Not long after I bought my first personal Mac in late 2004, I stumbled across an article that mentioned Ulysses, a text editor geared toward creative writers -- essentially the marriage between a word processor and project management software. It allows you to have all documents within a writing project at your grasp. As a journalist and author, Ulysses was a dream come true, but expensive. Costing more than $100 at the time, it didn't fit into a journalist's salary.

I wound up using CopyWrite for a time and was fairly satisfied with it until I read in a forum that people were having luck with a program which, at the time, was called Scrivener Gold. I gave the free beta a try and was blown away by the program's potential. When the full-fledged release of Scrivener came out in early 2007, I bought a license as a birthday gift for myself.

Scrivener pulls all the things needed for a complete writing project -- be it writing a script, novel, research paper or newspaper/blog articles -- together in one location and has so many features that even after nearly three years of use, I don't think I've fully explored all that it has to offer. I recently started work on writing my first graphic novel, and have really gotten the chance to flex Scrivener's muscles.

This is video from a fast-paced chat with Joe Michels of Software Ops, creator of several iPhone apps. His lineup includes several applications for secure storage of information, such as My Eyes Only (iTunes link) and ID Lock (a "lite" version of My Eyes Only). There's also Aerochive on the Mac desktop, which allows wireless archiving and visualization of the information stored in the iPhone apps, which can include credit cards, passwords and notes, among other things. With your data fully encrypted and password protected, Joe's stated mission is to keep your info safe and away from prying eyes.

Joe also mentions an upcoming application, called My Eyes Only Photo, which brings My Eyes Only security to photo storage and browsing. There are screenshots of the soon-to-be-released application up on the Software Ops site. Check out the video to hear the developer's take on these apps.

I hope this post gets filed in the "I knew I wasn't the only one!" mental filing cabinets of many. Because if it doesn't, then it makes me the only one who really looks forward to the music Apple uses in its keynotes. Whether it's a song that leads up to Steve Jobs' entrance on stage, or one used in software or hardware demos, there's no denying that music is very much a part of Apple's DNA. Heck, the company's namesake reflects Steve's love for the Beatles. Apple occasionally invites some of music's biggest names to perform at its events because, as Steve says, "it's all about the music."

And this post is all about the music. It's all about the music that Apple has used in one way, shape, or form at its keynote events. Although by no means a definitive list, it's certainly a fair sample.

A malicious QuickTime movie made the rounds across MySpace profiles last weekend, altering user profiles and changing links on their pages to redirect to phishing websites crafted to look like MySpace logins. The movie, CNET reports, actually capitalized on a MySpace flaw and QuickTime's legitimate support for JavaScript to craft what has been dubbed the Quickspace attack. It is also worth noting that while this movie could infect users who simply viewed a compromised page, the attack (as far as we know) only works on IE and Firefox in Windows (in other words: if you're on a Mac, you can resume your regularly scheduled MySpace obsession).

Yesterday, MySpace's chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam contacted Apple to request a fix to plug the hole, even though it was a flaw of MySpace in combination with a legit feature of QuickTime that caused all the damage. Apple is reportedly working on a fix, but for now the two companies have ironed out some workarounds, such as blocking all the phishing URLs and scrubbing their network for compromised profiles.

On a side note: what exactly does one gain from harvesting MySpace account logins? Wouldn't oh, say, credit card numbers be a little more productive? I know there's a lot of kids out there who bank on whether they're in some people's top 8 spaces, but I'm still having a hard time seeing how or why phishers would deal in the same currency.

Thanks Daniel

That experiment with chat and the education store must have gone well, as the public Apple Store has recently become a little chattier with the seemingly quiet introduction of a new "chat now" feature to its product pages. Interestingly, it appears (at least for me) only on Mac product pages, and only a second or two after the rest of the page loads (as if there's an intentional delay), though I don't see it on any software pages or even in the iPod sections. I had a quick chat with the 'Apple Expert' Rache, but I was quickly dumped once I was found out to be a mere blogger (helping to spread the word...) instead of a cash-in-hand shopper. Oh well, this still seems like a great idea. I hope it sticks around.

[Update: it seems only some users can see this feature. It might simply be a page caching problem (as in: try emptying your browser cache), but for now it might be the case that only certain users, regions or countries can see the chat feature.]

Thanks Andrew

Major new features in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard like Time Machine are great, but I've been thinking about all the other aspects of the Mac OS X experience that could use some spit and polish from Apple's engineers. They've done a fantastic job building a damn impressive OS over the years, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvements both big and small (besides: they have to keep their OS product cycle on a good pace). Following is a list of 10 unlikely requests I have for the next version of Mac OS X that might not be worthy of a Stevenote, but they could bring smiles and sighs of satisfied relief to many a user:

• Removing applications - and all their baggage: Deleting (or "uninstalling") an app on Mac OS X is easy: you just move it to the trash. But what about all the extra data apps create when you use them (databases, media libraries, etc.)? Sure there are 3rd party apps like AppZapper that truly remove the app and all those extras, but I think Leopard needs an integrated, obvious and thorough process for removing apps and their extra baggage (perhaps AppZapper could go the way of CoverFlow?). I can't count the number of times I've been asked how to do it by users both old and new. This method could include a dialog when dragging an app to the trash which asks the user if they want to nuke the 'extra' files like Application Support directories and preferences. I know many apps don't leave much behind, but it all can pile up, and there are at least a few apps that really know how to gobble up the mega and gigabytes. To help everyone get on the same page though, a dedicated System Preferences pane would work best.
  
• Don't make me eject an idle drive: This one is always a tricky conversation, and I should disclose up front that I am certainly no developer. All I know is that it seems just a little strange in the year 2006 (or 2007, once Leopard is released) that I still have to eject a flash drive I haven't touched in two hours. Mac OS X is now both smart and pretty - I don't think it should be that hard to implement some kind of smart ejection system that can eject the drive when not in use, but fire it back up when needed. Further, if we set my lazy nerd ambitions aside for a moment, I'm sure this would save the lives of countless finance reports and term papers for all those users who don't understand what 'ejecting' a drive means or why they have to do it.

By now you're probably picking up on a new theme of 'Why Wait for Leopard?' If so, good eye. If not: you really need to read more TUAW. In either case, we've tracked down another Leopard-busting app in the form of SyncBridge, which brings all the features of syncing, sharing and editing iCal calendars to the table, without the wait for Leopard or price of .Mac (sidenote: I'm a .Mac member and fan, so don't be hatin').

The SyncBridge software uses Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's built-in SyncServices to share calendars over the SyncBridge servers, allowing others to subscribe to and edit calendars, sending changes up to the servers and syncing back to your own calendars. Users can even log into the site to see their calendars displayed, though it isn't possible to edit the calendars on the web; that has to be done through an iCal client. A tour is offered at the site, explaining each step of the process.

SyncBridge is charged as a yearly subscription service at £25 / $46, which probably places it outside the range of the casual calendar editing/sharing enthusiast. Nevertheless, this is a viable alternative to waiting for Mac OS X Leopard to land next spring.

Reports are surfacing on the web that, while everything Apple showed on stage at WWDC 2006 was exciting and purty 'n all, the more exciting attractions are what wasn't shown on stage. AeroExperience, a Vista developer resource site (of all places), claims to have an exclusive list of many of the underlying changes, newly introduced APIs and other developer goodies that might simply not have been prime fodder for the news and PR spotlight session of the keynote.

It's a pretty lengthy list, so here are some of the highlights for you cliffnote readers out there:

• Leopard will feature resolution-independent user interface and there are several functions to get the current scaling factor and apply it to pixel measurements (we've mentioned how cool this is before, and so has Mr. Gruber).
• Address Book adds support for sharing accounts, allowing an application to restrict content according to user (.Mac already does this, so I'm wondering if they mean some kind of framework or protocol is in place to open this up to something like WebDAV or simple FTP).
• Automator includes a new user interface and allows things such as action recording, workflow variables and embedding workflows in other applications.
• Time Machine has an API that allows developers to exclude unimportant files from a backup set which improves backup performance and reduces space needed for a backup (I was curious about how Time Machine would handle 'useless junk' types of files myself).
• Carbon, the set of APIs built upon Classic MacOS and used by most 3rd party high-profile Mac OS X applications, now allows Cocoa views to be embedded into the application. This could provide applications like Photoshop and Microsoft Office access to advanced functions previously only available to Cocoa applications.
• Text engine improvements include a systemwide grammar checking facility, smart quote support, automatic link detection and support for copying and pasting multiple selections.
• Mail stationery is open to developers, allowing any web designer to create fantastic-looking Mail templates, with defined areas for custom user content (bring on the stationary plugin packs!).
• A new framework is included for publishing and subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds, including complete RSS parsing and generation. Local feeds can be shared over Bonjour zero-configuration sharing and discovery (I suspected something like this; sounds like Safari and Mail.app might share the same RSS database, as can other apps, so users don't have to waste time exporting/importing between RSS apps).

Check out the full list at AeroExperience for more of the potentially rocking Leopard features that Steve and company didn't show on stage.

Parallels must have been missing their beta days, as they have already announced a new beta version of their Desktop software at WWDC today that brings quite a few much-requests updates. Parallels Desktop, in case you haven't been following the Mac web the last few months, is virtualization software which enables users to run Windows and other OSes inside of Mac OS X on Intel Macs.

At the top of the list of updates is much-improved USB performance and broader device support, including Windows Mobile 5 devices. Fleshing out the list is "substantially" improved Mac OS X performance while running a virtual machine (which is a different OS, like Windows. We've explained virtual machines before in our Parallels Desktop How To), improved graphic performance, complete keyboard support including the Eject key and shift key mapping for non-English layouts, Unicode path support, improved shared folder performance and, of course, minor bug fixes.

This is, or will be, a free update for paid users once it goes official. For now, users can download the beta the Parallels Desktop update page.

The first bell that rung in my ear when Steve announced Mac OS X 10.5's ship date of Spring 2007 was: "Apple just pulled a Microsoft". I know, I know: those words might be nails on the chalkboard in your head, but it's true. Leopard was originally promised for Fall 2006, and now it's been bumped back to 2007.

Now don't get me wrong, if they need the time to work on it and bang out all the new features (including those secret ones they couldn't even show today) then by all means the company should take their time. I'm simply interested in the ramifications, if any, of a delay like this.

Microsoft has received boatloads of criticism from every media outlet imaginable for continually delaying Longhorn Vista for the last 4 years. Some have postulated that today's modern and feature-packed OSes might be getting too big for their britches. Even those recent prominent un-switchers in the media also cited buggy software and wonky Mac OS X problems as part of their reasoning for jumping ship.

I'm not trying to Pull a Dvorak™ and invent some crisis here or anything, but could some of these complications be making their way into the Apple side of the fence? Each new version of Mac OS X has brought incredible innovation with it (and these 10 new Leopard features are no exception), but also slightly more instability and 'growing pains' as well. Mail.app is widely harped on for a good number of reasons, namely instability and flakiness. GarageBand rocks, but only until you try to use the fancy podcast recording features. Even the cutting-edge new Spotlight is a great concept with a decent implementation, but it too suffers problems of inaccuracy, sluggish performance (even on recent machines like my MBP) and over-activity.

What do you TUAW readers think though? Is the new Leopard ship date cause for alarm? Do you think you'll pick up the 1.0 release, or wait for initial reports and the subsequent updates? Sound off!

[UPDATE: For clarification, many reports since the introduction of Leopard have changed their tune for a release of 'late 2006/early 2007', but plenty of them, at least around the original announcement, specified Fall 2006.]

Remember that Shiira v2 beta preview that delusions of grandeur had at the end of July? Well instead of simply reading about it, now you can take your own copy for a spin, as a public, localized beta has been released. Shiira, if you haven't been following the coverage as of late, is an open source and uniquely feature-packed browser based on WebKit, the same web (and also open source) rendering engine that powers Apple's own Safari.

Most of the new features that were previewed seem to be implemented, including the Shelf, Tab Exposé, a tab thumbnails option (instead of standard tabs found in Safari and Firefox), FullScreen Mode with a really slick and self-hiding navigation overlay, a palette replacement for the sidebar and more.

When this first landed on digg, the download was only a PowerPC build, but it has since been replaced with a true Universal version. So what are you waiting for? Get downloading!

Ben Long has released v3.0 of his rocking set of Automator actions for Photoshop, introducing 11 new actions and a slew of new and updated abilities including:

• Add Layer, Add Empty Adjustment Layer, Duplicate Current Layer
• Render action allows saving as EPS, or using Save for Web
• Save for Web can also be used in conjunction with other formats, allowing users to save in multiple formats with one action
• Add Color Balance, Hue/Saturation and Channel Mixer effects as Adjustment Layers
• Shadow/Highlight, Mono Gaussian Noise, and Bleach Bypass no longer require that you activate GUI Scripting
• Smart Sharpen, Shadow/Highlight, and Unsharp Mask now provide an option to automatically add their effects to a duplicate layer that has its own Layer Mask (can anyone say 'non-destructive editing'?)
• Resize Canvas now offers a choice of background colors
• Mono Gaussian Noise now allows you to apply noise to a new layer filled with color. Full control of blending mode and opacity is provided

All of these new features, in addition to what is already a massive list of capabilities, make this a powerful package of donationware actions indeed. Photoshop Automator Actions v3.0 can be had from Complete Digital Photography.

Brent Simmons, developer of the most popular RSS reader on earth, has published some pre-WWDC predictions as to where he sees Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's UI will evolve. He throws down the gauntlet on brushed metal, delves into customizable toolbars and even touches on what might happen to 'bubbly popup menus'.

If you are at all interested in UI design, this is definitely a good read from a most prevalent Mac OS X developer. Keep in mind, however, that Brent - unlike the Scobleizer - doesn't have any insider info, so don't get your mouse cable tangled if next week proves his post to be way off the mark.

It was another packed week for software premieres and updates, so here is a roundup in case you missed them the first time around:

Shareware

• Groupcal 3 - manage your Exchange calendar from iCal
• EyeTV 2.3 - Front Row-like menu and speed boosts
• OmniPlan (beta) - OmniGroup's brand new project management app
• BurnAgain - powerful and standards-compliant multi-session 'smart' CDR/RW burning utility
• Rax 2 - virtual rack software for musicians
• Übercaster (beta) - all-in-one podcasting application
• NewsFire 1.4 - feature update for popular RSS reader
• mira 1.1 - make your Apple Remote control more than just Front Row

Freeware

• Automator action to change wallpaper
• Fenêtres Volantes (Flying Windows) - gorgeous 3D screensaver that gives your open windows something to do
• Suggest-a-ZOT - be the first to suggest a new macZOT app, get a free copy
• Skype 1.5 beta and video preview - more Mac OS X integration and a 'preview' version with video support

Donationware

• iStat Pro 3.0 - powerful system monitoring widget gets a major upgrade and a new UI

Widgets

• bpiDash - finally, a second widget for Backpack
• Basecamp - widget for 37Signals' much-loved online project management service

Universal

• Flip4Mac - QuickTime codec for playing Windows Media files
• ShapeShifter (beta) - Unsanity's Mac OS X skinning utility gets a speed boost (thanks Intel!)
• Now Up to Date and Contact 5.3 - contact management software
• MaxMenus - application launcher
• LiteSwitch X - application switcher
• Democracy Player - popular and powerful IPTV player gets the Intel treatment

The kit's been out for a while, and I have been running with my own (with a cheap shoe wallet; not Nike's shoes) for about a week now, so I figured I would post a brief review and some thoughts about one of the most unique (and arguably active) iPod accessories to date.

In a nutshell - it's nice. Very nice. Setting up and configuring the kit was a snap, especially for a couple of typically complex and finicky gadgets like these (cmon, how many times has a wifi connection had an attitude with you?). For those waiting for more confirmation as to whether you need Nike's specialized shoes for this kit to work: you don't. I, like many others already, purchased one of those $8 Nike Run Shoe Wallets we blogged, tossed the sensor inside (with a couple pieces of kleenex to make sure it doesn't bounce around) and attached it to the top of my generic running shoes. I configured my kit by both running and walking a .25 mile distance, and measured my route with the gmap pedometer to make sure the sensor was accurate.

Now a lot of users are (understandably) frustrated with Apple and Nike for designing the kit to only work with the iPod nano. Unfortunately, this is a situation to actually thank these companies for, as hard drive-based iPods aren't designed to take the kind of impact that running delivers; their drives would ultimately end up failing sooner (as opposed to later), and there would be a lot of unhappy, iPod-less runners out there. Believe it or not, Apple (for once) actually saved a lot of people a couple hundred dollars with this move.

I won't spend much more time on a review, as iLounge has already been there, done that. I do, however, think that some feature requests are in order. After all, this is a 1.0 product, right?

• When on a distance run, the audio feedback begins rattling off the remaining distance every 100 meters when the last 500 meters is reached. I realize it's a 'pump you up' technique, but this can get kind of annoying when I'm grooving with a song; an option to toggle this would be super.
• The Nike+ site really needs to discover the wonders of those futuristic 'cookie' things; having to re-login at every visit is so... 1994.
• Speaking of the site - this one might be a little crazier, but: I think it would be a smoother experience if the Nike+ 'application' was simply integrated into iTunes itself (toggle-able in the Sources list: My Library - Podcasts - Videos - Nike+ would be cool). I'm using an iPod with an iPod accessory, and I need to plug said iPod into iTunes to do anything with this running data anyway - why am I surfing out to an external site to view how out of shape I am and challenge friends to distance competitions to see who has to pay for coffee next time we hang out?
• Add a 'podcasts' option to the music choices available for the run. As far as I can tell, if I want to listen to a specific podcast on a run, I need to create a playlist (either on my Mac or 'On the Go' on the iPod itself) and add a podcast in order to listen to it during a run. Clunky.

That's about it for my list of requests for an update to the Nike + iPod Sport Kit product and software. What do you readers think? Has anyone else been stopped dead in their tracks with one problem or another? Sound off.