DevonThink: Digitizing paper documents

The Mac has two persistent significant weaknesses. One is speech recognition -- there's nothing on the Mac comparable to the best XP solutions. Speech recognition is still a niche market however. The other has been imaging and document management -- a bigger market. The Mac OCR software I've seen has been a leftover from another era. So this Macintouch announcement caught my eye:

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

DEVONtechnologies LLC released DEVONthink Professional Office 1.3.2 and DEVONthink Professional 1.3.2, which update the top end of the company's information management software line. The Pro Office version adds support for MailTags 2.0 notes, an option to the resolution and the compression of PDFs generated by the built-in IRIS OCR engine, support for ExactCODE's ExactScan software to drive Avision document scanners, an option to set default encoding for email import, and better detection of URLs in text messages... DEVONthink Professional Office is $149.95 and DEVONthink Professional is $79.95 for Mac OS X 10.3.9 and up (Universal Binary).

DevonThink is a senior instance of the many information management solutions for OS X, like most DT suffers from the fatal flaw of proprietary data stores. All of these products have had to figure out where to go post-Spotlight; full text search eliminated a portion of their value proposition without introducing file format lock-in. DT seems to be focusing on the problem of managing paper document stores with PDF files, wrapping the old IRIS OCR engine with a modern software environment. If someone would only produce the scanner I want (very easy to do, so the failure to make a what I want puzzles me ) DT would be one of the first products I'd turn to ...

iPhoto '08 breaks Google (Picasa) web album Export

iPhoto '08 breaks the excellent Google (Picasa) export iPhoto Plug-In. Sigh.

I forgot, again, the #1 rule of life with Apple -- wait two months after any major update before use. Apple doesn't pre-release non-OS software to vendor partners, so they need at least two months to fix their software.

Update 10/13/07: It's been six weeks now. Google's Picasa Web Album Mac Tools page still says this:

The Picasa Web Albums Exporter is a plug-in that lives right inside iPhoto™. Select photos, choose Export in the File or Share menu, and upload them directly to your web album.

There's no mention that the plug-in no longer works. A month ago a developer commented on a post of mine saying that they were working on a fix, but there's been no communication since through any venue. Plaintive calls turn up every week or two on the Picasa Web Album Google Group.

I know a bit about the vertical IT market. In that market resources are very tight and timelines are long. This kind of thing happens in our market, but it's amazing to see it happening to Google. Microsoft moves with lighting speed by comparison, and they would have updated their publicly facing material weeks ago. Even Apple would have communicated better than this, and they're notoriously close mouthed.

Google Maps: now almost display geolocated Picasa web album photos

Google Maps now sort of display Picasa web album photos in context. It's an option in the "My Maps" "Featured Content" collection.

I tried this in Old Montreal. I'd taken some photos there that display correctly in Google Earth (Lachine Canal bike/skate trail). I got mixed results. The images took a long time to appear, and I seemed to get quite different sets at different resolutions. I suspect they're still working on this, but I'm going to test it further today during a family skating outing on the Lake Wobegon trail.

It would be nice if it works, a way to build cheap "guides" for eccentric families like ours.

Update 8/31/07: It's still not working. My Lake Wobegon images haven't appeared yet, though I do see a few other people's images. The Lachine canal images I saw on Google Earth aren't in Google Maps today. Display of the images that are found is quite slow. I don't think the current model is going to scale, Google will have rethink this.

Sidejacking: good news for the VPN providers

Tidbits has a long article on "sidejacking". It's a man-in-the-middle attack on non-encrypted hot spot transactions. Nothing new, but now the attacks are packaged. Basically, you need to pay for VPN services ...

TidBITS: Sidejack Attack Jimmies Open Gmail, Other Services

Use a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN can encrypt all the data entering and leaving your machine, which prevents any local sniffer from gaining anything of utility, including tokens. Several services offer VPN "rentals," where you pay a monthly or yearly fee to have a tunnel from your computer to their servers, out in a network operation center far away from the network you're using. A couple of services are particularly Mac friendly: WiTopia.net's personalVPN ($39.99 per year for an SSL/TLS VPN) and publicVPN ($5.95 per month or $59.95 per year for an L2TP/IPsec VPN).

Jobs explains iMovie '08

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Smurfy Pogue stabs me in the back

See here. He's pissed about the new iMovie. Which, um, I agree kind of sucks. And he kinda sorta hints at why we put out such a brain dead movie maker program. Little hint. Our initial marketing slogan was gonna be, "You wanna make real movies? Go buy Final Cut Pro, you cheap bastards." Or something like that. That one was Phil Schiller's idea. Katie Cotton suggested we try to "soften" it a bit and so in the end it just became: "Completely redesigned to help you make movies in minutes".

Actually, it's not Final Cut Pro Apple's protecting, it's Final Cut Express. $300. Grrrrrrrrr.

iPhoto '08: makes Aperture look fast?

I agree:

iLife 08 - Macintouch

...iPhoto 08 is much slower than 06. When I open it, the MDS process all of a sudden uses a ton of CPU, anywhere from 30%-100%. This happens as long as iphoto is open. Closing iPhoto fixes the problem. I'm running a black macbook 2GHz Intel Core 2, 1GB RAM....

Apple has figured out how to make Aperture look better -- it's now more responsive than iPhoto! I sure hope this will turn out to be a fixable bug. In imported 26 images into an empty folder, and mid-way through the fifth full screen edit iPhoto became sluggish and my MacBook fan roared to life.

Update: I tried another session and I didn't run into this problem, but I avoided full screen editing this time. I'm hoping this really is a bug, possibly with the full screen edits. The editing tools are all significantly improved. I like the events features because I never used rolls, events are simpler. it's odd that double clicking the title bar doesn't hide iPhoto, maybe Apple's abandoning that age-old UI feature.

If this isn't fixed, then I'd suggest not upgrading to iLife '08, but instead save your pennies for Lightroom.

(iLife '08 includes iPhoto 7.01, but most people call it iPhoto '08.)

Panorama from ProVUE: stealth product from stealth company

I remember Panorama as a FileMaker alternative back in the days when there were at least six significantly marketed end-user database solutions for the Mac. So when I read a Macintouch notice of a new version of Panorama I paid a visit to the ProVUE web site:

ProVUE Company Product History.

...2002 The Panorama iPod Organizer combines the power of Panorama's unique RAM based database technology with the portability and flexibility of the iPod for storing phone numbers, email addresses, flight numbers, appointment times ... all the important information you need to access on the go...

It's quite a list of products, most of which I'd never heard of. It's a curious example of a company that's lasted a very long time, but keeps a pretty low profile. I suspect their niche market is older machines running commercial applications -- they still support Classic!