Status-Q

I’m one of the very many people who find Quicksilver to be the most valuable utility on their Mac, though I’m far from being a power-user. There are some people who start almost every activity with a Quicksilver keystroke, while I, for a long time, used it simply as a quick way to fire up apps that weren’t quite important enough to go in my Dock.

Great though it is, however, it’s far from being self-explanatory, especially for some of the more esoteric features! Fortunately, there are lots of tutorials out there from various enthusiasts to get you up and running. Some of the ones on Lifehacker.com are full of useful tips. You could do worse than starting here and following the links in the first paragraph. Even experienced users will probably learn something.

Or explore some of the Quicksilver-related screencasts on The Apple Blog or elsewhere. A Google search will find lots for you, and you’ll soon be on your way to guruhood.

As everybody says, once you get used to it being on your Mac, you’ll really miss it on machines which don’t have it. And the best news? It’s free!

As somebody who fires up a rather elderly copy of Photoshop at least once a day, I’ve been looking forward to the release of the new version – CS3 – and possibly to upgrading my entire package of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. There are plenty of nice new features, and, importantly, the programs will now be native Intel binaries so I won’t be running them under emulation on my MacBook Pro. They’re great products.

However, Adobe packages have always been expensive, and this is really rather expensive – a copy of the full suite would set me back nearly £1500 even though I’m upgrading. Plus VAT. I really can’t justify that. Unfortunately, the package I bought came just before they started calling it ‘Creative Suite’ and so, even though I have all the apps, they’re treated as individual apps and I don’t get the ‘suite’ price for the upgrade.

So I started looking at alternatives – upgrading the individual apps rather than the whole suite, for example – and I can get most of what I need for rather less. But as I explored I discovered something sufficiently disconcerting that I didn’t quite believe it at first: upgrades in the US are half the price they are here in the UK. Sometimes even less. Now, we’re used to slight differential pricing here, but this is ridiculous.

Let me put it in perspective. If I want to buy a copy of CS3 Design Premium, I can just buy it here. Or I can go for a long weekend in New York next weekend, fly out on British Airways, stay three nights in a hotel on the upper west side, visit the Met, do a little shopping at Zabar’s, and come back with a copy of the software in my suitcase. The price would be about the same, and I’m an existing customer buying an upgrade, not even paying the full price!

Fortunately I go to the States quite a lot, so I’ll probably just buy a standalone upgrade to Photoshop while I’m over there. And Adobe, because of this daft policy, will fail to get quite a lot of my hard-earned cash. If only their business guys were as good as their software engineers.

See also this ZDnet report.

Here’s one of those hints that will be blindingly obvious to those who know about it already, but may be very useful for people like me who have just discovered it…

In Apple Mail, after you’ve replied to a message, you get a little indicator in the message list (assuming you have that column displayed):

What I’ve only just found out is that the little arrow is a button. Click on it, and it will pop up the reply you sent. Exceedingly useful. But you probably knew about that already…

If you have a phone which isn’t supported directly by Apple’s iSync, it may be supported by the extra plugins available for a few Euros from Nova media.

I’ve been using their Nokia E61 plugin for a while now, but I’ve just discovered they do Address Book plugins too, which enable the SMS-sending and other functionality. Good stuff.

No connection – just a happy customer

One of Apple’s biggest achievements in the creation of the iTunes/iPod system was the balance that it managed to strike between the needs of customers and the needs of the recording industry. Their DRM (Digitial Rights Management) system allows you to make enough copies of your music on enough devices that it will seldom be an encumbrance to anybody, while not being a free-for-all that the music industry couldn’t accept. All DRM systems make me slightly uneasy, but it’s hard, I think, to find another company that has incorporated one as well as Apple.

Nonetheless, they’ve come in for some criticism recently because they don’t license their DRM to anybody else. Steve Jobs has just posted his response on the Apple site. As he says…

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.

But nonetheless, Apple would very much like a DRM-free world. Cynics may say that it’s easy to say that you’d support something when it’s so unlikely to come about, and that the real message of the piece is “Don’t bring antitrust measures against us – it’s not our fault”. But that doesn’t make the arguments invalid. Worth reading.

A quick thought on the AppleTV box…

Not only does it look like half a Mac Mini – that’s probably rather close to what it actually is. It has about half the hard disk space, for example, and is about half the price.

It has a better set of A/V connectors on the back, but the main thing it’s missing, from my point of view, is a DVD drive.

“Aha!”, you may say. “That’s because it’s not meant to be a PC – it’s meant to stream video from your PC, and your PC will have a DVD slot.” Yes, but DVD video is not very highly compressed, and streaming it over a wireless network, though it should in theory be possible, might be a bit challenging. So you’d have to rip the DVD to some other format on your PC before viewing it on your AppleTV, which can take all night.

Apple, of course, would like some aspects of this – it means it’s much easier simply to buy your movies through iTunes. And it is true that buying or renting movies on DVD is going to be ever-less-important over the coming years.

But I’ve had a Mac Mini under my TV for some time now, and it’s been great. It will do almost everything the AppleTV will do and a lot more, so I’m going to stick with that for a while.

Well, Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote seems to have lived up to a lot of the hype, with two key announcements:

• the AppleTV box – which lets you stream content from your Mac over the network to your TV but also has a built-in hard disk which will sync with iTunes automatically. To make the streaming work better, it supports 802.11n, and there’s a new
  Airport Base Station to help take advantage of it. Only the very latest Macs can manage 802.11n, though – my MacBook Pro is an early one, for example, and doesn’t – those based on the Core 2 processors can. But since I’m usually plugged into ethernet at home I’m not worried.
• The iPhone. Yes, it’s here, and it looks like a glorious device. Well, almost here. You need to be patient, because it won’t be out until June in the US and closer to the end of the year in Europe.

  It has wifi, it has a camera, it has almost no buttons and a very sexy touchscreen interface. It runs a version of Mac OS X. Wish it had 3G, but it has everything else, and might just have to be my Christmas present for next year…

If you, or a friend, are a new Mac user, you’ll appreciate Adam Pash’s Guide for switching to the Mac, which introduces you to things like the most important keyboard shortcuts. Nicely done.

…here’s a story about some of Apple’s problems, too. One lawsuit…

…is over Apple’s use of a copy-protection system that generally prevents iTunes music and video from playing on rival players. Likewise, songs purchased elsewhere aren’t easily playable on iPods.

The claim is that they’re creating an illegal monopoly. It’s certainly true that songs purchased from Apple can’t easily be played on non-Apple devices or software. But there are numerous routes which make it far from impossible.

And songs purchased elsewhere in CD or MP3 form can, of course, be played on an iPod. Of the 3000 or so tracks on mine, only about 200 came from Apple, so I’m hardly ‘locked in’, and I knew when I purchased them that I would need to use Apple stuff to play them. Songs purchased from other places in other formats are often not playable because they employ the copy-protection technologies of an earlier illegal monopoly.

Actually, it’s amusing to contrast this complaint with Microsoft’s strategy – their content doesn’t even play on their own player! The “PlaysForSure” copy protection used by services like Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo, Movielink and CinemaNow is not supported by Microsoft’s Zune, and users who purchased content expecting ongoing support from Microsoft are now disappointed. Napster, Rhapsody & co are probably even more disappointed.

But PlaysForSure doesn’t play on the iPod either. This seems like a lesser offence to me!

The moral of the story is, of course, that proprietary formats are dangerous, and whenever you buy anything in some non-standard format you should think of it more as a lease than as ownership. Buying all of your music in Apple’s Fairplay format is like storing all of your documents in Microsoft Word format. It’s very convenient now, but you must bear in mind the fact that access to this data may be denied you in future, so you need to take steps before that happens to make sure that anything of value is backed up in a non-proprietary manner.

The Mac’s Spotlight feature is great, but has many limitations. I love it, but I’m also frequently frustated by it.

MoRU is an alternative and much more powerful front-end to the Spotlight engine. The web page gives a good list of the features.

I really like the look of this. There’s a free trial, and it’s only $10.