Once in a while, for entertainment (we hope) and tongue-in-cheek humor, we will reproduce excerpts of our technology motivated conversations as they unfold in iChat, almost live. Today we upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and changed our style sheet to improve on readability and just because we like to stay current.
Interesting video produced by Apple on the new breakthrough battery designed to last longer (3X the industry standard lifetime) with up to a 1,000 recharge cycles for an 8 hour operation. Apple contrary to other manufacturers, is directly involved in the design of the battery. They aspire for the battery to be the thinnest possible, to last the longest (environment-friendly) and to sustain a full work day of operation. Mission accomplished. Now can you work on pricing? 
I just tried out the iWork 09 30-day FREE trial version available here. I did not give it an extensive workout but from what I have seen, consider this one an Apple donation if you plan to upgrade. I will in resignation and support for an alternative and because of Keynote. Other than that feel free to sit this one out.
I don’t think there are any new groundbreaking features in the Keynote, Pages and Numbers applications. They all have this share on iWork.com link in the menu to enable online sharing and commenting but you could probably obtain the same results with a good old PDF that they all create on the fly. Adobe has made document revision available in the free Reader (provided that the issued document was created in Acrobat, Standard version is at $299). This feature does not compete with Microsoft’s track changes and a corporate SFTP site. You need a MAC account to use it.
I seldom use Pages and Numbers because I find them to funny to take seriously. Excel and Word are tough customers to beat and— ubiquitous. As I said before, they almost pack too many features. However, after years in Lotus and Excel, I am still learning new tricks.
Keynote has a definite edge over PowerPoint but its small market share makes it hard to recommend. Others have died before, competing in the business presentation field (Adobe Persuasion, Harvard Graphics (still barely breathing), General Parametrics Videoshow, Corel, LMSoft and others). Still Keynote is my favourite business presentation software and Apple only needed to add one transition effect to incite me to upgrade. And they did.
Well, the sentiment is that this year’s MacWorld was flat. Everyone was expecting hardware news but, aside from a new 17″ MacBook Pro equipped with a non-removable battery, Apple announced mostly software upgrades. So, in a manner of speaking, they went soft on the Apple community. You will find everything here. iLife and iWork got major new features. iWork will offer online collaborative services à la Google docs. iMovie has face recognition. Garage Band has stars like Sting teaching you music (Artist Lessons, sold seperately, batteries not included ). And the biggest news as far as I am concerned is the removal of DRM on all iTunes songs starting now. It’s about time.
Allright Steve Jobs, just released a “personal” letter to the Apple community saying that his weight loss was due to an hormone, eating away his body’s proteins. So the rumors were partly wrong. At least they were over dramatic as he should be okay by Spring 2009. Good for innovation.
Always trust MacRumors to bring forward the most exciting Apple rumors. According to them, Apple would showcase Snow Leopard (a new version of Mac OS X) at Macworld to be held January 5-9 in 2009. In terms of other rumors, apparently Steve is rumored to be sick, hasn’t been seen in public recently and won’t attend Macworld, a traditional venue of his popular keynotes. Apparently, analysts estimate that he represents 20 Billion dollars of Apple’s market capitalization. Board room rumors (over the Internet) and heresays have him transitioned and replaced soon… If that’s the truth, it’s bad news for innovation.
Very interesting product for conducting online collaborative meetings: dimdim. A market dominated by webex for years and bought by Cisco. Dimdim in its free version allows up to 3 simultaneous connections. There’s a pro version for those who need it. You can share a presentation, see and here the presenter. You have a whiteboard and you can share your desktop with others. All you need to save on traveling expenses.
Oh well, one has to admit that digging into a subject reveals intricacies that might not have been apparent on the surface. There’s more to Spotlight. It can be accessed from the terminal by typing mdfind and reveals further parameters seen in the picture below.
Immediately, if i were to find all presentations on my volumes, here is what I would type:
Noticed that I sent all the results to a text file. invisible:1 would find all the hidden files on my volumes.
I would point your attention to real power here: kMDItem. These are the categories of metadata that a software publisher can set for its files or applications. You can get a full (gigantic listing) by typing:
Here are two examples of searches I conducted to find all my audio files:
To find all pictures with a width of 1024:
(notice that for numbers, you drop the * for strings).
It’s interesting, isn’t it? Here are for instance the fields that can be searched for Adobe’s PDF files:
Enjoy the power searches of a complex data world.
Time to revisit Apple’s great search engine— Spotlight. The interface is bare naked and a bit annoying at first because it sets itself in motion immediately after you start typing for a keyword. There are alternatives that I’ll introduce at the end of this blog entry.
One of my favourite search tip is that you can use kind:[description], replace description and the square brackets by document, PDF, jpeg, png, tif, excel, email, movie, image (also yields disk images), presentations, music, folder and others like conversation to find a saved iChat discussion. This trick helps narrow results by file types. cmd+ENTER or cmd+click on the result will reveal its location in the Finder. In the Finder window, cmd+Y will slide preview an image file, cmd+option+Y will preview selected images full screen. For an exact match, place an expression in between double quotes just like in Google. There is also a calculator in Spotlight. Couldn’t find a kitchen sink though…
Once you click on a search result, you can save the search by hitting the save button at the upper right hand side of the window. It will be saved in a Finder window as an intelligent search folder. You can use Boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR).
If this is not enough and you would like to have a richer search interface check out these freewares SpotInside 1.0 and EasyFind. They provide much deeper search options (contents, folders, Google, preview of content, etc.).
The information on every file (cmd-i) provides a field of metadata for Spotlight. You can use a specific expression, say “akey” for keynote.app to start an application just by using the keyboard and Spotlight (thanks Jonathan )
One last thing, if you use Mail, check out the menu in the From: field, it has a built-in call to Spotlight allowing you to find all emails from that sender easily.
I was stuck in traffic, could not move and was getting all the fumes from other cars thinking we will be the last generation to live this type of aggravation. Electric cars are coming and fumes will go away, not traffic jams.
Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 is outstanding. It is full of features, easier to use and simply close to being the perfect business presentation environment. I started a knol on business presentations. I want to take this to the extreme, so expect a pretty long article.
PowerPoint 2008 for Mac is very powerful. The transitions are now easier to choose because they are better presented with icons. The interface is so rich in features that initially the user is overwhelmed by its intricacies.
The slide masters can be modified to infinity. Hey guys, you’ve gone overboard. Just kidding, there is never enough features in any software, just people not aware of them. Contextual tooling is amazing. That’s when tools appear only when you select a certain type of object. For example, you select an image and the cropping tool appears. I guess the idea was to unclutter the style box. It’s pretty neat.
One major drawback, I was not successful in converting back from the pptx format to 97-2005 ppt format. That’s when I ran into www.zamzar.com and luckily it worked. Check it out and use it to convert files without starting the application. On the road again.
