Status-Q

So, the Mac Mini is out. The line is that Apple can make it smaller and better than most PCs because they make the whole thing:

From $499. (Costs about a third more if you buy it in the UK.) Very cool. This and a few other tasty new things at Apple’s site.

Ron Avitzur’s story of how he kept working at Apple when he was no longer working for Apple. [Thanks to Seb Wills for the link]

There was some discussion on Mac OS X hints in recent months on how to export your Apple Address Book as comma-separated values for importing into things like Thunderbird.

I did some tweaks to Sean’s AddressBookToCSV script, and have since tweaked it a bit more. You can grab my current version here:
AB2CSV.zip

I’ve written before about one of my favourite features of Apple Mail – the ability to select multiple mailboxes at once and see a merged list of messages which you can sort, search etc. If I’m looking for all my correspondence on a particular subject or with a particular person, I’ll often select all my (6) inboxes, sent mail boxes, and probably a few archives as well, and then type into the search box. I’ve never seen this merging of mailboxes work so well on another mail viewer; it’s the main thing I miss when using the otherwise excellent Thunderbird.

Once you’re working within some search query or other particular view of your mail, though, how do you get back to your normal view to make a quick check on something else without losing your current setup? It’s easy, I’ve just realised. On the File menu there’s a ‘New Viewer Window’ option. This gives you a duplicate of the main window in which you can work completely independently, so you can pop up a new window for a particular search, have separate windows for working in different email accounts etc.

[Original Link] Mac techies interested in the ‘Spotlight’ search technology that’s coming up in Tiger, the next version of Mac OS X, should have a look at this article.

I like this example. Backup all the files on your system containing the word ‘Tiger’:

for i in `mdfind Tiger`
do
    cp $i /Volumes/Backup/$i
done

[Original Link]

Just watched the Quicktime feed of Steve Jobs doing the iPod Photo launch, with the aid of U2. I have to take my hat off to Apple – I’m biased by my enthusiasm for their technology, but even without that I can think of few companies with their marketing and branding skills.

I’ve sat through plenty of roadshows and product launches in my life, and, in general, I detest them. So why would I voluntarily give up an hour of my weekend to watch a CEO telling me about his latest product? If you need to ask that, I suggest you watch one. This latest isn’t their slickest, and Steve Jobs, though on good form, is perhaps a little below his normal par, which is understandable after his recent major surgery. But there’s still no other company that comes close.

Get a good connection, expand your Quicktime window to a good size, sit back and enjoy. And remember that it’s Apple technology that you’re using to view the stream as well….

[Original Link] Here’s a hint I found quite useful. On the Powerbook, the function keys, by default, do other things like changing the brightness of the display or turning numlock on and off. To make them operate as function keys, you have to press ‘fn’ at the same time. If, like me, you use them more as function keys (for exposé etc), you can invert this behaviour in the Keyboard section of System Preferences.

Today Apple released the new version of their operating system, Mac OS X 10.3, more commonly known as Panther.

Actually, they released it yesterday at 8pm, and when I woke up this morning a friend of mine was still online in Seattle (1am their time) after the big gathering of ‘hundreds’ for the launch at the local Apple store.

Here, in contrast, our local Apple dealer closed at 5.30pm yesterday, so we had to wait until this morning to get a copy. And they only had 25. It would have been much too nerdy to be seen actually waiting at the door when they opened, so I sauntered in at a much more laid-back five minutes past the hour, and one of those 25 copies is now mine.

I also treated my elderly PowerBook to a new hard disk (so I could do drastic things without destroying my chance of returning to safety) and so I have a completely fresh install of Panther. I copied my applications, documents, some preferences etc into it from a backup on an external firewire drive, and so far it’s all going very nicely.

Like 10.2, this is not a very major overhaul from the appearances point of view, but there are small improvements to almost everything which make the cost (100 UKP) definitely worthwhile for me. The big changes are well documented elsewhere; the main benefit I’ve seen so far is the much better integration with a Windows network, and with remote servers. I can browse the ‘network neighbourhood’, can print to the Deskjet connected to Rose’s Windows machine, and can interact much more seamlessly with remote WebDAV and FTP servers.

And the ‘Exposé‘ feature is lovely too.