The amazing video application Miro was just updated with a new Torrent engine in version 1.1, and it is incredibly fast. If you haven’t had the pleasure of using Miro, it’s like VLC plus BitTorrent plus an RSS reader — and also a phenomenal program guide. And now it’s significantly better — the Torrent performance is the best I’ve seen on a Mac. I downloaded an entire episode of Peep Show (from Season 3 — not available in the States for no apparent reason) in under a minute. And then deleted it, of course.
Fake Steve points us to a provocative Discover Magazine commentary by technology visionary Jaron Lanier, best known for putting the virtual reality bug in everybody’s ears at TED II way back in the ’80s. Lanier argues emphatically that open-source software doesn’t automatically yield creativity or innovation.
Twenty-five years later, that concern seems to have been justified. Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
I think he’s mostly right, although it’s worth noting that many of the works of art in software that he speaks of were built on the backs of open-source software. For example, the iPhone runs on the Mach Kernel, which is open-source, and then OS X BSD above that, all available in Darwin and featuring contributions from the open-dev community.
What Lanier speaks to instead is that different methods are suited best to different kinds of innovation. Vision-driven projects plotting new directions in interface design, radical improvements and others are best served in proprietary contexts. Under-the-hood improvements and refinement can be driven quite effectively through the work of open communities. This is something that Apple has demonstrated for a long time — it’s very hard to come up with the right questions to ask. It’s relatively easy to answer them once asked. Apple and other proprietary visionaries cited by Lanier are asking the right questions. The open-sourcers answer well-known questions that have bubbled up for years. It’s incremental improvement, but no less critical for the future of software and hardware development.
At this point, it’s pretty clear that everyone loves the iPhone. Celebrities, executives, Time Magazine, even my Uncle Jim. It’s Apple’s biggest sensation since the original launch of the iPod, and a break-out success all around.
Unfortunately, the June arrival of the iPhone came at a cost. Apple had to delay the launch of its Leopard operating system by months in order to pull software developers off the Leopard team and onto the iPhone team. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. If anything, I presumed only good could come of mingling iPhone DNA with Leopard DNA.
But it’s mainly been frustrating. The delays were bad enough, but it really does appear that the switch-up had an impact on the overall quality of the shipping version of Leopard. I can’t think of an operating system from Apple since OS X 10.0 so filled with bugs and questionable design decisions. There are wholecommunities devoted solely to the documentation of Leopard bugs.
Worse, some of the intentional choices with Leopard aren’t up to Apple’s standards.There are many wonderful features like QuickLook and Time Machine, but a lot of the new interface elements are just flashy for the sake of flashiness. CoverFlow is goofy for browsing through anything other than photos in the Finder, and I will never understand the logic of a translucent menu bar as long as I live.
I’m never going to join the throng calling Leopard the new Vista, but I do have to wonder: How much did the stress put on the Leopard team to finish the iPhone disrupt the shipping version of the OS? This is a team that definitely put in 80, 90 hour weeks if not longer to finish the iPhone and then had to go straight back onto Leopard to meet an ambitious ship date. Whose quality wouldn’t take a hit under such circumstances?
What do you think? This is the first time in memory when I can recall a core Mac product being impeded or hampered by a more pressing new market product for Apple. What does that mean for the six-color bleeding Mac faithful? Are you bugged, or just delighted you got your iPhone on time?
I’m losing my mind. I’ve spent the last two evenings trying to get a 300-page document written in Apple’s Pages ’08 word processor to export properly to Word format.
The bulk of the document exports OK, but it screws up hundreds of endnotes: the markers jump to the wrong endnotes. I’ve tried everything I can think of — exporting to PDF (which can’t track changes) or RTF (which strips the endnote markers).
Anyone got any ideas?
UPDATE: Many thanks for all the suggestions. I eventually found a solution. There were several problems with the endnote markers in the Pages document. The most serious was a missing endnote marker right at the beginning of the 300-page document, which caused all the subsequent endnotes markers to point to the wrong records. Trouble is, the problem only manifested itself when I exported to Word. The missing marker wasn’t apparent in the Pages document — it only showed up after exporting to Word! And no matter what I tried, I could not get rid of that screwy marker. So here’s what I did:
1. Convert all the endnotes to footnotes.
2. Cut and paste the document, one chapter at a time, to separate Pages documents.
3. Export each Pages document to Word, one at a time, carefully checking that all the endnote markers work.
4. Reassemble from the separate chapters in Word.
Miraculously, it worked. Why? No idea. Note: Exporting the Pages as a PDF works better than exporting to Word for preserving endnotes. All the endnotes are present and correct, but you can no longer track changes.
Apple’s biggest embarrassment in recent months has finally been taken care of. The notorious iMac Freeze that has affected this summer’s revision is nipped in the bud with the iMac Graphics Firmware 1.0 Update.
Prior to this fix, iMac screens flickered and froze constantly. A lot of people were unhappy. Most readers now report that it’s taken care of. Problems solved.
Buying an Apple product on the first day it’s available is a recipe for disaster. This universal truth was reiterated today as Macintouch reported a nasty bug in Leopard where if you move a file to an external drive and then unplug the drive before it finishes copying, it will delete the file from the source and the destination drive.
In our test, we used Command-drag to move several large folders from a MacBook internal drive to an attached FireWire 800 external drive. While the folders were being moved, we disconnected the FireWire cable. The folders disappeared from both drives!
Yikes. Not an incredibly common flaw, but definitely easy enough to do that it should never show up in a shipping product — especially because it was present in OS X 10.1, and not inTiger. That’s a step in the wrong direction.
Time Machine, the automated back-up system built into Mac OS X Leopard, has been justly celebrated for making the least-fun of all computer practices easy. At the touch of a button, you can find every revision of every single one of your files on hand at the time of its installation. Unfortunately, as Steven Fisher recently discovered, this comes with an ugly side effect: Even executable code can get run from Time Machine. Cool as that might sound, the consequences could be grim:
Let me give you a simple example: You find out Adium (for example) has an available exploit that the developers haven’t patched yet. You remove Adium, but it continues to exist in your backup. You visit a web page that activates the Adium bug, and Adium is launched from your backup. That you can launch Adium from your backup is not a bug. That Mac OS X will do so automatically without confirmation is a bug. The backup should be considered a vault for the user, not Launch Services.
Yikes. Rogue code is bad. Rogue code that you have to go out of
your way to re-delete from your archives? Really nasty. Apple, let’s get a fix going.
Updated: Ah, John Siracusa. Is anyone else capable of such sublime operating system reviews? His Leopard manifesto (17 action-packed pages) is sublime:
That’s the Downloads folder on the left, and the disk image file on the right. It’s slightly bigger.
If you are not shaking your head, uttering something profane, or taking some deity’s name in vain right about now, congratulations, Apple may have a position for you in their user interface design group.
He’s complimentary where Apple got it right, mean where it got it wrong, and always insightful and funny.
Buzz on Leopard is mostly quite positive as we roll into the first full week of its availability on the market. That’s mostly, mind. R.L. Pryor, owner of ThinkMac Software and creator of such shareware gems as NewsLife and InstantGallery, has a few complaints about the UI in Leopard. I’ll share just one, then you must click through for more. Absolutely hysterical.
Stars in their eyes: Where do the stars end and the status lights begin? I suppose it could be worse, no one buy Steve Jobs one of those infinity mirrors OK?
The ever-entertaining David Pogue has supplemented his big Leopard review with a list of cool features that aren’t obvious on first use:
* Menu-bar calculator. The Spotlight menu (upper-right corner of the screen) is also a tiny pocket calculator now. Hit Command-Space, type or paste 38*48.2-7+55, and marvel at the first result in the Spotlight menu: 1879.6. You don’t even have to fire up the Calculator.
* Dictionary lookups. The Spotlight menu also searches the Leopard dictionary now. If you type, for example, “schadenfreude” into the Spotlight box, the beginning of the actual definition appears right there in the menu. Click it to open Dictionary and read the full-blown entry. (In this example, that would be: “noun: pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.”)
But can Spotlight guess my age and weight or prospects for love? The least I expect from an oracle in this day and age…
Leopard has been with journalists for awhile. Uncle Walt thinks it’s not a huge improvement, but it’s much better than Vista.
Leopard: Faster, Easier Than Vista Upgrade of Apple’s OS Isn’t Revolutionary, But It Beats Microsoft’s
The Mac is on a roll. Apple Inc.’s perennially praised but slow-selling Macintosh computers have surged in popularity in the past few years, with sales growing much faster than the overall PC market, especially in the U.S. By some measures, Mac laptops are now approaching a 20% share of U.S. noncorporate sales, up from the low single digits where they once seemed stuck.
Parallels, Inc., those bright kids in Renton, Washington who are so good at making Windows run nicely inside of Mac OS X, have just launched a new marketing campaign, “Why Choose?” for their Parallels Desktop product. The video, viewable above, depicts a rather satisfied fellow who refuses to compromise: He eats pizza while getting marked up for plastic surgery, he smokes while jogging, and he tries to have two women in his life (guess which one doesn’t work out? Hint: It’s not the jogging).
It’s a cute video, as well as the launching point for a pretty rad crowdsourcing video contest. The company is soliciting promo videos of three minutes or less along the “Why Choose?” theme. Other than that, the boundaries are pretty wide open. Official rules are at the company’s website, and the winner will receive a 17″ MacBook Pro, a Sony HD HandyCam and a trip for two to MacWorld. Runners-up can pick up a MacBook or an iPhone, too. Entries are due by Dec. 9, but you can get, um…a t-shirt…if you’re among the first 100 entrants. Who’s in? Everyone knows Mac users are the most creative folks in the world, so flex your power!
Wired Magazine just got caught up with my favorite obscure parent of the Macintosh, graphic designer Susan Kare, who created all of the original icons in the first Mac OS, including the Happy Mac and Clarus, the Dogcow. And in case you were wondering what a UI design legend does in retirement, wrap your head around this: Kare is the creator of those adorable virtual gifts on Facebook, from handcuffs to mojitos:
Launched last February, the site’s gift shop offers icons for every occasion, from balloons, puppies, and champagne to mojitos, handcuffs, boom boxes, and a can labeled whoop ass. To date, users have exchanged more than 20 million virtual gifts, paying up to $1 for each, making them one of the site’s most successful revenue streams.
“I can do things in gifts that I never could in UI design,” Kare says. “Screen icons have a job to do they’re more like traffic signs than illustrations. But the gifts don’t have to be anything other than what they are.”
Glad she’s getting paid, but I’m going to miss the glory days for some time now. Her work (and knock-offs) is still evident in applications on Mac OS X and Windows alike, but the same soul isn’t there. Still, puppies for a buck on Facebook…
After months of speculation, multiple jailbreaks and not a few bricked iPhones, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced today that a developer’s kit for the iPhone and iPod Touch will be sent out in February, creating a way to add function to the devices through official channels. But he’s still implying that developers will have to jump through hoops to actually get on the platform:
It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once–provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones–this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.
Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.
So it sounds truly homebrew apps will get shut out unless starting developers can prove their good intentions. By endorsing Nokia’s new way of doing things, Steve is heavily implying that Apple will stand in between developers and iPhones for our own good. I see his point — virally infected iPhones would be bad for the Apple image. On the other hand, maybe he could just make the iPhone as secure as regular OS X and block access to things like the base band and root folders? Just a thought.
Because no one asked for it — it’s Netscape Navigator 9 for Mac! How is this better than Safari, Firefox, Omniweb or Camino, you might ask? Well, it’s got a totally non-OS X compliant interface! And it’s from Netscape! Is anyone planning to upgrade? Can you explain why?
The iPhone 1.1.1 firmware Apple unleashed a bit more than a week ago has wreaked havoc on anyone interested in doing more with the iPhone than its manufacturer wants them to. Unlocked phones were closed down and rendered useless. Third-party applications were deleted and prevented from re-installing. It was back to Square 1.1.1 as soon as the update dropped.
But all is not lost. According to Engadget, the hackers who first broke into the iPhone have done it again — and this time they got into the iPod Touch, too. For the time-being, third-party apps are back on the table, so fire up your NES emulators! No one has installed the Mail application on an iPod Touch that has been reported, nor Weather or the other left-out apps. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. The exploit relies on a security hole using TIFF image files that cause Mobile Safari to freak out and open a back door. This TIFF issue has been fixed elsewhere, however, so this won’t last forever. Any new firmware would probably close the loop again. Cat, mouse. Mouse, cat.
Answering preliminary speculation about their departure, former Mac gaming kingpins and latter-day Halo-bearers Bungie Studios have addressed the subject of their imminent separation from Microsoft, which purchased the firm in 2000. My colleague Chris Kohler at Wired has the interview with spokesman Frank O’Connor. It doesn’t look good for a return to glory of Mac gaming:
The reality is that we like the 360, it’s a very comfortable environment for us to work. Realistically, for the types of games that we make, it is the most successful platform for us to work on, given the types of titles that we work on. So it makes prudent fiscal sense for us to continue working on it. And certainly all of our near- and mid-term projects are all Xbox 360.
Still, it doesn’t rule out the long-term projects…
Mac game OGs and Halo creators Bungie Studios are about to emerge from their indentured servitude to Microsoft, according to official PR from Redmond. The companies are about to evolve their relationship, which apparently means MS would be an investor in a newly independent Bungie Studios and publish any games they create. No potential for Bungie work that isn’t focused on “Microsoft platforms” is indicated.
I’m not quite sure what to make of the announcement. The timing makes some sense, as Halo 3 is newly out the door and a hit. The guys at Bungie made the best Mac games ever back in the ’90s (particularly Marathon 2 and Myth II), and the tie-up to launch Halo on Xbox brought an end to that. Let’s just hope their new agreement gives them the flexibility to embrace the Mac wholeheartedly again. Seems unlikely, but this is the best it’s been in almost 7 years.
Remember America Online? Yellow guy, blue triangle? “You’ve Got Mail!” No? Trust me, it was huge once — the dominant way a lot of Internet newbies first reached out across cyberspace. And after five years (yes, five years), AOL has finally rolled out a new beta for its main line AOL Desktop for Mac software.
After all this time, the actual upgrade’s features aren’t terribly thrilling (particularly for anyone who, you know, just uses a web browser for all of this stuff). There’s definitely still a market for an integrated Internet app that gets the basics — mail, chat and browsing — down well, and I’m always fascinated to see if AOL can ever start to gain back the kind of position it once held.
Here’s what’s in store, other than being “Leopard-ready”:
Fast Load Time: AOL® Desktop for Mac launches within seconds and enables users to begin browsing immediately, without signing in to the software.
Tabbed Navigation: Tabbed browser and AIM® windows offer easy access to content, and an uncluttered, organized view of all open windows.
Additional Email Options:A streamlined AOL Mail experience allows users to send and receive messages using multiple email accounts, includingApple Mac addresses, Gmail, Verizon and more from one Inbox.
AIM Integration: AIM is built in to the software, so users can view Buddies online, chat, and more while checking their email or browsing the Web.
Customizable Toolbar:An easy-to-use customizable toolbar gives users quick access to their favorite sites.
Yep, it’s only several years behind the cutting edge in browsing. Oh, and you can finally use other e-mail protocols. What a time to be alive. Anyone using the beta? What’s that all about?
Last December, we shared with the world the notMac Challenge, a contest to create a complete, free replacement for Apple’s frustratingly over-priced .Mac Internet service. Now, competing for a prize of $8,500, Ben Spink (of CrushFTP fame) has submitted a contender to the challenge, almost 9 months later. CrushFTP actually features prominently in the suite, but with a few UI tweaks to more closely take the place of .Mac. The current beta is available here. The judging of the contest will continue through Sunday, so download now if you want your voice to be heard.
It’s looking good right now. I mainly want this effort to succeed so Apple will just make .Mac free again, as happened once the XPonMac project successfully enabled dual boot on Intel Macs about five seconds before Boot Camp rolled out the door.
The biggest concern everyone had when Apple announced it would shift Macs to Intel chips from the PowerPC platform was whether third-party software companies (actually, just Adobe and Microsoft) would make the switch along with the computers. After all, it was Adobe and Microsoft’s unwillingness to develop versions of Photoshop and MS Office for Rhapsody that scuttled Apple’s first attempt to transform NeXT’s OPENStep into a next-generation Mac OS.
Adobe Creative Suite 3 brought the essential creative applications to Intel Macs at native speed, and now Microsoft is nearly ready to bring the essential productivity bundle along for the party. Though it won’t ship until January, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit is currently previewing the software at a Mac Office website — and hey, it looks a lot like the iPhone site!
All in all, it looks most like Microsoft trying to do Pages and Keynote while leaving in all the complexity. The interface still feels off (especially with Leopard coming before this), but you can tell they’re trying. And it’s about time the last excuse to not switch to an Intel Mac got polished off.
From everything I can tell, there’s nothing Mac-specific about the suite other than the interface and a few Automator workflows. It’s basically Office 2007 a year late and Windows-free. The YouTube video above shows the newly integrated SmartArt features that rapidly transform data into graphs.
Office 2008, featuring Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, is $400 in full or a $280 upgrade.
Office 2008 for the Mac Home and Student Edition, which drops Exchange support in Entourage and Automator workflows, is $150. Seriously. Corporate e-mail support costs $250 a head. Who knew?
Office 2008 Special Media Edition costs $500 or $300 for an upgrade and throws in MS’s Expression Media, a digital asset management tool on top of the standard bundle.
In case we had all lost track of the Macintosh with such fascinating news popping in the world of iTunes, the iPhone and the iPod, ThinkSecret emerges to remind us that Leopard, the next major update to Mac OS X is dropping in less than a month, on Oct. 7. The gallery has some more of the gorgeous icons Apple is unleashing for the OS, as well as screenshots of some details that haven’t previously been available.
Now that YouTube has set the tone for how short video clips should operate on the Internet, the race is on to define what the future of broadcasting might look like. The makers of Miro, a free, open-source Mac video player that’s near release-candidate readiness, suggest that it looks a lot like podcasting in iTunes.
The application, which is in universal binary, essentially aggregates channels of free TV that are open to the Internet, including public TV from all over the world. It can play virtually any video format, and it can also be fed BitTorrents and RSS feeds of TV shows from tvRSS. Basically, you can see anything ever when you want to, and download multiple streams from thousands of channels in the background. And it’s free. Some of it’s illegal, but a lot of it’s legit. In other words, it hints at what Internet-enabled TV should be like in the future. Any other Miro fans out there?
There’s a video that shows how it all works — it’s pretty incredible.
Earlier this year, a bunch of people wrote automatic scripts that video-recorded people using Macs they weren’t supposed to. A commercial version of such programs (combined with network logging and screenshots), Undercover, was recently used to bust a crook who took 4 brand new MacBooks from an elementary school in April. At least according to software-maker Orbicule:
Fortunately, it did not take the thief long to come online as he had no idea that the computers he stole were running Undercover. Within 9 hours of the computers being stolen, our recovery center was sending Mr. Kenneth Burman the screen shots of the web sites and programmes a totally clueless thief was going through as well as the snapshots of the thief himself. Later, Mr. Kenneth Burman delivered this information to the local police office. Real samples of the screenshots and iSight pictures taken by Undercover can be seen below. Some details are blurred in order to protect everyone’s privacy.
Although we have all been exposed to the MacBook thief’s moustache, which is almost too perfect to believe.
