OS X Apps to contemplate

The unexpectedly vital Macworld has several list of OS X apps and products to contemplate...

• Gems I’m thankful (nov 2009)
• Mac Gems of the Year (2009)
• GemFest 2009: All-time favorite affordable software
• 25th annual Editors' Choice Awards

Some of these I use all the time. Others sound interesting, but potentially risky. The ones that I personally might look into include:

• Shimo - VPN management
• RipIt - copy DVD
• ClickToFlash - Safari plug-in
• Back-In-Time - advanced interface to a Time Machine backup
• BusyCal 1.0 - tempting. iCal doesn't merely suck, it wretches
• Dropbox - I've been resisting, but I'm becoming resigned to yet-another-service
• Acorn - vector and raster for $50. That's hard to equal.

ClickToFlash--
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Creating a photo collage: Picasa on OS X (Intel)

My family does some things well, but family pictures are not among them. So for the Solstice this year I had to go the "collage" route.

iPhoto does many things well, but Collage creation is not among them. (Neither is Library merge, but don't get me started.) So for our Solstice collage I had to turn to Google's free Picasa 3.6 for OS X (Intel only). It worked very well.

If you do go this way, and you're not a Picasa expert, these install and setup tips might help:

1. Download and install Picasa 3.6 for OS X Intel. It's a very straightforward drag and drop to Applications install.
2. Launch. It will start reading in your photo library. You don't have all day, so you want to turn this off. Go to Tools:Folder Manager and remove everything.
3. Go to Preferences and turn off face recognition. You don't need it and it will slow things down.
4. From iPhoto export your images to a desktop folder. (Picasa can browse your iPhoto albums (not events) in a mixed year/name hierarchy, but it won't let monitor just one album/folder. It's all or nothing for iPhoto monitoring. So you have to export.)
5. Using Tools:Folder Manager monitor the folder you just created to.
6. Select what you want to work with, and choose Create:Collage.

I didn't fully investigate the Collage tools, but they're impressive. Right click on images to change their stacking order. Click and move the red dot to change size and orientation. There's a "Clips" view on the left side you can add from, but I didn't investigate it further.

From here you can create your collage as a JPG that can be edited and exported. Export and them move it back into iPhoto.

I might start using Picasa for Mac as a supplement to iPhoto. Among other things, it's a powerful tool for reviewing and managing Picasa Web Albums -- which Apple conspicuously fails to support. If I do I'll write more on that, and add a link to this post.

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Google Groups and the lost free version of Google Apps

Google Groups, long thought to be following DejaNews into extinction, has been reborn as a Google Apps service. It provides mailing-list like functions, something that Gmail makes (intentionally) very tedious.

Google Apps Premier that is ... (emphases mine)

About groups - Google Apps Help

... As a Google Apps administrator, you can create and manage groups for your entire domain. If you enable the user-managed groups service (available for Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition)...

So we can't add it to our free family Google App.

The free version of Google Apps doesn't show up on the main page any more. It's still around though, hanging off Business Apps page (nonprofit is there too). I imagine it's a pain for Google to (non) support.

If the business version were $25 a user I'd pay for it, but $50/year/user is steep for what my family does.

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Build your site from Google web elements

Code fragments to embed bits of Google properties into any JavaScript compatible web site: Google Web Elements.

Note "JavaScript compatible". That rules out Google's all-but-forgotten Sites.

Louis Gray has the details (via Jesse Stay), he reminds us that YouTube is the most famous "embed" ...

... In a recent meeting I had with Google engineers at the company's Mountain View campus, I was told the expansion of Web Elements is an extension of the company's goal to be open and enable data to flow between sites, rather than keeping all the traffic for itself in a central location. But it is perceived that Google hasn't yet done a fantastic job of highlighting this available content, so, starting today, Web Elements on downstream sites will feature a Web Elements logo and click through to the service's directory...

I've updated the "translate" button on this Blogger-generated page (using the HTML/Javascipt widget) with the new Web Elements "translate" function. It displays correctly in the language of any visitor. Here's how one of my blogs looks translated to Hindi:

Not bad! On the other hand, their Calender embed is broken. They've replaced the "subscribe to calendar" button with an "Elements" button. WTF?!

They did better with the new "reader shared items" seen on the right side of this blog page and inline below. The new version now includes a portion of your "notes".

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AT&T call quality – down the tubes in the Twins

Until recently Minneapolis and St. Paul AT&T customers were spared the misery of the San Francisco and Manhattan iPhone users.

Alas, our day has come. Even as AT&T makes more noises about transaction-based pricing dropped calls have become a serious problem for me. I just had 3 drops in a 60 minute conference call.

I’ve installed AT&T’s free “Mark the Spot” app and submitted my first report. It makes me feel better, even if all it does is generate an SMS response from the death star. In the old days I’d have the more satisfying experience of joining a class action lawsuit, but the Bushies more or less cut that option off. Now we have to hope more US Senators start using iPhones. Those customers can get satisfaction.

I’m sympathetic to AT&T’s problems. The industry’s business model was predicated on their customers owning crummy phones that used very little bandwidth. That “tragedy of the commons” model collapsed when the iPhone landed. I doubt Verizon would have done much better.

AT&T does need to switch to bandwidth, transactional or tiered pricing. Problem is, they won’t be able to resist the temptation to shaft their customers during the transition. For example, if AT&T introduced tiered pricing but made SMS messaging a bundled component of transaction use, they might fashion a win-win for us and them.

I don’t see them being that smart however.

Sigh. I’ll put “Mark the Spot” on my home screen.

Office 2008 for Mac - first impressions and the PPT type lag bug

I've revised this post.

My first impressions were of Microsoft Office 2008 were very positive ...

I'll put my Microsoft disgust up against that of any other geek.

So watch out for the end of days, because I have something ni ... n... nuh ... not so bad to say about Office 2008 for Mac (about $80-90 on Amazon).

Look at this ...

Yeah, two PowerPoint windows open at once.

You're not impressed? Then you don't use Office on Windows, where the #$!$# Windows are glued inside the app window. You can't move one presentation or spreadsheet to one monitor, and a different one to a second monitor.

I must say more, even though it pains me so.

I could mention Microsoft's licensing, compared to, say, Nisus Writer Pro ...

Amazon.com: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition: Software

... Don't need Microsoft Exchange Server Support or workflow management? Home and student users pay for just the features they need. Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition comes with three licenses of non-Exchange-enabled Office 2008 licensed for noncommercial computers...

Three licenses. In case you're wondering, this is effectively 3 machine licenses -- you're not asked for a license for each user on a single machine.

The multiple service pack updates are a pain, but the install was smooth. None of Adobe's problems with non-admin users. The only gotcha is you need to go into Entourage (dead and rotting software) and make sure every feature is turned off lest it seize control from iCal (undead and rotten software).

Pigs not flying yet? How about performance. Office 2008 is responsive on my G5 iMac. The Apps are much more Mac like than, say Aperture -- or many of Apple's products. The file formats are de facto standards (I wish this were not so).

Ohh, yeah. No button bar. Thank god.

I haven't made heavy use of it. I'm sure there are bugs. Even so, it's good enough that I'm willingly using it. Never thought I'd say that about a Microsoft product*.

* Ok, So I love Windows Live Writer. But that was developed outside of Microsoft and seems to have been abandoned by the borg.

Then, about a month later, I tried to use Office 2008 PowerPoint on a real presentation. This time I was using my quad core iMac with Snow Leopard, my earlier experience had been on an old G5.

It was unusable. The keystroke delay is intolerable. I wasted an hour then gave up and finished the work using PPT 2003 on my seven year old XP box.

I think it might work well on a G5, but it doesn't work acceptably on Intel machines.

I'm removing Office 2008 from my machines. I'll install iWork.

Update 4/6/2010: I was working on a presentation that seemed fine. Then I added text to a graphic slide. Instantly all text input became extremely slow. I reset the theme and text lag cleared again.

I think this is a theme corruption bug of some sort related to PPTs that have moved from XP to OS X.

There are some Office 2008 forum discussions of the type lag bug.

Update 4/6/2010b: I think there may be both theme and master slide associated bugs. I don't see any way in the view master slide UI to remove master slides (reset to standard). There are few to no master slide related help topics. PowerPoint 2008 is not a serious product. I expect the user base is becoming very small -- basically academics who don't use Keynote. I've uninstalled Office 2008, I'm going to use Office 2003 in my Fusion VM and I'll evaluate iWork and Keynote.

Update 4/8/10: A colleague tells me that PPT for XP has the largest and most intractable code base of any Microsoft project. I'd not have guessed that; maybe it explains why the Mac version is so bad. Keynote does a nice job of importing PPT files, but for now I'm using Fusion. I will probably buy iWork.

Now I understand why Jobs insisted Apple develop Keynote, and why the other iWork apps followed Keynote.

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iPhone Voice Memos.app - the secret feature

I wasn't that impressed with Voice Memos.app when if first appeared with OS 3. I joined the chorus complaining about the audio levels -- or lack thereof. It only works if you talk directly into the phone or headset mike. The record button should be huge, instead the UI is given over to a pointless graphic. It takes too many taps to close a recording. And so on.

There was, I thought, only one good feature of Voice Memos.app. It's fast. iTalk Lite had great features [1], but it was too damned slow to launch and record (I'd have paid for the pro version if it were five times faster).

That was before I discovered the secret feature.

If you're wearing Apple's earset and you have Voice Memos running, one click of the microphone switch starts recording, a second click stops and saves.

So if I'm driving with my right earset in, I can click dictate and click again. No distraction, no multi-taps, no delays. This is a great feature. Now I love Voice Memos.

So, where the #$$!$ is this documented? My Google searching can't find mention of this feature. Heck, I can't find any documentation on Voice Memos.app.

This is classic Apple. Great feature, no documentation, only the wise know. Is it so they don't catch flack if an undocumented feature disappears? Is it some conspiracy to sell David Pogue's great iPhone book? (Sorry, I bought it already. I'm not buying every edition, so I don't know if this is in the latest one.)

PS. There is Apple documentation on some of the microphone switch's features. You can use it, for example, to decline an incoming call (hold 2 seconds) or to switch and hold (click once) or switch and kill (hold 2 seconds). No mention of Voice Memos.app though.

Update 4/28/2010: I still use and appreciate Voice Memos, but recently I tried to use iTalk Lite to record a hour call. It worked well until minute 45 when a background notification caused it to lock up. I had to kill it and that lost the recording too.