Macworld 2009 Rambling

A laptop on the road is becoming the equivalent of a 1954 salesman sample case.  John Candy hauled a suitcase full of shower-curtain-ring samples in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (Not the best movie).  When I see someone pull out a giant Dell surfboard in an airport terminal or hotel lobby I think, “Wow, I can’t believe they have to haul that thing around.”  When I see people with GIANT laptop bags slung across their shoulders and walking to the parking deck I think, “Wow, there has to be a better way.”

There’s something about opening a laptop lid that’s just too much.  Opening it, the added thickness, the weight.  The laptop in its current form-factor is the best catalyst for tablet development.  And don’t even get me started on the tablets that are really laptops with the lid spun around.  My doctor carries one around all day.  I’d cry.

Dozens of blogs have published their Mac Tablet (Mac Touch) wish list.  Here’s the quick and dirty on what Murphy wants:  Not much thicker than an iPod touch.  Six by eight - no bigger!   Cellular built-in and modular.  Bluetooth, wifi.  An Apple-branded wireless travel keyboard accessory.  Mini-USB.

Why do I want this?  I can leave my laptop behind now that I have an iPod touch.  But everyone keeps saying the touch and the iPhone are computers.  They’re so close.  But I need easy USB connectivity to copy files onto the device.  And the ability to connect a card reader.  Does anyone else want that?  I don’t know, but the lack of USB connectivity is what stops me from calling the touch and the iPhone computers.

Will it run Snow Leopard, or an OS more like the touch and the iPhone?  Interesting question.  With all the apps in the app store it seems like the lighter OS is a possibility.  Wouldn’t bother me too much, as long as there’s Flash support!  What if it could run in either of two modes:  Full OS X or the Mobile flavor?

Think about how easy the device would be to slip in and out of a bag on an airplane.  Instant on.  Light.  Simple.  Connected.

Back to the touch for a second:  I heard Paul Thurrott saying he uses his iPhone to triage his email.  And that’s about all I use my iPod for with regard to email.  I can’t stand to write more than a few sentences on the iPod.   I use it to read and delete emails that don’t require action.  The interface is great for scanning, deleting and filing emails.  But I don’t write big replies.

The tablet touch keyboard won’t be much better, unless Apple comes up with something none of us have thought of yet.  A wireless keyboard is nice, but it’s not a perfect solution.  And here’s the biggest problem.  How do you prop the tablet up when you don’t want to hold it?  It wouldn’t look very Apple-like with a pop-out stand. Without an easy way to really type I won’t be better off on the road than I am with my iPod touch.

Ireland - a frequent commenter on AppleInsider, would like a low angle stand.  Then you’d type on the keyboard while the device is resting on the table.  Hadn’t thought of that.  It’s an interesting idea, but sounds like an ergonomic mega-lawsuit in the making.

Unfortunately, I think the chances of a tablet at Macworld are nil.  It would have been a perfect last keynote for Steve.  But the rumor mill has been far too quiet.  There was more noise about a $99 iPhone at Wal-Mart than there’s been about new products for January 5.  The last few product announcements have been well-leaked, so I’m not expecting anything that will make your jaw drop.  As my friend Ireland says, it’s too soon - they’re working on it but it’s not ready yet.

What Else?

New iMacs.  A new Mac Mini.  Maybe some more Cinema Displays.  I’m still hoping my FM tuner will work with my iPod touch but I suppose it’s time to let go of that entirely reasonable expectation.

What do you expect on Monday?   What do you think of the following?

A 12″ Macbook Pro.  (It’s why they pulled FW from the new Macbook)
Apple television
Apple hardware accesories for iPhone and touch.  Like card-readers.
What about a touch screen iMac?  (I don’t see the point, but HP is selling a few of them…)
More services for Apple TV

We don’t have long to wait…

Some interesting Mac Tablet mock ups:

Stand
Kindle-Like
iPad
Popular Mechanics Not Even Close
I like this one

WakeUp for iPhone and iPod touch

Maybe you’ve got an Airport Express hooked up to your stereo - and it pulls from iTunes on your computer upstairs. You want to listen to some music - but you’re comfy on the sofa and you don’t want to go upstairs and wake up the Mac. Or the PC for that matter. If you can muster the strength to retrieve your trusty iPhone from the coffee table you don’t have to get up.

WakeUp is from the same people who make this handy Wake-on-Lan Widget that Murphy posted about long ago. (so long ago that Apple TV was called iTV.)  It’s 99 cents in the App Store.  Link to WakeUp in iTunes.

With WakeUp you can send a magic packet to sleeping computers, as long as they’re wired into your Ethernet network - and have their Wake-On-Lan ability activated.  See this post for more details.

Now your computer is awake, and you can use your iPhone or iPod to remote control iTunes.

Related Posts:

Sleep Your Mac by Email
Twitter While You Sleep
Sleep Your Mac with Terminal

Two Years, Two Hundred Posts, Over 150 Screencasts

Well, the screencasts have slowed down.   They’re brutal to make and I’ll tell you why if you ask.  But 200 posts isn’t bad.

Murphy’s first screencast posted two years ago:  how to close lots of windows with a single click.  For some reason we thought the anniversary was Nov 28 so this post was held until today.  But it was actually Nov 20.  Oops.

There have been some big posts over the last two years.  Murphy’s screencasts have been featured on Digg, TUAW, Lifehacker, and Ars Technica.  I’m still waiting for Leo Laporte to tell everyone how he waits for Murphy’s next screencast to come out.  Are you there Leo?

Quickly, here are some of my favorite posts:

Retrieving a Remote File by Email
Sleep Your Mac by Email
Mail a File by Dragging to a Folder
Google Calendar on Your Desktop (with GeekTool)
How to Make a Quicktime Skin
Command Line File Encryption
Split Files into Smaller Files

Browse the categories in the sidebar, there are plenty of screencasts to look through.

Notable Mac Websites:

Silver Mac
OS X Daily
Tim Margh

Do you have an idea for a Murphy Mac screencast?  Post it below…

Access Web Sites Directly

A quick look at simple ways to open frequently visited web sites directly, without your mouse.

Hopefully you don’t click in the address bar and forward-delete and backward-delete to erase what’s there.  But some people do.  Here are Murphy’s tips for opening web pages directly with the keyboard.

1.  Add an alias for the site to the Dock. You can access the Dock with Control+F3, even if you’re in another application.  Use the arrow keys to select your site-alias and the Return key to open it.  You can create the alias by dragging the icon from your browser address bar to the Desktop.  Then drag from the Desktop to the right side of the Dock.

2.  Command+L and a Firefox keyword. This is an easy one.  Command+L selects everything in the address bar in Safari and Firefox.  Control+L does it in Internet Explorer.   Now you can start typing - whatever is highlighted  will be deleted.  But don’t type out the url, just type the keyword you’ve assigned to the site, which could be as short as one character.  Keyword?  Read on…

Edit your bookmarks in Firefox and view properties by selecting a bookmark.  There’s a field for keywords.  Go ahead and set a keyword - now you can enter the keyword in the address bar instead of the url.

Safari doesn’t have the bookmark keyword feature - but you can use Command+1 and so forth to access the bookmarks on the bookmark bar.  They’re numbered from left to right automatically.

3.  TextExpander. With TextExpander your Mac is always watching for certain text strings.  When you type a configured string the assigned action is carried out.  The action can be an Applescript.  A simple script can open your browser of choice to your destination site.  The great thing about TextExpander:  Your browser needn’t be active to invoke it.  You could also use TextExpander simple text replacement to replicate the Firefox keyword function in Safari. More about TextExpander. $29.95.

4.  1Password. You might know about or even use 1Password for storing all your log-on credentials in one secure database.  But it also features a bookmark pop-up that lets you jump to a site and auto-populate your username and password.   1Password lets you assign names to your entries, so you can keep them short.  It’s a way to bring keywording to Safari.
1Password licenses start at $39.95. This post has more information and a screencast about 1Password.

5. Terminal. Do you always keep a Terminal window open? Set an alias in Terminal to open your favorite browser and pass along the site to enter.  A command like this will store the alias for you:

alias mm=’open -a Firefox http://murphymac.com’

Then open a terminal Window, type mm and hit return.  Your page will open.  See this post for information about making an alias available when you reboot.

6. Use Quicksilver.

Do you have a favorite way to open favorite sites? Let us know in the comments.

Related Post: Murphy shows how to open a set of tabs in Safari with one click.

Tar

I’ve avoided the tar command for some time now, only to find there’s nothing to be afraid of.  My Windows background always led to pkzip for compression and archiving.  Knowing that zip shipped with OS X there wasn’t really a need to look any further.

But sometimes you’re sent things in the tar format.  Or the even more mysterious tar.gz.  If you have no experience with Linux or Unix the tar command and tar.gz files might leave you confused. Before OS X the only experience Murphy had with Linux was hacking a Directv TiVo so he could install a bigger drive.

Anyway - OS X makes tar and tar.gz files simple to work with.  Double-click one in the Finder and its contents are extracted.  But what if you want to create one?  Or see what’s inside before you open it?  We’ll do both of those things in the screencast, but here’s a quick overview of some tar basics.

tar -cvf irl08.tar Pictures/ireland_08

That command will create an archive called irl08.tar in the current directory.  All the files inside the ireland_08 directory will be placed inside, without compression.  The c creates the archive, the v displays progress as files are added, and the f specifies a file as the destination.  (tar stands for tape archive)

tar -zcvf irl08.tar.gz Pictures/ireland_08

This command is almost exactly the same, but the z option compresses the archive so we’ve added the customary gz to the file name.

Here’s how to view the contents of a tar archive:

tar -tvf irl08.tar

The t option lists the files.  If your archive is compressed add a z option too.

How does tar compare to zip?  Murphy isn’t sure what all the differences are.  He compressed a directory with dozens of screencasts in it using both utilities.  The resulting archive was about the same size for each.  The screencasts were already compressed themselves, so they might not be the best test subject.

A little research shows that extracting a single file from a very large archive might be quicker with zip than with tar.  A zip file includes a table of contents that makes locating an included file more direct.  And a zip file compresses the included files individually as they’re added.  A tar.gz file creates the archive first and then compresses the whole thing at once.  That can make single file extraction more time consuming as the entire large archive must be opened up.

There’s also gzip for compressing files.  But gzip deletes your original file, replacing it with the compressed one.   That makes Murphy a little nervous.  tar leaves your original files in place, so you can delete them if you need to.

tar.  One less thing to be afraid of.

You might find these posts interesting:

zip
command line encryption