Mac mini -- some more details via the product manager and the usual rumors

Clearing up confusion about the Mac mini - The Unofficial Apple Weblog - apple.weblogsinc.com

I spoke with the product manager for the Mac mini today to clarify a few facts.

1. Yes, it will boot headless, meaning with no display or video device connected, enabling you to have what I like to call an iServe.
2. While it is strongly recommended that you only have an Apple Authorized Service Provider crack it open and install RAM, hard drives, Airport and Bluetooth, it will NOT void your warranty if you do it yourself. As is standard operating procedure, however, anything you break while attempting anything on your own is not Apple’s responsibility and will not be covered under warranty. I think that is pretty much common sense.
3. Airport and Bluetooth can, in fact, be added after purchase. AirPort Extreme card and Bluetooth module attach to the Mac mini’s motherboard via a special connector and will be sold together as a kit for $129.
4. RAM is the most accessible upgrade once you get the case off. That much is clear from the picture.
5. All upgrades other than RAM are not as accessible, but accessing them won’t void your warranty, with list item #2 above in mind.
6. The reason the TOP of the Mac mini doesn’t glow and pulse (this is my only gripe so far) is that there wasn’t enough room to light it once the optical drive went in :)

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Macintouch has some interesting discussions on where the Mac Mini may go. Some are trying to make it a home server (presumably w/ an external drive, otherwise the wee internal drive will melt). Others note that, despite the absence of various I/O jacks there are an interesting range of firewire peripherals that may allow it to become a media center. Still others speculate that "Asteroid" is more than a GarageBand breakout box, but is a peripheral that makes a Mac mini the center of a home entertaintment system. Ahh, Apple is such fun.

Gmail: View by RSS client again available

Gmail: Help Center

In November Gmail briefly introduced Syndication of one's email inbox. This has now been made widely available.

You can view Gmail messages in your aggregator by subscribing to a new channel. Enter https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom in the ‘URL’ field, and submit your Gmail address and password.

Please keep in mind that Gmail messages don't appear in your aggregator unless there are unread messages in your inbox.

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There's some security risk here. If you use a web based RSS client, like Bloglines, your email pw is available to anyone that hacks Bloglines. Safest for a local RSS client. In fact, at the moment, Bloglines doesn't support this feed. It does work in Firefox though (go to bookmarks, from bookmarks menu choose live bookmark, enter url. It displays in Bookmarks drop down menu as a folder in which each inbox item shows up as a bookmark.).

Maps based on Flash

Maps, All Interactive Like | Metafilter

It's only taken 10 years to start to get away from GIF or JPG maps. These vector maps are based on Flash. I'd prefer to see SVG maps, but them's the breaks. PDF work well. Anything is better than GIF/JPG for maps.

Multiple Libraries in iPhoto 5?

Ars Technica: Macworld 2005 keynote coverage: "but multiple libraries have come to iPhoto in 05"

Damn. I should have watched the darned keynote. Noone else has mentioned this most critical feature.

The first Mini Mac review worth anything (ars technica)

The Mac mini preview

If, as Apple states when they consign rumor sites to the ninth plane of legal hell, innovation is the DNA of the company, then it must be fossilized. Low-margin, low-tech, white box, red state PCs have been around since before Michael Dell first declared Apple doomed, so what is the big deal about Apple finally doing what most PC manufacturers have been busy losing money at for years?...

...It's clear that the xMac [jf: Mac Mini] performs considerably faster than both my iBook, which cost me $200 more than an xMac, and nearly as fast as my wife's PowerBook, which cost four times as much and is less than a year-old...

...It’s not about the computer. It’s about the effect, or rather the affect. The “y” of xMac, or Mac mini, is another question: why not Windows? For people in the real world, the Mac mini, with the included software, does everything people need, while not doing things they don't need, like becoming infected with malware.

And the Mac mini does it at a price, US$499, competitive with the charcoal turds produced by more successful PC vendors. It's taken twenty years, but Apple may have come full circle at last.

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This is a funny, slightly scatological and somewhat impish review. It's also very good, and done by someone who really knows their stuff -- including speculation on whether Apple would revise Tiger's video infrastructure to accomodate the low end Mac Mini video specs.

Bottom line, this is a really positive review.

Griffin Technology BlueTrip: broadcast from iPod to stereo system.

Griffin Technology

A quite worthless picture! How does this thing look attached to an iPod?!! Grr.

Griffin has more fun and interesting products.

Yahoo! Desktop (X1) is the new champion

Yahoo! Desktop Search Beta [updated 1/18/05]

Until recently AOL/Copernic was my choice on the XP platform for file search (not Outlook, for that I use Lookout). Copernic isn't ideal however.

Now X1 freebie, better known as Yahoo Desktop Search (YDS) has taken over. Roughly following the same format as my previous Copernic review, here are my comments. Bottom line: it smokes everything else.

Some key features with some caveats :

1. You can configure location of the indices. I store them in a folder that I exclude from backup. You really don't want to backup search indices. All my various search indices tools store files in this folder. The X1 index is 400 MB for a 14GB dataset, but much of my data are in large non-indexed databases.
   
2. You can control readily what folders are indexed. I turned off Outlook search since I use Lookout. NOTE: X1 does NOT appear to index Outlook Task or Note folders.
   
3. It indexes PDF and a wide variety of data types. You can preview files within X1. Big feature. It even includes viewers for obscure applications, like MindManager.
   
4. You constrain your search results by additional quick filters such as data, result type, substring on file name. You can readily sort search results by the usual metadata (file name, date, etc) and by file PATH.
   
5. You can tell it not to index files over a certain size (I used 10MB).
6. You can control when it builds the indices. However, control is limited. Indexing is not all that smart, since my machine is often active (backup, maintenance, etc) the index wasn't getting built. I had to turn off the default option of waiting for an inactive machine. The index did get built and it wasn't a big performance hit. You can't specify a time range for index building.
   
7. You can't index network shares with Yahoo's licensed free version. The commercial version of X1 does this. I may buy the commercial version for my home.
8. It indexes folder names and it treats folders as first class searchable items. You can constrain a search to limit it to folders. This is a HUGE advantage over Copernic.
9. When you find an item, you can right-click to open it in the enclosing folder.
   

Some defects:

1. No fundamental defects for file search so far. Big advantage over Copernic!
2. Toolbar is kind of dumb. I don't care about Outlook searching (I use Lookout for that) but those items still appear on the toolbar. They also appear on the desktop toolbar and take up a lot of room. However you can specify "Files" as the default to search (RMB, properties) on the desktop toolbar then hide everything but the data entry field.
3. YECH (Update 1/18/05). You can't get rid of the Yahoo toolbar in Outlook. Sure you can remove it, but it returns the next time you restart Outlook. This is very annoying, because (see next point) X1 is a crummy tool for searching Outlook. I have a longstanding problem with toolbars in XP that show up unwanted -- I'm still fighting an idiotic Adobe Acrobat 4.0 toolbar that's infested my OS for years. I think I have to figure out where these damned things live -- problem is I think they can live in many places in the OS.
   
4. NOT a good choice for Outlook search. I use Lookout for that, but this would be a huge problem if I dependend on X1. It doesn't index notes and tasks! I didn't notice if it indexed Outlook attachments, didn't care enough.
5. Minor defect: it doesn't seem to understand abstract entities, like "desktop" or "documents" -- only physical directories.
6. It doesn't "smart rank" search results (ie. explicity metadata > directory match > file name match > etc), though in practice the rapid sorting of results and subsearch capabilities mean I don't miss this too much.
7. It doesn't, apparently, search Eudora mail archives. For that you need the non-Yahoo version of this.
8. It doesn't search mounted drives. Again, the non-Yahoo X1 version of the app does this.
9. Update 6/30: It ignores basic windows metadata (subject, author, keyword) entered via document properties dialogs. It ignores PDF metada entered within Acrobat. It doesn't index text comments on Acrobat documents. All of these things make YDS a poor choice for indexing scanned documents. Quite disappointing, actually.
   

My configuration

1. Limited search to the folder that contains my data and the desktop folder. (Removed all other folders, for non-removables set to ignore via "modify" button.)
2. Moved indices to my "Cache" folder (no backup of this folder).
3. Max file size to index 10MB.