Apple joins the spyware world

Boing Boing breaks the news. Apple's iTunes update quietly added the 'feature' of monitoring music played so Apple can suggest similar songs. This was not clearly stated during the install. Closing the 'mini-store' turns it off.

The Dark Side of Steve Jobs is to be feared. I've long felt that the only thing worse than Bill Gates ruling the world of personal computing would have been to have Steve Jobs in charge. Jobs is best when he's a distant #2, which is a good reason to hope Microsoft does claw back market share from the iPod.

So how bad IS MacBook battery life?

Thurott is unaffected by the reality distortion field. He's put up a very nice table comparing the PowerBook and MacBook. He particularly notes the curious absence of any data on battery life.

Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus: Comparing the MacBook Pro to the PowerBook G4

Balm to the soul of current G4 owners. The G4 was quite power efficient. Heh, heh.

Update 1/11: Looks like 4 hours or less with a fresh battery. Comparable to Dell, worse than current PowerBooks. Speed has a price.

The new Intel iMac - main feature

TUAW noted this. The new iMac supports a second monitor fully -- no hacks, pure DVI. Also, far more SDRAM. Hmm. Might be a very good Aperture machine when Aperture goes "universal".

Apple - iMac - Graphics:

Home to luscious widescreen living, the 17- or 20-inch iMac display hides the whole computer. Now iMac lets you widen your horizons with a second display on a pure digital DVI connection in extended desktop mode. And power them up with over-the-top ATI Radeon X1600 graphics with up to 256MB DDR SDRAM.

Google Earth for OS X 10.4

After the false alarm of a week ago, Google Earth is really out for OS X -- in beta and for 10.4 only. At last, a good reason to upgrade to 10.4. My old iBook would never have had the horsepower to run it anyway ...

Official Google Blog: Google Earth in a Mac world (PC too)

1/10/2006 12:49:00 PM
Posted by Chikai Ohazama, Google Earth Team

... And we have a brand new member of the family -- Google Earth for Macintosh. We're happy to finally have some good news for the, ahem, vocal Mac enthusiasts we've been hearing from. Let's just say that we have gotten more than a few 'requests' for a Mac version of Google Earth. They've gone something like this:

1) 'When is it coming out? Your website says that you are working on it.'

2) 'You know, Mac users are very heavy graphics/mapping/visualization/design/ architecture/education/real estate/geocaching/social-geo-video-networking fans who would certainly use Google Earth a lot.'

3) 'So when is it coming out?'

We heard you loud and clear. The Mac version runs on OS X 10.4 and up. Happy travels throughout Google Earth, whether you're on a Mac or a PC."

The PC version is out of beta. Time for me to upgrade, though I if the OS X version works I won't be doing that much on the PC version.

The windows download page also lists some interesting Google Earth RSS overlays.

Update 1/10: The OS X page has the same overlays. I highly recommend the Wikipedia overlay, it links articles to locations. Panoramio overlays images on the earth. I had to download them to the desktop and then tell OS X to open them with Google Earth, it wasn't quite as simple as Google's overlay page suggested.

Pretty darned incredible. The performance and appearance on the iMac is beautiful so far.

Lookout for Outlook 1.3.0

Lookout for Outlook was one of the best pieces of productivity software ever created for the Windows platform. It makes Outlook, one of the shoddiest and crummiest piles of code ever sold, actually work.

Microsoft bought it and it disappeared. Allegedly MSN search has some of it.

I use version 1.2.8 dozens of times a day. By chance I see there was a quiet update to 1.3.0 last February -- almost a year ago. Worth trying.

Update 1/11/06: Hmm. I think 1.3.0 is not rebuilding my indices every hour as its supposed to. Alas, I fear I did this update once before -- with similar consequences. I withdraw my recommendation. I guess 1.2.8 is as good as it's going to get.

Fujitsu ScanSnap

MacWorld loves the Fujitsu ScanSnap.

It really does sound like a great product. Fujitsu has long been a dominant player in the low end of the document scanner marketplace (low end in this market was $1000 and up -- please don't mention HP's combo shred and scan devices to me), now they've taken their expertise down below $400. (That price includes the full version of Acrobat 7.)

Years ago I kludged together a scan to pdf solution for a software product I worked on. It didn't get to market, but it was the right way to go. Now ScanSnap and others are doing it right. Adobe has had a great solution for document scanning, but they've been reluctant to cannibalize their high end sales. I hope we'll see more of that at the low end.

It's all about the paper feeder. Fujitsu knows how to do this. I've seen their real SOHO scanner ($1000) scan in a thick plastic card. Very nice device.

Mac NoteTaker for PalmOS with TextMate

This came across a list for missing sync, an app that lets me use our old CLIEs on the iMac. Missing Sync is a great application, but it's desktop companion to the PalmOS Notes/Memos is really weak. This alternative to the Memo Pad has its own OSX conduit and desktop app...

From: Mark H. Subject: [missing-sync-palmos-talk]
Re: DayNotez or alternate journaling application with Desktop component?

I too am a DayNotez fan who would love to see a Mac desktop (or better still a conduit to one of the many excellent Mac journalling applications).

However, I've recently started experimenting with something else. I've been using Mac NoteTaker (Palm application and conduit) with TextMate (rather excellent text editor). [jf: TextWrangler is superb and free]

NoteTaker provides a hierarchical organisation of text notes on the Palm which are two-way-sync'd via a conduit to an identical hierarchy of folders and text files on the Mac. So it's extremely flexible. And it's free :-)

You can browse the notes on the Mac using Finder and edit them using any text editor such as TextEdit. However, I've found TextMate to be rather excellent for the task. Drop the NoteTaker folder onto TextMate's icon and it will produce a single window which has a side draw which shows the folder structure (see the screen shot on MacroMate's home page). TextMate calls this a project and you can save the project to open later, so I have a "NoteTaker" project on my desktop. TextMate contains some great text editing features which are handy for note taking / journalling, including spell-checking, templates and indent/outdent, bookmarks and clipboard history. It's also massively scriptable.