TidBITS#824/03-Apr-06
=====================
We're starting to work on internal systems here at TidBITS,
prompting a comparison of business card design software
from Senior Editor Joe Kissell and a call for suggestions on
collaborative editing systems from Adam. Geoff briefly covers
the iPod maximum volume update, and in other news, we look
at Apple turning 30, the release of Interarchy 8, Final Cut
Studio going universal, and a new collaboration with our friends
at Macworld on their "Macworld Digital Photography Superguide"
ebook.
Topics:
MailBITS/03-Apr-06
iPod Update Offers Maximum Volume Setting
Comparing Business Card Design Software
Wanted: Better Document Collaboration System
Take Control News/03-Apr-06
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/03-Apr-06
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-824.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2006/TidBITS#824_03-Apr-06.etx>
Copyright 2006 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
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MailBITS/03-Apr-06
------------------
**Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.4.6 Update** -- Just as we were
finalizing this issue, Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.6 Update,
which appears to be a massive, miscellaneous bug-fix update.
Numerous bugs and inconveniences that we've experienced are said
to be eliminated, including a Mail crash, the mysterious "we are
using special permissions" reports when repairing permissions with
Disk Utility, the misbehavior of the Calculator percentage button,
the Help Viewer blank window, problems saving Microsoft Word 2004
documents across a network, and many others. The update also
includes iSync 2.2, which provides synchronization support for
additional mobile phone handsets; however, iSync users should
perform a full synchronization of all devices _before_ installing
Mac OS X 10.4.6.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303411>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303419>
As usual, you can use Software Update or download the update
installer and run it manually; and in the latter case, you can
download a delta updater (updates 10.4.5 to 10.4.6) or a combo
updater (updates any Tiger installation). The updates are massive,
with versions available via Software Update clocking in at near
46 MB, and standalone and Combo installers ranging from 65 to
191 MB. Apple also warns that (for reasons not revealed, but
likely revolving around the login-related fixes) PowerPC-based
Macs will automatically restart twice after the installation.
The 10.4.6 update is available for both client and server versions
of Mac OS X. [ACE]
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/>
**Listen in as Apple Turns 30** -- On April 1st, 1976 - 30 years
ago this last Saturday - Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald
Wayne founded Apple Computer, and the intervening years have seen
its fortunes rise, fall, and rise again. But no matter what its
stock price or market share, Apple has never been boring. More
important, despite the fact that the company never attained the
size or raw power of Microsoft, Apple's influence on the computer
industry and on popular culture has been immense. To commemorate
this anniversary, we encourage you to sit back, tune in, and
listen both to some of Apple's earliest employees and to a number
of writers who have been covering Apple since the earliest days.
In SFGate.com's Chronicle Podcasts, reporters Matthew Yi and Ben
Pimentel interview Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, John Sculley,
Steve Capps, Guy Kawasaki, and Mike Boich. And then in a pair of
MacNotables podcasts focused on the past, present, and future of
Apple, host Chuck Joiner talks with Chris Breen, Bryan Chaffin,
Jim Dalrymple, Dan Frakes, Andy Ihnatko, Ted Landau, Bob LeVitus,
Dennis Sellers, and Jason Snell, along with Tonya and me. As
difficult as it is to look far into the future, here's hoping
we see another 30 years of innovation from Apple Computer! [ACE]
<http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/category?blogid=5&cat=508s>
<http://www.macnotables.com/archives/2006/632.html>
<http://www.macnotables.com/archives/2006/633.html>
**Interarchy 8 Adds WebDAV, Widgets, and Bonjour** -- Peter Lewis
and Stairways Software have released Interarchy 8.0, a major
upgrade to the powerful file transfer and network monitoring
application. Significant new features in Interarchy 8.0 include
support for WebDAV (including Apple's iDisk), Automator (Download,
List, Upload), local FTP server detection via Bonjour, Dashboard
(in the form of Bookmark and Network Status widgets), FTP/SSL-TLS,
HTTPS, and HTTP Authentication. Changes to Interarchy's interface
are also notable: The Connect to Server window encapsulates all
the steps necessary in an Automator-like interface, there are
Action menus everywhere with available actions, there's an option
to select new tabs as they're created, tabs can be permanently
colorized, and the Transfers window behavior has been improved.
Mirroring of local and remote folders has also been enhanced
with a combined Mirror Reports window and Mirror Dry Run option
(in Interarchy's Mirror preferences) that lets you see what will
happen before committing to a long file transfer. Interarchy 8.0
requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, including Tiger, and it's now
a universal binary for people using Intel-based Macs. Upgrades
are free for those who purchased Interarchy 7 after 01-Jan-06;
otherwise upgrades cost $20 and new copies are $40. It's an
8.4 MB download. [ACE]
<http://www.interarchy.com/>
**Universal Final Cut Studio Now Shipping** -- When Apple
introduced the Intel-based Macs in January, I was frankly
surprised to hear that the Final Cut Studio suite would be
available in universal binary form as early as March. After all,
Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and Motion are
all heavy-duty professional applications that rely on processor
performance (multiple Oscar winner Walter Murch edited Cold
Mountain and Jarhead using Final Cut Pro, for example), and late
last year Apple was pushing the idea that consumer hardware would
be the first to include the Intel processors. True to their word,
Apple is now shipping a universal binary version of Final Cut
Studio, which is available as a $50 crossgrade. This is good news
for owners of MacBook Pros who use Final Cut, since the existing
studio applications wouldn't run on Intel machines at all.
<http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/>
<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004555/>
<http://www.apple.com/universal/crossgrade/>
Final Cut Studio 5.1 also contains some important bug fixes and
changes (for example, some Final Cut Pro problems with the Media
Manager are resolved, and you cannot open version 5.1 projects
in earlier versions of the program), but the universal version
appears to be the only upgrade; owners of PowerPC-based Macs
don't have a downloadable upgrade option. Perhaps Apple will
explain more at this month's big National Association of
Broadcasters (NAB) conference, but for now the fixes are
available only to those who pay the $50 crossgrade price. [JLC]
<http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Final_Cut_Pro_5.0_lbn_z.pdf>
<http://www.nabshow.com/>
**DealBITS Drawing: Disc Cover Winners** -- Congratulations to
Damian Burke of gmail.com, Ronald Jore of jore.com.au, and
Jonathan Baumgarten of frostbaumgarten.com, whose entries were
chosen randomly in last week's DealBITS drawing and who each
received a copy of BeLight Software's Disc Cover. Even if you
didn't win, you can still save 15 percent on Disc Cover through
12-Apr-06, bringing the price of the download edition (which has
only about 900 clip art images from the full set of 23,000) to
$29.95 and the CD edition to $33.95 plus shipping and handling
(about $43). Order using the third and fourth links below to
receive your discount. Thanks to the 653 people who entered,
and keep an eye out for future DealBITS drawings! [ACE]
<http://www.belightsoft.com/disccover/>
<http://www.tidbits.com/dealbits/disc-cover/>
<http://usd.swreg.org/cgi-bin/s.cgi?s=31176&p=31176311762802&;
v=2&d=0&q=1&t=&a=tidbits>
<http://usd.swreg.org/cgi-bin/s.cgi?s=31176&p=31176311762802&;
v=2&d=1&q=1&t=&a=tidbits>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08468>
iPod Update Offers Maximum Volume Setting
-----------------------------------------
by Geoff Duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Apple has released a software update which, along with fixing a
handful of bugs, enables users to set a maximum volume limit for
their iPods. The 28 MB update supports both Mac OS X and Windows
XP/2000, but applies only to Apple's fifth-generation video-
capable iPods and the iPod nano.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ipodupdater20060323.html>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303414>
After installing the update, users can configure a maximum volume
setting for their iPod: once set, the iPod displays a padlock
icon when it reaches the configured top volume. Users can assign
a password-like combination to the setting, which will enable
parents and others to set a maximum volume that another user of
that iPod won't be able to exceed. Apple has also published a
set of informational guidelines about sound levels and iPod use.
<http://www.apple.com/sound/>
The update comes amid growing concerns that high music volumes
from iPods and other portable music devices may be contributing
to hearing loss, particularly for folks who use the devices for
extended periods of time. iPods (and most other digital music
players) aren't necessarily any louder than other consumer
electronics devices with headphones, but users tend to listen
to iPods in noisy environments, and crank up the volume to
drown out the noise around them. The noisier the environment,
the louder they want their music, and the greater the potential
for hearing loss.
Apple is currently facing a lawsuit over claims of hearing loss
caused by iPod use, and French concerns over hearing loss caused
Apple to alter the design of iPods sold in France to lower their
maximum audio output.
Comparing Business Card Design Software
---------------------------------------
by Joe Kissell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
When I began my duties as TidBITS Senior Editor recently, one of
my first official functions was to order some business cards for
myself. Although I could simply have plugged my contact info into
the existing TidBITS business card template, Adam and Tonya wanted
to come up with a new design that incorporated information for
both TidBITS and Take Control. So they sent me the graphics and
suggested that I see what I could come up with in each of two
business card design applications: Business Card Composer from
BeLight Software and SOHO Business Cards from Chronos.
<http://www.belightsoft.com/products/composer/>
<http://www.chronosnet.com/Products/sohobc_product.html>
Designing business cards is not exactly rocket science. I've done
it before - without the benefit of any special software - and I
fully expected that either of these two applications would make it
a completely painless and speedy process. While I found a lot to
like about both packages, though, I found them to be surprisingly
different. I also discovered that first impressions can be
deceiving; SOHO Business Cards, the more polished-looking program,
was in fact much less capable of producing good results easily.
**Business Card Basics** -- Both Business Card Composer and SOHO
Business Cards start with roughly the same fundamental model:
choose a design from one of their many premade templates, and
then tweak the colors, graphics, fonts, masks, and other elements
to your liking. (You can opt to start with a blank card, too,
if none of the existing designs meets your needs.) Tools are also
included for drawing lines and shapes, for aligning elements,
and for moving them forward or backward with respect to other
elements. The applications automatically fill in fields such
as name, address, phone number, and email address from a contact
you select in Address Book. When you're happy with the final
design, you can print it to business card blanks you can buy for
your own printer (both programs support a wide variety of brands
and styles), or create a PDF that you can send to a commercial
print shop.
Business Card Composer includes about 420 designs; SOHO Business
Cards comes with more than 800 (for each of several card sizes).
Both applications also include libraries of clip art that can be
used for backgrounds, logos, and ornamentation. On the whole,
I found the premade designs and artwork in both packages to be
attractive and useful, a few lemons notwithstanding - though
Business Card Composer's designs struck me as more creative and
visually appealing, even if there were fewer of them. In my case,
however, because I was starting with my own logos and had fairly
specific ideas about what I wanted, I decided to start with a
blank card in both programs, and then return to the templates
later on to design cards for my own company, alt concepts, inc.
<http://alt.cc/>
**Business Card Composer** -- The design process in Business Card
Composer was straightforward, albeit with a few quirks. For
example, one of the first things I wanted to do was resize a
graphic I'd dragged in. I assumed that, as in virtually every
other application, holding down Shift while resizing would
maintain the graphic's original proportions. But no: As I
discovered by trial and error, the proportions are kept the
same by default, and pressing Shift turns off that constraint!
Similarly, a few features I expected to see were bafflingly
missing. You can align elements with each other horizontally but
not vertically. Although alignment guides appear as you move
objects on the canvas, the alignment applies only to the edges
of an element's containing box; in the case of a text block,
baseline alignment would have been much more useful. Similarly,
I could find no way to put text in small capitals. (SOHO Business
Cards suffered from neither of these limitations.)
Despite these quibbles, Business Card Composer was generally quite
solid. It helpfully separates your canvas into a background layer,
for elements common to multiple cards, and a foreground layer,
for information specific to each person. In addition, you can
have a single file that holds designs for both the front and back
of a card (which we decided to use for TidBITS and Take Control);
you can switch sides with a single click.
To add Address Book data, you choose a contact and design your
card with actual data from that person's record (all of which
is editable). If you then want to use the same design for another
person's card, you can select a new Address Book record with a
couple of clicks. You should be aware, though, that if you edit
a piece of data (say, a phone number) for a contact, switch to
another contact, and then switch back, your edit will be lost.
Business Card Composer's Address Book fields work best when
Address Book contains exactly the information you want on the
cards; otherwise, your best bet is to add custom text manually.
After working up some sample double-sided TidBITS/Take Control
cards from scratch, I looked for a design that might work well for
my own company. After finding one I liked, I plugged in my contact
information, changed a couple of colors, and was ready to print
within about five minutes. In short, the happier you are with an
existing design and the less fiddling you need to do, the easier
the program will seem.
**SOHO Business Cards** -- I thought I would like SOHO Business
Cards better, because it has a slicker interface and comes with
a much larger library of graphics, fonts, and templates. But as
I used it, I discovered that its frustrations outnumbered its
benefits.
For example, I quickly found it infuriating that in the Design
pane - where you can resize and reposition elements - you can only
see blocks representing where text from my Address Book will be
placed, but not the actual text itself. You have to switch to the
(non-editable) Preview pane to see what your design will look like
with its text. Because the Design view gives you little sense of
how the final block will look when filled with contact data, the
design process becomes one of incessantly switching panes, a real
annoyance.
SOHO Business Cards has a special Fields palette that's designed
to give you extra control over layout and typography. You can
specify, for example, what happens if the text in an address field
is too wide: the box can expand to the left or right, or the text
can shrink to fit the block. The latter choice sounded like just
what I needed, because one of the lines in my address is much
longer than the others. But to my dismay, I found that when I
switched to the Preview pane, only that one line of my address
had shrunk; the rest stayed at their full size.
In fact, SOHO Business Cards's fundamental reliance on so-called
smart fields to hold and format Address Book data is misguided.
The idea is that you choose a smart field with exactly the
combination of Address Book data you want, set up its
characteristics, and then watch as it automagically reformats
itself to display the data of each new contact. Unfortunately,
SOHO Business Cards provides no convenient way of printing cards
for multiple contacts at one time; you must manually select
the Address Book contact used to insert data into any given card
design. Furthermore, you can't edit data inserted from Address
Book; if something is not quite right, you must either change
the data in Address Book itself or manually insert a custom text
field. In other words, in one respect SOHO Business Cards's design
is optimized for constantly changing data, but in another respect,
it assumes you're working with just one set of data. Those two
design imperatives are very much in conflict.
On the bright side, SOHO Business Cards does have the full
range of horizontal and vertical alignment options I expect
from a good graphics application, making layout of graphical
elements a breeze. It offers extensive typographical control
(unlike Business Card Composer) and lets you adjust attributes
like drop shadows, transparency, and rotation of any element
with great ease. Unlike Business Card Composer, which lets you
adjust the zoom level of the canvas only to a handful of preset
magnifications, SOHO Business Cards has a slider that instantly
zooms to any arbitrary size.
In the end, however, it took too much effort to get the result
I wanted. Furthermore, SOHO Business Cards doesn't support
double-sided cards directly, so each side had to be a separate
file. And although many of the templates provided were quite
handsome, none of them was a good fit for my own company's cards.
**Printing** -- Since my printer - an aging inkjet on its last
leg - can no longer be coaxed into producing crisp text,
professional printing was the only option I considered. Both SOHO
Business Cards and Business Card Composer use the same technique:
choose File > Print Online (SOHO Business Cards) or File > Order
Cards Online (Business Card Composer) and you'll be taken to a Web
page with instructions to save your file as a PDF and send it to
any of several recommended print shops. That process worked, but
I still had to visit each of the printers' sites, evaluate their
options and prices, and then manually send in a file. I had been
hoping for more of a seamless printing process such as the one
iPhoto uses for making photo albums and prints online, but no
such luck.
**Final Thoughts** -- If you're prepared to be happy with one of
the applications' built-in designs, and if the information you
want on your business card is identical to your Address Book card
for yourself, either application should get the job done. But if
you want to color outside the boxes, Business Card Composer will
make your job far easier. Business Card Composer costs $40 for
the boxed edition; the downloadable edition, which I tested,
includes fewer graphics and templates, sells for $35 and is
a 17.7 MB download. SOHO Business Cards costs $30, and is a
17.7 MB download.
Wanted: Better Document Collaboration System
--------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The TidBITS staff has been spending a vast amount of time and
energy thinking about how we want to recast our collaborative
editing system, but we haven't been able to come up with a
solution that meets all of our needs and wants. In the past,
we've gotten great advice from readers that, for example,
helped us set up a search tool (see "TidBITS Macintosh Search
Tool Shootout" in TidBITS-368_) and choose a content management
system (see "Help Us Choose Among Content Management Systems" in
TidBITS-675_). Let me explain what we're contemplating, and then
I'd like to see if you can suggest anything.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00721>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07143>
Our eventual goal is to create a system that enables us to create
new TidBITS articles, have multiple people be able to edit them,
and post the final result to a content management system. It
sounds simple, and in fact, conceptually, none of the pieces
is all that difficult. The three parts are:
* An easily accessible Internet file storage site for sharing
articles
* Change-tracking across multiple iterations of an article
* A combined format/technology solution for uploading finished
articles to a content management system
A company called Near-Time created a program called Flow that
addressed all of these problems. It provided an interface to
"spaces" that could be shared with other Flow users over the
Internet. Each space held documents that could be created with
standard Cocoa text editing tools, bolstered by extra-textual
comments. Flow handled version tracking by default, updating
itself every few minutes and optionally showing the changes
from one shared version to another. Once an article was finished,
we could post it to a weblog on our Web Crossing server via the
MetaWeblog API, and Flow would also pull down articles that
others had posted.
Flow was by no means perfect, though. It had an interface that
required significant training, many additional (and unnecessary,
in our view) features that cluttered the interface, and some key
bugs. More worrisome for those of us who like to control our own
services, Flow relied upon a Near-Time server and used SMTP and
POP to synchronize versions. I refer to the program in the past
tense because although Near-Time hasn't officially killed it,
you can't find any mention of it on their site and they're
focusing all their efforts on a Web-based service that provides
weblog, wiki, and shared calendar capabilities.
<http://www.near-time.com/>
Anyway, here's what we do now and possible alternatives we've
come up with.
**Internet File Storage Site** -- Any small group that's
attempting to share files needs some sort of centralized file
store. Our current solution relies on AppleShare over IP running
on the one Mac I have with a static IP address. On that file
server, which all of our editors can mount in the Finder, there
are two folders: IN and OUT. Files available for editing live
in IN; those that someone is working on are moved to OUT. We also
add metadata to article file names for more information. In other
words, a version number in the file name is incremented by each
editor, and each editor appends his or her initials to the
file name after editing. So, this file starts out life as
DocumentCollaboration-1.ace in IN. When Jeff wants to edit it,
he moves it to OUT and renames it to DocumentCollaboration-2.jlc.
That way we all know who has it checked out, and we know not
to mess with it until he puts it back in IN.
This solution works fairly well, but has some problems. Most
notable is that AppleShare over IP can be troublesome when used
over the Internet. It's not uncommon to have troubles with the
Finder, and having the volume mounted can slow down any activity
that queries the available volumes. Plus, it's sufficiently slow
that most people choose to copy a file locally before working
on it; that's extra work and can engender mistakes.
We've hit upon two solutions to this problem. First is the
Subversion version control system. Matt Neuburg, who's familiar
with Subversion as a programmer, set up a shared repository for
us and has helped train everyone in what's necessary to use the
main Mac OS X Subversion clients, svnX and BBEdit. Overall, the
Subversion setup works well technically, but despite loud claims
in the Subversion documentation that it can be used for any sort
of file, the entire system is designed by and for programmers
and falls down hard in terms of usability. The free svnX offers
a graphical interface, but it's obtuse, and BBEdit's interface
is essentially a long list of similarly named menu commands.
Most annoyingly, there's no built-in way in svnX or BBEdit of
saying, "Just keep my local copies of the files up-to-date at
all times," forcing us to update manually over and over again.
<http://subversion.tigris.org/>
<http://svnbook.red-bean.com/>
<http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/community/subversion/svnx/features/>
<http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/>
I came upon another possibility that's a bit reminiscent of Flow,
the weblog editor Ecto. Once properly configured to see our
Web Crossing server via the MetaWeblog API, Ecto automatically
showed me all the weblogs we host, and it's trivial to create
a new article or edit an existing one, regardless of who first
created it. Using Ecto, I could create a new article in a private
weblog, Jeff could edit it, and I could add more later. When we
were done, there's an easy way to transfer an article from one
weblog to another. Although Ecto doesn't automatically refresh
its listing of posts on a schedule, it's easy to do and could
likely be automated by AppleScript, and overall it provides
a nice interface. (Another program that provides roughly the
same feature set as Ecto is MarsEdit, by Brent Simmons of
NetNewsWire fame, but on the face of things, Ecto seems a bit
more full-featured.)
<http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/>
<http://ranchero.com/marsedit/>
**Change Tracking** -- So what's wrong with Subversion and Ecto?
In both cases, it comes down to tracking changes and commenting.
Because we have a number of people editing articles multiple
times, we need a simple way to view changes.
Right now, we use Nisus Writer Classic, and we all know to mark
notable changes in green and to make comments (prefixed with
three asterisks) in red. Obviously, this sort of change tracking
is more work than the way Microsoft Word does it automatically,
but paragraphs aren't cluttered with lots of very minor changes,
and we don't have to think about who made any given change.
A Word document that's been through a few edit passes is generally
a cacophony of color, which makes it hard to read, and it's
difficult to tell which changes were made when. If one of us edits
an article multiple times, it's impossible for others to tell
which changes were made in which edit pass. Also, we've noticed
over the years that Word's change tracking often sets up an
antagonistic situation ("How dare he change that word!") where
none really exists, and its accept/reject approach doesn't match
well with what we generally want to do, which is to accept all the
good changes (so it would be nice not to have to do this manually)
and tweak all the bad changes (seldom does anyone just reject
a change).
Flow got this right by storing each version of the document
that was shared and providing a comparison feature that could
be applied to any two versions. It wasn't perfect; sometimes it
declared an entire paragraph was changed when only a word or two
were different, but it worked pretty well. Better yet, you could
compare versions whenever you wanted, but the changes weren't
in your face all the time as they tend to be with Word (and yes,
I know that Word's change tracking display can be modified, but
it's clumsy).
Subversion, because it's designed for programmers to share
code, is great about maintaining multiple versions of documents.
But even though the versions are present, there's no good way
to see the differences between them. BBEdit can compare files,
of course, but it can do so only at a line level and shows the
comparisons in a separate window from the latest version of the
document. With prose text, a line is a paragraph, and adding a
single comma marks an entire paragraph as changed. There's also
the FileMerge utility that comes with Apple's developer tools.
It can do character-level comparison, but it's such a horrible
text editing environment that it's essentially unusable. Plus,
neither BBEdit nor svnX offer a halfway decent interface for
seeing all the versions of a document and comparing them.
While bemoaning BBEdit's lack of any control over the look
of individual characters, we realized that BBEdit can do
some colorizing of text when the document in question is
in a particular programming or tagging language like HTML.
In BBEdit 8, this colorizing is configurable via "codeless
language modules," simple XML files that define tags for BBEdit
to recognize. I created a codeless language module that understood
that .tb files used lines starting with three asterisks as
comments and would colorize text between backslashes (a subtle
character we essentially never use in TidBITS). In essence, this
solution recreates what we had in Nisus Writer Classic, though
we must add backslashes around notable changes and remember to
remove them at the end. Again, it's a functional solution, but
it's more work than would be ideal, and is generally inelegant.
Ecto has no versioning capabilities at all, which means that
the only way to track changes in a document would be to use
the colored text approach we used in Nisus Writer. That's not
unthinkable, but colorizing text via the Colors palette isn't
a fluid action. I don't know if there's any way to make a
keyboard shortcut for applying a color, but none has jumped
out at me. One of the planned aspects of our next-generation
content management system is the capability to maintain multiple
versions of articles (Web Crossing can already do this via its
wiki plug-in); it's possible that this capability would help
during the editing phase as well.
**Final Format** -- The third aspect of the problem is the format
in which we write, and how that interacts with our content
management system. Currently, we use a variety of styles in Nisus
Writer Classic, and when Geoff Duncan has finished the final edit
pass on the issue, he uses some age-old Nisus macros I wrote to
turn the styled issue file into the setext (structure enhanced
text) format we send out in email, and an HTML version that he
then imports into his database (which subsequently generates the
HTML edition that's also sent out via email, along with the text
and HTML announcement editions). Although we have to be highly
accurate about the styles so my macros can do the right thing,
it's easy to apply them and edit the document with them applied.
Unfortunately, this system is entirely dependent on Nisus Writer
Classic, and we simply can't be relying on a Classic application
any more now that Intel-based Macs don't support Classic.
In rethinking this part of the problem, it would seem to make
sense to create articles in HTML, since it has become a common
file format and would import easily into our next-generation
content management system as well as our current one. But we
don't want to have to write in full HTML code, since it makes
editing difficult and is prone to error. Plus, HTML can be
difficult to render down to something simple like setext
for email.
Ecto addresses this issue by allowing styled text editing and
sending HTML out when articles are posted, but any conversion
to something like setext would have to be a server-side function.
In the next-generation content management system, that's likely,
but styled text-to-HTML doesn't help us much at the moment.
We've also considered swapping our Nisus Writer styles for writing
in something very much like setext - John Gruber's setext-inspired
Markdown language. John designed it to be easy to use while
writing, and he provides a Perl script that can be installed into
BBEdit to convert Markdown format into HTML. Plus, it appears that
Ecto automatically understands Markdown as well when previewing
articles, so if we can create scripts in Ecto to convert Markdown
into setext and add Markdown support to our next-generation
content management system, we could have a solution for both
the present and the future. This may sound like a good approach,
but changing all of our systems will be a fair amount of work,
so we don't want to move further until we're certain it's the
best approach.
<http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/>
**Putting It All Together** -- If I had to make a decision today,
I'd pick a private weblog as the Internet file storage site, with
articles edited in Ecto using the Markdown format and colors for
change tracking. Our setext and HTML issues could be generated
in BBEdit using Text Factories until such time as our content
management system can kick those issues out semi-automatically.
But the more I poke at these different programs, the more picky
little details I come across, and the more I wonder if there might
not be other approaches that could work even better. For instance,
although I found that Ecto can send an article to BBEdit for
editing, that method of transferring the data always converts
characters that are problematic in HTML to their corresponding
entities, even though we want angle brackets, for instance,
to remain angle brackets in the setext version of TidBITS.
A discussion I had with Chuck Joiner on a recent MacNotables
podcast generated a few suggestions from listeners that I haven't
yet had time to investigate fully, but which look promising.
In particular, we're checking out Writeboard from 37signals and
AdventNet's Zoho Writer, though the latter works only in Mozilla-
based browsers like Firefox and Netscape. Both are essentially
online word processors, leading me to wonder if writing in a
Web browser instead of a real Macintosh text editor would be
acceptable, if the services would be sufficiently reliable
in both daily uptime and in the long run, and if we'd run into
troubles with needing to work in too-many offline environments
like airplanes.
<http://www.macnotables.com/archives/2006/631.html>
<http://www.writeboard.com/>
<http://www.zohowriter.com/>
So I welcome your thoughts and suggestions about alternative
solutions that we might be missing. Feel free to send them to me
directly, and if appropriate, I may forward some to TidBITS Talk
for further discussion. Thanks!
Take Control News/03-Apr-06
---------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
**"Macworld Digital Photography Superguide" Released** -- Our
latest ebook is a bit different from anything we've done in the
past, and in fact, it's not even a Take Control ebook! Instead,
it was written by our friends (some of whom also write for
Take Control) at Macworld Magazine. Called the Macworld Digital
Photography Superguide, it's a 102-page collection of the best
of Macworld's coverage of the wide world of digital photography.
In 21 detailed sections, you'll learn how to take great shots,
make them even better with image-editing tools ranging from
iPhoto to Adobe Photoshop, move them to something you can hold
in your hand, and protect them against mishap.
Now, you might be wondering why we're selling an ebook from
Macworld rather than writing our own. Quite simply, they did
a great job, and we couldn't see any reason to duplicate their
effort when we could work together instead.
The Macworld Digital Photography Superguide features a sleek
full-color layout, lots of illustrative photos, and the features
you expect from a good ebook, including internal links, bookmarks,
and links to referenced Web sites. But what really matters is the
content, and that's where it especially shines - we're sure you'll
learn a lot! (We encourage you to download the free 15-page sample
to see what it looks like and how it prints, since it is rather
different from our Take Control design.)
We're selling the ebook by itself, or in a special bundle with our
107-page Take Control of Buying a Digital Camera (discounted 25
percent), which gives you an in-depth discussion of the process
of purchasing a digital camera, in classic Take Control style.
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/mw-photo.html?14!pt=TRK-0033-TB24-TCNEWS>
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/buying-digicam.html?14!pt=
TRK-0015-TB824-TCNEWS>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/03-Apr-06
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The first link for each thread description points to the
traditional TidBITS Talk interface; the second link points to
the same discussion on our Web Crossing server, which provides
a different look and which may be faster.
**Creative Commons License Upheld in Dutch Court** -- A reader
provides more details about the case that Adam wrote about
last week. (1 message)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2945>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/777/>
**Comments on: Apple versus Apple** -- Geoff Duncan's article
about the Apple Corps lawsuit against Apple Computer prompts
discussion of the case, including the reasons Apple hasn't
pre-loaded music on iPods. (9 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2946>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/778/>
**How to reset printing under 10.4.5?** An inkjet printer stops
responding correctly under Tiger, but readers have a few
suggestions for fixing the problem. (3 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2947>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/779/>
**Apple, iTunes and France: The Reality** -- Readers discuss Kirk
McElhearn's article looking at France's proposed legislation that
could force Apple to open its FairPlay DRM or pull the iTunes
Music Store from the French market. (6 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2948>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/780/>
**Hard Drive Backups and Retrospect** -- Someone whose been lax
about backing up asks for experiences using Retrospect, Mac OS X,
and recent hard drives. (4 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2950>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/782/>
**Best standalone recorders for podcasts** -- If you're looking to
record audio on the go without hauling a PowerBook or iBook, check
out these suggestions for recording units. (5 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2951>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/783/>
$$
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