At Work On a Mac

I finally got my copy of iLife 09 today and immediatly set out to install it and test the new features. I do have a problem though. I haven’t created a DVD in ages (I don’ t have kids), I never shot video either (damn it Apple, I want QIK on my iPhone), I’m certainly not a musician and the I’ve had so many problems with the podcasting part of GarageBand that I’ve given up a while ago.

So what am I left with? iPhoto and iWeb. Now, I code web sites for a living so you’ll understand if iWeb is perhaps not for me. I do intend on trying it out though to see how it compares to other simple editor. There’s a real value to these simple to use software and I’m glad Apple took the time to create one.

So, back to photos. I do like taking pictures. I have my Nikon D80 and a few nice lenses to go with it. I’m a good Apple fanboy though and a couple of months back, I switched from iPhoto 08 to Aperture 2.1 because I wanted a little bit more power and, well, Apple said it was better.

And now I’m kinda sad. I want to use and like iPhoto 09, but my iPhoto library is empty and my 200$ copy of Aperture is laughing at me. I would love to have the new Places and Faces functions. I would love the Flickr and Facebook integration. So are we doomed? Well, maybe not. There’s a rumor out there that a new version of Aperture (3.0?) could be released by early summer.

I’ll have a full review of iLife 09 in the coming weeks.

No comment really. 5,000 more Macs infected by a wicked Trojan installed during the activation of cracked Photoshop downloaded through BitTorrent streams.

The new Mac Trojan variant OSX.Trojan.iSerices.B, detected last Thursday, is found in the crack application bundled with copies of Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Mac. While the actual Adobe Photoshop installer is bug-free, the Trojan embeds itself into a crack application that serializes the program, Intego said. After downloading the pirated Photoshop, the crack application extracts an executable from its data, then installs a backdoor in a file directory, which is not deleted when the computer reboots. If the user runs the crack application again, the Trojan creates another executable with a different name, making the malware more difficult to trace and safely remove.

It might be time to install Avast if you’re hanging around nasty sites. There’s a huge difference between anti-virus and anti-malware. There’s not a lot of descriptive notes on Avast’s effeciency with new threats of the Trojan category. Give it a try and if it slows you’re system down too much, start acting defensively with safe behaviour (no visit to illicit sites, no clicking on attachments from strangers, no downloading of strange PDFs or software, no execution of jpegs and mpegs with browsing software, change root password every month, no getting your emails from public places without changing your user passwords afterwards).

What you might also do is create a web browsing user without administrative privileges, disable Javascript, use Firefox (especially good at phishing detection).

I have an iMac running Parallels with Windows XP for various reasons, mostly because at the time, I couldn’t wait for Boot Camp and Parallels had beaten Apple to installing Windows on a Mac. Why Windows? I sometimes need to verify compatibility issues for business presentations, I tried and used some financial software that will only work in Windows and, mostly, I do not want to lose my Windows touch even though I have distanced myself over the years from that environment and way of thinking the user space. Parallels 4.0 would warrant its own review. Coherence, the ability to run Windows applications under Mac OS X and the possibility to run simultaneous Linux distributions, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 on virtual desktops makes this product amazing.

After hearing, reading and experiencing horror stories, I skipped Vista altogether, like a lot of people preferring XP over Vista any day. Since I read only good things about Microsoft’s Windows 7 and that I wanted to experiment with Boot Camp’s performance over Parallels, I decided to install the Windows 7 Beta on one of my MacBooks.

Because this is a blog, I’ll make an effort to keep it short and spare you an unpleasant downloading experience. It made me realize how different Microsoft and Apple were. I am sure both companies employ very bright engineers but, Microsoft seems to always manage to leave out the user in its design strategy. Downloading the Beta is a testimonial to that.

What if I were not new to Beta testing?

What does that have to do with anything? Microsoft wants to make sure you have a Windows Live sign on. I’m downloading a Beta, willing to invest my time to test it out. I would have giving you a false email just to make sure I miss an activation code? Also, it would be nice to always know how many steps are involved in any online transaction ahead of its completion, especially when superflous steps are added.

Now that’s a good one. I’m using Hotmail, a Microsoft product that cannot recognize an email stemming from— Microsoft. Attachments, pictures and links in the message have been blocked to protect me. Considerate, considering.

You don’t really need the product key for the install. Just hit return when you get to it. Microsoft, can you rethink this whole Product Key thing from scratch, putting yourself in the user’s seat? For future reference, it’s an annoyance, we always have to reinstall the system and end up losing the key. It’s a pain to enter even when we have it. Find another way. Diminish the unpleasant experiences of contact points with your brand and your products. Think different to paraphrase a famous Apple adage.

Yikes, go figure. In Microsoft I trust, in Akamai I… oh well, do I have a choice?

Microsoft is using a JAVA applet to manage the download, tsk, tsk. Thank you Sun. (couldn’t resist that one )

Now for some positive aspects of Windows 7. It installed relatively quickly, far from the over 2 hours I had spent installing XP and its updates and Parallels. It feels funny to see my MacBook wearing Windows. The Intel processor, Boot Camp, FreeBSD and Mac OS X transforms the Mac into a unique development machine. I like it a lot.

It boots very fast, finally (Apple take notes). To boot off Windows and to run Boot Camp at start-up, hold the “alt or option” key. Windows 7 looks very promising and has an intuitive feel to it. I like the way it manages networks. I don’t like another long key we have to write down for future pairing of computers with this local network. Email anyone?

I will now proceed to install software and see how it runs. As I said, I like the performance, the look and feel and the speedy start-up. The interface is well done and flowing. I’ll keep you posted when I really try it out.

As you probably know by now, the DMG disk image of iWork that’s circulating on Bit Torrent has a trojan in it that infects the Mac and then tries to connect to remote machines to do a DDOS attack on them. To my knowledge, it’s the first Mac “virus” that actually managed to make a splash and that actually tries to do something evil. At this point, the reports online are talking about 20,000 infected machines.

There’s a couple of things to mention here. First, this might finally make people realize that the Mac OS X operating system is not secure. Now before you get upset at me, I do realize it’s a much better architecture than a typical Windows version, but as this trojan shows, regardless of what the OS does, there’s nothing you can do to prevent user stupidity. And yes, I do consider downloading a random disk image from a random server somewhere and installing it (while, of course, giving the installer your admin password) stupid.

The second thing is that this really shows to me that no matter what businesses do, some people will always pirate the software. In the gaming industry, there’s a lot of arguments from pirates that games are pirated because the DRM is obstrusive and that if they would remove the user annoyances they would buy it. In this case, Apple removed the only “protection” on their $79 office suite — a serial number — so that it’s easier for the buyers and the first thing people do is upload the disk image to the net and at least 20,000 people then download the image.

That’s just sad. What’s the reasoning behind this? It’s not as if the office suite is overpriced. It’s not as if it comes with DRM that will annoy you a lot. It’s not as if it comes from a company we hate.

No, it’s just that some people will steal just about anything online because unlike in the real world, they get to do it anonymously.

If you are a Web developer or you’ve ever tried sending an email to a list of people, you know it can be quite difficult to pull off. It’s annoying because you have to make sure your message will be readable on a multitude of email clients, that it won’t be considered SPAM and that accents (if you’re writing in a language that uses them) will work. Character encoding is always such a troublesome thing to manage.

MaxBulk Mailer Pro version 6 is a piece of software that works on both Mac OS X and Windows that will help you send such an email. The software is quite powerful— it gives you guidance to make sure your mail is not considered SPAM, it can import a list of recipients from a multitude of sources (including a remote database system, a text file, CSV file, etc.) and it will work with whatever SMTP server you want (you can configure this when sending the mail). The software allows you to save lists of contact for future reuse and you can export that list to a text file if you’d like to move the list to another database.

The Pro version of the software also allows you to send mail attachments. Considering the small price difference, it can be worth it to go for the Pro version. The normal edition retails for $49 US while the Pro is $10 more at $59.

All’s not perfect though. The interface to write the email itself could use an overhaul. It’s not wysiwyg at all, it’s a simple text box where you paste whatever you want to send. If you are sending an HTML email, you have to type the HTML tags yourself. During our tests, we had some difficulties with text/html combo emails which for some reason Apple Mail wasn’t too keen on. It worked on a second test however…

While it’s not perfect by any means, it is quite a nice little piece of software and seems to work pretty well. The “new”-ish version 6.0 is a nice upgrade if you had version 5 before. Other than new features, the interface has been revamped a bit. Clearly, the next step for MaxBulk Mailer is to improve on the text editing widget since the rest of the package feels polished and feature complete.

You can try a free 30 days demo on their web site if you’d like to see how it works.

Google made a splash in 2008 when it released its new browser “Chrome”. Part of the reason why Chrome made a good first impression is that the browser is really fast and has good compatibility with Web sites in general. That’s all fine, but unfortunately Chrome is still not available for Mac. All hope is not lost though. What you may or may not know is that Chrome is based on Webkit, Apple’s HTML rendering framework used in a little application known as Safari.

When Apple first released Safari in 2003 it decided to use the open source HTML engine from the KDE project (a Linux desktop environment) as its basis. Since it’s open source, Apple had to keep it open source so what they did is that they launched an open source project of their own called WebKit.

Every now and then (mostly at major OS releases), Apple releases a new version of Safari and claims it’s “faster, more compatible,…” . If you’d like to get these benefits right now, you can do so easily by using a nightly build of Webkit. Simply visit the site and download the latest version. It won’t impact your installation of Safari so you’ll be able to go back to the “stable” version anytime you want. Webkit will use the same bookmarks as Safari and those will be synched through MobileMe if you are using that service. The transition back and forth between WebKit and Safari is transparent.

Enjoy the speed increase. While the software is technically “not stable”, I’ve never had a problem with it so you’re not taking a big risk.

If you live, well, on earth I guess you are probably aware that January the 20th is inauguration day for Barack Obama. A new President who, if anything, is well aware of the power of social networking (or at least someone on his team is) and likes his Blackberry a lot. Barack’s use of Twitter and Facebook over the past year was impressive but as he takes his oath on Tuesday afternoon, the impressive use of technology won’t come from him nor his team but from the good people over at UStream.

UStream.tv is a site that allows you to broadcast live video on the Web for free. That’s impressive, but it’s been available for a while (competitors Qik and Stickam do similar). What’s cool though is that UStream has just launched today their first iPhone/iPod Touch app. This free application is a video viewer and streams the video over WiFi (only) and let’s you watch any video content on UStream on your iPhone. The app comes just in time since the site will have a number of live streams all day on Tuesday for Obama’s inauguration.

I know what you’re thinking. No, the app doesn’t allow you to record video. Unfortunately, Apple has not yet allowed anyone to record video with the iPhone. QIK, a similar service that allows anyone to broadcast from their phone (works great with an N95 for example) has the application ready and is awaiting Apple’s GO.

We live in interesting days. For the past couple of years, we’ve been slowly moving toward Web applications and our operating system is becoming less and less important. Obviously, we still have quite a way to go before we can say web applications are polished as desktop apps, but from time to time I come accross Web applications that are quite impressive.

280slides.com is a keynote replacement made by ex-Apple employees who decided to recreate the cocoa API in Javascript. The result is, in a word, impressive. Oh, and it’s also free. The application doesn’t support even 1 third of the features that Powerpoint or Keynote support, but it does have all the basic features that perhaps 80% of us need when creating a slideshow.

When done with your presentation, you can save the result to a local file in either Powerpoint, PDF or Open Document format so that you can run it locally as you would a normal presentation. The service is still in Beta but the application works quite well and allows you to publish your presentations on SlideShare (also for free).

We may not yet be at a point where we can say Web applications are replacing our Desktop-based business apps, but a site like 280slides.com is proving that we’re getting there quite quickly.

One thing that can be frustrating these days is that even though the Internet has removed borders and we now have immediate access to anything that’s happening around the world, we’re still bogged down by real-world laws and limitations. One area where it especially hurts is availability of medias on the internet.

TV Shows are starting to be distributed on the Web (I’ve been saying traditional TV is dead for a while now) but at least here in Canada we get a lot of US TV shows on TV but then of course these are not always available on the Web for us Canadians. The solution to that has always been finding a proxy server in the US to make it look like you are coming from the US, but they rarely work well enough to stream video.

If you’ve been looking at a site like www.hulu.com thinking you would love to be able to watch it, the solution is quite easy and its name is Hotspot Shield. This “software” is really just a web interface to enable and disable te proxy setting on your computer. Once you enable it, you’ll be anonymous on the Web and it’ll look like you are in the US. It’s a simple software that gives a simple solution and it works really well so far for me.

It’s also hard to argue with the price : free. Highly recommended.

It’s been a few days now since Jobs announced he was taking time off for health reasons and I wanted to take some time to explain why I keep telling everyone to stop panicking. The chatter this week on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks was just wrong for the most part. Jobs is not dead, he has not left Apple nor does that mean Apple will go bankrupt anytime soon.

Steve Jobs’ recent letter to the media and his decision to take 6 months off for health reasons has once again made all the rumors and speculations about his future and Apple’s future all the more relevant. John Gruber recently pointed to a great CNN Money profile on Tim Cook, the man Jobs once again chose as his replacement to handle the day to day operation at Apple while he his away. CNN did a great job on this article. It’s a great read if you have some time.

For better of worse, Steve Jobs *is* Apple for many people. Most of us can’t imagine what the company would be like without him and we remember what happened last time Apple fired his founder : the company went through years of hell before he came back in 1997 and returned the company to greatness.

Steve Jobs, just like Bill Gates will go down in history as one of the most important people in the history of computing. He’s done some great things for sure and I have no doubt he’ll do many more before he retires. He may not be in the best shape of his life, but as far as we know, his condition is not life threatening and until we hear otherwise, I will assume he has every intention of coming back. His prior battle with cancer in 2004 made it so that many people on the Web just assumed he was doomed and started speculating on what that meant for Apple.

Let’s give him the time he deserves to get better and the privacy any human being deserves with situations like this. Apple is lucky to have a number of very brilliant executives to handle the situation. Tim Cook is one of them, Phil Schiller is doing a great job as the “public face” of Apple while Jobs is away and younger execs like Scott Forstall (iPhone Software) are making sure Apple comes out with new and interesting products in the coming months and years.