Leopard breaks AppleWorks, what about Classic

Leopard, aka OS X 10.5, breaks AppleWorks:

Macintouch: Leopard

....For anyone using AppleWorks, convert your files before you do the migration to Leopard. AppleWorks will not load in Leopard. Some files will open in iWork & Numbers, but others will even break the new programs. Large files seem to be the issue, and converting to Excel or Word formats before the upgrade would be a smart move..."

This is a bit surprising. I wonder what other OS X applications will break with 10.5.

I'm not too surprised though, Apple has always had a somewhat cavalier attitude towards breaking applications. Too bad they don't match that with support for old file formats -- including their own dam$%ed file formats.

Which reminds me -- I wonder if it breaks Classic? Classic won't run on Intel of course, but I run it on my G5 iMac with OS X 10.4.10. There's still not much in the way of children's games or educational software for OS X [1] -- and I sometimes fire up MORE 3.1 or FullWrite Professional to open old files.

Realistically, I should wait until February until I update my G5, or until iPhone 2.0 makes me update. January, after 10.5.1 and updates to Retrospect client and a bunch of other apps I rely on, will be when I update the MacBook.

Overall I'm looking forward to 10.5.1 however. There are many things on the feature list I really want (fully supported screen sharing, remote control, iChat, Apple's new version of "Outlook" called Mail.app, the signed application model, the memory map randomization, built-in PDF manipulation, better scanning support, etc, etc.) This looks like an upgrade for power users, developers, and for the support of good things to come.

[1] Really, there's not much in the way of interesting educational software or children's games on Windows either. That market basically went to Nintendo. There's more support for older software on XP than OS X though.

Clever exploit of Apple's OS transition

Apple will provide $10 upgrades to 10.5 if you've just bought a 10.4 machine. This can be translated into a clever exploit ....

Macs-imizing your Leopard upgrade:

... If the bottom line is the bottom line, the lowest retail price for Leopard is probably $109 at Amazon. However, for a few hundred dollars more, you can get a new Mac now and a copy of OS X in the mail later that you are ethically and legally bound to install on that purchased Mac. The question then becomes: which Mac?...

The Mini is a lovely machine. My mothers has run for over a year with essentially no maintenance. I check in on it every six months or so (she lives pretty far away).

I wonder if a Mini will run OS X 10.5 server? Then you could buy the mini, buy server, put server on the Mini and that $10 10.5 goes to ...

Mindjet MindManager: If it could only do acyclic graphs

Mindjet MindManager is "mind mapping software". It lets users create an outline (hierarchy) that can render as a two-dimensional layout of boxes connected by lines.

MindManager's strengths are its Microsoft Office  integration, its marketing, its attractive output and its corporate orientation. It comes in XP/Vista and OS X versions, the latter is a true OS X app but lacks some functionality. I've written about MindManager before; functionally it's similar to the much older Inspiration but it's a lot prettier.

Pretty counts.

MindManager has one glaring defect -- from a geek point of view. It can only do trees - strict hierarchies. No networks, no matrices, no directed acyclic graphs. No inheritance.

So a box (node) can't belong to to two or more branches (arcs).

This is a pain. Any reasonably complex domain representation needs a node to have multiple memberships.

I think the UI for this is not too hard. This is basically what a "Favorite" does in XP, or a "shortcut" does in OS X. The file lives in a single place in the file system hierarchy, but a reference can appear in another place.

Symantec More 3.1 did something similar with its outlines. You could have a branch appear in more than one place. Multiple inheritance in other words. [1]

MindManager could allow users to click on a box (node) and create a "favorite" that could be dragged and dropped anywhere. They don't even need to implement full references, it would be ok if clicking on a 'favorite' merely took one to the "true" object. (Symantec MORE 3.1 did the full include model.)

If some wants to displace MindManager from my desktop, all they need to do is allow me to model an acyclic graph, or even network. Trees are very 19th century.

Ok, so they have to be pretty as well.

[1] So it's not patentable guys. It's been done.

From PLATO to OS X iCal 3.0 - an illustrated history of Calendaring and Personal Information Management

AppleInsider usually publishes Apple news and rumors with a bit of analysis, so I was bemused by today's Prince McLean article. He's written a brief illustrated history of the past 24 years of calendar-oriented personal information management, including screen shots from Agenda, Notes, MeetingMaker, Organizer and more.

This guy is serious about the PIM/calendar world. He may even be nuttier about this than I am now, though in my heyday I'd have gone a few rounds with him.

The article is full of insider tips, like this one ...

AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X Leopard: iCal 3.0 [Page 3]

... Even home users that have no need for group calendaring will benefit from the new server-side improvements to iCal. That's because Apple didn't just build its iCal Server to fill out a feature check list. It has also begun using it company wide as its own corporate scheduling software in place of Meeting Maker. That means Apple employees are also now using the iCal client, and the result is that iCal itself has progressed rapidly...

Hey, we definitely need group calendaring in our home.  It's not just for Apple. Eventually we'll have five users (six if you count Kateva, but dogs don't care for calendars) on five machines with five calendars.

Now I'm thinking about buying a Mac Mini (Nano?) and running it headless with 10.5 server on it and a big external drive. I've looked over the 10.5 features, and I think Apple spec'd 10.5 from this blog (hey, it's theoretically possible) -- though I also think it will be very buggy for the next six months...

Technical comments on 3G limitations

So Jobs wasn't simply exercising his reality distorter ...

Why Apple's iPhone Doesn't Need 3G - Seeking Alpha

...High bandwidth networks drain batteries. Power consumption of any chip increases according to the frequency squared. That means if you want your network to go 10 times faster, the chip inside your phone managing that network consumes 100 times the power that a slower chip would (It's not quite that simple because of different signaling techniques, but the overall principle still holds). This is why Steve Jobs has decried the power consumption of 3G networks -- that speedy signaling actually matters in a battery-powered device. So why don't European users see this power-draining effect today with their phones? Well, check out the Nokia message boards and you'll find that they do experience some of the effect, but that effect is diminished by the fact that Europe has a much higher density of cell towers than the US does. And since cell phones decrease their radio power output when signal strength is high, the frequency effect of 3G transmission is partially offset by the fact they can use lower power amplifier settings for their radios....

I suspect the truth is more complex, I'm don't think 802.11g is really 25 times more power hungry than 802.11b for example. Maybe 2-3 times, but not 25. All the same, I do believe there's relationship between energy costs and throughput, particularly if the underlying protocol is computationally demanding.

The iPhones bandwidth issues are not a part of my 9 essential iPhone requirements list [1]. I'm much more concerned about using the phone PIM features when there's no network available at all.

[1] I see Apple has addressed item #8. So they only have 8 more to go and they make their big sale.

Why I'll buy Leopard - next January

Nobody seems to care about this, but Apple cares enough to rank it fourth on their list of new Finder features, right after the also incredibly great "back to my mac" feature.

Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Features - 300+ New Features

Back to My Mac
Connect to any of your Mac computers at home from any Mac on the Internet. Your home computers appear in the shared section of the sidebar. Just click and you’re in.


Instant Screen Sharing from the Finder
Start an interactive screen sharing session with other Macs on your network. Just select the Mac from your sidebar and (if authorized) you can see and control the Mac as if you were right in front of it. Change a system preference, publish an iPhoto library, or add a new playlist to iTunes."

This is going to hurt, because I'm sure Back to My Mac will require a .Mac account. So I'll be buying Leopard for two machines and getting a family .Mac account. Requirements, btw, are well in the scope of my G5 iMac.

10.5 will, of course, break EMC Retrospect Pro (the latest version actually works) and I'll need an update to my VMWare windows emulator. Happily the Retrospect server runs on my ancient XP box so I just need the client update.

I won't, of course, touch anything until 10.5.1 and until both Retrospect and VMWare's updates have been on the market for at least 1 month. I'm guessing January 2008 at the earliest.

I know Andrew will take the arrows for me.

Google/Picasa Web Album uploader for iPhoto 7

Google could have done a much better communication job over the past two months, but there's news of an updated Picasa Web Album uploader.

The web site says they now support iPhoto 4 to 7; the version commitment is a much requested improvement. iPhoto 7 comes with iLife '08, the blog posting here calls it iPhoto '08 (emphases mine):

Today's release of version 1.1 of the Picasa Web Albums Uploaders adds support for Apple's new iPhoto '08... this release installs and updates via Google Updater to ensure that you are running the latest version.

While our first release used a private API to talk with the Picasa Web Albums server, the new version is built on the public Google Data API interfaces and our Objective-C GData Library. This will make it easier for us to keep up with Picasa Web Albums' new features. For example, the iPhoto export plug-in now can convert keywords in iPhoto to tags in Picasa Web Albums.

Our goal is to keep the Uploaders as quick, straightforward utilities that make Picasa Web Albums readily available to Mac users. You can give us feedback about them at the Picasa Help discussion group.

The last bit almost sounds like an apology. The language of the post is a bit ambiguous, but it sounds like they've updated both the standalone OS X and the iPhoto plug-in uploaders. The Keyword to Tag conversion is much appreciated.

Update 10/27/07: Unfortunately, there's a significant regression in the new uploader. The old uploader concatenated the iPhoto Name and Description fields. The new uploader maps the Name to PWA caption and ignores Description. This behavior should be configurable, but, more importantly, Google needs to open source the uploader so users can configure it.

Update 10/27/07b: Someone who seems pretty knowledgeable responded to my Google Groups post. Their was real thought put into the design, though I fear the thought was misguided. It actually uses the Name field value if it's been changed, otherwise it uses the Description field value. So the behavior is going to seem unpredictable to many users. The author clearly is not an iPhoto expert, or he'd have known that Batch Update makes it trivially easy to set the Name value to a date or meaningful string with counter; so that edits to comments are an easy extension. This needs to be fixed.