Episode BritishMac009
NEWS
UNCLE MAC'S MAC MOMENT
FEATURE SECTION
Book Review - Hacking Mac OS X Tiger
ISBN 0-7645-8345-X
Amazon Price £10.55
Waterstones £15.99 Retail price
Listener's Letters.
Mike Bradbrook favourite apps:
Adium
AppZapper
Azureus
Camino (so fast!!)
ClamXav
Cocktail (although I now use MainMenu for my Mac maintenance)
Cocoalicious
D-Vision 3
DragThing
Firefox (I prefer Camino though)
Goliath
Handbrake and Handbrake Lite
iSquint
MacJanitor (as above, I now prefer MainMenu for my maintenance)
MacTheRipper
MainMenu
MenuMeters
NeoOffice
Pacifist
PodWorks
Preferential Treatment (although again, MainMenu is now my tool of choice though)
QuickSilver
Safari Enhancer
Skype
SMARTReporter
Sound Menu
StuffIt Expander
TinkerTool
UnRarX
VLC
VLC RAR Loader
WidgetKiller
Mac.TV (http://live.watchmactv.com/) which is an excellent place to see everything (skits, commercials, etc) related to a Mac. They've included the comparison of Vista to OS X and some funny skits from Saturday Night Live and Conan O'Brien.
Steve Job iPod skit (Saturday Night Live)

http://live.watchmactv.com/?p=117

iPod Commerical skit (Conan O'Brien)

http://live.watchmactv.com/?p=128

Sosumi prank

http://live.watchmactv.com/?p=111
Office suites:
Appleworks - £65 free with many Macs
Microsoft Office - £349 standard, £109 Student
iWork - £49
Open Office & NeoOffice
Google buy writely

Google has purchased Writely. Writely is a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser. Writely is still in beta form, and there is a lot of work that still needs to be done before it is officially released into the marketplace.

Writely is being pushed as a web word processor. It allows you to instantly share and collaborate on documents in real time. The browser is the only requirement you have when working with Writely. You can upload from Word, save to your desktop, and publish documents to the web, and a blog. No downloading of any special applications is necessary. You documents are stored securely online, and like Google's Gmail, documents are saved every 10 seconds.

At present, you must sign up to receive an invitation to test of the Writely online tool.
Lisa Hendry
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14929-2087266,00.html.
How Apple ate the world
It is business, culture, art and a quasi-religion. Bryan Appleyard praises the great god of computer design

Apple Computer is 30 years old on April 1. What follows, before you turn the page, is not for geeks, it’s for aesthetes. Apple, with its laptops and iPods, is certainly, from one perspective, a geek thing; but, from another, much more interesting perspective, it’s an art thing, the story of how, even in our time, art and art alone can make, break, remake and, above all, express a contemporary cultural reality.
Two films make the point. The most recent is the 94-minute address to the 2006 Macworld Conference, in San Francisco, by Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple.


You can find it at www.apple.com. The second is the 45-second TV ad made by Ridley Scott in 1984 to announce the launch of the Macintosh computer. It was screened once, during the Super Bowl, and it is widely and justifiably regarded as the greatest television ad ever made. It can be found on any number of internet sites.
The Jobs address should really be watched as a feature film; it is just the right length, and is replete with narrative, character, drama and revelation. Jobs annually uses this event to announce new corporate triumphs and new products. He is never speculative. Apple does not believe in deferred gratification; almost everything Jobs announces is in the shops as he speaks, and he never trails the future. The event is a prayer meeting, full of gasps and cries of affirmation from the audience of believers. The preacher’s message is: join us and be free.
Ridley Scott’s advert proposed the same hot gospel. In some futuristic hell, robotic serfs gaze at a giant screen showing the crazed rantings of what is plainly George Orwell’s Big Brother. An athletically clad girl races in. She is pursued by helmeted goons and she carries a sledgehammer. With a cry, she hurls the hammer at the screen. It explodes. The serfs gaze on, bewildered and open-mouthed, as a voice tells us that, thanks to the Apple Mac, 1984 will not be like “1984”. Join us and be free.
Whatever its share price, Apple identifies itself not as just another company, but as a cause. Indeed, it is a cause in opposition to other companies. Its recent switch to Intel chips — those used in most other computers — was again advertised as a liberation, this time for the chip itself. Previously it had been “trapped inside PCs doing dull little tasks”; in an Apple, it can do “so much more”.
The cause is highly consistent over time; it is the liberation from imprisonment in dullness and uniformity. But the cause, as in some fable, has been betrayed by false prophets. Apple failed to prevent the dominance of first IBM, then Microsoft, in the computer market and, in disarray, slumped in the early 1990s towards what seemed to be a certain demise. Its computers were dreadful. (I abandoned them at the time; I have returned now. A twitch on the thread brought me back to the faith.) Then it bounced back, first, on the back of some astonishing product design, then on the huge success of the iPod. Just as every vacuum cleaner was once really a Hoover, so now every music player is really an iPod.
The slump was caused by the departure of Jobs, who is now also head of the cartoon film company Pixar, and the revival by his return. So, whatever the public cause of Apple may be, its private cause is Jobs. Considered as a work of art, Apple is the product of two artists.
The second is the designer Jonathan Ive, but the first is Jobs. Considered in terms of a religion, Jobs is God, Ive his son.
So, first, Jobs. He started the company in his bedroom with Steve Wozniak, who was the real computer brain. The liberation theology sprang from their joint and essentially 1960s hippie conviction that computers should be for the people. In the 1950s, IBM executives had seriously believed that the world needed only half a dozen mainframe computers. The garage and bedroom hobbyists rebelled and, in the form of Jobs and “Woz”, succeeded in proving their point.
What followed is now a hoary old story, but the key aesthetic point that is usually missed is Jobs’s perfectionism. Unlike most businessmen, he wanted to produce not just a saleable product, but a perfect one. At the technical level, this meant he wanted to make both hardware and software in one perfect, integrated package. Microsoft took the financially saner route of making the software and leaving the hardware to others.
Aesthetically, this was a way of maintaining creative control. Apple has always gone to extraordinary lengths to make its systems beautiful and, when asked what he most disliked about Microsoft, Jobs answered, with measured disdain: “They have no taste.” The slightly sinister, autocratic side of this is the way this aesthetic control freakery demands that you play the game according to Jobs’s rules. Apple systems are much more opaque than Microsoft’s, going to greater lengths to conceal the machine’s inner workings. The smiling face is a mask; but then all art is fiction.
Having left in 1985, Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and unleashed his corporate son, Ive. Apple’s software was in a mess and its market share almost invisible. So Jobs went for taste, and Ive produced a series of extraordinary, wildly postmodern machines. With their translucent, candy-coloured plastics and, in the case of the desktops, large, inviting handles, they had an almost overpowering tactile quality. Ive’s style may have now resorted to an extremely refined modernism, but this tactile quality remains. Go to any one of the extravagant Apple temples — the word “stores” falls laughably short of the actual experience — and you will see people (sometimes me) not just using the machines, but stroking them.
But the true apotheosis of Jobs and Ive happened in 2001. The operating-system software was radically improved, Ive had made his switch to modernism and the iPod was introduced, a product that suddenly turned Apple into a big music company with a small computer operation attached. In business terms, Apple was a player again; and in artistic terms, it had joined the pantheon.
For fear you will think, possibly correctly, that my rediscovered faith has driven me mad, I will not wax too lyrical about Ive’s current designs. I will only say that I know of no product, the most refined cars included, that comes close to attaining their strangely glowing celebration of their functionality. Other products — Issey Miyake’s clothes, say — are just as great works of art, but only Apple brings this level of aesthetic excellence to the mass market, and it does so within the demanding technical confines of the electronics involved.
Okay, it’s art, it’s culture, so what’s it all about? Art for art’s sake is never quite the whole story; there is always context. The answer, I think, lies in the true nature of the Jobs-Ive perfectionism. Ive is 39 and Jobs is 51. The first is a Generation X-er for whom technology is as natural as breathing; the second is a baby-boomer for whom it is an exciting anti- authoritarian adventure. Somewhere in Jobs’s imagination will be Nasa’s breathtaking Saturn V rockets; somewhere in Ive’s will be William Gibson’s Neuromancer, with its cyberpunk visions of the super-integration of the human and the machine. Jobs’s control freakery and technophilia find expression in Ive’s dreams of integration.
Apple’s key technical — and world-transforming — innovation was the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Well, it was copied from a Xerox experimental lab, but it was Apple, not Xerox, that knew what to do with it. It gave us multiple windows, the mouse and the computer paradigm of point-and-click.


It also gave the machine a face with which we could interact. The idea of the machine face has, ever since, been an Apple obsession. Most vividly, it was demonstrated in the previous generation of the company’s G4 desktops, with their hemispherical white “shoulders”, from which sprang a chrome “neck” supporting a screen that could only, as a result, be read as a face. But it is also present in the current generation of desktops, in which the screen face has a single support that demands to be called a “foot”. The same points can be made about the cuddly, mobile and highly organic designs of the software.
The design emphasis of the iPods and the laptops is different but related. The iPod aspires to the condition of an implant, almost like a pacemaker, in that it keeps on growing smaller. And the peripherals sold by Apple offer you the chance to strap it to your body. The laptops may not be able to shrink to fit quite as much, but Ive has refined the designs to the point where they seem more like art objects that are part of the human world, rather than machines in conflict with it.
All of which is to say that the true subject of Apple’s art is the cyborg, the integration of human and machine. It is no accident that it was Ridley Scott, the director of the great cyberpunk thriller Blade Runner (1982) — a film about the ultimate confusions at the machine-human interface — who directed that 1984 television advert. Both contrasted the idea of machine hell with that of machine paradise.
Of course, Apple may be about to go horribly wrong, as it has done in the past. Certainly, its new shops, with their “genius bars” and auditoria to induct converts, suggest that the theme of the prayer meeting is being taken to dangerous extremes. The imminent underground store in New York is surmounted by a 32ft glass cube bearing only the Apple logo, a hubristically ecclesiastical effect.
Furthermore, it is far from clear that the iPod boom can be converted into a potentially more lucrative computer boom for the company. Its share of the computer market remains dangerously low at about 3%.
But what the hell? I couldn’t have written this article about Dell, BMW, BP, Microsoft, Sony or IBM. No company I can think of is quite as consistently interesting as Apple, and I can certainly think of none that might qualify as a corporate work of art. So, on the sole basis that interesting me is a good thing, happy birthday, Apple, and many more of them.
Martin Pickering
In your podcast episode 7 at 5:21 minutes you mention a Freeview digital
tuner on Apple's web site for £99.
<http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/6314040/wo/Pked4WIweze
V2CSohp01A1k41tu/2.0.19.1.0.8.25.7.11.3.3>

I bought this and it was totally useless. It located only a couple of
programmes and neither was watchable. However, I happen to get darn good
Freeview reception from two Freeview receivers so I knew it wasn't my
aerial at fault.

Consequently, I bought the more expensive ElGato EyeTV410 Freeview tuner.
<http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/6314040/wo/Pked4WIweze
V2CSohp01A1k41tu/2.0.19.1.0.8.25.7.11.1.3>

I can't praise this too highly. The tuner pulls in all programmes and the
software is excellent. I previously wrote a review of the ElGato EyeTV200
(analogue tuner) for the YMUG magazine and I've now updated my own copy
with mention of the 410. I use both connected in series to my G4 tower
and I'm able to record from both simultaneously AND watch a previous
recording. Not bad for a 1.4GHz processor.

To find out if you can get Freeview reception go here:
http://www.satcure.com/freeview.htm
BRITISH ICON
Steve Coogan