Let's get back on track after missing a week in print with the Post. This week is the first part of my look at iLife, beginning with buying the package and starting up iPhoto.

iLife '09 (1): Purchase and iPhoto Slides

Actually, there is so much that is good in iPhoto that this is running for 3 weeks. Last week however, we had nothing in black and white which caused a minor ripple in my house when I went to fetch the newspaper on Wednesday morning.

I finally managed to contact the editor after lunch and there was apparently a 2-way problem: the mail I sent was not received; while the mail she sent asking me where that week's submission was, did not arrive at my end. After a bit if shuffling around, I am now using my gmail account and the Mobile Me account as alternative and for backup. A check with the guys who run the site showed nothing untoward, although I had had a feeling that some mail was going missing. Time to move on.

I still had some problems sending stuff to the Post and after going down there on Monday -- on other matters -- I spoke to the editor, then had an email chat with Wanda Sloan who, I might tell you, was the one responsible for getting my first articles accepted, back in 1989 I think it was.

With some transcripts from undelivered mail and some comments from the editor and Wanda, it would seem that the problem is with the Post's ISP in the US. I am setting up a way for the articles to be downloaded directly from my site rather than risk email any more.

We are used to the claim that a program will not run on Macs and has only been developed for Windows; but there is a move in the other direction this week with a company called Apogee Electronics who will "focus all research, development, and support resources on the Apple platform" so Mac Daily News tells us.

A program that will run on Macs and PCs is Safari and this week Apple announced the new Safari 4 which is currently available in beta. There are a lot of new features including the way tabs are now positioned at the top of the page and a new panoramic feature called Top Sites, which can also be opened by clicking on a new tool on the bookmarks bar. And along with the install package, there is an uninstall package as well.

Apple seems to be moving on with the Cinema Displays and last week we had a story that the 20" one is to stop. Perhaps the 30" one as well. That leaves the 24" one but there may be some revision with new connectors. That 30" one does look good.

Other rumours concern the Mac mini which some think is overdue for a replacement or update. Lots of sites had shots of what is claimed to be the new mini, and some even had a video. I guess the article by Electronista is about the best summary of it all, so I will link to that on the page that goes with the podcast. The shots show a slightly fatter or higher device, with an identical white top to the current range. It has about the same square aspect, too. Most interesting, and immediately visible are the five USB ports along with Firewire 800 and video ports at the rear. Next month: who knows?

Another rumour on Steve Jobs. MacNN report that he will not be attending the Apple shareholders' meeting which is today actually (25 Feb), the day after his birthday.

The low price Netbook is a favourite of the rumour mongers and analysts. I would like a smaller Mac notebook, if only to reduce the amount of weight I tend to carry about, but a netbook is not the way to go. Macsimum News report that analyst Brian Marshall thinks the netbook from Apple is a sure thing; while on the other hand, LowEnd Mac are sure that Apple Won't Ever Make a Mac Netbook and take the same approach as me: or at least what I want.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of Ziff Davies, suggests (probably rightly) that Apple is hardly likely to take advice from a bunch of cheapskates: those who want an Apple and think that, while they are unwilling to go up, Apple should come down to their level and that includes licensing OS X to those like Dell. Apple does not do cheap.

Following on from a couple of things I mentioned last week concerning the iPhone -- like sour grapes and envy -- I read in the Bangkok Post Business section on Saturday that a group calling itself the Telecommunications Consumer Protection Institute appears to have come out of the woodwork and is claiming that the iPhone launch and distribution violated the law and exploited the consumer.

On the last point, as the other companies declined to join the party, with some strong comments too, and the rates were not only publicised beforehand, but they also match rates in other countries in the region, I cannot see much to beef about here. Not cheap, for sure, but if I had the right credit card, or enough funds with the one I do have, I would be online in an instant ordering my own.

True are similarly unimpressed and rather than scream or sue, have reported the allegations to the National Telecommunications Commission. Who, or what the organisation is, we are not sure as yet, but True did mention the number of unlocked iPhones that were available; and I guess they mean at places like Mahboonkrong. As in other countries, and as before, the unlocked iPhones won't work with the True service which should not be a surprise to anyone.

Mind you, as an additional bit of information, DTAC's parent, Telenor, are happy to handle the iPhone in Scandinavia.

For some reason, an awful lot of people tried the podcast last week. Not that I am sorry: tell all your friends; click on the links. I wondered if one of the reasons was the mini review of that neat little iStat app for the iPod touch, so I may as well include something along these lines when I can. I have over 80 myself, so there are lots to choose from. And this week I downloaded one which will be really useful here. That comes later.

One I was tempted to buy is fairly topical, at least as far as politics in other countries is concerned. The app Pay to Play is based on the recent Illinois Governor scandal involving Rod Blagojevich so although it is available in the Thai iTunes app store, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything related to Thai politics whatsoever. The rubric tells us "You have 30 days to "pay back the unions, make tons of cash, and get out of town before getting impeached".

On that note about all the apps I have, there was a report that appeared in a number of sources last week, including CNET, that suggests that most iPhone apps are downloaded and not used.

I must say, that is about right with my experience too. Some of them I use once in a blue moon, some often, and some I have a look at then they just sit there. Some, of course, are waiting for the right moment to be used. One example is an app for checking on resistance colour codes for electrical engineers. really useful when needed, but not the sort of thing that you want to share with people at parties.

Another one is information about HazChem codes. As a traffic policeman, I used to see trucks rolling down the highway every day carrying chemicals. I still do: they are everywhere. In the cars we would have information about what action to take. A colleague of mine stopped a leaking truck one day and when he radioed in the UN code there was a pause and the dispatcher said, slowly, How close are you to this vehicle. . . . Just an everyday type of message really: life is tame these days.

As a teacher of engineers though, this sort of information is useful. But again, not something that I am going to be using every day. But when this sort of thing is needed, it really is valuable.

I updated a few apps this Sunday and, as always happens, when the download choices are complete, we are returned to the App Store home page. I had been looking at it only the day before, but this time a Thai keyboard app caught my eye. The developer goes by the name of Paul Abraham Jaimovich, but the site the app links to is bare to say the least.

This is an odd one as Apple has failed to develop a Thai keyboard, although there has been one for jail-broken iPhones for a long time now, and here is an App, that is obviously approved that gives access to this and allows emails to be written in Thai. This app was marked at $1.99 which is fairly cheap, particularly if you are Thai and work in the language every day. We could read them for a while now. I really think Apple has missed something here by not providing this facility especially as the iPhone is being sold here. There may also be a problem as, according to a review, the initial keyboard layout was previously used by another developer, but the update has changed that. Weird. Another reviewer expressed the opinion that it was not good and should be free.

I found when typing a message that it all has to be done in the app: subject and text and if you go to Mail too soon, the message is done, so no editing. Also, the keyboard response was rather slow, particularly in comparison with the normal iPod touch keyboard. Getting some characters to appear was a slow and deliberate process: treacly almost. Nonetheless, this gives users Thai with an approved app, so that is an advance on what there was before: nothing.

I later found that the same developer has a Thai email editor app that does Thai in colour as well. There is also a Thai dictionary and some other Thai apps: it is good to see this opening up to local users and to local developers.

Anyone who wants to develop for the iPhone, needs the iPhone SDK which I installed several months ago, along with a number of videos from Apple. O'Reilly also has a book on the subject of the SDK installation and as part of their extensive coverage, there is a useful outline of the work on their pages.

An area where Apple really ought to make changes is with the podcasts section of the iTunes store. I have mentioned this before, but it gets annoying switching between stores to access these gems, and I include the iTunesU in that as well. Those have been provided by the universities as a way to improve everyone's access to online academic information, of the type particularly useful in developing countries.

Among all the rumours, I have seen nothing about 10.5.7 which one might expect after 10.5.6. There are however several reports this week about screenshots of OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard. Some of these confirm what I was told in SF in January that there are to be no major changes on the surface, but a strengthening of what lies beneath. Tom Krazit of CNET has some more information on the upcoming release.

I was going to say something about Microsoft and the way it dealt with some redundant workers and I have left the text on the page that goes with the podcast.

But it seems to me, I would use the time better with comments on the new Safari, which I have been using for the last few hours with, unsurprisingly, one crash. It is a beta.

I don't like the Tabs bar on top. There are a couple of other new features that may need some changes, but to the rescue comes the aptly named Random Genius with a list of the changes that can be put back to the earlier formats with a bit of work in the Terminal.

It is clearly much faster and while I was not impressed with the Top Sites page that loads and I went back to opening with a blank page, from that page there is a search button that reveals the history in Cover Flow. Not all the pages will load, perhaps due to security and logging in with passwords, which is fair enough, but it looks good.

Too Good to Miss?

An item that was in the Register today, by John Ozimek, tells us that the Home Office (the UK equivalent of Interior Ministry) is planning to force the installation of the cameras in pubs, or shops that sell alcohol, and give the police easy access to the data recorded. The approach the new Policing and Crime Bill takes is to allow the Minister to issue regulations, and this means that laws are made, within any restrictions that the section imposes, by committee and not debated by the law makers themselves. This is an insidious creeping of controls that have no place in a free society and I repeat the words of Benjamin Franklin that I included last week: those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security, deserve neither.

Now here's a story to warm the heart in this time of recession, cutbacks and job-losses. Microsoft, as we learned a couple of weeks back, has laid off a large number of workers and, as the law demands, these unfortunates are given severance pay. Apparently, the computers at Microsoft, and I have no idea what OS these were running, calculated the amount and it was duly paid.

Only now, Redmond finds that some of them were paid too little, but some were paid too much and wants the money back. By Monday, Thai time, there were reports that Redmond had capitulated and was going to let those overpaid keep the money. I expect that the PR fallout was too much even for Microsoft.

Among all the other insecurities that abound on our computers, Adobe has found that Acrobat and Reader, versions 7 through 9 have a buffer overflow problem that could let someone in. Like a lot of Mac people who were not in the wave that migrated from Windows, this is one of the things I have never bothered with since OS X allows creation of PDFs using the print menu; and we can read all of them using Preview. Both Macworld and TUAW have reports on this.

By the time this goes out, the Oscars will be done for this year and it will be interesting to find out how many movies were made on Macs. In the past a fair amount of Lord of the Rings was made using Apple computers and the Coen Brothers not only use Macs but they have a profile on the Apple site showing how they do some of the stuff.

The curious Case of Benjamin Button actually used Macs from beginning to end of production as most of the shots were taken with Thomson Viper digital cameras -- very expensive too. From there the input went straight to the Macs and Final Cut Pro, among other software.

Ah, Wall-E. Not really a surprise there for the Oscar. Pixar.

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