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Articles about OS X applications.

How to use Safari to track The Masters leaderboard

In general, I don't use Safari—mainly because I'm addicted to the add-ons I get with Chrome and Firefox. (Yes, I know Safari has extensions…but they're underpowered and feature limited compared to what you can get in the other browsers.) However, during Masters week, Safari has a key role in my following the tournament, thanks to one key feature: web clip, i.e. Open in Dashboard.

While The Masters has an excellent iPad app, I don't like having the iPad locked into one app for hours at a time. So, to follow the leaderboard, I turn to Safari's Open in Dashboard feature, along with a favorite old Mac OS X Hints hint that allows me to drag widgets out of the Dashboard. Using these two things together, I can view the full Masters leaderboard, floating in a window all its own.

Best of all, the interactivity of the leaderboard is preserved, so I can re-sort the list, expand a player's scores, and do all the other things I can do on the actual leaderboard page.

Note that you'll need some spare monitor space for this trick: the dragged Widget floats over every other window, so it will get in the way if you're using, for instance, an 11" MacBook Air.

If you'd like to do the same, here's how…
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A look at how OS X tips spread via Google

When iTunes 8 came out, one very annoying change was the removal of the "Show iTunes Store arrow links" preference -- in previous versions of iTunes, you'd toggle this setting to remove the link arrows that appear when you select an item in your Library.

I never use these things, and they bother my eye, so as soon as I got my hands on iTunes 8, I started looking for a solution (here's how I do that). With some help from Kirk McElhearn, we soon found the solution in a hidden preference value -- a variable named show-store-arrow-links.

After a quick test, we confirmed that it worked, and I wrote it up as hint on Mac OS X Hints. At the same time, I ran a Google search for 'show-store-arrow-links', and came up with no matches.

Note that this does not mean Kirk and I were the first people to post about this workaround -- more than likely, it had already been posted elsewhere, but Google hadn't yet indexed those sites (we were doing this shortly after iTunes 8 was released).

Still, I thought this was a perfect chance to see how things propagate across the internet, as I could repeat my search for show-store-arrow-links over time, and see how quickly the hit count increased. Given the uniqueness of the term, any matches would definitely be people either linking to the hint on some other site, or actually posting their own version of the hint.

Within two hours of the original hint's posting, the hit count was up to five. After seven hours, 137. At 24 hours, 384. At that point, I grew bored with tracking the increases, and tabled the study. Today, though, after 12 days, I ran the search again, and there are now over 1,000 sites that contain the hint (or a link to it) on how to block the iTunes Store arrow links in iTunes 8.

I think that's a good measure of how many people dislike these arrows, and who really wish Apple would have left that preference in place. (Sorry iTunes for Windows users; preferences are stored differently in Windows, and I'm not sure anyone's figured out how to make similar modifications on that platform.)



Review: VMware Fusion

Macworld logoYou may need (or want) to run Windows, or other operating systems, alongside Mac OS X, and Parallels Desktop (4 mice) is the best-known of several programs on the market for that purpose. (Full native Windows support, of course, is also available via Apple's Boot Camp, but it requires you to reboot out of OS X and into Windows.) A new-to-the-Mac player now brings a formidable challenger to the arena, however. VMware, an expert in x86 virtualization—that is, the ability to run one or more x86 operating systems as 'guest' under a 'host' x86 operating system—has released Fusion 1.0, its first OS X offering. Like Parallels, Fusion allows you to run many versions of Windows and other operating systems from within OS X. And unlike Boot Camp, you don't have to log out and restart in order to use it.

VMware Fusion supports more than 60 operating systems: Windows coverage extends from version 3.1 to betas of Windows Server 2008. If Linux is your cup of tea, you'll find support for Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandrake, and more. You can also install Novell Netware, Solaris 9 or 10, FreeBSD, and MS-DOS systems. Even 64-bit releases of Windows and some families of Linux, such as Red Hat and SUSE Enterprise Linux, are supported.

Read my Macworld article, Review: VMware Fusion, for the rest of the story...



The Beatles on iTunes: Tomorrow never knows

Macworld logoSo if my esteemed coworker Philip Michaels is correct, next week we'll see the release of The Beatles' catalog on iTunes. This news has literally been years in the making, and the excitement surrounding this potential announcement seems to be huge. Crowds are (virtually) forming outside the iTunes Store already—well, OK, maybe not. But you'd have to be sleep-surfing not to have seen some mention of "Beatles," "iPod," and "iTunes Store" over the last couple of days on hundreds of sites, including ours.

And here I sit, a child of the Beatles era—literally a child, as my first exposure to The Beatles came from hearing it played on my parents' record player. (Anyone else remember those?) While there are clearly bigger Beatles fans in the world, I do enjoy their music, and presently have something over 30 of their songs in my iTunes collection. (I'm what you might consider a fair-weather fan, as I tend to prefer their more popular songs to the remainder of their catalog.) The Beatles created some amazing songs, and definitely helped change the future of music—with over a billion units sold worldwide, they have definitely left their mark. So with that background, you think I'd be thrilled to hear they're on their way to iTunes.

The truth is, my reaction to the rumors has been more along the lines of "Umm, why does everyone seem to care so much?"

Read my Macworld blog entry, The Beatles on iTunes: Tomorrow never knows, for the rest of the story...



Review: Numbers

Macworld logoSlowly, but surely, Apple's iWork is turning into a full-fledged office suite, as iWork '08 gains Numbers, Apple's latest foray into the world of spreadsheet programs. So what is Numbers? Is it at long last a replacement for the spreadsheet component of AppleWorks? Is it a direct competitor to Excel? Will it enable users looking for alternatives to finally move from either AppleWorks or Microsoft Office to iWork?

The answer to these questions is any of yes, no, and maybe, depending on your specific spreadsheet needs. Those with basic needs will be impressed with Numbers' ability to make short work of their projects. People with more complex requirements, and those hoping to migrate from Excel or AppleWorks, will find the transition more difficult. And some people—scientific users, students, and advanced Excel users in particular—may find that certain details in Numbers make it impossible to use the product in its current form.

Read my Macworld article, Review: Numbers, for the rest of the story...



First Look: Numbers

Macworld logoIn January 2003, Apple introduced Keynote, a fairly groundbreaking presentation application. Two years later, along came Pages, a mixed page layout/word processing tool.

Together, Keynote and Pages were sold as the $79 iWork'05 "suite." Compared to the venerable AppleWorks, though, iWork was missing both spreadsheet and database applications. With the release of the still-$79 iWork '08 (Best Current Price: $67.41), Apple has plugged the spreadsheet hole with Numbers.

Read my Macworld article, First Look: Numbers, for the rest of the story...



An Office 2008 VBA to AppleScript helper

Macworld logoA while back, I wrote about what I thought of Microsoft's decision to drop Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) from the next version of Office. In short, I think it's a short-sighted and stupid decision. Apparently my thoughts had no influence on the folks in Redmond (shocking, I know!), as Office 2008 is set to ship without any form of VBA support.

But it will have AppleScript support, and the fine folks at MacTECH were kind enough to send me a preview copy of their upcoming 150+ page guide to switching from VBA to AppleScript. I wrote a brief preview of this guide for Macworld last week. If you're a serious VBA scripter looking to make the move to AppleScripts, this looks to be a must-have guide. And thanks to some Microsoft support, you can buy it and six-month subscription to MacTECH for all of $10 or so. More info can be found in the link in the Macworld article.



My opinion on the next version of Office for the Mac

Macworld logoIn case you haven't heard, the next release of Microsoft's Office for the Mac will lack one major feature: support for Visual Basic (VB). This core technology is what allows one to record macros, and it works basically the same on both Windows and Mac. But the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft has discovered that porting the code to Intel would be very hard...so they decided to just drop it completely.

I think this is a really bad mistake, and wrote about why in this opinion piece for Macworld.



This is going to take not quite as long…

Back in February, I wrote about the incredibly lengthy time estimate that Stuffit gave me for an expansion. Well, it happened again today, but with QuickTime:

estimate

I was thinking about including a 1920x1200 movie capture of Redline Racing in my Pick of the Week writeup, so I had captured a couple minutes of the high-res stuff--the raw movie file was 8.6GB in size, in fact! After it opened, I had trimmed it down and then wanted to convert the format. When the export dialog appeared, the above was the initial estimate. It should be noted that at "only" 1,491,308 days, this is about 84 times faster than the Stuffit expansion!

What I also found humorous was the "7 minutes" bit -- it's not enough that I wait over 1.4 million days, but don't forget about those extra seven minutes! And yes, the dialog cleared itself up (unlike the Stuffit dialog, which never changed), and the actual export took only five minutes or so. In the end, I chose not to use the movie, but the funny dialog was worth seeing.