LAUG 2.0 News

One of the things I love about software for the Mac is the quality and abundance of programs that help users get the most out of their computing experience while integrating with the Mac as much as possible. Timbuktu Pro remote control software from Motorola (formerly Netopia) is no exception to this rule.

Before we get to far into this review I think we should talk a little about what exactly Timbuktu Pro does. Timbuktu Pro is basically a remote computing application that allows a person to control one computer from another machine all within a very Mac-like interface. Additionally the program allows drag ‘n drop file sharing, voice and text chat functionality as well as the ability to use it in cross platform environments.

Since this app is an extremely powerful and feature rich remote computing environment I decided to focus my review on what is, in my opinion, easiest way to get set up and running. (more…)

Personally, I am a Keynote junkie. I think I’m going to put in my will that my eulogy be done in Keynote. While I’ve used PowerPoint in the past, once Keynote was released I’ve never gone back.

Unfortunately, because I use the program so much, I (and my audience) get quite bored with the standard backgrounds included by Apple. I’ve gotten so bored that I’ll occasionally import backgrounds from PowerPoint, but that’s so PC! Sure I could design my backgrounds, however I have absolutely no design skills. If I was a good designer, I probably wouldn’t be using Keynote so much in the first place.

When I read about PowerSlides I knew I found the product that would save people from seeing the standard chalkboard background I used for practically every presentation. The product can be used for either Keynote or PowerPoint and retails for $39.99.
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Dave’s current spurt of posting from Macworld has inspired me to post a couple of reviews that have been on the back burner for a while. First up is a great app from Bitcartel Software, entitled Radiolover. Basically you can think of it as a Tivo or DVR for streaming audio content.

While I subscribe to tons of podcasts there are still a few radio programs that I’d love to have on my iPod that haven’t gotten hip to podcasting. Radiolover fills that gap nicely. To start recording go to your favorite radio station’s website, copy the address of their streaming audio URL and enter that into Radiolover. Once you’ve entered the URL you are free to setup up a schedule of when you want to record that station and how it integrates with iTunes. The best part of the app is that once the recording is complete Radiolover automatically moves the file(s) over to iTunes and will set their name, genre and add them to a playlist of your choosing.

Personally I’ve been using the app for a few months now to record NPR shows that are not offered as podcasts yet. To do so I utilize the WBEZ Chicago’s streaming radio station as my local NPR station does not offer MP3 streaming. If you do run into a radio station that streams their content via Windows Media or Real Player instead of MP3, BitCartel makes another app, iRecordMusic for just that purpose. While iRecordMusic has many of the same features, in fact more features then Radiolover, I enjoy Radiolover’s simple clean interface for scheduling recordings.

Overall I give this app 4 out of 5 dog cows. My only complaint is that the program does not auto-launch when it needs to record. However, using iCal to schedule the recordings as well as Radiolover allows for seemless-timeshifting-audio-joy.

This is my very first attempt at reviewing a commercial software application, so may be a bit rough around the edges (I hope my readers will bear with me). In January of 2006 Apple introduced it’s yearly update to it’s media creation suite iLife 06. This new version contained so many new features and enhancements that I could easily write a long, detailed article on each one. However, since each application has been professionally reviewed many times already, I decided to focus my efforts on reviewing the photo to web process which is where my interest lies.

My review begins with a very simple question: “How can I easily put up my own website with photos so my friends and family can see them?” This issue was raised and discussed in a previous meeting of the Lawrence Mac User Group and I thought it presented a good focus for my software review. The goal is to describe the process of getting a group of photos from the camera to the web. While there are a great many options and tools available on the market to do this we want to find out if Apple’s most recent solution is worth buying. Especially if you already have an older version that you are using. Before I detail my personal experience using these two applications to build my photos website I’ll give you a brief review of the latest version of iPhoto and the new iWeb.

What’s New in iPhoto 06?

There are many new features in this version of iPhoto and I would have to say that most of them are solid improvements that will make organizing and editing much easier. The first thing you might notice when opening up iPhoto 06 is that it feels faster than any prior version. The iLife developers have worked hard to improve the performance and it can now hold up to 250,000 images. I don’t have anywhere near that many photos but who’s to say how many pictures we’ll all be sitting on in five years. Digital cameras are making it easier than ever to shoot without restraint. The interface has also been updated to more closely match the current style of iTunes. Nothing too major has been redone but the style is a little more slick and professional looking.

iPhoto 6 introduces a Full Screen Editing button. Clicking on it will and iPhoto’s interface—along with your desktop and any other windows—will completely disappear, replaced by a solid black field in which your image will be displayed as large as possible. In full-screen editing mode, you can edit your photo without the distraction of other interface elements or colors. After doing extensive editing work in last year’s version of iPhoto I have to say that I like this mode very much. It gets everything else out of the way and puts the one picture your editing front and center. Pushing the full screen button again instantly returns you to normal iPhoto view. Along with the full screen editing mode is the new Compare button. It allows you to display images side by side. This is really useful when you’ve shot many versions of the same subject and want to decide which picture you like the best. Along with the editing panel is the new Effects pane. This allows for the easy one-click addition of simple effects like black-and-white, sepia tone and edge effects like blurs. The Effects pane and the Editing pane are both in the new black, slightly transparent, floating window style which Apple has been using lately.

Photocasting is a new feature which allows an easy way to instantly share your photos libraries with others. You need to have a .Mac subscription to make it work. It works by selecting an album and clicking the Photocast button on the toolbar.
Your photo album will then be uploaded to .Mac’s servers and then emailing out a notice to your friends with the website address. So far it doesn’t sound at all different than posting your own website but there’s more. Other users can subscribe to your site using their copies of iPhoto. Whenever you change the photos your users will automatically see the updates as well.

The book making function has been enhanced to produce higher resolution results. Newly designed books can be viewed full screen with all of it’s effects. Custom greeting cards and calendars that can now be ordered along with the photo books. The calendars tie into iCal to display all of your important dates and appointments automatically. Other notable improvments include the ability to export photos as 16-bit TIFF files. Borderless printing can now be done if you have a printer that supports it. A new preference can be used to store photos in locations other than iPhoto’s internal library. iPhoto now allows for ColorSync tagging when importing images.

What is iWeb and how does it work?

iWeb is Apple’s new entry level desktop Web publishing application. It allows you to build simple but good looking websites. These sites can contain audio Podcast’s, text blogging, short video clips or still photographs. The big selling point is that all of this can be don’t with absolutely no HTML coding at all. The entire website can be designed and modified in a drag and drop style. When opening iWeb (or automatically importing images from iPhoto) you will be prompted to select one of several predesigned templates. Most of the Apple templates are nice and I certainly expect the number of choices to grow with each new version of the application. If none of the templates suit your taste then you can select a blank page. Once you’ve selected a template you can fill it up with content pulled directly from a floating palatte called the “Media Browser.” It’s a simple process to drag images from the Photos pane, movies from the Movies pane, and audio of any kind, including podcasts, from the Audio pane. You can also drag and drop items from your desktop if you like.

The entire iWeb application functions in one main window. The workspace called the Canvas is in the middle. Here you can choose a template and proceed to fill it with all of your stuff. With iWeb’s 12 included templates, your Web pages are pre-formatted for blogs, podcasts and movie clips. To the left, an iTunes like list called the Site Organizer, lists all of your pages in order. On the bottom is a toolbar that contains text and image controls. You essentially start out with an Apple template (or a blank page) but can end up with something that looks totally different. On a photo page for example, you can have a solid color background, a texture or your own photo of choice. Pictures and titles can have various levels of opacity. Thumbnails of your pictures can have different kinds of borders. Titles and captions can have different fonts and colors. All of these options and many more are all accessed through the single floating window called the Web’s Inspector. Through the Inspector we can make all of the changes I mentioned above as well as alter the page dimensions text attributes such as size, and line spacing; set margins, word wraps, and lists; add drop shadows and reflections to your boxes and images; and designate links. The Inspector can add password-protection to your site and even track how much space is used on your iDisk.

While there are a great many things you can alter in Apple’s pre-designed templates, some thing remain beyond your control. The navigation menu can’t be moved. At present these is also no way to create submenus. You have to manually create links to all of your individual albums—this isn’t hard, but it takes a little time. I hope they add this feature in the next version of the program. The very first version of iWeb had a problem of optimising each image file as a .PNG file rather than the more standard .JPEG. This created the side effect of web pages ballooning in size and being slower to navigate online due to PNG’s being larger than JPEGs. However, the iWeb 1.1 update seems to have corrected that issue.

The web publishing route of choice for iWeb is a .Mac account. Using this system, it’s method of one click publishing “just works” as advertised. However, if you do not have a .Mac account and prefere to publish to another domain through an FTP server then you have to take a few more steps. It involves using the “Publish To A Folder” command, then navigating to your user folder/Sites, find the files you want to copy, and upload them via FTP. If you happen to have a .Mac account and little interest in learning HTML web coding skills then iWeb might be a good tool for you. It will allow you to design a good looking Web site with all of your own content. However, for those with experience using more powerful layout apps like Dreamweaver or Adobe Golive then iWeb will seem inflexible and far too basic to design large complex sites.

My Experience Designing a Website

I should mention that I have a membership to Apple’s $100. per year .Mac (pronounced dot Mac) service and have been using iPhoto 5 to import, edit, organize and upload my images to my Homepage space. While the process has been relatively easy, I’ve always felt a lack of control over the design of my website. Most of Apple’s website templates are pretty lame and haven’t been updated in a long time. The Homepage templates also suffer from not being customizable. In preparation for an art show that I was going to be put on during September and October I built a simple online portfolio using iPhoto 5 and .Mac’s Homepage feature. Due to my distaste for most of Apple’s templates I almost always use the simple black pages for my photos. I have also found that brightly colored artwork tends to be viewed best against a neutral background anyway. Once I got my hands on iWeb I went about recreating that simple black website but with a refreshed look.

I started by building a new photo album of the picture I already had in iPhoto. I also used my Kodak Easyshare (5 megapixel) digital camera to shoot some new pictures of my show after it had gone up at a local coffee shop. Getting the pictures into iPhoto is as easy as plugging in the USB cable that came with the camera. If you happen to be pulling your images from another source like a scanner then you would use the software that came with your scanner and then use iPhoto’s “Import to Library” command under the File menu. There can be as many or as few images as you like. iPhoto offers of the option of deleting the pictures off your camera once it’s done, or leaving them alone. It also lets you name the incoming batch of images for searching later. Once our pictures are imported it’s easy to sort them into albums or folders. I made great use of the new “Full Screen” editing mode offered by iPhoto 06 during this process. Being able to blow those pictures up to their largest possible size for editing greatly improved my ability to see what I was doing. Once I had my photos titled and edited I pushed the iWeb button and off they went.

iWeb automatically opened up to receive the incoming photos and asked me to select a template to work with. For obviouse reasons I went with the clean and simple black page template. Using iWeb turned out to be easy and painless for me. I found a surprising amount of flexibility in moving objects around and using the Inspector Palette. I could have adding colors, frames, fancy text, shadows, password protection, hyperlinks and a wide variety of other elements to my pages. For now though I opted to keep it simple. The Site Organizer lets you move the order of different pages around and create entirely new sites. iWeb also offers image editing tools using the very same floating Editing pane that shows up in iPhoto. After dragging the photos around to an order that I liked and grouping the pages up I proceeded to publish my website by simply pushing the “Publish” button. Although for this particular project I decided to use a super simple and plain site design I am planning on reposting my very popular photo website in the near future. For that project I’ll employ more color and flair for my web pages. I’m looking forward to it already.

And that is my review. Although not nearly as comprehensive as some of the professional reviews done on iLife, I tried to touch on most of the new features and highlight how I used them to actually get some work done. I hope that some of the information I’ve detailed here will interest you to take a closer look at this amazing package. Using any one of the included applications in iLife 07 can enhance your ability to manage and share your digital memories.

iPhoto
Pros: Faster scrolling and performance. Full screen editing mode. New book, greeting card and calendar designs.
Cons: Runs a little sluggish on my three year old iBook (darn!). I recommend running it on a newer system or having lots of ram.
Rating: 4 out of a possible 5

iWeb
Pros: Built in templates and web publishing are a huge improvement over the old .Mac Homepage service. Finished sites can look professional and slick. Handles video clips, blogs, Podcasts. Lots of options to tweak pages to your taste.
Cons: Inability to create and save reusable templates. Publishing to FTP not easy enough.
Rating: 3 out of a possible 5 (which isn’t bad for a version 1 product). Expect a new version of iWeb in January ‘07 to add new features and address shortcomings.

If you would like to view the website I designed for this project the url is:
http://web.mac.com/alexanderodood

NiceCast software is probably the most affordable & easy program out there for your Power PC or Intel Mac to have the capability to streamline audio through the internet, playable in any PC or MAC audio program. Not only that, but it will archive whatever you stream, saving it as a music file of your choice at what sample & bitrate you choose, even if it’s different than your stream settings. Futhermore, if you choose to purchase a serial, you have the option of listing your stream on macstreams.com, and get your music out to a curious audience of usually a couple dozen to over a hundred listeners at any given time. It helps greatly if you have at least a half dozen friends &/or family tuned in for your station to get any notice or a decent placement in the search.
There are no recommended system requirements for the Nicecast, other than operating system, & a high speed internet connection. I ran the program on both Tiger & Panther, and on a 400mhz G4 system with a 1gb of pc 100 ram, & a G4 800 emac with 1gb of pc 133 ram. I have the fortune of being in Time Warner Cable’s footprint, with a fairly good high speed connection. When it comes to streaming, it’s actually the upload that you’ll want to have plenty of speed in, using different speed tests, mine averaged at about 440kb/s. By comparison, my download is usually just under 5mbs. Having your own server is optional, since nicecast offers a free one.
First run, on my emac, was to one listener, my friend Travis. I decided to use some high settings for an audio mix that i played through a griffen powerwave composit, a 100 dollar usb 2.0 device (backward compatible), which lets you input analogue audio from any source, mine being a mixer, into your computer. Nicecast gives you the obtion of streaming from 3 different types of sources, system audio, external usb/firewire devices, & applications. Since this is a stereo music session, I set it at a bitrate of 128 kbs and a sample rate at 44.1khz, & began an archive session at the same settings. This was done on a weeknight, and I used nicecast’s macstreams server. The “share” tab on nicecast gives you the URL for both people online and on your own network. Travis tried the url in Windows Media Player to no luck, he then put it in WinAmp and successfully logged on (he was on a PC). The url will not work unless you begin broadcasting, and stopping will boot people, essentially, and they will have to restart the stream after you begin broadcasting again. I didn’t play long, but Travis said nothing but good things about the quality of the stream.
Second run, I tried on the g4 powermac, with half as much processing power. I also tried it on a Saturday night, where nicecast’s server was being used by many more broadcasters and listeners. At the same settings as before, I was told I’ve had a terrible choppiness. So I stopped the broadcast and lowered the settings. Still choppy, so i stopped archiving, i closed my browser (your browser will take up quite a bit of your internet connection), and lowered the settings some more. I also allotted more CPU Usage/Quality, although I’m not sure what good this setting does for the stream. The final verdict was choppy, but not as bad. Ultimately, I think the lowest i was set at was 64kbs bitrate with a 32khz sample rate, still using stereo, this was music, after all. This was a rather frustrating session, if I couldn’t archive it, I couldn’t save it for playback later, which was something I was looking forward to. And even if I did archive it, the quality was poor enough to be upset. Another thing I noticed this session, is that I had a maximum of 8 listeners, but could not have more tuned in. The more popular stations on macstreams can have up to 100 listeners. I do not know if this is something that you pay for at macstreams, or if it is based on popularity, and if i had all 8 listeners tuned in one night, I might be able to have 20 listeners the next evening. Both rogue ameoba’s website an macstreams did not have readily available explanations for these, & I decided it didn’t really matter to me, since the most listeners I ever hoped for were like 2 or 3 freinds.
I did a final 75 minute broadcast more recently with 3 friends tuning in for me. It was a Thursday night and macstreams wasn’t as busy as other evenings. At my favorite high settings, I had maybe one or two skips/chops, and all of it archived! I also tried the mono setting at the end of the night, talking through a microphone connected via an maudio mobile preamp. The voice quality was extroidinary! Much better than expected. Proving that nicecast would probably serve best as a voice broadcasting system. Although I’m sure if you used your own server and had a bit better system than mine, and a very expensive internet service providing upstreams over 1mb, broadcasting and archiving at sample rates as high as 360 to 100 listeners would be no problem at all.
If you’re looking to have your own online radio station, you’ll find that nicecast will be a good start. You will be limited when it comes to listeners, as macstreams offered no more than 100 for even it’s most popular broadcasters. But again, it does give you the option of using your own server. You’ll also hesitate to broadcast at higher sample rates unless you’re dedicating all of your internet connection to it, even if you live in an area with a more expensive consumer internet options, you’ll notice that those increase your download by another 3 or 4 megabyles a second, but your uploads might gain no more than 100 kilobites a second. You can archive as you mix live, then restart your broadcast and have an itunes library folder dedicated to replaying your archived sets while you’re away. As of now, nicecast does not give the option of switching audio sources during broadcast (it would be a great addition for future versions!) You will not be able to have friends at other computers add to your broadcast stream, because the nicecast url is computer specific, so your ‘guest dj’ will have to physically be your guest, and using your same computer or internet connection. For those of you who intend to broadcast voice only, you’ll have little or no problems with quality of your feeds using nicecast’s server alone, but again, you will have a limit to how many listeners you can have at once.
The podcast thinks it’s beat out the significance of radio, but that’s not true at all. The broadcast is communal, one source, several listeners. But one thing in common, it’s all happening right then, in the moment. Using a chatroom or im communicator you can get feedback, it brings you together, enjoying the very moment. It’s definately cool, and nicecast is an affordable, easy, and fun way to be the source of such an experience.

Jeremiah Zentz
eternalvibe radio
http://72.128.59.121:8000/listen.m3u

Pity the mighty dinosaur. You were there first, you are bigger, stronger and older then those pesky little mammals scuttling around your feet, but it seems like all anyone wants to talk about is how cool it is to give birth to live young and how exciting that new lactation feature is. The world of computer software is not quite as red in tooth and claw as the Jurassic, but software (no matter how “intelligently designed”) evolves as surely as does natural life, and many ancient dinosaurs of Mac-kind continue to plod on in a world that is several ice ages and a comet impact different from the world in which they were initially released a decade or more ago.

“Dinosaur” Mac applications are not “abandonware” or useless. All the applications I will discuss are professional applications that are still supported and developed, and have many thousands of loyal users. Each one of them is still a real-world solution. Still, they all have seen their moment in the sun pass, as the changing nature of the Mac market, new competitors, OS upgrades, and the cruel passage of time have knocked many of these grand old applications from their former pre-eminence. Among these grandfathers of Macdom are Qualcomm’s Eudora, Extensis’s Portfolio, Bare Bones’ BBEdit, Netopia’s Timbuktu, and EMC’s Retrospect.

Each of these products is still actively developed. All of them run on OS X, and several are already Universal Binaries, running natively on Intel Macs. They all have engineers fixing bugs and working on new versions, and each product can be purchased right now. Every one of these applications was once the undisputed champion (and in some cases founder) of entire Mac software genres with life-spans well over a decade and heritages dating back to the old “classic” MacOS days.

Although these Mac applications all do different tasks, ranging from remote control to data backup, they all share many features in common (scaly skin, anyone?) “Dinosaur” apps generally feature very “old-school” user interfaces that pre-date OS X, have very powerful but complex feature sets, can be intimidating for beginners, and enjoy a rabidly loyal (if declining) user base. These apps also tend to be priced somewhat higher then their competitors, often as a legacy of the “old days” when they could claim a premium price as the founder of a new market segment.

Qualcomm’s Eudora is one of the grandfathers of email on the Mac. The first version came out in the early 1990s and Eudora has evolved through many revisions since. Geeks love it for its very powerful customization features; you can literally tweak hundreds of obscure options. Eudora is also very fast and has a powerful filtering mechanism. Yet Eudora is missing many modern email features. It doesn’t handle HTML email, has poor built-in SPAM filtering, and doesn’t take advantage of any modern MacOS features such as Spotlight. In spite of these flaws, Eudora still has a loyal cadre of users who are sticking with this mature product in the hope of upgrades to come. In an era when the capable Mail.app is free with every copy of the OS, Eudora has some major work ahead of it in order to stay relevant in the modern age.

The Mac has always been the favorite of creative users such as photographers and designers. Extensis’s media asset application, Portfolio, was one of the first products of its type, allowing users to catalog their collection of digital assets such as photos, illustrations, and clip art. Stuffed with an amazing and powerful suite of image categorizations tools and output options, Portfolio has managed to maintain a loyal user base and continue with a steady upgrade cycle through the years. Extensis will have to maintain this innovation in the future, as (in a common scenario for all the applications covered here) Apple has muscled in on their user base, with programs like Aperture, designed specifically for pro photographers. Still, Extensis is fighting back, with new features and a Universal version that may keep this dinosaur alive even as the mammals take over.

BBEdit is a humble text editor, beloved by programmers, scripters, and HTML jockeys everywhere. It has the level of power you expect in professional application and a feature list to match. BBEdit is renown for its extensive library of text manipulation tools and support for many common scripting and programing languages, but it has faced some serious competition in recent years from both a new generation of powerful OS X shareware applications such as TextMate and free editors. In addition, like many of it dinosaur peers, BBEdit’s user interface is very “old school” and doesn’t take advantage of much of the modern look and feel of OS X. Still, BBEdit has fought back, with aggressive support for some new OS X technologies, and Bare Bones has created a stripped-down free version (called Text Wrangler) to both head off the more inexpensive competition and addict a new generation of text fiends. BBEdit’s future looks good, and its legion of fans will likely be happy for years to come.

Netopia’s Timbuktu was the very first application that let you take control of a faraway Mac from the comfort of your local desktop. Over the years, Timbuktu has gathered a loyal base of users including system administrators, consultants, and road warriors. Although Timbuktu has been kept up-to-date (the latest version is a universal binary and features optional integration with the popular Skype application) it has faced some new and stiff competition over the years, and its powerful features are wrapped in a somewhat dated user interface. In a familiar refrain, Apple itself has taken a bite out of Timbuktu by offering its own remote control program, and several smaller, more inexpensive competitors (including the free open-source VNC) are busy scurrying around Timbuktu’s large scaly feet. Timbuktu has kept fresh by adding new speed and security features that its competitors have not matched, and has hung on to a solid user base, but as Apple and others continue to make remote controlling another computer ubiquitous, Timbuktu will need to evolve right along with them.

Backing up has always been a necessity of computing, and EMC’s Retrospect is one of the longest-lived Mac backup applications. It remains the only enterprise-class Mac backup option, and its ability to do cumulative backups to a wide variety of media types is unparalleled. Still (and stop if this sounds familiar) they are threatened by both a slew of new OS X-only competitors, and Apple themselves has added backup to the MacOS, reducing Retrospect’s market even further. Retrospect also suffers from a very complex user interface, and has been somewhat slow to support new OS technology, such as modern file metadata. Nonetheless, Retrospect is pretty secure for a big old reptile, given that its enterprise-level support (such as being apple to back up to tape drives) is not matched by any other native Mac software. With a Universal version on its way, this dinosaur should be roaming the Earth for a while to come.

There are more dinosaur applications around then these five. Roxio’s Toast used to be the only way to burn optical media on a Mac, something that the Finder and most Apple applications can now do themselves. Extensis’s Fusion (previously Suitcase) was an essential font manager, until the OS began to come with built-in font management. Equilibrium’s DeBebelizer once was the only way to convert graphics between different formats, a function now handled by Preview. As we’ve seen, no matter what ecosystem a dino has evolved in, several things are working against it, including competition for mindshare and marketshare from Apple and others, as well as expensive price points and dated user interfaces. Nonetheless, all these dinosaurs, unlike their biological counterparts, are likely to survive. Loyal user bases and ongoing engineering efforts will likely keep all of these applications going for years to come as they hopefully find new users in the fast-changing world of the Macintosh.

I am here in San Francisco for Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. There are over 4800 Mac geeks stuffed into one building in downtown San Francisco to learn about the latest MacOS hardware and technology. The WWDC used to be aimed primarily at Mac programmers, but in recent years it has expanded to be a learning experience for IT administrators, scripters and other technically-inclined people. Apple made two majot announcements today: Steve Jobs, with his usual theatrical flair announced the new Mac Pro desktop system, which is basically a very fast Intel-based Mac in an old (but slightly re-jiggered) g5 enclosure. In addition to the new Mac Pro, Jobs introduced a new Intel-based xServe server, and he also took (partial) wraps off of the much-anticipated MacOS 10.5, Leopard.

I’ve learned a lot about the new OS which I cannot share with you, due to Apple’s legal requirements, but there is still plenty of new information on the OS which Apple has made public. You will definitely want to go to Apple’s web site to see the demoes and read about all the new features in detail, but I will share my initial thoughts on a few of the highlights.

The big “cool” new feature is built-in, automatic backup, called “Time Machine.” Time Machine lets you restore your entire system, or an individual file from any point in the past, through a really cool interface which looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. The only requirement is that you have an extra hard disk to back up to, such as an external firewire drive. If you went to the LAUG meeting last month, you learned about how important backing up is, but also how confusing it can be. If Time Machine works as advertised, backing up will be automatic and easy, and millions of Mac users will be able to rest a bit easier. And no, as hard as Apple engineers worked, Time Machine can only go into the past, you can’t yet travel into the future!

A couple other cool new features and improvements are a major upgrade to iChat which gives those with video cameras many new options to share presentations and videos, and a much faster and more advanced Spotlight. Apple also has built in virtual desktops, which will allow you to “switch” from one desktop to another as you move between applications. In effect this gives you a monitor that is four times bigger then its physical size!

However, in my opinion, some of Apple’s new stuff for Leopard isn’t quite as exciting as Time Machine. In fact, I was very disappointed that Apple made no improvements to the Finder, which is one of the weakest part of the Mac. Apple also added some fairly silly features to Mail without apparently fixing Mail’s many flaws. You can now have to do lists in Mail and send attractive HTML email messages easily, but there’s no sign that Mail’s horrible Spam filtering or clumsy user interface has seen any improvements.

Still, I am eagerly looking forward to seeing Leopard become more polished as it heads towards release. The new OS is certainly a step forward from Tiger in many areas and anyone using a Mac can look forward to it when it ships next Spring.   

I just wanted to drop in really quick before the extended weekend to talk about my new favorite piece of software, Write Room. Basically the software is a simple text editor that allows the user to enter a full screen mode in which the distractions your computer presents i.e. IM, RSS, email, podcasts etc…disappear.

I really love this quote from the developers site;

For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world.”

The software is still in beta but it looks to be another great app from Hog Bay Software. I’m not going to give the software a “dog-cow” rating as it is still in beta, but it looks to be a great app. I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July weekend!

Via: Binary Bonsai

Every once in a while a product comes along that does one thing, and does it really well. The only question is “do you need it” With modern LCD screens and sleep/energy save modes, screen savers are virtually unnecessary. That’s really the point of Aquazone, it has no practical value, but it is very cool.

Before we got our little dog Tova, we had a fish tank for a number of years. I do miss some of the relaxing aspects of watching fish swim around and interact. Fish are generally low maintance and considered by many a key stress reducer. I think of this screen saver program as a virtual tamagotchi or a aquatic version of the Sims. You can do everything you would do with a normal fish tank: add and remove fish, feed them, tap on the glass (or the keyboard in this case). Even better, you can mix fresh water and salt water, no worries about two male Betas in the same tank Fortunately you don’t have to clean the tank and you don’t get algae. If you want fish not included in the tank, you can buy some more at www.aquazoneshop.com.

If you ( or someone you know) enjoys fish and want to buy something fun and rather frivolous, this is a great program. If you aren’t into fish, probably not worth buying

Pros: Does exactly what is says, creates a virtual fish tank
Cons: Probably a productivity waster at the office, gotta love fish to enjoy the program.

4 out of 5 dog cows

Ok, I may be dating myself, but does anyone remember that Saturday Night Live skit where they talk about something being a floor wax and a dessert topping? I think it was Dan Akroyd and someone else. Don’t confuse this with the Bassomatic…that was something entirely different (Mmm, that’s great Bass!).

Why is this relevant? CheckIt is just about everything you want rolled up in one package (technically 2 since it’s on 2 cds). If I were on a desert island and I was only allowed one utility program, it would be CheckIt.

First, Checkit includes Tech Tool Platinum. Tech Tool is the best all around utility for the Mac. If something isn’t working right on your Mac, odds are Tech Tool will find it. It incorporates all the functions of the old Norton such as disk defrag/speed disk and repair, data recovery, along with checking each and every aspect of your hardware—ram, motherboard, hard drive, and so forth This is the program every Mac user should own and keep in their laptop bag for emergencies on the road.

But wait, that’s only the tip of the iceberg! Buy Tech Tool as part of CheckIt and pay about $90.Buy Tech Tool from Micromat and it’s the same price. However Checkit includes a suite of other programs.

Included in the CheckIt Suite is the Spring Cleaning Suite. Sweet. There are about 25 different programs that let you clean up every aspect of your hard drive. For example, you can search for duplicate files, eliminate broken aliases, find the largest files. If you want to clean up your hard drive of unneeded junk and save yourself from having to upgrade, Spring Cleaning is the program to run. Personally, I used the quick compare to compare a backup of my iTunes folder and make sure my external and internal music libraries were synced up. I also freed up about 10% of my laptop’s hard drive by letting it eliminate a variety of unneeded and duplicate files. Since laptop hard drives are expensive, getting rid of waste is a big savings. If you were to buy just Spring Cleaning it would be $50.

And if that weren’t enough, they through in Retrospect which is considered an industry standard for backing up your Mac. Though many people can use the backup software included with a .Mac account, Retrospect makes backups as well as restores easier. In addition, you can restore your files to a computer that doesn’t have .Mac or Internet access. This product by itself costs $90.

Checkit Suite is probably the best bargain ever for Macintosh software. It helps you backup your computer, clean up the hard drive, as well as protect and diagnose practically any problem. Operators are standing by and quantities won’t last, so call today. Oh, I think I’m getting that confused with the Bassomatic again!

Pros: Perfect suite that includes every aspect of managing and protecting your computer.
Cons: Can’t think of a one.

5 out of 5 dog cows