about the personal computing experience. · book while adding new features specifically designed...
TRANSCRIPT
ATPM12.05 / May 2006 Volume 12, Number 5
About This Particular Macintosh: About the personal computing experience.™
ATPM 12.05 1 Cover
Cover ArtCopyright © 2006 Catherine von Dennefeld1. We need new cover art each month. Write2 to us!
The ATPM Staff
Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Michael Tsai3
Managing Editor Christopher Turner4
Associate Editor/Reviews Paul Fatula5
Copy Editors Chris Lawson6
Ellyn Ritterskamp7
Brooke Smith8
VacantWeb Editor Lee Bennett9
Webmaster Michael Tsai10
Beta Testers The Staff11
Contributing Editors Eric Blair12
David Blumenstein13
Matthew Glidden14
Ted Goranson15
Andrew Kator16
Robert Paul Leitao17
Wes Meltzer18
David Ozab19
Sylvester Roque20
Charles Ross21
Mark Tennent22
Evan Trent23
Vacant1http://www.eternalrings.com2mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]
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ATPM 12.05 2 Cover
Artwork & Design
Layout and Design Michael Tsai24
Web Design Simon Griffee25
Cartoonist Matt Johnson26
Blue Apple Icon De-signs
Mark Robinson
Other Art RD NovoGraphics Director Vacant
EmeritusRD Novo, Robert Madill, Belinda Wagner, Ja-mal Ghandour, Edward Goss, Tom Iovino, DanielChvatik, Grant Osborne, Gregory Tetrault, RaenaArmitage, Johann Campbell.
ContributorsLee Bennett, Paul Fatula, Ted Goranson, MattJohnson, Chris Lawson, Robert Paul Leitao, WesMeltzer, Sylvester Roque, Charles Ross, Mark Ten-nent, Christopher Turner, Frank H. Wu, Macintoshusers like you.
SubscriptionsSign up for free subscriptions using the Web form27.
Where to Find ATPMOnline and downloadable issues are available at theatpm Web Site28. atpm is a product of atpm, Inc.© 1995-2006. All Rights Reserved. ISSN: 1093-2909.
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ReprintsArticles, original art, and desktop pictures may notbe reproduced without the express permission of the
author or artist, unless otherwise noted. You may,however, print or distribute copies of this issue ofatpm as a whole, provided that it is not modified inany way. Authors may be contacted through atpm’seditorial staff, or at their e-mail addresses, when pro-vided.
Legal StuffAbout This Particular Macintosh may be uploadedto any online area or included on a CD-ROM com-pilation, so long as the file remains intact and unal-tered, but all other rights are reserved. All informa-tion contained in this issue is correct to the best ofour knowledge. The opinions expressed in atpm arenot necessarily those of the entire atpm staff. Prod-uct and company names and logos may be registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Thank youfor reading this far, and we hope that the rest of themagazine is more interesting than this.
• • •
Thanks for reading atpm.
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ATPM 12.05 3 Cover
SponsorsAbout This Particular Macintosh has been free since 1995, and we intend to keep it that way. Our editorsand staff are volunteers with real jobs who believe in the Macintosh way of computing. We don’t make aprofit, nor do we plan to. As such, we rely on advertisers and readers like you to help us pay for our Website and other expenses.
• • •
You can help support atpm by buying from online retailers using our links1. If you’re going to buy fromthem anyway, why not help us at the same time?
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ATPM 12.05 4 Sponsors
Welcomeby Robert Paul Leitao, [email protected]
Welcome to the May issue of About This ParticularMacintosh! In this month’s column, we look at recentproduct announcements and some important trendsemerging in the Macintosh world of personal comput-ing and the PC business in general. Our publicationcelebrates what we call the “personal computing ex-perience.” We encourage you to read this month’sissue in its entirety. We bring you the latest news,views, and reviews in an easy-to-read monthly for-mat. We begin this month’s Welcome where we leftoff in April1.
Boot CampIn last month’s Welcome we alluded to Apple an-nouncing Windows functionality on the Mac. WhileMac OS X is known to be a superior, more secureoperating system, the perceived comparative lack ofapplications for the Mac versus those available forusers of Windows XP was considered a drawback forMac owners.
In early April, Apple announced Boot Camp2.Boot Camp provides the means for installing Win-dows XP on a Macintosh computer and allows usersto choose between Mac OS X and Windows XP atstartup. Released now as a public beta, Boot Campwill be included as a commercial solution in theforthcoming upgrade to OS X called Leopard.
In addition to Boot Camp, solutions are comingto market allowing the installation of Windows on aMac through “virtualization” or running Windows onMac OS X. The principal benefit of this solution is theability to run Mac OS X and Windows applicationssimultaneously and without the need to restart thecomputer.
Apple’s migration to the Intel architecture willprovide greater opportunities to install and run ap-plications for other operating systems that have thisarchitecture in common. Whether or not Apple willprovide Mac users with its own virtualization solutionis a matter of much speculation.
The 17′′ MacBook ProIn late April, Apple debuted the new 17′′ MacBookPro. Introduced in time for the NAB2006 media
1http://www.atpm.com/12.04/welcome.shtml2http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/
show, the new portable replaces the 17′′ G4 Power-Book while adding new features specifically designedfor the needs of media pros such as FireWire 800 anda dual-layer SuperDrive.
Dell vs. AppleDell Computer is the undisputed leader in global PCunit sales. Apple Computer is considered the world’sleader in PC design. Aside from acknowledged lead-ership in different aspects of the PC business, whatmight these two industry giants have in common? Forone, the two companies have similar market vales. Atthe end of April, Dell was valued on Wall Street at$60.44 billion while Apple was valued at $59.77 bil-lion, a difference of only $670 million in value betweenthe two companies.
Why is it that the world’s leader in PC unit ship-ments, with revenue in its last fiscal year of about $56billion dollars, has similar market value to a companysuch as Apple with annual revenue in its last fiscalyear of about $14 billion?
The answer: research and development. Appleinvests significantly more in the development of newproducts than Dell, and this investment provides thecompany with higher gross margins on each productsold.
In fact, to keep Dell’s market value from droppingthrough the floor the company has used more than$18 billion in cash to buy back its own shares. Re-ducing the number of shares outstanding is the onlymeans the company has to keep earnings per sharerising at a rate acceptable to shareholders. The com-pany has now used $5 billion more in cash than theaggregate net profits the company has earned sinceincorporation. In other words, Dell is cannibalizingitself in order to keep investors from fleeing the com-pany.
The more of this story: Investment in innovationis often the better path to shareholder wealth. Dellpushed innovation in manufacturing and distributionduring the 1990s, and this innovation lead to Dell’smarket leadership and financial rewards for the com-pany’s shareholders. Absent meaningful investmentsin R&D, Dell’s share price has remained relativelyflat for the past few years.
ATPM 12.05 5 Welcome
Apple continues to grow in revenue and marketinfluence due to award-winning products and a com-mitment to research and development. Watch forApple’s fortunes to continue to rise as the companycompletes its transition to the Intel architecture andreleases new iPods and the next upgrade to Mac OSX in time to compete head-to head with Microsoft’smuch-delayed Windows Vista.
Quarterly ResultsFor the quarterly period ended April 1, 2006 Applereported its second highest three-month revenue totalin the company’s history with revenue of $4.36 billionand net earnings of $.47 per diluted share. Mac ship-ments increased four percent year-over-year to 1.112million units. In the same period Apple shipped over8.5 million iPods.
Buy a Mac, Give a PC BackIn late April, Apple announced a free computer re-cycling program beginning in June for US customerswho purchase a new Mac through the online Applestore or at any of the company’s retail store loca-tions. The recycling program is intended to reducethe amount of hazardous waste created by the dis-posal of personal computers and consumer electron-ics. Environmentally conscious customers interestedin a new computer may see this program as anotherreason to consider purchasing a Mac.
Our May issue includes:
Bloggable: Yes, Drill Sergeant!Something’s wrong: Apple’s demeanor has turned somilitary-oriented lately. First, they went from hippiefruit-“flavored” computers to plain white and metaldress uniforms. Now, they’re even calling their dual-booting software “Boot Camp.” Hey, Steve, whileyou’re at it, resuscitate “Be All You Can Be,” andwe’ll be set, booting XP in our standard-issue whiteand silver dress code. . .. Or not, if this month is anyindication. Consensus opinion is that Apple is ac-tually subverting our monolithic corporate overlord,Microsoft. Either way, plus more blogosphere awards,Jason O’Grady, 20 years of Apple, and more in thismonth’s Bloggable.
MacMuser: Data CompostingWhat on earth does one do with back copies of atpm?Feed them through the shredder? Send them for re-cycling? Is there any use for digital detritus and elec-tronic ephemera?
MacMuser: Fish Out of WaterYou can talk to the trees but they won’t listen toyou, so try sea gulls instead. Their window on theworld opens new vistas for Mac users worried thatBoot Camp spells the end of Mac OS X.
Web SitesATPW returns with music from a hundred yearsago, modern music you probably haven’t heard, andthe delicate sound of the Internal Revenue Code.You’ll also find shortcuts through the labyrinth oftelephone customer service and a game you can playwhile you’re waiting for someone to pick up thephone.
FileMaking: Text Parsing With FileMakerThis month, FileMaking returns by looking at build-ing functions for text parsing.
Outliners: Outlining Workflows and Con-ceptDrawTed Goranson looks at outliners in a work flow inthis month’s ATPO, with ConceptDraw Suite as anexample.
Desktop Pictures: EAA AirVentureAircraft enthusiasts will enjoy this month’s desktoppictures provided by Chris Lawson. The images fea-ture planes being shown and flown at the 2005 Ex-perimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture event.
CortlandWe learn Cortland is a James Brown fan, and there’sa lot more to Brody than meets the eye—much more.
Review: Footlights Pro 2.1After a recent How-To for performing video extrac-tion, Sylvester Roque learns of another utility for thejob and takes it for a spin.
Review: Hardsleeveatpm continues its long-running offerings of case re-views. This month, Frank Wu looks at Axio’s hardexterior laptop sleeve—the Hardsleeve.
Review: iPod 5GApple’s iPod juggernaut continues its revision cyclewith arguably the best iPod yet.
ATPM 12.05 6 Welcome
Review: iTunes Catalog 2.0.1iTunes Catalog provides handy access to your libraryfrom a remote location—even the ability to play mu-sic files. Though it was found to have a few roughedges and bugs, it’s still a very cool way to accessyour music.
Review: SmartBoard USB5000Is there an affordable ergonomic keyboard built forthe Macintosh that will hold up under the worst atouch-typist can deliver? Datadesk may have builtone.
ATPM 12.05 7 Welcome
E-MailSuperDuper1
Yes, it’s everything the man says.—Don Munro
• • •
I also dropped Retrospect several years back whenthey went to Microsoft-like options and pricing andincreasingly poor tech support (and when my tapedrives no longer had sufficient volume). Most re-cently, I’ve been using SuperDuper and am veryhappy with it—simple to use and it works withouthassle. It would be nice to see an archival feature forprevious backups so you could get at data (or fileschanged) from several months back.
—R Rayner
• • •
SuperDuper is the best Mac back-up utility I’ve hadthe pleasure to use. Support (should you ever needit) for the application is top-notch too.
—Krishna Sadasivam
• • •
I have been using Carbon Copy Cloner for severalyears now and wonder if anyone out in the Macsphere can comment on comparing Carbon CopyCloner with SuperDuper.
—Jack Barr
• • •
I've written a few comparison comments on MacUpdate2
and VersionTracker3. Here’s a post from Apple Dis-cussions that I made last February (the original’slong gone):
I was reasonably satisfied with CCC(which I paid for) before switching to SDso I have experience using both.Some of SD’s features/benefits:
1http://www.atpm.com/12.04/superduper.shtml2http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/138033http://www.versiontracker.com/php/feedback/article
.php?story=20050310120611838
• Nicer, “out-of-the-boxfriendly” user interface
• User interface is responsiveduring copying
• Better system resourcemanagement
• Superior documentationand support
• Smart Update is fasterand more robust than thepsync4 Perl script CCCuses
• Handles cases CCC thatdoesn’t (floating owner/on-the-fly verify)
• Doesn’t copy-then-deleteitems like virtual memoryand temp files
• Updated fairly consis-tently, with optional auto-matic updating
• Copy scripts (not just top-level folder selection)
• Saved settings• Safety Clone
Aside from cost (maybe), the only advan-tage I can think of that CCC currently of-fers is a built-in scheduler and that’s com-ing in the next major SD release.While CCC works fine for many usersthere are valid reasons why some mightprefer SD instead, or consider it worth-while upgrade (as I did).
Of course that was written before version 2 wasavailable.
Maybe they exist, but I’ve never seen convincingarguments why CCC is superior to SD.
—sjk
Performing a Video Extraction5
Have you considered the much-less-time-consuminganalog-to-DV option6?
4http://www.dan.co.jp/cases/macosx/psync.html5http://www.atpm.com/12.03/howto.shtml6http://www.macworld.com/2004/07/reviews/firewiredi
gitalvideoconverters/index.php
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The article is a bit out of date now, but the infor-mation is basically the same. There are now a numberof other models from Canopus from which to choose(high-end to low-end). Best of all, you would be cut-ting out most of the export, import, and translationsteps by going this route. Also, your final video qual-ity might not lose as much in the translation process.I don’t know this for sure, because I haven’t tried ityet.
I’ve been researching both options for over a yearand have frequently thought about doing things ex-actly as you have done them (I may go both routessimultaneously, just to be safe; but prices will have tocontinue to drop before I do that); however, I suspectsome quality is lost converting from VOB to DV. AmI wrong about that?
I like the idea of converting my many home videosdirectly to DVD, as you have done, without goingthrough the bottleneck of my computer’s hard drive,but I also really want to be able to edit my homevideos in iMovie, and I do not like the thought ofall the extra steps involved in converting them fromVOB to DV and the possibility of quality loss.
I have read a number of customer reviews ofanalog-to-DV converters at various sites, and mostof them are quite positive. Are you in a position toget “loaner” analog-to-DV converters?
—Mike Welfl
I did consider some of those options briefly.At the time, I had a Blue and White G3 thathad been upgraded to a G4. I wasn’t sure itwas going to be up to the task. The othernice thing about this method is that it shouldwork for those folks that have combinationvideo recorders/DVD burners as long as theunit produces standard DVDs.
I’m not in a position to borrow an analog-DV converter at the moment but may be ableto do so soon. With the transfers that I havecompleted thus far there has not been anysignificant quality loss. The tapes that I havetried are not a good indication, though, be-cause they started out in pretty bad condition.Any time things get converted from one formatto another and then back again (MPEG-DV-MPEG) there is the potential for loss ofquality—especially if the format/settings arenot chosen correctly.
—Sylvester Roque
• • •
For a very straight-forward and simple solution forbringing your DVD projects into QuickTime for edit-ing or converting, try using DVDxDV7. I have usedthis application often and with great success.
The basic application is $25, and the professionalversion is around $80. Just a heads up—the trialversion is free, but will put the words “TRIAL VER-SION” across your imported video.
—Bryan Walls
DVDxDV is one of the applications that I ex-perimented with while trying this project. Ialso tried a program called Cinematize from Mi-raizon.com. Given my current budget, MPEGStreamclip had an advantage. There are alsoa few other options available. I hope to do acomparison of these options in the near future.
—Sylvester Roque
• • •
After 25 years or so as a PC user, I just bought a newIntel Mac mini, primarily because I wanted to editvideo that I had archived from my DVR to DVD. Istruggled trying to figure out why iMovie did not rec-ognize the VOB files. Out of desperation, I found thisarticle a tremendous help. I followed the instructionsstep-by-step and succeeded at my first editing/DVDcreation without the usual efforts and confusion thatusually accompany breaking new ground like this. Iam enormously grateful for the instructions!
—John Dean
Thank you for the positive feedback. Thereare other hardware and software options avail-able. Hardware-based options are out of mybudget at the moment. I hope to test someof the other software options soon but manyof them require purchasing full versions of soft-ware ranging from $25 to $90 each.
—Sylvester Roque
Making Calendars in iPhoto ’068
Isn't there a way to print this at home?—Jason Madore
• • •
I guess you can print it to PDF, as you can do withphoto books, and then print the PDF file to paper.
7http://www.dvdxdv.com/DVDxDV.overview.htm8http://www.atpm.com/12.04/calendars.shtml
ATPM 12.05 9 E-Mail
The only thing missing will be the spiral. . .—Sergio Carmona
TVMini HD9
I’ve had this now for about two months, and it’s noth-ing short of awesome. At home, I get all the basicchannels. I noticed that I get them in Standard Def-inition, but if you go up in the higher numbers youget those same stations in high definition. In fact,all the major shows, news, and sports are in 1080ias well. I’ve recorded many of them even with thelittle antenna it comes with. I’m blown away at thequality. Here is what to remember if you are consid-ering: You’ll need a lot of space. CSI (Vegas) in HDwas more than 8 GB. After I removed the commer-cials, another cool feature of this product and soft-ware, it was only 5 GB. It should be noted that whenyou schedule it to record, you can automatically setit to compress it down for the iPod video when it’sdone. Also, check to see what the DTV coverage isin your area. It’s great at my house, but bad at mywork. Hopefully they’ll broadcast closer in the nextfew years. Otherwise, a medium to large HD antennapointed in the right direction can make this productshine. I even use it while I’m a passenger in cars, butreception is somewhat limited based on driving di-rection. This, too, would change if a broadcast towerwas put closer.
By the way, dark levels and color have a ton to dowith file size. Here is an example: I recorded Gray’sAnatomy (GA) and CSI Vegas on the same night.GA was 5.6 GB and CSI was 7.2 GB after recording.I edited commercials from both, and GA was 3.6 GBwhile CSI was 5.2 GB. Each were 1080i signals andexactly 41 minutes long. The only difference was CSIhas very heavy blacks and extremely rich colors. GAis light, due to the hospital scenes, and its colors aresubtle. Both look stunning. By the way, sometimesin playback there will be some stuttering. I’m tryingto figure out the best way to playback to avoid this—especially when it’s hooked up to an HDTV screen.
—Scott
• • •
There is, as yet, no really good way to use this orany other such device with encrypted digital cablesignals. . .maybe satellite too.
You can jury-rig it if you have a little spare cashand don’t mind getting your hands dirty with some
9http://www.atpm.com/12.04/tvmini-hd.shtml
simple AppleScripts. I’ve been using a G4 mini withan EyeTV to record encrypted digital cable for morethan two years now. I use the iRed/IRtrans10 soft-ware/hardware combo (I think this is the only extantOS X–compatible IR blaster) and a programmableremote like the Keyspan digital remote. Everything(Keyspan, iRed, EyeTV, iTunes, DVD Player, Quick-Time, etc.) is scriptable, so it’s easy to whip upsome AppleScripts to make the operation seamless:i.e. pause iTunes, turn on the TV, start EyeTV, andgo to fullscreen all with one button.
With some tweaking, this works very very well.The only problem is that you have no program guideand can’t use the TitanTV service. I started tolook into making a program guide with XCode andXMLTV, but it’s beyond my abilities.
—Silas
• • •
The only problem is that you have no pro-gram guide, and can't use the TitanTVservice.
Have you tried MacProgramGuide11? It usesZap2it instead of TitanTV.
—sjk
Copyleft, Right?12
Software companies need to be realistic and makesome distinctions between home users with multiplecomputers and businesses where multiple computersare actually being productive at the same time. Areindividuals with a desktop and laptop supposed tofeel morally bound to buy multiple copies when theycan only use one machine at a time? Even in familysettings (ours anyway), the times when two comput-ers are in use at once are rare, and even then thesecond user is probably a child doing homework. Ifyou buy a boxed copy of the Mac OS it will install onany machine that’s capable of running that version.You can install a box-specific copy on another modelby using target disk mode and installing through theoriginal box. I think it’s commendable that Appledoes not impose network restrictions, and it’s alsocommendable of Adobe to allow a copy of Photoshopor CS2 to be installed on both desktop and laptop intheir license. I think the Microsoft thing about the
10http://www.filewell.com/iRed/11http://www.coolmacsoftware.com/mpgmain.html12http://www.atpm.com/12.04/copyleft.shtml
ATPM 12.05 10 E-Mail
motherboard is hilarious—is that for real? Maybethey should just ask for donations.
—Jimmy Gleason
Path Finder13
Cocoatech recently released version 4.1 of PathFinder with significant improvements and newfeatures. The quirk of desktop filenames not word-wrapping when right-side label placement is enabledis still present, but as best I can tell, the bug ofnot remembering the View By setting (Name, Kind,Size, etc.) has been squashed. And the improved GoTo Folder function is fantastic.
A detailed list of new features and fixes14 is onCocoatech’s Web site.
—Lee Bennett
We’d love to hear your thoughts about our publication. Wealways welcome your comments, criticisms, suggestions, andpraise. Or, if you have an opinion or announcement aboutthe Macintosh platform in general, that’s OK too. Send youre-mail to [email protected]. All mail becomes the propertyof atpm.
13http://www.atpm.com/12.03/path-finder.shtml14http://www.cocoatech.com/changelog.php
ATPM 12.05 11 E-Mail
Bloggableby Wes Meltzer, [email protected]
Yes, Drill Sergeant!I don’t know but I’ve been told,Windows XP’s very cold.I don’t know but it’s been said,Redmond’s software’s made of lead.
In 1997, Steve Jobs invited Bill Gates to speak atMacworld Boston, in which Gates and Jobs publiclyagreed to collaborate on software. This elicited sig-nificant displeasure from the crowd, understandably,but guaranteed Apple that the Office suite would con-tinue to be available for Macs. It’s more than likelythat this deal is what saved the Mac, first and fore-most. But when Jobs said the following words, theaudience groaned:
[A corporate relationship] has stood outas a relationship that hasn’t been goingso well, but has the potential, I think, tobe great for both companies. And I’d liketo announce one of our first partnershipstoday, a very meaningful one, and that isone with Microsoft.
They jeered Steve, in shock, when he announcedthat Internet Explorer would be shipping as the de-fault Mac Web browser. Not to mention, when hebrought up the satellite video feed of Gates on theprojection screen. . .. Well, you could hear the boosechoing off the rafters. Gates, to his credit, justshrugged it off.
Oh, how the Macintosh ecosystem has changed inthe intervening nine years.
Almost a month ago now, Apple released a pub-lic beta of Boot Camp1, software that allows you tostart your Intel Mac in Windows XP. This is unfortu-nate for those who chipped in to the $13,000 prize Iwrote about last month2, but Apple’s solution is, forobvious reasons, somewhat less of a hack. This func-tionality will be built into 10.5, according to Apple.
This took just about everyone by surprise. Mygeneral feeling, and I’m sure I wrote about this butcouldn’t Spotlight it, was always that Apple wouldn’t
1http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/2http://www.tuaw.com/2006/03/16/winxp-on-a-mac-cont
est-is-over-dual-booting-success/
stop you from booting Windows but wouldn’t go outof its way to support it. Daring Fireball’s John Gru-ber just about nails it when he says, “after just a fewhours, it now seems so. . .obvious3.”
Huh? I’m still getting used to the idea of buyinga Mac that can boot Windows. On the one hand, itwould mean I could finally sync my Windows Mobile5.0 device with my computer. On the other hand, itwould mean booting Windows.
I’m not the only one torn about booting Win-dows either. “The Joy of Tech,” a Web comic,nailed my feelings exactly with a hilarious strip4
using the Boot Camp interface and another thatponders the existential question of why a Macuser would want to use Windows5. Codepoetponders the future6 of Mac software, with easydual-booting available (and concludes that it’s safe),and Paul Stamatiou suspects Apple is going tosteal Windows users7.
My fear is that this feels a little like that UPScommercial with the oracle you know, “Well, I can’tcompete with that.” Thankfully, OSx86 Project’sfounder, Mashugly, disagrees with me. He thinksthis is a way of resolving the conflict between Appleand Microsoft while leaving the door open8 for moremarket-share growth. And Jason Snell, blogging forMacworld, takes down9 USA Today’s Andrew Kan-tor for his column suggesting that Boot Camp mightcause Apple to start losing OS X users to Windowsby selling dual-booting machines. Andrew’s point isthat Apple is trying to steal Windows users by giving
3http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/windows_the_new_classic
4http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/809.html
5http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/802.html
6http://www.macgeekery.com/column/eloquent_apathy/third-day_thoughts_on_boot_camp
7http://www.paulstamatiou.com/2006/04/05/apple-releases-boot-camp-puts-smile-on-my-face/
8http://www.osx86project.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=162&Itemid=2
9http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macword/2006/04/andrewkantor/
ATPM 12.05 12 Bloggable: Yes, Drill Sergeant!
them a computer that can do both, not the other wayaround.
Oh, and Slate’s Paul Boutin all but cries at thethought of Windows XP on a Mac, since he wouldreally prefer an OS X that boots on grey-box PCs10.
Boot Camp lets you buy the most expen-sive computer and load it with inferiorsoftware. Thanks, Apple. Thanks a lot.But wait—what if Apple offered the op-posite deal? Instead of a disk that allowsyou to boot Windows on a Mac, whatabout a disk that lets you boot OS Xon any Intel-powered PC? I don’t wantWindows on a Mac. I want OS X on aPC. Dedicated hackers can already do itthemselves. The only thing keeping ev-eryone else from loading Apple’s OS on aVaio is a free disk—and Apple’s blessing,of course.
I think it’s safe to say Apple is never going tomake the mistake of licensing its operating systemagain (see this Gruber analysis11). Sorry, Paul.
The remaining open question is what Boot Campwill look like in 10.5. There’s quite a lot of spec-ulation right now that Apple wants to implementvirtualization, so you don’t have to reboot, especiallyafter the release of Parallels Workstation12, whichharnesses the Intel chip’s virtualization support todo just that. RealTechNews’s Michael Santo thinksthat’s a better strategy13 than dual booting. And,somewhat unfortunately for the likelihood that thiswill happen, so does Robert Cringely14. BecauseCringely is predicting it, I’m putting the odds at fourto six—and coining a new award for this month: theCringely Award, for speculative Apple developmentleast likely to take place. (You may remember my lastaward, the JFK Shot by LBJ Award, from March15.)This month, that award is actually going to JohnDvorak, PC Magazine’s venomous and invariablywrong columnist, for predicting that Apple will useBoot Camp to become a Windows PC vendor16.
10http://www.slate.com/id/2139517/fr/rss/11http://daringfireball.net/2006/03/ipod_juggernaut12https://www.regnow.com/softsell/nph-softsell.cgi?a
ction=add_to_cart&items=13166-7&quantity=113http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/290614http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060413h
tml15http://www.atpm.com/12.03/bloggable.shtml16http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1927885,00.as
p
And, for your monthly schadenfreude, I’d liketo note that not all is perfect in Boot Campland. This month’s reason why you should stickwith OS X: Apparently, there’s a risk your Macmight not be able to17 reboot back into your pre-ferred operating system. Ouch. The Unofficial AppleWeblog says, “Being stuck with Windows is yourpunishment for installing Windows (that last onewas a joke)!”
Fall Out!• Many of you have noticed that John Gruber
is probably my favorite Mac pundit. But weall have even more of a reason to support hisexcellent writing. As of April 20, he is no longeran employee of Joyent and is supported solely18
by his work on Daring Fireball19. Membership,which gets you a full-text XML feed and alsoXML of the Linked List, is only $19 a year,or $29 to get you a nifty T-shirt. I heartilyencourage you to join20, especially if, like me,you rely heavily on the Linked List to keep youinformed and entertained.
• In recognition of John Gruber’s entry into anentirely new class of Mac punditry altogether,in which he is no longer a technical amateur, Iwant to honor those who do a beautiful job ofamateur Macintosh punditry in his tradition.So in this column I am awarding the inaugu-ral John Gruber Award, for best amateur pun-ditry, to Panic Software’s Steven Frank21. Hewins for his entry about tech complexity22 andthe way certain products may be getting toocomplex. Congratulations. And no, I am notgiving him the award just because he’s a fellowPortlander.
• Jason O’Grady’s case, Apple v. Does, has beenappealed to the California Supreme Court.The question, as outlined by the EFF’s FAQ23:Can Apple subpoena Jason O’Grady’s e-mail,through his ISP, in connection with the effort
17http://www.tuaw.com/2006/04/13/boot-camp-users-were-stuck-in-windows/
18http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/initiative19http://daringfireball.net/20http://daringfireball.net/members/21http://stevenf.com/mt/22http://stevenf.com/mt/2006/04/more_on_tech_complex
ity.php23http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Apple_v_Does/faq.php
#1
ATPM 12.05 13 Bloggable: Yes, Drill Sergeant!
to find out who leaked what Apple claims aretrade secrets? O’Grady has his take24 on theexperience; and Gruber has an analysis25 ofthe situation, although I think he’s a bit toogenerous to Apple here. I’d be pissed if I werein O’Grady’s position.
• Engadget has a great feature from AprilFool’s Day called “30 years in Apple products:the good, the bad, and the ugly26.” You’lllaugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll recognize lots ofproducts that even you knew no one would buywhen they were released. My favorite? ThePortable, of course.
• Good news for my fellow student-age readerswithout summer jobs yet: Adium is now aGoogle Summer of Code27 mentoring project,according to the Adium Blog28, which meansthat you can get paid to make Adium a betterapplication. Hint: I will love you forever if youget AIM A/V support working, so I can reallyhave One AIM App to Rule Them All, etc.
Copyright © 2006 Wes Meltzer, [email protected].
24http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=17025http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/ogrady26http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/01/30-years-in-app
le-products-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/27http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/SummerOfCode28http://www.adiumx.com/blog/2006/04/google-summer-o
f-code.php
ATPM 12.05 14 Bloggable: Yes, Drill Sergeant!
MacMuserby Mark Tennent, [email protected]
Data CompostingWhen we move home and office, we have always setup our new location in a larger space than we had be-fore. Our first flat (apartment) had a tiny back yardsandwiched between the fire escapes surrounding it.Later, our homes grew in size with commensurablylarger gardens. Our present house, the largest so far,has roughly an acre of land in an English seaside towncenter, the car parking area being larger than our lastgarden alone.
With the growth in garden size comes an in-creasing burden of unwanted garden material. Aslawns get larger so does the pile of clippings from themower’s collecting box. Annual pruning of shrubsand trees creates heaps of woody material that has tobe disposed of in some way, by burning, taking to themunicipal tip, or composting. Since moving to ourpresent home and office in 2003, I have bought andexhausted eight garden shredders, each heavier-dutythan the previous one (we have a lot of trees). Asa consequence we have seven compost bins and awormery that are just about able to cope with thevegetative waste the garden generates. The black,earthy compost they produce gets spread aroundour gardens, making them more fertile and able toproduce even more material to be composted. Pluswe get the luscious crops of fruit and vegetables andthe flowers my partner loves so much.
If only the same composting cycle could be usedwith digital data. My first “real” computer had twin3′′ floppy drives. The CPM System was on one disk,the other loaded programs into the computer’s RAM,and work was saved onto other disks. Although thislittle computer was in use every day, I doubt we hadmore than a few floppy disks containing everythingwe had done with our computer. This included arange of books that were output to “galleys,” whichwere cut and pasted with real glue. In those days theartwork rapidly filled our storage area with large cardmount-boards.
My next machine had a 20 MB hard disk, an un-believable amount of storage space that I never man-aged to fill even though we had become “desktop pub-lishers” and were combining text and graphics intomagazines. A complete eight-page newsletter would
still fit onto a 3.5′′ floppy, and data backup was ontothe many hundreds of floppy disks we rapidly accu-mulated.
Then in 1989 we moved to Macs, one each be-cause we had become “designers.” These had 40 MBhard disks, which never seemed to be big enough.We struggled on using data compression techniques,early forms of StuffIt1, DiskDoubler2, and the like.Floppy disks were still our only form of back up un-til it became obvious that we needed bigger storagespace, and so began the SCSI chains of external de-vices and hard drives. By then the files for a magazinewould need so many floppy disks that we turned to anew type of removable hard disk called SyQuest. Atone point we discovered that we had over £1,000 of44 MB SyQuest cartridges at printers, photo-settingbureaux, scanning houses, and with clients. This wasnot a happy situation to be in, and when the firstCD burners became available we turned to them asour salvation. We even made a small living by burn-ing other computer users’ data onto CDs for them.At least we could dispose of the pile of paper andcardboard that used to be the artwork, as files were“run-out” as camera-ready bromides and film.
Nowadays, after ten years or more, we have hun-dreds of CDs containing all our work, applications,letters to the bank manager, and so on. Latterly weuse DVD’s to transport work, looking similar, butable to hold the same amount of information as halfa dozen CDs. Our Macs have more RAM than thecombined memory of all of the computers we haveowned in the past. Their internal hard disks can storehundreds of gigabytes of files and, luckily, have somespace left for more. Data backup is still a problem,solved only by having multiple hard disks mirroringeach other, both internally and as FireWire drivescluttering up our desktops.
The combined total of our data is measured in ter-abytes (thousands of gigabytes), an amount growingat a terribly fast rate. The last jobs I did were twobooks for the Imperial War Museum in London. At
1http://www.atpm.com/2.05/reviews205/rev_stuffit.html
2http://www.atpm.com/2.06/page14.shtml
ATPM 12.05 15 MacMuser: Data Composting
nearly 200 pages each with three colored pictures perspread, they wouldn’t fit onto even a couple of DVDsand had to be transported by hard disk. I did tryto FTP one of the books; it took over ten hours tocomplete and was not without problems, so it neededwatching for the entire process.
Like our gardens, the amount of waste materialkeeps growing, and we can see no end to it as mul-timedia takes the place of 2D graphics, and film andmusic replace static images. The really sad part to allthis data we have stored is that shortly we will not beable to access a huge amount of it. We have alreadyleft behind floppy disks, thrown away SyQuest car-tridges and Zip disks, and ancient hard drives havebeen erased and disposed of with no thought to whatthey contained. An enormous amount of our liveswere spent creating the information, and it is nowlost. Even when we retain the CDs and DVDs, theapplications used to make the files are no longer vi-able. When Classic is finally abandoned, so too willbe the CDs (not without some relief) because we willnot be able to open the information saved on them.
This will be a great loss to future generations,not because it is our work that is lost but becausethe ephemera of this entire generation will be gone.We can look back in time to the last century and be-yond because the technology of the era was simpleand mechanical. As long as the film stock can berescued, we can see exactly what life was like then,with sound and moving images, because we can easilyrecreate the machinery to view it on. Printed mate-rial, posters, books, and newspapers all preserve thelife and times of the people living then.
Our generation uses increasingly sophisticateddigital devices, which rely on specific computersrunning the right programs to access the files. Forexample: Film cameras have all but disappearedas digital photography has become the norm. Atthe same time, there has been a move away fromprinted images to showing them only on-screen. Ingenerations to come there may be a huge gap in theirknowledge of our times simply because we haven’tleft anything for our successors to see. Where oncean amateur photographer would save all his negativesand prints to be handed down, these will no longerexist, and it is highly unlikely that all the millions ofdigital images already taken will ever be printed orsaved in any other format.
Similarly, we could well be seeing the end ofprinted magazines and newspapers as they move toonline and digital formats such as this one you are
reading now. atpm was first created in a proprietaryformat called DOCMaker, which only runs underMac Classic. In the next year or so those early edi-tions will only be available to view on an increasinglysmall number of obsolete computers. In the UK,spending on advertising in print has shrunk at thesame rate as it has grown on TV channels and onlinesites. As the number of cable, satellite, and digitalterrestrial channels multiply, advertising becomescheaper. Many TV advertisements are simple Flashmovies requiring no actors or a director and filmcrew.
Where does one go to buy or sell a car? It used tobe the classified ads of the local rag. eBay has madeit cheaper, easier, and quicker to address a world-wide audience and has captured the small ads market,stealing the revenue used to run local papers. I usedto buy a daily newspaper and Sunday broadsheet, atotal of about £360 per year. Now I pick and choosearticles from around the world that cost me nothingto read and give a far more balanced viewpoint.
With composting our garden waste, we at leastget a new product as an end result that is beneficialto the garden as a whole, and that arguably contin-ues the spirit of the garden by allowing its futuregenerations to grow and multiply. Composting com-puter data just eradicates it for ever. Apart from theold CDs hanging above our spinach to deter the fatpigeons who live nearby, all the massive amount oftime, money, and energy we have put into creatingthe data will be lost, never to be recovered.
Copyright © 2006 Mark Tennent, [email protected].
ATPM 12.05 16 MacMuser: Data Composting
MacMuserby Mark Tennent, [email protected]
Fish Out of WaterI was talking with the herring gulls the other day—not talking like King George III did to trees, or ourBritish heir apparent does to his plants. I mean realconversations about topics we both understand andcontribute to. In the case of the gulls, their subjectsare more restricted than the builders I’ve had workingon my house recently. They limit it to “Give mefood,” or, “I am eating, get out my face.” Come tothink of it, that is about the extent of the builders’chatter too.
When they first adopted us, this pair of gulls wasbarely a few months old, all fluffy and covered injuvenile spots. They fluttered their wings, tapped onthe windows, and soon got me trained to cook extrafood to fill their beaks. It took them only a goldfishor two from my pond before they learned they didn’tlike the taste, and if they did eat my fish they gotno food from me for a week. Or until their plaintivemewing and tapping on the window got to me.
Now that they are four-year-olds, have losttheir spots, and look very handsome in their adultplumage, these birds and I can hold stilted con-versations. They are hampered by their lack ofvocal skills, and they’re usually limited to wantingfood or expressing appreciation about having it.Obviously the gulls are well able to fend for them-selves but choose to stay around my garden in oursymbiotic relationship. I feed them, they give mepleasure, and they use up any food leftovers andstale biscuits—though spaghetti or roast potatoesare preferred.
On this particular day they alerted me to a gold-fish they were standing guard over, left on the lawnby a crow that has taken a liking to the fish. The crowhas been the scourge of the garden for two years, fly-ing around with his magpie pal, bullying the otherbirds, searching among the rocks for frogs and eatingmy goldfish. OK, so the gull’s warning was a bit likeFlipper’s whistling being interpreted as “The kid isstuck down the mine-shaft,” or was that Skippy theBush Kangaroo? In any case, the fish was still alive,a bit battered, but having survived the experience.
Being a fish out of water just about sums up myexperience with Windows. I have never owned a PC
that uses Microsoft operating systems. Any use ofWindows and its derivatives is limited to cash pointmachines and searching the local library’s catalogue.When I gave lessons in QuarkXPress and Photoshopon PCs using Windows, I wasn’t in the driving seatso didn’t have to get to grips with right clicking, startbuttons, and goodness knows what else. It helped toknow the keyboard shortcuts. My only other Win-dows experience was running early emulators on myMac, and of course then I was really running a Macprogram so it doesn’t count.
When Apple announced its move to Intel chips,my first thought was that it would mean dual boot-ing Macs, getting the best of both worlds: rock solidMac OS X and all those lovely games I can ask for asbirthday presents. Then it was announced that theIntel Macs would not be able to run Windows na-tively. Whether this was a bit of FUD1 from Apple isdebatable. Or did they just mean that Vista wouldn’trun when/if it is finally released? In any case, itdidn’t take hackers long to prove Apple wrong, andsuddenly Apple released their own software enablingWindows booting on the new Macs. Is this a goodthing or not?
From my own point of view, when I saw how mucha copy of Windows actually costs, I cannot see anyneed to buy it. In the UK, Windows XP is around£120 (though prices seem to vary from £58 to over£200). For £249, I could purchase a Dell laptop thatcomes with its own, pre-installed copy. Microsoft haspretty much bottled-up Windows piracy, but it mightbe legal to use that copy on my Mac and run Linuxon the PC. Another laptop is always useful even ifonly to act as a Web browser and word processor.
If it is very easy to install Windows on the newMacs, what is to stop software companies such asAdobe from only making a Windows version of theirproducts, possibly bundling it with a cut-down copyof Windows? Why should Mac-only developers limitthemselves to a potential 5% of the world computermarket rather than the whole? Of course, the 5%who bought Macs did so because of the operating sys-tem and not the computer it runs on, so they would
1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fud
ATPM 12.05 17 MacMuser: Fish Out of Water
have no wish to switch to Windows. ConsequentlyAdobe, etc, will have to continue making native Macsoftware or lose that market. But if that did hap-pen, what then for Mac OS X itself? Apple is, afterall, a hardware company whose computer section isdwarfed by the emerging new technologies of iPodsand who knows what else from their ultra-secretivedesign department.
On the other hand, bench-testing head-to-headswith Macs running Windows up against PCs de-signed to do that from the start, show the Macs arevery quick machines. Jason Cross at ExtremeTech2
describes his long-term search for the perfect Win-dows notebook. He wanted a computer that willrun Windows, with a fast CPU, plenty of RAM,optical drive, and good graphics processor. He hasjust found it, a MacBook Pro. Unsurprisingly, hehas started to prefer Mac OS X over Windows XP,though like many Windows émigrés he is still wantinga multi-buttoned mouse—something I find strangebecause I have turned off all the buttons on myMighty Mouse to make it a one-button mouse withscroll ball.
The new dual-core PowerBooks and iMacs seemas fast as our desktop twin-processor G5s. Whatprice for those when the pro end of Apple’s computerlineup moves to Intel? Usually I have a buyer ortwo waiting to purchase my old machines at abouthalf the price I paid for them three or four years be-fore. Maybe not so when extremely rapid Macs willbe available, which means I won’t be able to affordto upgrade. Colleagues who have got new Mac lap-tops tell me the Finder is running at the fast speedit had under Mac OS 8. A mixed blessing perhaps,as memories return of folders lost “somewhere” whenaccidentally dropped while moving them around, andduplicated duplicates when I miss the progress barthat remains on the screen for exactly eight nanosec-onds.
Apple Macintosh computers have always beena slightly risky choice to make, being off from themainstream and up against rivals including IBM andMicrosoft. The company has weathered some hardtimes, with the introduction of the original Mac itselfalmost bringing the company to its knees because ofits price, lack of RAM, expandability, and software.Now, Apple is making another about-turn as theychange chips yet again. Could this be the changetoo far? Developers who have only just adapted to
2http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1949208,00.asp
Mac OS X may have a big job ahead to make theirsoftware ready for MacIntels. If those computers areable to run Windows, what is the point of makingtwo versions available for the same hardware?
The answer is that users like the Mac OS X en-vironment and the Mac-only applications that run init. With Apple’s switch to Intel processors, the bestcomputer system in the world will be the Mac. It willbe the only one designed to run both Mac and Win-dows software, especially as Apple is likely to keepone step ahead of hackers trying to run Mac OS Xon non-Apple computers. I just hope that it staysthat way or else I’ll be a complete newbie and willhave to learn a new computer system from scratch,something I will be reluctant to do.
Copyright © 2006 Mark Tennent, [email protected].
ATPM 12.05 18 MacMuser: Fish Out of Water
About This Particular Web Siteby Paul Fatula, [email protected]
Cylinder Preservation1 and DigitizationProjectOnce upon a time, before there were MP3s, peoplelistened to music on CDs. Before that there weretapes. Before that there were LPs, and before thatthere were cylinders. While many people still haverecord players laying around, few of us can play cylin-ders, and even if we can they’re not exactly easy tofind. Fortunately, cylinder recordings are so incred-ibly old that even the long ears of the Sonny BonoCopyright Term Extension Act cannot keep them outof the public domain. UCSB offers a number of livefeeds and MP3s from a century ago, making our mu-sical history available to anyone who wants to listen.
gethuman2
A few months ago my cable Internet stopped working.I’m so used to being able to google any information Ineed that it took me a while to find a piece of paperwith my ISP’s phone number on it. That phone num-ber proved to be nothing but a door into a labyrinth ofbutton-pressing. I began to wonder whether Mark Z.Danielewski was collecting royalties for every minuteI stayed on the line. This Web site, if I’d had Web ac-cess, would have saved me both frustration and time:It lists phone numbers and navigation instructionsto get to speak to a human as quickly as possible.Of course there’s no guarantee the human you reachwill be competent, but at least you can stop pressingbuttons.
TaxPod3
Personally, I don’t understand the recent craze forspoken audio content. Speech is slow and it isn’tsearchable or scannable. Good old-fashioned text canbe read quickly and searched easily, and it’s not aproblem to skip over a boring paragraph or two. Butfor those accountants who have been daydreaming ofworthwhile audio content, Jack Bogdanski set out toread the complete Internal Revenue Code of 1986, onesection per day. Looks like sec. 25A is as far as hegot, but there may be more to come. We wish himwell.
1http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu2http://www.gethuman.com3http://bojack.org/taxpod.html
Samorost4
If you’re anything like me, your first reaction whenyou see the words “Flash game” will be to roll youreyes and stop paying attention; but really, this oneis cool. The graphics and the the music combine tocreate an interesting and puzzling world. Fiddle yourmouse about, find things to click on, see what hap-pens, figure it out. When I first played this gamesome months ago, I wished there were a sequel. Nowthere is, and it’s just as amusing as the original.
Said the Gramophone5
Doesn’t it seem bizarre that the music industry istaking such extreme steps as suing dead people6 inan attempt to keep consumers from discovering newmusic? Fortunately, there are lots of MP3 blogsout there, aimed at introducing people to good,non-mainstream music. Not merely a list of down-loadable MP3s, the blog links to a song and providessome discussion of why the writer likes it, with a link(when available) to purchase the music if you decideyou like it, too. The trick to MP3 blogs is findingone written by someone whose music taste mesheswell with yours; so if you don’t like this one, goahead and look around for others. For my own part,I will forever be grateful to Said the Gramophonefor introducing me to Lajkó Félix’s “Etno Camp”(which I only wish I could find on CD).
Copyright © 2006 Paul Fatula, [email protected].
4http://www.samorost2.net/samorost1/5http://www.saidthegramophone.com6http://www.betanews.com/article/RIAA_Sues_Deceased
_Grandmother/1107532260
ATPM 12.05 19 ATPW: Web Sites
FileMakingby Charles Ross, [email protected]
Text Parsing With FileMakerPardon my extended absence from this column. Lifejust has a way of getting away from one at times, andthe work load piles up. But hopefully I’m back to anormal schedule again.
As mentioned in the last column I wrote regard-ing the direction of this tutorial series, we’ll now coversome basic text parsing functions. For beginning File-Makers, parsing text is one of the most useful skillsto have as well as one of the first that questions areasked about.
What Is Text ParsingText parsing is the process of applying a calculationto a string to pull out some other string within itthat is useful or to determine if some condition istrue regarding the string.
This comes up many times in FileMaker, or forthat matter, any database application. I’m currentlyworking on a project where data is received from anoutside vendor as a text file, where each line is arecord and each field in the record is a particularnumber of characters in the line (such as, characters13 through 20 store the creation date of the record,21 through 30 the product ID, etc.). This format iscalled a fixed format file because each field is storedin a fixed number of characters. Text parsing calcula-tions allow me to extract the data into separate fieldsin my database.
Name ExtractionFor example, proper database design dictates thatinformation about people should have their differentnames (first, middle, last, etc.) separated into differ-ent fields: FirstName, MiddleName, LastName. How-ever, perhaps you need to import data from anothersystem where all three of these pieces of informationwere placed in a single field and you want to breakthem out to their individual components.
FileMaker includes a wide range of text functionsthat can be used to help with such chores. You canview a list of these text functions by creating a calcu-lation field and choosing “Text Functions” from theView menu.
However, a better way to become familiar withthe available functions is to look through the onlinehelp documents that come with FileMaker. Whilein FileMaker, click Command-Shift-/ to bring up thehelp system, and then click on Contents in the topleft of the window, followed by Function ReferenceCategory List, and then Text Functions. Click thelink for each of the available text functions to becomefamiliar with them.
ATPM 12.05 20 FileMaking: Text Parsing With FileMaker
For text parsing, the most useful functionswill be Left(), Right(), Middle(), Length(),PatternCount, and Position().
So let’s begin by establishing some rules on howone would extract individual names from a full namefield. My own name is a good example of a simplefull name, with a single word for each of the first,middle, and last names: “Charles Edward Ross.” Itis made up of a single word for each name (a wordin FileMaker is a string of characters separated bywhitespace, such as a space, return, or tab character).We will begin by extracting just the first name. Inthis case, the first name can be extracted by gettingall of the characters before the first space. So the firstthing we need to figure out is where the first spaceoccurs, which is done with the Position() function.
Position( FullName; " "; 1; 1 )
Assuming we have a text field called FullName,the above will return the number of the characterthat has the first occurrence of a space. In the caseof my name, this will be 8.
Now that we know where the first space occurs,we want to get all of the characters before it. For thiswe use the Left() function, which returns charactersin a string beginning from the left side for the numberwe specify. The number of characters we want is 1 lessthan the position of that first space, so our calculationbecomes:
Left( FullName; Position( FullName; " "; 1;1 ) - 1 )
If Charles Edward Ross is in FullName, theabove will return Charles. If FullName containsChuck Ed Ross, the above will return Chuck.
Now, FileMaker does have more powerful func-tions available to us that we could use. For instance,I could do the above with the following as well:
LeftWords( FullName; 1 )
However, this tutorial is not only about how todo things in FileMaker, but also how to think aboutwhat you’re trying to do. I want to show you how tothink about the result, and using both Left() andPosition() were more instructive toward this thanusing LeftWords().
Debugging Our Name ExtractionAs we have our FirstName calculation, it will workso long as the first name is the first word. But what
if it isn’t? What if the FullName field contains Mr.Charles Edward Ross? Our function will return Mr.instead of Charles. So let’s next account for thepossible, but not necessary, presence of a title beforethe first name.
First, let’s consider which titles we want to ac-count for. Off the top of my head, I can think of,Mr., Mrs., Ms., Miss, Dr., and Rev.. We want tocheck if the first word of FullName is any of these,and if so, get the second word. If it’s not present, getthe first word.
We’ll begin by creating a variable to store the listof titles. Unfortunately, FileMaker doesn’t have abuilt-in list or array construct, but we can fake oneby using a return separated string.
Let({
Titles = "Mr.¶Mrs.¶Ms.¶Miss¶Dr.¶Rev.";FirstWord = LeftWords( FullName; 1 );SecondWord = MiddleWords( FullName; 2; 1
)};
Case(Position( Titles; FirstWord; 1; 1 ) > 0;
SecondWord;FirstWord
))
We begin this calculation by setting a number ofvariables, including a list of the possible titles that afull name could begin with. For ease of readability,we also set the FirstWord and SecondWord variables.
Then we use a Case() function to determinewhich word, the first or the second, we should use.The Position() function will return a 0 if thesearch string (the first word) is not in our searchedstring (the list of titles). Take a close look at theparameters of the Position() function by checkingthe documentation. We are looking for the first wordof the full name being in our list of titles.
We can simplify this calculation a bit. First ofall, our test expression in the Case() function doesn’thave to check for the value being greater than 0. File-Maker interprets any numerical value that is not 0 asbeing True, so the first thing to simplify the functionis to remove the inequality expression:
Let({
ATPM 12.05 21 FileMaking: Text Parsing With FileMaker
Titles = "Mr.¶Mrs.¶Ms.¶Miss¶Dr.¶Rev.";FirstWord = LeftWords( FullName; 1 );SecondWord = MiddleWords( FullName; 2; 1
)};
Case(Position( Titles; FirstWord; 1; 1 );SecondWord;FirstWord
))
The second thing we can do is realize that us-ing Position as a test for one string simply contain-ing another string is probably going to be a commonneed. That implies that we could create a customfunction for this purpose, called perhaps Contains().We’ll create this custom function to take two param-eters, a text parameter and a searchString param-eter (see the article on creating custom functions1).Here’s the definition of our custom function:
PatternCount( text; searchString; 1; 1)
After defining this, we have the following for ourcurrent FirstName calculation:
Let({
Titles = "Mr.¶Mrs.¶Ms.¶Miss¶Dr.¶Rev.";FirstWord = LeftWords( FullName; 1 );SecondWord = MiddleWords( FullName; 2; 1
)};
Case(Contains( Titles; FirstWord );SecondWord;FirstWord
))
Parsing Out the Last NameNow that we can extract the first name with somereliability, let’s work on the last name. We’ll beginwith a calculation similar to that of the first namecalculation, accounting for a possible suffix. In thiscase, we’ll assume that any existing suffix appearsafter a comma, as in Charles Edward Ross, Jr. orCharles Edward Ross, Ph.D.. For the time being,we’ll also assume that there can only be one suffix.
1http://www.atpm.com/11.10/filemaking.shtml
Let({
LastWord = RightWords( FullName; 1 );SecondToLastWord = MiddleWords( FullName
; WordCount( FullName ) - 1; 1)};
Case(Contains( FullName; "," );LastWord;SecondToLastWord
))
If FullName contains a comma, then the abovewill return the second to last word in FullName. Ifit does not have a comma, then the last word is re-turned.
Note the use of WordCount() to determine whichword is the second-to-last word. As you would ex-pect, WordCount() return the number of words ina string, so WordCount( "Charles Edward Ross,Jr." ) would return 4. Subtracting 1 from this givesus word 3, and using MiddleWords() to begin at word3 and get 1 word returns "Ross".
Refining Last Name ExtractionAgain, there’s an exception to the rules we’ve cov-ered for last names: Not all last names are a singleword. Some last names are two words, as in Mc Gowan(my wife’s maiden name) or von Neumann. Other lastnames might begin with de or O (without an apostro-phe). Again, off the top of my head, I can think ofMc, Mac, O, De, and Von. I’m sure there are others,but that will suffice for now.
So here is our newly defined rule for last names.Assume that the full name has n words in it. If wordn is not a listed suffix, and word n–1 is not a listedlast name word, the last name is word n. If word n–1is a listed last name word, the last name is words n–1 through n. If there is a suffix, shift the last name(and the tests for a separate last name word) to theleft by one word.
Sounds complicated. Let’s see what it looks like.First let’s add a variable to hold the possible wordsthat a last name can begin with:
Let({
LNamePrefixes = " Mc ¶ Mac ¶ O ¶ De ¶ Von ";
LastWord = RightWords( FullName; 1 );
ATPM 12.05 22 FileMaking: Text Parsing With FileMaker
SecondLastWord = MiddleWords( FullName;WordCount( FullName ) - 1; 1);
ThirdLastWord = MiddleWords( FullName; WordCount( FullName ) - 2; 1 )
};
Case(Contains( FullName; ",");Case(
Contains( LNamePrefixes; ThirdLastWord);
ThirdLastWord & " " & SecondLastWord;SecondLastWord
);Case(
Contains( LNamePrefixes; SecondLastWord );
SecondLastWord & " " & LastWord;LastWord
))
)
We’ve surrounded our last name prefixes withspaces because we only want to find them if they areseparate words. We don’t want to catch the wordbefore the final last name if it’s O’Grady, only if it’sO Grady.
Note that this isn’t a perfect extraction of firstname and last name. There are many other excep-tions we could account for, a suffix without a comma,or three-word last names (de la Hoya). But thisshould give you plenty to begin with for your owntext parsing routines.
Email VerificationText parsing isn’t always pulling out a piece of astring. Sometimes you need to know if a string satis-fies a condition. A classic example is if the string is avalid e-mail address. You can’t verify that it’s validin the sense that e-mail sent to the address will arriveat an e-mail server someplace, but you can verify thatit looks like a valid address.
A valid e-mail address looks something [email protected]. So, it has some characters, followedby an @ symbol, followed by some more characters,a period, and two or three more (i.e., .com or .uk).There are some more restrictions, but these willsuffice for our tutorial purposes.
First, an e-mail address is valid if it has the @character in it only once, and if it’s not the first char-acter.
( Position( EmailAddress, "@", 1, 1 ) > 1 )and ( PatternCount( EmailAddress, "@" ) =
1 )
For an e-mail address to be valid, the third-to-lastor the fourth-to-last character must be a period. (Fornow, we’ll ignore .name and other newer domains.)
( Position( EmailAddress; "@"; 1; 1 ) > 1 )and ( PatternCount( EmailAddress; "@" ) =
1 )and ( ( Middle( EmailAddress; Length( Emai
lAddress ) - 3 ) = "."; 1 )or ( Middle( EmailAddress; Length( Ema
ilAddress ) - 2 ) = "."; 1 ) )
The first line checks that the first @ symbolis not the first character. The second conditionchecks that there is only one @ symbol in the string.Parentheses enclose a compound third conditionmade up of two separate conditions, one checkingthat the fourth-to-last character is a period andthe other checking that the third-to-last characteris a period. If either of these is true, the third(compound) condition returns true. So an e-maillike [email protected] will validate, [email protected], chuck@[email protected] [email protected] will not validate.
Again, this isn’t a complete validation of e-mailaddresses, but it should give you an idea of thethought process needed and the functions requiredto do a more complex validation.
• • •
I think that will do it for us this month. As an ex-ercise in using the skills covered in this column, Iwould suggest writing the routine to extract the mid-dle name from a full name, including the possibil-ity that the middle name isn’t provided (i.e., returnan empty string when FullName contains CharlesRoss). Until next month, happy FileMaking!
Copyright © 2006 Charles Ross, [email protected]. CharlesRoss is a Certified FileMaker 7 Developer and the Chief Tech-nology Officer of Chivalry Software, LLC2, a company spe-cializing in custom database, web and automation softwareand publisher of Function Helper3, a FileMaker calculationdebugging tool. He was a contributing writer and the techni-
2http://www.chivalrysoftware.com3http://www.chivalrysoftware.com/home/functionhelpe
r.php
ATPM 12.05 23 FileMaking: Text Parsing With FileMaker
cal editor for The Book of FileMaker 64 and has contributedto ISO FileMaker Magazine5 and Macworld6 in addition tohis series on AppleScript7 for atpm.
4http://www.nostarch.com/frameset.php?startat=filemaker
5http://www.filemakermagazine.com6http://www.macworld.com7http://www.atpm.com/Back/roll.shtml
ATPM 12.05 24 FileMaking: Text Parsing With FileMaker
About This Particular Outlinerby Ted Goranson, [email protected]
Outlining Workflows and ConceptDrawIn past ATPO columns, we’ve explored all sorts ofways of looking at outliners. The idea is to play withthese in such a way that we raise choices about toolsand how interactive imagination works. We assumethat ATPO readers want to have some awarenessabout how they work and choose their tools accord-ingly.
So we don’t review or recommend, but we do dragout as many applications as we can during the col-umn’s meander so that readers can have an idea whatthe choices are. This month, we’ll look at workflows.I’ve stayed away from this in the past out of pure fearof inadequacy. Workflows are specific things. Each ofus will have our own proclivities, and those among uswho take what is dictated by the big developers with-out thinking—even those folks—connect tools up inpersonal ways and bend them to suit.
And it isn’t just differences in combinations ofapplications, or even different goals (writing a book,keeping a diary, etc.). It’s that people have mindsthat work differently from each other. Bending tothe user’s imagination is what it’s all about, right?
So what I thought I’d do is start generically andtalk about more abstract connections among tasksand urges. Maybe a framework of sorts will emerge.After we’ve beaten that to death, we’ll look at theConceptDraw Suite1, built around a mindmap con-cept. It isn’t the only application that’s gotten shortshrift in ATPO. Many others deserve attention too.But this one may be the most unfamiliar, and it isbuilt on a really novel idea—a whole workflow.
By workflow we mean all the steps you go throughto do the things that form your life with your Mac. Ifyou were in the newsletter business, you might havedrawing programs, a photo manipulation one, per-haps a separate authoring or writing application, andfinally one that does layout. You may then have somethat make PDFs of, validate, compress, and e-mailthe product.
Nearly everything we do on our computers spansdifferent tasks. Probably they span different applica-tions. Even more probably, you’ll have several work-
1http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/
flows, likely to overlap in some ways. And if you arean ATPO reader, you likely are unique.
Workflow DimensionsIn fact, ATPO readers will be so unique that we mightcreate a map on which you can locate yourself beforeyou think about tools.
Some dimensions of that map:
Waterfall vs. SpiralYou might have a set number of steps you gothrough. Once a step is complete, you do not revisitit normally. For instance, you might be someonewho brainstorms using a mindmapper and usesNovaMind2 to brainstorm on the content and designthe structure of a document. Perhaps you’d makesome detailed notes. Then you might import intoOmniOutliner3 to write the document and refine thestructure a bit. Finally, you’d export to Word4 forlayout and to deliver somewhere. Each of these thesesteps, once performed, would be irreversible. Oftenthis is called the “waterfall” method. Water neverflows up a waterfall, you see.
Or, perhaps you like to move back and forth be-tween a styled outline and a mindmap. Inspiration5
can support tweaking and creating in each mode.Tinderbox6 has something like this, too. You maylike the idea that you can see the thing in differ-ent ways and shift back and forth. People who liketo name these methods call this the “spiral” modelbecause you improve by going back through priormodes.
Dynamic vs. StaticA sister to the waterfall-spiral dimension is this one.At one end is a workflow that produces a result thatonce born stays the same, say a book. The contentof the artifact is static.
2http://www.nova-mind.com/3http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner4http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/word2004/wor
d2004.aspx?pid=word20045http://www.inspiration.com/6http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
ATPM 12.05 25 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
The other end of this is an artifact that is dy-namic, that you intend to change. A blog is a goodexample where new entries get added.
There might be different workflows in the sameartifact. For instance, take atpm. There was a re-cent workflow that produced a redesign of the site.It no doubt involved many steps and several appli-cations. That’s a relatively static result. There areparallel workflows that each atpm contributor uses toproduce content. In my case, I try to have it differ-ent each time, but each column is static: No changesoccur after publication (except the adding of readercomments).
So the content of atpm is dynamic, and any col-umn is static as is the presentation of the thing.
This dimension is one that drove many ATPOreaders to outliners in the first place because outlin-ers allow you to tweak content and structure endlesslyand publish episodically.
Local vs. Collaboratively DistributedMany of us have projects that are ours alone. So eventhough we may be syncing among several machines,the work and workflow is a personal thing. In thiscase, nearly anything goes. We only have to be politeto ourselves.
But we may have projects that require sharingand collaboration.
Within that, you may have cross-platform needs,in which case Word’s outliner, Inspiration, Con-ceptDraw, and jEdit7 files would be useful becausethose applications have Windows versions as well.Or you might use OPML sharing, which is sup-ported on the Mac by Circus Ponies NoteBook8,DEVONthink Pro9, Frontier10, hnb11, iTaskX12,Mori13, NoteTaker14, NovaMind15, OmniOutlinerand OmniOutliner Pro16, Process17, Pyramid/Incubator18,
7http://www.jedit.org/8http://www.circusponies.com/9http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonth
ink/index.html10http://frontierkernel.org/11http://hnb.sourceforge.net/12http://www.itaskx.com/software/en/default.htm13http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/mori14http://www.aquaminds.com/15http://www.nova-mind.com/16http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner
/pro/17http://www.jumsoft.com/process/18http://www.mindcad.com
SuperNote-card19, TAO20, and Tinderbox. (How-ever, in the transfer you lose a tremendous amount—only the outline is preserved.)
(JOE21, MyMind22, and iLiner23 export OPML.)Some of the same methods apply if you are at one
end of the “Many Applications versus One” dimen-sion. You can go from outline to finished product inone application using Inspiration, Mellel24, and Wordif your goal is a print document. Similarly, Curio25,NoteBook, NoteTaker, NovaMind, OmniOutliner,and Tinderbox can produce nice Web sites.
AquaMinds has just announced NoteShare26, aversion of NoteTaker that supports full collaboration.
Top-down vs. Bottom-upSome folks start with an outline of their project. Bythis I mean they determine all the parts, what goeswhere, and make some note about what goes “in”each part. Then it is just a question of filling out theparts and some tweaking by rearrangement. Let’s callthat top-down work.
Others start with a mess of stuff, items collectedfrom all over the place together with notes that theymake. Over time, these folks gather these items orperhaps they digest the parts and create new onesalways evolving. The evolution might be happeningwhile new bits are flowing in.
Certain outliners are better at this bottom-upbusiness, where a structured or organized documentor collection emerges from its bits.
Tracking vs. ProducingHere’s a dimension ATPO has mentioned before.
Outliners of different types are useful for doingwork, particularly if the work involves structuring orrefining information.
Outliners are also good at managing work. So youmight use your outliner for one, or the other, or forboth.
I do this extensively. For instance, in writing thiscolumn I collected all sorts of bits that I thoughtabout and collected over six weeks or so, and overtime I used a bottom-up method to put togethersomething that I hope makes sense.
19http://www.mindola.com/20http://blue-beach-systems.com/Products/Software/TA
O/21http://outliner.sourceforge.net/22http://www.sebastian-krauss.de/software/#mymind23http://www.mercury-soft.com/Top/newiLiner.html24http://www.redlers.com/mellel.html25http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/26http://www.aquaminds.com/noteShareFAQ.jsp
ATPM 12.05 26 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
About three weeks in, I superimposed on the out-line of the column another outline of tasks that Iwanted to do in creating the column. Some were to-do items, others annotations such as “rewrite this,”“check that,” or “get example screenshot.”
So this dimension isn’t quite a line with two ends.It’s more like a triangle.
Different outliners clearly are superior than othersdepending on which corner of this triangle you findyourself closer to.
DEVONthink Pro is good at starting with a messand building an outline, even using AI to suggeststructure.
Special Project TypesIf you happen to fall into certain niches, new possi-bilities open up. For instance, if you are writing ascreenplay (or a book that feels like a movie—whichmany novelists do), you might start with NovaMind’sscreenwriting addition27, which exports to a specialscreenplay authoring application, Final Draft28,which in turn links to its storyboarding sibling29.And as a final step you can automatically register ina copyright database and display the storyboards inKeynote30.
Our next column will probably be on outlining inmultimedia, of multimedia, and for multimedia cre-ation. It might take a while, and I’d really like tohear from people in this area.
Clearly, some outliners go out of their way to sup-port these project types, usually scripts, novels, andproject reports.
Perhaps you’ll find this map of help in exploringhow you structure your outliner-engaged workflow.You may have read this and already said to yourselfthat I missed a key dimension. Well, we are puttingtogether a wiki site at www.outliners.org31. It’s nowaccessible to an inner circle of readers who are work-ing to produce a presentable first form. Soon, you’llbe able to extend it publicly. If you want to help withthe setup, send me a private message32.
27http://www.nova-mind.com/Screenwriters/28http://www.finaldraft.com/products/fd-features.php
429http://www.finaldraft.com/products/av-features.php
430http://www.finaldraft.com/media/pressreleases/pr_0
40108-keynote_pro.php431http://www.outliners.org32mailto:[email protected]
The ConceptDraw SuiteWell, I guess I’ll leave general consideration of string-ing together a workflow, to introduce you to one suitethat has a workflow built in.
We’ve mentioned ConceptDraw MindMap33
before, and briefly the associated project man-agers ConceptDraw Project34 and LeadingProject35.There are lots of sibling applications, so let me giveyou what I think is the big picture. The developer,Computer Systems Odessa is based in Ukraine.
I think the story is that they started with thediagramming application, which they claim was notonly the first diagramming software on the Mac butalso the first commercial application on Mac OS X.
Then they grew a sibling mindmapping applica-tion, and from thence the program management oneand a couple others. This provenance is unique Ithink and pretty cool.
They recently took the project manager andcloned it, named the copy LeadingProject, andare building a suite around it based on a differentdemographic—though I understand this relationshippoorly, even after several e-mails with them.
Our topic today will be the mindmapper-centricsuite. You can now buy a cross-platform suite thathas a good mindmapper (like NovaMind), a goodcharting program (like OmniGraffle36), and a de-cent project manager (like, say, xTime Project37 orMerlin38).
I gave the Mac equivalents above, not because ofmuch feature similarity. I don’t mean to imply thatthere is. But if you look at NovaMind, OmniGraf-fle, and xTime Project, you’ll see delicious graph-ics with dropped shadows and Quartz transparency.And you’ll also see Mac interfaces with intelligentlydesigned modern features like collapsable inspectors.The bad news with the ConceptDraw folks is thatthey are a Windows/Mac shop. And when that hap-pens you get the dreadful conventions of the Windowsworld.
Toolbars are squirted all over the place with inex-plicable icons; medieval graphics, meaning the sharp,unshadowed, non-transparent images we left behind
33http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/mindmap/main.php
34http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/project/main.php
35http://www.leadingproject.com/en/main.php36http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/
pro/37http://www.app4mac.com/xtimeproject.html38http://www.projectwizards.net/en/merlin
ATPM 12.05 27 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
five years ago; ineffective handling of styles. That’sthe bad news (and pretty much all of it). There are acouple billion Windows users who don’t seem to mindthese transgressions, so let’s just set them aside fornow.
The integration of the ConceptDraw Suite can besomewhat emulated in an irreversible waterfall by No-vaMind, which exports to Merlin and Keynote. Mer-lin can build a project Web site. Both Merlin andNovaMind import OmniOutliner’s native format (di-rectly, not through OPML).
Oh, I guess I should mention price (of the down-load versions).
The diagramming application’s standard versionis $150. The Pro version adds basic scripting, morelibraries, and the ability to export to more formatsat $300.
The mindmapping application is $100 for the per-sonal edition. At $200, you add multipage docu-ments and the ability to export in forms that sup-port the workflows we mention here: into MS project,the ConceptDraw project manager, and Outlook (onWindows).
Looking at the project manager, there is only oneversion at $200.
Buying the suite gets you all three at $500 (other-wise $700 individually). It’s the suite we are talkingabout here. All of these are Carbon applications withno Universal versions yet (but the developers indicatethe next major releases—in the fall—will be Univer-sal).
Through their LeadingProject affiliate39 you canbuy a bundle with just the mindmapper pro andproject manager for $250, which if I understand itright is a much better deal.
The presenter is $200, the viewer free.It’s not at all fair to compare to other Mac pro-
grams because the features don’t overlap much. Butif you bought NovaMind ($120), OmniGraffle Pro($150), and Merlin (about $180), you’d be out $450.
39http://www.leadingproject.com/en/products/bundlMMPrj/main.php
The Mindmapper
The ConceptDraw MINDMAP Pro Icon
The mindmapper by itself is darn good. It comeswith a ton of templates. The screenshot shows one ofthe templates before I started horsing around with it.You’ll see about half of the available toolbars, plus alibrary of symbols that can annotate the map. Thinkof them as graphical metadata. I didn’t show thelibrary of shapes that can be assigned to nodes.
ConceptDraw MINDMAP Pro
I’m not a mindmapping expert, so I cannot tellyou from long, deep use of it and others. But I haveused it on a project and find all the features I ex-pect with a mindmapper including collapsible nodes,internal links, and multiple pages. Talking to othermindmap users, primarily on Windows, it seems tostack up well with the mindmapper competition.
You can distribute your mindmaps as images,HTML, or PowerPoint files; as interactive read-
ATPM 12.05 28 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
only documents via ConceptDraw Viewer; or makepresentations using ConceptDraw Presenter. Ex-port though OPML preserves notes, URLs, andsome other attributes. OPML is vague on thesethings in its specification, but linkage between themindmapper and ATPO power outliners is betterthan average.
A version to be released by the time you read thiswill export maps and outlines to the iPod.
The Diagrammer
The ConceptDraw Pro V Icon
This is quite a powerful diagrammer. It doesn’tmake pretty shadows and transparencies like nativeMac applications do. That’s one of the costs of beingcross-platform. Even PDFs of fancy graphics usingthese effects made on a Mac sometimes go awry whenviewed on a Windows machine. (Transparency of fillswas added in a version that appeared after I startedthis column. But it isn’t obvious; to apply it youopen the color palette, select Other, and a new paletteappears that has a transparency slider on it.)
So the drawings won’t be as pretty, but they’llbe roughly as capable as you can make withOmniGraffle—or Visio40 if you are on Windows.
Here’s a screenshot of ConceptDraw V with manyof its palettes:
40http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010857981033.aspx
ConceptDraw Pro V
That’s just so you can get an idea what it is like. Idon’t really want to focus on the features of the thingbecause it’s the integration that is the focus of thiscolumn. But if you are comparing diagramming tools,this one has better bézier control than most, and thePro version allows you to attach cross-platform BA-SIC scripts to objects, pages, and documents.
CS Odessa touts their rich set of libraries andthematic wizards and indeed they are impressive.You can buy versions of this application for the sameprice that are optimized for network diagrammingand medical applications.
The Project Manager
The ConceptDraw Project Icon
This is a rudimentary project manager asthese things go and is patterned after the $600
ATPM 12.05 29 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
Microsoft Project41. It’s more for task tracking thantask management.
The primary elements are a list of tasks and sub-tasks in an outline with a few columns for time andcost attributes of the task. Associated with that out-line is a Gantt chart. Attached to each task or sub-task is a list of resources (worker or material) assignedto the task.
A key feature is that you can manage severalprojects with the same resource pool.
Mac users will be a bit unimpressed by this appli-cation in the suite, because we are used to integrationwith individuals and groups in the Mac Address Bookand linking with iCal for some scheduling and alarms.Most of our project managers have a broader notionof resource as well. We can attach or associate allsorts of documents, e-mails, and such to a task.
Also, the Gantt chart drawing tools are remark-ably rudimentary given the drawing tool background.
So unless you are looking at it as attractive be-cause of the integration among elements, by itself itwon’t attract you. The version I used (2.01) was bro-ken in a few minor ways: the HTML help wasn’tconnected to the help menu item and had to be re-quested separately; and the customization dialog pic-tured therein wasn’t available (with the “Preferences”menu item grayed out.
Here’s a screenshot of one of the examples thatcomes with it:
ConceptDraw Project
An Integrated WorkflowThe ConceptDraw Suite case study needs more timethan your reporter had this month. Look for it nexttime.
41http://www.microsoft.com/products/info/product.aspx?view=22&pcid=9329b63e-fc88-4628-9251-29963bc4bfe6&crumb=catpage&catid=fab9617a-57ff-4789-9397-6dac071b19b0
The ATPO TrackerThis part of ATPO was envisioned as a sort ofnewsletter on happenings in the Mac outlining com-munity, with an emphasis on “tracking” the progressof what we call our herd of power outliners. It hasbeen a while since the last tracker, so I thoughtwe’d take a snapshot of where these are. Please bereminded of the ATPO stance: We don’t do reviews,and what follows is not a feature comparison. In-stead, they are simply some notes on elements thatwe track. All of the products have generous trialperiods.
I thought you would appreciate the time to becomprehensive, so this tracker summary has noscreenshots. We’ll add them to the wiki. If you are apower user of one of these, perhaps you’ll help withcomments, analysis, and screenshots.
Our ATPO power outliners are:
Curio42
$129 Pro version ($79 Home version, $39 Basicversion). Many users will be happy with theBasic edition43. Curio is a unique product. It isa two-pane outliner where the “note” is a freeformcanvas that can be used for a spatial and/or graph-ical representation of information of a huge numberof types. It is, if you will, a notebook for visualthinkers with a built-in Web search agent.
What’s been recently added (version 3.1.1): somereal outliner capabilities (as lists, no collapsing forinstance); hoisting; a strong presentation mode;LinkBack44; a host of “property” controls.
What ATPO likes: You can have outlines of can-vases, and each canvas can have list-like outlines, andeach of those outlines can have any object as a header.Objects can link to other objects, URLs, files, or Ap-pleScripts. There are lots of style and property con-trols.
What it could use: Full scriptability would makethis a killer. Clones of objects.
DEVONthink Pro45
$80 Pro version ($40 Personal version withoutscripting and only a few other features, $20 forNote version46.) DEVONthink’s strong suit is col-
42http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/43http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/editions.htm
l44http://www.linkbackproject.org/45http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonth
ink/index.html46http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonth
ink/comparison.html
ATPM 12.05 30 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
lecting, categorizing, and searching informationcollected from others. A wide variety of file typescan be “understood,” and either fully importedor referenced. It has built-in pattern recognitionsoftware to help you find documents with similar“meaning.” A partner application, DEVONagent47
uses the same technology to include Web searches.What’s been recently added (version 1.1.1):
Actually the Pro version itself is new, adding fullAppleScriptability and the ability to open multipledatabases.
What ATPO likes: The wide variety of types thatcan be included is impressive. It uniquely providessuggestions on how to group files into groups. Theassociation technology also gives better search resultsof its databases than Spotlight.
What it could use: The grouping of files in theoutline adds a huge amount of meta informationabout the files. The AI association technologydoesn’t seem to take this added meta informationseriously. It would be nice if DEVONthink integratedbetter with some of the power outliners to build anintimate workflow.
Inspiration48
$69. Inspiration is a cross-platform integratedmindmapping and outlining application. It is oldand mature. Though it now exclusively targetssecondary education, it is a strong writer’s tool thatallows switching back and forth between text andgraphical structures.
What’s been recently added (version 8): access toa large Web library of symbols for pasting. Improvedrapid-fire brainstorming in mindmap mode. A builtin thesaurus.
What ATPO likes: I has an un-Mac-like interface,but it is well constructed. It seems easy for writers tosettle into, though it lacks the advanced manipulationcommands of others on the list.
What it could use: It is an almost perfect systemfor the topic of this column, an integrated workflowwhere you can shift back and forth between brain-storming and polishing modes. But its export toWord is imperfect. It lacks document structure innamed styles so none of that conveys on export, noteven to Word’s outline mode.
47http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonagent/index.html
48http://www.inspiration.com
Mellel49
$49. Mellel is a strong, Mac-only word processor. Ittargets multilingual writers, technical and businesswriters, and others that need long, structured docu-ments. It has a built-in outliner as an editable viewin a separate pane.
What’s been recently added (version 2.07): noth-ing so far as outlining. On the document side,columns and section styles.
What ATPO likes: the ability to work with struc-ture and content simultaneously within a structure.
What it could use: better outline display and ma-nipulation options. On the document side, there isa deep need for feature parity with the discontinuedFrameMaker50. XML and SGML support.
Mori51
$28. Mori is a new outliner from the developer of HogBay Notebook, intended to have all of its featuresand a stronger architecture for future growth. It’s anew product and not yet as feature-rich as its prede-cessor. Still, it is the only power outliner with thefollowing: AppleScript, smart folders, clones, inter-nal links, custom metadata columns. No other poweroutliner has even three of these. Mori is based onTiger’s new Core Data functionality and has an opensource plug-in architecture.
What’s been recently added (version 1.2): customcolumns.
What ATPO likes: the clean interface, userassignable columns, links, clones, and smart folders.The ability to have two views of the same docu-ment and the way you can promote “lists” in notesto outlines and vice versa. Scriptability, databaseunderpinnings. The open development methodol-ogy, which includes both an open source plug-inarchitecture and letting users determine and vote onfeatures.
What it could use: agents like Tinderbox.
NoteBook52
$50. NoteBook is one of two on this list that use aliteral notebook metaphor: pages are stacked on oneanother, have section dividers, a tables of contents,and a number of rich indexes based on different searchcriteria. It is strongest in “notebooking,” for instancein taking class notes. Multimedia can be in outline“cells,” and rudimentary metadata can be assigned.
49http://www.redlers.com/mellel.html50http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/main.html51http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/mori52http://www.circusponies.com
ATPM 12.05 31 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
What’s been recently added (version 2.1 imma-nent): LinkBack; iCal syncing; PDF creation withlinks.
What ATPO likes: This is the best implementa-tion of outlines of outlines. Each page contains anoutline (or now, a “word processing” page) and allpages are organized in an outline. It has good persis-tent search facilities also.
What it could use: a better drag methodology allaround for links and outline-to-outline rearranging.
NoteTaker53
$70. NoteTaker also uses the notebook metaphor ofstacked pages of outlines with tables of contents andrich indexes. It seems to focus more on richer mediatypes and features and has many of both. Devel-opment is aggressive. Integration with a variety ofInternet technologies is strong.
What’s been recently added (version 1.9.10): Thebig news is that a partner application, NoteShare($150), has been released with all the capabilities ofNoteTaker and which allows collaborative authoring.With the appearance of Tiger, NoteTaker added Au-tomator, Spotlight, and Dashboard support.
What ATPO likes: It is fully AppleScriptable, hasgood XML support, and has an open plug-in architec-ture for cells. We like how it solved the drag problemswith stacked outlines. Has a good clipping strategyfor getting things in.
What it could use: It still has a less elegant userinterface than others on this list, and it has no dis-tinct equivalent to a “note” or paragraph entry sointegration in a publishing workflow is stymied de-spite the XML and scripting support.
OmniOutliner54
$70 Pro edition ($40 otherwise). OmniOutliner isprobably the most widely used on this list, was thefirst OS X outliner, and has been bundled on newMacs. It is elegant and mature, a conventional out-liner in many ways. Its strengths are in how it fullysupports columns and styles. It has an extremely pol-ished and well considered user interface. It has strongAppleScript and XML support.
What’s been recently added (version 3.5): 3.5added LinkBack support, version 3 added Spotlightand Automator support.
What ATPO likes: This just flows with the Zenof the Mac interface and in many ways seems moreMac-like than Apple’s own applications. The way
53http://www.aquaminds.com54http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner
it is designed, it can be used in many ways: as awriting tool, as a collector’s notebook, as a task or listmanager, as a lightweight spreadsheet. Its flexibilityis apparent in the free and very useful “getting thingsdone” add-on scripts by Ethan J. A. Schoonover55.
What it could use: It lacks key features ATPOtrumpets, namely internal links, smart folders, andclones. Its support for live Web viewing and somemedia types is underwhelming.
Process256
$39. Process2 is one of those applications that flowswell. It seems simple but is highly leverageable.ATPO thinks of it best as an outliner built as aproject manager with project development toolsintegrated. ATPO talks a lot about this strengthof outliners: the ability to work at two levels. Onelevel makes stuff, the other tracks the making of thestuff. It simply has an outline of tasks and allowsyou to make notes or attach and view a variety ofassociated files.
What’s been recently added (version 2): iCalsync, Bonjour collaboration, Spotlight, and customcolumns.
What ATPO likes: It uses Tiger’s Core Data soit is scalable, fast, and clean. It isn’t complicated.It does a few things and well, one of them being ourvalued manage-while-you-work.
What it could use: It has a three-pane setup inits main view where one pane has the header in out-line mode and another has the “note” associated withthat header. In this pane, you can create notes orview attachments, one at a time. A neat badge atthe top of this pane shows the file type and name.The problem is in assembling your project from yourattached sources. Process needs a well-designed dragstrategy.
TAO57
$30. TAO is something of a phenomenon. It isdesigned to replicate and improve on the veneratedMORE. If you think of it as a writer’s tool instead ofa notebook, it has a relentless list of features whichwe won’t list here. There’s an update every few days!
What’s been recently added (version 1.1): Spot-light and multimedia support. Growing support fornamed, CSS-type styles.
55http://kinkless.com/56http://www.jumsoft.com/process/57http://blue-beach-systems.com/Products/Software/TA
O/
ATPM 12.05 32 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
What ATPO likes: TAO values many things wedo: clones, links, header manipulation/merging/splitting,and split editing. It has a high-level view that showsthe document schematically. TAO has growing,apparently intelligent, support for named styles anduser-definable columns.
What it could use: It’s so rich in some ways anddeficient in others. The main problem—how can wesay this—is that the user interface isn’t as competentas the soul of the thing. It’s a mess compared tothe others on this list, almost proudly un-Mac-like.Featurewise, the biggest need is AppleScript support.
Tinderbox58
$192 initially ($90/year thereafter for upgrades).Tinderbox is the most capable of the power outlinersin most respects. It has remarkable smart agentcapabilities, clones, and links. It can shift betweenoutline view and several graphical views, most no-tably a “map” view where headers are boxes that“contain” other boxes. Since its appearance, it hasalways been the king in terms of most features plusits internal scripting language.
What’s been recently added (version 3.06): Im-proved support for images. The ability to havescripts act on notes without needing to collect themas clones.
What ATPO likes: We think this has the bestuser interface conventions for the things that mat-ter: dragging, cloning, linking. The map view is themost Mac-like spatial thing we’ve ever seen, in termsof the original spatial-Finder metaphor. Tinderbox’sinternal scripting language is the most advanced andpowerful of anything on the list. It’s native format isXML.
What it could use: AppleScript. Continued im-provement in the internal scripting language, partic-ularly advanced control over text manipulation innotes (which would be simple if AppleScript werecallable). It has a weak multimedia, clipping, and im-port strategy. Manually editing attributes is clumsy.Linking with the file system is poor compared to al-most any other on this list.
• • •
In addition ATPO tracks some mindmappers (in ad-dition to Inspiration, mentioned above):
58http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
Incubator59
$49. Incubator is the successor to Pyramid. Its notclear whether Pyramid ($33) will continue to be of-fered.
What’s been recently added (version 2.1.2): Thewhole incarnation as Incubator is new. New featuresare nicer curved connection lines; relocatable branchlocations with nice alignment and distribution con-trols; collapsible branches; and an outline view. Pluslinks, internal and external.
What ATPO likes: It supports multiple canvases(pages). Beyond that, ATPO likes the mere fact thatthese guys exist. Featurewise, this has been the un-derdog compared to its competitors. Now it is prettydarn good. We often like to work with generated textonly. Incubator doesn’t allow images as nodes and allthat, so if you want to stick with plain old fashionedwords, you might find this clean and useful as it fitsthe outlining paradigm more than the mindmappingdogma.
What it could use: You can view the outline in adrawer, but not edit it. If you could edit the outline,or at least edit notes, it would be a good alternativefor text-oriented mindmapping because you could seeand tinker with the outline and map in one view.
NovaMind60
$99 (Screenwriter Edition $119). NovaMind has areputation as the most feature-rich mindmapper onthe Mac. Because the Mac has such superior graphicsand user interface conventions, some cross platformusers claim it is the best overall.
What’s been recently added (version 3.0.19): No-vaMind is now also available on Windows. The userinterface now employs collapsible inspectors. An ed-itable outline view is available. Lots of branch at-tributes have been added to support the screenwrit-ing and project management/Merlin modes.
What ATPO likes: This makes beautifulmindmaps, and the features are cool, especiallythe rapid-fire ones. We particularly like the screen-writer and project management attributes and theinspector interface. The editable outline view iswelcome. Import from OmniOutliner is one-wayonly, but very nice. The Web site export has coolcode to hide/show branches.
What it could use: You can only have one can-vas per mindmap. (You can open as many individualfiles as you wish, of course.) You can attach text
59http://www.mindcad.com/60http://www.nova-mind.com/
ATPM 12.05 33 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
to branches just as you can graphics. But these arenot handled as notes in the export or outline. Asa result, the outline view is extremely rudimentary,virtually useless for power outlining. It would be niceto round trip to and from OmniOutliner. The screen-writing version could be stretched for all sorts of writ-ing projects using a template system.
ConceptDraw Mindmap61
$200 (a $100 version lacks multiple pages and someintegration features). In the first part of this columnyou were introduced to this capable, cross-platformmindmapper. The Pro version has project manage-ment features.
What’s been recently added (version 4.2): Bettersupport for integration with the ConceptDraw andMicrosoft project managers. OPML export and im-port.
What ATPO likes: We like this for the reason wedisplayed in the column: a workflow within a suite,such as it is. What we didn’t mention was its goodintegration with Microsoft Word. You can round tripto and from Word’s outliner and retain the structureand text.
What it could use: The whole line of Con-ceptDraw products is worth considering, but theWindows user interface seems clunky when set be-side real Mac applications. If the user interfacewere re-engineered, the integration with its own andMicrosoft’s suites would be compelling.
• • •
ATPO also tracks some outline-savvy project man-agers:
iTaskX62
$84. iTaskX is a robust project manager with severalgraphical views anchored by a task outline.
What’s been recently added (version 2.1): Spot-light support.
What ATPO likes: It has user controls over howthe charts are drawn, and the results can be lovely.
What it could use: User definable columns. Youcan now attach one document per task. The outlineshould be expandable to accommodate any numberof evolving documents.
61http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/mindmap/overview.php
62http://www.itaskx.com/software/en/default.htm
Merlin63
145 Euros (about $179 dollars). Merlin is a strongproject manager built around several views in onewindow. It integrates with iCal, Mail and AddressBook, and allows more attributes and reports thanothers.
What’s been recently added (version 1.3.9): Spot-light and NovaMind integration. Gantt chart shad-ows.
What ATPO likes: The NovaMind integration,obviously. It’s very cool to make a map and have acomplete project. Merlin also imports OmniOutliner2 outlines. (The current version is 3.5.)
What it could use: Round trip among OmniOut-liner, NovaMind, and Merlin. The ability to attachfiles as resources. Scriptability (like the competitor,Schedule64) and attaching of scripts to events. Also,the graphical views have no display options. Again,matching Schedule in this regard would be nice.
ProjectX65
$199. ProjectX is much like the other two we track.It appears to have strong chart support, Web pub-lishing, and has nifty Dashboard widgets to displaytask progress. It also integrates with all the core Macapplications.
What’s been recently added: This is a new appli-cation, still officially in beta it seems. It won best ofshow in last January’s Macworld Expo.
What ATPO likes: ATPO hasn’t gotten its filthymitts on a copy of this yet.
• • •
And finally the tracker reports random news:
• You’ll recall our appreciation66 of the classicoutliner Acta, which first developed some of theinterface conventions we still use. It is availablefor free. With the loss of Classic on the newIntel Macs (boo!), all these classic outliners willbe unavailable. So the original author of Acta,David Dunham67, is writing a Cocoa version.Stay tuned.
• We announced with great flourish that Fron-tier was being made open source. Well, Iguess it was too late because virtually no
63http://www.projectwizards.net/en/merlin64http://www.aecsoftware.com/65http://www.projectx.com/home.html66http://www.atpm.com/10.03/atpo.shtml67http://a-sharp.com
ATPM 12.05 34 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
one has jumped on the bandwagon. In thatsame column68, we discussed activeRenderer69
that was expected to grow to general linkagewith outliners. It has languished.
• In a few ATPO columns, we mentioned theproject manager Daylite (sometimes mis-spelling it as DayLight). Its version 3 is outnow and it has moved away from the outlineview of tasks. It’s an illustrative case againstoutlining for some purposes. Yojimbo70 a newinformation manager from a solid developer,aggressively avoids outlining. We’ll explorethe ideas behind these decisions in the nextcolumn.
• Jer’s Novel Writer71 is a new word processor,obviously tailored for novelists. It features abuilt-in outliner. Interesting. It’s still in betawith no documentation. The expected cost isunknown.
• SmartIdeas72 is a new cross-platform $59mindmapper for school kids. ATPO hasn’tworked with it yet, but it seems to have aunique feature: the ability to create elementsthat zoom into new mindmap pages.
• At $35, MacJournal73 is now at version 4.We mentioned the previous version in ourlast column74. Among other new features, thisversion now allows nested “journals,” whichwould look like folders in an ordinary outliner.
• In our very first column75, we mentionedoutlining in Emacs76, a feature-rich butMac-unfriendly editor. Now you can getan extremely Mac-friendly version77. It’s free!
• ATPO usually doesn’t highlight any entry inan outliner category. But if you want to use theoutliner paradigm with your contacts, this is
68http://www.atpm.com/10.07/atpo.shtml69http://www.activerenderer.com/70http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/index.sh
tml71http://jerssoftwarehut.com/AboutJNW.shtml72http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-US/Products/SMART+
Ideas/73http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=8
574http://www.atpm.com/12.03/atpo.shtml75http://www.atpm.com/9.09/atpo.shtml76http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/77http://aquamacs.org/
your only choice. Where Apple’s Address Bookallows you to collect contacts into groups, withOD4Contact78 you can have nested groups.Way cool. It is a full PIM, but it stores itsdata in the Address Book, so you can use itto just organize your contacts and use anotherPIM if you wish (one that allows outlining intask lists!), so long as that also pulls out of theAddress Book. OD4Contact is $55.
• We’ve still been looking for ways to usethe Finder as part of a flexible outlinersystem. If you are on this quest, considerSpotlight metatags79 as part of your solution.Or perhaps in Mail, a similar80 strategy.
• • •
Our next column will be on what it means to be achild. Send ideas and insights if you have them. Beclever and creative until next time.
Copyright © 2006 Ted Goranson, [email protected]. TedGoranson is senior scientist of Sirius-Beta.
78http://www.objective-decision.com/en/products/od4contact/
79http://www.fluffy.co.uk/spotmeta/index3.html80http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html
ATPM 12.05 35 Outliners: Outlining Workflows and ConceptDraw
Desktop PicturesEAA AirVentureThis Month’s Desktop Pictures1
These photos2 were taken by Chris Lawson at the Ex-perimental Aircraft Association (EAA) AirVenture3
2005 event held in Oshkosh, WI. He used a CanonDigital Rebel XT and Canon 100-300mm zoom lens.A couple of the nose art photos may have been takenwith a Canon 18-55mm lens.
• A-1 Skyraider: single-seat attack bomber of the1950s–1970s that saw a great deal of service inKorea and Vietnam.
• Aeroshell Diamond Climb: the AeroshellAerobatic Team4 does a climb in the classic“diamond” formation pioneered by the BlueAngels in 1946.
• Aeroshell Diamond Dive: the Aeroshell teamdives through on the back side of a loop. In thebackground are the four smoke trails from theclimbing portion of the loop.
• Aeroshell Diamond Fly-By: the Aeroshell teammakes a high-speed pass across the show line.
• Aeroshell Loop: the Aeroshell team finishes thetop of the loop as the flight lead starts his de-scent.
• Aluminum Overcast: the Experimental Air-craft Association’s B-17, “Aluminum Overcast5,”shows off her nose art.
• AT-11Kansan Front: frontal shot of an AT-11Kansan, a military version of the classicBeech 18 twin-radial transport that was usedfor training thousands of bombardiers andnavigators in World War II.
• AT-11 Left Engine: this is a close-up of the gor-geous Pratt and Whitney R-9856 radial engineand Hamilton Standard propeller. Also visibleis the bombsight in the nose.
1http://www.atpm.com/12.05/eea-airventure/2http://www.atpm.com/12.05/eea-airventure/3http://www.airventure.org/4http://www.naat.net/5http://www.b17.org6http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_R-9
85
• AT-11 Left Rear: the AT-11 faces west, over-looking the outskirts of the Warbirds displayarea at Oshkosh.
• Beech 18: the civilian transport version of theAT-11, the Beechcraft7 Model 18. Note the sea-plane taking off in the background (just over thecockpit of the 18).
• Campbell Pitts S-1S: Scott Campbell’s Pitts S-1S aerobatic biplane.
• DC-3 Nose: looking up at the nose of anotherclassic, the Douglas DC-38. If you haven’t seenone of these in person, or if you’ve seen one nextto a modern airliner, you don’t really have anyconcept of how big the DC-3 is. They’re quitelarge, and the nose sits a good 12–15 feet abovethe ground.
• Devil Dog: the Commemorative Air Force’s9
B-2510 “Devil Dog” nose art.
• Diamond Lil (B-24) Nose Art: one of only avery few (two?) B-24 Liberators11 still flying,“Diamond Lil” is another Commemorative AirForce ’bird. Nice nose art!
• Douglas DC-3: a wider view of the aforemen-tioned Douglas DC-3.
• F-16: a USAF F-16 Fighting Falcon12 landingafter the Heritage Flight.
• F-4 Phantom: a retired USAF F-4 Phantom II13
landing after the Heritage Flight.
• F-4 Taxiing: the above aircraft taxis past showcenter after the Heritage Flight.
• F4U Corsair: a US Marines Corsair14 (probablya Chance Vought15 F4U) on static display. The
7http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Model_188http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-39http://www.commemorativeairforce.org/
10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-25_Mitchell11http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-24_Liberator12http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-16_Fighting_Falcon13http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-4_Phantom_II14http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F4U_Corsair15http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vought
ATPM 12.05 36 Desktop Pictures: EAA AirVenture
F4U was the first US single-engine productionaircraft capable of 400 MPH in level flight.
• F8F Bearcat 2: the Grumman F8F Bearcat16
was the United States’ carrier-based answer tothe FW-19017, but didn’t enter military serviceuntil after World War II ended. It was the lastpiston-powered fighter that Grumman built.
• F8F Bearcat: another shot of a Bearcat inslightly different paint.
• Fairchild PT-23 Front: the Fairchild PT-2318
was one of several very similar aircraft (the ma-jor differences among them being the engine)used as primary trainers by both the Army AirCorps and RAF during World War II.
• Fairchild PT-23 Profile: the same PT-23 asabove, viewed from the side.
Previous Months’ Desktop PicturesPictures from previous months are listed in thedesktop pictures archives19.
Downloading All the Pictures at OnceiCab and Interarchy can download an entire set ofdesktop pictures at once. Use the “Web . Down-load Entire Site” command in the File menu, givingit the URL to the pictures page above. In iCab, usethe Download command to download “Get all files insame path.”
Contributing Your Own Desktop PicturesIf you have a picture, whether a small series or justone fabulous or funny shot, feel free to send it [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing it innext month’s issue. Have a regular print but no scan-ner? Don’t worry. E-mail us, and we tell you whereto send it so we can scan it for you. Note that wecannot return the original print, so send us a copy.
Placing Desktop PicturesMac OS X 10.3.x and 10.4.xChoose “System Preferences. . .” from the Applemenu, click the “Desktop & Screen Saver” button,then choose the Desktop tab. In the left-side menu,select the desktop pictures folder you want to use.
16http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F8F_Bearcat17http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Fw_19018http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_PT-2319http://www.atpm.com/Back/desktop-pictures.shtml
You can also use the pictures with Mac OS X’sbuilt-in screen saver. Select the Screen Saver tabwhich is also in the “Desktop & Screen Saver” Sys-tem Preferences pane. If you put the atpm picturesin your Pictures folder, click on the Pictures Folderin the list of screen savers. Otherwise, click ChooseFolder to tell the screen saver which pictures to use.
Mac OS X 10.1.x and 10.2.xChoose “System Preferences. . .” from the Applemenu and click the Desktop button. With the pop-up menu, select the desktop pictures folder you wantto use.
You can also use the pictures with Mac OS X’sbuilt-in screen saver. Choose “System Preferences. . .”from the Apple menu. Click the Screen Saver (10.1.x)or Screen Effects (10.2.x) button. Then click on Cus-tom Slide Show in the list of screen savers. If youput the atpm pictures in your Pictures folder, you’reall set. Otherwise, click Configure to tell the screensaver which pictures to use.
Mac OS X 10.0.xSwitch to the Finder. Choose “Preferences. . .” fromthe “Finder” menu. Click on the “Select Picture. . .”button on the right. In the Open Panel, select thedesktop picture you want to use. The panel defaultsto your ~/Library/Desktop Pictures folder. Closethe “Finder Preferences” window when you are done.
ATPM 12.05 37 Desktop Pictures: EAA AirVenture
ATPM 12.05 39 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 40 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 41 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 42 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 43 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 44 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 45 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 46 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 47 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 48 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 49 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 50 Cartoon: Cortland
ATPM 12.05 51 Cartoon: Cortland
Software Reviewby Sylvester Roque, [email protected]
Footlights Pro 2.1Developer: RadicalBreeze Software1
Price: $15Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3. Not
Universal2.Trial: Feature-limited (free non-Pro ver-
sion lacks movie exporting)When Footlights came up for review in this monthsissue I was intrigued. Part of my excitement stemsfrom the fact that I am a digital pack rat. I mean, sowhat if I have several utilities that perform almost thesame task? I was also intrigued by the possibility thatthe Pro version of Footlights program might replaceMPEG Streamclip in the video extraction process3
that I outlined in a previous issue.
So, What Is Footlights?Apple’s dictionary included in the current release ofOS X defines footlights as “a row of spotlights alongthe front of a stage at the level of the actors’ feet.”Now, the folks at RadicalBreeze Software, makersof such programs as DiscBlaze4 and RadicalPhoto5
bring us Footlights 2.1. Footlights is available forfree but unlocking the video conversion features willcost you $15 to purchase a serial number.
So, how well does Footlights work? Is it worth thetime, effort, and money? Let’s open the lab, fire upthe Mac, and take a look. Keep in mind as we test ev-erything that my current test Mac is a dual-processor2 GHz G5 with 512 MB of RAM. In addition to thestock 150 GB internal hard drive, I have a 150 GBexternal hard drive attached.
Installing FootlightsBefore we begin installing software, let’s look at thesystem requirements. The RadicalBreeze Web sitedoesn’t provide much information in this regard otherthan to say that the program requires Mac OS X10.3 and higher. No mention is made of minimumsuggested hardware, but their support team tells methat any Mac that supports 10.3 should work fine.
1http://www.radicalbreeze.com/footlights/2http://www.apple.com/universal/3http://www.atpm.com/12.03/howto.shtml4http://www.radicalbreeze.com/blaze/5http://www.radicalbreeze.com/radicalphoto/
One of the other things I found out by con-tacting the Footlights support team is that theplayback and conversion options available to youdepend upon which QuickTime codecs you haveinstalled on your system. Like many other conver-sion programs, Footlights relies on the QuickTimeframework to perform its magic. You can, for ex-ample, playback Windows Media files if you haveFlip4Mac Windows Media component6 installed.
One of the things I have come to expect sincemigrating to OS X is easy software installation.Footlights doesn’t disappoint in this regard. TheFootlights disk image weighs in at a paltry 2.6 MB.Whether you are on a dial-up or broadband Internetconnection you won’t be spending forever waiting forsoftware to download.
Once you have the disk image downloaded, a quickdouble-click will mount it on your desktop. Part waythrough the disk mounting process you will be askedto agree to the license agreement. Once that’s done,double-click the disk icon and drag the Footlights ap-plication to your hard drive. I placed it in the Appli-cations folder, but it also runs from the Desktop andshould run from anywhere on your hard drive.
The Video Playback ExperienceLaunch Footlights, and you are greeted by the videoplayback window. It’s pretty minimalist in design.The first thing I noticed is that, unlike the Quick-Time Player, Footlights has no buttons for such func-tions as play, rewind, and fast forward. These func-tions, like most others in Footlights, are accessed ei-ther by menus or keyboard commands. The onlyfunctions lacking keyboard commands are Clear, Se-lect All, Looping, Volume Up, and Volume Down.Even though the volume controls do not have directkeyboard equivalents in Footlights, the program re-sponds correctly to the volume keys on my stock Ap-ple keyboard. RadicalBreeze has chosen to use key-board commands that are pretty standard and easy toremember. The one keyboard command that threwme for a bit is the use of Command-P for Play. SinceI spend much of my time word processing, I associate
6http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv.htm
ATPM 12.05 53 Review: Footlights Pro 2.1
that command with printing. I discovered, quite byaccident, that pressing the spacebar would also startand stop playback.
Playback Window and Movie List
The real fun with Footlights begins once you havechosen the video that you want to play. In my tests, Iopened and played video clips ranging from a few sec-onds up to about 1 hour and 15 minutes. All of thevideos loaded quickly. Video playback was smootheven in Fullscreen mode. With my 64 MB video cardredrawing the window to fullscreen mode took a sec-ond or two, but once that was done playback wassmooth. The one thing I did notice is that video play-back stops if you hold the mouse button down a bittoo long when choosing a menu command but picksup right where it left off once you release the mouse.Video playback also stops if you shrink the windowinto the Dock. The audio keeps playing, and whenyou re-enlarge the window it immediately moves tothe right picture so that audio and video are not outof synch.
I’ve never been a big fan of QuickTime Player’sOpen Recent command. Don’t get me wrong, itworks fine I just can’t remember what videos arethere without clicking on the list. Footlights solvesthis problem with a separate window. Drag a videoclip into this window and you see a thumbnail ofthat video. You can also use the + and - buttons inthe window to add new videos and adjust the size ofthe video thumbnails with a slider.
I had a little fun experimenting with some of theeffects that are available while playing videos. Didyou ever want to play a video with the image turnedupside down or rotate the image to an unusual an-gle? Well Footlights can do that. If you click on thesmall button at the far bottom left of the window,a pop-up menu will let you to use sliders to adjustthe base Volume for the movie as well as Gamma,Brightness, Contrast, and Rotation. If you have a
video that just doesn’t look quite right during play-back, these controls may help. I used adjustments inthe gamma setting for a video that was just too dark.The adjustments show up in real time, so feel free toexperiment.
At the bottom of the window are three other fea-tures of interest. The blue button that somewhat re-sembles a blob is a slider that sets the transparency ofthe playback screen. With the slider set all the way tothe left, the window is not transparent. As you movethe slider farther to the right, the window becomesmore transparent and your underlying desktop startsto become visible. The last control on the right sideof the screen controls the zoom. Click the zoom tri-angle, and you can choose window sizes ranging from25% to Fill Screen. If none of those sizes meets yourneeds, grab the bottom right corner of the windowand drag it to the size that you need.
Special Effects
Converting Video With Footlights ProIf you have already downloaded and installed Foot-lights, upgrading to Footlights Pro will cost you $15for the license key. Enter it by launching the program,going to the Footlights menu and choosing Upgradeto Footlights Pro. Enter your name and license keyand you’re ready to go. Now the Export Movie com-mand becomes available. Choose that, and a dialogappears allowing you to set the type of movie thatyou want to create and then click Options to set thequality settings for the final movie. The available fileformats and quality settings will depend upon whichcodecs are installed on your system. If you are goingto save Windows Media files, you will need the paidversion of the Flip4Mac Windows Media component.
Once you have chosen appropriate quality set-tings, choose the location to save the resulting movie.Make sure that you have enough drive space. Somefile formats use more drive space than others. A 148MB MPEG2 file, for example, takes up over 850 MBof space as a DV file. This is not a flaw in the pro-
ATPM 12.05 54 Review: Footlights Pro 2.1
gram; it’s a function of the file formats and their cho-sen methods of compression. Conversions take aboutas much time with Footlights Pro as they have withother software I’ve used recently: Converting 75 min-utes of MPEG2 video to DV format took about 36minutes.
I didn’t notice any loss in picture quality whenvideos were converted with Footlights. In fact, I con-verted one black-and-white MPEG clip to a Quick-Time .mov file and put the windows side-by-side onthe computer. When I showed the two clips to mywife, she thought the converted file looked better thanthe original. Experiment with the various quality set-tings to find the right balance between file size andpicture quality.
Quirks Bugs and AnnoyancesDuring testing, I did discover a few quirks. If, forexample, you choose the Open Movie command butthen choose Cancel from the dialog box, an error of-108 is generated. This is on the list of fixes for a fu-ture release. If you try opening video object files froma DVD, the program will either generate a -2048 er-ror code or open the video with no sound. Footlightsdoes not currently support .vob files, but this featuremay be added in a future release. These errors donot crash the program, but it would be nice if theywere in some language other than geek speak. Ontwo occasions I did get a different error message thatforces Footlights to shut down, but it never crashedother programs or caused any other havoc with mysystem.
There isn’t much in the way of support informa-tion on the current Web site. In fact, Safari neverfound the support page indicated that I received fromour reviews editor. The e-mail address for supportdid work, though. In fact, I was pleasantly surprisedby how quickly my e-mails were answered. In an ex-treme instance, I sent an e-mail at about 1:45 AM ona Sunday morning. Less than nine hours later I hadanswers to my questions.
The only other problem I experienced is that forsome reason sound was lost when I converted videoclips. Initially I suspected that Footlights might bethe cause, so I sent an e-mail to the support team.They aren’t experiencing these issues, so I did someadditional testing. Whatever is causing the prob-lem is also affecting video conversions attempted withQuickTime Pro, but not conversions attempted withMPEG Streamclip so it’s likely that this is an issue
with my system rather with Footlights, but I thoughtyou should be aware of this.
When you make changes such as transparency,gamma, or rotation, these changes are not saved withthe movie. On the one hand, you can’t accidentallyruin the video, but it would be nice to save thesechanges. Some changes, like rotating video, may notbe that important, but it would be nice to save thingslike gamma changes.
Final ThoughtsOverall this is a nice program. It’s not quite as full-featured as QuickTime Pro but, then again it is lessexpensive. You can also do some things like createtransparent windows or rotate the video clip to anyangle. The effect is interesting although perhaps notvery practical. I particularly like the Movie List Win-dow. Were it not for the geek speak dialogs and a fewproblems playing movies that QuickTime Player han-dles with no problems, I’d probably like it even more.Overall I give it a rating of Good since I suspect thatthe sound problems are a function of something onmy system.
Copyright © 2006 Sylvester Roque, [email protected]. Re-viewing in atpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested,write to us at [email protected].
ATPM 12.05 55 Review: Footlights Pro 2.1
Accessory Reviewby Frank H. Wu, [email protected]
HardsleeveDeveloper: Axio1
Price: $130 (large); $90 (small)Requirements: iBook or PowerBook;
soon available for MacBook ProTrial: None
The Axio Hardsleeve is unique. Its name describes itwell: it is hard, and it is a sleeve. It is similar to theAxio line of backpacks2 popular with motorcyclists,using a combination of rigid polycarbonate plasticwith fabric.
In this case, the exterior is glossy plastic, in eitherblack with a faux carbon-fiber checkerboard pattern,or in pearl white, except for strip of cloth in the mid-dle that allows a zipper to be used as the closuremechanism. The interior is lined with felt that hasa very nice “hand” and has the Axio logo subtly im-printed.
High-density foam is used for a form-fittingpadding system. An inner strip of foam can be care-fully pulled out to make room for the larger models.It has been lightly pre-cut to the precise dimensionsneeded, and the job is easily finished with a sharp
1http://www.axio-usa.com2http://www.atpm.com/11.04/axio.shtml
knife. Semi-circular cutouts in the foam facilitateremoval of the machine.
There is a guitar-style strap that clips onto twometal studs. A pouch can be attached in turn to thestrap to hold a power adapter, though it just barelyfits and then not even the cord portion.
What makes this product attractive is its size. Itadds as little bulk to the contents as possible, and itoffers enough protection that it can be carried aloneinstead of being inserted into another bag—it actu-ally would be a belt-and-suspenders approach to putthe Hardsleeve into a briefcase. The Hardsleeve beatsany of the other sleeves on the market in terms of pro-tection. The only competitor to the Hardsleeve mightbe a Pelican briefcase. But the Hardsleeve looks farbetter and the Pelican is considerably larger.
ATPM 12.05 56 Review: Hardsleeve
So the Hardsleeve enforces the discipline of travel-ing light. You have to be a minimalist to appreciatethe aesthetic. You could take your PowerBook (orMacBook Pro once the new model of Hardsleeve isintroduced) to the library to do research, but youcould not take anything else: no accessories, no files,not even a magazine.
The real negative with the Hardsleeve, however, isthat because the interior has a much tighter fit thanmost carrying cases, when the case is opened up thePowerBook tends to be pulled open too. This maybe exacerbated by a weak latch on the PowerBooktested, but it’s enough to pose a concern. Further-more, the dual zipper doesn’t operate as well as itwould if it were pulling together only textiles. If thetabs are pulled without care, they easily miss teeth.Finally, the metal studs on the exterior (for the carry-ing strap) protrude and could easily damage a surfacethe Hardsleeve rests on. If you set it down on a din-ing room table made of wood, for example, you couldmar it without even being too reckless.
Nonetheless, the Hardsleeve is a great combina-tion of style and sturdiness. It combines great lookswith exceptional protection.
Copyright © 2006 Frank H. Wu, [email protected] in atpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested,write to us at [email protected].
ATPM 12.05 57 Review: Hardsleeve
Accessory Reviewby Lee Bennett and Chris Lawson
iPod 5GDeveloper: Apple Computer1
Price: $299 (30 GB); $399 (60 GB)Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9, USB
portTrial: None
The media reception given to Apple’s original iPodwas, to put it kindly, rather cool. Five years later,the mainstream media is as rabid for iPod rumorsas the Mac rumor sites were for Mac news in theirlate-1990s/early-2000s heyday.
While Apple’s fifth-generation iPod didn’t in-troduce any radical new features, it did bringlong-anticipated video capability to the platform.Many people—this reviewer included—wonderedaloud as to the point of watching video on a 2′′
screen, although this doesn’t seem to have stoppedcountless cell phones from being introduced withsimilar features. The video features of the iPod worksurprisingly well, and the brilliant color screen playsno small part in this. The aspect ratio was revisedfor video viewing with the screen pushed almost allthe way out to the edges of the new iPod. Videoplays crisply and without skips, although I still don’tunderstand why anyone would want to watch morethan a couple minutes of video at a time on such atiny screen.
1http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html
Viewing MacBreak’s first podcast from the Macworld Expoin San Francisco. No, the scroll wheel isn’t really that light incolor compared to the rest of the surface. The camera flash
exaggerated its color.
Fortunately, this is the perfect scenario for thevast number of video podcasts that are accessiblefrom a similarly vast number of sources. Even thoughfull-length television shows and more are becomingavailable in iPod-friendly format, the ability to viewvideos on the iPod is far better-suited for the phe-nomenon of podcasting.
ATPM 12.05 58 Review: iPod 5G
The 60 GB model is thicker than the 30 GB model, yet it issubstantially thinner than a 30 GB third-generation iPod.Note that even at this extreme angle, the video display is
quite visible. This angle also shows a truer representation ofthe scroll wheel’s color.
Playing the podcast videos is the good side. Onthe ever-so-slightly tarnished side, podcast manage-ment and access could use a bit of help. A long-standing gripe with iTunes is that some preferencesare needlessly buried. For several days, I was stymiedas to why some videos weren’t being copied to myiPod until I finally discovered that the option to copy
videos was off—apparently a default. Making mat-ters worse is that this option, like all the other iPod-specific preferences, aren’t even available to see oradjust unless an iPod is attached.
On the iPod itself, there’s a quirk (I’m not will-ing to call it a bug) that might have you believingsomething is wrong with video playback. The iPod’smain menu normally displays entries for both Pod-casts and Videos. If you navigate into Podcasts, youwill find a listing of all the podcasts to which you’vesubscribed—audio and video alike. But if you selectand play a video podcast, only the audio is played.To listen and watch the podcast, you must instead gointo the Videos menu, then one more level into theVideo Podcasts menu, in which you are shown onlythe podcasts that include video. Since I’d rather beable to stay in a single Podcasts menu item for all mypodcasts, it would be nice to instead have a prefer-ence setting to play only the audio track of a videopodcast.
Only video podcasts are seen in the Videos . Video Podcastsmenu. The main Podcasts menu displays all podcasts—audio
and video alike—but only plays the audio.
But aside from these access and managementgripes, catching up on a bit of Photoshop TV2 orMacBreak3, or having a little fun with Ask a Ninja4,Strongbad E-mails5, or Ze Frank6, is a great wayto spend your lunch hour or public transportationcommute.
2http://www.photoshoptv.com3http://macbreak.com4http://askaninja.com/5http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail.html6http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/
ATPM 12.05 59 Review: iPod 5G
Audio playback seems smoother, with fewer hangsthan the first-generation unit it replaced here at head-quarters. The new iPod is also substantially quieter,a benefit of a much newer (and thinner) hard diskmechanism. Battery life is now claimed to be 20hours with the 60 GB version (which has a largerbattery; the 30 GB model claims a 14-hour batterylife). Extensive use on the daily commute (about anhour each day) barely makes a dent in battery life af-ter three or four consecutive days without a charge,so this claim seems believable.
Also fixed is an old firmware bug (present, as faras I know, only in first-generation models) that wouldcause a song to continue “playing” all the way tothe 1:57 mark when the iPod was paused immedi-ately after selecting a playlist. Unfortunately, thenew firmware takes a step backward in the gamesdepartment; the new iPod is less useful for killingtime waiting for the bus unless you’re a huge fan ofParachute. C’mon, Apple, my cell phone has moregames than this, and it’s not like any phone has 60GB of internal storage. I think you could spare thespace.
Apple only provides four paltry games on the iPod. Formore, a Google search for “ipod games” will turn up plenty of
options.
If video playback is a must-have feature, the 5GiPod is a must-have upgrade, bringing the great iPodinterface that you know and love to video playback.If you don’t plan on using the video features, thecolor screen and immense battery life still make fora very compelling package. Apple has thrown downthe gauntlet once again, and the competition has yetto answer.
Copyright © 2006 Lee Bennett and Chris Lawson. Reviewingin atpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested, write to usat [email protected].
ATPM 12.05 60 Review: iPod 5G
Software Reviewby Lee Bennett, [email protected]
iTunes Catalog 2.0.1Developer: KavaSoft1
Price: $25Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9, iTunes
4.5. Universal2.Trial: Feature-limited (only artists begin-
ning with letters A-E are displayed).
In my ongoing quest to seek out methods of access-ing my iTunes library from a remote location, I cameacross iTunes Catalog. In this age of software com-monly being given names that bears little or no wit-ness as to the function of the software, iTunes Cataloghas not joined that ship. I initially made the error ofseeing the application as providing full remote accessto my iTunes library. In reality, it truly is a Web-based catalog of an iTunes library—one that comeswith several neat tricks.
The iTunes Catalog browser is a surprisingly well-donesimulation of the actual iTunes application browsing the
Music Store.
The primary function of iTunes Catalog is todisplay an iTunes-esque interface of your librarywithin a Web browser. Playlists are displayed onthe left just as you’d expect in iTunes. There is agenre/artist/album browser at the top and an iTunesMusic Store–style interface in the main window. This
1http://www.kavasoft.com/iTunesCatalog/2http://www.apple.com/universal/
main section includes boxes showing random albums,recently added albums, recently played albums andsongs, top rated albums, and more. There’s also aniPod browser—more on that later.
But iTunes Catalog goes beyond simply providingremote access to information and lists of your library.If you enable the option, you can play your songson the remote computer. Even the protected MusicStore purchases can be played, but only if the remotecomputer is one of the five machines allowed to beauthenticated to your account at any given time.
Almost as if it were icing on the cake, iTunes Cat-alog offers an additional method for browsing andplaying files in your library—a simulation of an iPod.And not just any iPod; you can select either the full-size or Nano versions in either black or white, as wellas a fourth generation iPod photo.
For many people, this could be the end of the re-view. The functions I’ve described above worked withno difficulty. The setup application was stable and,with only one exception concerning album artworkthat I’ll describe below, it was very straightforwardin its operation. There are built-in helpers to be sureyour computer’s Web Sharing and PHP are properlyenabled, and easily accessible toolbar buttons allowyou to publish an updated catalog either locally or viaFTP. There are also great tools to retrieve and man-age album artwork and lyrics, look up the year analbum was released, and interact with Musicmobs3.
However, for its price tag, a few changes and fixesare needed before I’d consider it a value.
Topping the bug side of the list is video playback.When I first began using iTunes Catalog it was atversion 2.0, and every video in my library that Iattempted to play resulted in a server error. I shouldhave made note of the exact error, but failed to doso. I’ve since updated to version 2.0.1, but the videoproblem is only partially fixed. They now will play,but only a thin horizontal strip is visible—an areaequal to the space normally occupied by the Quick-Time slider/controller normally seen via the Webbrowser plug-in. I would have expected a pop-upwindow to display the video but instead only get
3http://www.musicmobs.com/
ATPM 12.05 61 Review: iTunes Catalog 2.0.1
the thin strip in the upper portion of the catalogbrowser.
Video playback leaves a lot to be desired. Specifically desiredis being able to see all of the video!
The iPod browser exhibits the same video playback problem.
Also on my bug list is that music playback occa-sionally skipped if I switched to another Safari taband started browsing. I fault iTunes Catalog for thisand not my processor because I have many timesloaded an audio file into Safari that was either on mylocal computer or accessed from my server and thenswitched to another tab to browse while the audio filewas playing, skip-free.
An oddity that I can’t be certain whether or notis a bug is how songs and albums are tallied for thingslike the “Recently Added” and “Recently Played”sections. As things turned out, the most recent al-bum I ripped at this writing was volume 21 of the
“Now That’s What I Call Music!” compilation. Forthe record, I do not use iTunes’ compilation settingin the tag editor and always turn it off if a rippedalbum has enabled it. Yet something about this Now21 album made it always appear in at least two ofthe four “Recently Added Albums” spots (each witha different song label beneath). Often, three or evenall four spots show this album.
Also of confusion to me is why several albums keepshowing up in the “Recently Played” spot that I ac-tually have not played in quite some time. Worst ofall is that the “Recently Played Songs” box is com-pletely full of songs from a playlist I only use rarely,and even then I only use it on my iPod—never di-rectly from iTunes.
Suffice to say, I’ve had to largely ignore the MusicStore-like representation and simply browse artistsand albums in the upper portion, or directly accessone of my playlists shown in the left-side pane.
Rounding out the list of problems are a few func-tionality features I’d love to see addressed. Most ofall, iTunes Catalog is not designed to play a series ofsongs. I realize that, as a library catalog, previewinga single song should be very acceptable functional-ity. However, iTunes Catalog would be vastly morevaluable to me (and immediately worth more than itscurrent price) if it would play an album or playlist insuccession without having to click on each song oneat a time to play it.
Somewhat related to the successive playback ca-pability is protection. iTunes Catalog works bestwhen it is published to a Web server accessible fromanywhere via the Internet so you can browse and pre-view your library no matter where you are. (Mostpeople would have little need for such a catalog athome since their iTunes library is already right thereand they can browse the actual iTunes application.)Preventing the world from potentially finding yourcatalog and also possibly even being able to copy andsave any of your music that didn’t come from theiTunes Music Store should be on the to-do list. Apublished iTunes Catalog Web site is already PHP-driven. I may not know much about PHP, but I don’timagine it would be difficult to require a login to ac-cess the Web-based catalog.
In the setup application, there is a column thatindicates the status of artwork for each album. Itworks, but is not intuitive. It simply consists of twogreen, yellow, or red Aqua-style dots. One indicateswhether artwork exists in your iTunes library; theother indicates whether the artwork is in your iTunes
ATPM 12.05 62 Review: iTunes Catalog 2.0.1
Catalog library. Green means all albums/songs haveartwork, yellow means that some have artwork, andred means none have artwork. Nothing on the screenoffers a clue that the left dot refers to iTunes Cata-log and the right dot refers to iTunes. I had to digthrough the help screens to learn this. Likewise, Ialso had to search the help files to learn that there isa skill of double-clicking these dots to copy artworkfrom one place to another and to retrieve artworkfrom Amazon.
And finally: the amount of time required to pub-lish a catalog. I realize I am closing on 6,500 itemsin my iTunes library and that my library lives on anolder computer, but I hope the developers are explor-ing ways of optimizing the catalog generation rou-tines. I don’t know the exact time that was required,but I can tell you that after I had began publishingmy catalog, I went to watch a TV program, and thecatalog was not finished by the time the first set ofcommercials ran—about 15 minutes into the show.When I returned again at the end of the hour-longshow, it was finished and waiting for me. Thus, ona 450 MHz G4 with nearly 6,500 files, the time topublish a catalog was more than 15 but less than 60minutes.
My search continues for a better way to stream mymusic from home in a protected manner. (Yes, I haveheard of accessTunes4 and would like to review it oneday, but I must first work through some issues that Iam not yet convinced are not problems on my end.)For now, iTunes Catalog provides a useful methodto quickly snag a song from home to let a friend orcoworker hear.
Copyright © 2006 Lee Bennett, [email protected]. Re-viewing in atpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested,write to us at [email protected].
4http://www.bainsware.com/accesstunes/
ATPM 12.05 63 Review: iTunes Catalog 2.0.1
Hardware Reviewby Christopher Turner, [email protected]
SmartBoard USB5000Developer: Datadesk Technologies1
Price: $100Requirements: USB portTrial: None
I remember when Microsoft first re-leased its Natural Keyboard, the company’s attemptat bringing an affordable ergonomic keyboard to themasses. I purchased one for use at work, where it wasa Windows environment, and I longed for a similarkeyboard to be available for my use at home, on myMacintosh.
Apple used to sell a semi-ergonomic keyboard,the Apple Adjustable Keyboard, and I located oneon an online swap list, and used that until the lastADB-equipped Macintosh in my home departed.Thus continued the search for an affordable, er-gonomic keyboard built specifically for the Mac, anda USB-equipped Mac at that.
Some Macintosh users had taken to using the lat-est versions of the Microsoft Natural Keyboard inconjunction with system hacks and key-remappingsoftware on OS X. Eventually, Microsoft saw this asa potentially lucrative market, and created its ownsoftware for Mac OS X that would allow use of aMicrosoft keyboard or mouse on the Mac with theappropriate keys remapped. This was the setup Iused for quite a while, switching back to the standardblack Apple keyboard that shipped with my Cube onoccasion. My only caveat with using the Microsoftkeyboard was that the operating system had to loadfor it to be recognized. So if I needed to boot in tosingle-user mode for troubleshooting, it meant plug-ging in my Apple keyboard.
When my new Intel-based iMac arrived earlierthis year, I began my affordable-ergonomic keyboardhunt yet again, and it led me to Datadesk Tech-nologies, and their SmartBoard USB for Macintosh.Datadesk is no newcomer to the keyboard or Mac-intosh arena; they’ve been around for quite a while,and most people are familiar with them through theline of keyboards for children2. I contacted the com-
1http://www.datadesktech.com/desktop_sb.html2http://www.datadesktech.com/desktop_lf.html
pany regarding the SmartBoard, and soon one wason my desk.
The SmartBoard USB for Macintosh is made ofsturdy white plastic, with black characters on whitekeys. The F keys are a transparent grey-purple,which offers a nice contrast without being garish.It has two USB ports, for a mouse or trackballand other USB device. I use the second port formy Dazzle3 media card reader. Like the MicrosoftNatural Keyboard series, the SmartBoard is talltoward the center, with split key sections, taperingdownward for a more natural resting position for thehands.
Datadesk claims the SmartBoard is 20% smallerthan other ergonomic keyboards, so it can fit instandard-size keyboard drawers. Not having such adrawer, I cannot speak to this, but the size reductionis noticeable, mostly due to what they had to dowith the key arrangement to make it work.
First, not all of the keys are the same size. Keystoward the interior of the board, such as T, G, B, Y,H, and N, are narrower than outer keys like Q, A,Z, P, :, and /. The company refers to this conceptas “variable width.” This took considerable gettingused to, and I have average-size hands. After a monthof use, I’m still missing or hitting the wrong keys incertain situations.
3http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/Home+Video/Dazzle/?dz=1
ATPM 12.05 64 Review: SmartBoard USB5000
Another adjustment for me was the movement ofthe =/+ key, from its usual position to the left of theDelete key. Instead, it can be found between the ‘/~key and the 1 key. I’ve been typing since my junioryear in high school, so we’re talking over fifteen yearsof QWERTY familiarity, and this one key movementhas taken a lot of adjustment.
Another size sacrifice is the loss of some F keys,notably F13–16, found on the standard Apple key-board. This wasn’t a huge loss for me, as I have yetto work the F keys as task launchers in to my every-day workflow. The wrinkle it did have was that theF12 key became the substitute Eject key, and I hadto remap the Dashboard key in System Preferences.
Lastly, keys you would normally find betweenthe QWERTY layout and the number pad on theright have been moved. These keys include PageUp, Page Down, Home, End, and others. Theyhave been sandwiched at the top of the numerickeypad on the SmartBoard. This has not been as
much of an adjustment for me; I usually look atthe keyboard to use those keys, and unlike with theQWERTY layout, I can’t really use the numerickeypad without looking. Other users may have moreof an adjustment period with this setup.
Datadesk has a reputation for using mechanicalswitches in its keyboards, as opposed to rubber mem-branes. So using the SmartBoard will be considerablylouder versus using the standard Apple keyboard, orthe one found on your iBook or MacBook Pro. Mywife will occasionally remark, from the living room,on the sound of my typing; I would be in the study,separated from the family room by a wall and Frenchdoors, which are usually partially open. So if nearsilence in your computing experience is required, theSmartBoard may not be for you.
I, for one, am willing to put up with the noise, be-cause I appreciate the feedback I get from the keys.Mechanical switches are known for longer-term reli-ability when compared to rubber membranes, so it’sa good bet the SmartBoard will outlast most of itscompetitors.
There is a two-way wrist leveler, consisting ofthree sets of two flip-open risers, underneath, allow-ing you to tilt the front end of the keyboard up toa more ergonomically-pleasing position. (The frontof the keyboard in this case is defined as the sideclosest to the user.) My druther with Datadesk’s im-plementation is that the plastics of the leveler arevery smooth, and the keyboard tends to slide duringmoments of heavy typing, when my wrists might beshifting.
I did have a failure with the SmartBoard: theCaps Lock broke—which was surprising, given howlittle I use the Caps Lock key. It looks like the plas-
ATPM 12.05 65 Review: SmartBoard USB5000
tic connector on the bottom of the key, which fits into the switch, snapped off. Unfortunately, this meansI can’t simply snap it back on. I have been promiseda replacement keyboard, which I still await as of pub-lication.
The Datadesk SmartBoard certainly won’t be foreveryone. Its combination of noise, generated by themechanical switches, the variable widths of the keys,and the non-standard layout may give plenty of userspause. I still very much recommend the SmartBoardhowever, with a keen eye on their quality-control im-proving. Datadesk has a produced an affordable er-gonomic keyboard, which should last for a long while,even for the heartiest of typists.
Copyright © 2006 Christopher Turner, [email protected] in atpm is open to anyone. If you’re interested,write to us at [email protected].
ATPM 12.05 66 Review: SmartBoard USB5000
FAQ: Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat Is ATPM?About This Particular Macintosh (atpm) is, amongother things, a monthly Internet magazine or “e-zine.” atpm was created to celebrate the personalcomputing experience. For us this means the mostpersonal of all personal computers—the Apple Mac-intosh. About This Particular Macintosh is intendedto be about your Macintosh, our Macintoshes, andthe creative, personal ideas and experiences of every-one who uses a Mac. We hope that we will continueto be faithful to our mission.
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ATPM 12.05 67 FAQ
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How Can I Contribute to ATPM?There are several sections of atpm to which readersfrequently contribute:
Segments: Slices from the Macintosh LifeThis is one of our most successful spaces and one ofour favorite places. We think of it as kind of theatpm “guest room.” This is where we will publishthat sentimental Macintosh story that you promisedyourself you would one day write. It’s that specialplace in atpm that’s specifically designated for yourstories. We’d really like to hear from you. SeveralSegments contributors have gone on to become atpmcolumnists. Send your stuff to [email protected].
Hardware and Software Reviewsatpm publishes hardware and software reviews. How-ever, we do things in a rather unique way. Techno-jargon can be useful to engineers but is not always ahelp to most Mac users. We like reviews that informour readers about how a particular piece of hardwareor software will help their Macintosh lives. We wantthem to know what works, how it may help themin their work, and how enthusiastic they are aboutrecommending it to others. If you have a new pieceof hardware or software that you’d like to review,contact our reviews editor at [email protected] formore information.
Shareware ReviewsMost of us have been there; we find that special pieceof shareware that significantly improves the qualityour Macintosh life and we wonder why the entireworld hasn’t heard about it. Now here’s the chanceto tell them! Simply let us know by writing up a short
review for our shareware section. Send your reviewsto [email protected].
Which Products Have You Reviewed?Check our reviews index4 for the complete list.
What is Your Rating Scale?atpm uses the following ratings (in order from bestto worst): Excellent, Very Nice, Good, Okay, Rotten.
Will You Review My Product?If you or your company has a product that you’d liketo see reviewed, send a copy our way. We’re alwayslooking for interesting pieces of software to try out.Contact [email protected] for shipping information.You can send press releases to [email protected].
Can I Sponsor ATPM?About This Particular Macintosh is free, and we in-tend to keep it this way. Our editors and staff arevolunteers with “real” jobs who believe in the Macin-tosh way of computing. We don’t make a profit, nordo we plan to. As such, we rely on advertisers to helpus pay for our Web site and other expenses. Pleaseconsider supporting atpm by advertising in our issuesand on our web site. Contact [email protected] more information.
Where Can I Find Back Issues of ATPM?Back issues5 of atpm, dating since April 1995, areavailable in DOCMaker stand-alone format and asPDF. In addition, all issues since atpm 2.05 (May1996) are available in HTML format.
What If My Question Isn’t AnsweredAbove?We hope by now that you’ve found what you’relooking for (We can’t imagine there’s something elseabout atpm that you’d like to know.). But justin case you’ve read this far (We appreciate yourtenacity.) and still haven’t found that little pieceof information about atpm that you came here tofind, please feel free to e-mail us at (You guessed it.)[email protected].
4http://www.atpm.com/reviews5http://www.atpm.com/Back/
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