Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

The link below takes you to an article that looks at the state of Zune, so far. Interspersed with with the quotes from analysts, and the author’s own take, are responses from Microsoft’s own PR guy.

I myself couldn’t care less whether Zune will be a success or not; what struck be about the article was just how painful it is to read what a PR guy has to say about his own product. All thisexploring this space, urban demographics, price points, yada yada…

It’s almost like: it doesn’t matter what you as a company say once a product is out there — it’s always going to sound like an excuse, and all excuses carry with them a certain cringe factor.

Someone once said that the definition of “Cool” is: Never having to explain yourself. Guess who practices that.

On a slightly different but related note; there was a podcast about a year ago where John Sculley was interviewed on Apple’s 30th birthday. His responses were typically smooth, classy and positive. When hewas asked pointed questions about falling out with Steve Jobs, and such things, his response was: “I don’t talk about that.” The interviewer took the hint and moved on.

Say what you like about Sculley (anyone who shepherded the Newton is ok in my book), that was cool.

Playlist: Opinion: How Microsoft can make the Zune a success

The guy… Is a genius.

“…Nonetheless, it makes me wonder. We keep redefining the minimum unit of information, chopping it down into smaller and smaller bits. It seems like with Twitter, we’re left with a single atom of plutonium.

If we attempt to break this in half, there’ll be a huge circle of scorched earth where the lab once stood.”

Popular Twitter.com not for the wordy :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Andy Ihnatko

…The second tab is the Theme Generator, where you create (or steal, using the magnifying glass) a primary color, and iPick generates six further, beautifully complimentary colors for you…

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Quick Review — iPick

A while back I was telling no one in particular (probably no one at all) that I thought it was OK for the iPhone to be a closed system; arguing that the phone appears to be an elegant and fool proof appliance right out of the box and why open it up to bugginess and unreliability.

I also argued that Steve Jobs, who secretly despises third party developers, finally had a product that encompasses his bicycle for the mind theory…

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. And Apple has been — well, first of all, one’s very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very fortunate. It’s been able to introduce a few of these into the world. 1984, introduced the Macintosh. It didn’t just change Apple. It changed the whole computer industry…”

The iPhone is obviously a huge deal to him; such a huge deal that it would be the final real product where he can say, “Go ahead and enjoy it, but don’t tamper with it; a lot of really smart people have made it exactly what it is supposed to be…”

That’s great. What do I care? After all — it is a phone first of all — not a computer.

But, now there’s speculation that Leopard, the next version of Mac OS, will essentially lock down its included applications. No more third party tweaks that invisibly enhance existing applications such as Safari, Mail, iPhoto etc. Evidently (and it’s way too early to know for sure if any of this will in fact transpire) the reasoning is that it’s a security feature — another way to prevent malicious code from getting in the system.

Could be it’s Steve’s way of saying: “This whole system is starting to stagger around. Let us control the built in stuff. You stick with stand alone third party stuff.” Either way I’m very worried.

In my brief two-odd years of using Macs, I’d say that a good One Half of the enjoyment I get out of the experience, is derived from tools that hack right into the system itself. Tools like Butler, PithHelmet, Sogudi, Witch, et al.

So, now being potentially at the sharp end of this new Don’t Tamper policy — all I can say is: “I don’t like it! Not at all!”

Please, Steve, reconsider. The guys who write these hacks aren’t hacks themselves. This is subtle elegant classy seamless stuff; all done in the best possible taste. If all that is gone with OS 10.5 then I just might lock down the fine as-is OS 10.4 and be happy with that.

Leopard Axing Input Managers? - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I’ve been playing a little bit with Screenshot Helper. Its premise is that you can de-clutter your background in order to make screenshots — and that it does. However, an interesting side effect is that you can use it to generally de-clutter your workspace.

Here’s an example of what I mean (and remember, it’s much easier to do than it is to explain):

I’m looking at a website in Safari and I open three new windows to follow links on the page; I also download a file. Now I’ve got four windows overlapping, plus the download window. I can Cmd-` to step through them, but there’s still that background clutter.

Now I launch Screenshot Helper which shows nothing but a clean Desktop. I switch to one of the Safari windows using Witch, and now I see only that window — over a clean Desktop; now when I Cmd-` each subsequent Safari window is on its own on the clean Desktop.

Sure, I know there are other helper apps like Think, and Virtue Desktop that let you concentrate on only one application, but Screenshot Helper currently seems the best answer for concentrating on only one window.

Uh oh!

I’m rapidly running out of space!

My ISP allows me 10 megs of free web space, and the Mac Tips site so-far takes up about 9 of those 10 megs. Pretty soon there won’t be any more room for new content.

I could investigate paying for more room, but compared to the massive amounts of free space for, say, email at Google, what these guys would charge me for a mere five megs is truly exorbitant.

Besides, I Really hate spending actual money (just look at the amount of freeware that I review).

What I’m looking for, is about 5 to 10 megs on someone’s server, where I can easily ftp the screenshot files that are used in my Quick Reviews. I briefly looked at Picasa albums, where it’s possible to link directly to a stored image — but those images are arbitrarily resized — making that option a no-go.

If you know of a reliable benefactor that might provide some free space to a non-profit service like mine, please let me know; I could sure use the headroom.

Many Thanks

…From a clumsy ham-fisted Brit!

“I’ve seen so many plastic-panelled laptops that have been knocked off desks and ended up with cracked cases or - worse - broken screens or - even worse - damaged hard drives, yet my faithful aluminium-clad PowerBook G4 took many such tumbles with only scratches and scrapes to show for it. All the time it remain entirely functional. Tell a lie, the optical drive slot got bent once, so I couldn’t insert discs, but a quick push with a flat-bladed screwdriver sorted that one out. You can’t do that with plastic. And the screws don’t fall out either…”

Ten reasons why you should buy a Mac

“We’ve been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it’s a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.”

The Mossberg Solution — Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal.

NameChanger is an application for the batch renaming of files. All of the usual ways of renaming files are covered (prepend, append, add date, add number sequence etc), but with a few useful twists.

The first thing that differentiates this app is the live preview of how the files will be renamed, making it easy to fine-tune the changes prior to committing to them…

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Quick Review — NameChanger

When I’m using a tool that’s so good I want to chuckle, well, I just want to tell anyone and everyone. I guess that makes me some kind of an evangelist…

Anyway, I thought I’d kick off the week by mentioning an application that is already covered in the Mac Tips site, but that I’m really getting a buzz off of.

This time it’s Movie Time. I really love how I can escape from a movie, closing the app, and come back to it a few days later — right where I left off.

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Quick Review — Movie Time