A date for the new cat on the block

17Oct07

Obviously the biggest news this week has been the news that Mac OS X ‘Leopard’ has gone Golden Master¹ and then hours later Apple announces to the world that Leopard will arrive on Friday 26th October at 10am PDT (which just so happens to be the day I get paid, coincidence? I think not…).

The splash page on Apple’s website has been updated with a snazzy countdown timer and the ‘X’ representing Mac OS X in the Leopard style, against a cosmic background (a la Time Machine):

Its not the splash page that got a facelift, Apple added a mammoth page that lists all 316 new features of OS X in Leopard. So, if you’ve got an hour or two to spare, feel free to browse the 300+ features.

As a bit of a sidenote, five of those 300+ features relate to Front Row. Now, some people may recall that Front Row was bundled as a .app (in a similar way to Dashboard) in Build 9A559 of Leopard and was given an icon that resembled the buttons on the Apple Remote. That icon has now apparently been changed for the release, with the new icon as a red armchair (shown right).

Now if you’re thinking, “Damn and blast, I just went out and bought a new iMac because they were all shiny! Now I’m gonna have to fork out for Leopard!”, fear not. Apple is running a program called Up To Date. If you bought a qualifying Mac on or after October 1st from the Apple Online Store (see if you qualify here) that does not have Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard included you can upgrade to Leopard for $9.95 / £5.95 / €8.95. But don’t wait too long, this program expires on December 29th, so get ‘em in quick!

1. A term used to describe a stage in development process of software. A feature lock-down where bug fixing is the primary focus. Golden Master is similar to ‘Release Candidates’, which are favoured by companies such as Microsoft.

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Pick of the Week: Schoolhouse

12Aug07

This week’s pick is very useful for me personally, as it helps me no end to keep on top of my college work. I also like pieces of software where there is a transparancy between user and developer, it makes the software seem much more personal. It is for this reason that my software pick for this week is Schoolhouse. Schoolhouse is a homework and assignment manager that is developed and maintained by Logan Collins, a 19 year old university student from Kansas. While Schoolhouse is geared towards the US education system (e.g. Semesters are used instead of Terms, or even Years) it can be adapted fairly easily; I have two semesters, one for each year of my current study.

Schoolhouse has a very intuitive, very mac-like interface that can be learnt in a matter of seconds. There are two sides to the app, you can track homework assignments, due dates, documents and notes that correspond with certain assignments and the different subjects that they are part of. Smart groups are implemented superbly in Schoolhouse with useful defaults such as assignments ‘Due this week’ or assignments flagged as ‘Very Important’. It makes navigation much like moving through an iTunes library or the Leopard Finder. The other half of Schoolhouse is grade tracking of each subject on a term by term basis which can generate graphs with lots of useful ways of presenting the information (presumably to give you the best chance of making one’s grades look good, hehe).

There are even some neat features such as ‘Ask Tutor’ which as a toolbar button allows you to e-mail your tutor for a certain subject about an assignment (you have the option to enter a name and e-mail address for your tutor when creating a subject. And a new feature called Classcasting, allows one to share assignment details with others who subscribe to the feed (over several methods, including .Mac, FTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3). This would allow a tutor (or even a classmate) to maintain details of all the assignments for a subject and update students with one click.

There are a few small things that Schoolhouse is missing, such as the ability to copy and paste subjects and terms so as to save time adding the same subject to a new term (semester). But these things are only little niggles compared to the great features that Schoolhouse has to offer. And the best thing? Schoolhouse is free. It is donationware however, so if you can spare some cash for Logan please do (as I know what it’s like being a poor student!).

My overall score:

80%

Download Schoolhouse

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Something interesting I about iWork 08

10Aug07

So after installing iWork 08 yesterday I was expecting my already stretched hard disk to take a hit on free space but I was actually pleasantly surprised; I had lost as much space as I thought I would over the previous version. In fact when I checked the snapshots of Keynote 06 and Pages 06 (that I made with AppFresh) I worked out that Apple have over halved the total size of iWork 08 over iWork 06, and thats after adding Numbers! Here are some specifics:

• The iWork 06 folder’s total size (this is just Keynote and Pages) was 1.89GB, and the iWork 08 folder was only 687MB.
• Keynote 06 was 1010MB while Keynote 08 is only 282MB (the biggest reduction).
• Pages 06 was 825MB and Pages 08 is only 265MB.
• Numbers is only 136MB

So, I don’t know how they managed it, but thank you to all the coding monkeys at Apple who are on the iWork team who have given a superior product (or rather superior set of products) and saved me some disk space.

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Tip of the Week: Get fake Stacks in the Dock

09Aug07

So anyone who’s drooling over the new Stacks feature in Leopard, look no further. You have always been able to do the same kind of thing in OS X, it’s just Stacks are making it into pretty eye-candy as well as making it easier to use. If you want to emulate the Downloads folder that SJ showed off at WWDC this year then just follow these simple instructions:
1. Create a new folder in your Home (or indeed anywhere if you don’t want it cluttering up your Home folder) and call it Downloads.
2. (Optional, Advanced) You can add a custom icon if you want to make it more obvious that it is the Downloads folder.
3. Drag the Downloads folder onto the right-hand side of the Dock (right of the dividing line), next to the trash and drop it in there.
4. Now go to Safari (or your browser of choice) and change the default download location, which for Safari is the Desktop. In Safari you can do this by going into Preferences (Safari > Preferences) and changing the ‘Save downloaded files to:’ preference (which is found under the General tab).
5. Now when you download files from your browser, they will download directly to your Downloads folder. To get quick access to these files you can Control-Click (or Right-Click or hold down the Left-click) on the folder icon in the Dock and a menu will appear out of the folder showing you it’s contents.

Like I said, it’s not as visually appealling as Stacks, but it does the job. I suppose we only have to wait until October.

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Ok, ok, ok… There’s some good news and some bad news

08Aug07

So, the bad news: I was wrong about Apple not moving to aluminium for the new iMacs, and to be honest I’m pretty disappointed. Now in case you’ve been living in a cave for the last couple of days then you should know about Apple’s update to the iMac. However if you have just emerged bleary-eyed into the daylight, you can check out the new iMacs on Apple’s website. Along with the iMac update there was a big boost to iLife and a new version of iWork (which is the good news by the way). But first the iMac.

In some ways I think that this was a very weird move for Apple to make and in some ways I can see why they’ve done it. This is move away from Apple’s design era that began around 2001 with the iMac G3 Snow and continued with the iMac G4 and the ‘IceBook’ iBook of using white plastics to represent their consumer products while their Pro products used brushed aluminum (a la the PowerBook G4, PowerMac G5, XServe etc.). While I think this move is a real shame, I have thought more about it and I can now see the logic. Apple is moving into a new design era that started with the iPhone, this new iMac and even the redesigned Apple website.

In my opinion the new iMac looks too much like a ‘machine’ and not enough like a ‘piece of furniture’, and I can’t help thinking that the new iMac, if I were to buy it, would keep on reminding me that it ‘belongs in the future’. Can you see what I’m trying to get at? I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful machine, but it would be a beautiful machine if it were a TV.

The specs are nothing to turn one’s nose up at however, I like what they’ve done with the product line (and I’m very glad that even though they dropped the 17″, which I was completely against, they haven’t closed off that market, they’ve just given that market an extra 3″ on their screen for the same price).

So, enough about the iMac, lets talk about the software that Apple announced yesterday: upgrades to .Mac, iLife and iWork. I’m going to focus on the iWork suite, because that is the most exciting release for me (as I use iWork extensively in my studies at college instead of Microsoft Office for Mac. And even then I’m not going to say much beyond what I think of the release, I’m not a news site, you can see things for yourself. I think iWork has been underestimated and skimmed over by many. With the choke-hold that Microsoft has on the office/productivity software market, even on the Mac, there didn’t seem room for a new suite, but Apple proved that creating great documents needn’t be stressful or time-consuming. I will certainly be buying iWork 08, and with the addition of Numbers (the new spreadsheet app) to the mix, iWork is definitely worth the £55 (or $79) compared to the £269 for the equivalent version of Office (£269! Geez!).

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iMac? Roll on August 7th…

01Aug07

Okay, okay, it was a woopsy on my part not telling you I was going to be away for a week or so, therefore no PotW or TotW. But I’m going to make it up to you now I’m back.

But anyway, thats not what this post is about. The date August 7th has been flying around for a while now as a potential date for an iMac overhaul. Those rumours seem to have been confirmed, well, the date has at least; Apple is holding a special event at their Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, California on the 7th of August (a Tuesday, which historically has been Apple’s day of choice for announcing new products) at 10am PDT.

The Engadget blog was invited yesterday to a “product presentation for Mac” at Apple Town Hall on August 7th. Apple were very specific that the event was for the Macintosh, presumably so as to quash any iPhone/iPod rumours.

As I have said before, I see no reason for Apple to break its product branding (pro = metal, consumer = white/black plastic) for the new iMac, but with so many rumours about the new brushed metal iMac, I’m finding it hard to ignore it.

But I do think that Apple would shoot themselves in the foot if they released the “super slim brushed aluminum keyboard” that everyone has been going on about. Or rather if they release that particular design, they are shooting themselves in the foot. That keyboard is basically a 104-key version of the current MacBook keyboard, and I don’t know about any of you, but I prefer to type with a ‘proper’ keyboard whenever I can, so that new keyboard for me would be a no-go. But maybe thats just me.

I’d like to hear people’s thoughts and comments on this topic, so drop a comment below.

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Tip of the Week: Make Dock items of hidden apps translucent

19Jul07

It looks like I’ve gone and given up on my blog again, but I promise you, I haven’t. Slow news brings very few blog posts. So when things pick up a bit, so will I. But I am soldiering on with my Tips of the Week and Picks of the Week, so at least there is some conselation.

This weeks tip is a bit of a functionality tip for getting more out of the little hidden features in Mac OS X. We all know about hiding (and if you don’t, this is your chance to learn), we know that by hitting ⌘+H (Command+H) or by by choosing ‘Hide…’ from the menu with the name of the application, we can make all the windows of that app disappear while still having them running. This can allow us to get access to apps underneath, to the desktop or even just to clear some space. But in the Dock, there is no visual way to quickly ascertain which apps are visible and which are hidden, so we have to make mental notes and try to remember which apps are where, and that can get confusing.

As it happens, OS X has a built-in feature that you can use to make things a little easier. By modifying a small setting (this is the little hack), you can make the Dock show which applications are hidden by displaying them as a semi-transparent icon. To do this, open up the Terminal (Applications/Utilities) and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool yes

And then press Enter.

Now, for this change you’ve just made to take effect, you have to restart the Dock, which is a fairly simple process. Simply open Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities) and then find the process from the list called ‘Dock’ and hit Quit Process (and then Quit again on the sheet which pops down). The system will then automatically relaunch the Dock and you’re done!

Try hiding an application now, such as the browser window you are reading this in, then look at the Dock icon for that app. Neat, huh?

If you decide that you don’t fancy this mod after you’ve tried it out, no problem. Just repeat the process but replace the “yes” for a “no” in the code you put into Terminal, i.e.

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool no

Then restart the Dock in the same way and you’re back to how you were before.

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Pick of the Week: AppFresh

15Jul07

This week’s pick of the week is one of the most useful pieces of software I have come across in a long time. Updating apps can become a real drag, and I know that I ignore updates regularly just so I can start using my apps as soon as possible. Now of course Apple’s Software Update covers all of the stuff Apple do, like iTunes, QuickTime and Mac OS X updates, but what about the rest? Is there no way of automating the updating of all my third-party apps all at once? AppFresh has broken my bad habit and allows me to keep up to date on all my apps – Apple and 3rd-party – all with the greatest ease.

But, there is a problem… It’s not only just entering Alpha development, so I don’t recommend it for daily use yet, just because, however I haven’t had any issues or bugs with it so far after a few days of messing around with it. But please keep your eye on it and remember this shining letter of recommendation when you think “Wow, this software is reeeeally useful now that its out of beta!”. I’m just letting you know now before something screws up and you come back here to lynch me. =)

So this is what it looks like:

In the left-hand column you can see the which apps are up to date and which have updates waiting, as well as the different categories of software that AppFresh monitors, which include: Apple apps, third-party apps, application plug-ins, preference panes and widgets. The sidebar features badges such as those in Mail or iTunes so the interface becomes intuitive from the beginning.

In order to keep track of all of the different bits of software, AppFresh gets its information from iusethis.com, a site dedicated to keeping track of what software people are using on their Macs. This allows AppFresh to create a central repository of all the apps tracked by iusethis.com, meaning you can pick up an update as soon as the new update is posted to iusethis.com (which is pretty damn quick if I do say so).

But perhaps one of the best features of AppFresh is its built-in Snapshots feature. I can guarantee that this will happen to you once in your lifetime: you will be the receiving end of a fatal bug in someones app and you’ll be wishing and praying that you could simply roll-back the clock to the older version of that software, to before you had that little accident. Well, AppFresh can do that for you. You have to think of this as Time Machine for your apps. What AppFresh does is it creates a ’snapshot’ of the current version of any app (below I’ve done a screenshot of me doing a snapshot of iTunes 7.3 before updating to 7.3.1) that you can then roll-back to at any time from the comfort of AppFresh (you can even restore User and Global preferences if they go sour).

I’ve started doing this regularly with every app when I update, simply to cover my back in same way that a Back-up (which I hope you all do) covers your back. Before I update any app, I create a snapshot of the current version. I then keep that snapshot until I come to update to the next version, I then replace the old snapshot with a new version in preparation for the next update (did that make sense, it did in my head). This means I always have a proven version of each app to fall back on each time, just in case.

Any way, watch this space, I expect great things from AppFresh. So go give the developers, Maik Szmatulewicz, Thomas Winkler & Jonas Witt your support by downloading AppFresh and giving them feedback.

My overall score:

90%

Download AppFresh

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Tip of the Week: Close all an app’s windows at once

12Jul07

So this is one I didn’t know my self until recently, and unfortunately it’s another Key command (I know, I’ll get something different for next week). So, have you ever had several windows open that belong to the same app and you want to get rid of them all at the same time? Well here’s how:

If you hit ⌥+ (thats Option + Close window button) then all the windows from the corresponding app will close simultaneously, but the app will remain running (you must ⌘+Q or Cmd+Q for that). Alternatively you can add the ⌥ (Opt) key to the standard keyboard shortcut for Close Window, to get ⌘+⌥+W (Cmd+Opt+W).

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Where’s all the Mac gone?

11Jul07

In the last few weeks and months we’ve been hearing iPhone this and iPhone that and nothing but iPhone. But I have to ask… where did all the Mac go? Between January 9th and June 29th Apple seems to have been under radio silence so as not to ‘undermine’ the iPhone. Now in terms of the iPod, I can understand that: you don’t go and announce a huge new product with bucket-loads of features that costs a bomb and then go and release another product that is basically a stripped down version of this very expensive device which has many of the features lots of people are after. That would be stupid. But what I can’t get my head around is why there has been nothing from the Macintosh camp.

It’s been 308 days since the last update to both the iMac and the Mac mini and we are sorely overdue for one (so much so that MacTactic.com has had ‘Overdue for replacement’ and ‘Replacement estimate: Extremely soon’ slapped all over the two Mac’s sections for months now. So, what can we expect when we start to see invites to an Apple Special Event going out to journalists and professionals?

What I think we can expect however is the death of the ‘Leno iMac’ (the one with the big chin). The design is getting a bit long in the tooth as it has been with us since August 2004, almost three years. The design even survived the switch to Intel, a move that many thought would usher in a revamp of the entire Mac line-up. So what are we going to get instead of the Leno? Well, one thing I will say now, as I said a couple of days ago, we will not see a Brushed aluminum iMac. Personally, I think we will be provided with a similar kind of design, with the ‘floating screen’ idea that has served Apple so well. But I believe the design will be thinner and sleaker with a smaller bezel around the edges, much like the current Apple Cinema Displays (except in White, not aluminum).

In terms of the Mac mini, I doubt that that form factor will change much, if at all (except maybe to make the whole thing shorter (less tall). I don’t think the width and depth will change as there are an array of Mac Mini-compatible devices (such as external hard-drives) and Apple would be mad to make them redundant.

Now, the other big question is when we will see these new Macs, not just what we will see. As to that, I think the rumour sites may have hit the nail on the head with that one. Mid to Late August into Early September may seem like an odd time, being fairly close (not very close, fairly close) to the holiday season, but I think Apple are being very strategic for several reasons. Firstly, a release at the end of the Summer means education and young person-based sales will be up for the beginning of the new school year. Secondly, Apple promised us that “the first 30 years were just the beginning” and that we should expect big things out of Apple in 2007. While the iPhone was a “big thing”, it is, in my opinion, not enough to make 2007 one of Apple’s most memorable. And so a product release closer to the holiday season would only serve to solidify that view with a lot of people – “Well they had a little launch in March, one thing in the Summer and another at Christmas… Thats nothing special”. And thirdly, I believe space in the holiday season is being made for 6th Gen iPod – the supposed ‘iPhone-without-the-phone’ – which will be a huge deal for Apple, as it will bring Multi-Touch to the masses: ‘normal’ consumers will prick their ears and go, “Wow, my Click-wheel iPod looks cruddy now. I want this shiny new toy!”.

So, as disgruntled as I am with the distinct lack of Macintosh news, I think the best is yet to come from Apple in 2007.

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