Tuesday, November 13, 2007

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) (9 сообщений)

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The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
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  • TUAW first look: FileMaker announces Bento organizer app

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    When you've been creating and selling the same application for 20 years -- the most successful database on the Mac platform, and a contender on Windows -- and you're a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple, Inc. with plenty of customers in business, education and SOHO markets... well, what do you do for an encore?

    FileMaker Inc. has a pretty good market with the namesake app, but as the Mac universe grows to include more families, independent professionals and first-time switchers, the full power and cost of a relational database may be more than these new Mac users need (and might actually be more scary than appealing, despite FM's legendary ease of use). Time for a light, personal-organizer version of that FileMaker power -- an iData, if you will. It's coming in January, for Leopard users only, and it's called Bento. (That's Backup.app on the left and Butler on the right. Hi, I'm Mike, and I'm a Cover Flowaholic.) Bento will cost $49 for a single-user license, with a $99 family 5-pack option.

    The idea of the bento box -- one-stop lunching, with compartments for the individual bits of yummy -- gives you a basic sense of the product. With contact, calendar, tabular/relational data and media file embedding, Bento can serve as a basic organizer or a reasonably savvy database, with a lot of room in the middle. For those with long memories who are saying "Hey, wasn't there already some Mac databasey-thing called Bento?" -- yep, that was the name of OpenDoc's native file format (thanks Christina for the tip).

    Gallery: Bento by FileMaker

    Bento icon


    Bento's time-limited preview version is available now for download; it expires in February after the on-sale date. We got a brief advance look (more details below) and there's a screenshot gallery for you to enjoy, but you'll best grok Bento by getting a copy and playing with it.

    Continue reading TUAW first look: FileMaker announces Bento organizer app

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  • Spotlight in 10.5 skips over user Library files

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    Wondering why your Adium chat logs aren't showing up in Spotlight search now that you're running Leopard? Vincent Noel was wondering, and he tracked down the reason: files in your user ~/Library folder are now not reported by Spotlight, unless you enable "Include" to show system files (easiest way: invoke Spotlight with Command-Option-Space to perform a "universal search"). This search hiccup also affects Journler, and presumably any other third-party app which stores files in ~/Library.

    It seems that files inside your Library folder are considered off-limits for basic Spotlight results... which is kinda funny, because that's where Mail.app keeps your messages, and those are sure searchable. OK, so files Apple applications store there are fine -- everything else is off limits. Hmm.

    Thanks, Vincent.
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  • VMware Importer makes migrating from Parallels a snap

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    In our post yesterday on VMware Fusion 1.1 we mentioned that VMware had also included a beta of their new Importer application. However, after using it tonight, I thought it was worth a separate post of its own, because it makes migrating from Parallels to Fusion incredibly easy. The amazing thing is that I converted an old Parallels 2.5 WinXP VM which Parallel's 3 itself had not been able to import successfully!

    Basically, when you start the Importer it gives you a window in which to drop the Parallels .pvs file (just Win2000, WinXP, Win2003 Server or Vista at this time). It asks you where you want to save the new Virtual Machine and a few minutes later, boom it starts right up in Fusion -- no muss and no fuss. For me the amazing thing was that I had previously tried to import the same image into Parallels 3 and it failed. So basically the upshot is this: if you're running Parallels, but you'd like to give Fusion a try, the barrier to entry has now dropped to next to nothing (besides the hard drive space).

    I bought Parallels for my Intel Mac as soon as it was released,but given my experience with Fusion (especially with the downloadable appliances), I think VMware has a convert. I fully recommend giving it a try. The VMware Importer is a free download. It's also supplemented by the VMware convertor which will create an image of a working PC that can then be imported into Fusion as a VM.
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  • Britons snap up 'tens of thousands' of iPhones

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    Over the last few days, there's been plenty of reports about the scale of the iPhone's launch here in the U.K, and what a 'flop' it was. Not so fast, dear readers, for Ars Technica is reporting that on Friday night carrier O2 activated 8,000 handsets: more than double their initial estimate of 3,000, despite issues with activations on the network's side (where have we heard that before?). Problems aside, the iPhone is apparently O2's fastest selling handset with 'tens of thousands' sold. Whilst not as high as the 70,000+ some had been murmuring, that's a remarkable achievement given the widespread poor reporting of the launch by the mainstream media.

    Whilst in the queue on Friday, people were being asked what they thought about the iPhone 'lacking a camera', with at least one news crew leaving the Regent Street store with a significant portion of laughter at that question. Of course, with Apple having kept the U.K. iPhone under such tight lock, few had actually seen one 'in the flesh', but not seeing it in the flesh seemingly didn't stop people deriding the device out of hand.

    Gripes aside, it seems to have been a moderately successful launch, if not setting the world on fire. Thankfully, if you weren't to be found queuing for an iPhone on Friday, there's a plethora of photographs from the launch here in the U.K. Thanks to all those who left comments on our (repeatedly, and abruptly, interrupted) Live-Blog. If you're wondering where the queues were, you might want to check photos from London #1 #2, Manchester, Birmingham and across the country.
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  • Improve your Stacks with some drawers

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    As noted in our recent (bad) little things about Leopard post, the dynamic Stacks icons are a bit of a pain. Basically the Dock icon for a Stack automatically changes to reflect whatever is first in that Stack (based on how it is sorted, by name, date, etc.). A clever Japanese user came up with a beautiful work-around for this annoyance with these lovely drawer icons, which is nicely explained for us Japanese-challenged folks here.

    The idea is pretty simple. The icon pack features 18 custom drawer folders, and you just place whichever one you like in the Stack you want prettified. Then using a simple terminal command you change the date modified for that folder to well into the future (2020). Now when you sort the folder by date modified, the custom icon folder will always come up first and so give your Dock this great effect.

    You can download the drawer icons here (download link) and the terminal jockeying is explained here.

    Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
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  • TUAW Tip: Auto-quit Printers in Leopard

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    I just ran across this simple, but handy tip over at Mac OS X Hints. One of the little annoyances of Leopard that didn't make our recent post is the way Leopard handles printers. When you print something it starts the little application that controls the print queue for that device but (unlike Tiger) the application remains on your Dock after the print job is finished.

    If this annoys you (like it does me), it turns out that there's a simple fix. Just right click on the Dock icon and select "Auto Quit." Now the printer queue application will quit itself (and so disappear from your Dock) once it's finished processing your print job.

    I'm not entirely sure why this behavior is not the default (as it was before), but it's a nice little discovery that removes yet another little annoyance.
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  • Unsanctioned patches for Leopard's X11 now available

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    If you've been running into trouble with the X11 infrastructure in Leopard, you aren't alone; issues including multi-monitor support problems and crashes in bunches have been frustrating those who depend on the MIT-originated tools (apps such as The GIMP, OpenOffice and Sun's Tarantella/Global Desktop are X11-based). The X11 code in Tiger was forked from the older XFree86 project, while Leopard's X11 is based on the x.org 'reboot' of the windowing system -- while newer and potentially better in the long run, the x.org code apparently still has some rough edges.

    Thanks to the efforts of Apple's point guy for XDarwin, Ben Byer, many of these bugs have now been squashed in an unofficial, unsupported new build of the Xquartz library. Installing the revised components is not for the casual user (you will have to compile it from source for now) but if you spend a lot of time in X11, you might well appreciate the changes. There's plenty more on the X11/Leopard saga at MacOSXHints' forums and on the Apple X11 mailing list.

    By the way, the dashing fellow on the right there in the red cap? That's Hexley, Jon Hooper's platypus mascot for Darwin. Perhaps that's the new X11 build he's unpacking.

    Update: Thanks to our commenters for the links to the precompiled binaries and the 3-step Macports installation process.

    Thanks, Vincent.
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  • iPhone update 1.1.2 is available in iTunes (US)

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    On Monday night, Apple finally made iPhone Update 1.1.2 available via the US iTunes Store. Apple's description of the update is typically cryptic ("...new features and bug fixes"), but we've noticed a few changes.

    First, iTunes now displays your iPhone's battery status next to the phone's icon. Also, there's a new sub-menu that separates custom ringtones from the standard set.

    Finally, you can select French, German or Italian as the default language and change the keyboard layout to English (UK), French, German or Italian. Go and get it, folks.
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  • SHOUTcast recorder for iPhone

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    If you're into Nullsoft's freeware digital audio streaming, you can now grab your 'casts from your iPhone--that is if you don't mind working at the command line. iPhone Hacker-meister Core has ported StreamRipper to the iPhone. With it, you can grab shoutcasts from the command line and save them as mp3 files. (You can use my playaudio utility to play them back.) Download your copy from his webpage, where you can also find out more about using the software.
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