Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Mail – we all get more links to articles and webpages nowadays than ever before. I would often find myself coming across an interesting article, but would lose track of it in a mess of tabs, unless I read it right away.
Bookmaking is the most obvious option, but you risk cluttering your useful bookmarks with lots of items you’ll only look at once. So how can you organise your reading? Here’s the system I use…
Have you ever been given a PDF document, only to find you can’t read it on your device of choice because it’s password-protected? Most universities nowadays make course material available in PDF format. However, some insist on making their material password-protected, in order to prevent unauthorized users from reading it.
Unfortunately, the password protection can cause other issues:
But if you have the correct password and can open the PDF file, there’s a (slightly tricky) way to store a non-password protected copy for personal use. There are a few different ways you can do this, but after trying out several methods, I believe this is the easiest. Continue reading →
If you watch TV on your Mac and been annoyed by the constant buzzing of the Vuvuzela’s during the World Cup games, you might want to try this tip.
I use the equinux TubeStick to watch TV (full disclosure: I work for equinux) so this tutorial was written for The Tube, but it’ll work with other software or online streaming sites as well.
Update:
My colleague has put together a small application that eliminates the need to use Garageband. Check it out for even easier Vuvuzela filtering.
Download the free Soundflower utility from Google Code. This utility allows you to pass audio from all applications back into your system, allowing us to filter it using Garageband.
Once installed:
Your audio will now be muted – don’t worry, this is normal.
There are other ways to filter out the buzz of the Vuvuzela’s manually, but Prosoniq offer a free AU plugin that takes care of it for you. Download it, then drag it onto the ‘Components’ alias:
Prosoniq suggest using their filter with Audio Hijack Pro, but if you’d like to save yourself $32, you can use Garageband which probably came free with your Mac.
Simply launch Garageband, create a new real instrument project and adjust these settings:
You should now hear audio again. Now fire up The Tube and you will notice that Vuvuzela’s are a fair bit quieter. Turn the filter on or off to really hear the difference. You can also click the filter in Garageband to manually adjust the level of noise reduction – be careful though, too much reduction will cause the commentary and other game sounds to sound distorted.
Any there you have it! Enjoy a vuvuzela-free World Cup!
If you play guitar, you’ve probably tried the various tab and chord sites out there. I recently discovered Chordie.com and it has quickly become my favourite.
One thing I often do is look up chords for songs I’m listening to in iTunes. I do it so often that I decided to put together a little script to make it a bit easier to do.
Head on over to my Projects page to download Search Chordie and to find out how to use it.
Search Chordie is based on Search Wikipedia by the fantastic Doug Adams – check out his other iTunes scripts at DougScripts.com.
Thanks also to Chordie.com – if you play the guitar, you’re going to love this fantastic resource.
Ever since I reviewed the Olympus E-P1 last summer, I’ve been fairly convinced that this is a market segment waiting to explode. So many people I have spoken to have expressed an interest and interestingly enough, this niche seems to attract multiple user groups:
Until now, Olympus and Panasonic have been the only two companies offering cameras in this space, so they have generally been referred to as “Micro Four-Thirds” cameras – after the joint standard those two companies established together.
However, Sony have recently announced their “Alpha Nex” series, which uses a larger APS-C sized sensor, that should give the Micro four-thirds competitors a run for their money.
With Sony entering the fray, a new term is needed to describe the cameras within this category. In the interest of keeping things simple, I’m just going to refer to them as “Micro DSLRs“.
So what has happened since the release of the original Olympus E-P1 that kicked everything off?
If you’re in the market, it’s probably worth waiting until the new Sony models are released in July, but it’s definitely turning into an interesting year for Micro DSLR fans.
I should have a chance to take a look at a few of these new models in the upcoming months, so stay tuned.
For years, one of the most popular OS X FTP applications has been Transmit. Panic’s FTP workhorse is so well regarded and robust, it’s engine was even chosen by Apple to power the FTP upload feature built-in to iWeb.
But OS X has gone through a lot of changes since Transmit 3 was first introduced and the app is starting to show its age. Enter Transmit 4!
This latest update adds a completely new user interface, innovative new features like Transmit Disk as well as a slew of customisation options. I was fortunate enough to be a beta tester for version 4, so I’ve had a few weeks to play with the new version – here are some of my thoughts.
Panic is know for their sleek user interface design and attention to detail and Transmit 4 is no exception. First off, the biggest change of them all: A NEW TRUCK!
But the logo isn’t all that has been refreshed: The entire app feels brand new. Most UI elements have been given a 2010 update and the interface feels a lot tidier.
You start off with a list of your configured servers that uses a sleek black look that was made popular by apps such as Pixelmator, CoverScout 3 and SongGenie (disclaimer – I work for equinux).
Selecting a server puts you into a familiar file browsing mode – more on that below:
Buttons and features are usually exactly where you would expect to find them and unobtrusive animations and pretty icons round out the package and give the app a nice touch of Panic personality. Here are a few bits of eye candy I noticed during testing:
An FTP client fundamentally has two jobs: show me my remote files and allow me to move files between my local and remote storage. To accomplish that, an FTP application has to replicate a lot of the functionality of a regular file browser, so users can browser their local files as well as their remote files.
Transmit 4 offers single and dual file-browser layouts, (rearrangable!) tabs and the icon, llist, column and cover flow viewing styles you are familiar with from the Finder. But it also has a few additional tricks up its sleeve, that you won’t find in the Finder.
Here are some of the more interesting file browsing options:
Places is really useful, but the way you add locations by dragging them to the breadcrumb area is a bit unconventional. Once you’ve figured it out though, it quickly became one of my favourite Transmit 4 features.
Transmit 4 offers enough view options to suit almost anyone’s preferred file browsing style. Whether you perfer to work with multiple windows, tabs, split layouts, column view etc – Transmit 4 has got you covered. While it’s debatable whether most users need so many options, file browsing habits are usually so ingrained that it was probably a good idea for Panic to include as many options as they could.
Most of the time, I find myself uploading files to the same place over and over again. Transmit has a number of ways that give you an easy way to send a file to your FTP server straight from the finder:
TransmitDisk is a nifty new feature, that uses MacFUSE to allow you to mount your FTP server as a volume that the Finder can see. Once mounted, you can interact with your FTP folders like you would with a drive on your local network.
In my experience this worked fairly well, but occasionally felt a little bit more sluggish than using Transmit’s own file browser – but your mileage may vary.
Overall this is a great upgrade to an already very useful application. The new features are well thought out and make working with your FTP server a lot easier and faster. While this isn’t a revolutionary upgrade, it is solid enough to make it worth your while.
You can buy or upgrade to Transmit 4 in the Panic Online Store.
Let’s be honest: most of you reading this have wondered how to improve your Mac’s performance at some point or another, whether it was while waiting for an application to load, or just the last time you saw the spinning beachball of death. For years conventional wisdom has been that adding RAM to your Mac would give you the most noticeable performance improvement.
But nowadays, RAM is no longer the primary bottleneck on your Mac – it’s the aging, mechanical technology that powers your harddrive. But conventional mechanical harddrives are slowly but surely being replaced by solid state drives (abbreviated “SSD”). Whilst early SSD drives offered limited storage capacity and had a finite number of read /write cycles, The current generation of Intel X25 SSD drives are very compelling alternatives indeed…
Although still pricy when compared against conventional harddrives with similar capacities, SSDs have steadily been dropping in price and now only cost about 100-200 dollars more than a conventional drive. So what are the benefits? Well, speed primarily: SSDs offer blazingly fast read and write speeds. And unlike conventional drives, that can be damaged if jostled or dropped whilst in use, SSDs are extremely sturdy, making them ideal for notebook computers.
It took me about 10 minutes to swap the stock Fujitsu harddrive in my 13″ MacBook for the X25-M. You basically pop the battery lid, unscrew one screw and pull your old drive. Slot the X25 into its place, close everything back up again and you’re done!
As my previous harddrive was larger than the 80GB review unit I received, I opted for a clean Snow Leopard install, instead of trying to partially migrate my data and settings from my Time Machine backup. The entire OS X installation was very fast (~10 minutes) and after a quick Dropbox sync, I was up and running with my most important apps and documents.
Intel’s X25-M is currently considered to be one of the best SSD drives on the market and the raw numbers tend to agree:
So how do the numbers translate to your everyday, real-world experience? I mean, are you really going to notice if Safari loads 0.4 seconds faster? Probably not.
But in my experience, the big difference wasn’t that any single task felt much faster, it was the fact that everything felt faster. Whether copying a file, opening a DMG or launching an application – everything feels very responsive and snappy.
Here are two videos to give you an idea of what to expect:
All this performance doesn’t come cheap though: the 80GB review unit I tested currently retails for about €200 / $250. The larger capacity models can be several times as expensive. But if you use your Mac professionally, installing an SSD is an easy way to give your Mac a speed boost. The Intel X25 is ideal for professionals and performance junkies who need the highest possible performance. Enthusiasts and casual users might want to look at some of the cheaper alternatives on the market instead. They still trounce the performance of a traditional harddrive, without making too large of a dent in your wallet.
The Intel X25 is a fantastic upgrade for your MacBook and will boost the speed of even mundane things like opening an application. It’s ideal for performance fanatics and professionals, casual users may want to wait a while longer until the price / capacity ratio improves.
Most people would agree that the iPad is a fantastic 1.0 device. This is of course partly due to the shared iPhone OS heritage, but the overall experience is nonetheless is extremely well-rounded and polished.
But there are a few areas that feel a bit crummy, when compared with the rest of the experience. Considering how many apps Apple had to completely overhaul for the iPad’s presentation in January, it’s no surprise to find a few rough edges, on the otherwise fantastic device.
I understand why Apple is hesitant to add any kind of file system to the iPhone OS, but considering how much emphasis was placed on the iPad apps at launch, you would think that they would have come up with an elegant way to get documents on and off your iPad.
Unfortunately, in reality it’s a huge pain. Ted Landau took the time to document all the steps it takes to actually get a document into iWork on your iPad, none of which are particularly intuitive. Plus you then have the hassle of managing revisions and tracking multiple copies of the same file.
The iPhone app SimpleNote and Notational Velocity on the mac show how document sync can be done right. Some apps are also adding Dropbox support, which gives you an idea how file sync in general could be improved. Given the fact that Apple has already done a lot of the hard work by creating the MobileMe and iWork online services, one can only hope that we’ll see seamless, cloud-based file syncing added sooner rather than later.
If you open multiple tabs in safari on your Mac, switching between them is instantaneous. In mobile safari, you can never be sure whether the tab will open immediately, or whether it will need to be reloaded over your wifi or 3G connection. On the wifi-only iPad, where users can’t be sure they’ll always have access to an internet connection, webpage persistance is particularly an issue. The fact that Offline Pages (iTunes link) is currently one of the top free iPad apps in the App Store would seem to underline this point.
Mobile Safari’s limiting caching abilities are most likely due to the limited amount of RAM in the iPad, which has just 256MB, however as Rentzsch has pointed out, it should be possible to offload pages to the solid state drive as a workaround, although it’s not a trivial problem.
Making event creation in calendars difficult seems to be one of Apple’s favorite UI slip-ups. The calendar app on the iPad is gorgeously designed and it makes browsing through calendar entries a visual pleasure.
But the interface for adding entries seems to have been cut & paste directly from the iPhone version and doesn’t make any use of the additional screen real estate the iPad offers. You get the impression the designers spent all their time working on the rest of the UI and simply stuck the editing controls in there at the last minute.
Consistency between the two platforms is of course a good thing, provided it doesn’t slow the user down unnecessarily. I would argue that you could better use the iPad’s screen real estate to make a much more efficient and intuitive event creation UI.
Just a quick note to let you know I’m playing around with a different theme design for the blog. I wanted to go back to a traditional front page layout with all articles on a single page and decided to try a different style while I’m at it.
Let me know if you find any weirdness, or just what you think!
One of the ways you can measure the impact a device has, is by how frequently it’s used. A netbook, for example, might look like great device on paper, but a lot of early adopters seem to have switched back to using a full-sized notebook, whilst their netbooks collect dust.
The problem is feature overlap: if a netbook can do some, but not all of the same things a notebook can do – why not just take the notebook? You’ll need a bag to carry either, so there’s only a slight difference in size and weight to consider. Smartphones on the other hand can do some of the same things a notebook can do, but have a clear size and weight advantage, as well as a telephony features that a notebook doesn’t offer.
The iPad might suffer from the same problem as netbooks. It offers a lot of features offered by both other device categories, but it also presents these features in a new, multi-touch interface. But is the new interface and compact form factor enough to convince users to ditch their smartphones and notebooks for certain tasks?
Browsing some of the initial comments about the iPad, most users are initially very enthusiastic, as you would expect with most highly anticipated new CE devices. However, some users are already reporting that the initial excitement has worn off:
Jeff Jarvis tweets:
“After having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I am having morning-after regrets. Sweet and cute but shallow and vapid.”
Update: Turns out Jeff is actually returning his iPad:
[...] “(I) simply don’t see a good use for the machine and don’t want to spend $500 on something I’m not going to use.”
Funemployed entrepreneur Nat Friedman posts on Facebook:
“24 hours later, I must admit I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be using this thing for. The charm is wearing off.”
On a more anecdotal note, I recently had a few friends over for a party and they were playing with an iPad borrowed from work. Most of them were fascinated by the device and wanted one, but couldn’t really see much use for it apart as a “toy”.
Unlike the iPhone, which you always carry with you anyway, the iPad is something you need to actively seek out and use. With many people purchasing iPads without a clear idea what they’ll be using it for, it’ll be interesting to see whether Apple’s latest can win a permanent place in user’s day-to-day lives, or whether it will be yet another gadget collecting dust somewhere. My guess is that it’ll be the type of gadget you use regularly – just not as often as your phone or notebook.
What are your thoughts? Are you starting to get bored of your iPad – or has it already become indispensable?
When Apple introduced the iPhone and later the iPhone SDK, they established a series of UI metaphors, interaction models and conventions, that have served as a template for nearly all third party apps. Gestures such as swipe to delete, or UI elements such as springy lists are simply expected.
Apple has done such a great job of establishing best practices for nearly all types of UI interactions that it’s not often you see news kinds of UI interaction introduced by third party developers.
But when Atebits introduced Tweetie 2, it also introduced so-called “spring reloading”. Basically if you pull down past the end of a list, causing it to spring back, you can refresh the current list of tweets.
Many reviewers noted the ingenuity of this design, as it effectively turned a habit of many users (namely playing with the springy lists) into a useful feature. This design has since been adopted by several other applications and seems as though it may become a de facto UI convention on the iPhone OS.
Here is the original Tweetie 2 design:
Foursquare is basically a straight up copy:
This is Gowalla’s take on it – the logo appears to let you know you’ve pulled down far enough:
And the Wikipedia app Articles uses the design to lock or unlock your screen orientation:
It’ll be interesting to see if this convention is adopted by more applications going forward – or if Apple will even perhaps add it to their own apps. But at any rate, it’s nice to see good UI innovations from a third party developer being adopted by others. I can’t wait to see what Atebits and others come up with for the iPad.
Over on the 37signals blog, David makes the argument that the App Store review process doesn’t actually serve to improve the overall quality of the apps posted to the store.
If you compare a typical Mac app with a typical iPhone app, you’d probably have to agree with David. I’ve experienced far more issues with some fairly popular iPhone applications than I have with popular and successful Mac applications, despite the lack of any sort of approval process.
David argues:
Only good stuff in the App Store: Ha! The App Store has some 140K+ applications. I can guarantee you that the bulk of that is less than average. There are some 100 fart apps for christ sake!
[...] In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.
His argument, as I’ve understood it, is basically: there are shitty apps on the App Store because updating an app is so cumbersome and slow, so developers can’t iterate as often.
I think that’s an oversimplification though. A large number of developers on the App Store are probably new to Objective-C programming and its pitfalls. The iPhone’s limitations also mean that apps are more severely affected by problems that wouldn’t affect a desktop app (memory issues for instance) – another reason that iPhone app quality is lower than Mac applications.
There are definitely other reasons as well, but I think those go a large way towards explaining why so many apps on the App Store are pretty mediocre, when compared with desktop Mac apps.
Newbie developer + extremely limited hardware resources = poor software quality.
If the App Store didn’t have the approval process, you’d still have a lot of crappy apps.
But let’s ignore the shitty apps on the App Store for a second; Does the approval process improve the quality of apps made by respectable, experienced software developers?
In my experience, it does.
On the Mac, built-in update mechanisms (such as the excellent, ubiquitous Sparkle framework), make it easy for a developer to push out a release and fix any issues almost instantly.
An iPhone app doesn’t have that luxury, precisely because of the delay caused by the approval process. Instead you’re stuck with 7-14 days of angry customers and lost sales due to poor reviews.
So “real developers”, with a reputation to protect, are forced to test and review their own apps more extensively before submitting them to Apple for approval.
In that sense the approval process is a blessing and a curse for consumers: it forces developers to test their apps more thoroughly, but it also means that if a bug does slip through the cracks, you’ll be forced to put up with it for quite some time.
Assuming the approval process forces developers to test more and therefore does improve the quality of apps – is it beneficial overall for consumers?
I’d still argue it’s not. Every piece of software has bugs. The approval process means developers spend a large amount of time hunting down the million and one things that could go wrong – time that might be better spent adding new features or polishing another area of the app.
And when an issue inevitably does crop up, the artificial delay means your paying customers will be stuck waiting 7-14 day for a (probably tiny) fix that a Mac developer could have pushed out in an hour or two.
I think one solution would be for Apple to insist on a very thorough review for initial releases, but then only quick reviews for updates and fixes.
From my day job: equinux has written about some of our Macworld experiences over the years and how we made the decision not to go back this year. It’s a good look behind-the-scenes at Macworld and worth reading if you’ve been or plan on going.
There’s a lot of speculation at the moment regarding some unanswered iPad questions:
For what it’s worth, I believe it’s entirely possible Apple might be holding back certain features so there’s something new to announce around the time it’s actually due to ship. In fact, there’s a precedent for this.
Shortly before the original iPhone was scheduled to launch in 2007, Apple announced two major (supposedly last-minute) improvements.
The first was a battery life upgrade (which was probably achieved by software improvements), the second was that they were “upgrading” the display to a glass screen – which seems like such an integral part of the overall device that it would have to have been planned all along.
My guess is that we’ll see one or two minor iPad announcements in March, but it probably won’t include a camera.
For the first time ever, the iPad gives developers the chance to design desktop-class applications for a multi-touch based user interface.
Here are 3 Mac applications with user interfaces that I think would work really well on the iPad:
This fantastic RSS reader is already multi-touch aware and is a dream to use on MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads. You tap to read full articles, 3-finger swipe up to return to the overview or 3-finger swipe left and right to switch between sections. The gorgeous UI is the closest thing to reading a real newspaper on your Mac and Times could be a perfect match for the iPad.
The coverflow-esque UI in CoverScout is a perfect fit for the iPad: You can swipe through your albums, double-tap to start a search and then drag a cover from your search results to an album to apply it.
The search results bubble introduced in CoverScout 3 is also very reminiscent of the new popover list UI element introduced for the iPad.
Whilst you can certainly argue whether this is the type of application you would use on the iPad, the interaction style seems as though it would be an ideal match.
If there’s one application that would really work well with a touch-screen UI, it’s Djay. Being able to use a MacBook multi-touch trackpad as your DJ controller is nice, but a 9.7 inch touchscreen control would offer a much better, hands-on experience. Currently it looks as though access to the music on your iPad will be restricted though, making a real port of Djay unfeasible.
It’ll be interesting to see which Mac applications will be turned into iPad versions and what level of sophistication iPad apps have. Will they stay simple and iPhone-esque? Or will we see Mac application developers come out with truely desktop-challenging versions of their products? 2010 should be an exciting year for developers…
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