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The Apple Blog
The Apple Blog, 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.
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iTunes And Alternate Endings
A Tumblr post by Truong Nguyen regarding an alternate ending for “I Am Legend” struck a serious chord in me today, and not just because the the ending is a much better one than they showed in the theater. It demonstrated what is still a glaring gap in the iTunes / Netflix-streaming / Amazon Unbox model of content-delivery: no consistent mechanism or even basic ability to handle alternate/augmented content.

With DVDs, you can easily select options to watch a movie with a particular set of criteria, including different audio tracks, subtitles and even alternate endings (or “middles”). There are very straightforward ways to code that into the options on the discs and users know how to cue up what combination they want to view. The best that iTunes could do – given the current distribution model and viewing options – would be to present a small clip as an additional download that contains deleted or extra scenes. There are no user expectations in the current UI – either in iTunes, Front Row or the Apple TV – that indicate one could or should be able to gain access to such content/options.

Your personal feelings on movie integrity aside (some folks despise alternate endings or “director’s cuts”), the lack of a standard in this area will mean that streamers and downloaders are relegated to second-class citizen status when it comes to video content in the same way that we were relegated to low bit-rate MP3’s in the early days of music downloads, which is a completely unacceptable situation.

Apple has an opportunity to take the lead and define how extra content will be bundled and viewed as the industry [quickly] moves to widespread digital distribution. We consumers also need to also step up and demand access to the same or even better content and not settle in and just take what we’re given. In the meantime, it looks like I’ll still be relying on DVDs – old school or (hopefully soon) Blu-Ray – for longer than I had anticipated (if you’ve ever tried to keep a DVD collection pristine with three kids in the house, you know what a losing battle that is).

Give the media bots that sweep the interwebs something to take notice of and drop a note in the comments with your take on the state of digital video content distribution. The more we raise issues, the better chance our voices will be heard.
Tags: Commentary, dvd, itunes, movie rentals, movies, Software

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"Disabling" Launch Services File Quarantine
Dan Benjamin of The Talk Show fame posted a general inquiry to the Twitterverse on how to disable the Leopard open confirmation dialog that comes up when you attempt to access a recently downloaded file.

This dialog is a one of Leopard’s new security features called “File Quarantine” and is primarily designed to protect users from trojan horse attacks. Any application that may download file content from the Internet can tag them as being "quarantined" to indicate that the it may be from an untrustworthy source. This is done simply by assigning values to one or more quarantine properties which preserve information about when and where the file come from.

In OS X, the majority of user-space files are opened via Launch Services. When an open event is triggered (i.e. by double-clicking on the file) the operating system checks to see if the file appears to be an application, script, or other executable file type. If that is the case, Launch Services will display an alert asking the user to confirm whether the file is some kind of application. If/once the file is opened, the quarantine properties are automatically cleared by Launch Services if the user has write access to the file.

The Gory Details

You can see this in action if you’re willing to brave the Terminal. Go ahead and download some application from the internet, say Bean 1.0 (the minimalist document editor which released version 1.0 yesterday). Open up a Terminal prompt and type:

xattr -l Downloads/Bean-Install.dmg

xattr is a command that can perform operations on extended file attributes that are normally hidden from the GUI side of OS X.

After running that command – which lists these attributes – you’ll see some very unfriendly output that looks like this (main items we care about have been highlighted:
```
com.apple.diskimages.recentcksum: i:4803338 on 26E026C0-FD2C-3745-8A89-3F2157D5B176 @ 1206470700 - CRC32:$E2826548 com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms: 0000   62 70 6C 69 73 74 30 30 A2 01 02 5F 10 31 68 74    bplist00…_.1ht 0010   74 70 3A 2F 2F 77 77 77 2E 62 65 61 6E 2D 6F 73    tp://www.bean-os 0020   78 2E 63 6F 6D 2F 72 65 6C 65 61 73 65 73 2F 42    x.com/releases/B 0030   65 61 6E 2D 49 6E 73 74 61 6C 6C 2E 64 6D 67 5F    ean-Install.dmg_ 0040   10 2B 68 74 74 70 3A 2F 2F 6D 61 63 75 70 64 61    .+http://macupda 0050   74 65 2E 63 6F 6D 2F 69 6E 66 6F 2E 70 68 70 2F    te.com/info.php/ 0060   69 64 2F 32 34 38 38 31 2F 62 65 61 6E 08 0B 3F    id/24881/bean..? 0070   00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03    ……………. 0080   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 6D    ……………m  com.apple.quarantine: 0000;47ea606e;Safari;569BD03D-469D-4546-92FF-83C0F3669A07|com.apple.Safari 
```
- “com.apple.diskimages.recentcksum” has the checksum of the disk image which is used in verifying the integrity of the file.
- “com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms” stores the URL where the file was downloaded from.
- “com.apple.quarantine” – however – is the entry that causes Launch Services to generate the confirmation dialog
The only way to prevent this dialog from appearing is to remove this attribute, which can easily be done by doing the following from the Terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Downloads/Bean-Install.dmg

This is not a practical solution as it would be much easier to just click “OK” and be done with the dialog rather than go through this series of command line gyrations.

A More Elegant Solution

If you are determined to bypass this built-in security feature (which I highly caution against) then you may be interested in solution developed by Henrik and available over at The Pug Automatic. It involves an AppleScript that performs recursive “xattr -d’s” and is then attached to key folders – like “Downloads” – as a Folder Action. Any time files are added to the folder, the script will ensure that all quarantine values are unset, freeing you from having to expend precious energy and human compute cycles to evaluate a small dialog and click “OK”.

The script/action combination works well (I tried it and then removed it), but if you know of another means to accomplish this task (a hidden “defaults” setting, perhaps) or have more questions on File Quarantine (or other Leopard security features), please drop a note in the comments.
Tags: automator, Commentary, developer, Development, launch services, os-x, quarantine, security, Tips

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Recession Fears Don't Touch Apple
The Baltimore Sun is reporting today that Apple sales will stay strong regardless of a declining and troubled economy. I wonder if a bonus check from the government has anything to do with this. Changewave Research conducted a survey of consumers and corporations that plan on buying a computer in the next 90 days. According to the article, Changewave Research conducts these surveys with its own group of people: the same 15,000 for each survey to allow for historical comparisons.

Apple is staying mostly steady, not going up; but that is much better than HP and Dell who are declining in both the consumer and corporate markets.

In the OS arena, 53% of those corporate respondents that use Leopard said they were “very satisified.” Anybody want to guess how many corporate Vista users were “very satisfied?” Eight percent.

As I mentioned Changewave uses the same 15,000 members for all the surveys. In November, 29% of respondents said that they planned on buying a Mac in the next 90 days. But the February survey of those same people said that only 16% did purchase a Mac. This was not evident in PC sales, where there was only a one percent difference between those who said they would, and those who actually did, buy a PC. I think that there is the discrepancy because Macs cost so much, and people actually have to save up for one. You can buy a cheap PC that is obviously not as good as a Mac, but it is still a computer. And when you’ve only got a few hundred bucks, a new PC could be tempting to those without a discerning palette.

Any other thoughts on why Apple is losing those that plan to buy a Mac?
Tags: Commentary, economy, recession, sales

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Budget, Organize and De-clutter Your Life With ReceiptWallet
If your daily existence is anything like mine you collect a decent number of items that need to – or at least should be – filed, stored or organized in some way. Whether they be downloaded PDF documents or saved purchase records, grocery store receipts or just important physical papers these items are probably either buried in your wallet, purse, messenger bag or numerous drawers (for physical records) or strewn across a dozen or more directories on one or more drives (for electronic records). If you’re in sales or own your own business, you know how important it is to keep records of your transactions and if you’re just a consumer, your receipt may be the key ingredient to receiving replacement products during the warranty period. The challenge for everyone is finding an easy and convenient way to keep these critical documents organized and safe.

Having done quite a bit of traveling for our move from Pennsylvania to Washington state, I was inundated with advertisements for ways to keep business cards, documents and travel receipts electronically organized. Unfortunately, none of these products worked on the Mac. In my quest to get organized and also to prepare for tax time I searched for an equivalent all-Mac solution and here’s the combination that has worked best for me.
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Tags: budget, Commentary, document, finance, Hardware, license, organize, pdf, receipt, scanner, Software Reviews

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Aspyr's d20 Hits The Mark With Neverwinter Nights 2 Port to OS X
With the move to Intel Macs, Apple set the stage for increased gaming opportunities and went so far as to promise OS X users more titles to choose from since they are “working closely” with the premier development houses to ensure OS X is considered a first-run target operating system. While some gaming companies have chosen the Cider/Cedega Win32 API “wrapper” route, others turn to companies like Aspyr to help them port games directly to the Mac platform, which is what Atari has done with the release of Neverwinter Nights 2 for OS X (official Atari NWN2 site).
(more…)
Tags: aspyr, d&d, game, Game Reviews, gaming

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