Latest Posts in Mac Word

A visit with Guy Kawasaki

So for a whole bunch of reasons far too random to detail here, I ended up sitting in a restaurant attached to a Bay Area ice rink last week, watching skaters slip and fall while chatting with longtime Apple evangelist and Mac columnist, and current venture capitalist, Guy Kawasaki.

If you’ve never heard of Kawasaki, I’d like to explain, but as Inigo Montoya might say, there is too much. Let me sum up. He pioneered the concept of product evangelism, whipping up enthusiasm among users and developers for Apple’s products. Later he wrote columns for first MacUser and then Macworld for years (more on that in a bit). And now he’s got investments in a bunch of interesting companies.

One of the big topics of conversation during my sit-down with Guy—which happened in the late afternoon, so I can’t say I lunched or dined with him, though (full disclosure) he did buy me a Coke—was his web site venture, Alltop. Alltop basically aggregates the latest and greatest news on various topics (hundreds at last count) on a single page. So, for example, if you happened to be interested in the Mac, mac.alltop.com will provide you with a slew of links. iPhone fans similarly can see the latest on iphone.alltop.com. (Yes, Macworld and its sites appear on both of those pages, which are handpicked by the Alltop staff.) Pick another topic, be it beer or gardening, and you’ll see links for those topics, too.

Apple makes two great iPhone moves

The past few days have seen Apple make two incredibly positive strides when it comes to iPhone development. If you haven’t heard, last weekend the company limited App Store reviews to those who had downloaded the product in question. And Wednesday the company announced that the blanket secrecy agreement on iPhone development was being lifted.

Last week I wrote an article critical of Apple’s App Store filtering policies. So it’s only fair that I respond to these two positive moves by Apple with some praise: Thank you, Apple, for making both of these changes and responding to the concerns of your third-party iPhone developers.

When I posted the article last week, several people contacted me, wondering why I hadn’t also discussed the iPhone Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) and the problems with user reviews on the iTunes store. The short version is, I felt that it was better to focus my article on the (still unresolved) App Store filtering policies rather than digress into various gripes about what Apple’s doing with iPhone development.

Don't drive iPhone developers away, Apple

One of the presenters at the recent C4 Mac developers conference made a point about Apple that is incredibly relevant to how the company is viewed, especially by the media and rabid Apple fans. To paraphrase his statement, in dealing with Apple, one should never assume that the company is being malicious when its behavior can be just as easily explained by incompetence.

These days, there are a lot of iPhone developers—and users—who are suddenly rooting for incompetence. Because when it comes to the entire machinery of the App Store, something is terribly wrong. It’s not something you may even notice today if you’re an average iPhone user. But in the end, if things don’t change, what’s happening right now may seriously weaken the iPhone as a platform and enable Apple’s competitors to get the upper hand when it comes to dominating the smartphone market.

To say that those responsible for the administration of the App Store are actually incompetent is pure hyperbole. Setting up the App Store has been a gargantuan task. I know people enjoy assuming that complicated tasks are actually quite simple, but let’s be real here. In a very short period of time, Apple had to roll out a complete third-party development environment for programmers (while still trying to get all the screws tightened on the iPhone 2.0 software—and look how well that turned out). It had to set up a new infrastructure for selling software via iTunes and get all the legal documents and payment methods worked out. And for some very good reasons, Apple created an application-approval process.

iPods, antigravity, and Apple's bottom line

You’ve got to hand it to Apple—the company has actually convinced most of the human race that at any given Apple product-launch event, it’s entirely possible that the world will be changed irrevocably by the time Steve Jobs strides off the stage to applause.

Yes, every so often an Apple product announcement is so groundbreaking and dramatic that it changes the industry around it. That certainly happened in the fall of 2001, when Jobs unveiled the iPod. And it may well have done so again in January 2007, when the company announced the iPhone. But as disappointing as it is to Apple fans and members of the media who love being the first ones to hear about the Next Big Thing, most of the time the company’s announcements are about tending its garden, moving its product lines forward and improving its bottom line. That’s the kind of announcement we heard from Apple on September 9, when the company rolled out a new line of iPods.

Meat and potatoes

So if you were expecting a groundbreaking, dramatic new product from Apple on Sept. 9, you were undoubtedly disappointed. After all, this new round of announcements was all about slight tweaks to functionality, improved storage capacity, and lower prices. But even the most innocuous fall introduction of new iPods serves an extremely vital purpose: they usher in the most important three-month period of Apple’s year. 

Introducing the Digital Music & Video Superguide

I was there when Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod. And when the event was over, the assembled members of the press were divided into two camps: one group didn’t know quite what to make of Apple entering the esoteric world of digital music players, a field with questionable prospects and no dominant products. The other group of us had already grasped what digital music was all about. In fact, we had already begun converting our CD collections into MP3 files.

In the intervening years, Apple has brought digital audio and video into the mainstream, not just through the massive success of the iPod, but via the iTunes Store, the iPhone, and the Apple TV. These are all cutting-edge technologies, and that means that they can be complicated. While Apple’s products are more intuitive than most, many features can’t be mastered simply by reading the flimsy getting-started guides that Apple includes with its products.

That’s why we’ve created this newest addition to our Superguide series, The Macworld Digital Music & Video Superguide. This update to our previous iPod and iTunes Superguide is a straightforward and up-to-date guide to working with music and video, and comes packed with practical advice for handling digital media on your Mac, iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV. In it, we’ve compiled the best tips, tricks, and advice from Macworld’s experts to help you get the most out of your device, your software, and your collection of digital media. We’ll lead you through every aspect of building, managing, and enjoying your digital media library.

When Apple's reach exceeds its grasp

The huge success of the iPod and the incredible media hoopla surrounding the iPhone have transformed the way the world looks at Apple. In five years, it has gone from being the company that makes weird non-Windows computers to the company that makes all kinds of cool products—including great, non-Windows computers. The public perception of Apple is that it's a technology juggernaut with immense power at its disposal as it steamrolls over everyone else in the technology industry while creating one industry-busting product after another.

There’s just one problem with that image: It’s not true. In the past year, we’ve seen numerous examples of how Apple’s reach can dramatically exceed its grasp.

Size is relative

Obviously, Apple is no longer the little two-guys-in-a-garage operation that started out in 1976. These days it regularly generates more than $7 billion in revenue every quarter; in its last quarter, it reported a $1.1 billion profit. Clearly, Apple’s board of directors isn’t rifling through the company’s couch cushions searching for spare change.

iPhone apps: When 2.0 means 1.0

In the last week, Apple has released a major update to the iPhone, including a second generation of the iPhone hardware and a new version of the operating system that runs both the iPhone and the iPod touch.

Yet for all this talk of second-generation hardware and updated software, one of the most important components of the new iPhone is definitely still at version 1.0.

With the release of the updated iPhone software, Apple flung open the doors of its new App Store. On its first day, the App store was populated with more than 500 programs, and that number is growing rapidly.

AppleScript and chat privacy

Recently I was fuming on Twitter about the inability to set “private times” in chat applications. I’ve spread my instant-messaging address far and wide, and that’s fine—but there are certain times (like when I’m home looking up a hey-it’s-that-guy on IMDB) when I don’t really want to begin a random chat with someone who I’ve met once and who just wants to aimlessly chat about what’s going on in the world of Macs.

The good news is, instant-message services such as AIM allow you to adjust your privacy settings, so that only people on your buddy list can see you. The bad news is, I’ve yet to find an IM program that lets you adjust those settings on a schedule. I’d love to be able to say, “accept any chat on Monday through Friday, 10 to 6, but all other times limit the chats to those people on my Buddy List.”

But it can’t be done, so far as I can tell. My next step was to dig through the AppleScript dictionary and preferences file of my current IM client, Adium. No dice.

AppleScript versus Alameda County

You think your county has problems? Try California’s Alameda County, where court rulings are available in an unruly Java applet or as a long series of TIFF images.

I know this because I was interested in reading the ruling in the case of the University of California’s stadium project, which is being challenged by various Berkeley groups. (I’m a Cal football fan, so the subject of Memorial Stadium is near and dear to my heart. And I’ve been known to blog on the subject in my spare time, so I wanted to be up to speed on the ruling.)

Apparently the Alameda County courts are using technology so ancient that, rather than generate a PDF out of whatever computerized document system they used to generate the verdict, they printed out a copy, scanned it in, and posted the images straight from the scanner. (And then relied on a Java applet I couldn’t get working on my Mac to display it.)

Snow Leopard: Back to Basics

All the media attention this week has been on the announcement of the new iPhone 3G during Steve Jobs’s keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. But for Mac users there was another huge story that day, one that took up only a few seconds of the keynote: Snow Leopard, a brand-new version of Mac OS X.

Apple has been working on Mac OS X for more than a decade, and the public has been able to use it for eight years. In that time, the replacement for the classic Mac OS has grown through several stages: it began in an awkward, half-functional state, progressed into a fully functional replacement for OS 9 with increasing levels of speed and stability, and finally became an entrenched system that advanced by acquiring whizzy new features such as Spotlight and Time Machine.

Early in Mac OS X’s history, the operating system sped up with each new version, as Apple engineers tuned the code and got it working better. But those improvements have faded, and the last two releases have certainly been no faster than their predecessors. Instability, too, has returned to Mac OS X. (The title of my predecessor Rick LePage’s opinion piece, “What I Hate About Leopard,” says it all.)