Keys Corner

I’ve always had problems putting my Mac to sleep. Sometimes, especially if I have been playing iTunes, it wakes up again immediately. This can happen 2-3 times before it accepts it should go to sleep. I just spotted some advice on MacFixIt for people having this problem with the new aluminium keyboards – connect the keyboard to a USB hub, rather than directly to the Mac.

It works for the older white keyboard in my case – the Mac mini now goes to sleep immediately, every time more often.

Update (2007-09-12): After I posted this, the situation did improve, but I’ve since had occasional problems getting the mini to go to sleep. An improvement, but the problem is still present.

NeoOffice can now print at higher resolutions than 300 dpi. This makes a big difference if you want to print graphics, and if you want to print text documents which include fine lines (e.g. tables). Quoting from the release note:

Due to some restrictions in NeoOffice’s underlying OpenOffice.org code, printing resolution has always been limited to 300 DPI in NeoOffice. While many older printers only support 300 DPI, this restriction caused many newer printers to print high resolution images at a reduced resolution.

Fortunately, after much effort, we have been able to remove these restrictions and we are pleased to announce that NeoOffice 2.2.1 Early Access can now print high resolution images at the resolution supported by your printer

Get the patch here. (And get NeoOffice 2.2.1 Early Access, which includes support for the Mac OS X Spellchecker and Address Book and experimental support for Office 2007 Excel and PowerPoint files, here)

Well, I was right – it’s got a faster processor. No more details at the moment.

Apple COO Tim Cook, also on stage with Jobs for the Q&A along with Apple’s head of marketing Phil Schiller, also noted that today Apple refreshed the Mac mini with a faster processor.

(See my orignal entry below).

But take a look at the new iMac and keyboard – what a looker!

Do I want one? I’m not sure – my office desk has a window right behind it and the new iMacs only come with “glossy” (= highly reflecting, cheap to produce) wide-screens. Depending on the details of the refreshed Mac mini, I might well stick with that and keep my nice old fashioned non-reflecting, non-wide-format (how many movies do I watch on my Mac? None.) Dell 19” screen which suits me fine.

Well, well. The Apple Store is offering refurbished Mac minis, and in Germany Gravis is out of stock of both mini models. Those two events together often signal a model update is coming shortly. One can live in hope – it would be about time…

We’ve had the Apple TV for a couple of days now – the 160 GB version, which means that everything can be replicated to its hard-disk. So how do we feel it compares to the Roku SoundBridge, given that we bought both devices as music players and don’t need to synchronize the broadcasting of music to more than one room (in which case, other devices might offer a more appropriate, but more expensive solution)?

Both devices get their music from a dedicated Mac mini server in our office which runs both iTunes (for the Apple) and Firefly (for the Roku, which will now be moved to the cellar to continue its service there). The Roku has no local storage, so always streams from the server; the Apple TV can stream if the music isn’t already on its hard-drive, otherwise it plays from its own disk. In practice we never had any problems streaming to the Roku although the server is on another floor, separated by a reinforced concrete floor. Both can update their software from the internet at the touch of a button. Both are extremely simple to set up and should cause a non-techie no problems to get up and running, and both have active, helpful user groups in the internet if you do have any questions.

The Roku can only serve music, audio-books and podcasts, in various formats including WMA, FLAC and OggVorbis; the Apple TV can also serve music, audio-books and podcasts (but only those formats that Apple supports), but in addition TV-series or films (bought from iTunes), You-Tube videos, or your photo albums. The Roku can use iTunes libraries via Firefly, which means that it can (like the Apple) understand and serve up the smart playlists you have set up in iTunes – even if iTunes is not running on the server at the time.

The biggest difference is that the Apple has an iTunes-like display (on your wide-screen TV) of all the album artwork, so you can scroll through the artwork by album (or by artist or playlist) and pick the music you want to play. That is what sold the Apple TV to Ruth of course, although if you’ve seen her comment on the previous post about the Apple TV, you’ll see that she doesn’t think she’s agreed to move the CDs out of the lounge! Navigation on both devices is simple, but the Apple has the nose ahead here with the huge, easy to read display on the TV. It also has a nice screen saver, which cuts in after a couple of minutes with no input from the remote control, that can be configured to show your CD cover artwork or a selection of photos from your photo-album.

The one thing the Roku has, which we both really miss on the Apple TV, is the ability to build a temporary playlist on the fly using the remote control – the Apple TV can only offer you the existing playlists from your iTunes on the Mac. That is a major disadvantage, as we used the generation of a temporary playlist all the time on the Roku – the playlist is available until you stop playing it. I don’t see any reason why the feature couldn’t be added to the Apple device, so we are hoping it might come along in a future software update.

Note to self:
From some time in May, iTunes should be offering DRM-free tracks from EMI. Here’s a list of artists who are signed up with EMI.

EMI and Apple have announced that iTunes will sell EMI’s albums at a higher quality (twice the encoding frequency) without any copy protection (DRM), for the same price as the other label’s albums with copy protection. Single tracks will be more expensive, but in my case I almost never buy individual tracks, so that won’t affect me.

Thanks to Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) and Eric Nicoli (EMI Group CEO)!

There’s no mention in the press release as to whether this means that EMI’s CDs will also be sold without copy protection, but Boing Boing reported that EMI had decided to stop selling DRM’d CDs in January this year (I never saw an announcement from EMI at the time).

Our address book has been on our home computers since since the early-1990’s. First in Lotus Organiser, for a long time in an MS Access database, then in Act! and finally in Palm’s Desktop application, which we switched to when we changed to using Macs a few years ago. Looking back, I think the software I was most satisfied with was Act!, which is very flexible and powerful. It should be, as it’s aimed at business users, rather than home users. However, when we switched to the Macs, Act! only ran under Windows, and the Windows emulation software for Power PC Macs was slow, which is why we migrated the address book to the Palm Desktop.

We started using Palm PDAs in mid-1990s and since then, have always had the challenge of keeping contact data on a number of Palms and two or three computers in sync with each other. It’s not easy as the sync conduits which Palm supplies doesn’t handle multiple PDAs being synced with one PC well – they get confused and you can easily end up having several copies of the same contact in your database. It’s not a problem if you spot it quickly – you can check the date when each version was modified and manually delete the older copy, but it used to generate a lot of work until we got Palms which don’t forget their contents when the battery is empty, as when that happened, the conduit would usually allocate different internal keys when the contents of the database were recovered to the Palm after re-charging it and then sync them as new records to the other PDAs. I have manually removed 500-odd duplicate contacts more times than I care to remember because of that.

Of course, life gets even more complicated when you also want to keep the Palm Desktop synced across multiple Macs. We also print address labels for addresses in various international formats (the UK address format is by the worst to cater for as the British have almost completely unstructured multi-line addresses) and do a Christmas letter in OpenOffice (OOo), which gets printed out using the mass-mailing function in OOo. Both the labels and the mass-mailing documents rely heavily on OOo macros to format the addresses and other personal data correctly before it’s printed.

Where is all of this leading, you may be asking yourself? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the “charms” of using Apple computers is that Apple reckons that you can discover the finer points of using their software by stumbling over the niffty features of programs when you first need them, rather than drawing your attention to them in the “help” screens.

For as long as I can remember, probably since I first switched to the Mac in fact, I have been irritated and puzzled about why sometimes when I print out an e-mail, the print is ridiculously small on the paper, although on the screen it looks fine, it prints like this:

On other occasions, a mail would print just fine:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you are looking for an excellent utility to backup or copy your iPod’s music into your iTunes library, one of the best is Red Chair Software’s CopyGear for Mac.

They come originally from the Windows corner and also offer a tool-set for Windows called Anapod Explorer which includes CopyGear and additional utilities for managing photos on your iPod as well as integrating with Windows Explorer to provide drag-and-drop file management to and from the iPod. Until now I’ve used Senuti to transfer from my iPod, which is donationware. CopyGear is more powerful and well worth the $15 registration fee (you can try it before you buy – by transferring up to 25 tracks before the demo version stops working).

If you want the Mac version, just make sure you don’t do what I did, which was to inadvertently jump to the Windows product page in their store and buy that version before I realised I hadn’t bought the Mac version as intended! You can only get to the Mac store page from the Mac product page.