Mac Stuff

At long last, an ebook many months in the making is now available for sale: Take Control of .Mac. Normally $15, this 182-page ebook has an introductory sale price of $10. It is, if I do say so myself, the best guide to using .Mac in existence. If you’re a .Mac member, you’ll learn tons of information about making the most of your subscription, including working with email, iDisk, Address Book, .Mac Groups, Backup, and much more. You’ll also learn which aspects of .Mac are less than perfect, and how to avoid, solve, or work around many common frustrations.

If you’re not a .Mac member, this is the perfect time to join. You can sign up for a no-strings-attached 60-day trial membership by clicking the banner below; thereafter, it costs a very reasonable $99 per year for 1 GB of online storage (for files and email), Web hosting, photo sharing, and all sorts of other goodies.

This is also an important milestone for me: it’s my eighth published Take Control book in just over two years (not counting updates or translations)—I couldn’t believe it myself when I realized I’d been keeping up an almost one-ebook-per-quarter schedule, especially considering how long some of these newer titles have been.

I had my first serious conversation about writing this ebook with Adam Engst (publisher) and Dan Frakes (editor) back in January, at Macworld Expo. At that time, it seemed like a fairly easy and straightforward project, and I expected it would be out by mid-year at the latest. And then, of course, things happened—such as the other new and updated ebooks I’d committed to write, a long list of Macworld articles, and countless other tasks that took much longer than I expected. Plus, right after I finished the first draft of book, in late September, Apple made some significant changes to .Mac, forcing me to redo a sizable portion of the ebook before my editor even had a look at it.

In any case, I’m extremely pleased with the final result. This will be the last Take Control ebook (mine or anyone else’s) to be released in 2005, but we’ll be back in full force with new titles beginning in January. I’ve already agreed to write one new ebook and edit another, plus I have at least two updates on my list. With any luck, this time I can take control of Take Control and not begin the year with 6 months of work that turns out to take 12!

After even more delays and misadventures than usual, I’m happy to report that two of the ebooks I’ve been working on since way back when are now available for sale.

Today, TidBITS released Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger, a new 184-page, $10 ebook that is now the definitive reference on the version of Mail that ships with Tiger. Although based loosely on last year’s Take Control of Email with Apple Mail (which covered the Panther version of Mail), this new ebook has been completely revamped, and in the process has grown more than 80 pages longer than its predecessor. It covers such new features as Spotlight searching, smart mailboxes, photo management, HTML email, and parental controls. Anyone who has struggled with Mail 2.x should find a great deal of helpful information in this ebook.

In addition, there’s a minor (free) update available to Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail, now at version 1.2. It covers a few spam-related changes in the Tiger version of Mail, plus the newest versions of several third-party anti-spam utilities.

With luck, we’ll see a major update to Take Control of Mac OS X Backups in the next week or so, followed by the long-awaited Take Control of .Mac. And don’t forget: ebooks make terrific holiday gifts!

In late September, I mentioned that I’d no sooner finished a draft of an ebook about .Mac than Apple went and changed the service, updated their Backup utility, and generally wreaked havoc on my schedule by forcing me to spend days rewriting. Specifically, they fixed a number of issues I’d complained about, so I had to take out my complaints and even add a compliment or two.

Incredibly, that’s just happened again. Today, while I was in the process of reviewing my editor’s first round of corrections to my forthcoming Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger, Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.3. This update includes about a dozen changes to Mail, which will cost me a morning of experimentation and rewrites. And yes, in all probability, the deletion of a few gripes. I hate it when they do that.

One thing I noticed right away after applying the update is that my rules no longer worked—at all. After a few panicked minutes of tests, I found the source of the problem: the MailTags plug-in, which enables you to add Spotlight-searchable metadata to your messages. Disabling the plug-in resolves the problem. I reported this to the developer, and hope that an update will be forthcoming. (Update: Just a few hours after my initial post, MailTags 1.1 was released; it fixes this problem and adds a long list of new features. Excellent.)

I will say this, though: When this new ebook comes out in a couple of weeks, it will be shockingly up-to-date!