A spate of bad news surrounding Mobile Me and iPhone 3G quality problems paired with renewed vigor from competitors Microsoft, Dell, and Nokia has Apple running out of slack from the normally fawning press (TUAW certainly not withstanding).

Forbes has a story about why Apple seems to have lost its luster recently. The New York Times is waxing nostalgic with a retrospective article titled Apple Imperfect. The National Post cites TechCrunch's Michael Arrington saying Apple is "rotting" and "flailing badly at the edges."

Consider the parable of the friend. Say you have a good friend, who's trustworthy, reliable and generally happy to be around you. If that friend suddenly isn't glad to see you anymore, swears at the elderly and starts drinking cheap bourbon from a hip flask in meetings, you'd say something, right? At least you'd worry that your friend was on the wrong path.

That's where we find Apple today: A friend on the wrong path. Many have noted that a lack of transparency in admitting its mistakes is hurting its credibility. The fact that it's making mistakes in the first place is generally forgivable, but we've been spoiled by Apple's pristine track record of consistently delivering quality. As consumers, we want the quality back. If anything, our expectations are even higher now to properly correct the various perceived injustices we've suffered.

Taking the long view, Apple will pull out of its funk. Knowing Steve Jobs, it will do so in a spectacular fashion, too, with new products, product improvements, or both. Apple isn't suffering from a lack of talent or innovation. It's suffering from management problems that any company of its size faces on a daily basis: scheduling new products, preventing employee burnout, and managing logistics.

We're nowhere near Apple's nadir under Gil Amelio, over a decade ago. In fact, investors don't seem to be fazed at all, with stock prices rebounding to their levels in May. Apple may already be back.

Glenn Fleishman of Macworld, Wi-Fi Networking News and TidBITS fame has written two new Leopard ebooks, both published today by Take Control Books. The new titles, Take Control of Back to My Mac and Take Control of Screen Sharing in Leopard, are part of the popular Take Control ebook series.

Take Control of Back to My Mac provides many tips on how to get .Mac's MobileMe's problematic remote access service up and working for you, while Take Control of Screen Sharing in Leopard discusses the many tools available for sharing your Mac screen with others.

The books are $10 each, but if you purchase both ebooks and enter CPN006780611BUN as a coupon code, you'll get an immediate $5 discount. There's no excuse to suffer in silence with Back to My Mac anymore!

In the interest of disclosure, I've written two titles for Take Control Books, neither of which are discussed in this post.

[Via TidBITS]

Take Control Books, the digital delivery brainchild of long-time Mac authors Adam and Tonya Engst, has announced the publication of two new ebooks in their Take Control series.

Author Joe Kissell has written a 95-page tome titled Take Control of Apple Mail in Leopard that describes the 14 new features in the latest version of Apple Mail, details how to use its hidden power, and provides troubleshooting tips in case things don't work just the way they should. Joe's companion ebook, Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail, helps you to keep the wave of ED pharmaceutical ads in your inbox to a minimum.

The ebooks are $10 each and are downloaded immediately for your reading pleasure.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have authored two Take Control eBooks -- not this particular pair, though.

Years ago, Macs didn't even acknowledge the presence of Windows networks, which made those LAN wine-and-cheese parties pretty awkward. Now, however, OS X machines are exemplary network citizens, and apparently can even manage Windows workstations under the right circumstances.

TidBITS linked to a roundtable discussion at Cornell University, where Philip Halcomb, of Cornell's Mann Library ITS staff, demonstrated managing user accounts in Active Directory. Now, this wouldn't be very exciting, except for the fact that he was using Mac OS X Workgroup Manager to do it. Sweet.

Phil's part starts at about 7:30. It's a long QuickTime video, too -- almost an hour -- but for IT folks, especially in an education environment, the roundtable series is a must-see.

(Thanks, MHA, for Phillip's name!)

I decided to jump on one of the new AirPort Extreme Base Stations primarily because both my wife and I now own MacBooks, and we both have varying levels of success at maintaining any kind of steady backup schedule. Now when I say 'varying level of success,' I mean: my wife pretty much doesn't, and I did a fairly good job back when I had an Intel iMac set up on the network to which I used ChronoSync to do incremental over-the-air backups. So what does a new AirPort Extreme Base Station have to do with our backup habits, you ask? Well, aside from the new 802.11n speeds (for which I have not quite gone ga-ga just yet), I am most interested in the new AirPort Disk feature, which allows you to plug a USB hard drive into the station for automatic mounting whenever connected to the network. Now I can have one large drive to which I can back up both mine and my wife's essentials, as well as a repository for my iTunes library to free up space for Final Cut Studio and even tinkering with Linux and (yes, sadly) Windows in Parallels for my work at our sister blog, Download Squad.

I picked up the new base station Wednesday night, which I set up to relieve our trusty AirPort Express from its duties in the living room (now we have 'tunes in the basement office! hooray!). Since it's only been a few days and I'm still waiting for UPS to bring me a bouncing baby external hard drive, I thought I would post some general first thoughts on the setup experience thus far. A more detailed report is pending, and I plan on writing up how-tos for wireless backups and using this setup for a wireless iTunes library. Until then, read after the jump for some general thoughts on my initial experience with Apple's slick new base station.

TidBITS is perhaps the grand-daddy of electronic Mac publications (their motto should be: we were the Mac-web before the Mac-web was even invented). Anyway, they have published a lot of great articles over the years and their wrap up of MWSF '07 is no different. There are links to a variety of interesting things you may have missed in the flurry of coverage, and this superlative article (i.e. the best/worst/most whatever at Macworld) manages to sum up the Macworld experience nicely for those of us who couldn't make it to San Francisco. Enjoy.

This is most likely at best a minor bonus on most iTunes users' lists - if it's on them at all - but I was pleasantly surprised to discover yesterday that iTunes 7 (pre-7.0.1) now respects the Browse state when switching between the Library and playlists or other sections of the software. If you're scratching your head as to what I'm talking about, let me give you an obnoxious user scenario from previous versions: Let's say you're viewing your music library, and you enable the Browse button so you can track down that exact Genre, Artist or Album you have a craving for. Then, you switch to a playlist to maybe edit it or check and see if the track you're grooving to is on it (yes, I know you can do that by other methods). Upon switching back to the main Library, iTunes has now blown away whatever Genre/Artist/Album selection you had made, disrupting your flow and forcing you to hunt it down again.

If you don't use iTunes like this, feel free to move along at this point. But, if you're feeling my aggravating pain, I am happy to tell you that an iTunes engineer had you and I in mind my friend, as this behavior is now gone. iTunes 7 will respect your Browse state if you start hunting around in other playlists, Library sections or the store, maintaining that Genre, Artist or Album selection you made. Again, this is admittedly a tiny detail, but c'mon - we're talking about Apple, a company known for its attention to the smallest of details which often illicit the largest of "thank you's!" Enjoy.

Here we go with another Mac OS X Leopard tidbits roundup - yes, certainly to be confused with our running WWDC 2006 tidbits roundup; I figured it's all about the Leopard now, as we've pretty much exhausted everything WWDC-related besides which brand of socks Mr. Jobs wears with his new Nikes. So enjoy this latest batch of small tips and improvements in the next big cat from Cupertino:

• The ReadMe included with the Leopard requires G4, G5 or Intel processors - sorry G3 owners (ok, so maybe this isn't an improvement for the G3 folk out there, but it's still good to know)
  
• We're receiving reports that Safari can resize any text areas (such as comment fields) on the fly. We can't confirm because we don't feel like risking the wrath of Jobs. Some of us have families, y'know
• "Smart Renaming" - when renaming a file, the extension is no longer included in the file name selection (Someone buy that engineer a beer!)
• If you have to rename a file extension, the Finder now includes a preference for disabling the extension renaming warning (a second round, comin' up!)
• A new preference in the Dock System Preferences pane allows for toggling how quickly the Dock 'springs' when hidden
• The Finder allows for customizing the amount of space between icons
• iChat includes many handy window organizing features, such as a customizable keyboard shortcut for bringing the app to the front, as well as a preference for tabbed chats (instead of simply forcing it on those who aren't quite as hip on tabs)
• It sounds like Safari will know when you've entered text into a website (for example: when leaving a comment in a forum), and can prompt you before quiting and blowing away unsaved changes
• Spaces, thankfully, allows users to bind applications to one desktop or another. This will be handy for, well, keeping everything in its place, but it will probably be something to get used to for virtual desktop newbies

That's it for now. We'd post more, but we still have to walk that aforementioned line of not having to relocate to a building with "minimum security" in its title.

Thanks to everyone who sent these in

It's a sequel! That's right boys and girls: in our never-ending quest to dig up every detail we can on the recent events surrounding WWDC, Leopard and other random tidbits, we've gathered a few more juicy items for your digestion.

• Apple 'Teams?' Readers sent in various tips, and even The Gruber™ linked it. So it must be real. But what is it? [UPDATE: Looks like Teams is an advertised wiki feature of Leopard Server.]
  
• Readers are noting that, in the keynote, Bertrand Serlet says "With Spotlight, finally, it's easy to find information on your local disks and information on the web." Could this be a prelude to an even farther-reaching (and slower) Spotlight in Leopard?
• MacFixIt has a nice roundup of actual application versions included in Leopard. Of specific interest, they note that Exposé is listed as a 1.0 app, which might also mean that this icon in the dock heralds Spotlight as a full-blown app as well.
  
• Happy Finder, Sad Finder - neurotic Finder? Sorry for the crummy screenshots, but these were both taken from different times of the keynote (36:28 and 1:01:25, to be exact. Thanks David B.!). Could they have been from different Macs? If so, why the curious change in such a fundamental icon?
• This is on iChat's preview page, but it's still worth mentioning in part because no one did on stage: along with the new video and slideshow features, it also has screen sharing so users can get truly collaborative over a chat.
  
• This might be a new type of file preview ability in the Finder, or it could just be an extra feature in Time Machine. Either way, it looks handy. It also seems to be an indication that Apple is moving towards a broader use of palettes like those in iWork and iWeb, including the transparent style found in iPhoto '06.
• Some readers are reporting a new icon in Safari's toolbar (which can be seen on the Dashboard preview page), but that's just the Dash Clippings widget tool.

That's it for another round of WWDC and Leopard tidbits, and thanks to the many who sent these in; you readers have some good eyes. Keep those tips rolling in, and we'll keep rounding them up.

With big events and announcements like yesterday's WWDC, there's always a few bits and pieces that manage to fall through the cracks. New product details as well as features and screenshots of new Mac OS X functionality are prime examples, and these bits and pieces are now starting to trickle in. Instead of posting each minor piece of info, we figured it would be better to simply round them all up together, so here we go with the first WWDC 2006 tidbits roundup post of what we've found so far:

• In the Spaces video preview at Apple's new Mac OS X site, you can clearly make out a new RSS sidebar item in Mail.app (pictured). This isn't in the dedicated Mail.app preview section and wasn't mentioned on stage. Woops. [UPDATE: Commenter David is right: this RSS feature is mentioned lower on Mail.app's preview page, but it isn't featured at all in the demo video. Strange.]
  
• In a screenshot of the Dock, a folder on the right side of the divider has a black triangle underneath it, denoting the same 'yes, it's running' UI feedback that applications have.
• iChat is also featured with a new UI sans brushed metal (pictured on left). If it's already been stripped from iChat, could brushed metal have gone the way of the PowerMac G5 for the rest of Leopard?
• The Mac Pros are apparently the first (and only?) Intel Mac to not include Front Row and an Apple Remote. This also means (to our knowledge) they don't have an IR port either.

That's it for now. If you've uncovered more juicy new details not mentioned so far from yesterday's keynote, feel free to leave a comment in this post or use our tips form.

Thanks to everyone who sent these in

I wrote about Yojimbo (and revealed my ignorance of Japanese phrases) when it first came out, but my post was far from a review. Matt Neuburg has taken Yojimbo for a spin, and overall he likes what he sees. He agrees that there is a very slight learning curve, and that Yojimbo provides a user with a number of ways.

However, all is not sunshine and unicorns. Yojimbo's simplicity is a two edged sword, since the application doesn't offer much to sway people from leaving their current workflows behind. Plus, it isn't AppleScriptable.

[via Daring Fireball]