Almost exactly four years ago, on October 24, 2003, Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. On that same day, the very first ebook in the Take Control series appeared—my upgrading guide, Take Control of Upgrading to Panther. Little did I know then that this little publishing experiment, undertaken by most of the TidBITS staff and a handful of other talented authors and editors, would be so successful as to eventually produce the majority of my income. But today, less than 24 hours after Apple finally announced the shipping date of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I’m pleased to report that my 14th title in the series is now on sale: Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard: Early-Bird Edition.

When I wrote my second Upgrading book, Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger, I naturally started with what I’d written about Panther, added some stuff, removed some stuff, and generally updated everything to be accurate under the new system. But this time I wanted to go way beyond that. Leopard is a big, big release with lots of serious changes; I wanted the Upgrading book to reflect that and prepare users as thoroughly as possible. So in addition to massively reworking the text to cover all the changes to the Leopard installation process, I pulled in some material from my ebooks on backups, maintenance, and troubleshooting. Now I provide detailed instructions on getting your Mac in tip-top shape, complete with an excellent backup, before inserting that Leopard DVD—and I think the extra steps up front will lead to much happier installations later.

Of course, there was a tiny problem: ideally, you’d do all that preparatory stuff days or even weeks before you get your Leopard DVD, but I can’t actually release the full book, with all its top-secret information about the ins and outs of Leopard installation, without violating my NDA. So we decided to create two versions of the book. The Early-Bird Edition, which you can buy (for $10) and download today, has all the background information you need to get your Mac ready for the upgrade, but leaves out all the information I’m not allowed to reveal (which amounts to quite a large portion of the book). The full edition will become available the instant Leopard goes on sale in North America (that’s 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time next Friday, October 26). Anyone who has already purchased the Early-Bird Edition can simply click a link on the cover of the PDF to go to a Web page where they can download the full version for free. And then they can skip (or skim) about 50 pages of text and get on to the actual upgrading process fairly quickly. Of course, if you wait until next Friday or later to make your purchase, you’ll simply get the full version, which is a superset of the Early-Bird Edition.

Now then…what’s crazy to me about all this is that I initially wrote (both versions of) this book back in February, when Apple was still saying Leopard would be released in the spring. It went through our whole editorial and technical review process way back then. In April, when Apple announced a delay until October, we just put the project on ice. This summer I picked it up again, and updated the manuscript with new information from each new beta version of Leopard. Yesterday, as soon as Apple made their announcement, I had to tweak a few things in the Early-Bird Edition to correspond to the latest truth, but even so, we were organized enough that the PDF was available for sale within hours. Between now and next Friday, I very much hope to see an even more recent version of Leopard than what I’ve been working with, and should it contain any significant changes, I’ll work those into the final text as well. The result should be our most thorough and up-to-date upgrading guide ever! If you’re planning to install Leopard, I think you’ll find this ebook to be immensely helpful.

A couple of days ago, Take Control Books released version 2.5 of my ebook Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac. Even though the version number didn’t jump all the way to 3.0 (meaning this is a free update for people with version 2.0 and 25% off for people with version 1.x), version 2.5 was a massive revision. I added new sections on VMware Fusion and VirtualBox, took out the section on Q (which is now pretty much irrelevant), and provided up-to-date info on the latest versions of Parallels Desktop and Boot Camp. And that’s just the biggest changes—tons of smaller stuff was tweaked too. If you have any interest in running Windows on your Intel-based Mac, this ebook should tell you everything you need to know.

Because things are moving so fast in this area, I predict that at least one, and more likely two, additional updates to this ebook will occur later this year. And I suspect I’ll start getting into more detail about actual usage scenarios. For example, even though I’ve now got two Intel-based Macs, I still haven’t gotten used to the notion that I can now run practically any software whenever I want. When I read about something that’s PC-only, I still have that old habit of disregarding it with a grumble, and I really have to train myself to stop. The world (of software) is my oyster now—almost any Mac, Windows, or Unix program out there will run happily on my Mac—and it will take me some time to fully come to grips with this new sense of freedom.

And, I’d just like to say that my new 17″, 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro—fully loaded with the high-res screen and 4 GB of RAM, of course—is an awfully nice way to run any and every operating system. It’s my first new laptop since my 1 GHz TiBook (ca. 2002), and I’m really digging it.

Among the things I’ve been busy doing over the past month (besides, you know, getting ready to move to Paris and not updating any of my Web sites) has been finishing my latest ebook: Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac. As usual, it’s $10, comes with free minor updates, and has a free excerpt available for your perusal. I’ve already, of course, written about maintaining and backing up your Mac (in fact, the three titles together make a nice bundle at only $24—cheap!), but actually solving problems, rather than merely preventing them, was the big missing piece.

I get a lot of requests for Mac help. Some of it comes from friends and family; even more comes from people who have read my various books and articles. And I don’t mind offering a bit of assistance when I can, but as I’m perpetually tied up with a zillion things, I can’t always devote as much time as I’d like to solving other people’s Mac problems. But now, you can get a virtual Joe-in-a-box (book?), because this book more or less describes the algorithm I’d use to solve your problem. Well, yes, I took some liberties, because I was under strict instructions to make this a reasonably short book, and because my own troubleshooting technique is probably more of an art than a science. But still: for a great many problems, this’ll get you as close to a solution as I could in person.

Needless to say, it’ll also expand over time. We’ll add more problems, solutions, and techniques. But even as the book stands now, it should apply equally to past, present, and future versions of Mac OS X. It’s a handy thing to have around before problems occur, so if you’ve ever wished you had a little help available when your Mac goes kerflooey, now’s a great time to add this to your library.

Hello all. Over the past couple of months, this blog hasn’t seen much action, and the other alt concepts sites have also been pretty quiet in recent weeks. Apart from the holidays and related travel, Morgen and I have been frantically preparing for our upcoming trip to Indonesia and Hong Kong—we leave in a matter of minutes! There’s been so much to do that a few things, such as actual work, have gotten put on the back burner. However, I did want to provide a few updates before I head off on my big 40th Birthday Trip.

Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac: A couple of weeks ago, we released version 2.0 of this book, which reflects the huge number of changes in the Windows-on-Mac world in the last several months—major updates to both Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop, the release of CrossOver Mac, and the sort-of release of Windows Vista. Of course, no sooner did we get the new edition out than VMware went and released a beta of Fusion, yet another interesting way to run Windows on your Intel Mac. So I’ll update the book to discuss that at some point after I return from my trip. In the meantime, I think all the information there is still solid and reliable, and it’s a great improvement over the first edition.

Take Control of Mac OS X Backups: Version 2.0 of this book—a significant expansion—is also pretty much ready to go, and has been for weeks. But because of the holidays and preparations for Macworld Expo next week, it may not be released until mid-January or so. This new version discusses Time Machine to some extent, but after Leopard is released, I’ll do another update that covers it in detail.

Interesting Thing of the Day, SenseList, and The Geeky Gourmet: All these sites will be running on a greatly reduced schedule during January. We plan to collect lots of interesting things, lists, and food stories on our trip, and will be back with fresh content in February.

Macworld Expo: This’ll be the first time I’ve missed the show in I can’t remember how many years. But it’s for a good cause: you only turn 40 once. I’m sure I’ll have 32,768 email messages awaiting me on my return, informing me of all the cool things that were announced and that I must immediately buy. And, of course, there will inevitably be all sorts of books requiring updates .

So that’s the update. If there’s anything I forgot, I’m sure it’s on my list somewhere, and I’ll attend to it in February. See you then!

My 12th Take Control ebook, Take Control of Passwords in Mac OS X, went on sale today. (Gee, it feels like just a month ago that my last ebook came out.) I’m unusually excited about this title, because, as with Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, I think it addresses a number of vexing problems that virtually all Mac users face.

First, the ebook helps to make sense of password security: how do you choose passwords that offers the right compromise among security and memorability? And once you’ve chosen your passwords, how do you keep them safe? The ebook also discusses all the different places within Mac OS X where passwords are used, and spends considerable time dealing with Web site passwords. It talks about keychains in detail and covers not only the Keychain Access utility but also numerous third-party password tools. The goal of the ebook is to make sense of passwords, to make them no longer seem scary or confusing. If you follow my advice, you should be able to generate, remember, and enter appropriately strong passwords for almost any purpose with an absolute minimum of brainpower and grief.

The ebook is 96 pages long and sells for $10. We offer a free sample (22 pages long), and as usual, minor updates will also be free.

‘Tis the week for new printed books! Today, Take Control Books released the printed version of Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner. It’s available from Qoop, the print-on-demand service run by former Kensington head honcho Bill Murray. The print edition is 7 x 9 inches, Wire-O binding, with pages printed in either black and white ($19.99) or color (for $35.99). (Those who have already purchased the ebook can get a $10 discount on the printed version by clicking the “Check for Updates” button on the first page of the PDF.) The handy “Print Me” file with recipes and schedules is also available to everyone who purchases the print edition.

My latest print book, Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups, is finally shipping from Peachpit. This book is based on two of my more popular Take Control ebooks (Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac and Take Control of Mac OS X Backups), though we made a number of changes and adaptations in the course of preparing the book for print. I’m delighted for the book to be part of Peachpit’s successful and highly regarded Real World series, and I have high hopes that it will enjoy a long and happy shelf life (Leopard and Time Machine notwithstanding). Although particular maintenance utilities or backup programs may come and go, the basic advice I offer for keeping your Mac running smoothly should be perfectly valid years from now.

As I mentioned, I’ll be speaking next Tuesday, October 17, 2006, at the Diablo Valley Mac User Group in Walnut Creek, California. The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. (not 7:00, as I’d said previously), though my portion of the program won’t begin until about 7:30.

I’ll be discussing backup strategies, borrowing heavily from Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, but with some new material discussing, for example, the Time Machine feature coming in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. As a bonus, I’ll spend some time toward the end discussing Thanksgiving dinner. A good time will be had by all.

After the presentation there will be a Q&A session. I’ll be happy to answer questions about any of my books, articles, Web sites, or whatnot.

To celebrate the autumnal equinox today, I’m happy to announce the publication of an appropriately fall-themed book: Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner. Like other Take Control publications, it makes complicated tasks easy for mere mortals; in this case, though, the subject matter isn’t computers, but rather cooking Thanksgiving dinner. It costs $10 for the downloadable PDF version; a spiral-bound print-on-demand version will also be available in a couple of weeks or so (regrettably, too late for readers in Canada, where Thanksgiving falls on October 9 this year). Readers of both versions get access to a special “Print Me” file with summaries of all the recipes, shopping lists, and schedules. As usual, you can download a free 31-page sample.

I’ve written a lot of ebooks (this is, I think, my 11th, depending on how you count) and I thought I’d more or less mastered the process. But this one was a much different (as in significantly longer and harder) undertaking. For one thing, recipes take a lot of time to test: if you overcook the turkey you spent the morning brining, you can’t just use an Undo command or revert to the backup turkey you archived an hour ago. For another, everyone’s kitchen, ingredients, and skills are a bit different, so what works marvelously for one tester may not work for the next. And we’ve had to overcome numerous technical hurdles (such as getting fractions to print correctly on certain platforms) and management issues (such as an illustrator flaking out on us before Jeff Tolbert came to our rescue), among many others.

In all, this project has been much more work for all of us than we’d ever imagined, and speaking for myself, it was the most difficult ebook I’ve written. That’s a bit ironic in the sense that we’re trying out this whole cookbook thing for fun, not as a change in our editorial direction. (Of course, if this title sells 10,000 copies in the next month, I think we’d all be more than willing to endure this sort of pain again…but we’re not counting our books before they’re sold.) But I also think it’s one of the best and most useful things I’ve written. I’m really proud of the way it turned out, and I expect it will make Thanksgiving a lot easier and less stressful for lots and lots of people.

Speaking of cooking and computers, I’d like to officially announce The Geeky Gourmet, my new blog about food and technology. I’ll be mentioning a lot of Thanksgiving-related stuff, of course, but the blog will cover all sorts of things: cooking science, food gadgets, restaurants, culinary technologies, and anything else pertaining to food that strikes my fancy, especially if it also has a technology angle.

Last but not least, I should call attention to the fact that I’ve retooled the look and feel of this site a bit, moving from a cluttered three-column design to a more streamlined two-column approach, swapping in a newer picture of myself, and making lots of other small changes. Perhaps I’ll even manage to post a bit more frequently, now that the place looks spiffier.

For a couple of months, I’ve been on the cusp of producing an update to Take Control of Mac OS X Backups. I updated the manuscript quite some time ago to cover things like using USB 2.0 drives with Intel Macs and backing up Windows data from Boot Camp or Parallels Desktop, but then, every time I thought we were just about ready to publish, some backup app or another got a significant update, and I’d have to go in and rearrange things again. There are just so many backup programs, and they’re in such a constant state of flux, that it’s difficult to keep up with them all—even in an ebook. But we’ve finally drawn the line and finished version 1.3; it should be available later today as a free update.

This latest version of Backups, along with Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, will (with some modifications) be rolled into a new print book from Peachpit: Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups, due on bookstore shelves in late September or early October.

Meanwhile, even though it’s only July, my attention has been focused on turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce—I’m working on my next Take Control ebook, which (no kidding) will be about Thanksgiving. This fall, nothing will be left to chance, as you’ll be able to follow my simple instructions for a delicious yet stress-free Thanksgiving dinner. It’s our first foray into a food-related topic; if it’s successful, there may be more, but we’re mainly doing it for fun.

And does this have anything to do with backups? Yes indeed. Just as things can go wrong with your computer, they can (and do) go wrong when cooking. So the Thanksgiving ebook will feature a number of troubleshooting, backup, and shortcut tips to enable you to salvage the meal if something doesn’t turn out right.

Update (7/13/06): The updated version of Backups came out today—a bit later than I’d expected, but I’m delighted to report that it’s finally available.