software - page 55

UPDATE: Another online back-up solution to consider is Mozy, which gives out 2 gigs for free and charges for any additional storage. You can check them out here.

Backup remains the most elusive and under-appreciated form of computer technology. Though everyone knows we should, no one actually backs up other than the most diligent among us. I have a huge external hard drive, but I manage to put things on it maybe once every few months, if that. Good thing I did that at all, of course, as my hard drive just died on my Powerbook.

Anyway, until Apple unleashes Time Machine in Leopard to change back up forever, there are other things to try. One such as Carbonite, an online backup service that’s got some decent buzz on the PC side and now has a Mac client in beta. I haven’t given it a shot myself yet (will report back soon), but hey, free software!

If you’d like to get in on the beta, send a note over to beta@carbonite.com and mention Cult of Mac. The old high school friend who tipped me off claims that’s all there is to it. Let me know how it goes — he’ll hear about it if there are any troubles.

Other than the idiosyncracies of its software keyboard and the slowness of EDGE wireless, the biggest deficiency in the iPhone is its lack of instant messaging capabilities. Apple has been slow to bring out a true iChat client, so third parties have introduced a variety of solutions, none of which have been that great. That might be over with the introduction of mobile chat from twenty08 (mirror here), which looks as good as an Apple app and runs twice as nicely. Currently, it only supports AIM protocol, but the developers have GPL’ed the code, so it should get better over time. Get it while it’s hot!

Via Digg.

Sunday, I caught a cab with some friends over to a favorite bar in the lower Haight. By complete chance, we got the most Mac-loving cabbie in the entire city. He was blasting music on his iPhone through the stereo, and he fixed his 4g iPod while he drove by slapping it around a bunch. Most impressively, he announced plans to sell off a recently acquired Titanitum PowerBook G4 for parts on ebay. He was a consummate wheeler-dealer.

To cap it all off, as we arrived at our destination, he pulled out his iPhone, scrolled through his video list and produced the intro movie for Leopard, which I hadn’t even seen yet. Needless to say, it was gorgeous on the iPhone. Enjoy the visuals, courtesy of San Francisco’s finest. Apple’s really embracing that supernova look, eh?

Leopard isn’t even here yet, but the first big Easter Egg has already turned up. All icons for the new version of Mac OS X are resolution independent (basically, they can scale to be freaking HUGE), which provides all kinds of room for mischief. Apple has already taken advantage, printing the full text of the first “Think Different” commercial (Also known as “Steve’s back in town, boys!”). Ah, memories

Italian site Macity turned up the thing, which makes them responsible for my tears. I’m not crying, though. I was just cutting onions — making a lasagna.

For one…

Via Digg.

Unafraid of Apple’s lawyers, Think Secret has a gallery of gorgeous screenshots and icons from the latest build of Leopard (9A527), which was released to software developers last week.

Above is the large version of the new Network Utility icon. According to Think Secret, almost all the icons in Leopard are now bigger, better and brighter.

And just as the icons are getting bigger, so too are the applications. According to Think Secret, Address Book has grown from 25.2MB in Tiger to 47.7MB in Leopard; Safari has grown from 6.5MB to 51.9MB; and Mail has grown from 49MB to 279.7MB.

The latest build of Leopard (build 9A527) has a default desktop that looks like some kind of Star Trek supernova in outer space, according to a leaked screenshot.

Here’s what it looks like in use. The outer space theme is used at least twice in Leopard: the Time Machine backup app also has a spacey UI.

As Phil Ryu notes, with the cosmic backdrop, Leopards’ interface looks like the control deck of a futuristic spaceship looking out into void.

Could Apple be trying to imply that Leopard is so advanced it’s positively science fiction?

Apple killed iMovie. That’s all there is to say about it. While most of the upgrades to iLife and, especially, iWork 08 have been warmly welcomed, the once-venerable consumer application landed with a resounding thud.

You might expect, given the numbering, that iMovie 08 might be an upgrade to iMovie 06 HD, which was a very mature digital video editing suite with fantastic soundtrack capabilities, brilliant iDVD integration and an intuitive timeline for keeping track of overall progress.

But no, it’s actually a completely new application, and it throws virtually all of the great mindshare iMovie once had away. Someone at Apple decided it would be cool to make video editing more like photo library management. Which might be true. What this means in practice is that the program is great at insanely rapid video editing. Find your clips, make a sequence, go.

Which is fine, if speed is your main concern. Otherwise, it’s a significant downgrade. David Pogue probably has the best round-up of what’s wrong with the new program, but it’s too big a list to capture here. Essentially, they got rid of everything, even black-and-white video. Or even the ability to import iMovie 06 projects intact. For very good reason, the older version is still available as a free download. Incredibly, the new program has much higher system requirements than its (nominal) predecessor.

What do you think? Is anyone really enjoying iMovie 08?

Friends, Mac-Heads, Clarismen, lend me your ears; I come to bury AppleWorks, not to praise him; the spreadsheets that men do live after them, the oft-interminable crashes shake down to the bones. So let it be with iWork.

Surprising few who were paying attention, Apple officially killed of its former office suite, AppleWorks, with the introduction of Numbers, a spreadsheet program that completes the new iWork trifecta. The writing’s been on the wall for a long time. iWork was introduced in 2005, and I don’t think AppleWorks has been updated at all since mid-2002. Essentially, they got to Carbon OS X compliance and went no further.

Though it never served as a solid suite for OS X, I do have some affection for AppleWorks, which I first came to know as Clarisworks in about 1993 on my dad’s PowerBook 140. I’m not sure I can count the number of short stories and novels I started and abandoned in that little program, not to mention the dreadful book covers I mocked up in those days.

ClarisWorks was great in the mid-1990s, because it didn’t try to do too much. It was a solid little program that would let you do what you wanted to without trying to make you do things you didn’t. Claris never developed a talking paper clip assistant, for example. The spreadsheet program couldn’t make web pages, and the presentation mode was modest in the extreme.

There’s a lesson there, I’m quite sure. Software has never been more bloated, and Apple itself is as guilty as anyone. Aesthetics are lovely, sure, but when are we going to go about creating programs that strictly make us more functional again? We’ve been at about the same place for years. What’s the next level?

R.I.P. AppleWorks. You served well, and you went as far as you could go and no further. Godspeed.

Nintendo owns the portable gaming market. They have since they created it with Game & Watch in the mid-’80s and then revolutionized it with Game Boy in 1989. Many challengers have risen and fallen over the 18 years since.

But as I predicted the day the iPhone was released, a reckoning is due between Apple and Nintendo in the coming years. As GigaOM reported today, Nintendo has filed a patent for a tilt-sensitive handheld console (a perfect companion to the motion-based Wii). Meanwhile, the New York Times claims Apple is stealthily adding game functions to the iPhone. There’s nothing stealthy about it. You create a portable device capable of gorgeous graphics, pristine audio and driven by a multitouch interface, you’re already there in the first place.

Let’s go back to the prediction from Jan. 9, shall we?

And multi-touch in iPhone is significantly more flexible — it’s made to interpret complex gestures with more than one point of input. There are a number of DS games that could easily be adapted, and it’s just made to host a new rhythm or music game that would require drumming two spots at once. It’s not a threat to the DS, because its price-point is so much higher. It is a threat to crappy games for cell phones, which often cost $6 and suck.

More interestingly, this could begin to threaten Nintendo down the road. The iPhone and its interface are extremely high-end today. By the end of the year, Apple could replace its traditional high-end iPod with one driven by the new iPhone interface and screen and offer it for the same price those iPods sell for today — and even boost the hard drive size, too. Suddenly, you have the world’s premiere media player and rising games star in a $250 package. That beats the PSP any day and hounds the DS tomorrow.

Sounds good. Anything else?

That’s my prediction of the day: As the iPhone seizes the high-end of Apple’s consumer electronics products, the iPod becomes the ultimate PSP-killer, with an interface the DS can’t quite match without the need for a stylus. Tell me you wouldn’t buy that. I dare you.

I’m sorry. Sometimes the smug just gets everywhere.

And we’re off to the races. Despite Apple’s interest in restricting iPhone development to themselves and trusted third-parties like Google, clever programmers have delivered native software for the device — including an addictive-looking game called “Lights Off,” released today by Delicious Monster.

It’s a standard puzzle-game — tap the buttons to turn out all the lights in the 5×5 grid — but the presentation is very slick, and the iPhone interface alone makes it more compelling than it would be on OS X for Mac.

As with all unsupported iPhone software, it takes some warranty-voiding mojo to make “Lights Off” install, but the app’s creators, Lucas Newman and Adam Betts, helpfully include full instructions:

Installing third-party applications on your iPhone is not for the faint of heart. For more in depth instructions on iPhone modifications, look at the iPhone Dev Wiki.

1. Download iActivator and use it to “perform jailbreak” on your iPhone to allow access to the entire filesystem, which is necessary to upload applications.

2. Use iPHUC to upload Lights Off.app to the Applications folder on your iPhone.

3. Install SSH (or the alternate version) on your iPhone, and run the command: chmod +x “/Applications/Lights Off.app/LightsOff”

Not for the faint of heart, as you can see. But still: Blinking lights! Blinking lights and the satisfaction of walking on forbidden ground!

Via Daring Fireball.

Everyone who joking referred to the keynote Steve Jobs gave in January as the critical moment of the iPhoneWorld conference just got a lot more ammunition, as a large number of Mac-related expected announcements that never surfaced back then just dropped together: Sexy aluminum, thin, iMacs; a new version of iLife; a new version of iWork; and some new features for .Mac. A random August product launch is the new MacWorld.

Many of the rumor-mongers were right on the money about the iMacs. They’re thin as could be, they use the exact keyboard that leaked to the web the other week, and their fronts recall almost exactly the back face of the iPhone. It’s a clever design move, extending the iMac as big brother of the iPod metaphor to a new iMac as big brother to the iPhone. That said, it’s hard to describe these as being a radical leap forward. They’re virtually the same design as the last generation, only thinner, hotter, faster. The desktop market is ripe for disruption.

The additions to iLife are similarly unexciting. As excited as I am that iPhoto now has event-organized cataloging, and the Magic GarageBand feature that can turn music played on a guitar into a trumpet or otherwise. But the new Web Gallery features on .Mac aren’t that different from what came before — they’re just much more appealing and creative than what came before. Definitely not a big enough shift.

iWork has finally been fleshed out into a real office suite, offering Numbers, a spreadsheet program that has been rumored at least since Columbus landed in the Caribbean. It looks very appealing, and I think I’m finally going to invest in it. I love Keynote, and Pages looks improved (hey, Apple realized that people want to write, not just lay out text!).

Chart: MarketWatch.

Apple’s Q3 was the company’s best ever. It raked in $5.41 billion in sales, posting a $818 million in profit. Gross margins — the amount of revenue that is profit — is up to a whopping 36 percent. This surely is the highest in the industry. By contrast, Dell reported Q2 2007 margins of just 4.3 percent, earning $605 million profit on revenues of $14.1 billion.
Apple also reported 10 million iPods sold — up 21 percent on the year before; and 1.76 million Macs, up 33 percent year-on-year.

Apple’s stock is rebounding on the news: it’s up 6 percent after taking a hammering yesterday on AT&T’s iPhone numbers.

Picture by SeenyaRita

From the Urban Dictionary:

1. iPerbole

The hype surrounding any product Apple unveils.

Claims that the iPhone will change the world are all part of the iPerbole surrounding the cultish company.

by Mark Hengel Crestwood, Kentucky Jan 14, 2007

One of the biggest knocks on the iPhone (other than its slow mobile data rate and lack of unlimited storage, ala the INCREDIBLE LG Fusic) is that it doesn’t currently support live updating e-mail from corporate networks, the killer app that makes the BlackBerry the CrackBerry people know and snort. The iPhone can sync with Outlook and get push e-mail from Yahoo, it just can’t blend the two.

Well, maybe not for long. According to Mary Jo Foley, Apple might announce tomorrow that it has licensed Microsoft’s Exchange Active Sync software, the only missing piece preventing the iPhone from tapping into Exchange servers wirelessly actively to pull down messages automatically. It’s a very simple system, as seen above. No, I didn’t invent that flow chart. What it seems to mean, though, is that the last barrier to adoption of the iPhone among executives is about to vanish.

Hear that? It’s the sound of Palm and BlackBerry getting sick again.

Technorati Tags: iphone, microsoft, e-mail

Though Apple still hasn’t released a real iPhone SDK, developers continue to create fun and interesting ways to develop for the breakthrough device. The newest tool in the set is iPhoney, a WebKit-based application that looks just like an iPhone on a given screen and renders websites just as they would appear. Sure, it’s a great way to test a site you’re customizing for the iPhone, but it’s also a great way to pretend that you already own one. In fact, it’s the next generation — fully virtual. I’m not broke, I’m ahead of the curve.

Check it out and give the folks behind it feedback. They tell me it will go open-source soon, and I’m dying to see what people can do with it.

Technorati Tags: iphone, safari

New Apple hardware platforms are the new favorite home of interesting software development. When the AppleTV launched, the box was immediately hacked to do a lot of things it was never designed for. Now, the iPhone is rapidly filling with Web 2.0 applications, even 10 days before it actually rolls out the door.

You can see ample evidence of this over at iPhone Application List, which is trying to keep track of every new development for the device. While some apps look great — the shopping list one I linked the other day, news reader iActu — others are not quite up to Apple interface standards, to put it mildly.
It’s interesting proof that good apps can be built solely on Web technology. On the other hand, the applications all behave in pretty much the same way. And we’ve also very rapidly reached the ugly phase of iPhone development. One problem with Apple’s deliberately vague non-SDK approach is that iPhone apps look a lot like the Internet. And at this point, it’s safe to say: The Internet ain’t always pretty.

What are you still waiting to see in iPhone app form? Anything you don’t think is possible (other than anything requiring Flash, obviously)?

Technorati Tags: iphone, software

No matter what one thinks of Safari for Windows (which has already been patched three days after launch and still can’t render A LOT of sites), it’s nice to see Apple attacking Microsoft’s browser hegemony on its own turf.

Right?

Unfortunately, not really. As John Lilly, COO of Mozilla, points out, when Steve showed off a pie chart depicting his vision of Apple’s Windows browser marketshare, he didn’t depict MS losing any share at all. Instead, the image just eats up all the alternatives, including the still-rising Firefox. And while I have my problems with Firefox (it strikes me as a program only a software engineer could love), I only want to see Apple bite into Internet Explorer’s customers, not the folks who have already sought out an alternative.

The computer world is not the American political scene, and there is room for way more than two players. And so it should be. The more browsers we have, the fewer “browser-specific” features develop and the more readily standards get adopted across platforms. We all stand to benefit from a diverse, competitive markets. A shame that Apple reveals they have no interest in the same.
John’s Blog » Blog Archive » A Picture’s Worth 100M Users???

Technorati Tags: firefox, safari

Delicious Library 2, which has a snazzy new UI based on Core Animation, wins an Apple’s 2007 Design Award for Best Leopard Application. Still no screenshots of it though.

For discussion of Core Animation and how it might change interfaces, see here: Kiss Boring Interfaces Goodbye With Apple’s New Animated OS.

The other winners are:

Best Mac OS X User Experience: Coda. Panic.

Best Mac OS X Developer Tool: CSSEdit 2.5. MacRabbit.

Best Mac OS X Game: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade 2.0. Blizzard Entertainment .

Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution: Papers 1.0. Alexander Griekspoor and Tom Groothuis.

Best Mac OS X Dashboard Widget: BART Widget 1.0. Bret Victor.

Best Mac OS X Student Product: Picturesque 1.0. Zac Cohen.

For all of the complaining that has tripped down the wire about Apple’s total lack of an SDK for the iPhone, a couple of entrepreneurial developers have already created iPhone apps to try out in Safari.

Shown above is David Cann’s alternate interface for Digg. It’s quite fun, and I actually find it a better way to navigate Digg than the real site. (Sorry, Kevin!) I especially enjoy the way it implements the “grab and fling” interface for the rest of us.

The other contender is OneTrip, a quick (though very elegant) grocery list program put together over-night by Neven Mrgan. Both apps are really nice and fairly clear evidence that sophisticated programs suited to use on the iPhone are possible. I think the new Apple strategy of “the web is the new SDK” is actually a wonderful one. They’re pretty unlikely to crash, and really powerful development is a possibility.

Anyone want to lay money on how long it will be until Google issues a version of Reader optimized for the iPhone?

Via Digg. Twice.

Technorati Tags: iphone, thirdparty, software

With all the excitement and, to be frank, disappointment that came with yesterday’s WWDC Stevenote, I haven’t seen anyone pick out the obvious with Apple’s innovative new GUI element Stacks, which allows users to cluster files that would otherwise clutter the desktop into a discreet pile of files that blow out into a scannable list with a simple click. It takes the super-janky right-click a folder in the dock movement we’re all used to now and replaces it with a sleek Dock launcher we can all get behind.
It’s really cool. It’s also a very old concept, one that Apple has had patented for 15 years. And this doesn’t look to be a great implementation of it. Way back in 1992, Apple called the Stacks content “Piles,” first demonstrating the new interface at the CHI conference. Gitta Solomon of Apple’s Advanced Technology Human Computer Interaction Group created the fascinating interview, which The Register mooted was finally destined for Mac OS X way back in 2003. Only four years too early — and 11 years too late. Click through to learn more about Piles.

Technorati Tags: piles, stacks

Having spent a day with the beta for Apple’s much-ballyhooed Safari browser for Windows XP, I’m ready to pronounce it the fastest browser for XP that I’ve used on a regular basis. On the other hand, it also is riddled with the kinds of bizarre bugs only a public beta could expose.

Sometimes, it’s both the fastest and the stupidest browser on all of Windows. If you’re on the fence, click through to hear whether your working style is ready for this not-quite-ready-for-prime-time browser contender while stranded in the Windows world.

Technorati Tags: review, safari, software

General confusion and ambivalence about the continued value of stand-alone have gone mainstream as of…now. That’s because German developer Gernot Poetsch has released an alpha of a new RSS reader he calls Readomatic. What’s so weird about this app? Well, it’s a standalone application of Google Reader, which is itself a replacement for a standalone RSS reader. Google Reader’s great advantage is that it isn’t standalone — you can use it on any computer connected to the Internet and still have it keep up with all your readings.

We’re now in the age of applications that take the limited functionality and GUI of a web app and give it the restricted, non-portable feature set of a standalone app. We’re through the looking glass here, people. Still, it looks kinda hot. I’m not going to stop using Vienna, though.
Announcing Readomatic [poetsch.org]
Via digg.

Technorati Tags: rss, software

Microsoft, kings of irony, moved to the new Office Open XML document format with its new Office 2007 for Windows. It’s ironic, because the format, well, won’t really open on Mac OS X. Fortunately the Macintosh Business Unit inside MS is fighting the good fight, and in between latte-fueled coding runs on Office 2008, they put together a nifty little beta of a program designed to make Open XML more, well, open.

It’s got an amazing name, as well: the Microsoft Open Office XML File Format Converter for Mac. I would have added “2007 Home Edition” to the end to really make it an MS, but it’s a beta, so all in good time. The little program changes any .docx file into a charming and useful .rtf, OS X’s lingua franca. Nice work, folks.

Thanks, Tammy!

Technorati Tags: microsoft, Unpacking, vista

Though Apple still won’t acknowledge rumors that it’s about to make a serious video gaming play beyond iPod games, a third party has stepped in and shown that the AppleTV is ready for games now. It’s called Omelette, and it’s basically just Bejeweled. But hey, it works, right? Counterstrike is definitely going to be next.
Via Ars Technica.

Technorati Tags: appleTV, game, hack

We’re down to just a month until Apple takes the wraps off what few unannounced features remain for Mac OS X Leopard. So let’s all sit back and revel in rumors of what Apple might do next, courtesy of AppleInsider:

According to the filing, different Dashboards could contain one or more of the same widgets and “state” information for a widget could be maintained separately for each Dashboard in which the widget appears, or it can be commonly maintained across all Dashboards in which the widget appears.

“Different Dashboards can be available or ‘owned’ for different users of a computer or other electronic device, such that each user can only access their own Dashboard(s),” Apple said in the filing. “A user can specify a Dashboard as being available to other users, if desired. A user can also specify, for any or all of the Dashboards he or she creates, whether other users are permitted to make changes to the Dashboard(s).”

Uh…sounds good!
Apple filing depicts interactive Dashboard cube interface [AppleInsider]

Technorati Tags: dashboard, leopard, mac os x