Fresh Apple: TheAppleBlog (4 сообщения)

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TheAppleBlog
TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
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Penguin Plans to Make Books Shinier with iPad
Penguin doesn’t want to just continue releasing your standard, garden-variety e-books on a new platform with the iPad. CEO John Makinson showed off what his company had in mind for the platform at a presentation earlier this week, as reported by paidContent.

Penguin is apparently looking to sidestep the iBookstore altogether and sell content through the regular App Store, at least unless Apple has additional formats beyond .epub to offer for the iBook app. The publisher wants to offer embedded interactive content in its titles, including audio, video and device-to-device functions.

Looking at what Penguin is planning, I’m reminded of those elaborate electronic reading learning systems designed for children, or the original electronic books, which included simple noisemakers alongside traditional paper texts. In other words, it’s kind of neat, especially if you’re a five-year old, but it doesn’t really strike me as the exciting future of books Penguin is making it out to be. Besides, I don’t want a five-year old getting my iPad all grubby and sticky. Here’s a video of what the publisher was showing off:

The books demoed that were aimed at a more mature audience were a little more impressive, but I was mostly struck by how much they resembled regular apps more than anything else. They seemed like slightly less capable apps, in fact, in that they were still trying to look like books despite there being no point to that. People have developed great medical and astronomy apps for the iPhone (and iPad, by extension) platform. Why would I choose a book that’s been somewhat awkwardly made into an app instead of something designed, from concept to finished product, specifically for the platform?

As someone who avidly enjoys reading, and also buys more iPhone apps than is probably wise or justifiable, even if I do write for an Apple-centric blog, I’m not sold on Penguin’s vision of the future of books on the iPad. I don’t read books for the same reason that I use software applications or interact with rich media, and I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of mixing the two concepts. I think in doing so, you run the risk of losing the value of one or both of these activities.

A quote by Makinson illustrates exactly what scares me about Penguin’s plans:

We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about.

Cool stuff? Books aren’t cool. They don’t need to be, and your desperate attempts at staying relevant won’t change that.

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Steam and Valve Games Headed to the Mac

Us Mac gamers are a much abused, much maligned lot. We get titles late, and most never at all. By the time most titles do come to the Mac, we’ve probably already broken down and played them using Boot Camp or that gaming PC we hide in the closet that we bought specifically for the purpose. Today, things are looking up.

PC game maker and distributor Valve is dropping all kinds of hints, which are by no means ambiguous, that Steam and many of its titles are headed to the Mac sometime in the near future. MacRumors and various other Mac news sites received teaser images direct from Valve themselves, all of which point to that very same conclusion.

The teaser received by MacRumors features Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman wielding a crowbar and wearing an Apple logo on his chest. The image was sent “in anticipation of an upcoming announcement from Valve.” No timeframe or additional details about this announcement were included, however, so we’re left to speculate about that, although next week sees the annual Game Developers Conference taking place in San Francisco, so that’s a good candidate for a potential date.

Other sites also received tantalizing teaser images in a similar vein, which, when you notice the iPhone-like selector control at the bottom of the images, gives a pretty good indication that all are from the same series and further evidence of a Mac connection. MacNN received one using turrets from Team Fortress 2 and Portal acting as Mac and PC from the Justin Long/John Hodgman series of ads:

Shacknews got this image of a Team Fortress 2 Heavy class character as an iPod silhouette:

Eurogamer received this one, featuring a Left 4 Dead character and the “Hate Different” twist on Apple’s longtime slogan:

Rock, Paper, Shotgun got another promo, which plays off of the ad for the first Mac and seems the most clear about Valve’s intentions:

Finally, Macworld received this picture of Half-Life 2’s Alyx Vance character reenacting Apple’s instantly recognizable 1984 commercial:

Additional evidence for the introduction of some kind of Mac version of Steam can be found in the inclusion of Mac elements in the latest beta builds of the game marketplace software. For Mac users who’ve maybe shut out all gaming news out of bitterness or jealousy, Steam is Valve’s digital game distribution software for the PC. It also provides digital rights management (DRM) services for developers, and multiplayer services for users. So far, only Mac Games Arcade provides a similar service for the Mac, but that’s honestly like comparing an aircraft carrier (Steam) to a dinghy (Mac Games Arcade).

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How-To: Use Time Machine Over a Network

I love Time Machine for its simplicity and the fact that it’s free. Apple did the right thing in creating a backup utility that was integrated into the OS and was actually useful. Anyone who has fought with Windows Backup can tell you, this has been needed for a long time. Apple created a beautiful backup utility and then made money on hardware that seamlessly works with it. For the home user, nothing could be more simple.

In the office environment however, users tend to backup to server shares and not local external drives. So, let’s take a look at how to use Time Machine over a network.

Setting it Up

It’s easy to do this in Leopard Xserve by sharing a backup folder. Under Server Admin, you can check the box “Enable as Time Machine backup destination.”

This worked great in Leopard but in Snow Leopard, Time Machine no longer saw this as an available destination. Luckily, changing a property for System Preferences solves this.

Enter this command in Terminal:

sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This tells Time Machine to treat network shares as possible backup locations. Now, when I go to select a disk in the Time Machine preferences, I see my mounted AFP share listed.

Restoring

So that’s how you get the Time Machine backup working, but what about restoring. Most people don’t test the restore functionality but it’s the most important thing you can do. To restore a Time Machine backup over an AFP connection, first boot off the Snow Leopard install DVD. Then, Launch Terminal by clicking on the Utilities menu. In the terminal window, type the following commands.

mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine
mount -t afp afp://user:password@afpserver.local/ShareName /Volumes/TimeMachine

This will mount your AFP share and make it available to restore from. Quit Terminal and then run “Restore from Backup” from the Utilities menu. You will see your backup listed and you should now be able to restore from it.

Time Machine is a very nice utility and if you aren’t using it, you should be. I even have other Xserves backing themselves up to this share using Time Machine. Sure, there are third-party applications out there can do so much more, but I’m for just getting the job done. Integration with the OS is also important to me. It’s the main reasons I use Safari as my main browser. As with all backup solutions though, you need to test the restore functionality once in a while. If anything, you might sleep better at night knowing your data is not only safe but recoverable.

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