Tag: Mac

Cover art: When downloading new albums, I usually hunt down the album cover as well. Previously, artwork only showed up optionally in the lower left, in the iTunes screensaver, and on recent iPods. With iTunes 7, Apple has made cover art central. iTunes will now try and retrieve cover art automatically when adding new music, and you can force it to look for artwork of existing tracks with a Ctrl-click. But success is spotty, and you get no feedback if the search was unsuccesful. My guess is that the artwork comes from the iTMS database. But I’ve got albums I know are in iTMS but for which iTunes 7 still fails to retrieve artwork. Looks like this will continue to be a largely manual thing. Meanwhile, two new views in iTunes 7 feature artwork prominently. An album list view shows large versions of artwork along with track listings, and a fancy new “flip” (Coverflow) view uses Quartz to simulate a stack of LPs to sort through:

I like that they’re doing what they can to keep some trace of the album cover experience, but not sure how often I’ll use the feature. Especially since gathering artwork for 95% of my stuff looks like it’s going to remain labor intensive.

Cover art update: Just figured something out. iTunes isn’t doing the normal thing and putting cover art into the ID3v2 data area of music files – it’s storing it in subdirs of ~/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork . I had wondered why it used to take 20 seconds or so to write album cover data into every track of an album, but that it suddenly seems to happen really fast. Apparently the speedup is because iTunes doesn’t have to alter every file – it just stores the art files as external .itc files (i tunes cover?) and associates the images in the library. This is nice for speed and nice for not swelling library sizes, but sucks for portability between machines/platforms. Why isn’t this a preference? Or an optional mechanism to “permanently store art inside music files?” I’ve posted about this in my O’Reilly Mac blog, which has sparked a thread.

Genre view: Is gone. The new widget for accessing the Coverflow view replaces the old Browse icon, which used to let you sift and sort your collection by artist, year, album, or genre. In other words, Apple has replaced a whole lot of functionality with eye candy, which is annoying. You can still do era and genre tricks with Smart Playlists or via search (which is generally very effective), but hate to see the Browse view … hang on, I’m an idiot. They’ve just moved the Browse icon from the top right to a subtle gray replacement icon at the lower right; it’s been demoted, not removed.

New scrollbars: Mixed feelings. The “solid” look is kind of refreshing in comparison to the usual Aqua gel-cap look, but what is it with Apple ignoring the HIG and experimenting with new interface looks all the time? Does this portend a global change to Aqua, or are they just monkeying around to gauge reactions? To change the look of scrollbars in one app and leave the rest of the OS with glow-y scrollbars feels weird. Maybe they’re just treating the early adopters user base as a guinea pig farm; releasing the UI change into a single app, then watching blogs and mailing lists to see how the world reacts.

Multiple libraries: Long overdue – You can now divide your library into multiple libraries and manage them separately, which is useful for people sharing a single login, or if you want to move just part of a collection to another machine, or if your library is so large it causes performance problems. I really expected to see this in iPhoto before iTunes (it’s been possible with 3rd party utils forever).

Update: Check out Dan Sandler’s dissection of the  new UI, in high-res PDF or low-res JPG.

The Mac OS analog to SourceForge: “Mac OS Forge is dedicated to supporting the developer community surrounding open source components specific to Mac OS X.” None of the usual Apple branding there, though it is an Apple production. Cool to see they’ve already released the source to Calendar Server (for supporting iCal workgroups), which will be built into Leopard Server (itself not due for another nine months). And it’s Darwin, which means it’ll be possible to run it on Windows and *nix servers, just like Quicktime Streaming Server.

Unrelated nifty: Looks like there will be an RSS reader built into Mail.app in Leopard (via dsandler.org). Nothing innovative there – Thunderbird and others already do RSS – but it’ll be nice to have. Let’s hope it’s better than the craptastic RSS reader built into Safari.

At the risk of participating in the echo chamber, Apple unveiled a preview of OS X Leopard at WWDC today. Not attending this year, but looks like a fairly substantial release. Following on BeOS / X-Windows heels, Spaces finally gives the Mac a version of Workspaces. No mention yet on how many you can have, and little info on how they’re navigated, but it’s certainly an improvement over nothing at all (though I confess I stopped missing them sooner than I thought I would when switching from BeOS to OS X).

Very cool stuff on extending iChat for collaboration with desktop applications (though I can imagine some scary security issues here when a remote user convinces you that they’re your sysadmin “just need access for a few minutes” — wondering what the security model for this will be.

Time Machine uses built-in version control to let you rewind to previous versions of the file system, undelete long-gone images, etc. Nifty but not earth shaking. A feature probably growing out of awareness that most users are utilizing maybe 10 or 20% of today’s gi-normous hard drives. [Addendum: Turns out you need to have a 2nd hard drive installed to use Time Machine, a fact which will relegate the feature to use only by the hard-core, and perhaps some institutional implementations. Would like to see Apple offer a non-destructive partitioning scheme, so users could not only take advantage of Time Machine but also do all kinds of other things, like set up Boot Camp or other VM without starting from scratch.]

Since I like to imagine that someone is actually listening on the other end of the OS X Feedback form, I’m stoked to see the addition of a stationery feature to Mail.app — I wrote Apple about a year ago saying that stationery was the one killer feature in Eudora that no other mail client had seemed to grok (though I don’t care about fancy mail formatting, I always found the ability to craft boilerplate responses I could call up instantly an invaluable feature in Eudora). The macslash.org take on stationery is that they’re going to make it even easier to send “craptastic HTML email.” Which is probably true, as unfortunate side effects go.

A few years ago I noticed that OS X started offering “FireWire” as one of the tcp/ip connection types, alongside ethernet and modem. Sounded intriguing, but couldn’t imagine a situation where it would be useful.

The brilliance of this arrangement dawned on me over the past couple of weeks, as I found myself in a house with a DSL connection but no router — DSL modem feeding their eMac directly. To get my laptop online without taking their machine off the network, just enabled connection sharing on their Mac, connected a FireWire cable from it to me, and I was online, slickr-n-snot. All of my posts here over the past two weeks were made over FireWire.

Heck, you could even plug a laptop into the back of an external FireWire drive. Effortless.

From my O’Reilly blog:

An old friend called in a panic the other day. The modem on her G3 lime iMac had crapped out, and she needed to get online that evening. We verified that she could still get a dial tone on the line. Had her reboot. No dice. “Still no broadband?,” I asked. “Maybe someday. Haven’t gotten around to it.”

Started troubleshooting. “Click the blue apple icon in the top left of your screen,” I said. “I only have a rainbow apple.” Uh-oh. OS9 user on dial-up. How do people live? Time had caught up with her. Fortunately she had a bit of cash. Told her to order DSL, and meanwhile, I’d pick up a new iMac to get her online by evening. A new Mac is a very expensive modem — even as a stopgap — but the time was ripe.

Click for more

Nifty: Postfix Enabler turns any Mac into its own SMTP server, useful for laptop users finding themselves god-knows-where without an SMTP connection. Also includes a full POP/IMAP server, if you swing that way. Postfix is already built into OS X, but unless you’re running Server, you’ll have to jump through a few hoops to get it working. For $10, Postfix Enabler makes it happen in less than a minute, cleanly, con GUI.

Of course if your ISP requires mail to be routed through them, it’s not going to help a great deal – you’ll just have to configure Postfix to authenticate to the ISP anyway. But by telling your mail client to send outbound on localhost, sending at least feels buttery fast.

Technorati Tags: mac, mail, postfix, smtp

From my ORA blog: “iDisk uses DAV for remote disk mounting, and iCal lets me publish my calendars to a personal DAV server. Presumably, iPhoto photocasts to the iDisk DAV system, and iSync does the same. So why can’t I use my own DAV server to store all of my iSync data? Why can’t I photocast to my own DAV server?”

Technorati Tags: dav, mac, webdav

Apple could save a bundle on bandwidth by tapping into the unused cable/DSL bandwidth of its users. Macosrumors claims to have information pointing to the planned inclusion of a P2P system to be built into OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Users who elected to turn on the “Reward-Sharing system” would receive Apple credits, redeembable for iTMS downloads or other goodies.

Based on some rough math estimated for the proposal, the team pushing this concept believes they could cut Apple’s bandwidth costs by hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per year and by always finding the closest peer-sharing hosts, the system would also save terabytes of Internet backbone bandwidth that is now used for Software Updates, QuickTime Movie Trailers, and iTunes Store downloads among other things.

Integrating P2P into the operating system at this level would be a sort of acknowledgment that P2P isn’t an activity users do on top of a network stack, but an emergent feature of the network itself, increasingly integral to everyday computing.

In the midst of the net neutrality debate, this has additional implications, since it means users with lots of dark fiber would suddenly be using lots more of their Comcast (etc.) bandwidth. Apple essentially making the internet healthier by distributing the load … but ultimately at the expense of the carriers.

thanks dsandler.org

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, itms, mac, p2p

Question I hear a lot: “If the Mac is nearly virus-free / so great / [insert superlative here], why don’t they advertise the hell out of those things?” Fair question. Looks like they’ve started doing just that with a series of Mac vs. PC ads bound to stir the pot and sell a few pooters.

The dilemma is this: When you’re selling a product where the existing userbase has a well-established superiority complex, how do you push your real virtues without coming off snobbish? It’s one thing to sell advantages, another to knock the other guy. Thing is, negativity works. Patrick Coskren, on the MacOS-Talk list (with permission):

In political advertising, everybody says they dislike negative ads, but results show they’re very effective, which is why you see them so much. Perhaps the point of the ads is to attack the near-universal belief that even though Macs may be “easier” and “better” (for particular definitions of easier and better), Windows remains “good enough.” They want to jar people out of the complacency of thinking Windows is good enough, and push them to re-evaluate their platform choice. Windows is dominant (in part) because it’s … the default choice; if people actually make a choice, the chance they’ll choose a Mac is probably higher than the 3% (or whatever) the current market share would suggest. Just like if you’re running against the popular incumbent, it can be effective to go negative.

Apple also pushes the “virus free” message — a delicate button now that viruses are no longer unheard-of on the Mac. Even if it’s true that 99.72% of viruses are Windows-bound, it’s a bit of a glass bubble. Ars Technica’s John Siracusa:

It’s like an airline advertising that it has fewer fatal crashes than its competitors. This just isn’t done — and for good reasons. Putting aside the moral and ethical aspects, which arguably don’t apply to Apple, there are important practical considerations as well. The new “Viruses” TV ad pulls back a slingshot and holds it to Apple’s face. The backlash is inevitable.

If some portion of the virus-free aspect of Mac ownership is due to OS X being “under the radar,” then Apple has just posted a giant “kick me” sign on its back.

Not to make too big a thing out of it. I think the ads are well done overall, and kinda funny.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, marketing