iPhoto 7.02 breaks the old double-arrow scrollbar hack

I've had double arrows at the top and bottom of my scrollbars since I implemented this 10.1 hack:

macosxhints.com - Scroll arrows at both ends of scroll bars [10.1]:

... OS 10.1 adds an option in the General prefs to have double-scroll arrows at the bottom of the scroll bar. Scott R. wrote in with a quick preferences hack to enable double-scroll arrows at BOTH ends of the scroll bars. If you'd like to enable this feature, simply start a terminal session and type: defaults write 'Apple Global Domain' AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth You then need to logout and login (or, perhaps, simply force quit the Finder) to see the effect ... but once you've done so, you should have double-scroll arrows at both ends of your scroll bars.

....To return to the normal mode, use: defaults write 'Apple Global Domain' AppleScrollBarVariant Single (or you could just open the [Appearance] pane in the System Prefs and check 'At top and bottom') or defaults write 'Apple Global Domain' AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleMax to put them together only at the bottom (again, this is equivalent to clicking 'Together' in the General prefs panel for scroll arrows).

Alas in 10.4.10 with iPhoto 7.02 one sees odd gaps at each end of the scrollbar. I turned off this old hack and iPhoto's scrollbars appear normal again. I'm not sure they don't have some new behaviors though ... they feel somewhat Leopardish.

The dead quality desktop webcam market

It's a sad truth that the primary market for webcams has always been "adult entertainment". This favors cheap devices with optics that leave much to the imagination (example, Microsoft's disappointing LifeCam VX-6000). Bad news then for business users who need a sub $300 desktop solution that will work with a typically stressed corporate LAN/WAN.

Until a year or so ago Mac users had a uniquely only good solution -- the Apple iSight. Firewire, not coincidentally. Even Apple couldn't make money off this market though, and they downgraded to a cheap embedded solution that won't work for sharing whiteboards (newer iMacs have a slightly better camera, but it still doesn't focus).

PC and Mac users alike had another solution -- about 3-5 years ago. Back then Canon (and others?) sold firewire connected digital video cameras with a "network mode"

...You can turn your Optura camcorder into a powerful webcam. Both the Optura 400 camcorder features a Network Mode that enables you to remotely control your camcorder through the DV Messenger2 software application. Control the focus and zoom of your camcorder from a computer while streaming the video via its IEEE 1394 terminal...

Those were the days of good articles on using a camcorder as a webcam and software to fill in what vendors left out. Not any more! I can't find anyone who sells a digital video camera with this kind of capability today.

So, basically, USB and lack of customer interest killed the mid-range high quality PC webcam market, and the Mac market may be little better*. I hope Cringely is right when he says that new teleconferencing solutions are just around the corner. There's nothing to do now but wait ...

*Andrew is going for his iMac soon, so I'll have an update on how well Apple's new embedded webcam works. A used iSight, btw, sells today for about what it sold for brand new.

Screencasting for XP: BB FlashBack Express $30

I'm quite happy with iShowU for OS X screencasting (screen video capture), but the XP equivalents I've seen have been quite expensive or poor quality. I've got a new one to try for my employer projects (XP): BB FlashBack Express for $30 with an excellent trial policy. It looks quite promising, I'll update this post with what I learn.

Update 8/30/07: That was quick. A complete flop. It died without a notice after the first trivial video capture and left a hung process I had to kill manually. I suspect it doesn't like dual monitor configuration. At least it didn't waste much time. I'll try doing XP video captures using an old digital camera from my closest, and if that doesn't work I'll run Windows remote desktop from a Mac and use iShowU to capture the XP video.

ConceptDraw can import MindManager files

The ConceptDraw MINDMAP application for OS X and Windows ($200) claims to be able to import MindJet MindManager files:

ConceptDraw MINDMAP: mindmapping and brainstorming tool overview

.. MindManager Import You can seamlessly open files created by MindManager users on both Windows and Mac OS...

MindManager is definitely the market leader (alas, Inspiration, you peaked too early -- though I do hope you hang in there) in this segment. It's a fairly expensive product however, and it's very much a "lock-in" play. You put your data in MindManager, you'll never get it out again.

Until now. MINDMAP looks like it's aiming for the MindManager market, and it supports OPML export. They need to drop the price though if they want to get serious -- MindManager 7 for Mac is $130! There's no way MINDMAP can charge $70 more than MindManager and be a serious alternative.

I suggest they think about charging $130 for a dual platform license -- for the same price as MM get the right to use both the Windows and OS X versions on all machines one uses.

iPhoto beware: sharing doesn't include movies

I ran across yet another iPhoto "gotcha".

The only semi-approved way to migrate files with some metadata (caption, comments and date*) between iPhoto Libraries is by "sharing". It's a poor substitute for import capabilities, but this is what iPhoto's Product Management has given us. Among other limitations this kind of sharing allows one to import the last version, but not the original. The original is lost.

Tonight I tried sharing an iPhoto '08 Library from my MacBook to the main Library that sits on my iMac. (I've not yet updated to iMac to iPhoto '08 because I like to give Apple's releases two months to get the disastrous bugs out. One non-disastrous limitation is that Google's iPhoto Picasa Web Album plug-in doesn't work in iPhoto '08.) Sharing photos works, but movies aren't shared.

* I don't remember if keywords were preserved with iPhoto '07 sharing, but they aren't shared between iPhoto '07 and iPhoto '08.

So if you travel with one Library, then share your work back to the main Library on your return home, then delete the travel Library -- you lose your videos.

Lovely. Thanks again Apple!

PS. iPhoto '08 is a very good upgrade in most regards. There are lots of small fixes, overall it's a big enough improvement that even with the #$!$#!%! missing Library import it's well worth the price of iLife '08 to upgrade. I do recommend, however, using it in test mode only for at least one more month. Apple has a consistent history of disastrous iPhoto bugs with each major upgrade. Incidentally, there's something funny with the way the scroll bars work, they don't render correctly for me. I think that's because I enabled the "two arrow" hack years ago, I think I may need to undo that one.

Update 8/29: Wow, you can't even export movies from iPhoto 7.02 ('08). If you select movies then choose the "export" menu item, you get a "no item selected" message. The dialog's options make no sense for video only. It's pretty obvious Apple is trying to forget that they positioned iPhoto as a unified media library! You can click on the movie files and drag them to the desktop. When I copied them manually to my main Library they did keep the correct date attributes. I also saw my shared iPhoto 7.02 library vanish shortly after mounting in iPhoto 6. It took a while to get it back, I had to stop sharing the entire library and instead share a "smart folder" that had all photos but no movies. I was able to import all the versions (I compared counts). I confirmed that this type of "import" does discard the Originals.

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.