Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Mmm. Well. I was kind of right about the nano, totally wrong about iTunes and missed the Touch thing altogether. The best news, and it’s kind of hidden away, is that there are new headphones with remote controls for volume, skipping, pausing and making voice notes.

The Touch now has a real speaker built in, instead of a piezo beeper speaker, so that makes the countdown timer and alarm imminently more useful; should be good for listening to podcasts un-tethered as well.

The Classic line has been reduced to one model, as thin as the 80 gig, but with 120 gigs capacity. Perhaps that same drive will go in the MacBook Air, giving it a 50% boost in capacity.

Ok. Apple special event time again tomorrow morning. Here are my hunches/predictions:

1. iTunes will have a major revamp and it will be renamed iMedia or some such thing, to reflect the fact that it’s just as much about movies and iPhone apps as it is about music.

2. There will be a music subscription service where for $15 a month you can download all the music you want, but when you stop paying, that music disappears.

3. A new iPod nano, like the generation 2 model, but with the wheel at the bottom and the rest of the front taken up with a vertical screen. Flip it sideways for screening movies and the new orientation of the wheel is reflected by a virtual wheel that appears on the screen whenever you touch the real one.

4. Announcement that 10 million iPhones have now been sold. Thanks for coming. Goodbye. Event ends with some hip band playing live.

A great way to gather text together in one place…

The MacTipper Blog: Save Selected Text To a TXT File

I recently tried Leopard on my system. I didn’t need Leopard, but I felt that if I didn’t make the jump then I’d be forever falling behind the state of the art. It installed easily over Tiger as an archive and install. I made sure first that most of the applications that loaded at startup were temporarily disabled and one or two that were deemed actually dangerous to Leopard were removed altogether.

So, the installation went smoothly, and everything worked as advertised. But there were one or two nagging things that eventually caused me to change my mind about the upgrade: One was that the system was simply working too hard now for my liking; even though I have plenty of ram installed, the Finder was constantly rebuilding its cache of preview icons in order to drive Coverflow — in fact it was rebuilding even in list view. It worked, but it just wasn’t snappy any more on this G5 machine.

The second problem was that several of my favorite add-ons weren’t ready for primetime use under Leopard. They included PithHelmet, Mega Zoom, Sogudi and Menu Master. All told, the loss of these — and a couple other helper apps — made for quite a step back in productivity.

I knew I had to wipe the drive to go back to the previous system. I didn’t have a backup drive available to stow all my data so I decided to take the opportunity, while reverting to Tiger, to take stock of which data was essential and which was superfluous. I threw out everything that was there just for entertainment and managed to archive the rest (the really important stuff) on just a dozen or so CDs.

My plan was to wipe the hard drive, then install Tiger from the original disks, then rev it up to version 10.4.10 (10.4.11 was too buggy in my opinion). This I did, followed by the installation of all my archived data and my essential apps.

Then BANG, it broke.

It booted to the Desktop and everything I did in the Finder was fine, but every app that launched immediately quit, including System Preferences. I recalled reading some Apple forums where it was theorized that Leopard was writing to the disk in some low level way that the earlier Tiger OS wouldn’t recognize, even after a simple wipe; now I was thinking that theory might just be right. I started again with the Tiger install, only this time I had it write zeros to the whole disk to completely blank it before formatting it again.

Second time was a charm and over the next couple of days I slowly built up just the system that I wanted. Then BANG, it broke again. It was that sickening “Engine splutters while flying over open water” feeling you get with a totally random kernel panic. It took me back to a time when I went through three dodgy logic boards in six months (thank God for Apple Care).

Two more panics, and some hardware testing and swapping out of RAM showed that one of my two pieces of RAM was faulty somewhere in its higher regions; chucking the RAM (leaving me with one gig) fixed the glitch. Was that RAM always faulty and I’d never used that region before now? I don’t know.

I do know that it seems to run just as well as it ever did, with just the one gig. Maybe with the two gigs in the past, it was constantly correcting for the error and not running at optimum speed. Is UNIX that clever? Like I say: I don’t really know.

On top of all that, my internet connection was down for the past few days. So it’s been quite a week. And what has all this taught me?

I like Leopard a lot. It’s great, but I can wait a few months before attempting the upgrade again, until more of the bugs are ironed out. Even then I’ll think long and hard as the current setup is just so “right” for what I do. As with previous gadgets and systems I’ve adopted, I think I’ve reached a point where I’m more or less at the top of the curve as far as enhancement to the experience goes; more tinkering now is just for tinkering’s sake, and could be a little dangerous (I say that now…).

The other thing this experience taught me is that I was too ruthless in what I chucked out. I went past lean, to rudimentary. I now miss being able to, with a couple of clicks, call up some old TV episode, or piece of music, just for the hell of it.

Next on my wish list: That external drive…

I have an iPod nano and I usually charge it up using the USB connection to the Mac; only thing is, this only works while the iMac G5 is awake. I rediscovered just recently though that I can also charge it from the Mac via firewire, while the Mac is asleep.

Hooray!

I may have heard also that one of Leopard’s 300 new features is that they turned on USB charging while asleep as well…

I’m always a little nervous when it comes to OS updates. On the one hand it’s always nice to be up to date, but on the other, why risk breaking something that’s so stable in its current state.

When I looked at the specs of the 10.4.11 update the list of fixes looked very arcane, and not particularly exciting or relevant to my situation. But there also was included the final and supposedly stable version of Safari 3; and this was the only way to get a hold of it. I bit the bullet, induced by the prospect of exploring the new Safari.

I installed the upgrade and had no problems at all with the OS side of things; it was Safari itself that caused what grief I had. None of my SIMBL driven hacks liked it; several keyboard shortcuts had been changed — screwing up some of my Butler macros, and to me, it seems slower. Worse still, it was now here to stay (shades of the whole Microsoft IE embedded into the Windows OS brouhaha, but that’s another story).

This is the price one pays for tinkering, I guess. I don’t mean tinkering as in doing the upgrade; I mean tinkering as in having a pimped Safari to be upgraded. When I think back on all the software platforms I’ve used, PC, Mac and handheld, there was always some third party add-on that made each one “just so.”

Speaking of upgrades, have you noticed that Apple is more and more in the habit of adding some gift with each one? All of the iPhone and Touch updates, and the latest revisions to iTunes, have been primarily designed to stomp the latest hack, but they all add some new cool functionality that (probably) should have been there all along.

Omni Group have been working on this app for a very long time, and in the new year it will finally be for sale. Right now you can download a beta version that’s very stable, and newer versions are being released almost every day.

I’ve always been a fan of outliners, ever since I could collapse and expand lists in the built in MessagePad stationery, so I’ve tried my share of the current spate of super-outliners, otherwise known as GTD apps.

GTD comes from Getting Things Done, David Allen’s book on managing your things to do. My super condensed version of his theory states that if you have somewhere where you can write down (or enter) all of the nagging things on your mind (things to do – things you’d like to do or ponder), then you can free your cluttered brain for other things. Once you’ve assembled all these tasks you can group them into contexts, such as: At Work; At Home; Online; Running Errands etc.

When you find yourself say, at home or, running errands, you filter and handle those tasks related to that context — or if you want to get fancy you also filter just the next steps from more complex projects.

This is just a small part of GTD, but essentially the meatiest part, and OmniFocus handles this part of GTD very well indeed.

It does take a little getting used to, especially the issues of deciding whether to be working within the Planning or Context environments. After a couple of days it all falls into place though; one of its great strengths is that you can tinker endlessly with your naming conventions, views etc. without breaking anything. You’re never “locking yourself in.”

Give it a try. Organizing your chores can be fun!

The Omni Group - OmniFocus

Here is the scenario: you have a six CD audio book that you rip into iTunes. You then select all the tracks in the resulting enormous Album in iTunes and choose to Remember Position in each track, and you set the combined play count to zero.

You make a Smart Playlist for listening to the book, similar to the configuration shown above; each time you re-visit this playlist it picks up where you left off, and only shows the remaining unheard tracks. All fine and good.

But, the problem is that you also want to take the book with you, but the iPod that you use only has a limited capacity. Here’s the trick:

You can make a second Smart Playlist that refers to the first. This one is limited by size to whatever you can spare (in this case, 50MB). Now you set up your iPod to sync with the second Playlist.

When you’re at your Mac you can listen to either; they will automatically update each other. Why have two at all though? Why not just create the second 50MB Playlist? Well, the short Playlist is the slice off the top of the pile of files still to be heard; the long Playlist is the whole pile, which gives you more of a sense of how far there is to go.

Playlists can’t easily be duplicated or copied and then modified, but by using new Playlists that refer to existing ones you can make refined choices based on existing criteria.

You may have heard the stories concerning an ASUS exec letting slip that there’s an Apple tablet in the works. This may or may not be true; I’m sure that they’re constantly developing (say, eighty percent production ready) gadgets of all kinds.

Apple’s quest to put us at ease with technology
By Alice Rawsthorn
International Herald Tribune

…Ive is lucky in that advances in technology have accelerated throughout his career. Having already had new polymers and composite materials to play with, and pioneered the transition from cathode ray tubes to flat panel displays in desktops, he is now excited by the possibility of replacing hard drives with smaller, more robust flash memory in laptops. “When everything is new, it’s a huge amount of work because you have to validate the most rudimentary assumptions,” he said. “Otherwise you can go a long way down the development path only to find that the product doesn’t work.”…

All very tantalizing. What would an Apple tablet really be like?

If we look at past Steve keynotes when he’s introducing an entirely new product, step one is pointing out what’s wrong with what’s already out there. If Steve where introducing Apple’s Tablet he would first show how the current crop use clunky pens (Ours uses your fingers, just like the iPhone, and also just like the iPhone – it uses the familiar iPhone keyboard and gorgeous glossy real glass display).

He will show how the current crop use tiny scroll bars that are hard to point to, and then show iPhone-style flick and pinch scrolling and Coverflow and QuickLook for file management. The display will be seven inches; just big enough to make a great book reader and web browser, and just small enough to mean you’ll always take it with you…

Ok, so what’s the killer app?

One might be how you could carry it around the house all day on a single charge, accessing your internet connection; viewing shared files on your network; controlling your Apple TV. One might be that your wireless keyboard talks to it, for serious editing. Or, that it would work as a great additional input device when back at your Mac…

Trouble is, none of the above is really a one sentence – gotta have this – compelling justification for the great unwashed to buy the thing. People who use current tablets either like the scribble with a pen modality that Apple would never condone because the whole idea is just too “ugly”, or they like the twist and fold versatility of the more complex models; definitely a non-starter.

So, no. My take is that the Apple Tablet is still just a research project. I would buy one (”You paid how much for that Newton?!?”), but unless this device which will be regarded as a consumer product and not a “computer,” talks just as easily to PCs as to Macs, and does something amazing that folks didn’t realize they craved until now, then next year’s Macworld will be about new studio displays.

And perhaps the 11 inch flash-based MacBook Svelte.

Apple Tablet “confirmed” by Asus? - Engadget

Here’s one of those situations that takes a lot of time to explain, a little time to set up, and the blink of an eye to implement.

Step 1.

Use Sogudi to create a very short name for a website that you regularly visit. An example might be assigning NY to the New York Times site. To recap how Sogudi works, once you have assigned such a shortcut it’s simply a case of typing NY, followed by a space, in the address bar – then hitting return to go to the site.

Step 2.

In Butler, make a new Keystrokes Smart Item and in the Keys section: Press the Command key as well as L, followed by a delay (from the + menu) of 0.5 seconds. Follow that with the keys N and Y and then hit Return. You now have a little macro that opens the address bar ready for entry, waits a moment, types in NY and hits Return.

Step 3.

Go to the Triggers tab and give it a simple trigger like Opt-N. When you assign the trigger, make sure it’s only valid in Safari.

So, you’re in Safari looking at, whatever, when you decide you want to check up on the New York Times site; Opt-N and BOOM, you’re on your way.

A second here, a second there. It all adds up.