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Character entry? Isn't that what we used to call "typing"? Yes, but how can you type characters that aren't printed on your keyboard, or aren't available at all through any key combination? There is of course the venerable PopChar X from Ergonis if you need to insert special characters frequently, but what if you need just the occasional copyright symbol, checkmark, cents sign, or does-not-equal symbol?
It turns out that Apple provides some useful character discovery and entry tools, and in this excerpt from "Take Control of Fonts in Snow Leopard," I'll share what you need to know about one of them: Keyboard Viewer.
If you're interested in Mac OS X's font handling in general, I hope you'll take a look at the book, which has 225 pages of details on font history and architecture; how fonts work in Mac OS X; how to organize fonts; how to deal with fonts from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and Apple's iLife and iWork suites; and much more. It's only $15, and is the definitive book about fonts in Mac OS X.
Turn on the Keyboard and Character Viewers -- Mac OS X provides two text-input tools, Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer, to help handle the problems resulting from three issues: not all characters are printed on your keys (where the heck is ©?); most accented characters need to be generated with a special key sequence; and many fonts have characters that can't be typed with any key combination.
(Note that among the minor changes from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to 10.6 Snow Leopard was the renaming of Character Palette to Character Viewer. When I refer to "Character Viewer," translate that to "Character Palette" if you're still using Leopard.)
Turn on the tools in Snow Leopard:
In the Keyboard system preference pane, click the Keyboard button.
Check Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in Menu Bar to put the Input menu in your menu bar with both items listed.
Turn on the tools in Leopard:
In the International preference pane, click the Input Menu button.
Check Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer in the list.
At the bottom of the window, check Show Input Menu In Menu Bar to add the Input menu to your menu bar. Checking items in the list populates the menu, which includes a shortcut back to the International preference pane.
Character Viewer is also available from several other places, in both Leopard and Snow Leopard. In the Finder, TextEdit, and other programs that strictly follow Apple guidelines, Edit > Special Characters opens Character Viewer. This command works whether or not you've added the Input menu to the menu bar.
If you have an Input menu for foreign language keyboards but haven't put Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer in the menu, the Special Characters command not only opens Character Viewer but also adds both Viewers to the menu.
Keyboard Viewer's Font Menu -- Not all evolution is an improvement, and that of the Keyboard Viewer is a case in point. The original version was useful for more than just finding accented characters; it had a Font menu so you could see where every character lived in each font. With all fonts assumed to be Unicode compliant, however, characters should be in the same place no matter what the font. By the time Leopard showed up, Keyboard Viewer lost its menu bar Font menu.
In Leopard, Keyboard Viewer has a pop-up Font menu (which is more likely short for "font mapping"), with choices limited to Standard, which shows character placement for the currently selected language and a short list of PiFonts - picture fonts - that Mac OS X considers worthy of the label. The screenshot below shows an example of Mac fonts that are so worthy; if you have Microsoft Office 2008, the list includes Bookshelf Symbol 7, Marlett, MS Reference Specialty, and MT Extra. Unfortunately, Keyboard Viewer is of no help if you're using a picture font not listed - such as, oh, say that seldom-used, little-known Zapf Dingbats.
Snow Leopard's Keyboard Viewer evolution goes even further: no Font menu at all!
Find Option Characters -- Since the dawn of the Mac, we've been able to access up to four characters from each key on the keyboard: with and without the Shift key, with Option, and with Option-Shift. Many of the Option and Option-Shift characters - especially the ones you're likely to use often - are easy to remember because some thought went into their placement: there's often a relationship between at least one of the characters printed on a key and the Option or Option-Shift character.
You can check out the entire Option and Option-Shift character sets, and look up characters whose positions you can't remember, with Keyboard Viewer: open it from the Input menu, and hold down Option or Option-Shift to see the characters those modifiers produce.
Click Keyboard Viewer keys, or just type, to enter a displayed character. The best approach, however, is to learn what key combinations produce the characters you use often, and use mnemonics like those in the table below to help remember them.
(Note that the key combinations in this table and described elsewhere in this section hold for only the U.S. keyboard. With a different input keyboard or a different Mac OS X system language, even some common characters can be in different places.)
Type Accented Letters -- The Mac has always provided an easy way to type a letter with one of five common accent marks (for use in words like déjà vu, naïve, rôle, and El Niño) through the use of dead keys: keys that don't produce anything until you hit another key. The Mac's dead keys are Option-key combinations, and typing a subsequent letter produces the accented letter:
Press the Option key combination that produces the accent.
The dead keys are only half-dead in Mac OS X, so you'll see the accent in your text, with a squiggly line under it - or some other type of highlighting, depending on the program - to signify that you must type another letter.
Type the letter to be accented.
Accenting is restricted to certain letters - you can't just put an umlaut on the letter x because you feel like it. The accents and their key combinations are as follows in this screenshot:
To get é, for example, all you have to do is press Option-e for the acute accent and then type e. The final accented letter is a single character generated from what you typed, so a single backspace erases it.
Using dead keys is just a clever way to type characters that are otherwise unavailable from the keyboard. You could enter é in other ways - through Character Viewer, for instance, or with a foreign language keyboard - but why bother when this method is so easy?
When you need one of these accents but can't remember the key combination, Keyboard Viewer can help. It shows both the accent keys and the accentable letters, as shown in this screenshot.
Holding down Option in Keyboard Viewer highlights the accent keys (left); the available accented letters show up when you type or click one of the accent keys (right). This figure shows the accented letters that can be produced using Option-e. I added the red circles - Keyboard Viewer is not as enthusiastic about showing you the accented letters.
If you keep Keyboard Viewer open while you're typing, you have the option of clicking its keys to enter the accents and letters:
With Keyboard Viewer open, hold down the Option key.
Keyboard Viewer highlights the accent keys.
With Option down, press one of the accent keys or click it in Keyboard Viewer.
Release the Option key.
The Keyboard Viewer display changes, showing the accent over the letters that can use it.
Type (or click) one of the accented letters to enter it.
To type an accent by itself, type a space after using the accent's Option-accent key combination.
Type More Accents with the U.S. Extended Keyboard -- Roman-based languages use many more accents than the five basic ones that Mac dead keys have always provided. In keeping with the Unicode lots-of-characters spirit, Mac OS X provides 19 dead-key accents with the special U.S. Extended input keyboard. (I explain input keyboards in more detail in "Use Different Keyboards for Foreign Languages or Other Special Input" in the book.) Here's how to activate the U.S. Extended input keyboard:
Open a preference screen:
Snow Leopard: In the Language & Text preference pane, go to the Input Sources screen or choose Open Language & Text from the Input menu.
Leopard: In the International pane, go to the Input Menu screen or choose Open International from the Input menu.
In the list of "input methods," check U.S. Extended; this automatically checks U.S., as well.
Open Keyboard Viewer from the Input menu.
Choose the U.S. Extended keyboard from the Input menu. (Its menu bar icon differs from the standard U.S. keyboard by the little add-on U, for Unicode.)
Sometimes Keyboard Viewer doesn't update when you choose an input keyboard from the Input menu. If the Keyboard Viewer's title bar doesn't reflect your keyboard choice, close and reopen it.
Now you can use Keyboard Viewer to access the larger selection of accents and accentable letters the same way you use it for basic accents with the standard U.S. keyboard: hold down Option to see the accents, type the one you want, and then type the letter; see the screenshot. This example shows the results for Option-C, the cedilla accent.
Not all fonts include all the accented characters you see in Keyboard Viewer. If you type a character that's not in your current font, it's entered in your document in a different font - one that actually contains the character.
Why not always use the Extended keyboard? Because it giveth with one key and taketh away with the other. With all those accents given over to the Option key, you've lost standard Option characters like the √ from Option-V and π from Option-P.
Apply After-the-Fact Accents -- In some applications, and with certain fonts (yes, that's vague, but with so many variables the best I can give you is a "more often than not"), you can type a letter first and then use an Option-Shift-accent combination to add the accent when you have the U.S. Extended Keyboard active.
So, in TextEdit, for instance, you can choose Helvetica, type o and then press Option-Shift-U, and wind up with an umlaut over the o (this is needed to spell the names of heavy metal bands like M├╢tley Cr├╝e properly). For a list of the Option-Shift combinations you can use for applying accents this way, see Tom Gewecke's diacritics page.
More about Character Entry -- While Keyboard Viewer is helpful for entering Option- and Option-Shift characters, and accented characters, what if you want to enter a character that can't be typed from the keyboard at all? That's where Character Viewer comes in, and the full "Take Control of Fonts in Snow Leopard" has 16 pages showing you how to find and enter such characters via Character Viewer. Along the way, it devotes 12 pages to explaining the glyph approach to font characters, describing how characters that lack Unicode IDs are handled, and showing why you should care about alternative characters. Plus, if you've ever felt limited by the characters in Zapf Dingbats and Webdings, you'll have fun exploring all the dingbats available in other fonts, including the dingbat-rich Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro.
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Dialectic 1.7 -- JNSoftware has released Dialectic 1.7, a significant update to its popular telephony software for Mac OS X. Dialectic is a TidBITS favorite (see "Dialectic Simplifies Dialing Any Type of Phone," 10 April 2008) that lets you manage the telephone calls you make, regardless of what type of phone you use. New features in version 1.7 include 64-bit compatibility (under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard); support for Exchange, CardDAV, and LDAP accounts; and more and better support for a wide range of devices like the MagicJack and Aastra IP phones. The software requires Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or higher; full release notes are available. ($25 new, free update, 7.8 MB)
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Transmit 4.1.1 -- Panic has updated its file-transfer software Transmit to version 4.1.1. The full release notes list nearly five dozen fixes, but here's the overview: Transmit Disk - the feature that lets you mount remote FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, and other servers on your desktop as if they were connected hard disks - has been vastly improved, offering full compatibility with 64-bit kernels, improved MobileMe support, better deletion, and ending its reliance on MacFUSE. The update also adds more language localizations, reduces memory usage during file transfers, fixes a slew of cosmetic bugs, and plays more nicely with symlinks and redirected items. ($34 new, free update, 22 MB)
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MarsEdit 3.1.1 -- Red Sweater Software has updated their blog editing software MarsEdit to version 3.1.1. The new version is now 64-bit compatible. Additionally, a variety of new features have been introduced, including a new, per-blog setting to constrain uploaded images to pre-set sizes, support for Lightroom 3 media libraries, and plug-in support in the rich text editor (so you can view embedded movies, for instance). The update also fixes bugs, including one that caused a blank preview window and another that prevented the ejection of external media volumes. Full release notes are available at Red Sweater's Web site. ($39.95 new, free update, 6.0 MB)
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Savescreenie 2.0 -- Long ago, our article "How to Change Screen Capture Formats" (27 June 2005), prompted Christian Franz to create a small utility called Savescreenie to ease the process of changing Mac OS X's default screenshot format. Five years later, Christian's cf/x Software has released the free Savescreenie 2.0. It now supports a number of additional file formats (10 in all), and enables you to set the default location and base name for screenshots. Savescreenie 2.0 requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later and works on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs. So if you prefer a screenshot format other than Mac OS X's default of PNG, or would prefer that your screenshots end up somewhere other than on the Desktop, give Savescreenie a try. (Free, 1.0 MB)
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1Password 3.4.1 -- The fine folks at Agile Web Solutions have released 1Password 3.4.1, an incremental update to their popular password management utility. Among the included updates is partial support for Firefox 4 betas, but note that Autosave and HTTP Authentication don't yet work. The update also greatly improves the Sync Conflict Resolver, making it far simpler to diagnose and repair conflicts, including Dropbox syncing issues. Other fixes include improved localization, optimizations for 1PasswordAnywhere, and more; full release notes are available. ($39.95 new, free update, 17.3 MB)
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It isn't often these days that a new application makes me slap myself on the side of the head and say, "Wow! Why didn't someone think of this sooner?" But that was my reaction when I heard about Fake, a new Web browser from Todd Ditchendorf. And after I'd recovered from stunning myself, I said, "Wow! I can't believe someone implemented this so brilliantly!"
Before you run for cover, wondering why anyone would need yet another Web browser, hear me out. Fake isn't just any Web browser, and it isn't really intended to replace your current browser. It has a special purpose, and you might use it only for that purpose. But when you need it, there's nothing else like it.
Fake is a programmable Web browser. Its goal is to make it easy for you to write a script that can drive the Web browser itself, and that can be run against the currently displayed Web page, operating on its interface. There are other ways to write such a script; for example, you could code it in JavaScript. And there are other ways to run such a script against a Web page, more or less automatically; for example, that's what Greasemonkey does in Firefox. But remember, I said "easy." Exploring a Web page's HTML to work out how to access an element within it through JavaScript, and then writing and maintaining the JavaScript code to do that, hardly counts as easy. Fake lets you assemble your script with a point-and-click interface.
Fake's interface is deliberately reminiscent of Apple's own Automator (see "Meet Automator," 2 May 2005), where you assemble prefabricated but configurable "actions" into a "workflow," usually as a substitute for writing code in AppleScript. But Fake goes Automator one better; Apple never did give Automator any decent programmatic logic, such as loops and conditions and error handling, whereas Fake's actions include these. Basic actions include clicking a link or other element, setting values of an element or form, and submitting a form; you can also control the browser more generally, going to a given URL, opening and closing browser tabs, and so forth. Programmers can also build snippets of JavaScript, AppleScript, or Unix shell script into a workflow.
Here's an example of how easy it is to construct a basic workflow. I often want to search TidBITS for past articles I've written. I want these to be articles where I'm an author, not articles where I'm mentioned in some other way. We have an Advanced Search page with an Author field I can fill out; to get there, I must click the little gear symbol next to the search field at the upper left of our main page. Now I'll construct a workflow to go to the Advanced Search page and put "Neuburg" in the Author field.
I start with a Load URL action, pasting in our home page URL: http://www.tidbits.com/. Now I add a Click HTML Element action. This has a field where I can put in an identifier for the little gear icon. But which element is the little gear icon? I don't need to know the answer; I just Control-drag from the action to the gear icon itself, and an expression identifying it appears in that field. Finally, I add a Set Value of HTML Element action; once again I Control-drag, this time to the Author field, to set the first field of that action, and then I type "Neuburg" into the second field of that action.
So far, all I've done is drag some actions into my workflow, configure them by Control-dragging right to the elements I want to operate on, and type my name once. Not too difficult! However, I also need to provide a way of waiting until each desired page has loaded the element I'm going to operate on. No problem; I intersperse two Wait For Condition actions between the three actions I already have, copying and pasting from my existing actions the information about the element that needs to exist before proceeding. My workflow is finished!
Finally, I save my workflow as a file called "Articles By Moi." Presto, I now have a double-clickable file that goes to the advanced search page and fills in my name in the Author section, ready for me to enter additional information to search on and then perform the search. And the amazing part is that I wrote it in just a few moments, with no need to consult any manuals or learn any programming languages.
Of course, if you do know some programming languages, you can incorporate your knowledge into a workflow. Here's an example that extracts the date of publication from a TidBITS article. All of our article Web pages (such as this one) start with a little header giving the article category followed by its date (followed by some further information). To get that header into Fake, I start with a Set Variable action and (you guessed it) Control-drag from the action to that header. I also assign the action a variable name; let's call it "meta_article". So now when I run that workflow, I end up with a variable "meta_article" whose content is something like this:
Blog Post | 04 Aug 2010 | Listen | Print | Comment (27)
Now I want to extract the "04 Aug 2010" part. It turns out that JavaScript can see Fake's variables, and since JavaScript has regular expressions, it can easily extract that bit. So my second action in this workflow is a Do JavaScript action. It extracts the date from the "meta_article" variable, and returns it as the "date" variable:
var meta = window.fake.get("meta_article");
var res = meta.match(/\| (.*?) \|/);
window.fake.set("date", res[1]);
Finally, I want to move that information to the clipboard. I can do that with a simple Unix shell script, so my next action is a Run Unix Script action. Unix shell scripts can see Fake variables too, in a different way:
#!/bin/sh
echo ${date} | pbcopy
Now the date from that article is sitting on the clipboard, ready for me to paste into whatever article I'm writing. Okay, big deal, I hear you thinking: I could have just selected it and copied it. But that example can be worked into a larger workflow that copies the title and date of an article and assembles it into one of our standard references, like the one referring to my Automator article above.
Fake comes with lots of other cool features. It takes advantage of Apple's WebKit to provide element-level analysis of a Web page; select a bit of a Web page and choose Window > Web Inspector to see the same pane you see in Safari by choosing Develop > Show Web Inspector (or choose Inspect Element from the contextual menu). It enables scripts to be run, and stylesheets to be applied, against a Web page after it loads (like Greasemonkey). And it is itself scriptable, so instead of writing a workflow, you could drive Fake, using AppleScript or the equivalent, to perform a series of actions that you're defining in real time.
I imagine that Fake would be a heaven-sent boon to developers who need to automate interactions with a Web browser (for example, to test a Web application, such as the Take Control ordering process). But it's so insanely easy to use - at its most basic, just drag an action into a workflow, and drag from that action to the thing on the Web page that it operates on - that I'd think it would help anyone who does any kind of repetitive browser activity where Safari's auto-filling of forms doesn't cut it. If you think Fake wouldn't be any use to you, reread the examples above and think again about your own browser life. I bet there's some Web form or repeated sequence of Web pages where Fake could condense many mouse-clicks into one for you.
As I've already said, I think Fake is a brilliant idea, brilliantly implemented. It's the culmination of years of work by its developer, who has generously given away many tools resulting from his labors along the way (such as the other specialized browsers Fluid and Cruz, plus much of the code on which they depend), and is responsive, active, and extremely patient and helpful on a Google group devoted to Fake. Fake costs a very reasonable $29.95, with a feature-limited trial version (notably, it can't save workflows) available as a 4.9 MB download, and it requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later. I recommend it.
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Newsreader software takes RSS feeds and presents the latest news articles, blog posts, and other items in a newest-first list layout. But many people I know either have never cared for the email-like organization scheme of RSS readers, or never got into RSS at all because they prefer to see a Web page. (And then there's Adam Engst, our fearless leader, who finds the vastness of innumerable headlines that he feels he should read overwhelming and thus avoids newsreaders entirely.)
Newsreader naysayers take heart, however. The iPad is bringing a new approach to feed reading that may transform our relationship with the myriad updates we get. It could win some converts.
Two programs in particular are promising, and I expect if they perform well in the App Store marketplace, we'll see many more alternatives for the iPad and its smaller brethren, as well as osmosis from the iOS side back into Mac OS X.
Times for iPad and Flipboard take streams of updates and create newspaper and magazine layouts automatically. This approach works better than it may sound at first. Automatic layout seems like an iffy proposition, but both programs produce interesting results.
All the RSS That's Fit to Print -- The $7.99 Times for iPad from Acrylic Software comes populated with science, technology, arts and entertainment, and sports tabs. Each tab reveals a view of multi-column news briefs. You can set the display of each column, make it wider or narrower, and add your own RSS feeds. (There doesn't appear to be a way to rearrange feeds from top to bottom in the current version, unfortunately; you have to delete and re-enter them in the order you want.)
You can also set how many articles are displayed. Each view's pages can extend further to the right, too, to add more columns.
Tap an item, and it opens the RSS preview, with any associated images or media. In landscape view - but not portrait view, oddly - buttons appear to open the item in Safari, add the item to a global shelf of articles in the app (a kind of news clipping area), and share the item via email, Twitter, and Facebook.
The makers of Times for iPad already plan a Mac OS X version.
Flip-Flying Away -- The free Flipboard is far more limited in what you can add, but it's also more beautiful and varied in its presentation - it's more magazine than newspaper. It comes preset with several feeds. You can have up to 9 source feeds, shown in a grid of squares, on the first page and 12 on subsequent pages.
When you launch the program, it shows an image at full-screen size like a cover. Swipe from the right edge to the left, and the contents page opens up with the nine squares. Any source can be changed, but at the moment, you can choose only among feeds provided by Flipboard Inc., or you can add Twitter lists or individuals.
When you tap a source's square, Flipboard opens a page that includes teaser text of linked items, along with images. For Twitter, that's rather remarkable, because any item someone links in a 140-character-or-less tweet is turned into the full item itself.
Tap the item, and it opens up into its own page, and shows any other references to the destination or tweet in a sidebar as commentary. You can also tap a Read on Web button to view the full article in its original Web context (that's how Flipboard avoids displeasing news sources).
Articles and items can be shared via email and Twitter, and you can mark a tweet as a favorite within the item view.
Both apps have opened my eyes about the way in which streams of information can be dealt with graphically. Although I follow hundreds of feeds in my RSS reader, I find myself using it less and less, because the sheer volume, even when I scan and mark as read, is overwhelming. (I can hear Adam chortling even as I type this.)
By giving me a varied look and showing me items in some context, rather than in isolation, I find reading RSS feeds in these apps much easier on both my eyes and my brain. In the end, I'm reading again, instead of scanning.
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We're excited to announce a completely new Take Control ebook - "Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ." Written by iTunes expert and music enthusiast Kirk McElhearn, the 146-page, $10 ebook is up-to-date and bursting with answers to all your iTunes questions. Along with authoring a number of Take Control titles and other books, Kirk has written for TidBITS and is a Senior Contributor to Macworld, with numerous submissions to their Playlist column.
Beyond the broad goal of transforming you into an iTunes power user, Kirk's intent with this ebook is to help you appreciate and understand the process of adding media to iTunes, tagging it, adding album artwork, and organizing it into playlists. With that setup completed, you can enjoy your music, movies, audiobooks, ebooks, and more without hassles when it's time to find a particular item or you want to do something special like sync a select subset of music to your iPod, create a party playlist, identify music you haven't heard in a while, or listen to the chapters in an audiobook in the proper order. If your iTunes library is anything like mine, it's a mess, which makes using iTunes all the harder. But it doesn't have to be that way, and with Kirk's advice, you can regain control over your media in iTunes.
Speaking of media, if you're a current or future iPad owner, you can also buy Kirk's ebook in a 25-percent-off bundle with Jeff Carlson's "Take Control of Media on Your iPad." The two ebooks would normally cost $20, but bundled together, they're only $15.
To sweeten the deal, the ebook ends with a pair of coupons. You'll save $5 on Equinux's SongGenie tool for automatically filling in missing album artwork, fixing incorrect song titles, adding lyrics, and identifying unknown songs. And if you have an AirPort Express base station, you can save $3 on Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil software for playing audio wirelessly from any source, such as the Pandora Web site running in Safari.
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We're pleased to welcome the data-recovery firm The Data Rescue Center as our latest TidBITS sponsor. Although you may not be familiar with The Data Rescue Center name, you'll likely recognize their parent company, Prosoft Engineering, makers of the Data Rescue and Drive Genius software packages. Prosoft has been around since 1985, writing drivers and disk-related code that was licensed to Apple for Drive Setup and the disc burning features in iTunes.
When founding The Data Rescue Center in 2009, Prosoft's goal was to provide affordable data recovery services from both hard drives with logical problems and drives that had suffered physical damage. Although there are many highly reputable data recovery firms out there, they'd heard stories of other companies charging hundreds or even thousands of dollars for recovery jobs that required only running their $99 Data Rescue software.
When I talked with Gordon Bell, president of The Data Rescue Center, he told me that they first encourage people whose drives aren't making unusual noises (or evincing some other sign of physical damage) to try the demo version of Data Rescue, which can show files available for recovery and can recover a single file. If it works, it's easy to register it online and use it. (Keep in mind that Data Rescue recovers files to another disk; it does not attempt to repair disk structures, so you'd want to recover, reformat, and restore the data. And keep better backups!)
If you're at all unsure, you can talk with a technician and get advice about the best plan of action for free. If you end up sending in a drive with logical problems for diagnosis and recovery with Data Rescue via their Red Box program (they send you a prepaid shipping box designed to hold a hard drive securely) it will probably cost about $150, and they include a copy of Data Rescue when they return your data or give you a $100 discount if you already own the software.
For drives with physical problems, the costs are of course higher and variable, so within a day or two of receipt, a technician sends you a full diagnosis in email along with calling to answer any questions. The minimum price for a physical recovery is $300, and Gordon Bell said most recoveries end up costing between $600 and $1,000 due to the extra labor, the need for a clean room environment, and any necessary donor parts. All that said, they won't charge anything for a physically damaged drive if they can't recover any data, with the exception of recoveries involving damaged drive heads, since it's not uncommon for replacement heads to be damaged as well in the process of attempting to recover data.
Although The Data Rescue Center's drive recovery services sound great, it's always worth remembering that they won't be necessary at all if you keep good backups. However, The Data Rescue Center offers other services that fall under the data recovery rubric. For instance, they do a lot of photo archiving - scanning of physical photos to digital formats so you aren't vulnerable to losing the originals (and so you can use them like your modern digital photographs). For that, they use fancy Kodak scanners, and whether or not you could do the scanning yourself on your own scanner, many of us haven't. When I asked about the pricing ($0.29 per photo for 300 dpi images, $0.39 for 600 dpi, and $0.49 for 1200 dpi), Gordon Bell said that for all but significant enlargements, only 300 dpi is necessary and that the scanning is done at their offices in Silicon Valley, so photos aren't shipped to India for the actual work, as some services do.
Similarly, if you have data that's essentially stranded on an old hard drive, tape drive, Zip or Jaz cartridge, or floppy disk, The Data Rescue Center will "rescue" it by migrating it to a hard drive or DVDs for you. They'll even digitize audio from old cassette tapes or video from old videotapes, in a wide variety of formats. Data migration costs vary, of course, and don't include the cost of a destination drive or DVDs, which they can provide.
Honestly, I've never needed to use a data recovery service, since I keep good backups. But I do have a bunch of old photos that I'd love to have in digital form, along with some videotapes that I've planned to digitize for years without actually accomplishing anything. So I'll be testing out some of The Data Rescue Center's services as soon as I can find the time to sort through all the archives and figure out what I want to protect from the ravages of being analog.
Thanks to The Data Rescue Center for their support of TidBITS and the Mac community!
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Carbon Copy Cloner 3.3.4 -- Bombich Software has updated its backup software Carbon Copy Cloner to version 3.3.4, resolving a host of bugs and making a variety of other small improvements. Among the issues fixed are an error with files with more than 126 Access Control Entries, errors where extended attributes were not re-applied to files in certain situations, a Leopard-specific issue with saving passwords for encrypted backups, and an issue where the software's log file could be unwritable for the current user. Numerous other bugs, including hangs while authenticating and missing permission checks, are also corrected. Bombich provides full release notes. (Donationware, 3.7 MB)
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Firefox 3.6.9 -- Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6.9, updating the popular Web browser with support for the X-FRAME-OPTIONS HTTP response header that enables Web site owners to prevent their content from being embedded in other sites, which can lead to clickjacking attacks. The update also addresses a number of security vulnerabilities and bugs, some of which could result in crashes. (Free, 19 MB)
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PDFpen/PDFpenPro 5.0.1 -- Users and abusers of PDF rejoice, since Smile (née SmileOnMyMac) has released PDFpen and PDFpenPro 5, significantly beefing up the PDF editing and manipulation tools. Most notably, both versions of PDFpen are 64-bit, and include performance enhancements that speed the editing of large documents. Plus, when performing OCR on a scanned document, PDFpen can now take advantage of multiple CPU cores for added performance. If you need to redact (black out) information in PDFs, PDFpen can now do that easily, and there's even a Search & Redact command to do so across an entire PDF in a single step (Search & Replace provides normal text replacements). Image editing capabilities have also been improved, with the added capability to deskew scanned documents and adjust image settings such as contrast and saturation. Plus, PDFpen can now resample images to a lower resolution or color depth to reduce PDF file size. PDFpenPro 5 gains the capability to convert a Web site into a multi-page PDF document, can create list widgets and pop-ups in PDF forms, and can create a Submit button to submit PDF form data via the Web or email. Version 5.0.1 is current and requires Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard; full release notes are available. ($59.95/$99.95 new, $25 upgrade, free update for purchases after 14 February 2010, 42.8/43.1 MB)
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Safari 5.0.2/4.1.2 -- Apple has released Safari 5.0.2 and Safari 4.1.2 (the former for users running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later, the latter for users still running 10.4 Tiger). The updates patch a pair of vulnerabilities that could allow maliciously crafted Web sites to execute their own code or crash Safari. Beyond the security fixes, both updates correct issues with submitting forms. Safari 5.0.2 also addresses bugs with viewing Google Image results with Flash 10.1 installed, and uses an encrypted connection when surfing the Safari Extensions Gallery. The updates are available via Software Update or direct download from Apple, and are recommended for all Safari users. (Free update, 37.56 MB for Snow Leopard, 46.71 MB for Leopard, 29.46 MB for Tiger)
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iWeb 3.0.2 -- Apple has bumped iWeb to version 3.0.2. According to Apple's sparse release notes, the minor update improves comments and search support for blogs and podcasts published to Apple's MobileMe service. Assorted MobileMe publishing issues are also fixed. ($79 as part of iLife, free update, 177.14 MB)
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Cyberduck 3.6.1 -- The open-source file transfer utility Cyberduck has been updated to version 3.6.1. Cyberduck 3.6 unleashed a torrent of new features, including the capability to connect to Google Storage. (That's in addition to the software's existing capability to connect to FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Rackspace Cloud Files, Google Docs, and Amazon S3.) It also lets you edit Access Control Lists (ACLs) for S3, Google Storage, and Google Docs; adds a slew of S3-specific file control features; introduces the capability to import bookmarks from other file transfer utilities; shows the number of active file transfers on the Dock icon; and more. Cyberduck 3.6 also corrected bugs with Eucalyptus Walrus, Dunkel Cloud Storage, and Akamai NetStorage interoperability, and the quick 3.6.1 release corrects two minor FTP and SFTP bugs introduced with 3.6. You'll find plenty more fixes and additions in the full release notes. (Free, 19.2 MB)
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With Apple's release of the iBooks app and the iBookstore, EPUB-formatted ebooks have become increasingly prevalent. Surprisingly, though, there aren't many good ways to read an EPUB other than iBooks, especially if all you want is a quick look on your Mac.
O'Reilly Labs hosts Threepress's online Bookworm service, but it requires uploading a book and storing it online, which may be more effort than you want to expend, and the same is true of Ibis Reader, written by some of the same people. There's also a cross-platform, open-source application called Calibre that can convert and display EPUBs, but it's clunky and awkward to use. And there's a version of Stanza for the Mac, but unlike the Stanza iOS app, the Mac version strips all formatting and graphics from an EPUB, rendering some titles unreadable. Lastly, there's Adobe Digital Editions, an Adobe AIR-based application that's designed in part to help deal with DRM-protected ebook files across multiple machines; it's not terrible, but I'm not a big fan.
So I was happy to run across EPUBReader, a free add-on for the Firefox Web browser (whether running on the Mac, Windows, or Linux). Although most Firefox add-ons modify the Web experience in some way, EPUBReader simply takes advantage of Firefox's rendering engine to provide a custom display of an EPUB's contents within a Firefox window or tab. (Remember, EPUB files are XHTML and CSS inside a Zip archive.)
To install EPUBReader in Firefox, click the Add to Firefox button on the EPUBReader home page; you'll have to restart Firefox to complete the installation.
EPUBReader tweaks Firefox's settings so clicking a .epub file on a Web page downloads it, processes it, and displays it. You can also drop a local EPUB file on Firefox's window, or double-click one, if you change the Open With application for .epub to Firefox in an EPUB's Get Info window in the Finder.
Unlike downloaded PDF files that you view in a Web browser and then "lose" once you close the tab containing the file, EPUBs downloaded or displayed by EPUBReader are kept in local storage called ePub-Catalog, which you can access from Firefox's Tools menu, the Bookmarks menu (at the bottom of the list), or via a button at the bottom of any EPUB you're reading. Even better, the ePub-Catalog window has a pop-up menu listing a few sites from which you can download additional EPUB-formatted titles.
Once you have an EPUB open within EPUBReader, the mechanics of reading it are nicely obvious. The table of contents appears in a resizable pane on the left side of the window and the actual book appears in the right side. Clicking an item in the table of contents displays the associated content on the right, and if there are navigation links within the content, clicking them moves you around in the text as well.
Most EPUBs will have their own formatting, specified by internal CSS files, but if you prefer, you can modify a number of display options in EPUBReader's preferences. In the table of contents, you can set the background and link colors, along with font and font size. The same background color and font options are available for the content, along with margin width and minimum column width. And if you just want to change the font size, a pair of buttons are available for increasing and decreasing size. (Oddly, Firefox's Zoom In command also works for increasing the size of all the text - table of contents and the actual book text. But the Zoom Out command works only on the book content pane unless you first click in the table of contents pane.)
Other buttons let you access the ePub-Catalog window, save the file to a separate location on your hard disk, and set a bookmark (although I couldn't figure out how the bookmark feature worked). Finally, a pair of big green buttons lets you jump to the previous and next chapters. All of these commands are also available as keyboard shortcuts (Control-click the toolbar to access a menu that lets you display the keyboard shortcuts; you can also hide the toolbar entirely this way).
There's no question that EPUBReader's interface elements are ugly - no Macintosh developer would be caught dead using such awful buttons - but for normal usage, EPUBReader gets out of the way and just displays an EPUB with a clickable table of contents. And whether I'm checking the EPUB version of one of our Take Control ebooks or taking a quick look at something I've found online or been sent, a quick click or drag to Firefox is all that's necessary to load the EPUB in EPUBReader.
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In an unusual move, Apple last week released a statement announcing changes to the iOS Developer Program License Agreement that relax previous restrictions, possibly with the goal of reducing exposure to antitrust scrutiny.
Simultaneously, Apple announced that it would be releasing the App Store Review Guidelines to developers and creating an App Review Board to which complaints about rejections could be addressed. It's none too soon - I'm sure that 99.99 percent of rejections have been for good technical reasons, but the remaining controversial rejections have been embarrassing for Apple and the entire Apple community. Let's look at the App Store issues first.
App Store Review Guidelines -- Honestly, the App Store Review Guidelines sound pretty reasonable on the whole, while still being sufficiently vague as to allow Apple to do anything it wants. However, they are written in plain English, and Apple clearly differentiates between apps and books or songs, neither of which the company curates in the iTunes Store. If nothing else, it's nice to have that fact stated officially as well.
Apart from the many specific guidelines that will primarily interest developers, Apple lays out some broad themes that boil down to:
Since lots of kids are downloading apps and many parents don't set parental controls, Apple will pay closer attention to apps that might be inappropriate for kids.
Apple is looking for apps that do something useful or provide lasting entertainment. The money quote: "We don't need any more fart apps." Thank goodness!
Put some effort into it. Apple - and serious developers - don't want the App Store to be overrun with amateurish apps.
Apple will reject apps for any content they believe is "over the line," where "the line" is defined with a quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, referring to a no-longer-used definition of obscenity: "I know it when I see it."
The guidelines are constantly evolving to address new situations.
Finally, you can appeal to the App Review Board if your app is rejected, but Apple goes on to say, "If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps."
I hope that last bit proves true in the future, because in the past, it repeatedly appeared that the only reason that bans were lifted from certain apps was because of public outcry, and media coverage that made that public outcry possible. (See the Wikipedia entry on censorship in the App Store for links to coverage). Would Apple have reversed those decisions on its own? Doesn't seem likely.
Shining a light on situations like this is exactly what the press should be doing - the public does not have a right to know everything about Steve Jobs's private life, but knowing that Apple is rejecting political satire from the App Store is absolutely in the public interest.
App Development Language Restrictions Lifted -- Let's look next at the changes to the iOS Developer License Agreement. First, a clause stating:
Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
has been removed entirely. This clause was added a few months ago to prevent the use of cross-compilers such as Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone compiler (see "iPhone Developer Agreement Change Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler," 9 April 2010). The ostensible reason for this was to reduce the likelihood of security vulnerabilities and to avoid the poor interface quality of cross-platform apps.
Keep in mind that this all happened during Apple's dustup with Adobe over Flash, and while Steve Jobs claimed Adobe started it (see "Steve Jobs Answers (Nearly) All at D8," 11 June 2010), there's no question that emotions were running high and could have resulted in this blanket ban that still managed to target Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone compiler.
But why the change, and why now? According to a brief New York Post article, Apple's ban of cross-compilers generated antitrust scrutiny from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and from European regulators. While all parties have refused to comment, if there is truth to the Post's report, Apple's backpedaling would make sense in an antitrust context.
Interpreted Code Allowed in Apps -- Next, a clause that previously restricted apps from installing or launching other executable code by any means has been recast. Previously, it banned plug-in architectures, calling other frameworks, using other APIs, and downloading or using interpreted code other than code that was provided or approved by Apple.
That clause continues to ban the downloading and installation of executable code, but explicitly allows interpreted code as long as all scripts, code, and interpreters are packaged within the app and not downloaded. An exception is carved out for code downloaded and run by Apple's built-in WebKit framework.
Again, this change would seem to be designed to allow developers to create and use their own interpreted languages within apps, as long as they aren't downloaded, which would open up a gaping security hole. And again, along with the technical aspects of the decision, it may also make sense in the context of an antitrust investigation.
User Data Collection Restrictions Simplified -- Finally, a clause that was previously quite specific about the situations in which user or device data could be collected has been greatly simplified. Previously, this clause carefully laid out when and how data could be collected (basically, to provide a service or function that was directly relevant to using the app, or for advertising, but then only a subset of data designated by Apple as available for advertising purposes). Now, it simply says that apps cannot collect user or device data without user consent, it must be for enhancing the app or serving ads, and that apps cannot use analytics software to collect and send device data to a third party.
According to an earlier New York Post article, there could also be antitrust scrutiny associated with Apple's iAd service, and this change to the iOS Developer License Agreement can easily be construed as loosening restrictions on third-party advertising services. In fact, Google has already said as much.
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As Apple announced last week, iOS 4.1 is now available for download and installation via iTunes. I recommend that you install it, assuming you have an iPhone or iPod touch that can run it, meaning any iPhone or iPod touch other than the first generation of either model. iPad users must wait for iOS 4.2, scheduled for release in November 2010, before they get iOS 4 features.
Lots of people have already updated to iOS 4.1 without a hitch, and the new features and fixes make it a worthwhile update. Some changes, such as better performance for the iPhone 3G, more complete Bluetooth support, and HDR photos on the iPhone 4, make these devices more useful; other changes, such as iTunes Store TV rentals and the new Game Center, will make them more entertaining to many users.
If you have an iPhone 4, you'll find a few iOS 4.1 changes that aren't available on the other devices:
In the Camera app, HDR (high dynamic range) photo support should help you take a better photo with no extra effort, but at the expense of a few more seconds of post-shutter-click processing. Look for an HDR On/Off button on the screen as you take a photo.
If you record HD video, you can now upload it via Wi-Fi to YouTube and MobileMe.
While you hold your phone up to your ear during a call, the proximity sensor should be smarter about realizing that any button taps are being accidentally made by your head, not by your finger. This should prevent some calls from dropping.
I've read a few reports that suggest that this fix isn't working for everyone. If it's not working for you, try holding the iPhone normally against your ear and cheek during a call - you may have trained yourself to hold it away from your face because of previous dropped calls. I've also read the suggestion that you may solve residual proximity sensor problems by resetting the iPhone's settings in Settings > General > Reset. Tap Reset All Settings. Of course, you'll now have to recreate various user-generated settings, so don't do this unless your desire for a possible fix outweighs the trouble of losing your settings. You may also want to wait a few days and see if more information becomes available.
If you have any iOS 4-capable device besides the iPhone 3G, the new Game Center app will appear on your home screen, giving you access to multi-player games.
And, iOS 4 makes these changes, no matter which iOS 4-capable device you install it on:
In the iTunes app, you can now rent TV shows.
Playback controls on AVRCP Bluetooth accessories should all now function properly. For example, buttons on a Bluetooth headset for advancing music to the next or previous track should now work. AVRCP, in case you're wondering, stands for Audio/Visual Remote Control Profile.
If you have the Nike+iPod device, look for changes in the Nike+ app. According to the impressively detailed article at iLounge about iOS 4.1, the Nike+ app now can sync with its Web site and has fancier options for interacting with the site.
Parental controls in the Settings app now let you disable FaceTime "phone" calls, as well as the multi-player option in Game Center.
You can read more about the new features and fixes in "Apple Previews iOS 4.1 and 4.2" (1 September 2010).
An important additional fix listed in Apple's release notes is better performance for the iPhone 3G. Following up on my article "Speed Up Your iOS 4-Based iPhone 3G " (27 August 2010), I installed the update on my iPhone 3G. I can't tell if the iPhone 3G is exactly as fast with iOS 4.1 as it was with iOS 3.1.3, but it seems about the same. Many reports on the Web confirm my impression. If you'd like to see for yourself, watch the iPhone 3G Speed Test: iOS 4.0 version iOS 4.1 video at Lifehacker. Thumbs up to Apple for not leaving the iPhone 3G abandoned on the highway of progress, though it would have been better if iPhone 3G owners hadn't had to suffer months of poor performance and poor communication about the problem.
Although several people have reported that iOS 4.1 has solved performance problems on the second-generation iPod touch, Apple said nothing about it in the release notes for iOS 4.1.
Further, a new feature of iOS 4 overall is that notes from the Notes app can sync with MobileMe. In iOS 4.1 Apple inexplicably removed this feature from the iPhone 3G and the second-generation iPod touch. Apple mentions this removal briefly in a support article that was modified last week. Better release notes would have saved time and trouble for those who unexpectedly lost the capability to sync their notes wirelessly.
(By the way, several readers have commented that one tip or another in the article about speeding up an iPhone 3G improved the speed of an iPhone 3G running iOS 3.1.3. The article is likely worth a read if your iPhone - whatever model - is running slowly.)
Installing iOS 4.1 will take some time, so don't start the update right before you want to leave the house. It took about 30 minutes to download and install iOS 4.1 on my iPhone 3G and about 20 minutes on my iPhone 3GS. In both cases, I was already running iOS 4.0.2. If you're still running iOS 3.1.3, expect the update to take as long as a few hours, especially if you have a lot of content on your device.
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I recently bought an iPad to use as my photo portfolio. Frankly, I believe the handwriting is on the wall, and after a week with my new iPad, I can't imagine going back to a printed portfolio. However, getting your images to look their very best on the iPad is not as simple as it first seems.
Like many photographers, I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 to manage my raw files and prepare them to be output as JPEGs. Over the past few years I've developed several different Export Presets that I use, depending upon how the final image will be used, whether in print or on the Web. After exporting several images using my presets and importing them into the iPad using iTunes, I found that not all my images looked as crisp on the iPad as they had in Lightroom on my MacBook.
Part of the problem is physical. The iPad is not a MacBook and the iPad's 9.7-inch screen is considerably smaller than even the smallest MacBook Pro's 13.3-inch screen. The resolution of the iPad is a fixed 1024 by 768 at 132 pixels per inch, which is considerably less than the MacBook Pro's 1280-by-800 resolution at 101 pixels per inch. These differences ensure that your images will always look better on your MacBook than your iPad. However, there are a few things that you can do in Lightroom to even the playing field a bit.
Collection Sets & Virtual Copies -- The first thing is to create a separate Lightroom Collection Set to hold your iPad images. I generally create a Virtual Copy of each image to go into my iPad portfolio and move these into a Landscape or Portrait (horizontal or vertical orientation) collection.
I separate my images this way so clients looking at my portfolios are not constantly rotating the iPad from horizontal to vertical and back when swiping though the images. Using virtual copies is also important since you'll need to process these images a bit differently than you would a print or Web image.
Crop for the iPad -- The next thing you'll want to do is crop each image using the iPad's native 4:3 (1024 by 768 pixel) aspect ratio. If you've ever created images to be used in a projected PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, you'll understand why this is so important. For presentations, you generally want your images displayed as large as possible on the projected screen. The iPad is no different, except you carry the screen with you.
Once your image is cropped correctly, there are two Lightroom settings that I've found to make a huge difference in how sharp and vivid your image looks when displayed on the iPad.
Noise Reduction and Sharpness: To obtain the sharpest image possible I use Lightroom 3's "Sharpening - Narrow Edges (Scenic)" preset and set the Luminance slider in the Noise Reduction panel to zero. Since I'll never display this image larger than 1024 by 768, I don't care if there is a little noise in the shadows. At this resolution it's almost impossible to see the noise onscreen.
Saturation: I rarely touch the Saturation slider in Lightroom's Basic panel and much prefer the effect that the Vibrance slider provides. For images meant to be displayed on the iPad, however, I've found that setting the Saturation slider to 10 percent seems to work best. I have no quantitative data to back this up, but adding 10 percent saturation seems to make the images on my iPad match those on my MacBook more closely.
Exporting for the iPad -- The final key I've found after hours of experimentation is to export your images sized to fit the iPad's native resolution exactly, as shown below. This prevents the iPad's Photos app from resizing (and resampling) the images on the fly, which can hurt the quality.
The difference in image sharpness as displayed on the iPad is significant, and to confirm this I exported several full-size JPEGs taken with my 21-megapixel Canon 5D Mark II. Those 15 MB files looked softer and less vibrant than the 780 KB files exported using the settings in the screenshot above.
Conclusions -- The iPad is an incredible device and may change the way we think about personal computing. For a photographer who still meets with clients face-to-face (and if you think face-to-face is passé, you couldn't be more wrong), it's a cost-effective tool for presenting your ever-changing portfolio - whether you're showing off stills or video. It's also a whole lot of fun to play with (but don't tell the kids).
[Jeff Lynch is a commercial, landscape, and nature photographer, blogger, and author based in Sugar Land, Texas.]
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Radioshift 1.6 -- Rogue Amoeba has updated their Internet radio recording tool Radioshift to version 1.6, adding support for playing AAC and AAC+ streams, which makes hundreds more audio streams available to the software. Additionally, the new release fixes bugs affecting Flash-based streams, involving audio output when you connect headphones, involving power failures breaking subscriptions, and syncing track titles and audio during MP3 stream playback. ($32 new, free update, 11.2 MB)
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Audio Hijack Pro 2.9.7 -- Rogue Amoeba has updated Audio Hijack Pro, its tool to capture audio from any audio source on your Mac, to version 2.9.7. The minor update includes a slew of fixes: the Instant Hijack and LAME MP3 components - both of which provide behind-the-scenes core functionality for the software - have been updated to their latest versions, correcting several small bugs in the process. A crashing bug related to deleting a session which was recording has been corrected, and issues with the Minimize to Menubar Record option and hotkeys that included the "A" key were fixed, too. ($32 new, free update, 6.9 MB)
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Fission 1.6.9 -- Rogue Amoeba has updated its audio editing software Fission to version 1.6.9. The minor update reduces CPU usage during playback, adds proper support for 24-bit mono files, and updates the LAME MP3 engine (which is used when pasting files into an MP3 file) to version 3.98.4. Other fixes in the new version include correcting a long hang which could sometimes occur when closing large documents, a crash related to a QuickTime file extensions bug, a glitch when fading to the end of a file, and a bug with waveform appearance at certain zoom levels. ($32 new, free update, 3.7 MB)
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Things 1.4.1 -- Cultured Code has upgraded its task management software Things to version 1.4.1, hot on the heels of the 1.4 release. Things 1.4 dramatically improved synchronization speed (between the desktop software and the iOS apps), and also let users select different font sizes, reorder projects, and adjust more settings when creating new to-dos via the Quick Entry dialog. Issues with printing layouts and bulk-removing delegates have also been addressed. The 1.4.1 release corrects an issue with the initial 10.4 update that prevented Quick Entry from working on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. ($49.95 new, free update, 8.3 MB)
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BLT 1.0.4 -- The link testing utility BLT has been acquired by Before Dawn Software and given a small update (for more about BLT, see "Verifying Web Links in PDF Files," 14 March 2008). The just-released BLT 1.0.4 fixes a bug dealing with sites that have too many redirects on a given page, implements an automatic update mechanism, sends error reports to the developer, and builds in a new licensing engine. Existing owners will have to create a new account to generate a new license. ($24.95 new, free update, 1.7 MB)
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Lightroom 3.2 -- Adobe has updated its photo processing tool Lightroom to version 3.2. You can now publish photos to Facebook and SmugMug directly from Lightroom. Also included in the update are numerous bug fixes, tethered capture support for the Leica S2, support for new cameras like the Panasonic DMC-LX5, and more than 120 new lens profiles. ($299 new, free update, 79.6 MB)
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SpamSieve 2.8.3 -- C-Command Software's powerful Bayesian email filtering tool SpamSieve has been bumped to version 2.8.3. The update adjusts SpamSieve's tokenizer to make the spam filter even more accurate. In addition, SpamSieve now supports pre-release versions of Apple Mail, MailForge, and the upcoming Microsoft Outlook 2011. A few issues with installing the SpamSieve Apple Mail plug-in have been corrected, too. Full release notes are available. ($30 new, free update, 7.1 MB)
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Dreamweaver CS5 11.0.3 -- Adobe has updated its Web site-building software Dreamweaver CS5 to version 11.0.3. According to Adobe, the update addresses issues with workflows established in the Dreamweaver CS5 HTML 5 Pack Update, including Multiscreen Preview, Media Queries, Code Hinting, and Live View rendering. The company recommends that you restart your Mac after installing the update. ($399 new, free update, 14.1 MB)
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Apart from the iOS, it has been a long time since anyone tried to rethink the traditional desktop metaphor. But if you're interested in alternative ways of accessing your documents on the Mac, it's worth checking out Raskin. Inspired by the late Jef Raskin's pioneering user interface work, Raskin provides a zoomable interface that shows you all of your documents on a single surface that eliminates the disorienting tunneling necessary in the Finder.
To enter Raskin, which takes over your entire monitor, you can of course switch to it like any other application, but you can also press Command-Option-R or just hold down Command-Option and scroll down. These shortcuts have the added benefit of zooming to the frontmost document or Finder-selected item in Raskin.
Your top folders become "places" and you can choose which places appear by default and where on the surface they appear. Within a place, documents appear as tiles showing the file's icon, name, file type, and created and modified dates. If possible, Raskin shows the contents of the file in the tile, so text files, graphic files, and so on are more easily identifiable. You can sort tiles in all the standard ways using a pop-up menu in the upper right of each place. And just like the Finder, you can select a document and press the Spacebar to see the full Quick Look preview, double-click a document to open it, move documents from folder to folder, create new folders, and so on.
Moving around in Raskin will take some getting used to, but it's also the most compelling part of the interface. Since everything appears on a single surface, tiles get quite small when you can see everything at once. So you need to zoom in to see better, and when you're zoomed in, since you can't see everything, you need a way to scroll around.
To scroll around, you can use the scroll ball on an Apple mouse or a two-fingered drag on a multi-touch trackpad. If you have a scroll wheel, turning it scrolls vertically and Shift-turning it scrolls horizontally. You can also hold down the Spacebar and drag the Raskin surface or use the standard scroll bars. To zoom, just use the familiar pinch gestures on a multi-touch trackpad, Option-scroll if you have a scroll wheel or scroll ball, or click the Time Machine-like arrows in the bottom right corner of the screen. Jumping to specific places is most easily done with built-in keyboard shortcuts.
I can't predict whether or not Raskin will make you more productive, but it's certainly worth downloading the 30-day demo version and giving it a try. And of course, if you want to win one of four copies of Raskin 1.1, worth $49, enter at the DealBITS page. All information gathered is covered by our comprehensive privacy policy. Remember too, that if someone you refer to this drawing wins, you'll receive the same prize as a reward for spreading the word.
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I feel snappish today, as you can see:
I'm feeling snappish because my wife Daphne's point-and-shoot camera died after only three years of infrequent use, and because I cannot find a sensible replacement. Each "simple" point-and-shoot that I have looked at is more complicated than the next.
A century ago George Eastman made his fortune with the slogan, "You push the button, we do the rest." Today his successors say, "You read the hundred-page manual, decipher its ambiguities, remember it, and apply its lessons to every picture; and then you push the button and we do the rest."
A "Simple" Point-and-Shoot -- Daphne and I decided to buy a Samsung EX1 (in the United States, it's the Samsung TL500 and costs $400). We chose this model by following my advice in "How Not to Buy a Digital Camera" (17 June 2010) for buying a point-and-shoot: we looked for a model with the fewest megapixels that has image stabilization, a zoom lens, and a display that is easy to see. This model has image stabilization, a lens that zooms threefold, and an exceptionally good display. Not only does the display use a kind of LED instead of an LCD, it also tilts and swivels, so that you can adjust the angle to avoid reflections from the sun.
This display is the main reason we chose the camera. I can see the screen flat against the camera even in bright sunlight, unless the sun is reflecting directly off it straight into my eyes, and then I can change the angle of the display and still see it fine.
A lesser reason we chose the camera is that its sensor has fewer pixels than most other point-and-shoots (10 megapixels) on a somewhat larger sensor. This results in one-half the usual number of pixels per square centimeter, a difference that ought to mean a little less noise and a little more detail in shadows before they go dead black. (But just a little less. To have the clean and broad range of tones of a DSLR requires not one-half the usual density of pixels but 1/20th.)
Moreover, the EX1 will save unprocessed images as raw files, as well as converting them to JPEGs. When a camera creates a JPEG image, it throws away information. Daphne is usually satisfied with whatever her camera spews forth, but occasionally I want to take a "real" picture when her camera is the only one around. When I edit the picture, I want to have available all of the information in the original photo - a raw file, not a JPEG. Few point-and-shoots will save raw files.
Like every other point-and-shoot, the EX1 is purportedly simple to use. Indeed, it actually seems to be one of the simpler on the market, which was another attraction. However, this level of simplicity takes a 128-page manual to describe, and, even after studying the manual, I'll be damned if I can figure out what all of the settings do and when to use them.
Simply Ambiguous -- For example, look at the picture of the marketing managers below. The manual implies that for the best results I ought to tell the camera which of eight categories a scene falls into, but which category does this picture fall into, "landscape" or "beach & snow"? (It may be hard to tell in this reduced image, but the crocodiles are on a sandy beach and all of the vegetation is growing on sand.)
The manual does not explain how to clarify ambiguities like this, nor does it explain how the various categories are treated differently, so I have no way to determine which to use.
Alternatively, I could let the camera choose the category by setting it to "smart auto." "Smart auto" chooses among 17 categories, so it appears to be more discriminating (although it does not offer "beach & snow"). But if "smart auto" works and is more discriminating, why would I not use it all the time? The manual gives no clue.
Or take this next photo. I shot it from a bobbing canoe, so I was worried that the movement of my camera would blur it. The EX1 uses optical image stabilization by default, but since I was unusually worried about camera movement, had I been using the EX1 I would surely have been tempted by another of the camera's features, "dual image stabilization."
Samsung claims that this feature adds some kind of digital stabilization atop the optical stabilization, and they tout the feature heavily. The setting to choose it is on a dial on the top of the camera, the same dial that lets me choose "smart auto" - which means that I cannot choose both it and "smart auto." But if this feature works well, why wouldn't it be used automatically in every mode? If it works only some of the time, or has some disadvantages, when would I not want to use it? When would it be better to have "smart auto" selection of scene modes and when would it be better to have digital stabilization? The manual explains none of this.
Simply Absurd -- If I assume that all of these settings actually do something useful, that they are real features, then I cannot figure out who would use them. I think my wife and I fairly represent the two poles of the photographic market. Daphne knows nothing about photography, and I know rather more than nothing. If Daphne had wanted to take the pictures above, she could not possibly have decided which special setting to use, she could only have chosen "smart auto" and hoped for the best. On the other hand, with her camera I also could not have decided sensibly which special setting to use, so I would have done the same.
Those features are supposed to help people who want better pictures than they can get from a basic point-and-shoot but who do not know how to use a camera. The industry calls them "transitional features," but the transition is for the industry, not the consumer. Their purpose is to entice people to make a transition from a cheaper to a more expensive camera. They cannot be transitional for learning photography because they are nothing like conventional controls. There is not the ghost of a hint of resemblance. If those features could help anybody learn how to use a conventional camera, then a shortcut to teaching a child to read English would be first to teach him Greek.
The EX1 is also marketed to serious photographers who want a pocketable camera that they can control, because it can be used in the manual, aperture-priority and shutter-priority modes of a DSLR. Indeed it can be, but to do something routine like adjust the exposure compensation you need to push "menu," right arrow, down arrow, down arrow, down arrow, and "ok" - and that only takes you to the screen that lets you change the setting. Moreover, to bring up exposure information on the display and then hide it so that you can frame the picture, you need to press a button that toggles through four modes. I am not sufficiently serious a photographer to want to put up with this. When I use the camera, I would prefer to use it in its "smart auto" mode. Unfortunately, "smart auto" is too dumb to save raw files.
"Smart auto" is also arrogant. It will not permit you to modify the exposure if it gets the exposure wrong. This arrogance is almost deserved. I walked around taking pictures in difficult circumstances - bizarre lighting, back-lighting, sun in the picture, nighttime - and every photo came out looking acceptable. However, many of them could have benefited by slightly less exposure, and I'm sure that they all could have been improved by later efforts with the raw files.
Digicam Cars -- The Samsung EX1 differs in detail from other digital cameras but as far as I can see, every camera on the market is littered with useless complexities. Canon, Kodak, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Ricoh, Samsung, Sony - the user interfaces of every company's cameras range from bad to abominable. For taking pictures, all that a point-and-shoot needs is a button for the shutter plus a three-position switch (off/on/auto-flash), a switch for the auto-timer, and a dial to let you increase or decrease the exposure by halves of an f-stop, in case a picture turns out too dark or too light and you want to try again.
I can't help imagining what a car would be like if a camera manufacturer built it. The Pentacanakon Zoom 8 does not need a transmission lever or light switches or heater controls because a computer replaces all of these and more. Moreover, the Zoom 8's computer offers numerous useful features not found in a conventional car. For example, it can disable cylinders. The Zoom 8 drives smoothly with eight cylinders, but the computer will also permit driving roughly with seven, or bucking on six, or inching forward on five. Imagine how much gasoline this saves!
The Pentacanakon Zoom 8's computer does so many things that it needs a complicated set of menus. Since menus are awkward to read while driving, the more useful settings are programmed into a rank of pushbuttons. Thus, pressing only two buttons in the correct sequence will disable cylinders. In consequence, if you are trying to switch on the radio but push the wrong button, you may find yourself lurching to a crawl during rush hour on the freeway. Fortunately, a single button will floor the gas pedal and keep it floored until you manage to find it and press it again.
If the cylinder-disabler sounds far-fetched, consider that every camera made today has a set of tiny buttons and associated menus that enable you to take a perfectly good picture then throw parts of it away - controls that make the camera compress the file to various levels as lossy JPEGs, controls that reduce the resolution of the image, and controls that cut off parts of the image wholesale. Cutting off parts of the image is marketed as "Digital zoom! Four aspect ratios! Seven artistic effects!"
I often compress or shrink or crop an image, and occasionally I delete the full-sized original after doing so - when using my camera as a photocopier, for instance - but I do this on the computer's large screen, not the camera's minuscule screen, and I cannot conceive of throwing away the original without looking at the lesser version first, to make sure that it's okay. I don't know anybody who would throw away originals automatically and only then look at the lesser version, yet those wonderful "features" do exactly this.
As for a button to floor the gas pedal, the EX1 has this too: a button to shoot video without the need for deliberately changing modes. If you press this button accidentally, it will helpfully fill your memory card and drain your battery.
In principle it is possible to ignore many of these "features," but in practice menus often get changed accidentally, either when you try to change some other setting or when you hold the camera in your lap and touch some buttons accidentally, buttons like the "Fn" button on the EX1, which has no evident function save to facilitate destroying images by throwing away resolution. Indeed, it was just such an accident (on one of my DSLRs) that piqued me into writing this article.
I know that professionals shooting events often want numerous JPEGs instantly, so that they can offer pictures for sale as quickly as possible. Also, snap-shooters will want JPEGs most of the time but might occasionally want the option of going back to the raw file. For these reasons I can understand a setting that would allow saving pictures as JPEGs as well as in a raw format. However, with that exception I cannot see any reason for a camera's being able to save files in any format other than the best it can.
Better Cameras Aren't Always Better -- Let me make clear again that I am using the EX1 as an example. As I said, the EX1 is actually one of the simpler models on the market. I am not criticizing Samsung alone, I am criticizing the entire industry. As far as I can tell, every digital camera suffers from needless complexity.
Or rather, every photographer suffers from his digital camera's needless complexity. I have lost some spectacular pictures because I changed ISO speeds and file formats accidentally while carrying the camera or holding it in my lap. I have finally learned that every time I wake up the camera, I need to push the button that displays those settings, to make sure that they are still correct, and then push the button again so that I do not push another button that changes them.
Digital images are incomparably more practical than film, and the automation of point-and-shoot cameras is invaluable, but the automation of DSLRs is of virtually no utility. Consider auto-focus, for example. To focus a manual camera I turn the lens until the part of the image that I want to focus on is sharp. This is straightforward and quick. On my DSLRs, I move a switch from "manual focus" to "autofocus," point the camera at the part of the image I want to focus on, depress the shutter halfway until the camera focuses, then move the switch from "autofocus" back to "manual focus," so that I can maintain the focus while framing the photo. This is far from straightforward and is little if any faster than focussing manually, especially if I accidentally press the shutter more than halfway and take the picture before I'm ready. (Mind you, I do realize that some people have difficulty focussing a camera manually. For these folks - my wife is one - fully automatic focus is invaluable.)
Neither is automatic exposure significantly easier or faster. Before I take a picture with a camera - with any camera - I need to think. I need to consider the largest aperture I can use that will provide adequate depth of field for the picture I am envisioning, and I need to consider if the subject is sufficiently different from the average subject that I shall need to adjust the exposure meter's reading. After thinking about these things, I adjust the camera. With either a manual or an automatic camera, first I set the aperture, which usually requires turning a knob. With a manual camera I then turn the shutter-speed dial until the exposure meter's needle points to a mark, either the normal mark or a mark indicating less or more exposure, a straightforward operation that takes hardly any time at all. With my DSLRs, if I am willing to accept the normal exposure, then I don't need to do anything else, but if I want to modify the exposure, then I need to push a button and turn a knob while the button is depressed, which is more awkward than lining up a needle with a mark.
If this automation is a significant improvement, then I am fluent in French. Indeed, when setting the aperture or exposure compensation involves menus, an automated camera is slower to use than a manual camera.
If you want to control what your camera is doing - if you want to do anything more than just push the button - then for taking pictures there is only one significant advantage to a digital camera over film: you can instantly see how your pictures turn out. This has nothing to do with the camera's automatic operation.
Speed Kills... Pictures -- "But," I hear somebody object, "Even milliseconds matter when reacting to a fast-moving scene." That may be true if you are trying to react to things, but reacting rarely gets good pictures. You may be lucky occasionally, but to be lucky reliably you need to plan ahead and make your own luck: you need to see what is unfolding before you, imagine a photograph that you might be able to take, envision where you and the subject would need to be if you are to get that photograph, go there, arrive there in time to relax your arms (because taut muscles cannot hold a camera steady), and then wait for your picture to develop.
The crocodiles illustrating this article were not stuffed, yet planning my movements gave me sufficient time to think about exposure, and sufficient time to focus manually (which I find to be more reliable than autofocus with the extremely long lens that I was using). If I had been unable to gain this time, then I would have got no pictures, because crocodiles will dive underwater if they see you even 150 meters away.
In movies, you may see a photographer whip out a camera and snap a picture so quickly that his arms are still in motion. You may also see the Lone Ranger whip a pistol from his holster and shoot a pistol out of somebody's hand on the far side of the street, also while his arm is in motion. These images are comparably absurd. Professional photographers do not shoot from the hip, we plan what we are going to do. We may plan quickly and sketchily, sometimes very rapidly and roughly, but still we plan. Photographers need cameras that will let us observe the scene and plan without distraction.
The Cognitive Limit -- Distraction is a serious matter because with a camera as with a computer, the limiting factor is not the hardware or software, it is the cognitive capacity of the person using the thing. To understand the problem, look at this picture:
I am sure that you see the head of a crocodile. But look again: no crocodile is actually to be seen. There is an elongated splotch with a circle in the middle, and a smaller elongated splotch to its right. This bears little resemblance to the head of the crocodile in the first photograph. That head is all tooth and jaw. Here you are not seeing a crocodile, you are inferring a crocodile.
This is how we see most of what we look at. The eye samples a few spots of a scene and the brain infers the rest through probabilistic weightings of previous experience. That is why so many snapshots do not turn out as the photographer expected. That is why you can be surprised that a photograph shows a tree growing out of Aunt Zelda's head. When you looked at Aunt Zelda in the flesh, your eyes focussed on her, not on the tree. You were concerned with her, not with trees, so your brain did not notice the tree behind her. To avoid that tree you would have needed deliberately to look not at her but behind her.
Now take another look at those splotches of crocodile. One aspect of the composition that helps you to infer a croc is that everything in the picture emphasizes horizontality. Crocodiles are long and low - horizontal - and the horizontality of the composition both establishes a strong horizontal reference and serves as an associative clue. To effect this I made sure that the riverbank and the waterline and the two parts of the crocodile are all horizontal, and I put the bank close enough to the crocodile to suggest horizontality yet far enough from it not to distract. To come up with this composition required concentrated attention.
Every feature of his camera that a photographer needs to think about distracts from the concentrated attention required to take good pictures. The controls for taking pictures ought to be so simple and straightforward that no thought is diverted to the manipulation of the camera. Menus, interlocking buttons, scene modes - all of these interfere cognitively with the job at hand, which is visualizing a photograph and figuring out how to get all of the elements where and as they need to be.
A Simpler DSLR -- Minimizing distraction requires simplicity. An automatic camera suitable for serious photography needs to be more complicated than a manual camera or a point-and-shoot, because the automatic functions must have manual overrides, so I would prefer a fully manual camera. However, assuming that a modern camera must be automated, these are the controls that I would want to have for taking pictures with a DSLR or electronic equivalent - all of the controls:
A button to focus, using a central spot in the viewfinder. This button should be on the left side of the lens, so you can hold it in to follow a moving object without lifting your finger from the shutter. When you are not pressing this button, you can focus manually by turning a ring on the lens.
A dial with detents to set the aperture. The aperture takes priority over shutter speed for automatic exposure because depth of field (which is determined by the aperture) usually matters more than shutter speed and at the very least is of comparable importance. This dial should be someplace where a finger can find and turn it without looking.
A dial with detents for exposure compensation with a button in the middle that locks the exposure until it is pressed a second time. The exposure compensation is by halves of an f-stop because the usual thirds of a stop are needlessly fine and fussy. This dial and button should be someplace where a finger or thumb can find and use them without looking.
A dial atop the camera with detents to switch off the power, choose among single and continuous exposure, 2- and 10-second timers, mirror lock-up, and access to a special menu for shooting. This menu appears on the display and is accessible only with this dial, so that you cannot change its settings accidentally.
A four-way controller with a central button to maneuver through menus, including the one menu that is used occasionally for shooting.
An onscreen menu for shooting that is accessed from the top-mounted dial and that lets you (1) set the ISO speed, (2) switch from automatic to manual exposure, and (3) set the shutter speed for manual exposures. (I do not mind burying the latter two settings in this menu because manual exposure would rarely be used except with studio flashes, so the shutter speed would rarely need to be changed on the fly.) The ISO speed steps up and down with the top and bottom buttons of the four-way controller; the central button toggles between manual and automatic exposure; the left and right buttons set the shutter speed. There are no other menus applicable to taking pictures other than basic configurational menus like time and date, and a choice of saving high-res JPEGs as well as the normal raw files. The display's brightness varies automatically to suit the ambient light.
On the back of the camera, a pair of buttons arranged one above the other plus four distinct buttons, all for reviewing photos. (While in shooting mode, pressing any of these buttons shifts the camera into viewing mode; while in viewing mode, pressing the shutter button halfway returns to shooting mode.) The pair of buttons magnify and shrink the image on the display. One distinct button toggles between a plain image and an image overlaid by exposure information (ISO speed, shutter speed and aperture) and by a histogram of whatever portion of the picture is displayed. When the histogram is shown, any saturated or empty pixels appear a brilliant colour. The second distinct button is "cancel," the third one is "delete," and the fourth is "menu." In viewing mode, the button in the four-way controller is "okay."
Note that these controls do not include the usual button for previewing depth of field. This feature is all but useless, because a viewfinder is too dim too see much when a lens is stopped down. A digital camera lets you assess depth of field more easily and more accurately by magnifying a test exposure.
Seeing the Leitz -- If you think these shooting controls are stark, consider Leica cameras. The Leica (Leitz camera) was the original 35mm camera, and the Leica models that focussed with rangefinders have always been costly darlings of the photographic market. They have always sold for a premium, despite always being less versatile than the more common professional cameras of the day. In the late 1970s my primary 35mm system was a pair of Leica M4s with all of the lenses that fit, but the Leicas were sufficiently limiting that I also needed to lug around a heavy SLR with a second set of lenses. My Leica gear was well-designed and well-made, but it was not obviously exceptional in any way save in its limitations and high cost. I chose to use Leicas for the same reason other pros used theirs, because they were compact and had straightforward controls that were quick to operate. While using my Leicas it was easy to concentrate on the subject instead of the camera.
I have not bothered to look at the latest M-series Leica, the digital successor to mine, because its price is preposterous: $7,000 for a body that is less versatile than the cheapest DSLR, with an image sensor that may or may not be capable of better image quality than the Foveon sensor in my $1,000 DSLR, plus $6,000 for a lens that is less versatile than any cheap zoom lens and, after digital processing, is unlikely to provide a sharper image. Indeed, since the Leica lens offers no image stabilization, under many circumstances its images are likely to be less sharp than those from a cheap zoom lens. However I do wish that the folks who designed my cameras had looked at older Leicas while designing theirs.
If the Leica's price were commensurate with its capability - if it lacked one of its zeros - then I might have considered it for a particular project I am working on, but instead I bought a camera that is 1/20th the price, the Sigma DP2s.
Cheap and Cheerful -- The $700 DP2s is a remarkably limited camera, even more limited than an M-series Leica. It lacks interchangeable lenses, it lacks a zoom lens, it lacks image stabilization, it lacks a viewfinder, it will not shoot pictures in rapid succession, its display is relatively small and dim, and its controls are almost as preposterous as the Leica's price. However, for this particular project I was concerned above all else with the camera's size and image quality. The DP2s is about the size of the EX1 (and noticeably lighter) yet its Foveon sensor can produce image quality comparable to a big DSLR with a full-frame sensor. (For a comparison of the Foveon sensor with a Canon full-frame sensor, see "How Not to Buy a Digital Camera," 17 June 2010.)
The DP2s is aimed at camera enthusiasts and indeed, you would need to be mighty enthusiastic not to find yourself swearing at its limitations and controls. However, to my surprise, I have come to think it the most appropriate camera on the market for a particular niche: pedagogy. If I were teaching a course on photography, I would want my students to use it.
The DP2s enforces a professional approach to taking pictures. It works so slowly that when you are shooting a portrait with the DP2s, you cannot haphazardly snap off dozens of shots and choose the best, you need to set up the picture carefully and observe the model closely enough that you can be ready to squeeze the shutter at just the right moment to capture the evanescent expression that you want. And when you are shooting a landscape, you can see few details through the display, so you need to position the camera without looking at the display at all - by studying the scene from above the camera - and use the display only for framing.
This is how professionals work when taking pictures with big, bellows-fronted view cameras. The image on the camera is upside-down, backwards, and dim, and it disappears altogether once you insert a sheet of film. Using one of those teaches you how to take a picture.
Another pedagogical advantage of the DP2s is its lens. The camera has a fixed lens of normal focal length. You cannot change its lens or zoom from wide angle to telephoto. For learning how to see and frame pictures, I think that this limitation would be worthwhile. If you want to learn to draw, it is more efficient to use a pencil than a box of brushes.
Since students of photography usually love gadgets and features, most of them would object mightily to being forced to use a DP2s. If I did teach a course in photography and required its use, I would rapidly lose all my students. However, any student who did work with it would probably learn more than the norm, and the technical quality of his images would be out of proportion to the camera's size and price.
Bag the Gadgets -- Photography has always been a hobby for gadgeteers. Gadgets are tied so closely to photography that one of the Oxford English Dictionary's illustrations of the word "gadget" is "Gadget bag, a case for camera accessories." But where gadgets used to be separate from the camera, now they are built in. This is a significant change. Gadgets buried in a gadget bag are easier to overlook.
Moreover, the gadgetry of digital cameras is bizarre. Consider light-balancing filters, for instance. Film often requires tinted filters to balance colours, but if you did not want to use one, you could leave it in your gadget bag and not know you had it. Digital cameras never need colour-balancing filters, because the automatic algorithms are usually good enough and because you can always adjust a tint afterwards, in the computer - yet every digital camera contains a set of digital colour-balancing filters ("Customizable white balance!"), and the controls to use them are never far from your face.
Every film camera I ever owned was manually operated, yet I found most of them easier to use than any of my digital cameras, all of which have been automatic. I fully appreciate digital imaging, and I enjoy it far more than film - I am not a Luddite in this regard - but neither can I avoid an inescapable conclusion: if taking pictures with an automatic camera is more difficult than taking pictures with a manual camera, then something about the automatic camera is wrong. Digital cameras are more complicated than they need to be.
Before 1888, a tourist who wanted to take pictures would need a packhorse to carry his photo gear around - literally. George Eastman decided to make the camera "as convenient as the pencil," and he succeeded. He invented roll film and the box camera. Its pictures weren't very good, but the newfangled Kodak did not require even a backpack to carry, let alone a horse. You pushed the button (and turned the knob to advance the film, and moved a lever to cock the shutter), and then The Eastman Company's dealers did all the rest. They even changed the film for you. The corporation that grew out of this became one of the giants of the world. Surely it would be profitable for some manufacturer to build cameras more like pencils again.
[If you found the information in this article valuable, Charles asks that you pay a little for it by making a donation to the aid organization Doctors Without Borders.]
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In what has become a familiar September media event (though one that Apple provided via live streaming for the first time, reducing the need to read the numerous liveblogs), Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave a preview of iOS 4.1, due this week for the iOS 4-capable models of the iPhone and iPod touch, and iOS 4.2, which will finally provide a single operating system for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch (again, only for those iPhone and iPod touch models that already support iOS 4). Both iOS 4.1 and 4.2 will be free updates.
iOS 4.1 -- Perhaps most notably, Apple is promising three high-profile bug fixes in iOS 4.1. The iPhone 4 has suffered two notable troubles (beyond the widely publicized antenna issues, which are hardware-related), one with Bluetooth and another with its proximity sensor. Jobs said that iOS 4.1 fixes the Bluetooth troubles with dropped connections to headsets and in-car systems, as well as proximity sensor problems resulting in accidental hangups and FaceTime activations when the sensor failed to detect that the phone was next to the user's head. Also extremely welcome is the third fix, a promised solution for the performance problems suffered by iPhone 3G users who have upgraded to iOS 4 (see "Speed Up Your iOS 4-Based iPhone 3G ," 27 August 2010).
For those with an iPhone or a new camera-equipped iPod touch, iOS 4.1 makes it possible to take high dynamic range (HDR) photos that can significantly improve the quality of a photo. HDR photos use a technique called "bracketing," in which three photos are taken in quick succession, one exposed at the camera's best guess, one underexposed, and one overexposed. The three photos are then combined algorithmically, which can often provide noticeably better results, as details and colors that are visible only under different exposures are merged. For example, a blue sky that gets blown out to white under normal circumstances would appear blue in the underexposed photo (leaving foreground elements nearly black); when merged, the sky and foreground are properly exposed. The original photos remain available in the Camera Roll too, so you can compare to see if the HDR version is better or not.
Also new is Game Center, which Apple previewed a few months ago, but which didn't ship with iOS 4.0 (see "Apple Previews Major New Features in iPhone OS 4," 8 April 2010). Game Center comprises a set of APIs for game developers to build into their apps and an iOS app that provides an interface for inviting friends to play multiplayer games, for auto-matching with other online players, and scoreboards.
We're not major game players, but apparently we're unusual in that respect: according to Apple, the iPod touch is the top portable gaming device in the world, with over 50 percent of the U.S. and worldwide markets, and higher sales than the portable gaming devices of Nintendo and Sony combined. Steve Jobs said that 1.5 billion games and entertainment apps have been downloaded for the iPod touch so far. And it's hard to imagine that iPhone and iPad users aren't also playing games, so it seems likely that Game Center will be big, and will make iOS gaming even more compelling.
Also coming to iOS 4.1 is support for full HD video upload over Wi-Fi. Currently, although the iPhone 4 can capture HD video, the Photos app compresses video content and resizes it to a maximum resolution of 568 by 320 pixels when sharing via email, to MobileMe, or to YouTube. TV show rentals also join the mix at the same $0.99-per-show price as is being charged for TV show rentals in iTunes and on the new Apple TV.
iOS 4.2 -- The presentation offered a quick look at iOS 4.2, which Jobs said would be available in November of this year. Unlike iOS 4.1, which is for only the iPhone and iPod touch, iOS 4.2 will run on the iPad as well as on any iOS 4-capable iPhone or iPod touch. New features promised for iOS 4.2 include built-in Wi-Fi printing and AirPlay.
Several third-party printing apps are already available for the iPad, including ePrint, PrintCentral, and AirSharing HD (the latter does much more than just print). iPhone printing apps are also available. These apps have all had to devise a way of accessing a document in order to print it, and there are a variety of techniques. These apps have also suffered from having to run in the foreground. The new wireless printing option in iOS 4.2 runs in the background, and we presume that third-party printing apps will be able to add background capabilities, should they wish to try to compete with Apple's built-in printing. From the looks of the demo, to use built-in printing, each app must offer a print feature, so it may take some time before apps that ought to support printing actually do.
AirPlay is a new name for an older technology, AirTunes, which lets you stream music from iTunes through an AirPort Express base station to a stereo system. AirPlay now supports video and photos, and works with the second-generation Apple TV, enabling you to stream audio, video, and photos from any iOS device running iOS 4.2 to an AirPort Express-connected stereo or new Apple TV.
iOS Continues Apace -- Although much is being made of the increasing number of Android-based smartphones and tablets, Apple doesn't seem particularly worried. Jobs said that Apple has sold 120 million iOS devices so far, and is activating 230,000 new iOS devices per day. There have been 6.5 billion downloads from the App Store so far, a rate of 200 apps per second, and the App Store now contains 250,000 apps, 25,000 of which are native to the iPad.
Some have suggested that Apple is recapitulating the history of the Mac by keeping iOS and iOS devices entirely proprietary, much as it did with the Mac OS and Macintosh hardware. There's no question that approach limited the market share of the Mac in comparison to Windows-based PCs from numerous manufacturers, but today's situation feels different. That's largely because Apple is not only the first mover in the market, introducing features that make other manufacturers play catch-up, but Apple's huge success with the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad mean that it has far more market penetration than the Mac was ever able to achieve. Certainly, Apple would prefer to see the smartphone and tablet markets work more like the portable music player market, where Apple entered a weak field, set the standard with the iPod, and then maintained market dominance through innovation and excellent design.
One thing is clear, though - Apple won't be slowing the pace of significant updates to iOS and the increasing number of iOS devices. We'll all just have to hang on for the ride.
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After talking about new iPods, iOS updates, and iTunes 10 at Apple's media event last week, Steve Jobs got a laugh from the audience by swapping his traditional "One more thing..." slide for one reading "One more hobby...," a reference to his oft-quoted comment that the company's Apple TV set-top box was languishing because it wasn't a mainstream product.
Well, the market has changed since Apple introduced the original Apple TV in September 2006. Apple's TV show and movie sales and rental businesses have taken off via iTunes on the desktop, as well as on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and countless set-top devices compete for space in the living room, offering streaming video from Netflix and YouTube, hard drive storage for purchased or downloaded video, and more.
Citing customer demand for professionally produced content (Hollywood movies and TV shows, rather than a steady stream of cute cat videos), in high definition, for less money, without having to worry about configuring a computer, managing storage space, or syncing to a computer, Apple has tossed a new, second-generation Apple TV into the mix. Calling it "silent, cool, and small," to fit customer demands, Jobs says the new $99 Apple TV is a quarter the size of the unit it replaces. Like the previous Apple TV, the power supply is built in rather than provided as an external brick.
Apple's new set-top box moves entirely away from long-term storage and ownership of content, offering only rentals of TV shows and movies, streamed rather than played from an internal hard drive, all in 720p HD at 30 frames per second, when available. The device, which we're told runs a modified version of iOS on its Apple A4 CPU, sports an HDMI port to carry video and sound to your television (the only video-out option); an optical audio port to connect to fancier audio gear; 802.11n Wi-Fi that's compatible with 802.11a, b, and g networks as well; and a 10/100Base-T wired Ethernet port. It also comes with an aluminum Apple Remote, which controls the Apple TV via infrared.
There's also a mini-USB port for "service and support," which enterprising developers have used in the previous Apple TV model to extend the box's functionality. With the shift to iOS, it's unclear whether the Apple TV will be as hackable.
Content will be available with 99-cent rentals of commercial-free TV shows, available initially from just the FOX and ABC networks. (Jobs says he hopes the other U.S. broadcast networks will get on board, and we suspect they will eventually, unless they're too scared of Apple gaining the kind of control over TV viewership that it enjoys in the digital music field.) TV rentals must be watched within 30 days of paying for them, just like movie rentals, but once you've started watching, TV shows expire after 48 hours, an extra day compared to the 24-hour window available for movies.
New release movie rentals, which are available on the same day as the title's DVD release, cost $4.99 for HD quality, or $3.99 for standard definition (SD) quality. After the newness has worn off, movies drop in price to $3.99 for HD and $2.99 for SD rentals.
As with many other set-top devices already on the market, the new Apple TV will also offer streaming movies from the Netflix Watch Instantly library. And if you want the cute cat videos, you can watch any YouTube content, as well as photos and videos from Flickr and MobileMe.
We think one of the most compelling features is the Apple TV's use of AirPlay, Apple's new enhanced version of AirTunes. That technology not only enables the Apple TV to stream media from a Mac or Windows computer running iTunes 10, it also makes it possible to stream content stored on another nearby iOS device, such as an iPad. To borrow Jobs's example, you could watch part of a movie on your iPad on a plane, and when you get home, tap a new AirPlay button on the iPad to begin streaming the movie to your television.
The new Apple TV will ship toward the end of September 2010, and can be pre-ordered immediately on the U.S. Apple online store for $99. The company says iTunes TV show rentals and Netflix streaming are available only in the United States, and movie rentals are available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, and the UK, as well. Apple hasn't yet said when the device will be for sale outside the United States, and licensing restrictions on video content make that unlikely to be clarified any time soon.
We wish we could speculate that Apple would offer a software update to existing Apple TV devices to provide the new functionality to old hardware, but as the new Apple TV involves a different operating system on completely different hardware, we'd be astonished if Apple even attempted it. The low cost of entry, at $99 compared to the previous hardware's $229 price tag (it was originally released at $299), makes it attractive enough to buy a brand new one. No doubt lots of first-generation Apple TVs will be relegated to secondary TVs. (Just fill its hard drive up with "Dora the Explorer" and little Susie will love it.)
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Almost 10 years after releasing iTunes in January 2001, Apple last week announced and released iTunes 10. The new version offers a slightly refined interface that stacks the Close, Minimize, and Zoom buttons and desaturates the sidebar of all color (neither of which seems like an improvement), along with a new icon that drops the background image of the audio CD. Overall, iTunes 10's features are essentially the same as version 9, save for one big addition, called Ping.
Ping adds musical social networking to iTunes as a way of making it easier to discover (and buy, of course) new music. As with Twitter, friend-to-friend connections are asymmetrical, so a famous musician can pick up zillions of followers without having to follow each one back. You can set up your own profile so that anyone can follow you, so only people you approve can do so, or so no one can. Once you have a few friends, you can exchange messages about tracks and albums in the iTunes Store in a Facebook-like manner, see what music your friends are downloading, and even view a top-ten music list that summarizes the most popular music your friends are downloading. You can also view concert listings - Apple claimed a database of over 17,000 concerts - although it remains unclear if you can limit concerts to those in your immediate vicinity.
It all sounds very trendy, and we're looking forward to seeing if it helps us find excellent music that we'd otherwise never hear about. Although Ping should be a money-maker for Apple, it could also provide a financial boost for smaller bands that rely on word-of-mouth for marketing. Ping is available to all 160 million people with iTunes accounts, but we suspect that the number of people who are interested in social networking and music discovery may be a good deal lower.
Look for Ping in the iTunes 10 sidebar, under the Store category. Ping is available not just in iTunes 10, but it is - or will be soon - also available in the iTunes app on various iOS devices, where it will show up in the tab bar at the bottom of the screen.
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iPod sales have been falling, despite the inclusion of the massively popular iOS-based iPod touch in that category (see "Apple Reports $3.25 Billion Profit for Q3 2010," 20 July 2010). Some people, like Charles Arthur, writing in The Guardian, have even suggested that the iPod's declining sales might mean a general slowing of digital music sales.
Nevertheless, given the numbers Steve Jobs reeled off at Apple's special media event last week, it's clear that the iPod and digital music sales have been huge for Apple historically, and Apple isn't about to give them up. Apple has sold 275 million iPods so far (although that may include the iPod touch, which Apple appears to count as both an iPod and as an iOS device). In terms of digital content, the iTunes Store has so far sold 11.7 billion songs, 450 million TV episodes, 100 million movies, and 35 million books. Currently, 160 million people in 23 countries have iTunes accounts associated with credit cards.
So why have iPod sales slowed? The popularity of the iOS devices, of which Apple has now sold 120 million, is undoubtedly related, but there's also the simple fact that many people already own perfectly functional iPods and see no reason to replace them until they break. Each year's models are designed to entice people to replace existing iPods, but the fact is, apart from the move from the traditional iPod to iOS devices, there isn't much reason to upgrade a functional iPod.
That's not for lack of trying on Apple's part, and this year is no exception, bringing with it new models of the iPod shuffle, iPod nano, and iPod touch, all of which are available for pre-order now and will be shipping this week. (The 160 GB iPod classic remains available for $249 with no changes.)
iPod shuffle -- In redesigning the iPod shuffle, Apple reverted slightly to the design of the second-generation model, which was a squarish clip with buttons. (The third-generation shuffle relied on VoiceOver for controls, eliminating buttons entirely.) The new fourth-generation model is smaller than the second generation, but includes control buttons and the clip to attach it to your clothing.
VoiceOver and playlists are still supported, as in the third-generation model, as are the new Genius Mixes. Battery life is rated at 15 hours, and for $49 you'll get 2 GB of flash storage and a choice of five colors (silver, orange, blue, green, and pink).
iPod nano -- Only slightly larger than the iPod shuffle is the new sixth-generation iPod nano, which leaves most of its buttons behind in favor of a multi-touch interface on a 1.54-inch color display running at 240-by-240-pixel resolution. In other words, the new nano looks like a really thick postage stamp, and it's 46 percent smaller and 42 percent lighter than the previous generation. It does retain a top-mounted sleep/wake button and volume up/down buttons, and the bottom has a dock connector and headphone jack. A clothing clip is integrated into the back of the case.
Also shoehorned into that tiny space are an FM radio, pedometer, and Nike+, for tracking of casual exercise. However, the previous generation featured a video camera and voice recorder, and the capability to play video, features Apple has removed from the sixth-generation nano. That's probably due to the iPod touch gaining video capture capabilities - keep reading.
The new nano also features 24-hour battery life, supports on-the-fly Genius playlists and Genius Mixes, and comes in seven colors - the same silver, orange, blue, green, and pink as the iPod shuffle, plus graphite and a red unit that sends some of its profits to the Product (Red) program. An 8 GB unit will cost $149 and a 16 GB unit will cost $169.
Despite the multi-touch interface, it doesn't appear that the iPod nano is running iOS, and our sources concur. That said, its basic interface is similar. You can swipe left or right to move among pages of the Home screen, tap to select items, and touch and hold to rearrange icons on the Home screen. Double-tapping zooms photos, and the usual music controls are all handled onscreen as well. Although the nano's tech specs claim it has an accelerometer (for the Shake to Shuffle feature), you need to do a two-finger rotate gesture to rotate the screen if it's in the wrong orientation.
iPod touch -- Finally, we come to the real meat of the iPod announcements - the fourth-generation iPod touch that has taken over from the iPod nano as the most popular iPod of all time.
Not surprisingly, it looks a lot like the previous generations, but is even thinner. Equally unsurprising, given the changes in the iPhone 4, are the other new features, anchored by an LED-backlit, 24-bit color Retina display with four times as many pixels, running at 326 pixels per inch. Under the hood, it features an Apple A4 chip and a 3-axis gyro for improved gaming controls.
On the outside, even though it retains the old-style case rather than adopting the glass-and-stainless-steel look of the iPhone 4, the new iPod touch finally catches up with its sibling thanks to a pair of cameras: a rear-facing camera capable of recording 720p HD video at up to 30 frames per second and still photos at 960 by 720 resolution (which is less than what the iPhone 4's camera can produce for stills), and a front-facing camera that can do VGA-quality photos and video at up to 30 frames per second. Needless to say, the front-facing camera is designed for use with FaceTime, and can communicate with iPhone 4 users. Without the capability to make phone calls, the iPod touch can use an email address for initiating FaceTime sessions.
The new iPod touch features 40-hour battery life, ships with iOS 4.1, and will cost $229 for an 8 GB model, $299 for a 32 GB model, and $399 for a 64 GB model when it begins shipping this week.
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MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.9 -- Apple has released EFI Firmware Update 1.9 for mid-2010 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pros. The update addresses a rare issue where the Mac could freeze during startup or stall during use. The update also improves compatibility with external displays. Your computer must be connected to a power source to install the firmware update, and Apple warns users not to turn off the MacBook Pro while the update installs. (Free update, 2.16 MB)
Read/post comments about MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.9.
Camino 2.0.4 -- The Mozilla-backed Camino Project has released Camino 2.0.4, an update to the open-source Web browser that's more Mac-like than Firefox. The incremental update upgrades to the latest 1.9.0 version of the Gecko rendering engine, which includes several critical security and stability fixes. In addition, the Camino 2.0.4 update prevents a Flash 10.1 crash when you trigger Exposé while watching Flash video full-screen. Other fixes include tweaks to better remember print settings, improve behavior in the location bar, and improve the browser's capability to block Flash animation and Web advertisements. (Free, 15.8 MB)
Read/post comments about Camino 2.0.4.
Security Update 2010-005 -- Apple has released Security Update 2010-005, addressing an assortment of vulnerabilities in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard. Several of the fixes included in the update address various ways maliciously crafted files could lead to the dreaded "arbitrary code execution" that is the hallmark of many computer attacks. Mac OS X's handling of fonts, PDF files, and PNG files (the last only when accessed via PHP under Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server) was patched to block such vulnerabilities.
The update also updates ClamAV (in Leopard Server and Snow Leopard Server only) to block other potential arbitrary code execution risks. In both the server and regular editions, Mac OS X's CFNetwork framework was fixed; it could previously fall victim to "man-in-the-middle" attacks through anonymous SSL/TLS connections.
In addition, Apple updated libsecurity to prevent domain name trickery, patched Samba to prevent a buffer overflow that could allow a denial-of-service attack or arbitrary code execution, and upgraded PHP to version 5.3.2 to address multiple vulnerabilities in the popular scripting language.
Security Update 2010-005 is available via Software Update, which is generally the easiest method of acquiring it. You can also download the update directly for Leopard (211.88 MB), Leopard Server (418.92 MB), Snow Leopard (80.63 MB), and Snow Leopard Server (136.86 MB).
Read/post comments about Security Update 2010-005.
GraphicConverter 6.7.4 -- Lemkesoft has updated its flagship image-manipulation tool GraphicConverter to version 6.7.4. The significant 6.7 update earlier this year added the capability to import a variety of new image formats, including scrap files, HMR, dm2 and dm3, and direct SVG via PDF. Also new in 6.7 was added support for the AppleScript command "search with spotlight." Since that release, GraphicConverter has seen a few minor updates, adding more support for exporting QuickTime movies, importing larger TIFFs, exporting GIF animations as filmstrips, importing FUJI files, integrating with the Google Earth Safari plug-in, and the capability to undo actions even after changing your selection.
The recent update to 6.7.4 adds an option to scale after crop, PDN preview display, and a sepia batch action. Issues with color profiles, Unicode support, and 1080p and animation scaling were also addressed. See Lemkesoft's Web site for full release notes on all that has changed since 6.7.
Multiple versions of GraphicConverter are available for download; you can choose English-only editions, PowerPC-only editions, or the standard universal and localized edition. ($34.95 new, free upgrade, 100 MB)
Read/post comments about GraphicConverter 6.7.4.
Freeway 5.5 -- Softpress Systems has updated its Web design tool Freeway to version 5.5. Significant new features include Showcase (which lets you create image galleries or slideshows with minimal effort), support for SFTP and FTP-SSL, integration with the Amazon Associates affiliate program, and simplified HTML email creation. In addition to those new features in both the Pro and Express editions, the Pro edition of Freeway also gains a pair of new actions: the Relative Page Layout action converts absolute layouts into relative, resizable layouts instead, and the new Simple Site Search action lets you set up a search form on your site without needing a scripting language. Freeway 5.5 requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later. ($69/$229 new for Express/Pro, $25/$49 upgrades from 5.x to 5.5, free upgrade for purchases since 1 June 2010)
Read/post comments about Freeway 5.5.
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Apple has released iWork 9.0.4, fixing a few bugs and extending Pages to be able to export the EPUB format used by the iBookstore. Bugs fixed in Keynote include problems printing handouts with rule lines, the slide switcher, and automatically resizing some images while changing slide size. In addition, Keynote, Numbers, and Pages all receive a fix for a bug related to tables. The update is 63.44 MB, and is available via Software Update or directly from Apple's Support Downloads page.
But the far more interesting news is that Apple has added support for the standard EPUB file format for electronic books to Pages, so it's now possible to export an EPUB from Pages. The reason this is interesting is that despite the fuss about EPUB, the tools available to create EPUB have been extremely limited, falling into four basic categories:
WYSIWYG editing and EPUB export: Until the release of Pages 9.0.4, Adobe InDesign has essentially owned this category, because it was the only professional program in either the word processing or page layout space that could export reasonable EPUB files that were more than straight text. There are also several writing tools aimed at creative writers - notably Storyist and Ulysses and the upcoming Scrivener 2.0 - that can export to EPUB, though it appears on a quick glance that they are relatively limited in terms of stylistic capabilities, along with features essential for professional writers like change tracking and commenting.
WYSIWYG EPUB editors: The only Mac-compatible program I know of that claims to provide WYSIWYG editing of EPUB is Sigil, a cross-platform, open-source tool that works, but has some serious usability problems. If you have an EPUB that you wish to edit with WYSIWYG editing tools, try Sigil. Beware though, since in my experience, Sigil ignores an EPUB's existing table-of-contents file and creates its own, which is often sub-optimal.
XML-focused editors: These programs, such as Syncro Soft's oXygen XML Editor, provide tools for working with EPUB at the code level. Creating an EPUB with an XML editor is like building a Web site with BBEdit; you get a lot of control, but you have to know exactly what you're doing, and minor mistakes can require debugging.
Conversion tools: There are oodles of tools that claim that they can convert files from a wide variety of formats into EPUB. Frankly, none that I've tested has done squat with the Word or PDF documents that we create for Take Control. I suspect they would work with very simple documents.
In her book "EPUB Straight to the Point," our friend Liz Castro provides oodles of useful information about building EPUBs in both InDesign and Word (where you're really saving your file as HTML, and then manipulating the HTML file in a variety of tweaky ways to create an EPUB). Liz sells the book (as an EPUB-formatted ebook, natch) directly, or you can buy it in print through Amazon.com or any of the usual suspects. Since it's the sort of book you'll need to reference frequently while working, you'll either want the print version or an iPad for the ebook version; the content isn't well suited to the small iPhone screen.
So where does Pages fall? I haven't had much time to play with its EPUB capabilities yet, but it looks like a serious contender in the WYSIWYG editing and EPUB export category. To be clear, Pages cannot open or import an EPUB file, so it's useful only for exporting in EPUB format. (Luckily, Pages can import Word files quite well, so you may not be entirely out of luck if your documents are in Word format.)
Apple has published a Knowledgebase article on the topic that offers an overview of EPUB and PDF, and how to create an EPUB file with Pages. Although you can create an EPUB simply by exporting any existing Pages document, the results may not be ideal unless you start from a sample document that Apple makes available on the Web (it's not included with Pages 9.0.4, oddly). The sample document can be used as a template or you can copy its styles into your document. Liza Daly, one of the world's EPUB experts, has examined the template, and is generally positive about what Apple has done, identifying only one notable problem in the XHTML output.
As a quick test, I imported the Word manuscript of Tonya's "Take Control of iPad Basics" ebook into Pages, and immediately exported it as an EPUB. Almost shockingly, it was pretty darn good on the iPad. A number of internal navigation links were lost on import, but Pages retained the look and feel of our design, properly recognized the table of contents, dealt properly with Web links, and had no trouble with graphics. And when I ran the file through the EPUB validation tool that Liza Daly's Threepress Consulting makes available, it passed with no errors.
With this new EPUB export added to all the commenting and change tracking features that have appeared in recent versions, Pages may now rank as real competition for Microsoft Word for serious writing. Of course, with Office 2011 due out in a few months, Microsoft has a chance to up the ante, but Apple can't be far from releasing a major update to iWork as well.
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Apple's iOS 4, released only a few months ago roughly in concert with the iPhone 4, works not only on the iPhone 4, and the previous generation iPhone 3GS, but also on the iPhone 3G; the original iPhone can't run it. But to judge from vociferous complaints from iPhone 3G users online, Apple was perhaps overly optimistic in providing backward compatibility with the iPhone 3G.
If you have an iPhone 3G running Apple's older iPhone operating system - which was called iPhone OS 3, but has been retroactively renamed iOS 3 - I suggest that you not install the iOS 4 update. If you do, you'll likely notice slowdowns across the board, especially with opening apps, switching screens, and using the onscreen keyboard. Rumor fueled by an alleged email message from Steve Jobs suggests that Apple will address the problem in a future release of iOS 4, but as of version 4.0.2, using an iPhone 3G with iOS 4 remains painful for many people.
This is particularly troublesome because the iPhone 3G was for sale until the iPhone 4 shipped, and because it's non-trivial to downgrade to the previous iOS 3.1.3 version. When Apple has released versions of Mac OS X that turn out not to work well on older Macs, those Macs are often several years past their sell-by date, and, regardless, you can always revert to whatever version of Mac OS X shipped with that particular model. Besides, not only was the iPhone 3G so recently for sale, but it came with a 2-year contract, so users are locked into using it.
What follows are ideas for maximizing the speed of an iPhone 3G that's running iOS 4. I've tried all but the last idea personally. Restoring from recovery mode finally did help, but I think that restoring my backed-up apps and data caused me to lose most of the gain I'd achieved. However, I've read hundreds of comments online from frustrated iPhone 3G users, so I know that the several-second pauses that I was initially complaining about are not nearly as problematic as the 10-second pauses experienced by others, and those longer delays may be easier to reduce. I've listed the ideas in the order that I think would be most sensible to try them.
Do a Hard Reset Twice -- This action erases various caches and buffers, giving your iPhone a fresh start in some respects. To proceed, press both the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button for 5 to 10 seconds. Continue pressing them as the "slide to power off" slider appears (don't use it) and the iPhone powers off. Release the buttons. Now:
The iPhone may show an Apple logo and reboot.
The iPhone may remain off. Once it has been off for 15 seconds or so, press the Sleep/Wake button to turn it on.
Either way, rebooting may take several minutes.
After it reboots, the iPhone displays its usual Home screen. (If you aren't paying attention during a long reboot, you'll have a black screen, because the iPhone will have gone to sleep. In that case, press Home to activate the screen.)
You've now done a single hard reset, so repeat the procedure, which will ensure that the iPhone's internal caches and buffers are squeaky clean. (Or it may just be modern day voodoo.)
Shutter Spotlight -- Spotlight is the search engine behind the search options available on the leftmost page of the iPhone's Home screen. Since Spotlight is indexing the contents of your iPhone, turning it off may free up some system resources and improve performance.
To turn off the search options, tap Settings > General > Home Button > Spotlight Search. Then, on the Spotlight Search screen, tap any checked items to remove the checkmarks. Do a single hard reset to clear memory and start fresh.
Close Extra Pages in Safari -- These pages may be using valuable memory that could be better used elsewhere in the system. Open the Safari app, and notice the icon at the lower right of the screen. A badge on the icon indicates how many Web pages you have open in Safari (in the screenshot below, I have two open pages). Tap the icon to view a thumbnail of each page, floating on a scrollable screen. For each page except the last one remaining, tap the red X button to close it. Finally, perform a single hard reset to clear memory and start fresh. (If you use a Web browser other than Safari, trying this tip - or its nearest equivalent, such as closing extra tabs - in your browser seems like a good idea, too.)
If closing extra pages helps your iPhone's performance, you'll need to close extra pages every time you quit Safari, which is a pain, unless you use the information in the next tip.
Pay Attention to Memory Use -- You may find it useful to track how much memory is available on the iPhone using a memory-monitoring app, such as Gary Fung's free Memory Sweep (oddly, on the iPhone itself, it's called Scan). If you check the app periodically, and especially whenever you notice performance lagging, you may be able to identify a usage pattern that causes problems.
For instance, a blog post about the topic from Andrews Technology, "How I fixed my iPhone 3G lag," reported seeing better performance and more free memory after closing all pages in Safari, as recommended above.
Even better, Memory Sweep has two buttons, Free Memory Moderately and Free Maximum Memory. Tapping the first button seems to clear Safari's page cache (the page thumbnail images are blank on the next load), and whatever the second one does, it takes Safari even longer to start the next time. It strikes me that there could be cons to using these buttons, but Apple did approve the app!
Disable MMS -- Some folks have reported that turning off MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) makes a huge difference. MMS is used in the Messages app, and where SMS (Short Message Service) messages contain just text, MMS messages can contain photos, audio, and video. To turn MMS off, tap Settings > Messages and tap the switch to turn off MMS Messaging. Finally, perform a single hard reset to clear memory and start fresh.
Restore from Recovery Mode -- This procedure has five steps. Make sure you have a few spare hours for this task and that you feel comfortable with all the directions before you begin.
Back up your iPhone's contents. Apple details this process in the Knowledgebase article "How to backup your data and set up as a new device." You may not need to do everything in the article, depending on your situation.
Put your iPhone in recovery mode. While the iPhone is connected to your computer via USB and visible in the iTunes sidebar, hold down the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button for 10 seconds. Then release the Sleep/Wake button only. After a short pause, a dialog indicates that iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode. Click OK.
Restore the iPhone. With the iPhone selected in the iTunes sidebar, click the Restore button on the right. Proceed with the restoration and be sure to click set up the phone as a new device, when asked.
Test to see if the iPhone is working better with a factory default installation of apps and settings.
If you like, restore your backup from Step 1. This may reintroduce the problem, and if it does, you can decide whether you'd prefer to live with the problem, or redo Steps 2 and 3 and then set the phone up from scratch while making frequent backups in case the problem occurs again.
Downgrade to iOS 3 -- If you have a few hours to spare, you may wish to revert to iOS 3. Proceed with care. Unfortunately, this process is not supported by Apple, although the worst that's likely to happen is that you'll have to reinstall iOS 4.
The directions I've seen for downgrading look fine for geeks but sketchy for regular people. Check Lifehacker for full instructions. You might also want to read Chris Breen's commentary on their instructions at Macworld.
Wait Patiently -- Realistically, none of these are great solutions, and given that Apple officially offers iOS 4 for the iPhone 3G, the ball is in Apple's court. The company has remained mum about the issue, with the only break in the silence being an alleged four-word email message from Steve Jobs in response to a user's complaint: "Software update coming soon." Assuming that message is legitimate, whether that update is iOS 4.1, currently in testing, or something further out remains unknown.
But if the iPhone 3G performance problems aren't solved in the very near future, Apple should acknowledge the issue and provide official instructions for iPhone 3G owners to downgrade to the perfectly functional iOS 3.1.3 until the fix is available. Anything else shows a complete lack of regard for the user experience for iPhone 3G owners, something that a company as obsessed with details as Apple should be ashamed of.
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Since the iPad's launch, Netflix customers have been able to stream movies from that company's Watch Instantly service using the Netflix app. Netflix has now made the app universal, so iPhone and iPod touch owners can join their iPad-wielding compatriots in streaming movies to their iOS devices.
Unfortunately, as with the iPad version of the app, Netflix isn't a perfect iOS citizen. As my friend Dan Moren noted over at Macworld, the app appears to rely on HTML5 for most of its interface - meaning, the app is essentially a view onto a Web page. That's acceptable, but it means that familiar interactions like scrolling through lists and tapping buttons don't feel quite as smooth as they would in a traditional, fully native iPhone app.
That said, I tapped play on a movie, and within seconds it started streaming in excellent quality on my iPhone via Wi-Fi. When I tested it on my 3G connection, Netflix took a bit longer to start streaming, but the quality was still perfectly acceptable.
Worth noting, though, is that the Netflix app isn't optimized for iOS 4; if you switch to another app and then return to Netflix, the app doesn't pick up where you left off in your movie - you must navigate back to the film in question first. In addition, the app lacks any means of managing your DVD queue.
Still - streaming movies! On your iPhone! The coolness factor here is off the charts.
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Google Voice lets you forward calls to multiple numbers that ring at once, listen in to voicemail as it is being recorded, and bounce strangers into a confirmation stage, all for free. But it could not handle placing calls - until now. Google is rolling out computer-based VoIP calling.
This update offers free VoIP calls within the United States and Canada, although the feature will initially be available only to U.S. Google users. Calls placed to other countries are charged at reasonably low international rates.
Before this update, you would use Google Voice more as a hub for communication with a Google Voice phone number as the entry point. The service lets you associate phone numbers with an account, and choose behavior based on Caller ID, time of day, and other factors for what happens when someone calls the Google Voice number. It also offers free U.S. text messaging, and voicemail - along with hilariously weird voicemail transcription. (A message from my wife the other day read, "We've had a knife... Mark emergency in Indiana.")
You could place calls that would ring on one of your associated numbers, but you still had to have a phone nearby to make that work. (See "Google Voice Opens to All Americans," 22 June 2010.)
But because Google seemingly forgets which product is which, the site you use to make Google Voice calls is... Gmail. Yes, that's right. The webmail app that brought you Google Buzz and Google Chat (audio, video, and text) now brings you phone calls. Why not within, say, Google Voice? It's hard to understand that decision. (Sure, Google Chat is found within Gmail, and activating "real" phone calls there makes sense, but not as the first and only method to use it.)
You need to install Google's voice and video plug-in to use Google Voice in Gmail. Log in to your Gmail account, click Settings, and then the Chat tab, and follow the instructions there. With that set up, you will see a Call Phones item in Google Chat once Google activates the service for your account.
Google's new offering competes directly with Skype, which charges fees to have an inbound phone number (or more than one) associated with your Skype account, and has a fixed-rate U.S./Canada calling plans. Skype does offer one notable advantage so far: it's available for iOS devices, and Google Voice still remains missing there.
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The patient was having erratic symptoms. Sometimes he'd be happily waddling along or warming his egg beneath his feet. Other times, he'd keel over, flapping one wing frantically before losing consciousness for hours at a time, causing great consternation.
Our beloved Opus, an Intel-based Xserve of a couple years' experience, has been acting increasingly oddly over the last few weeks. That's okay (if sad) for a penguin or a person, but not so much for a Web server that handles content and ecommerce, that has thousands of daily users, and from which several of us derive significant parts of our incomes. (We actually operate an older PowerPC-based Xserve as well, but it's no longer used for mission-critical operations.)
These errors had already gotten Adam Engst and me talking about the possibility of unleashing ourselves from owning hardware, but it all came to a head last Monday, with Opus suffering inexplicable slowdowns, freezes, and disk errors. That's bad enough on a Mac you can touch, but Opus was colocated at digital.forest, and while the folks at digital.forest are great, there's a limit to what you can ask support technicians to do for you. For example, in an effort to get the TidBITS issue out, disk errors on the boot disk forced Adam, for the second week in a row, to clone the boot disk to a secondary disk, restart from that secondary disk, and repair the errors on the former boot disk.
While Adam fought to keep Opus alive a bit longer, I started preparations for our expedition - up in the air! Rather, into the cloud: the ambiguously defined notion of locating your resources in servers you can neither see nor touch and that may in fact be entirely virtual collections of resources formed into what looks like a server from the outside.
I've been experimenting with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for some time, and I and TidBITS have used Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), but EC2 isn't a good fit for us. I've been a Unix and Linux system administrator for over 15 years, but I'm not an IT guy. Amazon's services are well designed for people who understand how to build and use an infrastructure. Using EC2 and Amazon's associated resources is a bit like a builder sourcing every nail, stud, and tile, but then telling someone remotely how to put a house together.
Instead, we opted for Rackspace's Cloud Servers, which offer a similar service designed with someone exactly like me in mind. Rackspace has fewer options, but fewer can be better if just the right ones are included. We opted for a 2 GB virtual server, which comes with 80 GB of storage, 40 Mbps of bandwidth, and 2 CPU cores. The monthly fee is about $88, with an additional per-GB rate for bandwidth ($0.22 for each outbound GB and 8 cents for each inbound GB).
Rackspace uses virtualized servers, just like Amazon, but offers a simplified console, and much less fuss. I had my first disk up in a few minutes, logged in via the command line, and rapidly configured the Linux distribution I'd chosen. You still have to know how to beat a Linux (or Windows) system into the form you want, but it's incredibly easy compared to any previous approach I've used. Within a few hours I had the basics of the system working, and after a few more hours the next day, we were ready to repoint our DNS to the virtual server.
Rackspace's simplified approach has competition too. A Twitter colleague mentioned Slicehost and Linode. Both are cheaper for the same system (they both include bandwidth in monthly fees), but we knew Rackspace and didn't have time to kick tires. And should we need to move again, it seems likely that it would be even easier the next time.
The nice part of the migration is that we've built our operations well enough that we could move from a Mac OS X Server system to a CentOS Linux virtual machine with only a handful of changes in our files. You always hope that planning for future eventualities is worthwhile, and in this case it was.
Obviously, although we've tested our TidBITS and Take Control Web sites and ancillary services, it's entirely possible there's something that isn't working that we've missed. If so, just drop us a note and we'll fix it.
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The options for getting mobile broadband more cheaply for your laptop, iPhone, and 3G iPad keep multiplying as carriers want to take advantage of a growing market. Virgin Mobile joins the fray with a $40-per-month, 30-day service plan with unlimited usage that's now available.
Just two months ago, Virgin Mobile - a division of Sprint Nextel - began offering the MiFi cellular router without a contract for $150. Service plans started at $10, and worked with either the MiFi or a USB modem compatible with Mac OS X and Windows. (See "Virgin Mobile Offers MiFi Mobile Hotspot without Contract," 28 June 2010.)
But the plans topped out at the same rate charged by carriers for laptop plans: $60 for up to 5 GB used in a 30-day cycle, and there was no automatic renewal or billing. In my article at the time, I explained how the flexibility of Virgin's offering could be the right combination for someone travelling with one or more iOS devices and a laptop, rather than using AT&T's iPhone iOS 4 tethering ($45 per month including 2 GB of usage), or a MiFi from Sprint or Verizon, which requires a two-year contract.
This new $40-per-month deal is extraordinary, and Virgin Mobile lists no restrictions on its offer page. This seems to be a terrific alternative to iPhone tethering or 3G iPad plans.
The Virgin Mobile MiFi connects to Sprint Nextel's 3G network, which operates more slowly than AT&T's top rates in principle, but isn't that far off in practice. AT&T has plans to double its raw 3G rates by year's end. (Sprint has a far faster 4G network, run by its Clearwire division, that reaches about 50 million people.)
AT&T requires that you have its 2 GB DataPro plan ($25 per month) to use tethering ($20 per month). The DataPro plan costs $10 per 1 GB used above 2 GB in a 30-day billing cycle. The cheaper DataPlus plan, at $15 per month for 200 MB of data, costs $30 less than the DataPro with tethering option. (AT&T does let you switch your service plan level and turn tethering on and off at will, instead of requiring a new contract or other limits.)
Beyond the limited service, iPhone tethering is also irritating in comparison to using the MiFi, requiring the right combination of elements to make it work. If you want to use more than one device, you have to employ a wonky workaround (Internet Sharing in Mac OS X set to share the tethered connection). The MiFi can share its connection with up to five Wi-Fi devices at once.
Sprint's 3G network currently has about the same coverage as AT&T, reaching roughly 80 percent of the U.S. population. If you're out of Sprint's area, the company roams you onto Verizon's network, but limits you to no more than 300 MB of Verizon service in a billing period - something that's nearly impossible to know in advance.
Virgin Mobile doesn't note this limitation, and says it uses only the Sprint 3G network, which may mean you could be without coverage in Verizon-only territory.
But Sprint has coverage in all major and medium-sized cities, as well as at airports. The tens of millions of people living in smaller towns and exurbs that are served by Verizon with 3G but not Sprint are the ones who would encounter this particular dearth.
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Adobe Acrobat/Reader 9.3.4 and 8.2.4 -- Adobe has released updates to Adobe Acrobat and Reader - for both the current 9.x versions and the previous 8.x versions - to address a critical security vulnerability related to TrueType font handling. You can update using the programs' automatic update mechanisms, but many people, including us, have trouble with them, so use the links provided to download the latest version manually if need be. That said, be warned that many people are having trouble with the update to Acrobat 8.2.4 rendering the program unusable - Adobe is aware of the problem. Until a fix appears, users of Acrobat 8.x should hold off on the update or, if it's too late, revert to 8.2.3. (Free updates, various sizes)
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Pear Note 2.0.1 -- Hard on the heels of the major 2.0 release, Useful Fruit Software has released Pear Note 2.0.1 with two notable changes to the multimedia note-taking software. A crashing bug that could occur when Pear Note was updating its search cache has been fixed, and the Web sharing layout has been improved for very long recordings. ($39.99 new, free update, 5.0 MB)
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TextExpander 3.1.1 -- Smile - née SmileOnMyMac - has upgraded its typing shortcut utility TextExpander to version 3.1.1. The maintenance release fixes a couple of serious bugs, including a potential crash and an issue that could cause you to lose all your saved snippets (the customizable shortcuts that you type to trigger longer text strings). The update also includes a fix for the Adapt to Case option. ($34.95 new, free update, 4.4 MB)
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Typinator 4.1 -- Typinator 4.1 brings a slew of fixes and improvements to the text-expansion utility. Among them are speed boosts for Quick Search and text file imports, clearer behavior during installation and in-application updating, and corrections for text expansion with Gmail in Firefox, Amazon's Kindle for Mac, Komodo, and Apple Mail. Developer Ergonis Software offers more detailed release notes. (Γé¼19.99 new, free update, 3.2 MB)
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Interarchy 10.0.2 -- Nolobe's file transfer client Interarchy, which recently saw a major revision to 10.0, has now been bumped to version 10.0.2 to fix more bugs discovered after the main release. The latest bug fixes address various issues with Net Disks, and also correct problems with dragging and editing bookmarks, installing the Interarchy command line tool, and using the Open menu items. Also included in the latest upgrade are numerous improvements to Interarchy's Amazon S3 support. Note that this release also disables SSH ControlMaster, which was reportedly causing performance issues; a hidden preference key can be used to turn it back on. See Nolobe's blog for full release notes. ($49.95 new, free update, 6.5 MB)
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Snow Leopard Graphics Update -- Apple has released the Snow Leopard Graphics Update to address graphics problems in games and graphics applications. In particular, the update addresses frame rate performance problems in Portal and Team Fortress 2 on certain Macs, and fixes a bug that could cause Aperture 3 and StarCraft II to crash or freeze. Macworld is now reporting that the update can significantly improve graphics performance in other games as well. It's available via Software Update or the Apple Support Downloads page. (Free, 65.65 MB)
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Keyboard Maestro 4.3.2 -- Stairways Software has upgraded its flagship Keyboard Maestro utility to version 4.3.2. The minor update addresses aesthetic and functional issues alike. On the visual side, the new version improves the look of disabled keyboard actions to make them more obviously disabled. On the usability side, various tweaks improve typing performance, correct issues with rogue characters, and fix a crash that could occur when referenced files were removed. Additionally, the release adds a configurable command for osascript, which enables you to execute AppleScript plug-ins as 32-bit. Keyboard Maestro requires Mac OS X 10.5 or higher, and a free trial is available. ($36 new, free upgrade, 9.0 MB)
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As many of you have noticed, version 1.2 of the TidBITS News app has appeared in the App Store. The chief goal of this version is to support iOS 4's multitasking (see "What is Fast App Switching?," 23 June 2010). We also modernized the way the app presents its interface when playing a podcast, and updated the graphics to look nice on the iPhone 4's Retina display.
But these feature updates, though surprisingly non-trivial to achieve, aren't the subject of this article. The reason I'm writing this article is to explain why some people still using iOS 3 - either on an iPad because that's all it runs right now, or on an older iPhone or iPod touch that doesn't support iOS 4 or hasn't been upgraded to iOS 4 - are receiving an error dialog from iTunes complaining that TidBITS News requires a newer version of iOS.
Put simply, if you are using iOS 3 and you get this error dialog from iTunes, I recommend selecting the "Do not warn me again" checkbox and clicking OK. You aren't missing out on anything by not getting the update, and the version of TidBITS News you've already installed will continue to work fine. The people who are hurt are iPad users and users of older iPhone and iPod touch models who never installed the TidBITS News app in the first place, since now they can't obtain the app at all. But let me explain what happened.
The first version of the TidBITS News app (1.0) was developed to run under iOS 3.1.2, because that was current at the time. When the iPad appeared, sporting iOS 3.2, TidBITS News ran in emulation mode on it; this was acceptable, but a bug in iOS 3.2 caused the app to behave differently than it did on iOS 3.1.x, so we issued a new version (1.1) that fixed the problem. TidBITS News then ran fine on iOS 3.1.x and in emulation mode on the iPad on iOS 3.2.
When iOS 4.0 appeared, it was necessary to revise TidBITS News once more, to be a good multitasking citizen. But these and other changes necessary for compatibility with the new system meant that it would be difficult to maintain backwards compatibility with iOS 3.1.x. So we decided to drop future support for iOS 3.1.x, figuring that the vast majority of iPhone and iPod touch users who would be likely to get the app would have updated to iOS 4.0 anyway.
At the same time, we expected TidBITS News to continue working in emulation mode on the iPad, for which Apple has not yet issued its iOS 4 update. To ensure this, we set the app in Xcode to have a Deployment Target of iOS 3.2. The Deployment Target is the earliest system version on which you are willing for your app to run. And, sure enough, we then tested the new version of the app (1.2) both on devices running iOS 4 and on iPads running iOS 3.2 or 3.2.1, and everything worked fine.
Then it came time to submit the app to the App Store via Apple's iTunes Connect administration site. When I tried to upload the binary of the file to iTunes Connect (first via the Web site, and a subsequent time via Apple's Application Loader utility), it failed with this error:
The binary you uploaded was invalid. An application targeting the iPhone device family may not require an iPhone OS Deployment Target of 3.2, which is an iPad-only OS.
This was a puzzling error, because it was clear from our experience that an iPhone application may perfectly well require an iPhone OS Deployment Target of 3.2, since our app did and in our testing it worked precisely as desired and expected. Matt Neuburg (the developer of the TidBITS News app) queried iTunes Connect support, pointing this out, and was sent what amounted to a canned response advising him to make sure the app was compatible with iOS 4. This response was completely irrelevant and unhelpful, since the app was iOS 4-compatible. Next, I asked iTunes Connect support the same question. The canned non-answer I received told me to read the iTunes Connect Developers Guide and the Developer Program Overview, neither of which address our question at all.
When I pushed further for an actual answer, or at least some information that was related to the question, iTunes Connect support simply told us to use a Developer Technical Support incident. Since this back-and-forth had taken weeks, not days, we were too frustrated to wait any longer.
So Matt simply gave up, and set the app's Deployment Target to iOS 4. After that, iTunes Connect accepted it, and after the requisite 11 days or so in purgatory (only 1 of which was spent in review), it was approved. The result is that it is now available, but you can't obtain it for the iPad, even though we know that it could run perfectly well on the iPad in emulation mode (when the Deployment Target is iOS 3.2). In fact, all of us at TidBITS are running TidBITS News 1.2 on our iPads, supplying it to ourselves via Ad Hoc Distribution. So we can do this, but you can't, because of the App Store's inexplicable refusal to accept the iPad-compatible build of the app. Sorry!
We're well aware that this isn't an ideal situation. There are a variety of solutions:
Apple could change iTunes Connect such that it accepts our app, since it doesn't seem as though there's any reason it shouldn't be accepted. That seems unlikely.
Apple could release iOS 4 for the iPad. This will indeed probably happen within the next month or three. At that point, the TidBITS News app should become available for iPad users again at the App Store. At most, we'd have to recompile and resubmit, and it's unlikely that we'd have to do even that.
Matt could create an iPad-native interface for the TidBITS News app, such that it would be native on all the iOS hardware platforms. This is a reasonable idea, but it hasn't happened yet. (Free app, limited time, our Web site looks good on the iPad, insert all the usual excuses...)
Regardless, we regret any confusion that this situation has caused, and we ask you to understand that the problem stems from Apple's policies and lack of communicativeness, not from anything we intended to have happen.
If you do have an iOS 4 device, I'd encourage you to take a look at the app for a clean and simple TidBITS reading experience that works whether or not you're online. And if you have an iPad or an iOS 3.1.x device and you're already running TidBITS News 1.1, it will continue working just fine.
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For some people, Apple's Spotlight technology is a great boon, shining bright light into the dark nooks and crannies of a hard disk. For others, particularly those who want to search primarily by file name, Spotlight can be annoying to use. I fall into that latter group - I know what my documents are called, for the most part, so if I'm looking for a document, I almost always search by file name (when I do search by "contents" - all file metadata, including textual content - I'm usually disappointed).
One frequently mentioned solution to the Spotlight problem is the freeware EasyFind from DEVONtechnologies, which Matt reviewed in "EasyFind 4.0: It's Easy, It Finds, It's Free" (11 October 2007). But EasyFind is relatively slow, since it doesn't index your hard disk, and Spotlight can be tweaked to work more the way many of us want, with a few simple settings. There's nothing new here, but lots of Mac users still aren't aware of these options.
First, if you usually know roughly where the files you're looking for are located, you can restrict Spotlight to search the current Finder folder by default, instead of This Mac. To do this, choose Finder > Preferences, click the Advanced button, and choose Search the Current Folder from the pop-up menu. From then on, when you invoke the Finder's Find command by choosing File > Find (Command-F), searches will be limited to the current folder showing in the frontmost Finder window. This option first appeared in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Second, if you usually want to search by file name instead of the file's contents, you can make sure the Search bar at the top of the Finder window is set to File Name without requiring an additional click. Hold down the Shift key, and choose File > Find by Name (Command-Shift-F). This command is available in both Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard.
If you want Find by Name to be your default action, you can switch the keyboard shortcuts using the Keyboard Shortcuts view of the Keyboard preference pane. Just click the + button, and add entries for "Find" and "Find by Name..." (note the three periods - not an ellipsis - after the name) with the appropriate keyboard shortcuts. You may have to log out or restart for the new shortcuts to become active, and I've found remapping shortcuts in this fashion to be a bit finicky, sometimes requiring multiple tries. Again, you can do this in both Leopard and Snow Leopard.
One last suggestion. You can adjust the look of the search results window just like any other Finder window, and once you've done that, the Finder remembers it for subsequent usages. To do this, first start a search. Once the Finder window has search options in it, switch to the desired view (I prefer List view - choose View > as List or press Command-2) and choose View > Show View Options to reveal the View Options window. In it, you can select the "Always open in list view" checkbox if you desire, and you can pick which columns appear. I prefer Date Modified to the default of Last Opened, and yes, it's a darn shame that not all columns are available - notably Size. I have no idea why Apple won't allow us to see the size, version, comments, and labels of found items. You can also resize columns by dragging their column separators and rearrange columns by dragging their headers. Once you get the window looking the way you like, close it, and the Finder should remember its layout next time.
A few quick caveats. If you have "Always open folders in a new window" selected in the Finder's General preferences, using either of the Find commands will create a new window that defaults to whatever location is set in the "New Finder windows open" pop-up menu, which will likely be confusing. I recommend deselecting the "Always open folders in a new window" option. Also, these settings apply only when you start the search from the Finder, not if you use the Spotlight menu or Command-Spacebar.
If you find yourself changing Spotlight's Search bar settings every time you look for a file, perhaps these settings will make your life just a little bit easier.
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I don't TiVo - if you'll forgive my use of the word as a verb - but I do timeshift my TV watching. I can't recall the last time I watched anything live on the tube. All my favorite shows - from "60 Minutes" and "Frontline" to "Doctor Who," "The Big Bang Theory," and "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" - are recorded and archived for future consumption.
And being a Mac nerd, I do this the Mac way.
I am a longtime user of EyeTV-tuning gizmos, which are made by Elgato for use, primarily, with the Mac. For years, I have depended on my Apple computers and my EyeTV-tuning gadgetry to convert my programs into digital bits so I could watch them whenever and wherever I wanted.
EyeTV devices plug into a Mac's USB port and essentially turn the computer into a TiVo-style device. They detect analog (NTSC) and digital (ATSC) signals and display them on the Mac's screen, which becomes a TV. Users then record what they want, using EyeTV software on their Macs to change channels, set up automated recordings (via online TV Guide listings) and more. Once recorded, the programs are normal video files that can be viewed in iTunes or other software, converted to formats that can play on iOS devices, or even fiddled with in video editing software.
My love affair with Elgato's EyeTV products has grown gradually as they have matured. There was a time when they were awful - crude and unreliable, with video quality that was uniformly terrible. Much of this was not Elgato's fault - Macs (and computers in general) were not powerful and dependable enough to handle the necessary video processing properly, unlike a modern 27-inch iMac that makes a jaw-dropping television when Elgato-ed up. A detailed timeline of Elgato's hardware and software products can be found on Wikipedia.
Though Elgato products are now fantastic, using them can result in annoying moments. Every so often, I will overlook some little setting or detail and a favorite program won't be recorded. The use of Elgato gear is a decidedly geeky kind of TV timeshifting, and not for technophobes.
However, problems with the Elgato experience are, once again, not always Elgato's fault. These days, Elgato has been in a running technology battle with the likes of the cable giant Comcast, which is changing how its programs are fed to viewers. Comcast's changes have forced Elgato to adapt - which it has done very nicely.
Despite the Spanish-sounding name, Elgato is based in Munich, Germany, but has offices in San Francisco. The company has sterling credentials - its founder, Markus Fest, is the creator of the Toast disc-burning software for Mac, and the company's product evangelist for years (the aptly named Mike Evangelist), was one of the key minds behind iDVD while at Apple. (He recently took a job at Minnesota-based Code 42 Software - creators of the frequently lauded CrashPlan online backup software and service - as vice president of marketing. In the interests of full disclosure, Mike is a friend and fellow St. Paul-area resident.)
QAM, I Am -- Older EyeTV tuners, like the EyeTV EZ and EyeTV Wonder, recorded only analog signals. Later tuners, starting with the EyeTV 250, went digital in a variety of ways. As the age of high-definition over-the-air broadcasts dawned, for instance, I could connect an EyeTV tuner to a simple indoor antenna and pull down pristine digital signals.
But I now have an even cooler trick up my sleeve.
The roughly two dozen digital channels available over the air are also available via my Comcast feed, in digital form (and often in high definition) at no cost. The channels include all the network affiliates as well as other digital options. My wife's beloved Spanish-language Univisi├│n channel is on the list, for instance.
These channels, right there for the watching by any Comcast user who knows where to look and has the correct gear, are known as "clear QAM" or "in the clear" channels. Other cable providers offer similar ones.
Getting all this free digital goodness, in my case, is easy. All I have to do is:
Plug an EyeTV Hybrid tuner into a USB port on one of my Macs.
Connect the coaxial cable with my Comcast feed into the other end of the EyeTV Hybrid.
Fire up the EyeTV software.
Initiate a setup assistant to look for all those digital channels via the coax hookup.
Like magic, the EyeTV tuner and software sniff out all the free QAM channels and deposit them on the channel-list section of the EyeTV 3 application. I can then associate them with TV Guide's terrific online listings in order to set up automatic recordings of my favorite programs. (Only later-model EyeTV tuners, starting with the EyeTV 500, are able to perform this trick.)
As I write this on a MacBook Pro on a Sunday evening, "60 Minutes" in high definition is about to begin. The EyeTV Hybrid tuner will record it, and the EyeTV software will then export it to iTunes for my MacBook Pro or iPad enjoyment. Every weekday evening, I do the same with my wife's fave Univisi├│n soap opera, "Hasta Que el Dinero nos Separe" ("Until Money Do Us Part"... don't ask).
Tuning Me, Tuning You -- This great TV-recording technology is not unique to Elgato, to be clear. There are other Mac tuners (from the likes of Equinux) as well as a gazillion tuners for Windows (I like the Hauppauge ones). Older Elgato hardware was derived from tuners designed for Windows, in fact. Certain PC-centric tuners can even be used with Macs in tandem with the EyeTV software.
To complete this little circle, Elgato's latest tuner, the EyeTV Hybrid that I'm using, is packaged with Windows drivers so it can be used either with a Mac or in tandem with Microsoft's Windows Media Center.
What sets Elgato apart is its Macintosh-flavored elegance and its attention to detail. The EyeTV software has evolved into a masterpiece of interface design, with massive flexibility. For instance, its Smart Guides feature lets me do with TV recording what iTunes does with its Smart Playlists, giving me fine control over what gets recorded. Exporting to iTunes is, of course, killer, since I can then do whatever I please with the video, including transfer it to an iPod or an iPad.
For these and other reasons, EyeTV is my preferred means for keeping track of my favorite programs. I can't rave about it enough.
I'm reminded from time to time, though, that I'm doing all this TV stuff on a computer instead of a simplified, idiot-proof set-top box. With so many hardware and software variables - not to mention the occasional kernel panic - recordings occasionally won't happen as intended and I'll be deprived of my latest show. Failing to record my wife's latest soap-opera episode makes me feel awful, even though she's sweet about it.
To be fair, this will usually happen because of user error. The complexity of managing EyeTV 3 recordings means I'll inevitably make a mistake. So when there's something important that I want to ensure gets recorded, I've been known to set up multiple Macs, each with an EyeTV tuner, at different locations, to minimize the possibility of coming up empty. Crazy, I know, but I'd hate to screw up and miss a "V" episode.
Adapt, Adapt, Adapt -- Elgato has had to muster all of its ingenuity amid changing times in the cable- and satellite-TV realms. Old ways of recording programs using EyeTV gear are rapidly being rendered obsolete, so Elgato has to come up with new approaches.
Comcast, for instance, is in the process of phasing out most of its old-style analog service and nudging its customers toward digital offerings. In other words, those long accustomed to using Comcast service with a coaxial connection directly into their TVs now have to get cable boxes.
This creates complications for me, and for other Elgato users.
For the longest time, I've been able to get a full roster of analog channels, about 100 in all, the same way I accessed those QAM channels - with my Comcast connection jacked directly into my EyeTV Hybrid tuner.
Now Comcast has forced an unpleasant choice on me:
Do QAM as usual, with the capability to set up automated recordings via the EyeTV application, but give up analog channels entirely. Boo!
Get the full roster of analog channels on a Mac via a set-top box, but give up QAM entirely, along with automated EyeTV recording. Double boo!
Use a physical switcher to shift between the two previous options. I loathe this since it creates a mess of cables that is a far cry from the older, one-cable-into-the-EyeTV approach, and because it puts even more burden on me to avoid making mistakes.
Elgato, thankfully, has come up with an alternative solution for those who have cable or satellite set-top boxes.
Its latest device, the EyeTV HD, is not a tuner. Instead it plugs into composite and (if available) component ports on a set-top box to record whatever channel the box happens to be set to. Channel switching is done via an IR blaster, a zapper that sits in front of the box and works as a remote. IR blasters tend to work well, but are prone to error, when something is placed between the blaster and the IR receiver, for instance, or if the blaster is knocked out of alignment.
Your Mac becomes the brain of this Rube Goldberg system, running the EyeTV software, and connecting to the EyeTV HD via USB and to the TV via DVI or HDMI (essentially using the TV as the display). Recordings are deposited onto the Mac's hard drive and exported to iTunes, as usual.
The ideal Mac for this is, of course, Apple's new unibody Mac mini with an HDMI port for HDTV use. I tested the EyeTV HD and Mac mini with a big, beautiful LG plasma set.
The EyeTV HD is not the most elegant approach to TV recording and requires a bit of fiddling, but it works for the most part. And it goes a long way to answering the question, "Why in the world would I connect a Mac to my HDTV?"
The EyeTV HD solution is great in one key respect: All shows, HD or not, on all channels, are available for recording (limited only by the channel packages to which you are subscribed). The device even bypasses copy protection associated with some programs, since recording does not occur over the HDMI connection that enables this annoying impediment.
Elgato has recently started supporting iOS 4 with its iPad- and iPhone-savvy iOS app, which functions as an extension of an EyeTV user's Mac setup. You must first set up your Wi-Fi router to permit EyeTV access on that network, or via 3G or a Wi-Fi network at a separate location. Once this is done (which is a bit of a headache, largely due to router-configuration complexities), EyeTV 3 recordings and even live TV magically become viewable as Internet video, streaming from your Mac to your iOS device (not always smoothly, alas). You can access record settings and show listings from afar, too.
Elgato keeps working on the encoding end, too. It provides a separate USB-stick device called the Turbo.264 HD, which dramatically speeds up video conversion (from EyeTV's format to iTunes-friendly form, say), especially on older Macs. A software-only Turbo.264 HD version without hardware acceleration has just been released.
What's next, Elgato? I am dying to know what Elgato will come up with next.
I dislike the remote that Elgato bundles with its tuners, for instance, and have long lobbied for a cooler one. The logical approach to this problem nowadays, is, naturally, an iOS 4 app to turn one of Apple's devices into an EyeTV remote. I'll wager Elgato is cooking up something like that.
What about EyeTV software for Windows? Hey, that could happen. Apple created a version of iTunes for Windows, didn't it? I'd welcome a Windows-based EyeTV program since most of my Macs run Windows 7 as well as Mac OS X, via Boot Camp. It would be fantastic for my Macs to be fully EyeTV-capable regardless of which operating system I happened to be using.
As I've worked on this article, I have become increasingly amazed at how Elgato products (I must have used a dozen or more different EyeTV tuners over the years) have permeated my digital existence. It's one of the reasons I feel so lucky to be a Mac user. TiVo does have its fanatics, but given a choice, I'll go with a Mac and EyeTV tuner every time.
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Look! A book. A book Nook! Nook took books. Books! Look.
Barnes & Noble has changed the name of its ebook-reading software for iOS from eReader to Nook. Nook is also the name of its separate ebook reading device, and, as with Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble has realized that it should brand the entire ecosystem with the same name. This brings its iPhone/iPod touch-compatible app in harmony with the separate Nook for iPad app, also updated with the new name.
Download the new Nook app, and log in with your Barnes & Noble credentials. You can then download titles again that you want locally, and set up the appearance of book pages once more. The revised app supports fast-app switching (see "What is Fast App Switching?," 23 June 2010), and renders details at the iPhone 4's higher resolution.
In testing, I found the Nook app to offer substantially more choice than iBooks and Kindle in setting up the appearance of a page, without providing too many or poor options. Barnes & Noble made excellent choices in the fonts offered for onscreen display.
You can also set the margins of a page (nearly flush to the four edges or indented), and choose colors for particular elements instead of picking from preset colors.
The revised iOS app is a separate download from the previous eReader app. You can remove the old app, but you will lose all annotations, highlights, and notes. Barnes & Noble (at least in the eReader release) didn't synchronize such information with a central server, unlike Apple with iBooks and Amazon with Kindle.
You also lose any custom themes you set up in eReader - specific combinations of background color, font, and type size. If you want to keep notes and settings, retain the old app.
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