The Whole Widget

Excellent! My favourite backup solution for making bootable backups of my Macs has been updated so as to support Mac OS X Leopard.

If you've never used it before I strongly recommend you check it out.

SuperDuper! 2.5 Released!: "Shirt Pocket is happy to announce that SuperDuper 2.5 is now available as a free update for all users. The new version includes full Leopard support, including the ability to store a bootable backup side-by-side with a Time Machine backup on a single volume, and the ability to copy Time Machine archives to other drives for backup purposes or to move to a larger drive without losing history."

(Via Shirt Pocket Blog.)

When I initially read yesterday about the possibility of this happening I thought it must be an April Fools prank. However, it looks like the beginning of a sea change to DRM-free music from on-line music stores has begun with the announcement by EMI and Apple that DRM-free copies of all the EMI catalogue will be available on iTunes starting in May.Not only will DRM-free copies of EMI music be available for purchase, it will be encoded at 256Kbps – twice the bitrate currently available on iTunes – but will incur an additional cost to the purchaser of 20p per track. Any album purchase will be available only as DRM-free and will remain at the same price point as before and as a bonus any previous purchases can be upgraded to DRM-free although I'm not too sure on the cost of doing so.This is the tipping point for me that means that it will now be worth my while buying content from iTunes and I believe I won't be alone. Hopefully all the other major and independent labels will jump on board soon and we can kiss DRM'd music goodbye.

Well, with under 24 hours to go until Steve Jobs walks out onto the stage at the Moscone Center to deliver his Macworld 2007 keynote speech, I thought I should post what I believe we will see tomorrow.

Summary of sales over the holiday period.

With Apple laptops and iPods literaly flying off the shelves I think it will be safe to say that we'll hear all about it and I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs doesn't take the opportunity to have a little fun at the Zune's expense.

iLife 2007

I believe that this is a definite addition to the keynote, but will see just a feature bump to the existing applications rather that anything earth shattering. Ideally I'd like Apple to open up the iLife applications so that they could seamlessly interact with on-line services such as Flickr, YouTube, Google Maps and Odeo but I wouldn't be surprised if there was further integration with .mac, which would be a shame as I'm no longer a member.

iWork 2007

I think this will see feature updates for both Pages and Keynote and will also see the release of a simple spreadsheet application along the lines of what is available in AppleWorks. I'm definitely not expecting an Excel killer.

Mac OS X Leopard

Progress report on how things are coming and a release date announced for late Springtime. Hopefully we'll see some of the super secret features that Jobs eluded to back at WWDC 2006 now that Windows Vista has been released. Expect Jobs to have another dig at Microsoft here.

Hardware Upgrades

I think that both the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini will receive slight upgrades—the Mac Mini moving to Core 2 Duo across the line hopefully—but the rest of the hardware line will remain unchanged.

iTV Released

The iTV will be released and we will all learn it's real name. Hopefully it's got something more up it's sleeve than this, but I have my doubts. I really can't see any advantage to the iTV over buying a Mac Mini and sticking it under my TV. Obviously it's cheaper, but with the Mini I get a proper computer and therefore have the ability to play and record DVDs as well as allow my kids to play their favourite games and surf the Internet. I'm hoping to be proved wrong on this one.

One More Thing...

The iPod Phone. I think this will be a slider mobile phone that looks like an iPod nano but about twice as thick. When closed it will appear—and act—as if it is an iPod nano with about 4GB of storage, but when the slider is opened it will change into phone mode and the keypad will be revealed. I also expect it to pack a 2 megapixel camera with a flash.That's it. Check back later to see whether I'm gloating over my prediction performance or hiding my face in shame.UPDATE: It appears that Intel have just launched their first Core 2 Quad branded processors so don't be too surprised if the MacPro line get bumped up to these chips.

This is a great bit of news as the first thing I do on an install of Mac OS X is download compile and install all the various bits and pieces to get Ruby on Rails up and running. My ideal situation would be that this will be upgradable through software update and that setting up Rails apps with Apache would be handled through the Server Admin tools, but I won't hold my breath on that one.Anyway, this is great exposure for Rails so hats off to Apple for including this and congratulations to all the Rails team.

The developer seed that was distributed today at WWDC contains Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.2, but we fully expect to have Rails 1.2.x along with Mongrel, SQLite bindings, and lots of other Ruby goodies on the final gold master when it goes out in spring.It’s been no secret that Apple is held in very high regard by the Rails community. Every single Rails Core contributer is running on Apple and the vast majority of Rails developers are too. To see Apple acknowledge this and return the favor is very rewarding.

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (Via Riding Rails)

An nice review of my favourite text editor on Mac OS X has been put together over at Vitamin. I learned a couple of things about it that I didn't know existed and so if you're interested in finding out more about "the missing editor" for Mac OS X I recommend you head on over to Vitamin and take a look.Text Mate Review (Via Vitamin.)Technorati Tags: Software, Mac OS X

I recently stumbled across a blog post where Om Malik, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine, outlines his favourite Mac OS X applications, and why. Out of all his choices I would only have put two in my list, but then I'm sure we both do very different jobs, so that is to be expected.Anyway without further ado here — in no particular order — are my top ten third part applications and my reasons why.

Quicksilver

This is one applications that we both agree about. Quicksilver appears to be a application launcher when you first play with it but it is so much more than that once you delve a bit deeper. I use it to quickly fire off e-mails, append text to documents, control iTunes, open files, as well as the application launching that it is so good at.There are other worthy opponents in the same field (Butler, LaunchBar) but I find Quicksilver more aesthetically pleasing and the price is unbeatable — free.

NetNewsWire Lite

This is the freeware version of the RSS aggregator that Om had as one of his choices. Personally I've never felt the need for the 'Pro' features that are available from the full version so have always stuck to the 'Lite' version.I've been a heavy user of this application for the last couple of years with brief defections over to using NewsFire (whilst it was a free beta version) and Vienna (I quickly grew tired of it's navigation, although did love it's Growl integration), but have always returned to it quickly.

SpamSieve

For a long time I didn't suffer from spam, but recently this has changed. It's not that I was getting a lot, it's just that Mail's built in junk mail filters couldn't seem to catch persistent repeat spam concerning replica Rolex watches, viagra and penis extensions!!! Enter SpamSieve.SpamSieve adds Bayesian spam filtering to popular e-mail clients on Mac OS X and I have to say I am suitably impressed. After a initial learning period where it wasn't too hot at marking spam messages as spam and good messages as good it has solved my spam problem and I am happy to say that I am now spam free.

Kinkless GTD (requires OmniOutliner Pro)

Kinkless GTD isn't really an application, but is instead a free set of Applescripts that work with OmniOutliner Pro to create a framework for implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done task-management methodology. Essentially what kGTD allows you to do is empty your brain of all tasks that you need to complete and allocate them to projects that you are currently — and potentially in the future — working on. Additionally you assign a context to each task, for example a task that requires you to buy a new lightbulb could be assigned the context 'errand'.Now the way that the GTD methodology works is that, whereas traditionally you would work in a project oriented mode and work your way down your project tasks, you instead work in a context oriented mode. What this means practically is that if you take the 'errand' context, mentioned earlier, that you may have many errands that you need to carry out for many projects but instead of going out numerous times to complete them you could complete them all in one trip, thus using your time more effectively. This same principal can be used across all your contexts and you should find that you are getting more done in the same time than you were before.What makes kGTD so useful is that you can quickly create new tasks via a Quicksilver trigger and then synchronise all your contexts with iCal and even your mobile phone or iPod so you can always have your tasks on hand.I probably am not explaining the whole concept of GTD and kGTD's role in implementing it successfully very well so if you want some further reading I would suggest taking a look at 43 Folders and specifically the kGTD section and Quicksilver section.

TextMate

For years and years I was devout user of BBEdit for my text editing needs but in the last six months I've moved over completely to using TextMate. This is essentially down to my increase in developing Ruby on Rails web applications and TextMate's native support for many shortcuts for defining functions and methods for Rails, and partially for aesthetic reasons — TextMate just feels much more like a Mac OS X application whereas BBEdit still has a feeling of OS 9 about it.Those reasons combined with the fact that TextMate's project handling options are far superior to BBEdit makes it a winner in my book.

OmniGraffle Pro

This is the premier charting application on Mac OS X, in my opinion, and is the same vein as Microsoft Visio on the Windows platform.I use OmniGraffle extensively in my job as a web designer to create site maps, wireframes, database schemas and various other drawings required for specifying projects fully in the initial stages. It has templates built in for many charting tasks and can also import OmniOutliner documents and will automatically draw a chart of your Outline in any style that you specify. The 'Pro' version has a few nice extra features such as Visio XML Import/Export and therefore gets my recommendation over the standard version.

Synchronize! Pro X

This application is an unsung hero in my view. It's probably one of the most valuable pieces of software that is used daily at my work but rarely have I heard anybody praise it.What Synchronize! allows us to do at work is have individual copies of the sites we are working on on multiple machines in the office and synch them up safe in the knowledge that things won't go tits-up. It performs incremental backups and synchronisations of folders or even full systems and also has a handy auto run capability that kicks in when specific volumes are mounted — this feature alone makes it worth the asking price as it automates the backing up of essential files.

MK Console

Mk Console is a simple application that displays logfiles of your choosing on your desktop. This is really useful if you have to monitor servers or you just want to keep an eye on what's going on on your machine.Personally, I have the contents of my Apache error_log display in a fully transparent window on the desktop. This way I have quick access — via a full screen Exposé — to debugging information whilst I'm developing sites.

Witch

Witch is a system preference which, once activated, implements an Exposé of open windows. However unlike Exposé, where you have to scrub the mouse over similar looking windows to find out what the window name is, Witch displays a list of currently open windows grouped by what application they are associated with. From here you can select the window of your choice and either bring it into focus, close — this even works with minimised windows — or minimise it all without having to resort to using the mouse.An indispensible companion to Exposé.

Growl

Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X and as such isn't really an application. It's a framework that developers can hook into to allow their applications to send you notifications.Frankly I didn't see what all the fuss was about until I forced myself to give it a shot over a number of days and set up all of my Growl capable applications to use it. Now I couldn't live without it.For example, Growl notifies me when:

• SpamSieve has detected a spam message that requires confirmation from me
• iTunes changes track so that I can see what is next to play and what rating I have allocated it
• when I rate a track — using a Quicksilver trigger — in iTunes, thus confirming my action
• kGTD has finished performing it's synchronise or archive process it lets me know
• Safari has finished downloading a file
• hardware devices become available/unavailable.

Like Quicksilver, Growl needs a certain amount of configuration before you can get it to work the way you want it to work but, in my opinion, once you've used it for a while you can't imagine using Mac OS X without it.Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Apple hasn't been taking note and something like this appear in Apple's next generation of Mac OS X. You heard it here first!

So there you have it, my top 10 third party Mac OS X applications. Feel free to mention any you feel should be on the list as I'm sure there are plenty apps out there I'm not even aware that exist that could make my day to day work easier and more productive.

Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, Software

A new piece of software came to my attention yesterday called iAlertU. It's specifically written for the MacBookPro and uses the Apple Remote that ships with it to activate what is in effect remote locking — such as you would find on a car — for you laptop.The best way to do it justice is to see the on-line demo video hosted by YouTube.com.A couple of questions spring to mind, however, after watching the demo:

• If you are in a location where you cannot trust those around you not to steal your laptop, why on earth would you leave you laptop lying around?
• What's to stop the would-be-thief simply pressing the mute button on the keyboard therefore rendering this software useless?

I suppose it's a cool little application but I can't see any real world uses for it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Software

Just noticed this post from Engadget outlining details of Parallels Workstation, a virtual machine for enabling users of Intel based macs to run X86 based operating systems within a window from within Mac OS X.Personally this is my preferred solution to the Windows on Apple problem, as I only ever need to run Windows to check my designs in Internet Explorer. However, I'm sure gamers will prefer to go the Boot Camp route so that they can get every last ounce of power from their Intel macs.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Windows, Software

It looks like Apple have been less than economical with the truth once more. Just after the first Intel macs were released Phil Shiller of Apple was asked if the new macs would run Windows. His response was that they would but that "Apple will neither help nor hinder" the user in doing so.
Well, as of yesterday, it certainly looks to me that Apple is helping their users of Intel Macs run windows on them with the release of Boot Camp Public Beta.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Software, Windows