iTunes for OS X is not a Mac application

There are many great features of iTunes. The query implementation, including the ability to nest queries, is superb.

Against this must be set the fact that iTunes is not a Mac application. If it were produced by anyone but Apple we'd all dump on it.

iTunes does not respect the Dock, for heavens sake! It ignores it when sizing windows. Even Firefox 3 respects the Dock (a very nice improvement over FF 2 in that regard, among many others).

Click the green plus icon on any Mac app and the primary window sizes to the "largest size consistent with good screen practices". Click it on iTunes/OS X and you get the mini-player.

That's just gross.

Firefox 3 is a vastly better OS X citizen than iTunes.

Isn't there anyone in Cupertino with a modicum of shame?

I get video output from my (old) video iPod. Finally.

Greed has a different meaning when applied to a corporation.

By human standards corporations are supposed to be greedy. "Greed is Good".

But there's still such a thing as a Corporate Greed. That's when a corporation takes bites that generate near term returns, but make customers bitter and lead to longer term losses.

Apple does that on occasion, most recently with the way they sell their current iPod video out connector. More on that in a moment, but first ...

I have an old fifth generation video iPod [1]. I've never done much with the video -- the few times I've tried to output to a TV I failed. We're heading out for a long road trip though, and I've loaded up the iPod with TV shows. Time to see if I can get video output working. A good Father's Day project.

The output will go to an incredibly cheap very low end 2 panel auto DVD player marketed using a recycled "Kawasaki" brand [2] with a min-jack AV.

It's probably been 3 years since I failed to get video out of the iPod. I'd forgotten ...

• you can get video output through the earphone jack as well as the dock connector
• there's a settings option hidden in the video menu that controls which connector gets the video stream. I use the "ask" option.

Both options require proprietary Apple video connectors [3]. Years ago, however, people discovered you could use a standard AV camcorder with the fifth generation (not current!) iPods if you swapped the output cables ...

O'Reilly Network -- Getting the Video out of Your New iPod--for Cheap! (Derrick Story, Nov 2005)

...In order to make your TV play back the iPod signal, you've got to redirect the outputs. You can't just plug the yellow RCA plug into the yellow RCA jack and the red into the red or the white into the white. No. Those geniuses at Apple send the video signal over the red RCA output. (Normally it arrives on yellow.) The sound comes through the white and yellow plugs.

I ended up going to an Apple store and testing this on iPod after iPod. They all have this quirk. It was intentional. But hey, it's proprietary. Woohoo. So here's what you have to do:

• Plug the red RCA plug into your TV's yellow RCA jack.
• Plug the yellow RCA plug into your TV's white RCA jack.
• Plug the white RCA plug into your TV's red RCA jack.

Except that never worked for me. Today I gave it another go, as the alternative was a trip to the Apple Store to buy the iPhone-compatible $50 DRMd, counterfeit-preventing, Apple-only dock connector video out cable set [4].

I tried 3 mini-jack to component cables, first against my TV's component inputs.

• white cable that came with my original iBook. It has the swapped cables Story describes, but it didn't work. I think it's a slightly different form of proprietary. It works with my camcorder if I swap its outputs!
• black camcorder cable: nope, just got hash
• another camcorder cable: worked perfectly.

The "Kawasaki" has a mini-AV input, so I used a short male-to-mini-AV adapter to plug in there, mating the connectors as per Story's description. Works very well, with a lovely image. If you turn it around, however, it doesn't work. Since it's a mini Av to mini-Av cable it should work in either "direction" but this hacked mini-mini cable is one directional.

My guess is that Apple's variation isn't just a cable swap, but differs slightly in connector layout as well. This may not be a simple attempt to make a steep margin on cables -- though Apple is certainly not above that. The analog output jack on the fifth generation iPod, like the analog output on the iBook, is serving two purposes. It has to work perfectly with standard audio output, but it also has to support a video channel. This is different from a camcorder output, which need not support a stereo audio cable.

So Apple's analog output from this device may be justifiably atypical. Even so, we know some AV cables work - albeit with swapped outputs. I've run into less defensible variations of this elsewhere, such as converters that claim to allow 3.5mm stereo headsets to work with "standard" 2.5mm phone earset (microphone) connectors.

If you're trying to get video from the 5G iPod headphone jack start with a good quality AV cable and test at the store if possible.

Of course if you have a modern iPod/iPhone/iTouch you're out of luck, you need to buy Apple's $50 connector kit.[4]

[1] You can figure out which iPod you have with this rather complex Apple support document.

[2] I can spend $2000 for Apple iMacs with heat problems and screens that last two years, and $200 for something from an anonymous Chinese factory that lasts forever and just works. Why?

[3] That's not the greedy part.

[4] Yep, that's the Corporate Class Greed. The kit includes a USB charger -- I have maybe six of those. If Apple had sold the cable for $25 without the charger I'd say they were greedy by human standards, but within corporate norms. I need to buy one of these when I get iPhone 2, I'll try to find a used one first or hope some counterfeiter has broken Apple's anti-counterfeiting scheme. Of course if Apple eliminated the charger and dropped the price to $25 I'd buy it from them.

Update 6/15/08

Apple is greedy with the way they package their proprietary AV output connector, but there is some justification for their proprietary approach.

For example:

• converters for connecting "standard" stereo mini-jack headphones to cell phone 2.5 mm outputs don't work.
• We're carrying a (cursed) Flip video camcorder too. It has a video/mono output jack. This won't work with the 3 component cable that works with the iPod. I have 4 different video/mono output cables that came with various cameras including the Flip. The first one I tested didn't work. The second did.
• As mentioned in my revised post above, supporting both stereo headphones and AV output probably requires some changes to the usual camcorder output.
  

In this world of seemingly standard audio-video 3.5mm and 2.5 mm mini-jack output my sense is the only reliable standard is the 3.5 mm stereo output connector. Everything else is more or less proprietary.

Burn: The best optical disk burn solution for OS X.

I love Burn.

I've tried tried other commercial alternatives, particularly trying to get rid of the invisible .DS_Store and other dot files OS X can put on CDs.

They flopped. I was back to using the built-in burning tool, but it doesn't let me readily enforce the lowest common denominator (PC Juliet) standard, and I'm not sure it fully excludes the treacherous dot files.

Today though, my OS X gave me the ridiculous 0x8002006D error message during a burn. That means something is wrong. Helpful.

I fired up Burn for the first time. Simple. Lets me set PC Joliet easily. Shows dot files so I can remove them. It also showed the error, but said my CD burner couldn't calibrate. That's really helpful, it suggests a hardware problem. I blew in some compressed air and used a different CD and it completed the burn.

Great app. Open source and free. If they provide something other than PayPal for donations I'll send money.

As for the burner -- well, this is a G5 iMac. Those machines should never have been made. Fantastic heat problems, especially with the buggy hardware control software Apple used for the first year or two of the G5 iMac life. I suspect the DVD is another victim of too much heat for too long -- this machine is heading for the scrap heap at age 2.7 years. Not happy.

I'll try more CD cleaning methods of course. The compressed air jet was a quickie.

Update 6/15/08: Rich T says Simply Burns is also very well done.

Another Google product bites the dust. That's good.

This is probably the third or fourth Google app I've used that's been quietly discontinued or effectively abandoned.

Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued

...Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that synchronizes your bookmarks, web history, browser sessions and passwords across multiple computers by temporarily saving them to Google's servers. Unfortunately, this was the project of a small team at Google and it's no longer maintained...

I was think yesterday that Google Browser Sync was due to be abandoned. I'm getting psychic.

I'm glad they're at least officially shutting it down.

Google has been great at starting things, lousy at finishing them. They need to cut way back on new initiatives until they decide what they're going to be serious about, then fund maintenance properly. They also have to start recruiting people who like doing software fit, finish, and maintenance, and layoff hiring inventive types for a year or two.

For example -- either fix Google Calendar Outlook sync or abandon it.

I think all Google customers have a long list of apps that need attention (BlogThis!?). One cheer for a sign that Google knows they have a problem.

Cisco VPN Client for 10.5.3

Cisco VPN Client 4.9.01.0100 works for 10.4 and later, including 10.5.

It can be hard to find Cisco VPN client downloads, Andrew got this one for me.

Update: I couldn't get the image to download fully, and now it's offline. Comments tell us Cisco's distribution policy has not change, this was an unauthorized image and it's probably been removed.
I was able to download an image through my university account. It took 3 tries, I kept finding older versions on various U servers. The official site (UMN authentication required) had the version I needed: Cisco VPN Client 4.9.01.0100

I think for most people that's the best way to get an updated VPN Client -- find someone with access to an university account and ask them to get the client. Just be sure they know what the latest version is! I suspect many universities have multiple distribution sites.

Outlook 2003 treachery: revising recurrences wipes appointment data

I’m a hard core Outlook user.

I’m not proud of this. I wish Ecco Professional had survived, or even Agenda.

Still, it has some brilliant moments – especially when Outlook 2003 is combined with Windows Search (formerly Windows Desktop Search).

But.

Against good design, like the custom views (too bad the sort category view bug took ten years to fix!), must be set the the real nasties. Like one I just fully understood today.

If you change the pattern of a recurring appointment, you wipe all prior exceptions. That’s fine, but the “exceptions” are any appointment that has attachments, agenda items, category tags, etc.

Want to go back and look at a past agenda? Forget it.

Maybe you’ve attached attributes to appointments and keywords so the appointment record can serve as a lookup and index to printed notes?

Gone. Vaporized. All of it.

This is just plain evil.

Reduce SMS texting spam to cell phones

Cell phone spam costs recipients money – thanks to the insane charges carriers apply to text messages.

Pogues has some great tips - How to Block Cellphone Spam. The best at the moment is to change your SMS ID to an alias, spammers don’t bother to guess those and probably can’t process them with available software.

Clearly we’ll need better solutions though …