Second Half

Can anyone make sense of why, when the file browser opens to attach a file to an email message in Apple Mail, there is a check-box asking if you wish to make your attachments "Windows Friendly"? See below.

I don't understand this at all. Is there any advantage to sending attachements that are NOT "windows friendly"? If anything, it's a complete and total annoyance and simply silly not to always send such attachments. What happens if you forget to check the box? I have at least one person that I send attachments to that cannot read the attachments I send unless I check this silly box. Again, why would this not be always set internally and NEVER presented as a choice?

I could find no preference setting that would let me set this to be true all the time.

Apple Mail has held up well for me. Its search serves me well and with add-ons like Mail Act-On and Textpander available, I find it quite efficient. But this one "windows friendly" thing has me completely baffled. Last I checked more than 90% of the systems out in the world today are "windows" systems.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Who 'da thunk it?

UPDATE: Having now thought about this for at least some portion of the last 10 hours, here's where I think Apple is headed with this. Given that Leopard will not arrive until mid-year (and likely in developer preview mode at that), I am imagining that the end game for this technology is to allow Windows to be operating within an OS X "window", ala Virtual PC. This would yield all the performance benefits for both environments and make it far more useful than simply dual-booting. Until start up and shutdown time become instantaneous, having to reboot to switch environments is a non-starter for wide-spread use in my opinion. And even with instantaneous startup/shutdown, it's far less useful. However, operating simultaneously and sharing file spaces would be the ultimate in usability and with OS X as the "host" and Windows as the "slave", you can see where the perceived upper hand would be. I'd also expect that the reaction from the larger developer community would be to move more Win-only apps into the OS X environment.

UPDATE 2: This is what I'm talking about. If you don't want to click, it's a beta claiming to be the "First Vitualization Solution for Intel-powered Macs" that claims concurrent use of OS X, Windows as well as Linux. While this is a geek-step, it won't get broad use (in my opinion) until Apple includes similar capabilities as standard fare with OS X.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 8:39 AM | Permalink

nadamac's CamiTools is a definite winner. A simple and incredibly useful set of preference panes for the new Camino 1.0 browser on the Mac.

While the Camino features that CamiTools exposes are available via Camino's hidden prefs, CamiTools allows you to avoid the tedium and error associated with direct editing of the user.js file.

In addition, one of the things I wondered after leaving Safari behind was "how am I going to keep my bookmarks in sync between my powerbook and my powermac?". We'll fret no more...CamiTools lets you FTP Camino's bookmarks up to a server (assuming you have one); download them via FTP to the other system and...voila. While not a "true sync" per se, it's as useful as I need.

Nice work nadamac.

P.S. Interesting how I came across these tools. One of the very few readers of this blog saw my recent post about trying Camino and, noting my inability to figure out how to make "find as you type" working, posted a comment showing me how to do exactly that. My curiosity got the best of me, so I followed the link to the site owned by the comment author and was quickly dispatched to the nadamac site. Thank you again.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Camino - Mozilla power, Mac style.: Finding that Camino (with the 1.0 release id'd by Tim Bray and Dave Shea) to be a very nice Mac browser. One thing that I particularly like is that the Bookmark Bar simply wraps to a second line, rather than inserting the >> mark that Safari displays to indicate that you must click to see the links that don't fit.

The documentation speaks of a "find as you type" feature that is supposed to be "on" by default, yet it doesn't appear to function. No great shakes. It just requires, as the other browsers do, a press of cmd-f to get the find started.

In my brief 30 minutes of Camino-ing, it feels fast and compatible with the variety of sites I visit.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

There's a lot of discussion (like this via Dave Winer) about the consternation among some in the Mac user community about the branding of Apple's first Intel processor based laptop as the MacBook Pro.

Below, I repeat (slightly altered for clarity) the comment that I left on Dave's blog, with my own opinion on the subject. In a prior blog comment, someone had suggested "xBook", which is what had initially stimulated my reaction.

I don’t like MacBook either, let alone MacBook Pro.

But xBook??? Can you say xBox? I don’t think so.

I think it’s time to lose the “book” as well as the “Power”. The “Pro” to me is dated, old, lame. There are too many PC-industry “Pro” artifacts out there. That said, I would have rather seen the MacBook Pro come out as the iBook Pro, clearly implying that the iBook will continue on as the iBook, yet with entry-level (iBook) as well as professional (iBook Pro) models. I don’t think “Mac” is needed in the name.

This way, you have all these i[apps] (where apps = life, work, tunes, photo, movie, dvd, web) running on i[things] (where things = mac, book, pod).

As we say in the Mac world, “it just works”.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 12:12 PM | Permalink

You can find the beta for Google Earth for Mac here. It's simply amazing!

Posted by Bob Monsour at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just yesterday, I started using two Mac utilities, both of which were new to me, but have been around for a while.

The first is called Taboo. The search for Taboo was borne of a major frustration with Safari. Having become addicted to tabbed browsing, and the dangerous adjacency of the 'Q' and 'W' keys, I too often wind up quitting Safari completely when all I really wanted to do was close the current tab. Well, Taboo offers the necessary warning, saving much head pain. I was in the middle of writing notes using Instiki as a personal note-taking app and was in the middle of taking notes at An Event Apart (which was a great experience, by the way), when I managed to quit Safari and lose about a half-hour of unsaved notes. Now, with Taboo, that will not happen again; unless, of course, I manage to click right on through the warning dialogue.

The second, and way cool app, is called Mousepose, prounouced mouse-poh-zay, like Apple's expose, but with a mouse instead. What Mousepose does is give you a hot key combination (of your choosing) that puts a "spotlight" on the mouse position. It then can either time out or the same key combination removes the spotlight. Eric Meyer was using this during his presentation yesterday and it was very useful for highlighting portions of the screen. Working at home on a laptop with a second monitor to add display space, it is incredibly useful in simply locating the cursor.

I recommend both of these to any Mac user who has such needs.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 11:12 AM | Permalink

ecto: What is ecto?: ecto is designed to make blogging much more easier and yet give the users as much power as possible to manage their weblogs.

ecto is my new blogging tool (meaning it's new to me...not that I built it). I recently started this blog and was looking for a solid OS X desktop client to support blogging with MovableType. This is the one and it sure makes it easy to prepare posts offline for later posting, or just for getting things together and doing what appears to be EVERYTHING that I could do through the web-based MT interface.

If you're on a Mac and you blog (using just about any blogging system), then ecto is worth checking out.

Thanks to the ectonians for ecto...

Technorati Tags: blogging tools

Posted by Bob Monsour at 10:28 PM | Permalink

Here's what Apple announced today:

1. A cell phone with iTunes


2. Harry Potter digital audio books via iTunes Music Store


3. 1,000+ new accessories for iPods


4. Collaboration with Acura, Audi, Honda & VW on 'driving while podding'


5. A 'pencil-thin' iPod called the ipod nano


6. iTunes 5 - new features

Clearly, items #1 and #5 are of significant interest.

The best view of the phone seems to be via Cingular's web site. The ads are pretty cool and I think they've managed to make this work very well. Time will tell, but not being 18 years-old any more, it's tough for me to guage. Overall, I expect it will be a hit. That said, I don't know where Cingular's numbers are, but Verizon seems to dominate the area where I live (central New Jersey).

Much more interesting, however, is the new iPod nano 1000 songs, 1.5 ounces, color display, click wheel. Here are a couple of shots from the Apple web site.

No doubt the buzz will be loud over the coming days. I think that the iPod nano will be a huge hit and the phone will add more fuel to the iTunes Music Store...both good things for Apple.

Here's a piece from the Times Online (UK) that talks about the phone, it's price in the UK and other aspects of what was predicted for the launch.

Interesting times for Apple. In my opinion, we have only scratched the surface of Apple's Mac market share gains. Once they are fully switched over to Intel processors, I expect to see double-digit market share within the next 3 years.

Posted by Bob Monsour at 1:49 PM | Permalink