Now available is the eleventh iLounge podcast, and the first Week in Review to come from an Apple Expo, co-hosted by iLounge’s Bob Levens and Jeremy Horwitz. Live from Paris, France this week’s podcast includes the new Altec Lansing inMotion iM5 as well as the new iM616 and iM716 headphones. The…

Belkin today announced three new leather cases for the iPod nano. The cases, which will be available next month, are all priced at $24.99 and come in black, white, pink and light blue. “Designed to reinforce the nano’s minimalist industrial design approach, Belkin’s cases fully manage various aspects of user functionality…

With Apple Expo Paris almost at an end, we came back to the exhibition hall at Porte de Versailles this morning to take quick looks at a handful of products that were late to arrive for the show, or that we’d missed on our first two passes through. There are a…

Market research firm iSuppli has disassembled a 2GB iPod nano and estimates the $199 device’s components to cost Apple $90.18 to build and $8 to assemble, leaving a profit margin of about 50% before marketing and distribution costs. “That’s consistent with the margins on earlier iPod versions and serves as a…

Noreve has announced its Tradition leather case for the iPod nano. The case features a flip-top design with snap closure, a removable belt clip, and is available in four colors—black, white, pink and light blue. It provides access to the screen, click wheel, hold switch, headphone jack and dock connector port.…

The Guardian has posted an article based on an exclusive interview with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Referring to upcoming products, Jobs says that “a lot of new things in the pipeline.” Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman has spoken out on iTunes song pricing: “There’s no content in the world that…

Filed under: Tips and tricks

Photoshop guru Ben Willmore uses this OS X technique to quickly access files on his Mac while he's teaching his popular Photoshop seminars. It's caught the attention of his students, even though they're supposed to be focusing on Photoshop rather than OS X. If it can distract people from learning Photoshop from Ben, I figure it's worth passing on:

Drag a copy of the hard drive icon from your Mac OS X desktop to the right of the vertical line on the right side of your Dock. (If your Dock is vertical drag the hard drive icon beneath the horizontal line near the bottom of the Dock.) Press and hold the hard drive icon on the Dock to reveal pop-up menus of your file structure. Now you can use the pop-up menus to quickly navigate your hard drive and access your files.
 

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Filed under: How-tos, Hardware, Internet Tools, Software

Brian Alvey, co-founder of Weblogs Inc., (y'know, our bosses) has submitted a great question for this week's Ask TUAW post: What's the best way to control a Mac from a PC? Brian says he's tried Timbuktu but he isn't so hip on the $199 price. He's also tried VNC but says that no matter what VNC client he's using on the PC side, the session keeps dying on him, even though he's set his eMac to stay awake and he's running Tiger with all the latest patches.

So it's time to ask you, TUAW readers: what are your thoughts? How else could Brian take control of his Mac from a Windows PC? Remember: "just use the Mac" doesn't cut it  as an answer.

Also, don't forget that Ask TUAW is fueled by reader-submitted questions, so if you have a burning question or topic, please submit it to our Tips form using "Ask TUAW" as the subject. We'll sort through everything and post one question each Friday.
 

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Griffin Technology announced today that its iFM is now shipping. The small aluminum device integrates an FM radio tuner, voice and radio recorder, and remote control functions. The iFM functions as a remote for 3G/4G iPods and iPod minis and features a digital FM radio with a band-switch function to switch…

Apple is offering refurbished PowerBooks (scurrent-generation) at the Apple Store as well as refurb ...

Filed under: Accessories, Audio, iPod Family

Griffin Technology is now shipping the iFM, a triple-function radio, recorder, and remote for iPods. This gadget, which was first announced several months ago, sounds like it was worth waiting for. It's not only an FM radio tuner for iPods, with station scan capability and six station presets on each of three FM bands (U.S., European, and Japanese). It's also an audio recorder with a built-in microphone for recording voice or FM radio to your iPod. But wait--there's more. The iFM is also a remote for controlling your iPod. Use it to play, pause, or move through your playlist. The tiny iFM runs off the iPod's batteries. List price is $49.99.

Unfortunately, there's no iFM for the iPod nano yet, although MacMinute reports the nano version is scheduled for November. The radio and remote functions work with 3G, 4G, photo, and iPod mini models, but there's no recording function for the iPod mini, according to Griffin.  iDog and Playlist have published first looks at the iFM, both with photos. Now if we could just get our hands on one.
 

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Camino, Again

After a couple of hours of general surfing, I decided to set Camino as my default browser for a few days. It's been a while since I ran it as default (way back in the heady days before Safari reared its brushed metal head, when it was called Chimera), and the reason for doing so is absurdly prosaic: I wanted something ligher than Firefox to render some XML output I'm working with (I'm working with GPS data and generating both GPX and KML snippets, and even when it's not valid XML, the syntax highlighting in source view is very useful).

Safari doesn't do any of that, and I had dropped the latest dmg file in my iBook to test before coming on vacation, so... Out came Camino.

Besides the lack of Cocoa spell-checking (which is understandable), the one other thing I noticed was that Flash seems to take up a lot of CPU (it might be just a transitive thing, since there appears to be no logical explanation as to why the plugin would behave differently). Maybe it's due to be running on my aging iBook, or some such peculiarity.

So far I'm a happy camper, and heartily recommend it if you don't need all the extra Firefox stuff (although I see myself firing it up soon to use some of the extensions when I start wrapping a GUI around what I'm doing...).

Digital Foci today introduced Picture Porter portable digital photo album with hard drive and card reader that lets users instantly and securely save and view digital photos and video on a hard drive wherever they go...

Digital Foci today introduced Picture Porter, its portable digital photo album with hard drive and c...

Promethean today announced its ACTIVote VR Assessment software for Mac OS X, a new software componen...

In brief: Steve Jobs is officially the 67'th richest American, according to the Forbes 400 list.... ...

Everybody loves iTunes plug-ins. After the reader response to the plug-in listed yesterday, we did some digging and found an iTunes visualization plug-in we were unaware of from Forrest Briggs,...

Ideographer has released KaraTunes v2.5, a highly iTunes-integrated Mac OS X application that puts all your song lyrics in a single database, making easy viewing, searching, and modification a snap. ...

Palm Desktop 4.2.1 Rev D (free) updates the PIM software that manages date books, to-do lists, addre...

Josh Aas (Firefox developer):

Secondly, Macworld put Firefox 1.0.6 ahead of Safari, which is almost as ridiculous as putting Camino behind Opera. See, I’m not biased towards Mozilla browsers! Safari 2.0 is simply a better browser than Firefox 1.0.6. Its [sic] not even close. The story is a little different with Firefox 1.5b1, but that isn’t what they are reviewing.

I agree that the Macworld rankings are odd. I think I would order them Safari, OmniWeb, Camino, Firefox, Opera. I couldn’t care less about Firefox themes or extensions, and I deduct huge numbers of points from it and Opera because they don’t look or feel like Mac apps.

Wil Shipley’s heart is in the right place. It’s obvious that he cares about quality, and his experience and common sense rightly make him skeptical of process. But I think he’s absolutely wrong about unit testing. In brief, I think he misunderstands what unit testing is (or should be) and what it’s useful for. He shoots down a stupid way of doing testing, throws the baby out with the bathwater, and concludes that it’s better to write good code in the first place, do manual testing (“Try odd things. Whack keys.”), and rely on beta testers.

I don’t deny that this approach has worked for him. He’s written a lot of code, people have generally been happy with the products, and they’re not known for being buggy. But my hunch is that Wil’s teams have gotten good results because they’re unusually smart, experienced, and hard-working. They’ve succeeded in spite of their testing philosophy. Wil makes a great case that manual testing and defensive programming are necessary, but I think most programmers would be more effective and efficient if they combined these with extensive automated unit testing.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that by-the-book XP/TDD goes overboard. If you need a new class or method, I think it’s a waste of time to write a test that simply checks for the existence of the class or method, then write a stub, then run the tests, and then then flip back and write the real tests. Perhaps that example is just for pedagogical purposes and one isn’t meant to do that in production code.

I also think it’s a waste of time to write tests for everything. Some parts of the code are so simple that they don’t need tests, though this applies less often than you might think. Other times, it would take so much work to write a proper test that it’s better to punt and check that item manually. (I’m thinking of user interface details that you’d immediately notice when running the application, as well as more elaborate situations/interactions. In the latter case, write the test down in English and make sure that you really do it manually before shipping.) Again, though, this applies less often than you might think.

My overall point is that time is limited, so you should use it wisely. And this is why extensive unit testing is a big win. Yes, it’s not possible for your tests to cover all the pathways through the code, with all the possible inputs. And even if they could, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to spend your time writing tests to do that. This does not mean, however, that you should reject unit testing as impractical and try to test everything manually. That’s not a good use of time, either. In brief, proper unit testing saves time and improves quality because:

• Most of your testing can be automated with little “extra” work, and the computer is both faster and more reliable than you at executing the tests. You’ll spend (maybe) a little more time writing code, but much less time clicking around in your application and using the debugger.
• If you think it’s hard to get good coverage writing unit tests, imagine how much harder it would be if you’re just doing manual integrated system tests.
• Tests help you catch bugs earlier and isolate them more easily, so it’s less expensive to fix them.
• Tests make great documentation for other programmers (or yourself next month).
• In general, code that’s easier to test is better designed. If it’s really hard to get your code into a test, there’s probably something wrong with it. Writing tests helps you get the design right, and that saves you time.
• When (not if) your software has to evolve and change, having tests will help guard against regressions. You don’t want to waste time tracking down bugs that you introduced, nor do you want to let your code ossify because you’re afraid to risk breaking anything.

A lot of people seem to think that automated testing is only for frameworks, or for tools without graphical user interfaces and interaction, or for academics, or for software that’s directly responsible for people’s lives. Not true. I think unit tests are useful in writing Mac applications, and even for testing large chunks of the user interface (i.e. checking that a table is showing the right rows in the right order, that clicking a button has the right effect, that a certain sequence of actions causes a view to refresh in the right way, etc.).

That said, your tests will not cover everything, or even close to everything. GUI software has many sources of input—all the different user interface items, in addition to the disk, the network, etc. It also has complex interactions with huge chunks of operating system and library code that you didn’t write and don’t have access to.

So, yes, you shouldn’t believe that because you have unit tests you don’t have to do manual integration tests. I doubt anyone is in danger of thinking that. Wil says:

Testing is hugely important. Much too important to trust to machines. Test your program with actual users who have actual data, and you’ll get actual results.

And I doubt anyone would disagree with that. However, testing is also too important to trust to humans. This is one reason that you need automated unit tests. The other is that it’s not all about how many bugs users will find in the binary that you ship. It also matters how long it took you to create that binary, and how easily you’ll be able to develop the next version. People who like automated testing find that it helps them write better code more quickly. I believe it’s at least as beneficial for small teams.

Don’t miss the comments from Chris Hanson, Marcel Weiher, and others.

News.com: Microsoft's nightmare inches closer to reality.

New in your Software Update this morning: Apple's latest security update features fixes for internal system bits, as well as Mail, Safari and Ruby.

Filed under: Internet Tools, Software

According to Download Squad, the Google Toolbar for Firefox is out of beta. This version sports a few new features, including "Google Suggest," which offers suggestions in the toolbar's search box, as well as the ability to customize the toolbar's layout.

I had the beta installed for a while, but nixed it as I found I just wasn't using it. The Toolbar requires Firefox 1.0* or better and Mac OS 10.2 or better.

*Note: I was unable to get the toolbar to install with Firefox 1.5 Beta 1, but it worked like a charm with 1.0.7.
 

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Belkin today announced a variety of new cases for the iPod nano...

Aspyr today announced the final minimum system requirements for RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 for Macintosh...

Forums roundup: Users discuss the the possibility of a Mac mini update in the near future.... Discus...

Sonnet today announced Sidekick, a double-jointed USB 2.0 adapter that "bends over backwards and sid...

Look at this google search: http://www.google.com/search?q=the+sand+trap+.com. Where is http://thesandtrap.com/ in the search results?

The Sand Trap .com is the exact name of a site that resides at http://thesandtrap.com/. You know, "the sand trap .com" - the same URL as the words broken apart.

Oh well. I guess Google isn't always as smart as you'd think it should be.

Creating Passionate Users: Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide

A bunch of great tips for fomenting a bottom-up, user-centric revolution in your bigass company.

Here’s my little unofficial guide to creating passionate users for those working in Big Companies. Most is from things a maverick (but cleverly disguised as compliant) group of us did at Sun, while we could. Only one of our original disruption team remains a badged Sun employee, but our legacy persists today in areas that won’t make us famous, but do make a substantial difference in the experience that users get within the sphere we influenced.

One tip particularly caught my eye:

Never underestimate the power of paper

Print out little signs that say things like, “How does this help the user kick ass?” and leave them lying on the copier, or the fax machine, or taped on a bulletin board and your cube/office wall. Keep changing them! (Remember, once your brain expects to see it, it stops being effective.)

Nice one. And it’s true—you go totally blind to notes when they don’t change. Lots of great advice throughout the post.

Brett writes "Tommi Kyyrä, of IFPI Finland has said that being able to play music on a Linux or Apple computer is a privilege not a right, and that those that can't because of DRM'd CDs should just go out and buy a CD player. Is switching the debate to rights and privileges really where they want to go when we're talking about something we pay for?" From the article: "If the public and 'their' politicians believe that the entertainment industry is on the verge of collapse, they'll be much more likely to accept restrictions on use of content that they've paid for. For this reason, most industry talking heads keep their comments in check when talking about DRM schemes, but from time to time we've seen people truly speak their mind."

Several iPod nano owners are reporting inexplicable screen failures within the first few days of own...

Paradigma Software today released Valentina 2 for Revolution ADK and the Valentina Developer Network...

Apple has updated its Hot Deals site with the latest offerings from MacConnection and J&R...

Though it’s not what we’d expected, the first third-party iPod nano-specific accessory has arrived - and it’s something everybody needs. Japan’s Power Support - long a favorite of iLounge because of its superb iPod mini case Square Type (iLounge rating: A) and iPod control protector 3D Wheel Film (iLounge rating: A-)…

9/23/03: "Only a tiny number of aggregators understand enclosures because there's never been a great source of enclosures like this one."

I don't know if I'd call this funny.

Did the guy's head hit the rear of the truck? Near that latch? Sure looks like blood. If so, definitely not funny.

With the licensing agreements between Apple and the record labels set to expire next spring, the lab...

Filed under: Hacks, How-tos, Tips and tricks

Today, I came across this article at AppleTalk Australia which describes just how to get KDE up and running on Mac OS X. To get the job done, you'll need Fink, x86 (you'll have to replace X11 if you've got it installed) and, as the article points out, "...plenty of time and coffee." After downloading and configuring the necessary files, you'll have a free (as in speech) file manager on your Mac.

This trick requires a Mac running 10.3 or later and the latest Apple Developer Tools. Be forewarned, however. The author recommends a dual processor Mac running 10.4, as compiling KDE and x86 from source took the better part of 8 hours. So make sure you've got the day free. With that said, have fun! Let us know how it goes if you try this out.

[Via /.]
 

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Jonathan Rentzsch:

I may have to face the fact that my days of living off a PowerBook are over, perhaps for good. If so, I’ll probably go with big-honkin’ desktop machines and one small cheapie iBook for presentations and conferences. I fear the Macintel in the mail is the first step down that slippery slope.

Michael McCracken:

Do we really want to doom users of desktop apps to a lot of web-style scrubbing around with the mouse to discover features?…Have we just been conditioned to click and double-click around everywhere in case we can edit the text? It seems to me that kind of behavior only makes sense inside a text editing view, not just anywhere in a window.

Hopefully, Michael’s questions are rhetorical, but in case they’re not: Apple, this design sucks. Editable fields should look editable.

Over the course of the past week, MacDesktops has posted 14 new desktop pictures, including: Born to be worn (Apple - iPod), Port of Olympia at Sunset (Landscapes - Water), and Spooon (Animation)...

Xgaming today introduced the X-Arcade Trackball, an industrial-grade consumer gaming mouse tailored ...

In this week’s look at the iLounge Discussion Forums: iLounge member mcdj continues to impress fellow iLoungers with his conceptual art for iPod nano cases. So far he has presented The nanoPipes, The nanotes, The Nanoroll, The nanoPipe - Drivers Edition and The nanoHatch. Keep your eyes peeled for his next…

Cingular says it's hoping to work with Apple to create a music service that will allow users to down...

Ant writes "BusinessWeek Online reports that researcher iSuppli took a look inside the iPod Nano to find out how much Apple is making off it, and who supplies its parts. From the article: 'Apple has sold some 16 million iPods in the first nine months of fiscal 2005, and 21 million since its inception. Thus far in fiscal 2005, the iPod has brought in $2.6 billion in revenue, accounting for about 25% of Apple's total.'"

CNN: "A bus carrying elderly Hurricane Rita evacuees caught fire and exploded early today on a crowded Texas interstate, killing as many as 20 people."

Coldwell Banker came out with their 2005 Home Price Comparison Index. Erie has the most affordable homes in Pennsylvania. For example, a house in center city Philadelphia would costs 2.96 times more than a comparable house in Erie. The cost of an average home in the Erie area is about $107,000. There are currently 607 houses in Erie County for sale listed at under $110,000.

BBC: Radio has its eye on podcasters.

Griffin Technology today announced it has begun shipping its iFM device, its radio, remote, and reco...

Alias today began shipping Maya 7 Personal Learning Edition (PLE) and MotionBuilder 7 PLE, special v...

Danny Sullivan is unnecessarily personal in his criticism and David Berlind, who he ridicules, is actually right, which makes Sullivan's condescension even more unfair. Google doesn't include blogs in Google News, or at least that's what they claim. However, a lot of the supposed non-blogs they include are in every way blogs. ";->"

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Internet Tools

While playing around with the shiny new Groups feature of the recently upgraded .Mac service I stumbled on some interesting tidbits in the FAQ's I thought y'all might be interested in.

First: anyone who wants to join a .Mac Group has to have a .Mac ID - including Windows XP and Linux users. I don't know about you, but this seems like a bit of a stretch to force non-.Mac members to sign up for a trial membership and be subjected to all the trial propaganda emails just to take part in a Group. Sure, the user can still use the .Mac ID to access the group after the trial expires, but it still seems like some out-of-place marketing to me.

Second: Group iDisk space is etched in stone at 100 MB. You can't allocate more or less from your iDisk, and at this time there's no way to even buy more storage for your group if you wanted to. Seems a little shortsighted to me.

Now don't get me wrong. If you checked out our most recent podcast you'd know I'm a .Mac lover, and I've already set up a couple groups for personal and academic use, but I'm curious: What does everyone think about this new Groups feature of .Mac? 

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CS Odessa today announced the release of ConceptDraw MINDMAP 4, the latest version of its "mind-mapping" application...

Front panel scratches 'insanely easily'

Griffin Technology today announced that its iFM for iPod is now shipping...

the Scarlet Letters: Notes on Making Art

This is a terrific bunch of notes on hacking your creative process, especially as it applies to visual art.

I really love the idea of not getting hung up on your failures and trying always to make rather than judge as the process is underway. It reminds me favorably of what Anne Lamott says about fearlessly producing your “shitty first draft.”

A few of the points I especially enjoyed:

• Do NOT mix generating and editing. When you’re making a piece, don’t stop and get judgmental half-way through. If it’s a piece of crap, get that piece of crap out of your system — don’t try to fix it mid-flow. Finish it, move on.
• Don’t be afraid to re-use elements. If each piece has to be unique, then you’re going to get hung-up when you create some bit that you like. But if you can re-use bits, then you can keep moving.
• “Get through your first 50 failures as fast as you can.” I don’t think that we should be shooting for a place where we no longer make crappy art. A good artist is one who’s in motion making lots of art — you only think they’re so much better because they produce so much quantity that their pile of “good art” has also been able to accumulate. For every piece of crap you create, you’re one step closer to getting something you really like.
• Let your level show. Let the world know that despite having years of investment in your art form, you’re still a beginner who doesn’t know it all. Rather than hide your thought process, let your questions be present in your work. You are a fundamentally more interesting artist if people get to see what it is that you’re struggling with, rather than just your final answers. Show your work. Talk about what you still can’t understand (unapologetically).

[Thanks for the link, Carl Caputo]

Related books

• Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott

Tekkeon has introduced the myTune FM, a new in-car FM transmitter and charger that mounts to an automobile’s air vent. The all-in-one device features an iPod cradle that transmits music to your car stereo on one of seven pre-set frequencies (87.7-88.9) and charges your iPod through your car’s cigarette lighter outlet.…

CS Odessa has released ConceptDraw MINDMAP 4, a mind-mapping program for Mac OS X. New features incl...

Filed under: Software

Earlier today I came across Doctopus, an interesting little utility that allows you to put informative "badges" over your dock icons. These badges look much like the message indicator that pops up in Apple's Mail. For instance, you can monitor the amount of free size available on a hard drive by glancing at a pie chart on that drive's dock icon, or quicky peek at iCal events just by mousing over the iCal badge.

There's a universal "launcher" badge that you can assign to an Applescript, QuicKeys shortcut or Automator workflow. I've been playing with it for about half an hour, and it is pretty useful. The badges move in kind of an odd manner (it's hard to explain). They seem to "hover" above the dock icons, and they don't feel like they're actually attached. A minor complaint for sure, but if you've got magnification activated for your dock, it's a bit odd to see the tiny badges move just an instant after the icons move.

Still, it's worth checking out. There's a free 30 day demo available, and a full license will run you $19.95US. Doctopus requires Mac OS X 10.4 or newer and a 500 MHz CPU (1.0 GHz if Dock magnification is enabled).

[Via Spymac]
 

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