TidBITS#694/25-Aug-03
=====================
Do you own a Mac and a Bluetooth-capable cellular phone? Read
Joe Kissell's review of Salling Clicker to learn how you can
control your Mac from the phone in some ingenious ways. If text
is more your style, Matt Neuburg slings praise in his review of
Hog Bay Notebook. Also this week we see the releases of Snapz
Pro X 1.0.8, Dejal Simon 1.2, a Photoshop plug-in that optimizes
Photoshop for the now-shipping Power Mac G5s, and AirPort antennas
from MacWireless.
Topics:
MailBITS/25-Aug-03
Go Hog Wild with Hog Bay Notebook
Salling Clicker in Action
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/25-Aug-03
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-694.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2003/TidBITS#694_25-Aug-03.etx>
Copyright 2003 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
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MailBITS/25-Aug-03
------------------
**Snapz Pro X 1.0.8 Tweaked** -- Ambrosia Software has released
Snapz Pro X 1.0.8, the latest version of their screenshot and
video capture utility. Enhancements include a different method
of pausing processes for screenshots that's compatible with
iTunes 4 and new Macromedia products, Internet version checking,
Panther compatibility, performance improvements, and more. Snapz
Pro 1.0.8 is free for registered users, and is a 4.4 MB download.
Those interested in capturing video with Snapz Pro X might drop
in on the discussion of changes Ambrosia has in the works for
the next major release, including capturing of system audio and
significantly better video capture performance. [ACE]
<http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/>
<http://www.ambrosiasw.com/webboard/Forum70/HTML/000003.html>
**Dejal Simon 1.2 Monitors Internet Sites** -- Joining Maxum's
venerable PageSentry and James Sentman's powerful Whistle Blower
in the server monitoring category is Dejal's Simon 1.2. Simon can
monitor Web pages, FTP servers, and local applications, and it can
also perform DNS and ping tests. If a service has failed, Simon
can notify you by email, by speech, by playing a sound, by
launching a user-specified application, or by performing one
of a set of canned actions. What's perhaps most unusual about
Simon is its capability to detect changes in Web pages and notify
you of them; sometimes you want to monitor more fine-grained
details than merely whether or not the server is working. Although
Simon doesn't offer as many tests as the other products, it's less
expensive, with a Basic edition offering 3 tests for $30, a
Standard edition providing up to 10 tests for $60, and a $200
Enterprise edition that allows an unlimited number of tests.
A fully featured trial version is available from Dejal's Web site
as a 2.5 MB download. [ACE]
<http://www.dejal.com/simon/>
<http://www.maxum.com/PageSentry/>
<http://whistleblower.sentman.com/>
**Photoshop Boosted for Power Mac G5s** -- Adobe has released a
free plug-in for Photoshop 7 that is sure to please graphics
professionals using the Power Mac G5. The Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1
G5 Processor Plug-in update for Mac OS X optimizes Photoshop to
take advantage of the PowerPC G5 processor, and also uses a new
Adobe Color Engine component that's designed to work with the G5.
The plug-in is a free 1.4 MB download.
<http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=2132>
This release coincides with news that the Power Mac G5, which was
announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June, is
now shipping in its single-processor configurations. According to
Apple, dual-processor models are due to appear in late August.
Since the introduction, Apple has received over 100,000 orders
of the Power Mac G5, which features a 64-bit processor and
significant speed increases over previous desktop Macs (see
"Apple Announces 64-Bit Power Mac G5s" in TidBITS-685_). [JLC]
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/aug/18pmg5.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07241>
**AirPort Antennas from MacWireless** -- Want to increase the
range of your AirPort or AirPort Extreme network? The Mac-
savvy wireless company MacWireless is now selling a number of
directional and omni-directional antennas that connect to graphite
and snow AirPort Base Stations (MacWireless points at the
necessary surgical instructions for these two, which weren't
designed to have antennas added) and AirPort Extreme Base Stations
with antenna connectors. Prices range from $70 to $150 and gain
levels vary between models. To stick with antennas that are Apple-
certified and fit in with the look of the AirPort Extreme Base
Station, look at the Dr. Bott ExtendAIR Omni and ExtendAIR Direct,
which MacWireless also carries and which Macworld just reviewed.
If you're interested in increasing your signal strength outside
or in extreme environments, you might also check out MacWireless's
various outdoor mounting boxes and Power over Ethernet products.
<http://www.macwireless.com/html/products/antenna/antennas.html>
<http://www.macworld.com/2003/09/reviews/airportextremeantennas/>
For those unfamiliar with antennas used for wireless networking,
you can learn more about it in my book, The Wireless Networking
Starter Kit, but, briefly, an omnidirectional antenna is
essentially a stick which radiates in a 360-degree pattern, so
you'd position it in the middle of the area you want to serve.
A directional antenna focuses radio waves in a specific direction,
so it's best placed on the edge of an area you want covered. [ACE]
<http://wireless-starter-kit.com/>
Go Hog Wild with Hog Bay Notebook
---------------------------------
by Matt Neuburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Back in 2001, after I'd written several TidBITS articles about
intriguing ways to store and retrieve information on your Mac,
a number of readers attempted to impress upon me that for some
folks, simpler is better. It was with that in mind that I wrote
"Three Simple Snippet Keepers" in TidBITS-593_. And later, in the
same spirit, I discussed iData Pro X, hinting that perhaps it was
a bit _too_ simple, since its notes were just text, with no fonts,
styling, or Unicode awareness (see "The Digital Shoebox: iData Pro
X 1.0.5" in TidBITS-675_; also see the series "Two Bytes of the
Cherry: Unicode and Mac OS X" for more on Unicode). It was in
reaction to that article that a reader wrote suggesting that some
users were quietly but enthusiastically practicing the cult of
Hog Bay Notebook, and that I should be looking into this.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06529>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07145>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1217>
Hog Bay Notebook, which recently reached version 2.0.1, certainly
is worth looking into. It is indeed simple - you can learn to
use it in about a minute - and has an elegance and visual clarity
that is simply stunning. At the same time, it's powerful, mostly
because it has an amazing search engine build into it. If you have
snippets of information and you want to give them a modicum of
organization and incredible searchability, Hog Bay Notebook might
be the solution.
<http://www.hogbay.com/software/notebook/>
**Taking Note** -- The essence of a Hog Bay Notebook document is
the note, which is exactly like a TextEdit document. You can give
it a title, enter text, and add character formatting and paragraph
formatting, including alignment, line spacing, paragraph margins,
and tabs, by means of a ruler, just as in TextEdit. You can paste
in pictures, and even drag in other documents, such as PDFs or
HTML files, to be stored inside the note as an attachment. (If
you didn't know TextEdit could do all those things, you haven't
been playing with your computer enough!)
In fact, Hog Bay Notebook notes _are_ TextEdit documents. Hog Bay
Notebook's documents are bundles, and its notes are .rtfd files,
which are one of TextEdit's native types. Indeed, if Hog Bay
Notebook vanished from the universe tomorrow, you could open a
document with Show Package Contents, and presto, there are your
all notes, safe and warm, ready to be opened by TextEdit. All that
would be missing is their titles; but these are stored in an XML
document that any text editor can read. This structure adds
to your sense of confidence and security when you use Hog Bay
Notebook.
**Getting Organized** -- Notes themselves can be further organized
within your document. If you like, you can create virtual folders
in your document and put notes (or folders, of course) into them.
The resulting hierarchy is displayed in an outline view. You may
also set a few attributes of each note: a status, done or not
done, which appears a checkbox; a label, which appears as a color
(as in the Mac OS 9 Finder); and a rating of 1 to 5, which appears
as a row of stars. The attributes are displayed in a table view
of your note titles, where you can sort on any column.
Hog Bay Notebook also provides a couple of organizational extras.
Selected text can be highlighted, and you can then jump from
highlight to highlight within a note (but not through the document
as a whole, which is a pity). And you can make wiki-style links:
any capitalized word with inner capitalization, LikeThis, is taken
to be the name of another note, and you can jump to that note,
or create it, by clicking on that word. Also, you can navigate
backwards to recently viewed notes, as in a Web browser.
**Seeking and Finding** -- Hog Bay Notebook's tour de force is its
inclusion of a free, open source, search engine, Lucene, which
does a live batch search of your entire document while you type
into the search field at the top of the window. The results appear
in the table view, showing each matching note's title and a bar
whose length ranks the quality of the match. By default you're
doing a whole-word search, but you can do partial-word and
wildcard searches, boolean searches, phrase searches, proximity
searches, and even weighted searches. To keep things simple,
titles are automatically included in the searched material. This
magic depends upon an index, of course, which is maintained live
and adds somewhat to the size of your document.
<http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/>
<http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/queryparsersyntax.html>
In an attempt to push Hog Bay Notebook to its limits, I imported
my entire diary into it - over 3,000 notes. Hog Bay Notebook
wasn't fazed. I did unearth one bug: in the table and outline
views, note titles stop appearing beyond some number of titles;
but you can work around this by clumping your notes into folders.
Everything else - the search engine, sorting, navigating, opening
and closing a document - was as fast as if had been just one
note - namely instant.
**Taking Stock** -- I did run into a couple of little issues. Hog
Bay Notebook isn't at all scriptable with AppleScript, which is
a pity. You can't customize the names and colors of the labels.
Selecting a note in the outline view displays it, but doesn't also
show it in the table view, so I don't understand how you are
supposed to find out what attributes it has (its status, label,
and rating). And you can't navigate from a note to its folder -
when you're reading a note, you have no way to know where in the
hierarchy it lives - which seems to me like an oversight.
As weighed against this, however, one can only be astounded by how
clean and compelling Hog Bay Notebook's interface is. It's a kind
of poster child for Cocoa, taking advantage of what seems like
every widget and every technology Cocoa provides. The outline
appears in a drawer. The table appears in a split view, where
the split can be horizontal or vertical. You can edit a note in
its half of the split view or in a separate window. The clipboard
contents in another application can be pasted into a Notebook
without switching to it, through the application's Dock menu;
selected text can be copied in through a Service. There's spell
checking, which can be inline, and a note can read itself aloud.
It has a Finder-like toolbar you can collapse or customize to
display text, small icons, or large icons. In fact, things are
customizable to a fare-thee-well, plus there's extensive Undo.
It's as if the author's intent were to give every Cocoa feature
a workout.
It would be wrong, though, to give the impression that Hog Bay
Notebook is a mere Cocoa kitchen sink. It's not like a Liszt tone
poem; it's more like a Mozart symphony. The interface is clean,
clear, well-behaved, with a sense of rightness throughout. To the
user, it seems easy, obvious, light as a feather - but if you have
some Cocoa programming experience, you know that, behind the
scenes, this apparent artlessness is not at all easily achieved.
What's really impressive here is Hog Bay's evident thorough
dedication to doing Cocoa right. This, too, gives the user
confidence that, with Hog Bay Notebook, your snippets are safe.
Hog Bay Notebook costs $20 shareware, and is available as a 700K
download.
PayBITS: Did Matt's review of Hog Bay Notebook help you organize
your important information? Consider thanking him via PayBITS!
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=matt%40tidbits.com>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Salling Clicker in Action
-------------------------
by Joe Kissell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
When Apple first announced Bluetooth support in Mac OS X, I
thought it sounded like an interesting and useful technology, but
one I probably wouldn't experience anytime soon, since I couldn't
justify the cost of replacing my existing peripherals, PDA, or
cell phone with Bluetooth-enabled models. But while working on my
latest book, I found it necessary to talk about this short-range
wireless cable replacement technology, so I broke down and bought
a pair of D-Link Bluetooth adapters and a Bluetooth-enabled Sony
Ericsson T68i cell phone. Soon I was synchronizing my contacts
and appointments wirelessly and even using my phone to provide
wireless Internet access for my PowerBook. It took almost no
time for me to become addicted to the convenience of Bluetooth.
<http://www.apple.com/bluetooth/>
<http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=34>
<http://www.sonyericsson.com/us/spg.jsp?page=start&Redir=
template%3DPS1%26B%3Die%26PID%3D9932%26LM%3DPSM_V>
Then a new piece of software arrived on the scene that everyone
seemed to be talking about: a $10 shareware utility called Salling
Clicker. With this software, anyone with a Bluetooth-enabled Mac
and a compatible Sony Ericsson phone (T610, T68, T68i, R520m,
or T39m) can use the phone to control their Mac. (Nokia 7650/3650
users can get similar functionality by installing Veta Universal
on their phones and using it in conjunction with Arboreal
Software's Romeo.) At first I thought Salling Clicker was little
more than a geek novelty, but I soon found it to be highly useful.
Others agreed, and Apple even gave it two Apple Design Awards
(see "Apple Announces Design Awards 2003" in TidBITS-686_).
<http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/Clicker/>
<http://veta.irowan.com/>
<http://www.irowan.com/romeo/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07251>
**Installation, Actions, and Triggers** -- The Salling Clicker
installer adds a preferences pane and a system-wide menu to your
Mac. After pairing your phone with your computer using Mac OS X's
built-in Bluetooth software, you use the preferences pane to
configure one or more menus consisting of AppleScript actions.
You then publish the menu to the phone, and it appears on your
phone under the Accessories menu. With this symbiosis established,
you can send commands to your Mac from the phone, as well as
receive information back from the computer.
The basic functional unit in Salling Clicker is the action - an
event or series of events on your Mac that you want to trigger
with your phone. You build actions using AppleScript, but Salling
Clicker includes a rudimentary GUI scripting capability that can
send keystrokes to non-scriptable applications. Actions come in
several varieties. Simple actions are commands that require no
user interaction or feedback. There's also a slider control (to
adjust volume, for example), as well as a text entry field, a list
of selectable options, and two kinds of message displays that can
return output from the AppleScript script.
In addition to actions that appear in a menu on your phone's
display, you can set up keypad configurations such that each
button on your phone triggers a different action - just like a
regular remote control. Although this requires you to remember
key assignments, it is usually more convenient than scrolling
through a menu.
The main menu of actions you publish on your phone can contain
up to 12 items, each of which can be a single action, a menu of
actions, or a keypad. By nesting one menu within another, you
could put hundreds of commands on your phone. A typical
arrangement might be a main menu with a few frequently performed
actions (such as changing your system volume), along with submenus
for each of your favorite applications.
The most innovative method of triggering an action is proximity:
you can provide a list of actions that occur automatically when
your phone comes within Bluetooth range of your computer, and
another list of actions that occur when it goes out of range. The
usual example of how this would be useful is pausing iTunes when
you leave the room and resuming play when you return, though one
can imagine numerous other uses - activating a password-protected
screen saver when you leave, for example, or timing the length of
a break for those who bill for their time by the minute.
Proximity sensing does work, but not as cleanly as I had hoped.
For one thing, the distance that constitutes working range can
vary widely depending on what type of phone and Bluetooth adapter
you own, how your computer is positioned, interference from other
devices, and so on. I found that under different conditions,
effective range within my home could be as little as 6 feet (2 m)
or as much as 20 feet (6 m) - and in many cases, my computer still
thought I was "in range" even though I was in the next room. For
another thing, the computer doesn't always sense that a phone
has entered or left working range immediately; delays before
activation of proximity scripts ranged from less than a second
to more than a minute.
**Working with Actions** -- Salling Clicker includes a wide
variety of built-in actions for programs such as DVD Player,
iTunes, Keynote, and PowerPoint, as well as a handy utility
for browsing an online collection of actions and adding to
your collection or updating existing actions. One of the most
interesting actions is a keypad configuration that lets you use
your phone as a mouse - moving the pointer, clicking, dragging,
and even Control-clicking objects on screen. Besides the actions
Salling Software makes available, more than a dozen Web sites
offer their own collections. For many users, these ready-to-run
actions will be sufficient. But where Salling Clicker really
shines is in its capacity for customization. Using AppleScript,
you can trigger almost any activity by modifying an existing
action or writing your own.
Salling Clicker includes an integrated AppleScript editor, along
with templates for several kinds of actions. These templates
provide the AppleScript structures for creating basic menu
commands, pop-up messages, slider controls, lists, and so on;
all you need to do is fill in the blanks. This turns out to be
less convenient than you might expect, though. Even though the
integrated script editor has a button to check syntax, it doesn't
provide a way to test your scripts without installing them on the
phone, so as a practical matter, it makes more sense to write and
test your scripts in Script Editor, where you can test easily, and
then copy and paste them into Salling Clicker's preferences pane
for publishing to the phone.
Although these capabilities intrigued me, I was initially hard-
pressed to find a practical use for Salling Clicker. The most
natural application for such a mechanism is controlling Keynote
or PowerPoint presentations without having to stand right in
front of a computer, but that's not a major concern for me, and
there are other devices dedicated that task. Other common uses,
such as controlling iTunes, didn't impress me either, because of
the way my home is arranged. If I can hear my computer, I'm able
to reach the keyboard too; a remote control wouldn't make things
any simpler. In other words, the software seemed like a great
solution looking for a problem.
**Finding My Own Killer Application** -- A few weeks later,
though, I was setting up a microphone to do a bit of recording
using Cubase SX. My makeshift micro recording studio is a closet
with padded walls; recordings made in any other room of my home
pick up too much noise from traffic, birds, or neighbors. But
my problem was that the microphone picked up the noise of my
PowerBook's fan. I needed the microphone inside the closet and
the computer outside - but I still needed to press the record,
stop, rewind, and play buttons, among other things. Then the
light bulb went on: maybe I could do that with Salling Clicker.
<http://www.steinbergusa.net/Products/Cub_SX.htm>
My first step was to figure out how to control the necessary
actions with AppleScript. Unfortunately, Cubase SX is not
scriptable, so sending direct messages was out. Next I tried
using Salling Clicker's built-in GUI scripting support to send
keystrokes to Cubase SX, but for some reason they didn't work
correctly. Fortunately, though, Apple's beta GUI scripting tools
did the trick. I had to tweak the Cubase SX preferences for one
or two of the commands I wanted to use, but after that it was
a simple matter of telling Apple's System Events background
application to send the keystrokes. I duplicated the script
several times and modified the keystrokes for each action, then
assigned the new scripts to buttons on my phone's keypad and
published the menu. I went into the closet, put on the headphones,
and tried some sample recordings. Amazingly enough, it worked
perfectly and with no perceptible delay.
<http://www.apple.com/applescript/GUI/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07102>
Even though this may sound complicated, the whole process - from
figuring out what effect I wanted to achieve to the final working
solution - took me less than half an hour. Had it not been for
Salling Clicker, the only way to achieve noise-free recordings
would have been to jump out of the closet every time I needed
to press a control - a huge hassle at best.
My success in getting this setup to work inspired me to think
about other potential uses of Salling Clicker. The first thing
that came to mind was basic server administration without the need
for something as complex as Timbuktu Pro. One of the many user-
created actions for Salling Clicker displays a computer's uptime
on your phone; you could easily create scripts to display other
interesting statistics, restart your computer, or kill troublesome
processes. It also may provide an alternative for people who want
to listen to their iTunes collection in the living room but don't
want the expense of a remote playback device such as the SLIMP3
(see "SLIMP3: MP3, Get Thee to the Hi-Fi" in TidBITS-676_). As
long as you can run audio cables from your Mac to your stereo,
you can control every aspect of iTunes from your phone, including
viewing playlists and even assigning star ratings to your songs.
The catch, though, is that this works only if your phone is close
enough to your computer. Bluetooth range is limited enough that
you may not have adequate coverage even in a small apartment.
<http://www.netopia.com/en-us/software/products/tb2/mac/>
<http://www.slimp3.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07150>
Home automation is another interesting application whose
usefulness is hampered only by the limited range of Bluetooth.
Findley Studios, publisher of HomeRun automation software,
provides a set of Salling Clicker scripts that enable you to
turn lights on or off and adjust their brightness using your
phone. (This requires additional hardware: X-10 modules for each
lamp, a controller, and a USB adapter to attach the controller
to your computer.)
<http://www.findleystudios.com/homerun/applescripts.html>
I wondered what would happen if I tried to use Salling Clicker
with multiple machines. If you have more than one Mac with a
Bluetooth adapter, you can publish a menu from each; as your phone
moves out of one computer's range that menu drops off, and as it
comes in range of another, its menu automatically appears. This
capability can be useful for those who have Macs in several
different rooms. I was disappointed, though, to find that only one
Mac's menu can appear on a given phone at any one time, even if
more than one is within Bluetooth range. This may be a limitation
of the phone or of Mac OS X, but it means that you can't easily
use Salling Clicker to control both a primary computer and a
server, for example, if they're both in the same area.
**Click It!** If you already own a compatible Bluetooth phone and
a Bluetooth-enabled Mac, Salling Clicker is almost a no-brainer
at $10; a free demo version provides full functionality for 30
clicks. Is it reason enough to invest in lots of new hardware?
Maybe not, but the range of capabilities it opens up - especially
for people who give many presentations or do home recording in a
closet - is worth considering if you're already in the market for
a new cell phone.
[Joe Kissell is a writer and Mac developer living in San
Francisco. His most recent book is 50 Fast Mac OS X Techniques,
published in April of 2003 by Wiley. You can read his daily
articles on the "Interesting Thing of the Day" Web site.]
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764539116/interesthingo-20/ref=nosim>
<http://itotd.com/>
PayBITS: If Joe helped you find a problem to solve with Salling
Clicker, consider sending him a few bucks in thanks via PayBITS.
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=jk%40alt.cc>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/25-Aug-03
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
**Bandwidth required for iSight use** -- Do you need a fat
bandwidth pipe to use Apple's iSight and iChat AV video
conferencing combo? (3 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2043>
**Ebooks - everything old is new again** -- Are ebooks
completely new or are they harkening back to publishing days of
old when pamphlets and broadsheets ruled the land? (2 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2041>
**More Mac OS X Scrolling Tips** -- A few more tips on scrolling
in Mac OS X courtesy of readers. (3 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2040>
**Complaints about the 17" PowerBook** -- Some readers note that
the weight of the 17-inch screen prevents the PowerBook's hinges
from holding the lid up correctly, while others don't share the
problem. (10 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2039>
**International power adapters** -- Get current on international
power currents and which adapters are needed where. (18 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2038>
**Serious data archiving** -- In addition to talking about the
usefulness of tape media for data backups, we learn about which
types of "fireproof" safes actually live up to their names.
(13 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2036>
**Apple's share of the PC market** -- Discussion continues about
how to define the number of Macs are used in the market, and
whether the numbers are even significant. (23 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2035>
$$
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