Fresh Apple: The Apple Blog (6 сообщений)

На что подписаться? | Управление подпиской

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.
http://theappleblog.com
рекомендовать друзьям >>

Get A Blast From The Past With "Old" Apps For Your Mac
There are times – especially when I sit and wait a few minutes for Office apps to start – when I sit back reminisce about using Microsoft Word on my old, trusty Mac Plus (and later SE). It was a peppy little program that did word processing very well without all the bloat that we see today. Sadly, Microsoft is not the only company producing software where newer does not alwas mean better. Unless you are diligent about keeping installers or install media around, finding copies of older applications is not always easy. Developers do not like to have old versions floating around as they can create a support nightmare.

If you are pining for a program that lives solely in the past you may not need to look further than mac.oldapps.com. The site (and its sister sites for other platforms) houses old versions of software for your Mac and boasts a library of 490 previous versions of 33 Mac programs (which are not limited to OS X). For example, you can go all the way back to the beginning of iTunes, flip back to more peppy versions of Acrobat Reader and even see just how ugly modern sites look with Internet Explorer relics.

As you browse their library and stroll down memory lane it is important to remember a this caveat: many developers use new, major versions to fix security bugs in their programs and you may be exposing yourself to vulnerabilities that your anti-virus/malware software offer no protection against. Be sure the functionality/usability you need is worth the potential security trade-off.

If you do use their library of ancient wares, read up on their purpose and consider using the PayPal link on that page to say “thank you!” (and help with hosting charges). Also, if you know of any other sites that offer old versions of Mac software or have your own story to reminisce about, drop a note in the comments.

[Props to Ryan Naraine for the serendipitous link today.]

Переслать
Missing the Big Picture
There is a lot of buzz surrounding music labels’ agreements to sell DRM-free music in marketplaces other than the iTunes Music Store. The problem is that they miss the big picture. They don’t pay attention to the two things that really matter.
1. People want to be able to buy their music easily
2. People want their purchased music to work on their devices
The iTunes Music Store allows people to easily purchase music. They set the precedence with a $0.99 price point, and everyone is following suit. They showed that if it is easy to purchase music and easy to listen to it again, they will pay that price.

The problem is that with the (barely) exception of Amazon.com’s mp3 store, the price point has stayed the same 99 cents. People will still pay that price, and DRM-free music is certainly enticing for those of us that even understand that. Many people don’t realize that DRM even exists.

To make things worse, some companies try to charge $1.99/song for downloading it straight to your phone. It just doesn’t make sense.

So, you get a less-than-the-easiest interface for downloading music, and it costs about the same or more, and these companies want to bite in to Apple’s market share? I don’t think so.

If they want to bite into Apple’s bottom line, they need to offer something more than what iTunes offers. Yeah, it is DRM-free, but other than that, there is nothing.

Russ Crupnick, senior analyst for NPD group had it right when he said:

“When you have 80 percent market share on Apple devices…there isn’t much demand from people to get unprotected music. They don’t seem to encounter any issues with it.”

I am a big fan of tossing out DRM and all, but differentiating in only the DRM category is not enough. These DRM-free shops will get the Apple haters, but not much more.

To make themselves stand out and sell more, make a daring move and sell the music for much cheaper. People will continue to buy music from iTunes until something better comes along. Is it greed? If I could buy two songs from one vendor for the price of one iTunes song, and the quality was just as good as anywhere else (if not better), what would stop me from buying those two songs instead of downloading one song from iTunes? Nothing but ease of use. If the song could be downloaded and automatically added to my iTunes Library, I would do that in a heartbeat. Who wouldn’t?

Pirates will exist as long as it is easier to steal music than it is to buy it. Allofmp3.com had a good idea when pricing songs by the data size instead of a straight price. It was illegal which is not cool, but many people went to great lengths to purchase songs from that website. You could get between four and seven songs for the cost of one iTunes song. Music labels can create a site just like that and iTunes would immediately feel the pain. It would be so easy to get a lot of music for so cheap, that many people just wouldn’t bother pirating music. There will always be those who break the law, and so there will always be people who pirate music. But instead of borrowing a CD from my friend, I would much rather just go to a website and buy the album for a couple bucks.

People will always want value for the money they spend. If Rhapsody, Napster, Amazon, Microsoft, and anyone else wants to take market share away from Apple, they need to change their tune, start making it easier to get cheaper, DRM-free music into our iTunes libraries, and the money will follow.

Переслать
Google Talk Comes to the iPhone
One of the notable shortcomings of the iPhone is the lack of a chat client. Oh sure, SMS looks like iChat - but we all know that you’re really paying for each of those messages you’re shooting off. So we could wait for Apple to open up a true chat client…or just let Google do it for us.

Yesterday Google quietly launched Google Talk for the iPhone, and it rocks. Nice and quick, it follows the look of the Gmail iPhone interface and works very well. I was really impressed by the way it handles multiple chats - it has a pulldown menu at the top on the window with your contacts listed. When you’re chatting with someone and you receive another chat from another contact, the pulldown turns orange and highlights the contact that sent you the new message. Very cool, very easy to use.

Give it a whirl by going to www.google.com/talk on your iPhone.

Переслать
Tales From The Command Line: Where Has My Bandwidth Gone? (iftop & SurplusMeter)
I believe I can safely say that the primary objective for users running OS X is to connect to the Internet to read mail, check out web sites, chat with friends, download new apps or grab/share multi-media content, etc. With bandwidth caps staring to become all the rage by the mega-providers, knowing how much you are consuming may be critical knowledge to hold back the costs/fees on your monthly bill.

This post covers two of three key programs for managing bandwidth: iftop (a command-line utility) and SurplusMeter (a GUI tool). The third utility - lsof (another command-line utility) - will require a dedicated article in-and-of itself.

How Much Am I Consuming?

SurplusMeter is a small tool from the fine folks over at SkoobySoft with one mission: to show you how much bandwidth you are consuming with the option to enter any known caps to ensure you are not over your limit. You can download SurpluMeter directly from their site. It is a PPC binary compatible down to OS X 10.3.9. For those who want to live life on the wild side, you can grab the source code and compile it yourself. I have built an OS X 10.5 compatible Universal Binary version which you can download via this post. No matter which way you decide to go, it is important to copy the application to your local volume as it runs an agent program - which runs in the background collecting bandwidth data - that will make it difficult to remove mounted volumes if you keep it running.

The main view of SurplusMeter is fairly straightforward. You can set which day to start the monthly tracking period on and specify your known bandwidth cap - which can also include upstream usage. Monitoring can be paused if you know you will be moving between networks, the collected data can be reset and you can even choose which interface to monitor via their “English” names vs OS X short device names (e.g. “Ethernet port” vs “en0“). For my example, I did a short sample of bandwidth on my AT&T 3G ExpressCard, hence the PPP modem selection. If there were hiccups during program execution or you know of other bandwidth usage on your connection not emanating from your Mac, you can add bytes to the current data collector.

Similarly, you can also remove bytes if you were measuring data on an interface that moved between networks.

SurplusMeter is kind enough to store its data in ~/Library/Application Support/SurplusMeter/surplusmeter_data.plist in a very human- and machine-readable format (a well-annoted Apple plist) so you can do what you like with it:

In general, it is a great, special purpose utility to have around.

What’s Going On Here?

SurplusMeter tells you that you are using bandwidth, but does not provide any further details. This is where tool number two - iftop - comes into play. You can grab a pre-built package of iftop (”interface top”) from AFP548.com or grab the source and try your hand at building it (you may need to download some support libraries). Users of various “ports” tools should be able to find iftop in one of the repositories.

Where the command-line tool top provides a mechanism for determining what processes are consuming precious system resources (in a very similar fashion to the Activity Monitor application), iftop does something similar for network usage on a particular interface.

You will need some more technical information to run iftop successfully. First, you will need to know which network interface you want to monitor. To find out which interfaces you have on your system, open Terminal.app and run the command:

ifconfig -l

My output from that shows:

lo0 gif0 stf0 en0 fw0 en1 vmnet8 vmnet1 ppp0

Interface en0 generally is equivalent to “Ethernet” and en1 is usually equivalent to your AirPort card. ppp0 would refer to most modems, including 3G cards. Additional interfaces may be related to a VMware or Parallels install, your local firewall interface or other local types of network devices.

With Terminal.app open, run iftop -h to see what the command line options are for the tool:
```
Synopsis: iftop -h | [-npbBP] [-i interface] [-f filter code] [-N net/mask]     -h                  display this message    -n                  don’t do hostname lookups    -N                  don’t convert port numbers to services    -p                  run in promiscuous mode (show traffic between other                        hosts on the same network segment)    -b                  don’t display a bar graph of traffic    -B                  Display bandwidth in bytes    -i interface        listen on named interface    -f filter code      use filter code to select packets to count                        (default: none, but only IP packets are counted)    -F net/mask         show traffic flows in/out of network    -P                  show ports as well as hosts    -m limit            sets the upper limit for the bandwidth scale    -c config file      specifies an alternative configuration file
```
For this example, the most useful options are “-i” to let us choose which interface to monitor and “-P” to show which ports are in use. The tool requires elevated privileges to work so you have to run the following to start your view: sudo iftop -P -i ppp0 (again, replace “ppp0” with “en0” or “en1” or whatever interface you need to monitor).

You should see something similar to the following screen upon successful execution (minus the annotation):

The main part of the display lists, for each pair of hosts, the rate at which data has been sent and received over the preceding 2, 10 and 40 second intervals. The direction of data flow is indicated by arrows, <= and =>. So in this example, where I started iTunes just after kicking off iftop, we can see that:
- 166.129.237.160 (my local machine) made a series of http (web) requests to Apple servers
- some of Apple’s servers do not resolve from IP addresses to host names
- the average transfer rate over 40 seconds is between 0.2 kilobytes and 9 kilobytes per second
After quitting iTunes and running for a while, then letting it sit “idle” (not actively doing network activity), you can see that the pattern of usage can change dramatically.

While iftop can let you see more of what is going on, it cannot tell you which applications or processes are causing the usage. You can infer quite a bit (i.e. http traffic is most likely coming from your browser - but this is not necessarily the case as shown by the last screen), but finding out core details is where lsof can be of real value and will be covered in our next installment.

While I have presented a free way to monitor bandwidth usage, Guy Meyer has a set of tools - Net Monitor & Net Monitor Sidekick which do something similar but are not free (the Sidekick program is in beta which is expired so I was not able to test it).

If you are using any of these or similar tools to monitor bandwidth utilization, drop a note in the comments to share your insights with TAB readers and keep an eye out for our post on lsof!

Переслать
Three Weeks with Delicious Library 2

About three weeks ago, I finally upgraded to Delicious Library 2. It is definitely a slick program. The greatest addition for me was the ability to add my gadgets to my library. It just makes sense to be able to add all my electronic gear.

You can add items in nine categories: books, movies, music, software, videogames, toys, gadgets, tools, and apparel. Sadly, the software Delicious Library 2 cannot be added via the lookup tool:

What I don’t like

There are two ways to add an item to your library, through the iSight, and through a search box like the one pictured above. It uses Amazon search, and it lets you add just about anything that you can buy on Amazon. I am not sure how Shipley designed the search for Delicious Library 2, but when I tried to add my Nintendo Wii to the library, it brought up every accessory you can buy, but failed to show me the actual Nintendo Wii. I was able to find a couple Wiis with some additional accessories, but that was about it. I don’t have the box anymore, so I couldn’t just scan it (which is the case with most of my electronic gear). The good news is that I was able to add component cables for my Wii to my library, as well as extra Wii remotes, classic controllers, nunchucks, grip covers, and remote charging stations.

There are some frustrations with searching, though. In Delicious Library 1, you could search by ISBN (which was probably because the iSight scanning did not always work). But now, in Delicious Library 2, you can’t. It is very frustrating to know the ISBN but not be able to use it to search. It is probably easier to search with keywords, but sometimes the results listed are far too broad and varied for it to be that worthwhile. I wish the option to add was as simple as this:

You can also publish your shelves to the web. I published mine to my iWeb site, and it looked pretty good. The only drawback is that it did not include links to Amazon, so if someone were viewing my library, and wanted one of my books, they couldn’t just click on the title and get to the book. They would have to copy and paste, or just look the book up. That seems like a big oversight.

What I do like

Although the release notes for this version say that the algorithm for scanning with iSight is only “slightly improved” it is far better than Delicious Library 1. I scanned the same book in both, and got a much faster scan time for Delicious Library 2. I waved it all over the screen on version 1, but with version 2, I put it right in the guides, and scanned it before it was actually lined up all the way in the guides.

That makes for much faster adding of items. I also tried it out with an external USB webcam, and that worked just as well. That made it very easy for taking it to my bookshelves, instead of bringing all my books to my computer.

Visually, it rocks. When you add an item, a “container” fills up with colored circles that becomes your item. Your items shatter or go up in flames when you delete them, as shown below.

Perhaps the best feature for the kids out there is the ability to export your library (or just selected shelves or items) to a bibliography. In college, I used EndNote for my citation needs, and if this were available, it would have been much easier. EndNote requires you to type in every single thing about your book, and only just recently came out with a very poor online search tool that doesn’t get the correct info 95% of the time. Bibliographies are available in the following formats: AMA, Turabian, APA, CBE, Chicago, and MLA. For college students who do a lot of writing, it is definitely worth the $40 or $20 (for an upgrade).

In conclusion, Delicious Library 2 is most beneficial in that it provides a record of most things that you own, and it does it in a fun way. It is actually exciting to feel like you are a checker at a store as you scan items into your library. I finally have the itemized list of stuff that I need to show the insurance company if anything ever happens. Everything I buy from now on will go right into the library, so I can have a record of it. This is a good program for those who want to catalog their stuff and have a record on the web (or iPod) that you can get to if you need it later.

Delicious Library costs $40 for a new license and $20 for an upgrade from 1.5 at delicious-monster.com

Переслать
Diablo III
I have been way too busy recently to play any games, but one game that was announced last week has made me long for the days of yore when I could play for hours on end with no thought of responsibilities calling my name. Blizzard Entertainment announced Diablo 3. This third installment of mankind’s fight against Diablo picks up the storyline two decades after Diablo 2 ended. It will feature five new character classes and lots of enemies.

The 20-minute gameplay video shows a barbarian fending off dozens of beasts that are climbing up walls and coming out of every corner to fight. The graphics are of course beautiful, and Blizzard assures us in the FAQ that “as with all of Blizzard Entertainment’s recent releases, Diablo III will ship for both Windows and Mac simultaneously.”

There is no word on system requirements for the game, or a release date or price for that matter. It could be a while, as Starcraft 2 was announced over a year ago, and is still waiting for a release date.

You can buy Diablo II, which only requires Mac OS 8.1 or higher and a G3, for $19.99 and relive the glory days.

Переслать