TidBITS#687/07-Jul-03
=====================
Got a long commute? Kirk McElhearn looks at audio books from
Audible.com, which can be played on your Mac or iPod without
losing your position. Keith Cooper looks at why you might want
to consider color management for your digital photos. Also this
week, using Broadcom-based 802.11g PC Cards with AirPort 3.1,
the demise of Adobe Premiere on the Mac, and upcoming events at
Macworld Expo.
Topics:
MailBITS/07-Jul-03
Macworld Expo NY 2003 Events
Improving Your Mac's Colour
Heard Any Good Books Lately?
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/07-Jul-03
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-687.html>
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MailBITS/07-Jul-03
------------------
**AirPort 3.1 Supports Third Party 802.11g PC Cards** -- Owners of
pre-AirPort Extreme PowerBooks with PC Card slots can now connect
to higher-speed AirPort Extreme networks using third-party 802.11g
cards. It turns out that Apple's recent AirPort 3.1 update also
provides support for PC Cards that use the same Broadcom chip set
that Apple uses for internal AirPort Extreme cards. So, if you've
been lamenting the poor signal strength of your Titanium PowerBook
G4, you can improve signal strength and jump up to 802.11g's
faster throughput with a third party card. Both Asante and Buffalo
Technologies claim their 802.11g cards work with Mac OS X and the
AirPort 3.1 update; other manufacturers using Broadcom's chip set
are likely compatible as well. Buffalo Technology's card costs
about $60 and is available now; the Asante card costs $100 and
should be available this month. [ACE]
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120224>
<http://www.asante.com/products/adapters/AL5402-XG/>
<http://www.buffalotech.com/wireless/products/airstation/wlicbg54a.php>
**Adobe Premiere to Fade to Black on Mac** -- Adobe Systems has
announced that Adobe Premiere Pro, the latest version of its
12-year-old video editing application, should be shipping this
August both as a standalone application and as part of the
Standard and Professional editions of the just-announced Adobe
Video Collection application suite. However, Adobe will not be
shipping Premiere Pro for Macintosh, instead focusing all its
video applications on the Windows XP platform. Presumably, Adobe
has decided it's no longer worth their time and effort to compete
with Apple's extensive line of digital video applications
(primarily the recently revamped Final Cut Pro, but also Final Cut
Express, iMovie, iDVD, and iDVD Studio Pro) on a platform also
controlled by Apple. Current Premiere users may wish to migrate to
the Windows platform, but it wouldn't be surprising if Apple were
to offer a competitive upgrade to Final Cut Pro. [GD]
<http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200307/
070703PREMIEREPRO.html>
<http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/>
Macworld Expo NY 2003 Events
----------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The official name appears to be "Macworld CreativePro Conference
and Expo," so despite the waffling that was no doubt a result of
heavy duty negotiations between Apple and IDG World Expo, we'll
stick with calling the upcoming show "Macworld Expo" (but if we're
feeling cranky we might revert to "the Conference Formerly Known
as Macworld Expo"). Whatever the name or future location of the
conference, for this year, it's show time in New York City in less
than two weeks, from 16-Jul-03 through 18-Jul-03.
<http://www.macworldexpo.com/macworld2003/>
**TidBITS Events** -- I'll be attending the show and giving my
usual complement of talks and other events. Please come by and say
hello; meeting people is one of the best parts of trade shows.
* For those in town early, you can find me at the Apple Store Soho
in Manhattan at 6:30 PM Tuesday, July 15th. I'll be sharing iPhoto
2 tips and signing copies of my latest book, iPhoto 2 for Mac OS
X: Visual QuickStart Guide. If you are planning to come and have
some time afterwards, check out TidBITS Talk for another special
event.
<http://www.apple.com/retail/soho/>
* On Wednesday, July 16th, at 10:45 AM, I'll be giving a Level 1
session entitled "Getting Started with iPhoto" in room 1E20 that
will provide an overview of iPhoto 2 along with a variety of
useful tips and tricks. Since I always run out of time to answer
everyone's questions, I'll be continuing the iPhoto discussions
and signing books at Peachpit's booth (#536) at 1:00 PM after a
break for lunch.
<http://www.macworldexpo.com/macworld2003/V40/conference/session.cvn?eID=138>
* On Thursday, July 17th, at 10 AM, I'll be back at the Peachpit
booth (#536) to answer any and all questions you may have about
wireless networking and to sign copies of The Wireless Networking
Starter Kit.
* On Friday, July 18th, at 11 AM, come to the User Group Lounge
in room 3D04 for a one hour discussion of TidBITS, the most
interesting products of the show, and the Macintosh industry
in general.
**Netter's Dinner** -- Despite this show's new focus on the
creative professional, Al Tucker is forging ahead with the 6th
Annual East Coast Macworld Netter's Dinner, to be held Wednesday,
July 16th. People will start gathering at 6:00 PM near the statue
in the lobby before walking over to the restaurant at 6:30.
Preregistration via Kagi is required, so be sure to visit the
Web page below for the link. See you there!
<http://avalon.rockefeller.edu/nettersdinner/>
Improving Your Mac's Colour
---------------------------
by Keith Cooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Have you ever printed a colour image and wondered why it didn't
look quite right? That deep blue sky with distant hills and
forests looked so good on the monitor... is what you see never
what you get?
You've just come across one of the problems of colour management
on the Mac. Without colour management, reproducing an image from
a digital camera on an inkjet printer can require a lot of trial
and error, and a fair bit of wasted ink and paper.
The basic difficulty is that colours on your monitor are produced
by the addition of red, green, and blue light, while your printer
mixes coloured inks (typically cyan, magenta, yellow, and black)
If all the colours on every monitor were the same, and all
printers used the same ink and paper, it would be easier to
match things up. Unfortunately even identical printers are
subtly different, and monitors change their characteristics
as they age.
Unexpected changes in colour can lead to costly mistakes and
delays in projects. In commercial printing, a great deal of effort
goes into colour management - a whole industry is devoted to
getting things right. Although that's fine for business, what
about the casual user or photographer who just wants to improve
their photos?
**The Mac Does It Again** -- The good news is that in owning a
Mac, you have a system with all the best in colour management
technology built right into the operating system. As one of the
founders of the International Color Consortium (ICC) in 1993,
Apple helped to create open standards and neutral file formats,
which resulted in ColorSync. And in Mac OS X, there are some
powerful new tools for handling colour (older Mac systems have
ColorSync, but not the range of tools).
<http://www.apple.com/colorsync/>
The essence of managing colour depends on profiles for each
device. A profile contains a wealth of data describing the
characteristics of a piece of hardware, whether it's a camera,
scanner, monitor, or printer. For example, a profile includes
the range of colours that a device can represent (known as
the gamut). Using the profiles, ColorSync translates data between
the capabilities of different devices ensuring a consistent
handling of colour information.
The best bit is that for most users, the built-in colour
management is invisible. When you plug in your digital camera
and transfer images to iPhoto, all the necessary conversions
are carried out for you. The appropriate colour information is
assigned to the image file during import. Then, as you look at the
image, ColorSync matches the image to your monitor for display and
to your printer when you print it. And again, ColorSync takes care
of this behind the scenes without any input from you. But that's
not to imply that you don't have some control.
The ColorSync Utility (located in the Utilities folder in your
Mac OS X Applications folder) enables you to see which profiles
the system has allocated to devices, and helps you repair broken
profiles. With it you can examine the contents of profiles and
even view the gamut of the profile (represented as a solid 3D
volume you can rotate). The volume view indicates the number of
colours that a device can represent. Try looking at some of the
standard profiles on your system and you can quickly see the
variation between devices.
Each of your devices has a registered profile for ColorSync. Some
may have several profiles available and allow you to choose new
ones. The ColorSync preferences pane in System Preferences enables
default profiles for files that do not have colour information
associated with them.
So if it's all done for you, why do the results sometimes fail to
impress? It all comes down to the accuracy of the profiles. Most
devices come with generic profiles that provide only an average
fit.
**Start with the Monitor** -- If your monitor is not displaying
the right colours, any attempt at getting your prints right
becomes much more difficult. The Displays preferences pane in
System Preferences contains the usual settings for display
resolution, but it also has a Color tab for selecting ColorSync
profiles. If your hardware supports it, the panel can access
information directly from your monitor.
You can choose from a collection of monitor profiles for your
display. It's best to pick one that matches the monitor, such
as Apple Studio Display if that's the monitor you own. You can
also customise and improve the accuracy of the profile by clicking
the Calibrate button, which fires up the Display Calibrator
application and walks you through steps that determine how color
should be displayed. Keep in mind, though, that calibrating using
this method is somewhat dependent on the vagaries of your vision.
There are other utilities that do a similar job, such as Adobe
Gamma, which used to come with Photoshop. SuperCal (for Mac OS 9
and Mac OS X) does the same thing in a bit more detail. These
approaches are certainly better than no calibration at all, and
I'd recommend that you run Display Calibrator if you're planning
to work with any kind of images on your Mac.
<http://www.bergdesign.com/supercal/>
For the ultimate in color accuracy, hardware assistance is
required. You can buy a colorimeter that determines accurate
colour profiles by precisely measuring the colour output of
your monitor. A few colorimeters to look into include Gretag
Macbeth's $250 Eye-One Display, ColorVision's $230 Spyder,
or Monaco Systems' $300 MonacoOptix.
<http://www.i1color.com/products/i1_display.asp>
<http://www.colorvision.com/store/monitor_geu102.shtml>
<http://www.monacosys.com/products/monacooptix/monacooptix.html>
**Why Your Colour Prints Can Look Wrong** -- Setting your monitor
to display accurate colour takes you only halfway to achieving
better photo prints. Your printer must also output colour
correctly, which adds another layer of complexity. Printer
drivers have their own internal profiles that combine with paper
settings and any driver adjustments to produce a "best guess"
of how the image should be printed. The printer manufacturers
provide settings to cover all the options, so their drivers
are not optimised for any one particular setup.
Some printer drivers install additional profiles for specific
papers that you can select in the ColorSync utility. If you are
using the printer manufacturer's inks and paper, then it's worth
experimenting with their ColorSync profiles. Inks and papers from
other manufacturers will never work quite the same. There are
some excellent third party inks and papers that, despite what some
printer manufacturers might have you believe, will not ruin your
printer. For example, I use a specialized Small Gamut ink set
from Lyson for printing black-and-white photographs.
<http://www.lyson.com/>
<http://www.inksupply.com/>
If you print from an application such as Photoshop Elements you
have the option of using the additional profiles provided with
some printers. That's not necessary, of course - you can always
just accept the defaults - but if you choose to adjust the colour
management for a particular image, you must decide where the
colour management will apply in the printing process. There are
three options. First, if your application does its own color
management, you can use it, but you must also make sure to disable
colour management (the No Colour Adjustment radio button) in the
printer driver. Second, you can choose to let ColorSync do your
colour management. Third and finally, you can leave the colour
management task to the printer driver itself, which uses whatever
default settings the printer manufacturer built in. With the first
option, it's important to apply only one profile or your results
will be terrible. As an analogy, imagine translating from English
to Spanish directly as opposed to going from English to Japanese
to Spanish. The fewer intermediate steps, the better.
<http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopel/main.html>
As you can see, we've moved some way from simply selecting Print
in your application, and the need to consider exactly where
the colour management takes place adds complexity. Given what
ColorSync and the driver's built in profiles can do for you,
why not just leave it at that?
The benefits come with having a profile that is customised for
a particular ink/paper/printer combination. Some third-party ink
and paper suppliers (such as Lyson) provide profiles for some of
their products - many do not. For the best quality prints you need
custom profiles. In the next installment of this article, I'll
show you how I was able to get a more accurate profile of my
inkjet printer using ColorVision's PrintFIX custom profiling
device and software.
[Keith Cooper is a photographer and long time Mac consultant.
He also teaches photography and digital imaging to adult
classes. More photography and Mac information can be found
at his Web site.]
<http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/links.html>
Heard Any Good Books Lately?
----------------------------
by Kirk McElhearn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I may belong to the last generation for which radio was once not
just a source of music, news and sports, but also a primary source
of verbal entertainment. Born in 1959, I grew up as television
did, and many of my childhood references come from the screen.
But I also listened to the radio in my youth, and learned then
to appreciate how the spoken word can have a spellbinding, even
mesmerizing power.
In my early teenage years I listened almost religiously to the
great comic storyteller Jean Shepherd, as he wove his tales of his
youth in Indiana. I recall turning on WOR radio in New York, at
10:15 PM, and listening to him alternate stories with wacky songs.
I later discovered the work of Garrison Keillor, whose poignant
stories of small-town characters are literary creations brought
to life on his Prairie Home Companion radio show.
<http://www.shep-archives.com/>
<http://phc.mpr.org/>
I am also an avid reader, of both fiction and non-fiction, and
I read several books a week. I am fortunate to be able to read
quickly enough to feed my eclectic range of interests. But in
spite of my appreciation for the spoken word and my love of
reading, I have never succumbed to the idea of listening to books
on tape. Although radio shows were written for or adapted to that
medium, audio books are merely books read and recorded. They were
somehow different, and not as compelling for me as either radio
shows or traditional books. Nonetheless, I kept hearing about
how people with long commutes enjoyed them, and how others found
them an excellent way to pass the time (and stay alert) on tedious
car trips.
So when Apple added to iTunes the capability of listening to audio
books sold by Audible.com, I thought it would be interesting to
check into how audio books might fit into my life. Here was a
user-friendly way to approach spoken-word texts, built into a
program that I use often. (Audible.com works only with iTunes 3
or later, running in Mac OS X.)
<http://www.apple.com/itunes/audiobooks.html>
**Hear This!** Audible.com is, quite simply, an online bookstore
for downloadable audio books and other recorded works, including
radio shows, magazines, and newspapers, and it works like any
other ecommerce site. You browse their pages or search their
catalog, add items to your shopping cart, and pay with a credit
card. After making a purchase, Audible.com puts your books into
a Library, which lists all the books you have bought. You can
download your audio books immediately, in a choice of different
formats, and you can also defer the download of all or part of
these books if your bandwidth is insufficient to do so right away.
Unlike the iTunes Music Store, interestingly enough, Audible.com
always lets you go back and download your purchases again if ever
you lose the files or erase them accidentally.
<http://www.audible.com/>
After signing up, I first bought a copy of John Grisham's latest
novel, The King of Torts, which clocks in at just under 12 hours
long. The audio file comes in two parts, and the various formats
I could play offered file sizes of 22 MB, 42 MB or 84 MB. These
different formats correspond to different types of audio
compression. Audible.com's help pages explain these formats as
offering similar quality to AM radio, FM radio and MP3. Having
a broadband DSL connection, I chose the maximum quality, but
modem users would likely choose the lowest quality, otherwise the
download would take hours. Although the sound is less rich, this
is only spoken word, and even AM radio quality is acceptable for
many listeners. However, some older books were recorded at such
poor quality that the samples sound no better than a voice over
a telephone.
After you download the audio files, just double-click them and
iTunes opens and imports them into your music library. The first
time you do this a dialog asks you to enter your Audible.com
username and password, after which iTunes connects to the
Audible.com Web site to activate your account (this account
checking prevents copying of Audible.com files). You can then
start listening to your audio books using iTunes, transfer them
to your iPod, or burn them to audio CDs (in standard audio format
only; you cannot burn MP3 CDs of them, although you could of
course just convert an audio CD back into MP3 format, just as
with tracks from the iTunes Music Store).
The listening process is simple, and iTunes is a fine tool for
playback. When you stop listening to an audio book file, and quit
iTunes, it remembers where you are so you don't need to browse
through the file to find where you left off. However, at least in
the books I downloaded, there is no way to find specific locations
in a file, such as the beginnings of chapters. Apparently, some
Audible.com books do have chapter markers, which are supported by
both iTunes and the iPod. Although this may not be a problem with
novels, it can be annoying with non-fiction books, where you may
want to skip some chapters. I was also disappointed by the lack
of any table of contents or track listing. I wanted to know the
names of chapters, along with their length. Each time I started
listening to a chapter I wondered how much time it would take.
With the Grisham novel this was a moot point, since all the
chapters are relatively brief (15 to 20 minutes). But with other
books it would be useful to know when you start listening to
a chapter whether you'll have time to finish it.
Those who want to listen to audio books from Audible.com away from
their Macs (listening in the car is particularly common, as is
listening on the subway or on transcontinental flights) can use
a variety of MP3 players that are compatible with Audible.com's
file format, which use some sort of copy-prevention technology,
much like tracks from the iTunes Music Store. Most Mac users will
probably use an iPod, of course, and the iPod software works well
with Audible.com content to remember your position, just as when
you listen with iTunes. Ironically, the oldest technology used
for audio books - standard cassette tapes - works swimmingly for
remembering your position each time you stop them. There have
been reports of the iPod losing track of where you are in an
Audible.com book, but short of the iPod's battery being drained
or a hard reset, Apple claims the iPod should always remember your
position even if you switch tracks. Location within an Audible.com
track is even maintained when you sync to iTunes. In the worst
case, you could just "scrub" to the right position in the track
using the scroll wheel. Note that if you acquire audio books in
straight MP3 format from other sources, iTunes and the iPod will
not be able to save your location.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1986>
**Grating on the Ears** -- There are probably two types of people
in the world: those who like audio books and those who don't. I'm
not sure which group I belong to. Listening to the first chapters
of The King of Torts, I was quickly enthralled by the story, even
though I felt it was read a bit too slowly. But since I read fast,
this is a necessary adjustment. (And one way or another, for a
fast reader, listening to a book will likely take many hours more
than reading it.) As the novel went on, though, I lost interest.
The narrator was certainly capable, but his stereotyped use of
different accents to differentiate between blacks and whites,
and between the moneyed southern white characters and the
protagonist of the story, was grating at first and wore thin
after a few minutes. Even worse was his use of a slight falsetto
when reading female dialogue.
You can listen to RealAudio samples of each book before choosing,
so the experienced listener will certainly want to opt for the
types of voices they appreciate. Some of the voices are so stodgy
and stilted that I couldn't imagine listening to them for 10 hours
or more. It would be something like that high school geography
teacher who ranked high in soporifics and low in interest. But
it all depends on how you listen to these books, and what your
expectations are. I can understand that people who listen to
them on commutes may not have the same criteria as I do. Sitting
on my terrace in the French Alps, an excellent pair of headphones
on my ears, my iBook on the table beside me, I probably expect
more than if I were riding the F train going to work in Manhattan.
I'll admit it: while I do read mysteries, I'm more of a literary
elitist, and the second book I chose was Jonathan Franzen's essay
collection How to be Alone. This was a much more successful
listen, with the first essay, one about his father's Alzheimer's
disease, read by the author. The narrator of the rest of this
book was much more in touch with the tone of the words than the
Grisham reader, but it could be that non-fiction works better
than fiction for me.
**The Sound of Money** -- These books are no bargains, compared
to the price of the real print books, with prices generally
comparable to hardcover editions. Most people won't buy individual
items, though, since Audible.com offers subscriptions where each
month you can download one ($15) or two ($20) books, along with
one audio magazine, newspaper, or radio program, at a fixed price.
That may seem a bit high, but it's actually pretty good compared
to the price of audio books on cassettes or CDs, especially when
you consider that there is no shipping to be paid, and you can
feed your habit at any time of the day or night. Listeners with
iPods will find Audible.com's service especially useful, since
they don't have to convert tapes or discs they purchase to MP3
files to listen to them. Also remember that because it takes
a lot longer for many people to listen to an audio book than
it does to read a print book (often 10 hours or more), two books
per month may be all you can find time for.
In the end, your appreciation of these audio books depends on
the way you approach books and what you expect from the narrators.
For people who are already listeners of audio books, Audible.com
is an excellent service and integrates seamlessly with iTunes
and an iPod. If you've never tried audio books but have blocks
of commuting time that they might fill well, it may be worth
giving Audible.com a try if you already have an iPod; if not,
try borrowing some books on tape from your local public library
before you spend the money on an iPod and an Audible.com account.
As for me, if I had a regular commute and an iPod, I would
probably have stuck with Audible.com, but as it was, I couldn't
get over my irritation with some of the narrators to make the
cost and the time spent listening worthwhile.
[Kirk McElhearn is a freelance writer and translator living in
a village in the French Alps. He is currently working on a book
entitled Unix for Mac OS X: Learning the Command Line, to be
published by Addison-Wesley in late 2003.]
PayBITS: If Kirk turned you on to a new way of reducing the
monotony of your commute, say thanks with a few bucks via PayBITS!
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=kirk%40mcelhearn.com>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/07-Jul-03
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
**iPod 2.01 and Audible.com support** -- Apple claims Audible.com
support in the iPod 2.0.1 software update, confusing people who
have been using it all along. The conversation then shifted to
ways of converting text to speech for listening to on the iPod.
(6 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1986>
**NoteBook vs. NoteTaker** -- Users of these programs, which share
a common ancestor, continue to debate the merits of each.
(8 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1989>
**10.3 Panther upgrade** -- Discussions of Apple's pricing
strategy with Mac OS X, and talk about some of the specific
features promised for Panther. (4 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1991>
**Defragmenting and optimizing** -- So is optimizing your hard
disk really a waste of time? Some on TidBITS Talk say no, whereas
others agree with David Shayer. (10 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1992>
**The future of Casady & Greene products** -- A quest to find
the author of Glider Pro, along with a Mac OS X version of the
program, now that Casady & Greene has shut down. (4 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1993>
$$
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