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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...



This enhancement is not so transparent

Macworld logoWhen Steve Jobs demoed Leopard at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, one of the new features included in the revised Desktop is a semi-transparent menu bar. It's clearly visible in the streaming video of the keynote, and in many of the screenshots on Apple's Leopard pages.

Now, I'm all for fancy effects, at least where it makes sense and might actually help the user. But in this case, I don't think it makes sense—look at many of Apple's own screenshots, and you'll see that certain entries in the menu bar are quite hard to read, owing to the bad mix of black text, a semi-transparent background, and a dark background image. Instead of being useful, it seems to me that—based on what's been shown, at least—the semi-transparent menu bar will do nothing but annoy me when I try to find a menu item against a non-cooperative background image. Of course, I won't know for sure until October when Leopard ships and I can test (and discuss) how well it does or doesn't work.

Read my Macworld blog entry, This enhancement is not so transparent, 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.



Don’t leave the Windows open

Macworld logoI've been running Windows on my Intel Macs for quite a while now--I have Parallels, VMWare Fusion, CrossOver, and Boot Camp installed on two machines. Across all those installations, I've never done anything to protect my Windows installs from viruses and malware, other than using Windows XP Pro's built-in tools: the malicious software removal tool and the firewall. I wanted to see if Windows really was as susceptible to attack as everyone was claiming it was.

pwned

Yes, it was. I wrote about what happened for Macworld, as it was a most eye-opening experience for me--this particular Windows install hadn't done anything more "risky" than surf to a few well-known download sites, looking for some iPhoto-type applications for the PC. If this is the risk a Windows user faces every day if their machine isn't fully armored against outside attacks, I must ask...why do people choose to use this OS on a regular basis? It also made me quite thankful I've never worried about such things in all my years of Mac usage.



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.



All washed out

Macworld logoAfter struggling for many months to solve an odd color fading issue with videos I encoded using H.264, I decided to get serious about solving the problem.

After much Googling, I found an answer and wrote it up for macworld.com, in case others are being afflicted by the same problem.





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.