Onyx and Cocktail are two well known and used applications to help Mac users clean out their system of log files, temp files, rebuild their spotlight indexes, run scheduled Mac scripts on demand, and so much more.

A new kid on the block is MainMenu by Santa Software, and it is really nice. It has a clean and simple interface yet manages to perform everything that I'm looking for in an application like this. This isn't something that I run every day, or even every week. I probably run this sort of utility every few months, but I like the fact that it is at my disposal and can make easy work of these duties. In fact it has got me to uninstall Onyx and run MainMenu instead.

For those of you who can't get enough iPhone news, I've had my fill. But I do think these two tidbits are worthy.

1) There have long been rumors that the Edge Network was going to be improved for the iPhone, now there is a little more to that end. Mac Rumors has a story on it here, and how the speeds just may be much improved in time for the iPhone introduction later today.

2) There are some really nice high resolution screenshots of the iPhone interface just posted over at ThinkSecret - check them out here.

Perian is a great utility which adds codec's to QuickTime's arsenal, allowing you to play more file types with QuickTime. A fan of Perian has created a simple applescript that will get your Mac to show a nice QuickTime icon instead of a blank icon for the following file types: FLV, AC3, MKV, MKA, and VOB.

Well done!

You can snag the applescript here to fix your icons.

Here is a little humor to break all of the iPhone tension. A funny Music Video Rap parody of I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC commercials.

1) I installed the VMware Fusion 4.1 beta today. I've never used Parallels or VMware previously. I did try Q which is a freeware alternative, but they don't have virtualization working on it yet so it's much slower, probably more like VirtualPC was.

VMWare installed very easily, and installing Windows 2000 Pro on it went smooth as silk. I installed a Virus program and a few utilities, all seemed to go well. Although after I adjusted it to use more of my system memory, it seems to really slow down my entire system - yeah I know that may happen, but here's the odd thing. After I closed out of VMware my system was still really sluggish. I didn't have time to go back and retest, it could have been NeoOffice or something else that was the culprit. As I get more time to play with it, I'll post my experiences.

2) It has been a very long time since the last update, so the new Plaxo for Mac which came out today was a much welcomed update. Plaxo is fantastic. Consider it one more reason why you don't need to pay the .Mac tax.

3) I may have to shoot somebody if the iPhone fever doesn't end. The iPhone is either going to be the most successful new [electronic] product ever released, or the biggest letdown in history. I certainly hope it is a huge success, however it goes, we'll know soon enough.

Many people are familiar with iStat Pro, a widget with system information galore from iSlayer.

Their new utility is not a widget, but instead it runs on your Menu bar, iStat Menus. A similar utility has been out for a long time, MenuMeters. I have been a user of MenuMeters since coming back to the Mac. Like iStat Menus, it also runs in the Menu bar, and it is able to display system information that you may like to be able to easily monitor. Things like network upload and download rates, hard drive activity, cpu load, memory usage, etc. As I looked at iStat Menus today, I bring with me a familiarity and fondness for MenuMeters, I think that this gives me a good background instead of never having used this type of program previously.

Here are my initial impressions of iStat Menu:

It is an elegant implementation, the Preferences are simply gorgeous.

It also looks great on your Menu bar.

You have a high degree of customizability with regards to what you choose to show on your Menu bar. I have mine setup to show the Hard Drive icon, and there are arrows for drive activity, an UP arrow on the drive indicates a read, and a down arrow a write. Next is my CPU temp, the Date and Time information, network transfer rates, and CPU usage. There are many other items you can choose to show as well.

I like the date and time section so much that I turned off the Tiger Data & Time section that I had previously been showing on my Menu bar, iStat Menus shows the same information more concisely, and you can also click on the Calendar icon / Time and you will get a quick drop down calendar.

While I really like the look of the calendar above, the fact that it matches the look of the Menu bar, I'm not so crazy about the look of the other drop down information panels. They look great in their own right, but they contrast with the Menu bar, and the Unified look coming to Leopard.

There are really only two things right now that I kind of miss from MenuMeters, one is that MenuMeters CPU usage showed System and User usage on the graphs while iStat Menus only shows total in the graph, though it does show the breakdown in the drop down panel. The other item is that I liked being able to configure red and green lights to represent drive read/write activity. The arrows on the drive icon represent the same thing, I just prefer the larger color icons from Menu Meters. I'm sure I'll get used to the arrows though. Yes, that's correct, I've switched over to iStat Menus, and I'm not using MenuMeters any longer. This is a really nice utility and I'm already enjoying it quite a bit!

By the way, I just got a note from the developer and they are considering having a different look for the drop down panels in the future, I would guess with a color scheme that more represents the Calendar drop down. Great news.

iStat Menus is freeware, but remember that donations for all this hard work is greatly appreciated. I'm donating $5 right now - this is really nice and I'll use it every day. Maybe more would be fair? At least it's something.

I talked about RAID NAS options the other day, and I couldn't help myself, not leaving well enough alone I kept researching and thinking about my home data needs and different options and solutions. What was niggling me about the RAID NAS solution was this - if your RAID box has a failure then you are f*cked! Seriously, even though a RAID box has some level of protection against one of the drives failing, if the NAS box itself suffers a dire fate, you're hosed. And believe me when I say that I truly feel so sorry for those who have suffered a RAID failure and permanently lost important data.

I read an article talking about why RAID's aren't a good option for SOHO environments, and it confirmed the doubt that I was having about that solution. So instead of going with a RAID solution, I'm going a different route because if I lost my digital pictures, digital music, personal documents, and other digital treasures - I would be up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

With a RAID, I was planning to use it sort of like our work network storage - it would have been my main repository for stuff. Now I'm thinking a different strategy. Use my computers main internal harddrive as their main places for data, and then automate backups from these computers to a Network Drive. The main differences being 1) The primary copy of data resides on the computers hard drive not the RAID box, and 2) you have a complete and full duplicate copy of your data. With a RAID solution as a Network drive you only have 1 copy of your data.

Fortunately I found a great deal on a 1TB Gigabit Ethernet drive solution from LaCie for a very respectable $285 delivered from Buy.com Seriously, you can't buy two 500GB drives and a case with USB2 and Gigabit Ethernet for the price of this Big Ethernet drive from LaCie. By the way, because this drive has both a USB2 and a gigabit ethernet interface you have some options. You can connect this drive to your router and have an instant network drive. You can also connect it to your Apple Airport Extreme USB2 port and have an instant network drive that way. Or of course you can connect it directly to your computer via a USB2 connection. I'll be connecting mine directly to my gigabit ethernet switch on my LAN so that I get fast speeds to my wired computers.

If I decide that I really would rather use a network storage device as my primary repository for data on my LAN, then I can always buy a second LaCie Big Ethernet 1TB drive and clone my primary drive on the secondary drive.

I feel very good about this new solution, it offers me a high amount of data safety at a very reasonable cost.

I'm a user and big fan of the guys over at PotionFactory. Andy Kim from PF has written his thoughts after watching the 20 minute long iPhone demo. I couldn't say it better, so I'm going to instead just show you what he said. Head over to PotionFactory to check out VoiceMail and their other goodies like Tangerine.

June 22, 2007 - 3:41pm by Andy Kim
I haven't had any real interest in getting an iPhone, but after watching the iPhone Guided Tour, I am pretty much sold. The amount of polish that went into this thing is just amazing. The animation effects are done in good taste and result in a certain fluidity that is mesmerizing (am I too much of a UI geek?). I did worry a little that Core Animation will make a lot of developers put in unnecessary and cheesy animation effects into their apps, but now I can at least hope that they will follow the example set by iPhone; I know I will be. I mean, I can almost forgive Apple for not having the secret feature in Leopard now.
My self-imposed rule about not buying first generation hardware (Apple or otherwise, even cars) will have to be broken this time.
As a developer and user interface designer—after having watched the video 2 times—what impressed me the most were the new gestures revealed to us for the first time:
Flick right to delete
Instead of having to get into the edit mode just to delete an email, you can flick to the right with your finger on a row to reveal the delete button for the row. It's not something that's immediately obvious or discoverable, but it is ingenious nonetheless and analogous to dragging icons off the dock. It turns a 3 tap process into a "flick and tap". Yes, saving a tap is very important. I can see this being or becoming the standard delete gesture in the iPhone.
Tap with two fingers to zoom out
I only saw this in the Google Maps section, but I hope that it's used everywhere. It's better than the double tap for two reasons: 1) there is no confusion about zooming-in or zomming-out: The two finger tap will always zoom-out and 2) you save a tap. I'm wondering if there is a three finger tap that will zoom out two levels at once.
Now, the thing that I care about the most is whether I can accept these gestures in my own web application. The flick gesture might be possible with some pain, but I doubt that the two finger tap will be.
Apple, if you are reading, give us the SDK!

I'm not going to read you the riot act, downloading illegal software is not the right thing to do.

But out of interest to all the Mac fans out there, you may find it interesting that the WWDC released version of Mac OS X has hit your local bittorrent network.

I wonder if Apple put unique identifiers embedded into each of the copies of Leopard that was handed out at WWDC. If so, somebody is going to get in big trouble for their copy showing on up bittorrent.

It just seems that "never enough" applies to hard drives. I clearly remember back around 1990 when 20MB (yes Megabyte, not Gigabyte) drives were the most common at that time, I spent a lot of month getting an 80MB drive in hopes that I would never outgrow it's capacity. Yeah right.

My iMac has an internal 250GB, I've got (2) 320GB External FireWire 400 drives connected to it. My Media Center Edition 2005 (Windows) computer which currently powers my AV system has (1) 160GB drive and (2) 500GB drives. I won't count either my wife's or my work notebooks into the mix. That's a grand total of just over 2TB of raw drive storage (less actual space after formatting, that and the fact that hard drive manufacturers use 1000 base calculations when they should be using 1024 - a binary versus decimal argument but at the end of the day a drive rating in GB from the manufacturer is overly optimistic because it's using 1000 instead of 1024 in determining the capacity.)

I've been pondering a NAS unit for some time and gave it a lot of thought today. If I go the NAS route the Infrant (NetGear) ReadyNAS NV+ looks like the top choice. The box without drives is about $650. The option that I may opt for instead is to build an inexpensive Windows XP box (or migrate my MCE box when I move to a new AV media serving platform) and run a RAID 5 array in a PC based NAS box. One big advantage in my opinion is that client computers don't have to load any drivers to access the NAS like you have to with NAS specific boxes like the ReadyNAS.

There are plusses and minuses with any solution. Some will argue that a large external drive is a great solution, but I shutter to think if the drive failed. I'm not comfortable with a LAN network storage solution that isn't a RAID solution.

The Drobo is a cool solution, and it can plug into an Airport Extreme. However the ReadyNAS is significantly faster than the Drobo, and only $100 more money, and it has far better connectivity options. It depends on how you intend to use it.

I'm going to end up staying with my current setup for now, but when the time comes I guess I am leaning towards a NAS RAID box built on a PC as it's the most versatile solution and it's still cheaper than a ReadyNAS, and I already have most of the pc parts to get it up and running already. Then again, there is something to be said about appliances, and a ReadyNAS NV+ just sits there and does it's job without the hassles of being a full blown computer.

Windows Home Server is coming out later this year, but I don't see much advantage to it over a ReadyNAS or a generic PC with RAID.

And while talking about data storage, please please please backup your data. I use SuperDuper! and with a paid copy of it, you can automatically do nightly backups. I have a "Clone" external drive of my Machintosh HD, it updates nightly. And it has saved my ass a couple of times already. You can't be too careful when it comes to backing up your system. An offsite copy of your backup is a must also, I do this on DVD's today, but will probably just buy another external drive for the task.

One question I have about Leopard and Time Machine is whether Time Machine can backup to a NAS and not just an external hard drive.

I was over on Yahoo Apple/Macintosh News today. I couldn't help but notice that there were a LOT of iPhone articles, so I took count. 18 of the 30 stories on the main page were in fact about the iPhone. Wow. It stuns me at how much hype the iPhone is getting.

I certainly hope that the iPhone is worthy of all the attention that it is receiving (before average users even get to lay a finger on one...)

But there will be no iPhone for me for quite some time. The Cell Phone Soup Nazi has told me, No iPhone for you! when I recently got two new Motorola Razr's for my wife and I. I committed to a 2 year commitment to get the phones really cheap. I'm not so concerned about this. The iPhone is bigger than I'd like in a cell phone, but more importantly it's far more expensive than I'm willing to pay for a cell phone - even an iPhone.

Maybe in two years when my commitment is up the iPhone or its newer variants will be in the sub $300 range. That might interest me more.

There is a cool new BART Widget from WorryDream to help you with San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). Maps, routes, schedules, fares - it has it all.

There is also an official iPod BART QuickPlanner that is put out that can be very helpful if you're not at your computer (or soon to be released iPhone.)

Some heavy hitters in the content business are now choosing sides. Recently the porn industry said that it was backing HD DVD. Today Blockbuster Online announced that based on recent history they are going to back BluRay and not support HD DVD at all.

This battle is something I choose to view from the sidelines until the market makes a decision on which format is going to be the predominant format. While I tend to favor HD DVD, in reality either format is great and far superior to the old DVD format. But I don't want to join the HiDef DVD party until things are a bit more decided.

When it comes to searching, there’s no such thing as too fast.

And now, if you're a Mac user, you can search the entire online archive, including royalty-free, without ever opening your browser.
With our efficient Search Widget, you have almost instant access. You can scroll through thumbnail search results, preview your clips, choose between rights-managed and royalty-free, even download motion comps—all in seconds.
And because our Search Widget is so fast, it’s a defacto idea generator. A fun way to discover the unexpected shot or spark inspiration.
Apple has built powerful, easy features into Mac OS X, like Spotlight and Dashboard, to expedite production workflow, and we intend to take full advantage of these innovations to make your creative life as easy as possible.
DOWNLOAD

In the WWDC Keynote Address Steve showed how Leopard has Stacks, and how there is a new Download folder where items that you download from the internet will reside. Music to my ears, I to the same thing today without the assistance of having it setup by Apple, and without the fancy dock folder that Stacks / Downloads offer.

Running Tiger, I have my system setup with a similar function. This helps me to keep a [slightly] less cluttered desktop, and it allows me to have a single folder that I monitor for virus via ClamXav. (I don't feel the need to have ClamXav monitor everything - just things I download from the internet.)

I have a folder on my desktop named Web Downloads.

And I have also added this folder to the left bar in Finder for easy access:

At this point you may just want to wait for Leopard, but then again, in less time than it takes to read this article, you can setup a similar setup for yourself.

The 2007 WWDC Keynote Video is now available.

I wasn't going to read the live WWDC Keynote blogging today, but I couldn't help myself... if you missed it (even if you didn't) the Video should be following soon.

With every website out there detailing the WWDC Keynote speech by Steve Jobs, I don't feel the need to recap everything, but I would like to point out a few surprises that I didn't expect in the keynote.

1) No announcements for anything hardware or iLife.
2) Games for the Mac.
3) Safari for Windows

Games for Mac is very exciting and I think healthy for the Mac platform. Even if you can dual boot into Windows, or run it virtualized, not everybody wants to. And the Mac ecosystem would be better off overall if good games where available natively. I was just telling my brother a few weeks ago that I wish Apple would invest some of their billions into a game division.

Safari for Windows. "So what" you say. I think this is a bigger announcement than some may, the reason is that if Apple can increase Safari's market share from ~ 5% to 10%, 15%, or even higher - this is a great enticement for web developers to stop creating browser specific code. Far too many sites don't comply to standards based web protocol. If FireFox and Safari (and others like Opera) can take a bigger chunk of the browser market share, then it is a bigger incentive for web developers to go standards based. This will make browsing a better experience not only for Mac users, but anybody who uses an alternative browser. I say Hurray!

By the way, I've been using the Safari on Windows XP for an hour or so now, and it is still beta, but holy cow this is a fast browser. They didn't hype up the speed, it is for real. Now if I could only get KeyChain on my work XP machine...

I recently blogged about the exquisite Demo UI video, I also gushed about the well done PDF booklet detailing the thought and design of the upcoming UI.

Over the past few days I've had a great email dialog with David McLeod, graphic designer for the CenterStage Project. I was very pleased that David reached out to me for my input to take into consideration for the upcoming TV features for CenterStage. My guess is that he read some of my DVR/AppleTV/CenterStage posts here on the site and could tell that it's an area that I'm both very familiar with and passionate about - and that I feel that most solutions are not complete for a variety of reasons. David is a great listener and we had a nice discussion on the topic. It sounds like CenterStage will at first have very basic TV viewing and DVR functions, but hopefully it will ramp into a more fully featured offering as time and energy permits. I did let David know that I think it would be a terrific feature if CenterStage could incorporate and integrate TV Torrent downloading, sort of a DVR Setup without a Tuner Card for the pure time shifters (or consumers of non-local programming). As I think about this, David must be more than Graphics Designer for CenterStage if he's working on specs and features.

Btw - I told David that what I saw in the Demo UI Video for CenterStage is in my opinion what the AppleTV interface should have looked like.

Here is a new press release that David sent me on a significant new release of CenterStage.

PRESS RELEASE
===============
It's the eve of the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), so we thought we would get everyone into the 'sprit of excitement', before the forthcoming announcements from Apple. CenterStage 0.6.2 has been released and represents a milestone in the alpha cycle of our Mac Media Center project.

This substantial update should be considered our most fully functional and usable release to date. It is now a 'proper' media center, allowing you to playback Movies, Music and view your Photos. The required framework is in place and the next step is to begin adding our proposed user interface.

Talking of our future and the proposed interface. Hopefully, you will have seen a couple of new pages added to the site recently. The Current Progress page charts the progress of our work and communicates where we are now, and where we are going. Current Progress page includes a demo movie of where the project is headed, and numerous supporting downloads to show exactly what has been happening behind the scenes and what we the future look of CenterStage will be.

As always, the more developers we can get on board the greater this project will become as we move toward the Beta at a faster pace.

Download 0.6.2

Current Progress

The Future

I went to look at my Dashboard this afternoon and noticed that I haven't rebooted my iMac in over 16 days. Sweet! I wasn't even trying for a long uptime - just turned out that way.

I can't count on all my fingers and toes at how many error messages Windows would give me back when I tried not rebooting for several days.

Ah, stability is a blessing. Thanks Apple, OS X Tiger rocks!

John Dvorak is saying that the time has come to short Apple's stock (bet that it's going to drop) because the iPhone's keyboard is bad. So bad that 20% of people who buy an iPhone will return it because they hate the virtual keyboard.

Time will tell, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

"The keyboard is a disaster, and people are going to return the phone in droves. I'm guessing 20% will go back."

Read the full blog post here.

Start enjoying that cooler than [Parallels] Coherence, VMWare Fusion's Unity Goodness!

Dealzmodo: DivX Pro Free Today

Saw this notice over on Gizmodo today, free DivX Pro for Mac and Windows, get in on it now before they close the offer.

I've been successfully using Mozy on my work notebook (Windows XP) since I found out about it. I also set up Mozy on my iMac at home, but it gave me some troubles after a few days. I couldn't get too worked up over it since the Mac client was in Beta.

Good news, there has been a refresh on the Mac beta, and at least for me, it's working great now.

If you're not familiar with it, Mozy is a free online backup service for a 2GB account, and for only $4.95 you have unlimited storage. It's a really slick setup that I use and recommend. Click this link or the image below to signup with my referral, this will give you an 2.3GB instead of just a 2GB account.

I haven't tried either BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare. The only application for Windows that I run is Quicken (because Quicken for Mac is nowhere as good as the Windows version), but because I have a Windows Media Center in my house, I run Quicken on it and Remote Desktop to it.

I do have friends who have tried these products, and more people who have asked me my opinion on them. Keep in mind that I've not used them. But when it comes to Windows on a Mac, I've been telling people that my choice is VMWare. Parallels was the early product to market, but VMWare specializes in this market, and has done really well in it over time. Additionally, VMWare already had better directx support, 64 bit support, and USB support that Parallels, and VMWare is still in Beta. I also told people that the 1 feature that Parallels currently has that VMWare's Fusion didn't was Coherence mode - but wait I told them, I'm pretty sure it will come to VMWare also.

Since Parallels has decided to charge an upgrade for it's latest 3.0 version, you just may re-think Parallels and consider VMWare's Fusion.

Here's a video of it's version of Coherence, Unity, in action. It looks really slick.

Sun's ZFS file system has been rumored to be included in Leopard for quite some time now. Today Sun gave indication that ZFS will be a part of OS X 10.5. Ok, so what? That news in itself isn't very informative. Several months ago the Machine Check Exception Blog had a great post on why ZFS will matter to: Laptop / Desktop users, to Workstation Users, to Server Admins, and even why it won't matter. If you're curious about ZFS give this a read. I've put Why ZFS Will Matter to Laptop / Desktop Users below since that covers most of us.

Why ZFS Matters to Laptop/Desktop Users

People with iBooks, MacBooks, Powerbooks, Mac Minis, and iMacs all have generally the same storage setup: a single hard disk with capacity ranging from 40-500 GB. A lot of the magic of ZFS does not become manifest until you have several disks, but even with one, you can benefit in several ways:

Filesystems can be compressed. Unlike a compressed disk image, a compressed ZFS filesystem is read/write. Moreover, the compression flag can be turned on and off on the fly. New data will be compressed (or not) as per the flag, and old data will be left as is. Compressed filesystems are great for data that you don’t access very often, or data that compresses very well.

Filesystems are nested and making them is as easy as making a directory. This in itself is not very interesting for laptop/desktop users, but combined with compression, this means that you can effectively turn on compression for just a subfolder on your drive.

Every block of data on the disk is checksummed so errors can be detected during read operations. Many common hard drive failures are catastrophic, and painfully obvious when they happen. But it is possible for your data to be corrupted on disk in ways that you, and the hard disk, will never notice. While checksumming will not allow you to recover your data, it will let you know when you should go retrieve a file from your backup. (You are backing up, right? Go buy an external Firewire disk and SuperDuper!, and start doing it right now. It is easy, fast, and you’ll thank me later.)

Space-efficient and fast snapshots. A snapshot allows you to see your filesystem as it was some time in the past. ZFS is designed to snapshot a filesystem in constant time, no matter how much data you have, or how frequently you snapshot it. Moreover, the snapshot is very space efficient. Identical blocks are shared between snapshots and the live filesystem until they are written to. The space required for snapshots is therefore mostly a function of how quickly your files change, and not so much how often you make a snapshot. It’s like version control for your entire computer!

Apple’s much discussed Time Machine feature in OS X 10.5 is a great example of the interface possibilies when you have snapshots available. However, Time Machine does not appear to require ZFS, which means that Apple had to bolt snapshots onto HFS+, a complex and awkward task. Snapshots in ZFS are cheap and easy.

I checked out the new alpha of OpenOffice last night. The development team met there goal of having it distributable before WWDC - job well done.

I really can't recommend using it at this time since there are still some pretty big bugs to be fixed. But it was great to see it running natively without X11. In a few months it'll be time to put OOo Aqua up against NeoOffice and see how they compare.

If you'd like to check out the new OpenOffice Aqua, you can download it here.

The cool kids are running the Camino 1.6a1pre version of it. Here's a direct link to an Intel build of it.

If you'd like to be a slightly less cool kid, you can grab the official 1.5 version directly from Camino here.

IPTV is Television delivered over the Internet. There was some speculation today that the Apple + AT&T partnership may extend past the iPhone and could lead to getting IPTV for the AppleTV some time next year.

MacSeven doesn't run with all the Apple rumors, I prefer to work with what we have today and what we know for sure. But this story really piqued my curiosity. The thought of an AppleTV [fully supporting 1080P or 1080i and 5.1 audio] running CenterStage as the main interface, and having full Television & DVR through IPTV really, really interests me. Lets hope this, or something equally as fascinating plays out.

X Lossless Decoder, is a lossless audio decoder for the Mac. X Lossless Decoder(XLD) is a tool for Mac OS X that is able to decode/convert/play various 'lossless' audio files. The supported audio files can be split into some tracks with cue sheet when decoding. It works on Mac OS X 10.3 and later.

XLD is Universal Binary, so it runs natively on both Intel Macs and PPC Macs.

The All Things Digital Conference is going on, and Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together.
I really enjoyed watching it, it's about 90 minutes in total, or you can opt to watch the highlights video. There is also a full transcript, but I'd highly recommend watching the full video, you get so much more out of it than just reading the transcript.

Video of the complete Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview.

Check out Previous posts on MacSeven.com

MacSeven Posts from May 2007

MacSeven Posts from April 2007

MacSeven Posts from March 2007

MacSeven Posts from February 2007