2007 August | One Eyed View

Archive for August, 2007

NBC Fraks Itself

Friday, August 31st, 2007

You know something is up when the story goes from anonymous sources say NBC to end iTunes contract to Apple press release saying “see ya NBC” in the course of a few hours.

It’s particularly telling that Apple usually doesn’t put out a lot of pressers fired in anger. Usually, Apple doesn’t discuss its negotiations with third parties, so saying that NBC wanted to double the price of TV downloads is a proactive bit of spin on Apple’s part. NBC, you’ve been Steve’d. Or, to quote from your soon-to-be-former download powerhouse, “you’re fraked.”

Still, assuming the basics of the story as reported are correct — that NBC sought much a much higher price and more DRM restrictions — they certainly stand to look like fools if this is a bluff that has been called. Considering that network television loses a few million viewers every year (and has been consistently doing so for a decade), it’s vital that they have alternate revenue streams. And they’ve just pissed away iTunes. Amazing.

This is the latest in a series of attacks on iTunes by rivals, which seems remarkable in its pointlessness. Apple’s power, and money, come from the iPod, not iTunes. Apple doesn’t make a lot of money from iTunes, and if you fill your iPod with alternate sources, that’s no worse for Apple than if you use iPhoto and get prints from Shutterfly instead of iPhoto’s built-in printing service. As long as people continue to buy Macs, iPods, and iLife updates, Apple’s happy. iTunes challengers may eventually succeed, but even if they do, does it matter?

So far, the attempts to unseat the iPod itself have largely been laughable. It remains the dominant portable media player, and the key fact is that it plays two kinds of media: non-DRM’ed media, and FairPlay DRM’ed media. This leaves NBC with four highly unappealing options

Release DRM’ed shows in a format other than FairPlay. In other words, don’t run on the iPod. Given the carnage of the many Windows Media DRM stores — Rhapsody, PlaysForSure, Urge, etc. — this is obviously suicide
Release non-DRM’ed shows. In five years, we’ll look back and see how obvious this was: watermark the hell out of the files so you can catch the worst scofflaws, but let people play with their media on whatever devicese they like and re-use it in harmless ways (Universal is not going to go broke if I use one of their songs in a home video, fercryinoutloud). Given that NBC is reported to want more DRM from iTunes, not less, this is a non-starter for them in 2007.
Only release web-player versions of shows. And monetize it how? Can you really sell ads to that format? And is the 600×400 pixel Flash window really appealing to a non-trivial number of viewers
Don’t sell digital downloads at all. Step 1, do nothing. Step 2. Step 3, profit!

It’s worth remembering that NBC is part of NBC Universal, 20% owned by Vivendi, which also owns Universal Music Group. And those corporate cousins are also threatening to walk out on iTunes and boosting iTunes rivals with non-DRM content. So it seems like there may be a company-wide desire to resist or actively thwart Apple’s influence over media distribution. Which sort of makes sense, given that the various Universal divisions are media distributors, making iTunes a competitor. If Apple had the potential to make my company irrelevant, I’d probably be pissed too. But hopefully not as stupid.

Then there’s the other bit of format-wars weirdness from the company, Universal Home Entertainment’s long-time exclusive support for HD-DVD, and its rejection of Blu-Ray. At least Paramount and Dreamworks got paid handsomely for picking sides in the fight… $100 million might be more than either would have made selling discs in either format over the next year, especially now that the conflicting fortunes of the formats (it was just two months ago that Blockbuster dumped HD-DVD) is a strong disincentive for consumers to pick sides in the battle.

So, is Universal picking a fight it can’t win, by turning its back on iTunes and the iPod? If they play keep-away with their content, won’t they just drive a lot more users into grabbing pirated music and TV shows off Bittorrent? Or is there some sane, plausible strategy here that I’m not seeing?

Google Desktop for the Mac in 9 more languages

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Hey, we’re excited to launch Google Desktop and Updater for the Mac in 9 more languages today: Chinese Simplified and Traditional, Dutch, UK English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. For those of you who haven’t tried Google Desktop yet…

FFOSS (Freeware/Free & Open Source Software) Friday

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Journler 2.5.3
Sat, 25 Aug 2007 10:34:58

Journler 2.5.3 is a Mac OS X donationware (free for personal use) journal (daily notebook) application. This latest version only works with Tiger (10.4.x). However, older versions of Journler (1.17) is available for Mac OS X 10.3.x or older.

Journler integrates with Apple’s iLife suite and lets you add audio, photos, and video in your entries.

Panoramio: Submit Place Photos to Google Earth
Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:27:37

OK, this is more of a request than my usual nano-commentary.

Panoramio: Photos of the World

…was acquired by Google last month (July 2007). If you download and install the latest version of Google Earth, you’ll find that one its features displaying user submitted photos of places all over the world. This is great stuff (and a tremendous time waster :-). So, here’s my request…

Lightning: Mozilla Thunderbird Calendar Add-in
Wed, 22 Aug 2007 06:11:15

This has probably been around for a while. However, I only learned about the Mozilla Lightning add-on calendar project for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client (another on my must have list) a couple of days ago. It is listed along with the better known (to me anyway) Mozilla Sunbird standalone calendar client as a calendar project. I hope this add-on doesn’t fade away along with Thunderbird after it is split off from the main Mozilla group.

Buzzword: Web Word Processor
Sun, 19 Aug 2007 21:22:26

Buzzword
I use Google Docs a lot and I’m always looking for the next web-based untethering app like it. So, I hopped over to…

preview.getbuzzword.com

Got Open Data???

Create keywords on the fly in iPhoto ‘08

Friday, August 31st, 2007

You don’t need to use the Keyword window to add keywords in iPhoto 08. If you type a new keyword into the keyword field under a photo (make sure View » Keywords is set), it will be automatically added to the list of keywords (and becomes available in the pop-down list of guesses that shows up as you start typing in the keyword field).

So, by setting your view options to show keywords alone (not titles, etc.), you can Tab quickly between the keyword fields of a group of photos, adding new keywords as necessary, thus getting essentially the functionality of KeywordAssistant. (The only thing missing is the warning that you are adding a new keyword.)

[robg adds: Keywords are greatly improved in the new iPhoto (unlike, say, photocasts, which were summarily dropped). After you’ve created some keywords, you can make them even easier to use by creating quick entry keywords. Open the Keywords window (Window »…

Save ‘instant alpha’ images from iWork ‘08 apps

Friday, August 31st, 2007

The new “instant alpha” feature of Keynote ‘08 (as well as the other iWork ‘08 apps) can be used to make transparent backgrounds in images, but copying and pasting the resulting image doesn’t work as expected. Either the original image is copied or the transparency is replaced with a white background.

Ken Drake at Keynote User has a simple workaround. Place a shape with “no fill” (eg an invisible rectangle) over the instant alpha’s image, and copy and paste both image and shape.

To create a png file with the transparency, I opened iWeb 06, created a new page, pasted the image and shape, and exported to a folder. In there I found a droppedimage.png, complete with transparency.

Alternative delete a ‘word’ shortcut in Terminal

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Often times I’m in Terminal and I recall a command using the up-arrow. I then want to delete a portion of this command and replace it. Hitting the Delete multiple times is annoying at best.

The bash shell offers limited Emacs-style command line editing, with which one can delete a word using the sequence Escape-Control-H. While this works, it’s awkward because it requires lots of movement with the left hand, and is difficult to do repeatedly.

It occurred to me that the Delete key is probably sending out a Control-H, so I tried the sequence Escape-Delete instead, using my left hand for Escape and my right hand for Delete. It worked, and was very easy to do repeatedly. And even if you miss the Escape, you still get the Delete, so no damage is done.

Run SpringBoard from the command line

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

Here’s a nifty little trick. Install my iPhone utilities package. Then cd into /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app. Then issue the following command: restart; ./SpringBoard. This lets you run SpringBoard from the command line and peek at all its NSLog messages as they are issued.

Be aware that this is not safe, your stuff won’t work right, and you’ll surely have to reboot after. But it’s still kind of fun in a power-tool way.

One way to ease migration to a new Mac

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

So you’ve bought a new Mac, but your old Mac is up-to-date with the latest software updates from Apple. Or you’re doing a fresh install from your older install disk to a new drive, and plan on migrating from your old drive. Chances are your new Mac may NOT have all the current Mac software updates on it. Certainly your fresh install won’t. Here’s how to do migration sanely.

When asked if you are going to migrate your stuff from another Mac or partition, say no, and proceed to enter your user information — make sure that your shortname is the same as on your other Mac or existing install. When you finish that, create a temporary account via System Preferences » Accounts.

Next run Software Update to bring the new Mac or install up to date. Run it again until it says there are no more updates, as some updates rely on others being installed before they will be available. Then log out of your account and into the temporary one. Now you are ready to migrate your original u…

ezGear ships combo iPhone case/stand

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

Utah’s ezGear has begun selling the ezView Leather Case for iPhone, which attempts to differ itself …

Batch rename image files sequentially via perl script

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

I wanted to use the QuickTime “Image Sequence” feature to make rapid MPG movie out of a folder of JPGs. The problem was there were 600 pictures taken with my iSight over seven months, so I used a simple perl script to bulk-rename the files (it actually uses cp, so your original files are untouched). After running the script, open QuickTime, choose File » Open Image Sequence, and select 1.jpg, then the frame rate, etc. Here’s an example of the finished product. (I used the iSight auto-capture hint I submitted earlier this year.)

Here is the perl (rename.pl):

#!/usr/bin/perl$iteration=1;foreach my $file (`ls *.jpg`) {    chop($file);    system("cp $file $iteration.jpg;");    $iteration++;    }

[robg adds: I haven’t tested this one.]

Use a free program to simplify dragging from Terminal

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

For a long time I’ve really liked that you can drag files from the finder (or elsewhere) to a Terminal window, where they appear as a path. Unfortunately, there has never been a nice way to drag from the Terminal. For example, if I have a new tarball that I want to send someone, I have to click Attach in Mail, and then find the file using the Open sheet.

I’ve just written a program — Drag.app — that does allow you to drag from Terminal, and it is available for free, with source. It adds a new command (shell script), drag , which is usable from Terminal. When executed, it opens a new window with a file icon that can be dragged as normal. When the drag is complete, the app quits so your desktop isn’t cluttered and you can get back to the command line.

The closest I’ve seen to this before is the open command. If you open the enclosing directory of a file, then it will be displayed …

Use multiple contacts in a single iWork Pages document

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

Pages allows you to merge data from multiple contacts from the Address Book, but the merged data is used to create multiple documents for each contact that is inserted. Oftentimes I need multiple contacts to be used in one document (like a letter to several recipients.) Unfortunately, in Pages, you cannot define multiple contacts you want to bring into a single document. However, there is a workaround.

If you copy and paste defined Address Book Fields in Pages, it will preserve (copy) the "link" you have defined into the new Field(s). Dragging over a contact from Address Book will then fill both instances with the same data. If you then select one of these "instances," copy it, then paste it back in same place using "Paste & Match Style" it will lock that recipient in place. This allows you to drag over the next contact from the Address Book, and it will fill the other "instance" you have created. Hooray, you now a single document with…