The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

All the people hanging out on MySpace looking for friends make me sad. A great programmer turning to MySpace looking for love for his project makes me sadder, especially when the project in question is arguably one of the most useful OpenSource projects out there for OS X. Nevertheless, Sherm Pendley sent the following around to the macosx Perl list early this morning:

Well, I've finally given into peer pressure and created a MySpazz
account and CamelBones group:

<http://groups.myspace.com/CamelBones>

I'm getting a bit discouraged because CamelBones isn't gaining much
traction, and that leads to lack of motivation, which leads to not a
whole lot (well... nothing) getting done, which leads to not many new
users, which leads to... you get the idea. I'm looking for ways to
gain some new users, some new ideas, and generally psyche myself up
for the push to Leopardville.

Maybe some networking through MySpazz will help. And who knows - it
may even turn out that tons of people are using it, only I just don't
know about 'em.

sherm--

For those of you who aren't familiar, CamelBones is an Objective-C framework that allows projects written in Perl to be easily wrapped in Cocoa GUIs. You could also think of it as a way for Cocoa programs to access Perl objects (and therefore that magic repository of all that is good in data manipulation and socket programming: CPAN). Either way, CB has made many programmer's lives much, much easier and helped secure Perl's place as an indispensable weapon in OS X programmers' arsenals.

So if you're a CB user and have a MySpace account, drop by the group. Say "hi" and maybe contribute a couple of those new ideas he's looking for.

Finally, something to do with the ExpressCard slot on your MBP. Storage and digital photo accessory supplier Delkin Devices today announced their eFilm ExpressCard 34 is available for pre-orders. To be officially unveiled at Photokina and shipping Oct. 16th, the EC-34 is the first Compact Falsh-to- ExpressCard converter. It is plug-and-play on both Macs and PCs in both 34mm and 54mm EC slots, and will allow photographers and others to transfer photos and other data directly between their CF cards and computers at 20MB/s without the need for external USB readers. All I can say is: Delkin, where were you when I came back from vacation this Summer?

From the press images, it looks like there is also an eFilm EC-34/8GB CF Card combo pack in the works, but it's not listed in the store yet.

We haven't talked about iTunes U here in a while, but it's been on my mind lately, as I'm heading up my U's roll-out. It's a long, tortuous process--because of our internal bureaucracy, not Apple's--but, despite the fact I haven't been talking to our official reps (the extent of those conversations has been "we're still working out the details"), I have had the opportunity to sit down with some people from Apple and talk about the project. One of the topics of discussion was the direction of iTunes U 2.0 development. Apparently Apple has significantly increased the personnel dedicated to the project and has a number of enhancements planned. The person I was talking to couldn't tell me what, exactly, but he said that they were looking at community feature requests. Naturally, my next question was "well, what features have people requested?" The answers surprised me. Among the most requested features is on-site storage. This was a little bit of a shock, since one of the selling points for me was letting Apple handle the potentially multi-terabyte storage requirements and not worring about managing--not to mention funding--a SAN of that size myself. I can understand, though, that people want to keep control of their own information, and have on-site backups, etc. Closely following that was e-commerce capability. Again, a bit of a surprise. I wouldn't expect a free service to allow me to charge for access. on the other hand, I suspect that some professors would like to include materials that require royalty payment, so some vehicle for processing that will be required eventually, I suppose.

The #1 request, though, completely floored me: DRM. In fact, it is so in-demand that it has apparently been the deal-breaker for the majority of universities that had been approached about iTunes U and refused. That revelation literally left me speechless. It's one thing to realize that not everyone is as rabidly anti-DRM as I am, but DRM in the classroom flies in the face of not only my general IP position, but everything I like to believe about academic freedom. I've heard of cases, of course, where universities have claimed faculty-developed course materials as work-for-hire and property of the university, but that's never been the case at any university I've been associated with and I've generally understood that those were fringe cases. The idea that a significant number of universities would refuse to participate in iTunes U because of a lack of DRM is just...staggering.

Of course, that doesn't mean that FairPlay or any other DRM will find its way into iTunes U. But if Apple is dedicated to the project and the one of the biggest stumbling blocks seems to be DRM, well, you do the math.

And the worst part? If FairPlay does show up it won't be Apple's fault, or even the RIAA's. The universities will have done it to themselves.

Update: just wanted to clarify that second sentence a little. It's come to my attention that the original wording led a couple of people to jump to incorrect conclusions. You guys remember the bit about "assume," right?

By this time it is a well-worn cliché that there are 10 kinds of personal computer users: those that get this joke, and those that don't Mac users and PC users. For the most part, we, particularly Mac users, want to see this distinction as personality-driven. We chose Macs because we're creative, rebellious, cutting-edge, or, if we believe the ads, just plain cool. To the PC world, we're ridiculous spendthrifts, wasting our money on overpriced hardware that dooms us to a life of marginalization and incompatibility.

Personally, I see it as matter of genetic superiority. In a race for survival of the fittest, Mac users will win every time. We're infinitely adaptable. We're used to a constantly changing OS and set of core applications that we further rearrange with scores of hacks and utilities. The majority of PC users, on the other hand, got lost when Microsoft moved the "Programs" item from the middle of the "Start" menu in Win95/95/2k to the bottom of the "Start" menu in XP, and added a green arrow. The outcry against the ribbon interface in the new Office betas--the most innovative and useful UI modification to come out of Redmond in years--was so strong that the developers were forced to remove it. Meanwhile most Mac users are not only coping with OS X's mutability, but keeping up with PCs on the side; the fraction of Mac users who use only Macs is pretty small.

Chris over at Restiffbard, though, sees things differently. He's decided that it's the OS that makes the user, not the other way around. For him, it all comes down to the functionality of a single interface button: the maximize button. On Windows, you can't easily resize a window larger to a 'best fit' like Mac OS X can. Sure you can drag the bottom corner, but it's much easier to just hit maximize and go full screen. This leads to Windows users becoming task-oriented users by default. For Mac users, on the other hand, it's difficult do get a full-screen window in most applications. The green "+" button resizes the window to the size of the document, not the screen. This means that Mac users almost always have multiple windows and application visible. We can switch easily between them and, probably more importantly, they're always there, reminding us of their existence, nagging us. We naturally become multi-taskers.

I'm not sure how much of this I buy. I mean, really: are you going to tell me that you can take any old group of PC users in front of Macs for a couple of years and they'll just naturally become as cool as me, or Steve in a bowtie? I don't think so.

But it's an interestingly fresh take on a decades-old question.

Update:

if (($tongue{'position'} eq 'cheek') or ($sarcasm > 0)) {
$tongue{'position'} = 'notcheek';
$sarcasm = 0;
print <<END

Guys, check the categories, you'll see "Humor" and "Cult of Mac." No, I don't really think Mac users are genetically superior. And I don't think I'm nearly as cool as that pic of Steve in a bowtie. In fact, I don't think Steve is as cool as that pic of Steve in a bowtie. In fact, I don't think anyone is as cool as that pic of Steve in a bowtie. Ok, maybe Woz, but that's about it.

And just for the record, I don't think those of us who were weaned on Macs are cooler than "Switchers," or anyone else. If I'm cooler than you, it's just because I was born that way. :p~

END
;

This is probably of interest to a very small segment of our readers, but for that segment, it's exciting. Thomson ResearchSoft has finally released their flagship EndNote X bibliographic package for the Mac (PC users have had it for several months already), and I took it for a spin this weekend. The biggest changes are under the hood. EndNote X features a new compressed file format that allows libraries to be stored in less on-disk space. The compressed format also save libraries as single files, enabling easier sharing of libraries with your colleagues. Potentially more exciting, EndNote X features drag and drop management for embedded PDFs, so you can include articles right in your bibliographies. Combined with some stability and speed improvements, particularly combined with a shiny new universal binary, this makes for a very good upgrade.

Thomson has added in some eye candy and other fun stuff, too. Most noticeable is a new set of aquafied icons, but if you go to the tools menu, you'll find that they've also added customizable menus to almost every window, as you can see in the full screenshot.

Retail is $239.95 or a $89.95 upgrade for current users. Many colleges and universities provide it free to students and faculty, so ask. A 30-day demo is available.

Read on for a full on screenshot.

Read more →

I have to admit, I was pretty excited when I saw the screencap of an Adobe order confirmation email above from TUAW reader Craig. Despite Adobe's repeated official refusal [pdf] to do anything for Intel Mac Photoshop users until CS3, it looked like there might be big news on the Photoshop front. A closer look, though, shows that the rumor mill has gotten ahead of itself on this one, and here at TUAW, we believe in quashing this sort of thing in the bud. It's "Macintosh, Universal English," not "Macintosh Universal, English." That one little comma is huge. It's the difference between a universal binary, and a product that isn't localized specifically for British, American, or Canadian English.

You really do learn something new every day. Today, it was that EFI Macs can be set from the command line to boot into FireWire target mode on their next reboot (Open Firmware macs can do it, too, but it's more complicated). Nifty. Why would you want to do this? A couple of reasons. One, if you, like me, tend to be doing two, or three, or ten, things at once, holding down keys at startup can be a pain. I often hit 'reboot,' figure I have enough time to finish off a task on another machine, get caught up in the new task, and miss the window of opportunity to start the first machine in target disk mode, switch the startup disk, or whatever it was I wanted to reboot for. with the command line, it's "no muss, no fuss," just:

sudo nvram target-mode=1

That will set the machine to boot in target disk mode at it's next start-up. It only works for the next start-up, and can't be unset. That's a actually a bit of a pain: habitual command line users expect that '1' will toggle a behavior, and '0' will untoggle it, but that isn't the case here. Any value, even zero will work.

Another potential use is for a disk you suspect is corrupt, or to unstick a frozen system. Often, you can ssh in from another machine (assuming you have remote login turned on) even when finder crashes and a machine appears to be frozen. Just toggle target mode, issue a quick sudo shutdown -r now, and you can plug the offending machine into another computer and run your diagnostics. That, and it's a cool party trick.

Thanks to Matt for pointing this out.

The other day, I said that slowing down podcasts sounded like a great job for automator. TUAW reader Dave agreed, and sent us a link to his PodastConverter (jpg) Automator action. Dave takes the long way around and follows the conventional wisdom of turning the podcasts into audiobooks rather than using QuickTime to manipulate the MP3s directly. The advantage to this approach is that the 'casts will be listenable at much higher speeds. Many people claim to be able to listen to most podcasts at 2.5x or faster. That's almost twice as fast as what you can get from QuickTime, where things start to sound garbled around 1.5x in most cases. On the other hand, converting a bunch of podcasts from MP3 to AAC takes time, processor power, and storage space, so YMMV.

Dave hasn't posted the action for download, but he has posted a JPEG of the entire action, complete with detailed instructions. So in addition to being a useful little app, this is also a great introduction to Automator if you aren't already familiar.

Over at Download Squad today, we're talking about the report on "green electronics" and "e-waste" that Greenpeace released this morning. It's no secret that environmentalists have been unhappy with Apple--despite their claims to be an eco-friendly company--for a long time. This is the first time, though, that a big environmental group has gone out and ranked some of the major players, and Apple came in 11th out of the 14 companies rated. More disappointing than the ranking--somebody's got to be last, right?--was Apple's overall score: 2.7 out of ten. Companies were scored on a number of factors, from recycling programs, hazardous materials usage, and Apple came up wanting in just about everything.

The good news? Many of the issues are easy to fix. For instance, Apple has a lousy recycling program. They only accept consumer takebacks in five markets, and then only with purchase of a new Apple machine. They could change that policy tomorrow to accept any used Apple product for recycling, free of charge. In the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't cost that much and it might keep some Lithium and Mercury-laden computers and batteries out of the trash. They could also start accepting any machines as trade-ins. Bring in your old ThinkPad and leave it at the Apple Store when you walk out with your new MBP. They already do this for for corporate and education customers. Heck, if you're a school they'll even give you money for a trade-in on your old Dells. Why not at least offer to accept consumer equipment, and make a point of publicizing the fact.

Apple also needs to make a public and transparent commitment to banning hazardous substances. They've said they're committed to stopping the use of toxic PVC parts and Bromine Fire Retardant (BFR) coatings. But when? Just give us a date, Steve. Nokia stopped using PVC in 2005 and will be BFR-free by 2007. The parts that go into a MacBook aren't that different from the parts that go into a Nokia 770. There are more of them in the MB, but they're not that different. The other thing most companies seem to be able to do that Apple can't be bothered with is actually publishing a list of all the materials in their products. On that issue, transparency would itself be a huge step in the right direction.

And finally, they need to stop passing the buck when it comes to their partners. We know that Apple employees are environmentally conscious, and 1 Infinite Loop is a pretty green place. Even Greenpeace acknowledges that. It's time Apple starts holding its suppliers, contractors, and manufacturers to the same high standards.

There's no reason the answer to "Who will be first to go green?" shouldn't be "Apple." And since they've got one of the smallest manufacturing operations of the companies surveyed and they already claim to be eco-friendly, it'll actually be kind of sad if that isn't the answer.

According to Think Secret, Apple has fired at least five retail Apple Store employees for downloading leaked copies of Leopard. The employees were overheard discussing Leopard--and how they obtained it--with co-workers. Word got back to Cupertino, an investigation was launched, and the employees were fired. "Dozens more" may be getting pink slips soon. Based on TS's interview with one of the ex-employees it sounds like there may be more to the story, though. The person they chatted with mentioned violating the terms of an NDA, and it's not clear to me how, exactly, downloading software violates anyone's NDA. The NDA is violated by the people who post pirated software, not the people who download it. How can Apple claim these people violated an NDA unless Apple itself gave them the software on the condition of an NDA? Either there's more to the story, or something got lost in translation.

This is an interesting situation for Apple to be in, though. You want your employees to have a certain amount of obsession, or at least zeal, for your product. But where do you draw the line, and what do you do when people cross it? In this case, fire them, but I suspect this is a problem Apple and other companies are going to have to wrestle with more and more as their marketing departments keep starting the buzz about new products farther and farther in advance of release dates. It will be interesting to see how many people eventually get fired, and on what grounds. I would think a reasonable policy would be this: discipline employees who possess pirated software, terminate ones who help distribute pre-release software or tell others where to get it, which it seems like these five may have been doing.

[via DLS]