Griffin announces volume-limiting headphones for
kids

post from Macnn | The Macintosh News Network on 17 September 2009 10:55:00 PM. © Macnn | The Macintosh News Network

Griffin Technology has announced MyPhones, a new headphone with an integrated volume limiter to prot...

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Mariner Calc 2.0 adds customizable e-mail options

post from Macnn | The Macintosh News Network on 17 September 2009 10:20:00 PM. © Macnn | The Macintosh News Network

Mariner has released v2.0 of its spreadsheet editing application for the iPhone, Mariner Calc. The a...

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How Should Mac Apps Be Distributed

post from Daring Fireball on 17 September 2009 08:04:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Alexander Limi has a thoughtful piece regarding the problems Mozilla has identified with the current installation process for Firefox on the Mac. As it stands, they’re following the common pattern of delivering the Firefox app on a disk image, which, when mounted, uses a background image and alias to the /Applications/ folder to encourage users to copy the app from the mounted image to their startup drive. Limi writes:

Some common errors that we have seen repeatedly among informal testing with friends and family are:

They drag the application to their dock directly.
This creates a link to the file inside the disk image, which means that every time they try starting Firefox, the disk image is unpacked and mounted, and starting of Firefox becomes very slow, which makes it a bad experience.

They think that starting Firefox is done by opening the disk image every time.
This is very common, and the logic is that the first time they started Firefox, they had to do this, so they continue doing it. This makes starting Firefox a chore, since it takes a lot of clicks to accomplish.

I agree that disk images are problematic for lay users. The whole concept of a virtual volume is just too abstract. There’s a wonderful simplicity to the way that nearly all good Mac apps can be installed just by copying the AppName.app bundle to anywhere you want it on your hard drive, and that apps can be uninstalled simply by dragging that same bundle to the trash. Users don’t, of course, need to understand or even be aware that .app bundles are really just folders that the Finder treats as a single item. The only conceptual abstraction Mac users should need to know is that the icon is the app.

But to make this work for apps delivered by disk image, users have to understand that they must copy the app from the image to their startup drive. This is where some get lost.

The iPhone shows just how much simpler the concept of app installation — and just as importantly, un-installation — can be. There is only one place where iPhone apps can be: on one of the home screens. The entire file system has been abstracted away. If you see the app icon, it is installed. If you want to get rid of it, you just press and hold to invoke jiggle mode and tap that icon’s X button. Even better, there is nothing to “clean up” after an iPhone installation: no mounted image to unmount, no .zip or .dmg download file to throw away.

But while I agree with the problems associated with using disk images for Mac app distribution, my initial reaction was that I did not like Limi’s proposed solution: a disk image containing an installer app that is set to auto-run when the image is mounted.

What I don’t like about installers is that users don’t know what’s been installed where. (Yes, you can use the Show Files command in the installer File menu to see what’s going to be installed, but the only people who know about this command are those of us who aren’t confused by any of this stuff in the first place.)

But after thinking about this some more, it occurs to me that an installer for a Mac app — even if it’s merely copying a .app bundle to /Applications/ — arguably provides a more iPhone-like installation process. The iPhone’s App Store app is, effectively, an installer. You install by clicking an “Install” button; you uninstall by taking action on the app icon.

The difference, though, is that on the iPhone, the App Store isn’t just the conventional way of installing and updating apps, it is the only way. On the Mac, installers are considered at least slightly unconventional. It’s also the case that installers work against the wishes of some advanced users. Whenever I install a Mac app by drag and drop, I don’t put it in the root-level-of-the-startup-drive /Applications/ folder, but instead in the inside-my-user-account-home-folder ~/Applications/, just as a simple way of keeping third-party apps separate from Apple’s system apps. Installers that hard-code the destination to the root-level Applications folder work against that.

In Firefox’s case, Limi covers this scenario in an aside:

Note that experienced Mac users should be able to cancel the installer at any time and drag the Firefox application to the location they want instead, thus there should be no loss of functionality or flexibility for them.

Perhaps that’s a good compromise, but I suspect that many experienced users, who would in fact prefer to install Firefox by drag and drop manually, would not cancel the installer to do so, on the reasonable assumption that if there is an installer, it must be doing something in addition to just copying the .app bundle. “Cancel the installer” does not sound like a good step in the instructions for installing software.

Zip It

What I like best is the resurgent trend of delivering Mac apps as simple .zip archives (a technique that harkens back a decade to when Mac apps were typically delivered as StuffIt archives). Download the .zip file, double-click, and there’s the app. Just like with disk images, what users should do then is move the app to their Applications folder. But — and this is the advantage of using a zip archive over a disk image — they don’t have to. Users can just launch the app right from their Downloads folder, and it’ll work just fine. They can drag it to their Dock, and it’ll work just fine. It’s not tidy, but there’s no confusing abstraction like a virtual disk volume that will disappear after they log out for reasons they don’t understand.

And you know when you double-click certain non-app bundles of software, like Dashboard widgets and System Preference panes, and the Finder prompts to ask if you’d like to install it, and if you agree, the system goes and puts the bundle in the right location, like, say, ~/Library/Widgets/ or ~/Library/PreferencePanes/?

Perhaps Apple should do something like that for .app bundles, where if you launch an app from ~/Downloads/, it would prompt you to install the app, and if you agree, it would move it to the Applications folder and launch it from there.¹

Patrick Dubroy proposed something along these lines two years ago in a fine essay titled “Why Is Installing Software on a Mac So Complicated?”. And Lukas Mathis had two good pieces on Mac app distribution in July, here and here. ↩

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2009/09/how_should_mac_apps_be_distributed

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DigiOS Productions releases SmartBet 1.10 -
Ultimate iPhone Betting App

post from prMac on 17 September 2009 06:27:00 PM. © prMac

DigiOS Productions has released SmartBet 1.10 for iPhone and iPod touch. SmartBet is an ultimate bet calculator which has dream options for reasonable gamblers. It will tell you how to make double chance stake with maximum benefit. An unique algorythm will help to improve your results in betting. If you can't be pragmatic enough The SmartBet is exactly what you need.

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Notational Velocity Lives

post from TheAppleBlog on 17 September 2009 05:00:00 PM. © TheAppleBlog

Years ago — even before Getting Things Done was all the rave — a powerful note-taking application named Notational Velocity, was all the rage. And then it lay nearly dormant. For years. But just a couple nights ago I received a fantastic email notifying me of all that’s been going on with Notational Velocity these many, many months.

Notational Velocity captures your notes in a way that’s so simplistic, you really need to try it out to grasp its brilliance. The application window, from top to bottom, consists of a text entry field, a listing of all notes that have been created, and then the selected note’s content. The top field is multipurpose: Type a note’s title into it and if there’s no currently saved note with that title, hitting return creates the new note and moves your cursor to the body area. If the title you’ve typed matches an existing note, hitting tab selects that note and moves you into the body of that note’s content to continue editing. It’s an elegant concept, and in this writer’s opinion, creates a hugely simple and effective user interface.

Notation Velocity Window

There’s a great deal of new features in version 2.0. Making it a universal binary (for Intel Macs) is a great first step. The list is long, so here it is directly from the email:

- Option to maintain/synchronize notes as text files for Spotlight and/or text editor access
- More robust and space-efficient database with encrypted, compressed write-ahead logging
- On-demand mounting of disk images and servers while loading the database
- Optional AES encryption with variable-strength key derivation
- Styled text editor supports font-independent formatting, an alternative to “rich text”
- Partial word-by-word or full-phrase searching
- Highlighting of found words
- Multiple-note selections and sorting by different criteria
- Support for input methods and unicode searching
- Basic support for editing structured text and code
- Per-note undo histories
- Importing of additional file types, including the Mac OS X Stickies database
- “Paste clipboard as new note” command grabs the current web context
- URL and email address recognition

Though the list of enhancements is great, almost more noteworthy is the open status of this great application. If you’re a developer who’s interested in getting your hands dirty in Notational Velocity code, or just want to learn a thing or two, check it out over at github. Hopefully this means that subsequent updates won’t be nearly as few and far between.

It doesn’t get easier than taking and retrieving notes with Notational Velocity. I’m thrilled with the update, and highly recommend giving it a try to see it it will fulfill your note-taking needs as well.

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http://theappleblog.com/2009/09/17/notational-velocity-lives/

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Music Publishers Want Apple to Pay for iTunes
Stores 30-Second Previews

post from Daring Fireball on 17 September 2009 04:35:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

This is about one step away from demanding money for when you have a song stuck in your head.

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Philadelphia Avoids Massive Layoffs With State
Senate Vote

post from Daring Fireball on 17 September 2009 04:25:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

I think this means we get to keep our libraries.

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http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/politics/Crisis-Averted-59660547.html

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Get Your Google Reader Fix Natively

post from TheAppleBlog on 17 September 2009 04:00:00 PM. © TheAppleBlog

google-reader-apps

Although much has been said about the death of RSS I, for one, still get most of my news via RSS feeds every day. I find Twitter to be filled with too much extraneous junk, and services like Friendfeed and Facebook still don’t offer the feature set I want from my daily news aggregator. My RSS service of choice is Google Reader, which should come as no surprise as it is by far the most popular RSS Reader out there.

Getting your Google Reader fix is as simple as navigating to the website, but what I really want is a desktop solution that offers all of Google Reader’s features while giving me a Mac-like experience and offline access to downloaded articles. A year ago the choices in this space were almost nil, but thankfully we’ve seen several applications jump into the fray recently. Let’s take a look at each of the contenders.

NetNewsWire

Many Mac users will be familiar with NetNewsWire, which has long been one of the best RSS readers for the platform. I was thus thrilled to hear that the next version of NetNewsWire will be bringing Google Reader support.

NetNewsWire's interface should be familiar to many Mac users.

The current beta of NetNewsWire does support synchronization, starring and folders, but features such as sharing and liking items are still not available. Thankfully the developer has indicated that those features will be implemented. Unfortunately, there?s no word about future support for notes and tagging.

NetNewsWire offers excellent keyboard support, a built-in web browser as well as integration with Delicious and Instapaper. Lacking is Twitter or Facebook support. You can send articles directly to a blogging client on your computer, which is a nice feature. I also like the three pane interface that is offered as an alternative to the more traditional interface with articles on top and the preview below.

NetNewsWire also offers a 3-column view and a tabbed browser

Once the latest version of NetNewsWire gets out of beta, the combination of excellent user interface with reasonable Google Reader support will likely be compelling for many. It will still be missing some important features however, like notes, tagging or posting directly to Twitter and Facebook. This will likely keep me from using the software.

EventBox

Unlike other solutions on this list, EventBox is not singularly focused on RSS feeds. Instead it seeks to be the center of your online social life, with support for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg and other services in addition to Google Reader support.

The user interface offers access to your folders and feeds, but given the multi-use nature of the software I have to say that it feels a bit like Google Reader has been shoehorned into a generic interface. There are no keyboard shortcuts for sharing and starring, for example, and no support for tagging or liking.

Google Reader shares the spotlight with other services in EventBox.

Given EventBox?s support for a wide variety of social networks, you might expect sharing items from Google Reader to those various networks would be easy. Unfortunately this isn?t the case. You can send an item to Twitter or Instapaper, but not directly to any of the other social networks that EventBox supports.

EventBox is still undergoing active development and the developer says they are specifically working on improving integration between services. Still, improving the Google Reader implementation doesn?t seem to be high on the priority list. Hopefully this changes in the future, but as of now it?s not a good choice for most Google Reader users.

Gruml

I have used both NetNewsWire and EventBox extensively in the past, but I have to admit that Gruml is new to me. To be fair, it?s new to many of us as the application just opened to a public beta a few weeks ago.

At first glance Gruml is a Google Reader power user?s dream. It has by far the most complete implementation of features amongst the three applications I looked at, including support for starring, sharing, liking, notes and tags. There?s also support for posting an article directly to Twitter.

Gruml packs in the features, but constant lag is a problem.

The user interface is similar to NetNewsWire?s, with the option of a standard mail-like interface or a three-column view. Like NetNewsWire, there is also a built-in web browser for viewing articles and solid keyboard navigation support. Unique to Gruml is a menu bar icon that shows you how many unread items you have and pops up a list of the most recent articles when you click on it.

Gruml also offers the most complete access to Google Reader interface features, for example you can view your starred, shared, liked and noted items. You may also view a list of all your feeds, see them organized by folder or view articles by tag.

Unfortunately not all is well with Gruml, as you might expect from an application that is still in Beta. The biggest problem is laggy performance. While using the application I experienced constant slowdowns. Even moving to a new article would sometimes summon a beach ball, as did attempting to mark all articles in a folder as read.

If the developers of Gruml can address these performance issues, however, it currently offers the greatest hope for a complete Google Reader experience on the Mac desktop.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Mac desktop clients for Google Reader are a new phenomenon. This can be seen clearly by the fact that all three pieces of software I looked at are still in Beta. As it stands today, I don?t find any of them offer the mix of features and performance I?m looking for, so I still use a Fluid SSB with Google Gears for offline support to access Google Reader. All three applications offer hope for the future, however, and I can easily see myself using one of these in a year.

Read The Full Article:
http://theappleblog.com/2009/09/17/get-your-google-reader-fix-natively/

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LogMeIn CEO claims private line for App Store
questions

Apple is giving special support treatment to at least one iPhone developer, according to the latter ...

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Finer Things in Mac

From their about page:

This is not the place to find news or even analysis. We like to celebrate the surprise features and UI gems that developers slave to add to the software and websites we use every day. We are obsessed with productivity and polish.

Chock full of Snow Leopard details. Instant bookmark.

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Read The Full Article:
http://finerthingsinmac.com/

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