Gee, thanks. That tells me so much. I would have never understood the problem without this detailed explanation.

At least it appeared over and over, as though with repeated exposure I’d eventually get the point.

Let me begin by saying that I don’t know anything more about the new product(s) Apple will be announcing on January 27 than anyone else outside the company. (And I can’t get over how often people ask me what I know about future Apple products, as if Apple would share their trade secrets with me but not the rest of the world!) The only thing I can say for sure is that I’ve had discussions with two publishers about the possibility of writing a book on the next iProduct, whatever it is and whenever it’s released, so it’s a fairly safe bet you’ll see my name and the name of the new whatever-it-is sharing a book cover later this year.

But last night while I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep, I was thinking about the various rumors I’ve read, the paint-spattered “Come see our latest creation” invitation to the upcoming event, and the fact that no one, to this point, has proposed anything I’d consider a killer application for a product that’s presumably something like a large iPhone/iPod touch or a MacBook without a keyboard. So far, I haven’t read any descriptions of what the thing might do that make me conclude I really need to spend another however many hundreds of dollars on a device to supplement my iPhone and MacBook Pro—something that’ll do things neither of those devices can do, and do them so well that I can’t live without it. (Other than, you know, in the sense that I can’t live without money, and I make money by writing books about technology.)

As all these ideas were bashing around in my head, I thought of Wacom’s Cintiq, which is a graphics tablet with a display underneath the surface, so the artist doesn’t have to choose between looking at the pen and looking at the screen. And I thought, hmmmm, there’s a handheld device with a wide-screen display and touch-sensitive surface, no keyboard, hooks up to a Mac or PC, and costs $1000. Where have I heard those specs before?

So this is what I’m thinking:

• One of the major selling points (not the only point, by any means) of the new iProduct will be its painting/drawing capabilities. Which means…
• Apple will introduce some brand new iApplication that runs on the device and does for graphics what GarageBand does for music creation—puts high-quality results within easy reach of non-professionals. But that would make the most sense if…
• A version of said application also runs on your desktop computer—though probably just Macs, like most of Apple’s other apps. So, in addition, I’m guessing…
• The iProduct could be used for painting/drawing in either a stand-alone way, with the new iApplication, or as an input device for an existing program on your computer (Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever). Needless to say…
• This’ll all work wirelessly, unlike the Cintiq. And…
• A stylus will be optional. (Hello, finger painting!)
• If Apple does use the name “iPad,” I think it’ll apply to the software, not the hardware.

So, if this all came true, you’d be getting a thing with considerably more capabilities than the Cintiq for (I imagine) about the same price. This all seems utterly logical to me, and I’m rather surprised that none of the gadget blogs and rumor sites I’ve read have been playing up this particular scenario. But since I have nothing to lose by being wrong, I wanted to go on record with my predictions, such as they are.

Now, I have zero artistic skills or ambitions, and personally, I don’t think this set of capabilities would interest me much regardless of how easy and snazzy Apple were to make the software. I can’t imagine watching movies on such a thing (my flat-screen TV would get jealous), and I’m not a gamer, so those capabilities (which will surely also be present) won’t attract me either. I’d read books on it, sure, and surf the Web from the sofa, but I can already do that on my iPhone. So I’m still waiting to find out what it is about this hypothetical device that would induce me to buy it if I weren’t doing so for entirely professional (and tax-deductible) reasons. We’ll know soon enough!

So I was trying out Twitter Tools, which can do interesting things like creating a tweet when you post on your blog, and creating a blog post when you post a tweet. Both of which are potentially useful things. From the FAQ in the Read Me file:

What happens if I have both my tweets posting to my blog as posts and my posts sent to Twitter? Will it cause the world to end in a spinning fireball of death?

Actually, Twitter Tools has taken this into account and you can safely enable both creating posts from your tweets and tweets from your posts without duplicating them in either place.

Yeah, except it didn’t. As soon as I turned it on and set up the various options I wanted, two things happened. First, it downloaded my last 20 tweets and made blog entries out of them. (Not at all what I wanted, because some of them are quite old…I was assuming it would start with my next tweet.) And then, having discovered 20 new blog entries, it created 20 new tweets, one for each. (That’s what the Read Me explicitly said wouldn’t happen.) So they were totally duplicated—highly annoying. Nor did this stop after the initial batch—my next tweet, to apologize, was also turned into a blog post that was immediately re-tweeted.

I also discovered another missing feature: when Twitter Tools creates a blog post from a tweet, it just truncates the tweet arbitrarily and turns that into the title, but with no verbiage like “From Twitter…” (comparable to the “New Blog Post” it puts in tweets). So, another big minus.

So: Twitter Tools = FAIL. And sorry for all the birdy poo. Now to uninstall…

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.

Among the many interesting announcements from Apple yesterday was an expansion of .Mac’s capabilities, but with the same price as before. And there are lots of groovy new things, such as the Web Gallery and the capability to use .Mac with your own domain. Unlike most people, my reaction to these changes was, in a word, “Ugh,” by which I mean “I now have to spend many days updating my book Take Control of .Mac to reflect the current truth.” Yeah, I know, boo hoo.

However, what most caught my attention was the change in storage limits. Previously, .Mac came with 1 GB of storage for $100 per year, and you could increase it to either 2 GB (for $50 extra per year) or 4 GB (for $100 extra per year). Now, at those same prices, you get a base level of 10 GB, which you can increase to either 20 GB or 30 GB. And it seems a lot of people are thinking, “Wow, a 10x increase in space at no extra cost! Great!” But I’m thinking: not great.

As before, that space has to be divided among Mail, .Mac Groups, and iDisk—and, of the iDisk space, a lot of that will presumably go toward sharing all your photos and videos and iWeb sites. You can use whatever’s left for sharing files or backups. But here’s the thing. Apple is still way behind the times; they should have done that two years ago and made yesterday’s upgrade another order of magnitude greater. At least. Compared with other Web/email hosting providers (because really, that’s basically what .Mac is), .Mac still gives you a fraction of the typical storage space at a higher price. For example, Dreamhost will give you 145 GB of storage (which, by the way, increases by 1 GB each week) in their cheapest plan, which is $9.95 per month—just $20 per year more than .Mac (and you can decrease that to $7.95 per month by prepaying for two years).

My particular area of concern here, though, is backups, because I’ve written a lot on that subject, and am at this very moment in the process of updating Take Control of Mac OS X Backups to say a lot more about, among other things, online backup services. If .Mac stacks up poorly against Web hosting providers, the comparison with online backup providers is even bleaker. Mozy gives you unlimited backup storage space for $5 per month. And CrashPlan is right behind—you get 50 GB for $5 per month, with additional gigs at 10 cents each (so, 100 GB would be $10 per month, and so on). That’s exactly the sort of space:price ratio where Apple should be. Previously, they were at 1 percent of that, and now they’re at 10 percent. I find that kind of insulting, as though I’ll see all the pretty graphics (yes, they are pretty) and forget that I’m still being overcharged and underserved.

Speaking of that 1 percent figure…I find it interesting that the new iMacs released yesterday can include up to 1 terabyte of disk space. Clearly, Apple expects you to fill up that space with all your excellent new media. Equally clearly, they expect you to put no more than 1 percent of it (10 GB)—or, maybe, 3 percent (30 GB)—online. That’s weird and sad. I say this even realizing the realities of internet bandwidth (sure, it’d take months to back up 1 terabyte over a DSL connection). That’s no excuse to let your competitors leave you in the dust.

All this is not to say I don’t find .Mac useful. I do find it useful—enough so that I keep renewing every year (even though I also have to supplement it with other services). And I’m happy that it’s gotten considerably more useful in the past 24 hours. But let’s not kid ourselves: this is one area in which Apple is still far, far behind the curve.

My article in last week’s issue of TidBITS, Stewing Over Safe Sleep, generated an awful lot of feedback. Most of it was of the “Yeah, that was really stupid of Apple” or “Thanks; now I know how to solve an annoying problem” varieties. Some of it was along the lines of “How could anyone not love safe sleep?” or “I’m not seeing 49-second delays on MY machine” or “It probably doesn’t really matter if you move your computer while the RAM is being cached to disk” or the simple and elegant “You’re an idiot.” Well, thanks one and all for sharing your thoughts, constructive and otherwise.

Two particular threads of discussion, though, are worth a more detailed look.

Hibernating Only When Necessary First, Greg Nicholson sent me a clever script he wrote (to replace the one I showed in TidBITS) that’s significantly smarter. Greg pointed out that there are certain situations, such as a long flight to China, in which one might be much more likely to want the default Safe Sleep behavior. So his script, which he runs every 10 minutes with cron, checks the battery life. If it’s over 50%, it turns off hibernatemode (as my script does). But if the charge is less than 30%, it turns hibernatemode back on. Very spiffy, and I wish Apple would have built something like this right into Mac OS X. You can, of course, tweak the percentages and so on to your liking. Here’s (my slightly modified version of) Greg’s script:

#!/bin/sh
MODE=`/usr/bin/pmset -g | grep hibernatemode | awk '{ print $2 }'`
LEFT=`/usr/bin/pmset -g batt | grep Internal | awk '{ print $2 }' | awk -F % '{ print $1 }'`

if [ $LEFT -lt 30 ] && [ $MODE != 3 ] ; then
  {
     echo "Less than 30% remains" >> /var/log/system.log
     echo "setting Hibernate mode 3" >> /var/log/system.log
     `/usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 3`
  }
elif  [ $LEFT -gt 50 ] && [ $MODE != 0 ]; then
  {
     echo "Greater than 50% remains" >> /var/log/system.log
     echo "Setting Hibernate mode 0" >> /var/log/system.log
     `/usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 0`
     `rm /var/vm/sleepimage`
  }
fi

Greg noted that since the script requires root privileges, you need to add the following to your sudoers file:

ALL ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 3
ALL ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 0

An easier way to achieve that effect would be to put the cron job in your system crontab, if you feel comfortable doing that.

Dealing with an Unencrypted “sleepimage” file Correction (08-Aug-2007): I see I munged some of my facts here earlier, so I’ve rewritten this paragraph to reflect what I currently believe to be the truth.

Second, the issue of encryption came up. It turns out that using hibernatemode values of 5 or 7 (the prescribed values for those using Secure Virtual Memory) don’t actually result in your sleepimage file being encrypted—in fact, it’s just the opposite. If you have Secure VM turned on and use 5 or 7, your encrypted RAM is apparently decrypted while being written to the sleepimage file. So if you’re using Secure VM and want your sleepimage file, too, to be encrypted (which you should), stick with values of 1 or 3 (3 being the default).

Now, in the real world, this fact probably makes little practical difference for most people, most of the time. Even if you don’t encrypt your VM, it’s not a given that any particular password (or other sensitive data) will actually be in RAM when it comes time for your computer to sleep—it might be, or it might not, depending on a long list of details about how particular programs do things, how recently you logged in, what applications you have running, and so on. And also, the risk is certainly greater for power users who enter an administrative password multiple times per hour than people for whom that is a rare occurrence. Even then, the contents of your RAM is cached to that unencrypted disk image only when your computer goes to sleep and only when the hibernatemode setting is at its default (3) or “always hibernate” (1). And even then, the fact that potentially sensitive stuff is sitting on your hard disk in a readily readable format only causes problems if someone gets access to your computer and knows how to find this data. So, like I say, not a problem for most people, most of the time.

If you’re concerned about this, though, DO follow my advice to turn of Safe Sleep. But go a step further. Instead of using

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

to delete the RAM cache, use the secure version of rm, srm, and use the -m flag for a 7x overwrite rather than the default 35x overwrite:

sudo srm -m /var/vm/sleepimage

The command will take a long time to run, but the disk image holding your RAM contents will be safely overwritten. Note that you only have to do this the first time. If you’ve set up a script (as discussed previously) to check regularly to see that hibernatemode hasn’t turned itself back on, having a simple rm in that script will do the trick. The reason? When hibernatemode turns back on, Mac OS X recreates the sleepimage file immediately. But initially, it’s blank. It doesn’t fill up with the contents of your RAM until your machine tries to go to sleep. If your script runs and deletes the (blank) image before then, nothing incriminating will have been in that file.

I truly hope this all gets sorted out in Leopard.

For the past umpteen years, I have dutifully installed every new version of Microsoft Office for Mac that the company has put out. I expect I will continue doing so indefinitely. I’m not particularly fond of Microsoft as a corporation for all the usual reasons, and I’ve found plenty to complain about in every piece of Microsoft software I’ve used. Nevertheless, I use Office (and particularly Word and Excel) every single day, as probably 90 percent of my income requires it in some fashion. When new versions appear, I fantasize that certain bugs that have existed since the mid-1990s might finally be gone, and they never are, but at least a few things generally get better.

Since I don’t particularly expect that any of my long-standing complaints will disappear in Office 2008, I’ve been looking forward to it for primarily one reason: it’ll be a Universal Binary, and should therefore run faster on my Intel-based Macs than Office 2004 does. In other words, I’ll be glad when Office 2008 ships only to the extent that it should scratch one certain long-standing itch; otherwise, I would have been reasonably content to keep running Office 2004 for years to come.

I say all this to put into context my remarks about today’s announcement that Office 2008 will not, as the company previously claimed, ship in the second half of 2007 but will instead ship in mid-January 2008. As a user, this slippage in ship dates is barely worth noticing. Its net effect on me will probably be next to nil. As a Mac journalist, I find it highly significant that a company the size of Microsoft can’t hit a release window that’s six months wide even when they set that target a mere six months in advance, and I think that’s worth giving the company at least a mild tongue-lashing. But really: I don’t care about the slip. It’s a pity, but no big deal.

What I do care very much about, though, as someone who uses words for a living, is the language Microsoft chose to use in the press release they sent out announcing this delay. It is, truly, a delay: a difference of (depending on how you interpreted “second half of 2007″) anywhere from two weeks to six months and two weeks. And most of the news sites that reported on the delay described it as such. But Microsoft themselves did not use the word “delay.” They didn’t mention that they’d previously announced an earlier date. They didn’t say they were sorry. Instead, they used standard weaselly marketing language to make it sound like they were announcing a virtual non-event, and perhaps even to subtly suggest that anyone who wanted to think about it differently doesn’t care about quality.

Here is the exact text of the press release I received:

Office 2008 Coming January 2008

Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) today announced that Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac will be available in the US in mid-January of 2008 (planning for Macworld), with global general availability in the first quarter of 2008. This was a business decision based on the Mac BU’s commitment to deliver a high-quality product.

“Our number one priority is to deliver quality software to our customers and partners, and in order to achieve this we are shifting availability of Office 2008 for Mac to mid-January of 2008,” said Mac BU General Manager Craig Eisler. “We’re successfully driving toward our internal goal to RTM in mid-December 2007, and believe our customers will be very pleased with the finished product.”

As the Mac BU moves closer to the product launch, Microsoft will share more details about features and exact timing.

More information at the Mac BU’s Mac Mojo blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo

Now then…what Microsoft could have said in their press release, instead, is this:

“Office 2008 for Mac, which we previously said would ship in the second half of 2007, has been delayed until January 2008. We ran into some unexpected problems, and we now realize we can’t get this out as soon as we said. We apologize for any inconvenience this delay may cause. We hope our customers will find the final product to be worth the wait.”

See how much better that is? It’s easy: just plain English. No weasel words, but no protracted pseudo-explanations either. Just: “Look, stuff happens. It happened. We’re sorry. Here’s the new plan.” And yet, with those few words, you acknowledge that there’s a difference between what you said and what you’re doing, that that is in fact a bad thing that you wish hadn’t happened, and that you understand why people might be a bit upset with you.

Why is that so hard? Why can’t a company bring itself to admit any fault, however minor, to say they feel badly about something? It’s OK, really. Your customers will forgive you. What customers should not forgive is marketing speak. I don’t cry over spilled milk. I cry over “The erstwhile contents of the glass have been redistributed in a more horizontal fashion. This was a business decision based on gravitational forces. Information on forthcoming moisture containment strategies and potential new sources of dairy products will be made available by mid-January 2008.”

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.

When I turned 40 in January, I declared that the next 10 years would be my Decade of Wealth and Influence. (My 30s were, at least in theory, my Decade of Risk. That’s a story for another day.) Six months in, I can’t say I’m making much progress in the wealth department, but much to my surprise, at least some people seem to think I’m influential. I’ve been named one of MacTech’s 25 most influential people in the Macintosh community—I even get my picture in a printed magazine. Weird. My blurb in the article, featuring a now somewhat outdated bio (I really should update my “about” page a little more frequently), is on this page.

The article, cribbed as it was from (an earlier version of) my description of myself on this site, doesn’t say why it is that people think I’m an influential figure. And I find the whole thing curious, in a way, because even though I write an awful lot about Macs, I don’t really write with the goal of changing anyone’s mind about anything. I help people to get their work done and solve problems, and I report some news, but in terms of offering actual opinions, I haven’t said much beyond “you really really really need good backups.” Even Interesting Thing of the Day, which now has well over 150,000 feed readers, is merely expository in nature, not hortatory. Not that I’m complaining or anything; it’s just that I honestly don’t know who I’ve influenced to do what. But, you know, I’m OK with being famous for being famous.

Anyway, I’m in really good company: four other TidBITS personalities are on the list, along with numerous other Mac movers and shakers I respect a great deal. I’m honored to be counted among the Mac illuminati.

Last week on Datamation, I wrote about my Top 10 Mac Productivity Enhancements. Of course, Macs are pretty easy to use straight out of the box, but there are a bunch of tools—some free, some inexpensive—that can make a variety of day-to-day tasks vastly more convenient.

My very favorite such add-on of all time is LaunchBar, which has saved me, over the years, countless hours of clicking and searching for things. With just a few keystrokes I can open almost anything I need to use on a regular basis, and I can’t stand using Macs that don’t have it installed. (And yes, I’m well aware of such similar apps as Quicksilver and Butler. I’ve tried them and they’re OK, but I keep coming back to the simple elegance of LaunchBar.)

Many of the tools I mentioned in the article follow a theme: they reduce mousing, keystrokes, or both, in a variety of ways and across many different applictations. Sure, they may take some getting used to, but once you’ve gotten into the habit, you’ll wonder how you lived without them.

Had I written that article today, I might well have mentioned Coda, the new multipurpose Web development tool from Panic. I’ve been a fan of their Transmit FTP client for a long time, and Coda has many of the same elegant touches. It combines an FTP engine with a collaborative text editor (based on SubEthaEdit) and several other tools needed for Web design and testing: a CSS editor, a live preview, and a terminal, plus reference materials on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP—all in one window. Mighty nice. I’m exactly their target audience, too: the kind of guy who usually has three or four different apps open to do that combination of tasks and who would prefer to do them all with less clutter. The price is a bit on the high side, in my opinion—in particular, I wish they offered more of a discount for existing Transmit users. But so far, I’m really digging it.

Here’s a news flash for you: the spam epidemic hasn’t quite been solved yet. In the years since junk email began to be a problem, all sorts of putative solutions have appeared, ranging from tougher laws to improved server-based tools and the effective, but irritating, challenge-response systems used by an increasing number of ISPs. And yet, the flood continues. For reasons that continue to baffle me, apparently there are enough people in the world clicking those links and buying what the spammers are selling to make it worth their while to continue sending out messages by the billions.

Your last line of defense against spam is your email client—or, if its built-in filter isn’t cutting it, a third-party add-on. I cover the current range of options for Mac users in Spam Filters for your Mac: Six Choices, which was published today at Datamation. Although I covered earlier versions of many of the same programs in Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail, this article provides the most up-to-date information I have. If you use a Mac and find yourself frustrated with the amount of spam in your Inbox, I urge you to check it out.

[Update: In my Datamation article, I made the following statement:

I keep wishing I could get SpamSieve to give me more granular control over how it treats suspected spam. For example, I'd like truly obvious spam to be trashed immediately, and I'd like spam from different accounts to be routed to different junk mailboxes.

As it turns out, both of those things are possible. SpamSieve author Michael Tsai pointed me to the instructions for doing so, though the procedures are not obvious from looking at the SpamSieve UI. The process varies by email client, but this page shows how to get the most obvious spam to go directly to the Trash in Apple Mail, and this one describes the process for creating separate junk mailboxes for each account.]

This might also be a good time to mention my article Stop Today’s Spam in the April issue of Macworld, which focuses not on third-party clients but on working with rules in Mail and Entourage and other helpful tricks.

So you know that whole Bandwagon launch thing that was supposed to happen last week? Well, funny story. The newly launched service lasted all of a couple of days before it was taken offline; it’s now being completely retooled for yet another grand opening in April.

As near as I can determine, what happened was approximately this: A surprisingly large number of people signed up right away for the all-the-iTunes-you-can-back-up-online service at $69 per year. But most of those people had far greater iTunes storage needs than even the company’s most generous estimates. The Bandwagon folks did the math and discovered that they couldn’t possibly afford all the necessary storage space, CPU power, and bandwidth—they’d actually be losing money on the service. So they stopped accepting new subscribers, told the existing subscribers that they’d be getting their money refunded, and announced that a very different version of Bandwagon will go online in a couple of months. The early adopters, having already received a refund, will also get a free year’s worth of service on the new system for their troubles.

So what is this new and improved Bandwagon? You’ll still be backing up your iTunes stuff online. But now, instead of storing it on Bandwagon’s servers, you’ll be storing it on Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), which is some of the cheapest online storage you can get. You’ll pay Amazon.com directly for the storage space, and you’ll pay Bandwagon either $24 or $36 per year for, apparently, the use of their application. (At the higher price you also get syncing between two Macs, though I’m unsure of the details at this point.) Once again, Bandwagon is offering a discount (half off) for people who sign up before the official launch; you can read about that on the Bandwagon site. And once again, they’re offering an incentive to bloggers, but this time they’re looking for help with beta testing more than publicity, and those who provide helpful bug reports will get a six-month subscription free.

Now, I’ve been hoping for some time that some Mac backup app would directly support S3, so that’s cool. But the fact that it’s limited to iTunes content is a big minus. Also, and I’ve told the Bandwagon folks this more than once, their new pricing structure is a bad idea. They’re effectively asking you to rent their software. Since you’re no longer backing up to their servers, you’re not paying them for a service as such. I can’t comprehend why they don’t do what every other software company does and simply sell licenses to their software. They could charge much more than $36, and even come out with paid upgrades every year or two, so they’d be making more money. But their customers wouldn’t have to feel like they’re renting software by the month, and they wouldn’t have to make recurring payments to both Bandwagon and S3.

There’s another issue, too: S3 in its current form is still pretty much for geeks. Signing up for, and configuring, and account is somewhat complex. And it’s an extra step (or several) that each Bandwagon user must now go through. Bandwagon says they’ll also support other varieties of online storage in the future, but details are sketchy at the moment.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a less competent product launch, and I’ve seen some doozies. When you’re launching a backup service, you want to instill confidence in your customers, including confidence that you’ve done your homework and have a solid business plan. Launching, unlaunching, retooling, and relaunching doesn’t give me warm fuzzies. The pricing is weird and unfortunate. And the service is unnecessarily limited. But perhaps that’ll all change—maybe several times—before the next launch.

In this week’s issue of TidBITS, I have a review of CrashPlan, a new cross-platform online backup service. (See “CrashPlan: Backups Revisited.”) Bottom line: it’s very close to being extremely interesting. I mean that as a compliment; although there are a few annoying deficiencies right now, it’s definitely on the right path. I have every expectation that within a few months (or maybe less), it’ll jump to the top of my recommendations—at least for archiving.

Meanwhile, I should also note that a little over a week ago, Mike Bombich released the long-awaited first beta of Carbon Copy Cloner 3. CCC used to be the only Mac duplication tool worth talking about, but then it fell behind for quite a while and SuperDuper rose to fame and fortune. Now CCC is (almost) back, and it’s clearly taken some cues from SuperDuper: it has a simpler, cleaner interface with a lot more plain-English text about what it’s going to do. It can also clone over a network (a rare trick) and appears to use a different underlying file copying mechanism—no word yet on how the new version stacks up against SuperDuper in the metadata department. But, intriguingly, the next beta of CCC is supposed to add some sort of archiving feature. That would be incredibly spiffy. I’ll be eager to see how that turns out.

I’m delighted to see such active development in the world of Mac backup software. Yes, it’ll help me to sell more books, but mostly I’m pleased that the impending release of Leopard (and thus Time Machine) hasn’t taken the wind out of anyone’s sails. In fact, it seems to have done the opposite. Which is a good thing, because as nice as I expect Time Machine to be, it won’t be a complete backup solution, and won’t be ideal for everyone.

For the past few months, I’ve been beta-testing a new backup service called Bandwagon (formerly known as Xacktunes). Bandwagon combines a Mac OS X application and online storage space to provide automatic backups of all your iTunes content for a flat fee of $69 per year. (Or at least that’s the introductory price, which may increase in the future.) The new service launches officially this Thursday, February 22.

When I first spoke with one of Bandwagon’s developers about the project, roughly a year and a half ago, the company was talking about offering a more generalized online backup service. In the course of development and after getting early feedback, they decided to focus for the time being on iTunes content, which includes not only music but movies, podcasts, TV shows, games, audiobooks, and anything else iTunes can store. The rationale is that backing up iTunes data to conventional media is too cumbersome and time-consuming for most people to bother with, but the cost of losing that data could be high. In the event of a serious hard drive crash, fire, theft, or whatever, you could lose not only the media you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store, but also all those long hours you spent ripping your CD collection. If your iTunes library is sufficiently large, spending $79 per year to protect it could be a reasonable investment.

Bandwagon is limited, as are all online services, by your upstream Internet bandwidth. Even though I have a fast connection, it took a couple of weeks for my entire iTunes collection to be uploaded. Your mileage will vary, of course, but it’s somewhat ironic that the larger and more valuable your collection (and, therefore, the more likely you are to consider the investment worthwhile), the longer it will take to protect it.

So what about backing up to a hard drive instead, as I generally recommend? I’ve seen 250 GB external hard drives for less than $79, and if you were to use one of those to back up your iTunes content, you’d have much faster backup and restore capabilities, plus you’d only be looking at a one-time expense. On the other hand, your backup is only as safe as that drive. If it, too, gets stolen, lost, or damaged, you’re out of luck. Cost and convenience issues aside, inherently redundant and off-site backups are, without a doubt, the biggest benefit of online backup services.

I think Bandwagon’s biggest competition, for the time being, is going to be CrashPlan, which also provides online backups, but works on Windows and Linux as well and isn’t limited to iTunes. CrashPlan Pro costs $60 for the application itself; optional online storage starts at $5 per month for a generous 50 GB. But you can also choose to back up your data locally or remotely to one or more other computers you own, or to your friends’ computers, meaning you can have online backups and still not have to pay recurring monthly or yearly fees.

From now until Bandwagon’s official launch, the company is offering free one-year subscriptions to bloggers who post the Bandwagon logo on their blogs, as I’ve done here (so yes, this post is effectively paid advertising). One can never have too many backups, and free backups aren’t to be sneezed at. So if you’ve got a blog, it’s certainly worth a few minutes of your time to get a year’s free iTunes backups! And if their offerings and your needs happen to coincide in the long term, so much the better.

Update (2/28/2007): Well, forget about all that. The service went offline after just a couple of days and will apparently reappear in another form in April. Read about the details in Bandwagon Undo and Redo.

Each week this month, Take Control Books is offering a different, and very special, sale. These sales bundle several popular titles together under a theme, at the largest discounts we’ve ever offered.

This week, the sale’s theme is “Getting Around to It” (as in, getting around to things you planned to do long ago but have put off), and the titles included in the bundle are:

• Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger*
• Take Control of Customizing Tiger
• Take Control of Users & Accounts in Tiger
• Take Control of Syncing in Tiger
• Take Control of Passwords in Mac OS X*
• Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac*
• Take Control of Your AirPort Network

*Written by yours truly!

These seven ebooks together would normally sell for $55; until March 6, they’re yours for only $22. Get ‘em while they’re hot! Next week: another interesting sale.

Update: Sale #2 The second sale, beginning the week of February 11, includes five titles covering iPod/iTunes, iPhoto, iWeb, and GarageBand for just $23.18.

Update: Sale #3 The third sale, beginning the week of February 18, features six titles about working with Tiger, including my Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger and Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail, for $26.00.

Update: Sale #4 The fourth and final sale, beginning the week of February 25, features seven titles that might appeal to someone switching to a Mac, including my Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac and Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, for $25.18.

All four sales run through March 6, 2007.

Morgen and I have been back from our vacation to Indonesia and Hong Kong for more than a week now. We spent the first few days getting caught up with email and bills and struggling with jet lag. Now, life is more or less back to normal, which for us means far more work than time in which to do it. However, we’re also very happy to be home and quite excited about several new things on the horizon.

A lot happened during our absence. Some things readers may be wondering about:

How was your trip? It was mixed. There were wonderful parts and awful parts. I think that, in all, it sort of leaned slightly toward the unpleasant end of the scale. Which is, you know, just one of those things when you travel. On the plus side: I successfully turned 40. We saw some really cool things (still sorting through bazillions of pictures). We ate well. We avoided at least 13 disasters. We didn’t get sick (other than the usual minor digestive disturbances). We have some interesting stories. On the minus side: we ran into significant logistical problems. We couldn’t afford to do some of the things we were planning to do. We found the heat, the pollution, the noise, and the crowds oppressive. We experienced many frustrating cultural differences. We have some interesting stories.

What’s going on with Interesting Thing of the Day, SenseList, and The Geeky Gourmet? Progress is occurring!

• ITotD: There haven’t been any new articles on Interesting Thing of the Day since December; older articles from the archives have been appearing three times a week. Although we would have liked to keep new content going before, during, and after our trip, there just wasn’t time to make it happen. We hope to start publishing new articles next week, and later this month we’ll be fiddling with the format of the site a bit in ways that I think will benefit everyone. Interestingly—and not for the first time—we noticed that the site’s revenues actually increased significantly during the time we were away. Seriously: we didn’t lift a finger the entire month, and it turned out that January produced our highest AdSense income ever. Go figure. Maybe if we just forget about it entirely, the income will skyrocket. (But we won’t!)
• SenseList: We’re ramping back up. Look for all new, daily lists starting on Monday, along with a few site tweaks and an increased marketing and publicity effort. Our plan is to test some new approaches over the next four weeks and see if we can increase the site’s effectiveness dramatically.
• The Geeky Gourmet: I haven’t forgotten about it! I can only type so fast, though, and it’s just a lower priority for the moment. During a brainstorming session on our trip, we came up with an idea that might make it easier to infuse it (and our other sites) with new life without requiring too much effort. Stay tuned.

Your recent update of Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac doesn’t cover VMware Fusion, which went into public beta in late December. What’s your take on it? The beta looks reasonably good: better than Parallels Desktop in some respects, not as spiffy in other respects. I expect the final product will be pretty hot, but that the competition between the two for the ultimate feature set will be pretty intense for the foreseeable future. One thing VMware still has to do is provide support for running copies of Windows installed under Boot Camp, as the new betas of Parallels can do. One thing Parallels still has to do is match the performance and device support of Fusion. The next major update of Running Windows will cover Fusion, as well as the Leopard implementation of Boot Camp, in detail (meaning it won’t be released until after Leopard ships, and I’m not yet sure how long after).

Your recent update of Take Control of Mac OS X Backups doesn’t cover CrashPlan, which was introduced at Macworld Expo. What’s your take on it? (And is there an echo in here?) I’m testing it right now, and I’m in contact with the developers to discuss my impressions and suggestions for future development. CrashPlan is certainly a cool idea, and the best implementation I’ve seen so far of peer-to-peer backups. For automatic offsite archives, I can hardly imagine a simpler or more foolproof approach. However, I have some interface concerns, and a few essential pieces of basic functionality are currently missing, such as the capability to back up to local volumes and to create bootable duplicates. It also remains to be seen how it will stack up against Time Machine in Leopard. But look for a detailed review in the near future. The next major update of Backups will cover CrashPlan, as well as Time Machine, in detail (meaning it won’t be released until after Leopard ships—I’m not yet sure how long after—and yes, there’s definitely an echo in here).

In your review of backup software for Macworld (February 2007 issue), you gave Prosoft’s Data Backup a higher rating than Retrospect, which you’ve always recommended in the past. What gives? I got a few letters about this. Some wanted to know why Data Backup got such a high rating, since the version reviewed didn’t even support direct recording to optical discs. Others wanted to know if I’ve decided I no longer like Retrospect or am changing my recommendations.

Both are good programs, and both can accomplish the majority of backup tasks most people need. Data Backup has a much better interface and is actively under development. Retrospect has far better network support and scheduling options, and offers a long list of features that no other Mac backup program has—along with a sucky interface, bugs, expensive tech support, and updates that are very slow in appearing. (Also, there’s now a credible rumor afoot that EMC Insignia, having laid off a large percentage of the Retrospect team, is effectively putting the product into “life support” mode, or will soon.)

So it depends on what you need. For an individual backing up a single machine to a hard disk, Data Backup will be way easier to use, and is a better choice overall. But if you have more than one computer or are using optical or tape drives, the balance tips in Retrospect’s favor, despite the interface, bugs, and costly tech support. In addition, if you’ve purchased my Backups book, you have at your disposal a Retrospect primer that can take the edge off the interface, so I’m more likely to recommend Retrospect to someone reading my book than someone reading Macworld. Of course, the whole backup landscape could change with Leopard’s release, and I’ll revise my recommendations accordingly.

What other Take Control stuff are you working on? Egad. Lots of stuff. To wit:

• Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard is pretty much my top priority; it’ll be somewhat like Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger and Take Control of Upgrading to Panther, but will contain tons of new information, such as more detail about preparing your system for an upgrade, dealing with the peculiarities of external USB and FireWire drives on Intel vs. PowerPC machines, upgrading various Windows-on-Mac installations, and much more. As usual, we plan to release the ebook at the exact moment Leopard goes on sale in the U.S., whenever that turns out to be.
• An update to Take Control of .Mac, primarily to cover the new & improved Webmail interface. Not sure when this will ship, but it shouldn’t be too far in the future.
• Take Control of Apple Mail in Leopard, which will of course follow in the footsteps of Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger and Take Control of Email with Apple Mail. This, obviously, will also have to wait for Leopard, but I don’t know how soon thereafter it will appear.
• Smaller updates to several other ebooks are under consideration.

What do you think about the iPhone? It looks cool. I’m not thrilled with the 2-year Cingular contract in the U.S., the lack of 3G support, the closed operating system, and the fact that it won’t be available until late this year in Europe and next year in Asia. But I want to reserve judgment until I see the final product. I am looking to buy both a new cell phone and a new iPod this year, so I’m going to defer those purchases until I see whether the iPhone can meet my needs. It might, and that would be groovy.

If I’ve counted correctly, I’ve been a guest on Gene Steinberg’s Internet radio show The Tech Night Owl LIVE ten times now. Tonight I appear on the show again, this time to discuss Take Control of Mac OS X Passwords (and a bit about Thanksgiving dinner).

Despite the word “LIVE” in the show’s name, the interviews are prerecorded. You can hear a streaming version of the show as it’s broadcast at 6:00–8:00 p.m. Pacific (9:00–11:00 p.m. Eastern, or Friday at 0200 UTC), or download an MP3 recording of the show starting a day or so later.

Update: The link to the MP3 file of the show is here.

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.

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.