation of R, the statistical computing and graphics language from Bell Labs. The Mac OS X implementation comes complete with a Cocoa GUI that is pretty damned sexy for a stats package, especially a free one:

Cabel Sasser at Panic Studios writes about Audion, arguably the first industrial strength MP3 player for the Mac—certainly the coolest—and his decision to retire it. It’s a pretty fascinating story, replete with “interrupt time,” Steve Jobs meetings, near-mergers with giant mega-corporations, and the market forces that led to the retirement of the app.

I downloaded Audion when I went to business school. It was one of the first apps on my first PowerBook (a G3 Pismo), and it was always on. I downloaded a bunch of wild skins before settling on the one that was the smallest possible space, and proceeded to raise eyebrows every time one of my Windows-using colleagues saw my screen. (“What is that? Oh, cool!”) I loved that it was hard to crash, that the music kept playing no matter (well, almost no matter) what I did to it in the foreground, and that it was just so damned cool.

And then… the Mac OS X Preview Release came out. And Audion wasn’t OS X native, but iTunes was. And I agonized over it for a while, but iTunes kept adding more and more stuff. And its library management was frankly a hell of a lot better than Audion’s, which relied on the filesystem. With iTunes, I could sort and search by all kinds of obscure attributes, and it didn’t move around the MP3 files in their folders when I did so. And so Audion shuffled slowly off into obscurity. I just recently got around to deleting the playlist files it left behind.

Cabel’s story is instructive—for small software developers, for Mac developers in particular, for fans of the digital music revolution, and for anyone who wants to work in a small company. It’s exhilarating and heartbreaking and very, very informative.

In my spare time, I’ve been playing quite a bit with Delicious Library, and it remains pretty delicious. As I scanned in 13 books, 71 movies, and 748 761 CDs (to date) I’ve had some time to think about things I would change with the application.

1. Smart shelves: give me an opportunity to do advanced searches on a bunch of criteria, including signed items, rare items, and other attributes, and save them as persistent “smart shelves”
2. iTunes integration: There are a ton of opportunities in this area, including:
   • Check the iTunes library to see if the CD has already been ripped to iTunes
   • Smart lists to show albums that have not been ripped
   • If it has, allow playing the CD by double clicking the album cover
   • For music bought in the iTunes store, I’d love to see a way to list them in the inventory, separately from CDs, and using the standard iTunes 99 cent prices, figure out how much I’ve under- or overpaid by using the iTunes store instead of Amazon
3. Images: I’d love to be able to paste my own cover art in, either for albums that aren’t in Amazon or ones where the cover art isn’t brought back with the rest of the information (um, never mind—apparently you can do this by drag and drop, though I still would like to see paste supported). I’d also like to be able to copy the art out.
4. Looking up information by keyword: This is probably my biggest gripe. As I mentioned in my original post, I have a lot of CDs with no bar codes as a result of too many years spent in CD clubs. Unfortunately, for classical CDs the search facilities that Delicious Library offers—title and “source”—are completely inadequate. The problem with classical discs is that the title of the disc is often three or four different releases, the “artist” can either be the performers or the composer (or even the conductor), and often there is little or no agreement between two sources about how the release should be filed. This means that I got quite intimate with the search functions on Amazon, trying the advanced classical search but increasingly giving up and using Google to find the album on Amazon.
5. HTML export of a catalog wouldn’t hurt either.
6. And how about user definable fields on items? I’d love something to indicate whether I’ve posted an item to my blog already; one or more URL fields for additional info about the item; and even a catalog number (LOC and Dewey Decimal format)
7. And while I’m asking for silly things, how about skinnability? Normally this isn’t a feature I look for in an application, but the default woodgrain on the library shelves really hurts my eyes.

I just found a new must-have application for all rampant media consumers like me: the Delicious Library. It’s also a killer app for the iSight. Delicious Library is a media management application that allows you to inventory your books, music, videos, and games, and to manage check-in and check-out. The killer app part: it can scan your item’s bar codes using the iSight and look up all the information from Amazon, including cover art and reviews, and there’s a drag and drop checkout system.

Issues: Getting the hang of using the iSight to scan was a little tricky. (The FAQ includes some tongue in cheek instructions for using toothpicks and a rubber band to set up a distance gauge on your iSight to speed up the process.)

More importantly, not every item has a bar code, and not every item’s bar code is in Amazon. I tested the scanner with 11 DVDs, 10 CDs, and a CD boxed set. It had no problem with any DVD that I tried, but it only managed to scan four of the CDs and the CD boxed set correctly. Of the other CDs, the problems included:

• No bar code on CD case: a single cd from the Miles Davis Columbia boxed set didn’t have a bar code.
• Music club CDs: both Columbia and BMG, who built the majority of my CD library from 1990 to 1996, replace the bar code on CD art with their own bar code or a message from the club.
• Wrong release found: John Coltrane’s Lush Life scanned as a Count Basie CD.
• Nothing found: one indie label release, Eva Cassidy’s Live at Blues Alley, turned up nothing in Amazon’s DB (probably because it was subsequently reissued by a bigger label).

In these cases, I used the title search feature. While this was much more convenient than other release lookups that I’ve used, it required a bit more work. Still, a very cool library management tool and a killer use of the iSight. This solution sure beats the hell out of the CueCat.

Almost forgot: A major wish list item would have to be scriptability. The application has no AppleScript dictionary at all. I’d love to be able to grab an item and output HTML. I’d also like to be able to substitute my own Amazon Associate ID rather than the company’s for doing lookups.

The new iPod U2 Special Edition, iPod Photo, and iTunes 4.7 are out. The U2 iPod was widely leaked and so there are few surprises, except maybe its release 3 weeks ahead of The Complete U2, and the fact that it won’t be pre-loaded with the band’s albums, rather coming with a $50 coupon for the boxed set. Smart money says the Complete U2 will cost rather more than $50…

The iPod Photo is more of a surprise, but only because the rumor sites appear to have been correct for once. I rather like the form factor and the idea of bringing my photos around with me in easily-previewable form, and even the concept of being able to hook my iPod up to a TV with a video cable. I think that the boat was missed in one area: the iPod Photo should have a built in USB connection so that you could transfer photos straight from most digital cameras to your iPod’s hard drive. It’s also interesting that iTunes will be used to sync photos to the iPod, rather than iPhoto, but I suppose it saves a considerable amount of development effort to just reuse the existing sync code in iTunes rather than developing it again in iPhoto—then having to release bug-fixes for both apps for sync problems down the road.

Regarding iTunes 4.7: the only new feature on the Mac platform, if you don’t have an iPod Photo, is the ability to find duplicate tracks. This would have been a useful feature. Except that the criterion for “duplicate” is apparently same artist and song title. What about an artist who recorded the same song in the studio and live—in very different versions and with very different run times? At the least you’d think that run time would be included in the criteria—with a one- or two-second window to account for variations in ripped vs. downloaded versions.

Just noticed that the Cult of Mac blog is pointing to my write-up of my first-gen iPod FireWire problem. Pretty cool write-up, and the fix that I tried to do actually worked for the author. unlike mine—though she replaced her battery at the same time.

It looks like I have a little while longer before I have to make a decision about shifting photo publishing platforms. The storage limit on my .Mac account just increased from 100 MB (plus 5 for mail) to 250 MB partitioned between mail and disk.

Incidentally, I have to say I’m not super impressed with Flickr so far. The upload speed was quite slow for the trial batch of 10 photos that I put up. Also one of the most potentially useful features, the Calendar, sorts photos by when they were uploaded, not when they were taken (though this may have to do with the iPhoto-to-Flickr plugin that I used to upload them). Since I just spent a long time manually correcting dates on a batch of newly digitized photos from 1998 and 1999, I was disappointed to not see those dates carry over. But I’ll continue playing with it until I find my alternative.

I had been meaning to cobble together a quick script to do automatic image resizing (occasionally the images that Amazon provides for album covers or book jackets are larger than the standard sizes I use on the site, and I always want to resize album covers to 65 pixels tall), but was scared off by GraphicConverter’s AppleScript dictionary, which indicated I had to specify a scaling factor rather than an absolute pixel height. Today on MacOSXHints someone saved me the trouble, providing (a) a sample script that uses the built in Image Events application to do the scaling and (b) a link to information about a command line tool called sips that accomplishes the same thing.

My brand new Airport Express is now happily parked downstairs next to my stereo, where it’s streaming tunes from my PowerBook into the receiver and out through my B&W speakers.

And it’s interesting, because I can tell a definite difference with the digital tunes. I always play jazz for audio “firsts”—first time in a new house, first tune on new PowerBook, first tune for new speakers—and this time I chose the Brad Mehldau version of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place,” from the iTunes store, meaning it’s encoded as 128-bit AAC.

And yeah, it was flat, even through those speakers. No bounce in the bass, no life in the piano. I can probably tweak the eq and get some life back in it, but I can already tell I’m going to need a lot of hard disk space if I want to take my CD library digital, because I’m going to need a higher bit rate. Maybe even lossless.

Oh, the setup? I wish it had been easier. I plugged in the unit and connected it to my stereo using an (analog) Monster cable to the tape inputs (which were available), then installed the included software, rebooted, connected to the unit’s wireless network, and tried to use the Airport Express Assistant, which appears automatically, to connect it to my network. Only it didn’t want to. The assistant is programmed to set up a standalone network only, as far as I can tell. And I couldn’t get it to connect to my 128-bit WEP network the first time; I had to reset it, then reconfigure it. Finally it connected.

So my updated network topology (see this post for the previous version):

Safari users know about the “spinning beachball”—when using the browser, Mac OS X’s modal wait cursor appears for no reason, sometimes while you’re in the middle of typing or scrolling a page. I had been experiencing the beachball periodically over the last few months and my fix had been to quit and restart the browser—or, when it got especially bad, my PowerBook. Then I installed the public beta of NetNewsWire 2.0 and for the first time noticed the same beachball activity there. That inspired me to seek a fix.

I thought the two might be related, since the new built-in browser in NNW 2.0 uses WebKit, the browser framework classes that also underpin Safari. I wondered whether the same cause was at the root of both SBODs.

I first tried the number one suggestion for the problem from Google, which was disabling auto-fill for forms in Safari (choose Preferences from the Safari menu, click AutoFill, and turn off the third checkbox). This didn’t do anything. I then tried emptying Safari’s cache. Also nothing.

The last thought I had was that there was a problem with the underlying WebKit libraries. The only problem is that there wasn’t a clean way to rebuild them that I was aware of. So I went for a brute force method: I downloaded and re-installed Safari 1.2. After a reboot, I tried to run Safari, and it was fast, no beachball. I then tried running NNW, and it worked smoothly as well.

I don’t really like this solution, because it doesn’t isolate a fix. The problem could have been corrupted binaries, or it could have been prebinding that needed fixing—the reinstallation accomplished both. It also might leave me vulnerable. I don’t know whether the Safari 1.2 standalone download includes some of the security fixes that have been made since the browser was released. Finally, I am noting some irregularities with pop-up menus reporting “Localized String Not Found” in the place of some options. Nevertheless, my browsing experience is generally faster, so I thought this might help some others.

Ranchero Software (aka Brent Simmons) just announced public betas for NetNewsWire 2.0 and MarsEdit 1.0. I’ve been privileged to be a tester for both apps, and I can say without reservation that NNW 2.0 is the finest news aggregator I’ve used on any platform.

And MarsEdit? Well, I’ve used it to compose my weblog entries for the past several months. Multiple document interface, multiple blogs, flexible HTML support, live previews, in a clean, lightweight application. Plus image support, which I will rave about once it is fully supported on my platform (Manila doesn’t support the NewMediaObject verb for the MetaWeblogAPI). Fabulous stuff, and multiple well deserved cheers to Brent (and Sheila).

I apologize for the unexpected blog slowdown, but my power adapter for my laptop stopped working yesterday. For those following along at home, this is the fourth replacement power adapter (across two different PowerBooks) I’ve had to buy; see prior stories here (2001) and here (2003). Fortunately, it is the first on this particular laptop, so it looks like Apple’s design is improving somewhat.

Still, a power cord should not be designed to allow this sort of catastrophic failure:

I think it looks like they reinforced this connection in the new cord, so maybe I will have better luck with this one.