iPhone doesn’t do tasks? Who cares. OmniFocus.

Who cares that Steve Jobs has a !#% religious objection to task management?

That’s why Babbage invented computing …

OmniFocus for iPhone will be location-aware - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

… OmniGroup says that by "using your location, OmniFocus can create a custom list of actions to complete nearby. Buying groceries? OmniFocus can show you the closest grocery store and create an instant shopping list."

Pretty sweet. OmniGroup expects that OmniFocus for iPhone will be available via the App Store around the launch date in early July…

One of the “GTD” principles is opportunistic execution of location specific tasks. OmniFocus is a GTD oriented task manager.

Location specific task reminders are necessarily useful, but they are very cool.

I expect to own an early version of this app.

Update 8/10/08: Not so fast. Scratch OmniFocus.

Buy iPhone today, swap for new one?

Via Ars Technica

...AT&T remains sole iPhone carrier in US, revenue sharing axed (Updated) ... If you purchased the original iPhone on or after May 27 and want to swap it with the 3G iPhone, you will be able to do so without having to pay an additional handset charge. (There is, however, a 10 percent restocking fee on your old phone, apparently.)...

So if I buy one today, can I swap it with the new one in July? Tempting, especially for a refurb.

Why Firefox 3 is a great OS X browser

My impression is that for users of the Google tool suite, FF 3 is the best OS X browser.

One of the lead engineers explains how that came to be …

Firefox 3 for Mac OS X: Under the Hood « Boom Swagger Boom

Firefox 3 will be released soon (get the RC here). While the release contains a huge number of new features and performance improvements for all platforms, it is particularly significant for Mac OS X users. We rewrote most of the Mac OS X code that was behind Firefox 2 in order to benefit from modern Apple technologies and fix long-standing bugs. Once you try it I think you’ll agree that the results are astounding. I’d like to explain what exactly we did in this rewrite, how Firefox 3 for Mac OS X is different “under the hood.”…

So much better than FF 2!

My iPhone demands: How is Apple doing?

Almost a year ago I posted my iPhone demands.

Here's a status report (bold)

Gordon's Notes: iPhone: my demands

Non-negotiable:

1. Copy, Cut, Paste. (No)
   
2. Search. (Contacts only)
   
3. Tasks at least comparable to the 1994 PalmPilot tasks. (No)
4. Synchronization with Outlook at least comparable to the modern Palm OS (in other words, flawed, but useable). A 256 character limit on contact comments is not acceptable. (No, not yet)
   
5. Run FileMaker Remote. (No)
6. Synchronize notes. (No)
7. Multi select and process for email (Yes)
8. Apple needs to fix the "international problem". It's ridiculously easy to run up a $1000 phone bill unintentionally when outside the US. (Partial)
   
9. Let the iPhone bridge a computer to its net connection. (No)

Wishes, not demands:

1. A real calculator. (Yes)
2. Flatten the recessed headphone socket. (Yes)
3. Site-selective synchronization - so can sync at both work and home, but not send home data to a work machine. (No)
4. Support for a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. (No)
5. Video out - so I can use a larger display. (No)
6. Encrypted data stores. (No)
7. Third party app support (Yes)
8. Flash support, but not from Adobe. (No)
9. GPS (Yes)
10. Custom ring and alert tones (Yes)
11. Allow file storage on the iPhone. (No)

Current score:

• essential: 2/9
• nice: 5/9

BTW, 3G wasn't on my list -- high performance web access didn't even make my "nice" rating.

The only saving grace is the SDK and the Apple Store platform. I expect 3rd party developers will give me most of what I want. I'm buying iPhone 2.0, so I'll find out soon enough. Palm is dead one way or another, so I will have to work differently.

Still, pretty lousy score!

MobileMe syncs with Outlook

There's no way on gaia's green earth that MobileMe syncs seamlessly with Outlook ...

Apple - MobileMe - Features - MobileMe on your PC

... On a PC, MobileMe works seamlessly with the applications you use every day. You can use Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Contacts on XP or Vista. MobileMe automatically pushes your email, contacts, and calendars — and even your Safari or Internet Explorer bookmarks — to your other computers, iPhone, and iPod touch.
...

No way.

Still, interesting.

Notice the absence of $%!$%!%# Task synchronization. No Notes either.

I'm looking for info on gCal syn.

An offbeat Apple keynote prediction

Well, not so much a prediction as an entertaining thought for WWDC.

Amazon's Kindle is at least marginally successful, though most of the people I like to read seem to think it's not an enormous success. It has, however, made a lot of people very nervous about Amazon's power over publishing.

So I think Barnes and Noble, the big publishers, and Google might be willing to get together around a response to Amazon. Book publishers are very slow to move on anything, so they'd have to be passive-aggressive partners at best. The energy would have to come from B&N and Google.

Apple has an interest in an always connected touchscreen slate device that will do video display and conferencing, does audio and has a data-revenue stream associated with it.

So Apple will do a touchscreen slate device with a subsidized price, AT&T 3G data services, a required subscription model including the dotMac successor, and books through the (to be rebranded) iTunes store in partnership with Google and Barnes and Noble.

You read it here first ...

Burn CDs without the invisible .DS_Store (dot) files

This has been bugging me for years. I think I've finally figured it out.

The interesting bit, really, is why this problem is so mysterious. In think the mystery comes about because only old-timers wonder about this, for most people I suspect things just work (on CD anyway).

Long time OS X users remember when CDs were littered with .DS_Store and other OS X "dot" files holding file metadata. Some versions of OS X create these even when there's no extended attributes, resource fork, or other metadata for a particular file.

It's not just CDs. Thumb drives (USB mass storage media) got them too.

They're annoying as all get out. Media players that can manage AAC or MP3 files get confused by the dot files. At best they have to be skipped over.

So how do you get rid of 'em?

Well, in 10.0-10.2 you had to run use unix commands: macosxhints.com - Burn CDs without the invisible .DS_Store files.

In 10.2 or so the OS changed to burning hybrid CDs, a mixture of plain old Joliet and HFS+:

The .DS_Store (and many other mac-only metadata) files will be stripped from the crossplatform ISO/Joilet images. These files will still show up for the HFS side of hybrid images, so mac users will get them but other users on other platforms won't."

Some media devices still have trouble with hybrid CDs. I don't know about 10.5, but in 10.4 I don't think you can control this.

If you want to burn the simplest MP3 or AAC CDs for external devices, you need to specify PC Joliet as the Disc Type. In Disco ($20) and Burnz ($10) this is an option.

When you do this the PC view will not show any metadata or dot files.

Inexplicably, neither product explains why you'd want to do this. I guess they assume everyone understands that "PC Joliet" means no funky OS X metadata dot files.

Right.

Disco, by the way, has a problem in 10.4.11. When you insert a CD the finder blocks Disco's burn. No dialog is displayed, but nothing happens. I have to close all Finder windows to get it to work. I think there must be better options, I'm looking around.

Oh, and this is still a problem with thumb drives, at least in 10.4.

Update 6/9/08: I was really annoyed with Disco.app -- at one point it wouldn't burn no matter what windows I closed. Burnz didn't give me a simple enough control over what format I burned. Now I'm trying the free OSS app Burn.

The new world of Firefox bookmarks

This morning I watched a brief screencast on FF3, with a focus on Advanced bookmarking and tagging.

It's a terrific screencast.

The FF 3 bookmark and security features are even better than I'd realized -- and I've been running FF3 on my macs for weeks.

This is one heck of a browser launch. We're spoiled on the OS X platform now, with both Firefox 3 (blessed by Google) and Safari 3 (blessed by Apple) as excellent choices. The primary drawbacks of FF 3 for OS X are the lack of Cocoa integration (no services, no dictionary lookups) and the lack of AppleScript support (even less, currently, than FF 2). (I use Camino on my aging 10.3.9 iBook and I very much love its Cocoa integration. I'd really like to see a future version of FF 3 and Camino merging, perhaps adapting the tab management features of OmniWeb.)

Firefox 3 beats Safari by a country mile though when it comes to bookmark management. No more of that silly filing and organizing -- unless you REALLY want to do it.

One click to add any site to the unsorted collection. A second click (or a double click) to change the default name and add tagging. Tag model is similar to bloggers, easy to type or select from an on-the-fly dictionary (flat ontology). It's easy to see how well with will work with bookmark synchronzation and integration with web bookmark services. The search model is seamlessly integrated into the url field.

This is the way I've been managing my Outlook email for about two years now -- tagging, renaming subject lines, minimal filing for special projects, full text search.

Brilliant design.

Update 6/8: More great FF 3 features.

Vermeer/FrontPage lives in Sharepoint Wiki

This is a story of recursion and the rise and fall and rise of software. I'm one of the few people that could spot this particular example.

It began with Vermeer, later known as Microsoft FrontPage. I knew it well, even the Macintosh versions. Once, before it started drinking sterno and snorting meth, FrontPage was a software classic. I still use FP 98 on my XP box, there's never been anything better at creating hypertext documents.

FrontPage had a terribly swift decline after FP 98, but even in its debauched state it was the forgotten father of two bits of software - the early versions of Sharepoint and today's version of Sharepoint Designer.

I don't use SP Designer, but I use Sharepoint 2007 - a lot. Even on deep inspection there doesn't seem to be much of FrontPage left in the newest version. SP 2007 is an unspeakably awful document management system and file server, and a very clever implementation of a list/table manager.

Oh, and it includes a Wiki built on extensions to the list manager.

The Wiki is where the recursion comes in. As I worked with it, stringing together hypertext documents and switching between list and web views, the deja vu hit. I'd worked this way before.

The Sharepoint Wiki, I realized, maps very easily onto the actions and interactions of Vermeer/FrontPage. It's not as powerful or as quick to use as FP 98, but it's more approachable for novices and it doesn't require a thick client on each desktop.

So a shadow of FrontPage lives on, buried deep within Sharepoint.

Oh, and now I can explain to young folk the appeal of the original Vermeer/FrontPage. It's the super-powerful toolkit you wish you had for your Wikipedia writing.

Update 9/26/08: I had occasion to copy and paste a very long FrontPage document into a Wiki item. It rendered suspiciously well. I know Sharepoint Designer is a descendant of FrontPage, and that Sharepoint Wiki articles are editable using SharePoint Designer -- so maybe it's not surprising that Sharepoint Wiki is very accepting of FP HMTL. You really do feel the inheritance.

Access 2003 and bugs with special characters and escape sequences

Microsoft Access has some curious behaviors with certain characters. They can be very hard to reference in searches or text operations. Most software (ex. grep) uses “escape sequences” or delimiters for characters like #-()[]?* etc that may have special meaning, but Access struggles here.

From the Access Help files (which are impressive, but often like reading the scrolls of a long lost civilization), we can see that even the expected behavior is very obscure:

• Wildcard characters are meant to be used with text data types, although you can sometimes use them successfully with other data types, such as dates, if you don't change the Regional Settings properties for these data types.
• When using wildcard characters to search for an asterisk (*), question mark (?), number sign (#), opening bracket ([), or hyphen (-), you must enclose the item you're searching for in brackets. For example, to search for a
  question mark, type [?] in the Find dialog box.
• If you're searching for a hyphen and other characters simultaneously, place the hyphen before or after all the other characters inside the brackets. (However, if you have an exclamation point (!) after the opening bracket, place the hyphen after the exclamation point.)
• If you're searching for an exclamation point (!) or closing bracket (]), you don't need to enclose it in brackets.
• You can't search for the opening and closing brackets ([ ]) together because Microsoft Access interprets this combination as a zero-length string. You must enclose the opening and closing brackets in brackets ([[ ]]).
• A Microsoft Access project uses different wildcard characters than an Access database uses. For more information, search the Microsoft SQL Server Books Online index for "wildcard characters"…

I love the last bit, where Microsoft hints that even the odd rules Access once used won’t necessarily keep working.

As of June 2008 though things are worse in a patched version of Access 2003. I couldn’t get search on a [ character to work at all, and I had to escape a single quote using: """".

I think software ages at dog speeds, and Access is well into senescence.

Microsoft Access 2GB file size limitation and the Invalid Argument error message

Every time I ran “Make Table” in Access 2003 I got an “Invalid Argument” error message.

Google found the explanation in seconds:

Error message when you run an append query, run a make-table query, or import data in a large Access database file: "Invalid argument"

In Microsoft Access, when you try to run an append query, to run a make-table query, or to import data in a large Microsoft Access database file, you may receive the following error message:

Invalid argument.

This problem occurs when the size of the Access database file approaches the 2 gigabyte (GB) size limitation.

The limitation still exists in Access 2007.

Shades of the old DOS 640kb memory limits. Will we never escape those old 2**n boundaries?

Of course these kinds of meaningless error messages were impossible to decipher in the days before Google. It’s getting hard to remember how things worked back then …

iPhoto strips Finder metadata from image files on import in OS 10.4, fixed in 10.5

I've rewritten this post since original publication.

You can trace the evolution through this Apple Discussion thread: When you drop an image into iPhoto in 10.4.11 the Finder metadata (extended attributes – Spotlight comments, Labels, etc are not copied.

I thought this was an iPhoto bug, and I bemoaned the lack of attention to Finder metadata.

Apparently it's an OS bug! In 10.5 metadata, including Spotlight comments, is preserved.

So I can't blame the iPhoto engineers, but that's a pretty amazing OS bug.

OS X file renaming utilities: alternatives to ABFR

There are hundreds of splogs that claim to review software, but there's a simple trick to getting to the good stuff.

Once you come up with two product names, search for the two in combination. Then when you get to three, search for the three in combination.

Splogs can't auto-generate inter-product comparisons, so this blows away the junk.

I did this as I looked for an alternative to A Better Finder Rename for file renaming. I like ABFR, but I need to pay up again since my version won't work in Leopard (this is why OS updates are so expensive, the OS cost is the least of it).

Before I pay up, I need to scan the free alternatives. TUAW has a good quick review or 3-4 solutions - Name Mangler: batch rename your files,
and Renamer4Mac mentions 2-3.

I like paying for quality products, so I'll probably still pay for ABFR, but I'll at least try the best seeming of the freebies.

Managing video files with the Finder and Spotlight

Imagine, for a moment, you have been engaged in months of ugly struggle with PureDigital's Flip Camcorder, 3ivx's codecs, QuickTime, AppleScript, Automator, OS X, iMovie HD, iMovie '08 and too many other bits of software to name.

Imagine then that QuickTime 7.45, OS X 10.4.11 and the 3ivx codecs PureDigital's Flip camera uses stop working together. (thank you Perian)

It's not just me. Apple's been making lots of customers miserable. I think we're all entitled to free versions of OS X, by hook or crook, for all eternity.

So I was ready to try something very simple for managing our video fragments (there's no equivalent of EXIF for video btw):

Here's how it works with the Flip camcorder:

1. Drag them off the camcorder into my custom video folder (see custom Finder column settings in image below, the built-in software no longer works since I had to remove the official non-functioning Flip codec).
   
   
2. Using 'A Better Finder Rename' I rename the videos to the form: YYMMDD HH MM_##.AVI where the YYMMDD is their last modified date (basically the time Flip stopped writing to the AVI file).
   
   
3. As per Image 1 (below) I click on file and then do cmd-opt-I to open the "Inspector". Now when I go from image to image I can see a thumbnail of the video, click to play the video in the Inspector, and type descriptive comments that Spotlight will search (Spotlight Comments in Inspector). These are part of the standard OS X file metadata. I can also rename the image from the Inspector. No extra clicks or delays. Videos I don't want get a "d" in comments, I delete them later. (It's not shown here, but I've since customized my labels to correspond to the usual 1-5 star rating, renamed labels with the ratings in Finder options, and display the label name in the custom folder view.)
   
   
4. My spotlight searches (Image 2) use the comments. Spotlight (sigh) doesn't show comments in search results (argh), but the Inspector works on Spotlight results. I just open it and view details as I go from result to result.

It's a pretty darned simple workflow, and it's not dependent on any special software functionality. Just QuickTime, Perian, and OS X. I don't file the videos, I toss them into the folder and rely on search. If I end up storing them in some future OS X app the metadata will still be around, and potentially scriptable into some future repository.

Image 1: View of the video folder with inspector open. Files where comment = "d" will be deleted.


Image 2: Results of a Spotlight search, with Inspector open so I can click on a search result and see image and comments.



Update 6/6/08: When you drop an AVI file to iPhoto, iPhoto does not copy the extended attributes. In particular, it doesn't copy the Spotlight comments or the labels. I'm going to go and drink now.

Update 6/6/08b: The loss of extended attributes was a 10.4 defect. It's fixed in 10.5.3.

Nisus Writer Professional - the manual is a work of love

Nisus Writer Professional is not cheap for families. The license covers a single user at a time, so a family like ours with 5 users would need to spend $200 for use on a single machine. Other software has similar policies, but Nisus is very explicit about this during installation. Word and Pages leave such details to the imagination.

On the other hand, some testing shows NWP doesn't enforce the license (though for all I know NWP reports violations). They also have a generous upgrade policy for past licensees.

What else can I criticize about NWP/Nisus Writer Express?

• HTML export is pretty darned unimpressive
• I'm annoyed that NWE didn't survive the migration from 10.4 to 10.5.3. Many of my old apps run fine in 10.5.3, but NWE locked up when I tried to import a simple Word 97 document.
• NWP can't translate a Word Table of Contents into a NWP Table of Contents and vice-versa.
• NWP doesn't do image compression! Word has fabulous image compression, so a 2MB Word document can balloon into a 32MB NWP/NWE document.
  

I'll have more to say about the good things after I play with NWP a bit more. NWE has been my word processor of choice, and, even with the family licensing costs, we're staying with Nisus.

I'll point out one marvelous sign that most everyone else will miss. Nisus has a 400 page work-of-love PDF manual, which is sold as a bound book for $25.

These people love their product. That's a very encouraging sign.

There are some other things, from my time with Nisus Writer Express, that I expect