At Work On a Mac

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.

From time to time, you come across technologies or gadgets that seem almost magical. It doesn’t happen quite that often these days because we’re totally used to having very advanced technology in just about everything but the Pulse SmartPen from LiveScribe really is one of those things that will impress just about anyone you give a demo to.

So what is it? Well for one thing it’s a $150 ($200 CAD) pen with an infrared camera, a microphone, an LCD screen and — of course — a USB port. Oh, and it also writes on paper if that’s your thing.

More seriously though, the PULSE SmartPen uses special paper (with a unique arrangement of micro dots printed on it so the pen knows where and on what page it is) and its infrared camera to record everything you write. When you plug it in to the Mac or PC, you automatically get a digital copy of what you wrote. The desktop software that comes bundled with the pen then allows you to search through your notes and it does a pretty good job of recognizing handwriting. On Windows, a companion software that you can buy for 30$ will allow you to transcribe your written words into text but that software isn’t available on the Mac so far.

I said earlier the pen had a microphone on it. At the bottom of each piece of paper you will find a serie of buttons. 3 of them, Record, Stop and Pause allow you to control the microphone. If you record while you are writing, not only will you get what you write, you’ll also get the audio of what was said when you were writing it. Because the pen always knows exactly where it is on the page at all time (thanks to the micro-dots on the paper), one click either in the desktop software or anywhere on the piece of paper with the pen will launch an audio playback of what was being said when you wrote that word. Depending on which model you get, you can record either 100 hours or 200 hours of audio with the pen. Once filled, you’ll have to delete some audio, but it doesn’t matter because everything is archived on your computer.

The pen also has a few applications built in and more scheduled to come out later. Write the word “CALC” anywhere on a LiveScribe paper and the calculator launches. Then write your equation (say “28×7=” and the LCD displays the result. Launch the piano application, draw a simple panio and start playing music.

The pen has been on sale for a few months but the Mac version of the software just came out in December and is currently in public beta. There are still a few things missing on the Mac side of things (you can’t yet print your own paper on Mac, but that’s coming soon according to the developers).

When I ordered the pen, I was convinced it would barely work (if at all) but I’ve been very impressed with it so far. When I demoed it at the Montreal Mac User Group, everyone in the room was really impressed and when I showed it to people at work no less than 5 people bought one the same day. I gotta say, I’m loving it though I do wish it were Bluetooth and the Mac desktop software still needs some work. Since it does host a USB interface and an infrared camera it’s not the most comfortable pen you’ll ever use, but it’s light and isn’t too big to feel uncomfortable.

And when you’re done with all the built-in apps, head over to Penlet.com to get more games and apps for your pen. Right now the site is just getting started, but a community is starting to build around the technology and an SDK is available to build your own app.

We’ve covered many search applications and options here before for your Mac. There is yet a new one and it is very nicely done by the search experts themselves— Google. QSB is part of the Google code project and is still at an experimental stage but shows promise. You can get it here. I like the simplicity of the interface and its powerful options. Give it a try.

The news over Steve’s health is taking its toll. Now former fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons a technology columnist at Newsweek is apparently banned from CNBC for criticizing a CNBC reporter on air. While he might not have acted properly, I think he had a point.

Apparenlty CNBC reporter Jim Goldman kept repeating what Apple PR was saying to him, i.e. that there was nothing wrong with Steve’s health. But here’s the catch, he allegedly knew about Steve’s declining health for a week but failed to report on it. It does not make sense and Lyons said that CNBC might as well repeat Apple’s press releases. The PR spokeperson at Apple’s is apparently a former CNBC employee, adding to the drama. This is beginning to sound like a genuine saga. Only in America.