I’ve never understood why Apple conceals useful operating system features from its users. I’m talking about such things as changing the default file format for creating a screen shot or turning off the Dashboard app.

Sooner or later (usually sooner) some clever Mac geek figures out how to access and enable these hidden options via the Unix command line in the Terminal or writes a utility to facilitate the task.

Such is the case with Deep Sleep, a Dashboard widget that lets users put their Mac into a standby mode that completely shuts off the power, similar to the “hibernate” function in Windows.

I stumbled upon Deep Sleep in my continuing quest to resolve my Mac Pro’s reboot on wake problem. (It recurred for the first time in over two weeks yesterday. Nuts.) Several Mac Pro owners in the forums had suggested use of this widget to bypass the issue.

It turns out that the default sleep mode on a Mac is only one of three sleep options built in to the operating system. The others are “safe sleep” and “deep sleep.”

In the default sleep mode, the Mac maintains a continuous trickle of power to the computer’s memory. Without that stream of electricity, everything stored in the Mac’s memory (that is, whatever you have running on your desktop) would go poof in a nanosecond.

Because the information is preserved in memory, wiggling your mouse or tapping a key on the keyboard brings up your Mac desktop just as you left it.

Apple created the safe sleep mode for PowerBooks a few years ago, gradually making it a standard feature on all Mac laptops. To prevent data loss, safe sleep adds an extra step. It saves the contents of memory to the hard drive just before going into regular sleep.

With regular sleep, if the PowerBook’s battery ran out of juice, the computer’s memory would lose its lifeline of electricity. The state of the desktop would be lost, and any unsaved work in open documents with it. But safe sleep could retrieve that data from the hard drive. Once power to the laptop is restored, so is the state of the desktop.

The Deep Sleep Widget uses the safe sleep option of copying the contents of memory to the hard drive to eliminate the need for that memory-preserving trickle of electricity in desktop Macs as well as laptops.

The advantages of deep sleep over regular sleep is that 1) it saves your open files to the disk so you won’t lose any data and 2) it uses virtually no power. For laptop owners, the ability to sleep the Mac without consuming any battery power can be invaluable.

The primary disadvantage of deep sleep is that it takes several seconds longer to sleep the system (because the Mac must wait for you’re the contents of memory to write to the hard drive) as well as to wake it up (because the Mac has to read the data off the hard drive).

I have been using Deep Sleep for when I plan to leave my Mac Pro unattended for many hours (such as when I leave for work or go to bed at night) and use regular sleep the rest of the time. I started this to work around my reboot on wake problem, but I think deep sleep might be better for the Mac.

As for the potential power savings, don’t get too excited. According to an Energy Usage Calculator on Apple’s Web site, a Mac Pro running 24/7 (never sleeping) would use $120 worth of electricity in a year at 10¢ per kilowatt-hour, slightly less than the 10.86¢ BGE currently charges. (A 24-inch iMac would cost $123 because of the built-in monitor; a 20-inch iMac $74.)

Using regular sleep mode 12 hours a day would save a Mac Pro owner $57. Using deep sleep 12 hours a day should save you $60 -- just $3 more (assuming the Mac is drawing no electricity).

Not quite enough for a new iPod, but it could get you a movie rental from the iTunes Store.

Posted by David Zeiler at 3:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

Although it’s been nice to see some of the bigger PC game developers such as Electronic Arts and Id Software returning to the Mac platform this year, a few smaller game developers have supported the Mac all along, even during the Dark Ages of the late 1990s.

One such company, Freeverse Software, known early on for its quirky adaptations of classic card games (I personally spent way too much time playing “Burning Monkey Solitaire”), has made yet another significant contribution to Mac gaming.

This week Freeverse announced the relaunch of Macfun.com, a site devoted to shareware-type Mac games such as those Freeverse makes. The games typically cost a reasonable $19.95 each.

You can download demos of the games, or buy them directly from the site. There’s also an “online” area but so far it looks like it contains only lists of uploaded scores showing where registered users rank against each other. It’s not clear if this area will gain more functionality in the future.

To commemorate the launch, the company is offering visitors a free copy of one of their most popular games, 3D Hearts Deluxe. According to the press release, “Macfun.com will always have at least one free game available, so visitors should come back often.”

In another move to keep folks coming back, Macfun.com also plans to release a new game every Friday.

As a longtime fan of Freeverse games (other favorites of mine include “Wingnuts” and “Burning Monkey Casino”), I applaud the company’s latest effort to boost Mac gaming. Frankly I prefer Freeverse’s less intense, less time-consuming and less expensive games as compared to most mainstream commercial offerings.

I recommend any Mac users with an interest in gaming to check Macfun.com out for themselves.

Posted by David Zeiler at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

In the interest of redirecting more of my energies to following Apple news and writing posts based on that news, I have decided to discontinue the weekly Monday morning Macware feature of this blog.

That doesn’t mean I won’t write about cool freeware or software ever again, just that I won’t be doing it on a weekly basis. Should I come across something I think a lot of readers would find useful, I will let you know.

All previous entries will remain accessible as always, though I have added the word “archive” to the category link at right since it will no longer be a regular feature.

Posted by David Zeiler at 3:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

While the portability of laptops is the main reason they’ve grown increasingly popular, that portability comes a price, namely rechargeable batteries. Not only do these batteries limit how long you can use the computer away from a power outlet, they gradually lose their ability to hold a charge.

That’s why laptop users need to be able to check the health of their computer’s battery periodically. True, you can always go to the Energy Saver System Preferences Pane and click on the “Show battery status in menu bar” option if you just want to know how much juice is left, but it’s helpful to know exactly how much of a charge your laptop battery can still hold, and how close it is to requiring replacement. Here are a few of the better options among the Mac battery freeware and shareware out there (all are Universal Binary, good for both PowerPC and Intel Macs):

CoconutBattery: Perhaps the most elegant of the freeware options, CoconutBattery offers a single gray window with three panes and lime green indicator bars. One pane shows the current battery charge and another current battery capacity, indicating how much of your original capacity your battery has lost since you’ve owned it. A bottom pane of “Additional Info” shows you “battery load cycles” (how many times you’ve recharged the battery) and the age of your Mac laptop in months. CoconutBattery even has a Dashboard Widget available.

Battery Health Monitor: Another freeware option, not quite as pretty as CoconutBattery, but gives you most of the same information. Battery Health Monitor has a grid at the top that shows you the power status of the laptop. When plugged in, the word “A/C Power” is bold for example; when on battery power, the word is grayed out. Other indicators include “Battery Depleted” and “Not Chargeable,” neither of which you’ll want to see bolded. Battery Health Monitor also tells you how many charge cycles the battery has gone through as well as the current voltage the battery is delivering.

SlimBatteryMonitor: This piece of freeware is essentially a fancy replacement for Apple’s battery icon. While it does not provide any of the supplemental data the other options do, SlimBatteryMonitor’s main attraction is that it takes up less space in the menu bar than Apple’s built-in version and is much more customizable, particularly in the colors you can choose for the battery icon.

iBatt2: I had the earlier version of this on my old G3 500 iBook, and it helped me track issues with two aging batteries. It’s $19 shareware, but does offer more than the other apps. iBatt2 offers multiple windows, some of which supply the same data as the freeware apps, such as current charge capacity versus the original capacity. A second window supplies the serial number and manufacture date of the battery, as well as “average time to full” data if you’re charging and “average time to empty” data if you’re on battery power. A third window uses data from other users stored online to compare your Mac laptop’s battery to others using the same model. In addition to the raw capacity numbers, iBatt2 assigns your laptop battery a grade. My MacBook’s battery earned only a “C.” The software also charts your battery’s power activities on a graph that updates itself automatically. Finally, iBatt2 has some cool-looking but not terribly useful gauges at the bottom of the screen showing wattage and charge levels.

Posted by David Zeiler at 4:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

If you use archives frequently, a utility called Springy ($18 shareware, Dragan Milic) could make your life a good bit easier. Springy can read, extract and create archives in all the most common Mac OS X formats, including DMG, TAR, ZIP and SIT. It’s a slimmer, well-designed, less expensive alternative to Stuffit Standard ($49.99) and the venerable Stuffit Deluxe ($79.99). Stuffit Expander, which can expand archives but can’t create them, remains free for the download.

One of Springy’s handy features is that it can view what’s in an archive without taking the extra time to extract it. This can be a great time-saver. If you find what you’re looking for, Springy can extract it with a double click. While this will work with any of the archive formats that Springy supports, I found it most useful in working with those disk image (DMG) files so common in OS X.

Creating an archive is almost as easy. Just hit Command-N and a dialog box appears asking you for a name for your new archive, which file format you want to use and where you want to save it. Once created, a column-view window opens. You can add files to the archive simply by dragging and dropping them on the window, just the way Mac users like it.

The ability to avoid extracting all the files when re-opening an archive saves more time when you want to modify an archive by renaming, adding or deleting files.

Perhaps the most compelling feature Springy offers is Contextual menus. During installation you drop a plug-in into the appropriate folder to make Springy available in the Finder at all times, whether the program is running or not. When you right click (or option-click, if you prefer), Springy’s archiving magic appears at the bottom of the menu. Now that’s convenient.

Springy is a Universal binary app, so runs equally well on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs. The free trial version has most of the functionality of the paid registered version but the limitations -- primarily that archives cannot be larger than 50 megabytes -- strongly encourage users to pay up.

Posted by David Zeiler at 4:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Back in August I wrote about two pieces of software (FruitMenu and XMenu) that restored the ability to customize the OS X Apple Menu as one could under Mac OS 9. Today I present two more options to restore OS 9 functionality in Mac OS X, both freeware.

The first, TigerLaunch, is a very simple app created in Apple’s Cocoa programming language by Ranchero Software. When you start TigerLaunch it creates an extra icon in the Menu bar, just like XMenu. However, TigerLaunch has a more “aquified” OS X look and feel. TigerLaunch searches your Mac for apps and generates a complete list of them – regardless of the folder in which they reside. XMenu only takes the apps that actually reside in the Mac’s Applications Folder. But TigerLaunch only lists programs, while Xmenu creates separate menus for Applications, Documents, Home and more.

Of course, if you collect a lot of small apps and utilities like I do, the menu Tiger Launch creates is absurdly long. Not to worry, though; clicking on the “Configure” option brings up the menu list with a checkbox beside each app name. Unchecking the boxes prevents those apps from appearing in the menu. A tedious task, but it really trims the menu to a manageable size and only need be done once.

TigerLaunch must be re-launched every time you reboot or log out of your Mac, but can be added to the Startup Items to force it to launch automatically. That’s all there is to TigerLaunch, but if you’re looking for a basic, free solution to your overloaded Dock and pine for an OS 9-style Apple Menu, it’s worth a look. (FruitMenu remains by far a superior solution, but does cost $10 and is a “haxie” – it alters your system software.)

Today’s second option, RapidoStart by app4Mac, re-invents another Mac OS 9 legacy – the Launcher. This utility creates gray transparent windows full of large icons arranged as the user chooses. Visually it resembles the application switcher function built into OS X (Command-Tab). By default RapidoStart is activated by a green button it creates in the lower right corner of your screen, but in the preferences you can move the button to any corner. Power users will prefer assigning it to an F-key, such as F1, so that hitting that key instantly brings up the RapidoStart window.

RapidoStart is delightfully customizable. The default window holds 8 Application icons, but can be changed to 16, 32 or 48 if your screen is big enough. You add app icons by dragging and dropping them. You can rearrange them in any order at any time, and delete icons by using the right-click menu (or option-click for those Mac die-hards with a single-button mouse).

If you need more room for icons or just want a better way to organize your stuff, you can create more windows and name them whatever you like: Games, Documents, whatever. After you set up more than one category, you can switch between them by clicking on arrows located at the top left of the RapidoStart window. If you end up with so many categories and icons that navigation gets tricky, RapidoStart provides an iTunes-like search window to help you find the icon you’re seeking.

In the preferences is a convenient option to Launch at Startup, which any regular user of this utility would want.

For freeware, RapidoStart is remarkably polished. It may be the most unobtrusive means of relieving the Dock of some of its burden I’ve seen yet.

Posted by David Zeiler at 4:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

System maintenance under Mac OS X is much simpler than it ever was under Mac OS 9. In the bad old days, even commercial utilities didn’t always restore your ailing Mac to health. Don’t even get me started on extension conflicts.

OS X eradicated most of the previous system’s headaches just by virtue of its completely new, UNIX-based architecture. But even OS X can get sluggish over time, or have the occasional oddly behaving program. That’s why it’s still a good idea for Mac users to run certain basic maintenance routines from time to time.

Without going into the technical details, suffice it to say that these maintenance routines “clear out the cobwebs” and return your Mac to its usual efficient state. While Apple provides ways to perform many of these tasks, it never bothered to consolidate them in one handy utility. But plenty of others have.

Generally speaking, what third-party Mac OS X maintenance utilities do is take what are essentially UNIX text commands and put them in a visually more accessible form with clickable buttons and drop-down menus. I have tried several such utilities, including Socks and Cocktail. All have their merits, but one, OnyX, stands above the others for one simple reason: it’s free. (Both Socks and Cocktail are $15 shareware, but free is free.)

Like others of its ilk, OnyX provides a handy way to repair disk permissions, run Unix system maintenance scripts, run prebinding and optimization operations, and delete log and cache files. If you don’t understand a word of what you just read, that’s OK. You only need to know that running these routines periodically helps keep your Mac in optimum condition.

Another thing to like about utilities like OnyX is that they open access to features and options hidden in Mac OS X. (Why Apple doesn’t provide access to these features in the SystemPreferences is a mystery.) In OnyX, clicking on the Parameters icon brings up a whole collection of system options in seven categories, including Finder, Dashboard and Exposé, Dock and Safari.

Some examples of what you can change:

• In the General category, you can elect to have double scroll arrows at both the top and bottom of all your Finder windows.

• A menu (also in the General category) to choose the format of files saved when you use OS X’s built in screen capture function. The default is a PNG file, which can be converted to other formats via the Preview software Apple supplies with all Macs, but what if you want all your screen grabs in JPEG format? OnyX not only lets you change the default to one of 10 image formats, it lets you change the default name.

• In the Dock section you get a third option, “Suck,” for the Minimize window effect. You can also anchor the Dock to the top of the screen, though I can’t imagine why you’d want to.

• With OnyX, you can disable Dashboard (Apple provides no option for turning it off). If you change your mind, you can always use OnyX (or one of the other third party utilities, for that matter) to re-enable it. But it’s nice to have the ability to choose.

While utilities like OnyX draw the most interest from geeks who relish tweaking and optimizing their Macs, I think many less technically inclined users could derive some benefits. If nothing else, you can use it to make sure all of OS X’s UNIX maintenance routines have run (yes, I know Tiger OS X 10.4 is supposed to do this automatically, but I still prefer to run the routines manually sometimes. It can’t hurt.)

And you very well could find a system preference that you were dying to change but could never figure out how.

Posted by David Zeiler at 5:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

Rather than tell you about one or two pieces of inexpensive software, this week I’m going to tell you about a way to save tons of money on very expensive software – but only if you are the parent of a school-age child (or a student yourself).

Most large software companies offer their products at a steep discount to students and schools in the hope of nurturing future customers that, once gainfully employed, will pay full price to own and use software with which they’ve grown comfortable.

As I have not been a student for, er, a very long time, I have ignored these discounts, assuming I was not eligible. And though I am not eligible, I do have a daughter who just entered the second grade. You would think second graders would only be eligible for discounts on children’s educational programs, but it turns out that even kindergarteners qualify for prodigious discounts on professional-grade software.

I happened to be on an Internet hunt for a discounted version of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3, which includes such programs as PhotoShop, Illustrator and the page design program InDesign, all of which we use in the production of the Baltimore Sun. But if you want to dabble with such programs at home, you’re looking at a wallet-draining price tag: the standard design package lists for $1,200. If you’re upgrading from just one component (in my case, PhotoShop), it’s still $900.

That’s when I stumbled on the Web site for the Academic Superstore. They specialize in selling software at educational discounts, and they aren’t alone. Typing “academic software discount” into Google brings up dozens of similar sites. Browsing the Academic Superstore I quickly found CS3 standard selling for $389.95 and the premium version – which lists for $1,800 – for an astounding $589.95!

At that point, something else caught my attention: a chart that listed students from kindergarten through college as eligible for the discount. Still disbelieving my good fortune, I clicked on the Students/Parents eligibility page for more information. Here’s the key paragraph:

If you're a Student or Parent of a Student currently attending classes from Kindergarten through College, you can buy most products at a special academic discounts! The Student is the eligible customer and orders may be billed, shipped, and charged in the Parent's name. Yes, parents can buy a copy of Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office for a Kindergarten Student at 30% to 50% savings over Retail prices!

There are several options for verifying the status of your student, all fairly easy. Older students with ID cards can submit those for verification of eligibility. I simply asked the principal of my daughter’s school for a Letter of Enrollment (a letter on school letterhead which says your child attends that school). The school e-mailed me the document a few days later. I forwarded the letter to the Academic Superstore and they validated my daughter’s eligibility within hours. My software was shipped shortly thereafter.

Not all the software is available at a huge discount, but it’s worth poking around any of the sites if you’re looking for something in particular. In addition to CS3, the Academic Superstore had high-end video software (Avid Xpress for $295 from $1,400) business software (FileMaker Pro for $178.95 from $300) and other categories ranging from CAD and Modeling to Research Tools. And of course you can find the expected stuff like the Microsoft Office Student and Teacher edition for $159.95).

Thanks, Mandy!

Posted by David Zeiler at 4:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

As an old tech geezer who remembers when cool graphics meant there was more than one color on the screen, I tend to prefer old-fashioned games to the complex and time-consuming fare that gets most of the attention these days. Last week I came across something called Fairy Treasure (Red Marble Games, $19.95, Universal Binary), a fresh interpretation of the classic computer game Breakout. It’s actually a Windows game converted to the Mac by Red Marble Games and released just last week.

In Breakout-type games players use a paddle at the bottom of the screen to deflect an ever-moving ball up into a field of bricks, the object being to destroy all the bricks without losing your ball. The original form of this game is actually built into some iPods (well, it came with my 30 GB video iPod).

The object of Fairy Treasure is the same, but features rich graphics and sound along with the fantasy theme. Instead of simply advancing to increasingly difficult levels as you do in most Breakout-style games, in Fairy Treasure the completion of each level carries you further on your journey through the Kingdom of Trollandia. After each level you are shown your progress on a map of the kingdom. Your goal is to complete all 120 levels to recapture the fairy treasure from an evil troll.

Yes, I said 120 levels – but the game remembers where you left off so you don’t have to do it all in one sitting. Better yet, while losing all your balls resets your score to 0 it doesn’t restart your “quest.” Your next game picks up at the level where you left off unless you choose to restart from scratch. The game also offers three difficulty levels, a useful feature that keeps the game easy for beginners and challenging for experienced players.

Typical of a Breakout-type game, hitting certain bricks causes various bonuses and power-ups to fall which you need to capture with your paddle. But Fairy Treasure adds some nice theme-related touches, such as flitting fairies that help break up the bricks when your ball releases them from the jars in which they’re imprisoned. This is a commercial-quality shareware game.

A free trial is available from Red Marble that’s good for 60 minutes of playing time. Or, if you’d rather check it out with downloading anything, you can play a “light” version (it requires Flash 7.0) for free online.

Posted by David Zeiler at 5:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Our regularly scheduled feature will not be blogged today due to the Labor Day holiday. Please tune in next week for more great Mac freeware/shareware.

Posted by David Zeiler at 3:09 AM | Permalink
                    

Here’s a question for those of you heading back to school this week, particularly those focused on mathematics: Where do you get custom-made graph paper?

Thanks to a Westminster, Md. company called Black Cat Software, you can use your Mac to do it with its Graph Paper Maker (shareware, $19.99). Black Cat has produced quite a few shareware products for the Mac since its founding in 1991 such as Audiocorder, a nicely executed sound recording program.

I can barely remember using graph paper when I was in school, but as an English major I treated math the way Mac aficionados treat Windows – I dealt with it only if necessary. Doing a quick search on Google revealed numerous sources of free PDF graph paper files, but among those PDF files are many permutations. If you need something tailored to a specific situation, you could be in for a lot of hunting.

That’s the purpose of Graph Paper Maker: it provides complete control over the creation of a grid. Options include not just power over line spacing but also the thickness and color of the lines; the size and font of the labels; linear or log scales; and even the paper size. Should you want to generate something quickly with less fuss, there’s an “Easy Graph Wizard” that winnows your options to a less-daunting 8 data fields.

When you’ve finished adjusting all those settings, a click on the “generate” button creates and saves a PDF file of your graph paper. To print copies, you’ll need only open the PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Reader or Apple’s own Preview app included on all Macs. Once you have the PDF file, you can open that customized graph paper any time you want to print more copies – you don’t need to re-create it in Graph Paper Maker.

In addition to square grids, Graph Paper Maker has a menu that offers a few more exotic variations, including Isometric Graph Paper, Axonometric Graph Paper, Trapezoid Graph Paper and Hexagon Graph Paper. Don’t ask me what people use it for, although the Hexagon Paper brought back fond memories of board-based Avalon Hill* war games.

Someone must need this stuff; Graph Paper Maker debuted just over a year ago in July 2006. And Black Cat has covered just about every possible customer. Not only is the Mac OS X version Universal Binary, the latest release – 1.6.1, released Aug. 16 – also can be had for Mac OS 9. How many companies are releasing software for OS 9 these days? Oh, and there’s a Windows version, too.

*Local trivia note: Avalon Hill, now part of Hasbro, started out as a Baltimore-based game company in 1958 with it headquarters on Harford Road.

Posted by David Zeiler at 4:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

The Mac platform has been through many hardware and software transitions in its three decades of existence -- 68K chips to PowerPC chips to Intel chips as well as the Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X switch. Each transition has left behind some favorite piece of software or hardware that isn’t compatible with the new gear and never gets updated. Maybe the company went out of business, or stopped development for the Mac to focus on Windows software (a common problem in the mid-90s). But whenever it happens, it leaves affected users searching -- sometimes desperately -- for a replacement.

I recently helped a reader in just such a quandary. He wrote me about a program written for OS 9 he had used called Gofer by Microlytics. Last updated in 1989, Gofer could search files and folders for words or word strings and would display the results in their original context. According to my reader: “Without opening the program, you could just copy a section or even the whole document, and paste it in whatever you were working in.” As he pointed out, the built-in Spotlight function in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger will search for text and display a list of files, but it does not show you the results in context.
Gofer could run in Classic mode on a PowerPC Mac, but my reader is getting ready to upgrade to an Intel-based Mac. The new Macs can’t run Classic mode, and thus no old OS 9 programs. Did I know of any substitutes?

I did not, but relishing a challenge I went on the hunt. I actually found two possible substitutes. The first is a $10 piece of shareware called SpeedSearch X by a fellow named Matt Brunk. The latest official version was released in 2002, although you can chance a more recent (2006) beta version if you’re feeling daring. SpeedSearch X does mostly what my reader required, although I had a little trouble with the interface. My goal was to search a folder of mostly text files for a term (actually I searched copies of some of my blog entries for the word “Apple”).

I couldn’t get the program to find anything until I realized I needed to click a disclosure triangle above the search term window to reveal several more options, including one that tells the program to search file types other than TEXT. Then I got 267 matches, showing each mention of the term “Apple” in its original context (although it’s just a single line -- not a paragraph or even a full sentence.) You can click on an icon to open the selected document in its original program to cut and paste the text, but you’ll still need to hunt it down within that document.

Otherwise, SpeedSearch X is a pretty good text search tool with plenty of options for making the search as broad or as narrow as you require. For example, you can search your entire hard drive or just a folder; or you can tell the program to search for certain types of files by extension, such as .html. You can even add your own categories to the various menus -- I added .doc to the file extension selector menu to filter for Microsoft Word files. SpeedSearch X’s greatest drawback is that it has not been updated as a Universal Binary -- it’s PowerPC only. It still can run on an Intel-based Mac under Rosetta (Apple’s built-in technology to translate PowerPC code to Intel code), but Universal Binary programs run natively on Intel Macs, which always is preferable.

The other option I discovered is TextWrangler 2, a text editor from Bare Bones Software.
Some Mac users may be familiar with an advanced HTML and text editor called BBEdit. It’s been around since the early 1990s, and continues to be updated. TextWrangler is a less-robust offshoot of BBEdit (which costs $124.95) that Bare Bones gives away for free, our favorite price. (Veteran Mac users may recall an older, similar product called BBEdit Lite. TextWrangler has replaced it.)

Among TextWrangler’s many capabilities is text searching. Like SpeedSearch X, TextWrangler brings up a list of results organized by the name of the file. It also shows the search term in the context of the document, with the line of text in which it appears excerpted. But here’s where TextWrangler goes SpeedSearch X one better. Clicking on one of the lines brings up the entire paragraph in which the search term appeared, so you can copy and paste it as my reader does now with Gofer. The only glitch is that text from a word processing program such as Microsoft Word contain a lot of embedded formatting code that shows up in plain text files as gibberish characters. Fortunately, most of the gibberish appears before and after your body text, not within it.

As a program produced by a commercial entity, TextWrangler is much more polished than SpeedSearch X, and it can do a lot more for those who need its text editing features. Considering that it’s free, TextWrangler looks like the hands-down winner of the text-in-context searching contest... unless any readers know of something even better suited to this task. Suggestions, anyone?

Posted by David Zeiler at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

Many veteran Mac users -- those who spent years on the “classic” Mac operating system of OS 9 and earlier – lamented the omission in Mac OS X of one prominent, handy feature: the Apple Menu. While a form of the Apple Menu remains in OS X, it mostly contains basic system functions and is not user customizable.

As a replacement, Mac users got the Dock. The problem with the Dock, however, is that its strength is also its weakness: it holds icons for frequently used programs (that may or may not be running), currently running programs, minimized windows of currently running apps, documents, and the Trash Can. As with the old Apple Menu, the user can add, delete or move these icons (except for the Trash Can). Anything you put in the Dock is easily accessible. But the more you put in the Dock, the more crowded it becomes and the harder it gets to find what you’re looking for.

I always thought that Apple should have kept a customizable Apple Menu as an option for power users who want quick access to a lot of apps, folders, file servers and documents without loading up the Dock to the point of impracticality. Such users need a customizable Apple Menu to keep items they may not use every day but still want readily available. The “Recent Items” submenu in the OS X Apple Menu tries to fulfill this need but its contents and the order in which the items appear change according to what you’ve used most recently. Useful, but it’s still not a menu I can control.

Luckily, third parties have long since solved this problem. Today’s Monday morning Macware features two variations: one I have used for years, FruitMenu, and another I discovered just recently, XMenu.

FruitMenu (Unsanity, $10 shareware) is by far the more powerful of the two. FruitMenu not only returns full OS 9 functionality, it improves upon the original by making just about everything customizable. Not only can you add and group items together as you see fit, you can even assign hotkeys to individual items for even faster access. You can put anything in FruitMenu: apps, folders, documents, even disks. You can even add your Mac’s IP address (geekspeak for network address) to the Apple menu.

That restores the old Apple menu functions, but FruitMenu takes menu customization much further. You can create customized Apple menus for individual applications. If you’re a fan of contextual menus – those mini-menus that pop up when you right click or hold down the control key as you click the mouse – you can customize those, too. Any apps that don’t have customized settings simply use the global settings.

FruitMenu has only one drawback, but it’s a significant one that precludes me from recommending it unequivocally. To work its magic, FruitMenu employs a “system hack.” That means it loads a piece of software into your system called the “application enhancer” which adds some code to the programs you launch and run on your Mac. Unsanity has expended a great deal of effort to ensure that the application enhancer works invisibly and does no harm. I can personally vouch for it, having run it for several years on multiple Macs without incident. Nevertheless it’s possible that some less experienced users could feel uncomfortable running a system hack on their beloved Mac.

That brings us to the second option, XMenu (DEVONtechnologies, freeware), which the squeamish will be relieved to learn requires no system hacks whatsoever. XMenu functions as a background application (it doesn’t show up in the Dock while it’s running) and simply adds new menus to the Mac’s menu bar. Because it’s an app, you have to launch XMenu each time you boot up your Mac -- unless you add it to your Login Items (accessed through the Accounts System Preferences panel) so it will launch automatically when you start up the computer.

XMenu, though far less sophisticated than FruitMenu, does achieve the goal of restoring an old-style Apple menu – with a twist. Instead of altering the OS X Apple menu, XMenu adds new ones on the far right side of the Menu bar. You can add up to five: Applications, Developer, Home, Documents and User-Defined. Each has its own icon. Only the User-Defined menu is customizable, though; the others draw their content from the system folders of the same name. Thus, the Documents menu lists everything in your Documents folder. Any changes you make to those folders are picked up automatically in the respective menus. The User-Defined Menu draws its content from a folder inside the Library folder of the user’s directory. This is more like the OS 9 customizable Apple menu, in which you can keep any apps, folders or documents.

Depending upon how you work, XMenu could serve your needs better than FruitMenu. It costs nothing and won’t monkey with any code. Not everyone wants or needs the level of customization that FruitMenu offers, although power users generally like maximum control. It’s a matter of taste.

Both XMenu and FruitMenu are excellent options for any Mac user yearning for the functionality, flexibility and convenience of the classic Mac OS Apple menu. You can try both risk-free (FruitMenu offers a 15-day free trial).

Posted by David Zeiler at 5:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

Last week, Microsoft announced that the release of Office 2008 for the Mac would be delayed from the fall of 2007 until mid-January 2008. Craig Eisler, general manager of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, attributed the delay to “quality issues.”

Whatever. In any case, the extra months until the software's release will give Mac users another excuse to look for alternatives. The world has changed a lot since 1997 when Bill Gates appeared on a giant screen behind Steve Jobs at the summertime Macworld Boston show to promise that Microsoft would continue to develop the Office suite of software for the Mac for at least five years. Back then, Apple was struggling and could ill-afford to lose Office, for which there were no practical alternatives.

Last week's collective yawn over the delay of Office 2008 shows just how much the situation has changed. Not only is Apple thriving, it no longer needs Microsoft software to remain viable. Mac users now have alternatives. In addition to being Intel-native, Microsoft's Office 2008 should offer Mac users the best compatibility with the Windows versions of Office, but it will be the most expensive option by far.

For instance, Apple can sell you iWork '06 for $79, though it includes just two programs, the Pages word processor and the Keynote presentation software. Both programs are compatible with files produced by their Office counterparts, Word and PowerPoint, but the suite lacks a spreadsheet (though it's remotely possible iWork '08 will add one).

But Mac users can do even better. One of the benefits of Mac OS X being Unix-based is that Unix operating systems have a long history of “open source” software development. Open-source software is usually written by a loosely organized group of programmers in their spare time and offered to the community for free. Anyone with the skills can fix bugs and enhance the software, though with the understanding that their improvements will become part of the public project.

In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought a German company called StarDivision, which made a software suite called StarOffice. Sun turned the software into an open source project known as OpenOffice.org and has since shepherded its development on multiple platforms, including Mac OS X. The problem with the current Mac version of OpenOffice, however, is that its Unix roots require an extra tool called X11. This drawback not only forces an extra step during installation (the X11 tool must be loaded from the Mac's included system DVD), but also means OpenOffice does not adhere to the Aqua interface that governs the look and feel of native Mac programs.

Enter NeoOffice, an open source side project based on OpenOffice.org code but focused entirely on creating a Mac OS X version. NeoOffice 2.1 runs natively on OS X – no X11 required -- while still offering all the compatibility benefits with Microsoft Office of the Sun Microsystems project. And because it's open source, NeoOffice is a free download. Unlike iWork or the Web-based Google Docs and Spreadsheets, NeoOffice actually gives you more modules than Office for the Mac: word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database and drawing.

As I have tested NeoOffice, I've found that it mostly gets the job done, but is not as fast nor as smooth as the programs that comprise Office for the Mac. While using the word processor module to compose this blog entry, for example, I'm having no trouble. But when I opened up an old, heavily formatted resume originally saved as a Word file, all did not go well. To NeoOffice's credit, the file opened with most of the formatting intact. The trouble started when I tried to manipulate the paragraph and character style sheets; I had problems getting them to work, particularly in regard to my fonts. Maybe it had something to do with my huge collection of nonstandard fonts, but that's what's on my system.

I haven't spent enough time with the software to offer a full review (although I found a very thorough one here), but my first impression is that NeoOffice could well serve the basic needs of many Mac users. If you don't need all the frills of Microsoft Office but need the ability to open and save Office-formatted files, NeoOffice could fit the bill.

My greatest need at home is for a word processor (no surprise there), with occasional dabbling in spreadsheets and rarely in presentations. (I did adopt Entourage for my e-mail long ago, but if I hadn't I probably would be using Apple's free Mail program.) Apart from Word I tend to use the other Office modules mostly for opening files sent to me by others, and NeoOffice has proven very good at opening Word, PowerPoint and Excel files.

My advice to Mac users contemplating the purchase of Office 2008 for the Mac is to download NeoOffice – remember, it's free -- and give it a trial run. Even if you decide on iWork for word processing and presentations, you could still keep NeoOffice around to deal with spreadsheets and databases. That option would still save you money. Microsoft hasn't announced pricing for Office 2008, but the least expensive version of Office 2004 costs $149 – and only if you qualify for an educational discount. The upgrade version is $239 and the full version a wallet-straining $399.

NeoOffice isn't perfect, but the open source developers regularly release patches and continue to fine-tune the code. It will only get better with time, so if you don't think it's quite good enough to meet your needs now, check it out again a year from now. This much is for sure -- you'll never find an office productivity suite for a better price.

Posted by David Zeiler at 6:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

How many songs do you have in your iTunes library? 1,000? 2,000? 5,000 or more? If you’re one of those people that never has enough music in his or her collection, then today’s software pick, The Filter, is for you. The Filter is a utility that works with iTunes and, ideally, a broadband Internet connection to add a few new wrinkles to music listening on your Mac.

Created by the U.K.-based company called Exabre Limited with backing from such notables as Peter Gabriel, The Filter is a free download for both Windows and Mac (which is Universal Binary, good for both PowerPC and Intel Macs).

It does several cool things with your music collection:

Automatically generated playlists: If you select several songs from your collection (Tip: hold down the Apple key while you click on songs with your mouse), The Filter will generate a playlist of similar songs (a jog wheel at the bottom of the window lets you control the number of songs selected). You can tell The Filter to base the playlist on the songs, the artists or the genre. The new playlist appears under your Playlist header in iTunes like any other, and will transfer to your iPod the next time you sync it with your Mac. You can have endless fun selecting odd combinations of songs just to see what the software comes up with. Picking three alt rock songs from the 80s generates a list with other alt rock songs from the 80s. Mixing up musical genres generally results in schizophrenic playlists, but the bizarre juxtapositions can put a fresh perspective on old songs. It’s a bit like the iPod’s Shuffle function, but with more control. You can use The Filter's window at the bottom of your screen to control the currently selected playlist, pausing, playing or skipping songs without going back into iTunes. The Filter even uses iTunes’ album cover art.

Discovering new music: Clicking on "Discover Music" in the sidebar of The Filter’s window brings up a list of recommendations of other music you might like. Double-clicking on one of the songs in the list directs you to the iTunes Store page where you can preview and buy it, if you like. Better yet, if you repeat the process you’ll get a slightly different list of recommendations. This feature could be dangerous to your wallet.

Artist info: My favorite feature is the Artist and Album Information option, also selected from the sidebar in The Filter's window. In addition to showing the basic stuff -- the name of the song, artist and album along with its cover art -- this feature uses your Internet connection to fetch a series of info tidbits about that artist and album from The Filter Web site. It reminds me of that old VH-1 show, Pop-Up Video, except the sort of nuggets The Filter displays are more in-depth. It reads like a hip encyclopedia seasoned with a smidgen of trivia. If you have a lot of artists in your collection, expect to waste countless hours on this, particularly since it provides distinct data for each album, rather than just a generic set of entries for each artist.

The Web connection: If you go to The Filter Web site and create an account, the software on your Mac connects with the Web site and delivers a heavier dose of the same features, plus a few new ones. When you go to the My Filter page, you’ll see an assortment of elements relating to the artist you’re listening to. To the left is a list of recommended artists, with links to both the iTunes Store and Amazon. In the center is information and photos, including a bio of the artist and an album review. Below that is a window showing more albums by that artist. Clicking on an album changes the album review information in the section above. To the left is a “Wishlist” where you can store lists of music you plan to buy, and a Playlist widget, which can store Playlists that The Filter creates (a button on the control strip widget transmits Playlists to the Web site). Below that is a list of the top five You Tube videos (rated by popularity) featuring the selected artist. Awesome!

Caveats: All that said, The Filter has a few drawbacks. The worst for me is that it’s a CPU hog, slowing down my entire system. This could partly be due to the advanced age of my 867 MHz G4 tower, but still. I also encountered some quirky behavior; for instance, it periodically failed to bring up an iTunes Store page. Trying again sometimes rectified the issue, but on a few occasions I had to restart the program to get that feature to work again. To be fair, The Filter is a free and in many ways experimental piece of software, so perfection cannot be expected. It is definitely worth checking out.

UPDATE: Just my luck... they updated this software this morning, so the interface is a bit different. I've revised a few sentences in my review to reflect the changes and updated the screen shot as well.

UPDATE 2: Eoin Norris, a member of Exabre's Mac team, e-mailed me today to thank me for the review and noted that some of my problems coulkd have been related to my old graphics card: "

We have added some cool and snazzy features ( unfortunately I didn't notice that the Now Playing Core Image image manipulations did not work on lower level cards until just before release : we will fix that this week).... Also you can switch between the new version and the older (smaller) player by clicking the green maximise button."

Posted by David Zeiler at 5:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)