Friday, May 4, 2007

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) (6 сообщений)

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  • InfoWorld columnist on iPhone open development

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    Will the iPhone support third party application development? Tom Yager of InfoWorld writes that it needs to, because "Open is just how phones are done, and not just smart phones." Yager talks about BlackBerry's Java support, Nokia's Symbian support and Windows Mobile, contrasting these to Apple's as-of-now closed platform.

    At this time, both the iPod and Apple TV have been opened to illicit third party development without Apple's cooperation. Of the two, development for the iPod has been far harder; just a few third-party items are available. Apple TV, in contrast, is essentially a slimmed-down Mac Mini running a compact version of OS X, which is more or less what we expect the iPhone to be. Porting software to Apple TV has been extremely easy.

    Yes, the iPod also has official third party software in its games offerings, but how long can this "fully blessed" approach go on? Does Apple need to continue controlling the content that will eventually run on the iPhones? Or will the iPhone open up beyond the "prison farm" to allow widescale third-party development?

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  • Roxio to announce Crunch, a new video conversion app

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    Looks like VisualHub and iSquint are going to have some competition on their hands, as Roxio on Monday will announce Crunch, their own entry into the software video conversion market. With computer-based video leaving the nest for devices like the Apple TV, the iPod and soon the iPhone, tools that can easily convert video from a plethora of sources and formats are becoming ever the more useful. Roxio looks to make a decent splash in the market with Crunch, as it features their typical UI (which, personally, I detest) and a nice array of features, including batch encoding of multiple files, conversion of DVDs created with Toast, iMovie, and other video editing apps (in other words: it won't rip and encode commercial DVDs), support for a very wide array of video formats including the elusive MPEG-1, presets for specific devices and one killer and rare feature you don't see in many (if any) other apps: encoding from VIDEO_TS files that are ripped straight from a DVD.

    Still, all this comes at a price: Crunch will cost $50, whereas similar solutions that don't do DVD or VIDEO_TS conversion, like VisualHub, can be had for half that. Still, we'll have to reserve a final judgment until we can get our hands on a copy. Until then, check out our gallery of Crunch screenshots to get a better perspective on whether you should try out a demo.
    [Correction: VisualHub does convert VIDEO_TS folders as of version 1.1; our apologies.]

    Gallery: Crunch - Roxio's video conversion utility

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  • Mac 101: Dragging and dropping from the Title bar

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    Have you ever noticed that teensy icon that appears in some title bars? It's an OS X feature that shows up in many editing applications. You'll see it in TextEdit, iMovie, Preview, Microsoft Office, and so forth. It's called a "proxy icon" and it allows you to drag and drop directly from the title bar. It's just as though you had clicked and dragged on the document icon in the Finder. For example, you can drag from iMovie to iDVD, or from Preview to the command line in Terminal, and so forth.

    It works like this: first, you have to save whatever you are working on if you've made any changes. The reason you have to save is that OS X assumes that when you drag and drop, you'll want all the latest information and updates included in your data. Saving makes that happen.

    Saving also makes the icon go from a light grey to a dark grey; you can always tell if you've made unsaved changes in these applications because of the icon's color. Go ahead, give it a try in TextEdit. Type some text and then save the file to disk. The icon appears for the first time (in dark grey) once you save your untitled file, and then if you start typing, the icon goes light grey until you save again.

    After saving, you can drag the proxy icon to another application and drop it onto either the application icon or into an open application window, or a Finder window. To perform the drag, click on the proxy icon and hold the mouse button down for a second until the icon darkens. Once it goes dark, you can drag it.

    The results of dragging the proxy icon are going to vary by source and target application. In most cases the effect should be the same as if you had dragged the Finder icon for the document. For example, if you drag a TextEdit document onto Mail or Eudora, it creates a new letter with your document as an attachment. If you drag onto a Terminal window or into another TextEdit document, you add a bit of text that shows the path to your document, e.g. /Users/ericasadun/Documents/mytesttext.txt. Drag it to Safari and it opens and displays the document in a new window. You can also drag pictures, videos, audio and other file types.

    Keep your eyes open and look for the proxy icon in your day-to-day applications.

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  • Rumors: iPhone displays to be installed

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    Mac Daily News reports that AT&T Mobility (the former Cingular) stores across the US will soon be getting their enormous iPhone displays. They link to this Boy Genius Report, which relies on information from industry insiders and says the displays will require their own power supplies and network cables in order to show off the iPhone. The display itself should be 3 feet wide and 7 feet tall, which does not sound particularly "enormous" to me in terms of retail merchandising.
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  • dotMac is down for maintenance

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    If you've had trouble accessing your iDisk or any other dotMac features today, it's because the dotMac service is currently down. Apple has posted a "temporarily unavailable" message on the dotMac site that says that the service is undergoing scheduled maintenance.

    Thanks everyone who tipped us about the down time.

    Update: dotMac is back online.

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  • TUAW Tip: The best way to add the Trash to your Finder sidebar

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    Update: Alas, it looks like I'm going to have to withdraw this one. Do not use this tip, particularly on PPC Macs. Although it worked fine in my initial testing on an Intel Mac, it's becoming clear that this doesn't work for everyone, nor does it persist after a restart. So while I don't think it's dangerous (if you tried this and it didn't work properly, just force-restart the Finder to return things to normal), it is not actually a good solution. See our earlier Ask TUAW post for other, more permanent ways of doing this.

    On an older Ask TUAW we were asked how to add the Trash to the Finder sidebar. I pointed to several different solutions to this, but just recently reader DG left a comment on that post with far and away the most elegant solution. Basically, show the Trash folder in the Finder by clicking on the Trash can in the Dock. Next hit ⌘-i to reveal the "Trash Info" window (right). Click on the triangle to reveal the Preview if it's not already visible and then drag the preview icon onto the Finder sidebar and drop it.

    This will place the Trash in the sidebar with the proper icon and you can now drag and drop files to the Trash from the Finder. Not only that, the icon will even animate to show whether the trash is empty or not (though it may take a few moments to refresh your Finder window so you can see it).

    Thanks, DG!
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