For some time, Apple has given the Designated Family Tech Support Personnel among us a small reprieve with its “Find out how” selection of tutorial videos. While they don’t really tackle inevitable questions like “was deleting ~/Library/Keychains a bad idea?,” they serve as succinct primers for The Way of the Mac and Apple’s various apps and services. Now, if your tech-blossoming family and friends prefer to gobble their media in a subscription format, Apple has finally created iTunes Store podcast channels for its “Find out how” series.

Organized by application, service, or topic, the nine “Find out how” podcasts that Apple has published so far cover MobileMe, iWork ’09, iWeb ’09, and of course, Mac Basics (search for “Apple find out how” to see them all). There are around ten to 20 episodes in each of these podcasts, though for some series it seems that not all episodes have made the transition from Apple’s site to their podcast counterpart. While the iMovie podcast has a few more episodes than Apple’s website, the Mac Basics podcast is short around ten or so episodes.

It’s nice to see Apple making these useful tutorials available in more ways, and hopefully future videos will continue to keep the attention of aspiring i-everything users. They may not make a dramatic dent in the number of family tech support hours that some of us clock, but every little bit certainly helps.

For Mac e-mail software, Apple Mail is good enough, but barely just. Microsoft Entourage has retail polish and bloat, while Mozilla Thunderbird is clearly a product of open source software.

There’s room for something in between, and Postbox might be it.

Version 1.1.1, which was released by Postbox Monday, feels a little more at home on Mac OS X. It features the ability to use Spotlight to search for messages and attachments in Postbox and full integration with Mac OS X’s very own Address Book. Setting Postbox as your default e-mail client will open the door for two-way communication with iCal for notifications and events, and allow you to easily transfer photos from iPhoto. Just like many other Mac apps, Postbox can now look up words in Dictionary with a right click, and allows you to create new messages by dragging and dropping files on its Dock icon.

Built by former Mozilla staff, Postbox runs on Mozilla’s Gecko engine, the same technology behind Firefox, Camino, Songbird, and Thunderbird. Apart from sharing the same foundation as other Mozilla-derived software, it has a few business-friendly features that should appeal to former Outlook users. E-mail can be filed into a variety of topics, like folders and filters in Outlook. For people on a tight schedule, Postbox can create brand new items for a to-do list or transform individual e-mails into to-do items.

Most impressively, Postbox picks out some of the most important bits out of your e-mail. On the right-hand side of every e-mail you view, you’ll see lists containing every address mentioned with links to Google Maps, attachments with image previews, links to every Website found, and a tiny card with the sender’s contact information pulled from your address book. In addition, there’s a wealth of search options, filters and organized lists featuring all the recent messages, files, images, and links you’ve sent and received, as demonstrated by this video.

Postbox has to spend a few minutes indexing all your mail before these helpful search options and lists become available, and the iPhoto, Facebook and Twitter integration features feel a bit superfluous to me. Nitpicking aside, the latest version of Postbox promises to be a great e-mail client that the folks behind Letters.app could learn a thing or two from.

Postbox costs $40 and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

The Great Amazon Delisting may be coming to an end, according to the New York Times. What no one can quite understand is why it happened at all, or took so long to resolve.

A little more than a week ago, Amazon removed all Macmillan books from its online store, both in Kindle versions and the dead-tree variety. This was in response to hardball negotiations between Macmillan and Amazon over pricing of Kindle e-books. Amazon, the market leader in the e-book market, wants to maintain pricing of new e-books at $9.99 to maintain the Kindle's dominance; Macmillan and other publishers, on the other hand, want to control the price of their electronic products.

It's unclear what effect a certain upstart in the iBooks... er, e-book market had on these negotiations, but few think it’s a coincidence that Amazon exercised the nuclear option only two days after Apple announced the iPad and its own online bookstore. Apple is offering publishers the right to set their own prices, and takes a 30 percent cut, much as it does for the App Store; in the book biz, this is called the “agency model,” and it’s what publishers have been pushing Amazon to adopt.

Two other major publishers are now on the agency model bandwagon, and Amazon has publicly capitulated to the new terms. But online Amazon sales continued merrily along for HarperCollins and Hachette all week, while it took five days for Amazon to flip the database switch for Macmillan.

Amazon has attempted to spin its actions as protecting the consumer interest in cheap e-books, but influential author and publisher blogs have generally ranged in calling the Amazon move something between ill-advised and stunningly boneheaded. Most readers, the reasoning goes, neither know nor care who publishes their favorite authors, or about the internecine negotiations between major players in the book market; all they see is that Amazon isn’t selling books they want to buy. Amazon’s move hurt Macmillan's bottom line for the last week, but if those customers bounced over to another online bookstore (or, heaven forfend, a brick-and-mortar store), the long term impact on sales will accrue far more to Amazon than anyone else.

Which seems an odd strategy, when Apple is perceived not as a new e-book startup, but rather the presumptive 800-pound gorilla. Apple has already crushed the competition in both the music and smartphone industries; Amazon may have a 12-length lead starting this race, but no one thinks the odds are 50-1 against Apple catching up. Five hundred dollars will buy you either a Kindle DX ebook reader, or (in two months) an iPad with many more features. Such as color. And 140,000 other applications.

In any case, some news outlets have jumped to the wrong conclusions regarding some aspects of this story (and noblesse oblige prevents me from including any links in this sentence). I don’t have any insider information, but I’ll put on my prognosticator hat and make a few predictions:

1. This isn’t the “death of the $9.99 e-book.” It’s the death of the $9.99 bestseller... but that particular product has been on life support, thanks to Amazon’s willingness to lose money on most of those sales. That would have lasted only so long as Amazon felt the need to establish a monopoly position; losing money and making it up on volume hasn’t been a viable long-term strategy since 1999.
2. This is potentially the beginning, however, of the cheaper non-bestseller. Book publishing is a classic example of a long tail industry; for every bestseller, there are literally tens of thousands of other books which aren’t. Publishers can’t tinker with the prices of the rest of their products, since the prices are inconveniently permanently printed on the back cover, but they can easily do so with e-books. Every other media industry which has migrated onto the Internet has seen pricing wars and deep discounting—witness the ubiquity of the 99-cent iPhone app. It’ll be a long while before you see e-books for a buck, but publishers will be quick to recognize the difference between selling 100 copies of a 2005 e-book for $14.95, or 1,000 copies for $5.95. The floor for an ebook’s price will likely be set by the cost of its equivalent paperback; once a book goes out of print, though, that floor drops out.
3. It remains to be seen how competition between online booksellers will affect pricing; it is notably paradoxical that the entry of Apple into the market will raise the price of some books. Most likely, publishers will keep pricing at parity between the Kindle and iBooks versions, but future strategies may include platform competition and wholesale discounting.
4. What hasn’t changed: you still don’t really own the e-books you buy. Thanks to e-book DRM, they’re more like semi-permanent rentals. Unless Apple has something up its sleeve with its use of the ePub industry standard, your e-books will continue to be locked in to a particular platform. I personally expect to see iBooks available on iPhones (much as Kindle e-books are), but good luck getting your encrypted e-books running on your laptop or next year’s gadget from another manufacturer. If you want to buy a book which you can lend to a friend, or which you’re guaranteed to be able to read in 2020 regardless of technological change, paper is still your best friend.

This week, Macworld Expo opens in San Francisco. And, as everyone likely knows, it’s a particularly significant episode of Expo because Apple will not be counted among the participants. You know what this means: No Apple announcements or booth, no Steve-led keynote, fewer vendors, and little front-page coverage.

Yet when I put my selfish desires aside, I care very little about Apple’s absence. Because, for me, what Apple does and doesn’t do at Expo makes up a small portion of the value I derive from it.

At last year’s keynote presentation, Phil Schiller repeated Apple’s line regarding trade shows—“Every week, 3.4 million customers visit an Apple store around the world…. That’s 100 Macworlds each and every week.”

And, from Apple’s perspective, he’s right. For Apple, Macworld Expo was a marketing event. It was a way to create buzz about new products and the company and give attendees a chance for some hands-on time (even though the extent of that hands-on time might be staring at an iPhone suspended in a glass case). While the Apple Stores certainly serve to sell products, they also provide some of the same experience as meandering through the Apple booth—you have a chance to gawk at Apple’s product line and ask questions.

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Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld UK. Visit Macworld UK’s blog page for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.

This is not an iPad, despite the sound-alike name X2 chose for its Windows 7 device.

With perfect timing, a company called X2 has announced the iTablet, a name once rumored for Apple’s iPad prior to Steve Jobs unveiling the tablet late last month.

Expected to be available from April, the iTablet runs Windows 7 on a 1.6GHz Intel chip. The iTablet will have space for a 250GB hard drive, 802.11b/g Wi-fi and optional 3G mobile broadband. The device will support Flash, unlike Apple's iPad, and will have 3 USB ports and a 1.3Mp webcam.

HDMI output is offered as an optional extra.

For the fashion conscious, the 10.2-inch or 12.1-inch, 252x192x35mm tablet will be offered in a choice of black, white, blue, pink, yellow, red or grey.

Pricing has yet to be confirmed.

PC Advisor notes X2 is an industrial product design company whose technical director, Robin Daunter, was formerly the head of R&D at Evesham Technology.

However, with the exception of Windows 7, the device may not be as new as some reports suggest. “Pretty sure the X2 iTablet suddenly making the UK tech rounds is the same AMtek iTablet T200 that’s been out for years now... 2007 in fact,” notes Engadget editor Thomas Ricker on his Twitter feed.

[Via Electricpig]

Everyone’s got it! It’s the next big thing, computing reinvented, or it’s a piece of junk! Nothing more than a sized-up iPod touch!

The Macalope is pointedly pro-iPad and this week he waxes poetic again, so if that’s not your cup of tea, just close the lid of your laptop now. If you’re using a desktop computer, just angrily shove your monitor off your desk.

Corporate IT shops, of course, won’t much care for the iPad. And what about that name? Apple doesn’t even fully own it yet! Oh, the nerve! The cheek! The audacity! The other words in the thesaurus! It’s enough to give a noted technology pundit a bad case of the vapors!

Shameless boosterism

You’re going to have to forgive the Macalope. He fully admits he’s got pro-iPad derangement syndrome. Sorry, but have you seen his head? What did you expect when Apple came out with something that’s his diminutive but precocious relative?

The problem the horny one has with the detractors is they are almost exclusively arguing about specific features the iPad lacks—Flash, a camera, an SD card slot, bladdity, bladdity. “A netbook has all these things! And costs less!” It’s true! Guess what? This isn’t a netbook replacement! It’s something completely different.

Mike Monteiro sees it.

The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing.

It’s the payoff to all the work done by multiple industries over the last 20–30 years. It’s the subtraction of 20lbs of textbooks in my son’s backpack, and the device I finally feel comfortable buying my parents.

Andy Ihnatko had a terrific analogy on the latest edition of MacBreak Weekly to a story the Macalope had heard before. Back in the 1960s, designers of the lunar lander were having terrible trouble getting the thing to pencil out within the constraints they had. The astronauts needed a clear field of view, but a sitting astronaut requires a large swath of glass in order to gain peripheral vision.

So they took out the seats. Not only did that solve the sight problem, it also solved the weight problem and the problem of mobility within the lander.

Nobody wants to give anything up, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do to get something back—something a netbook or a tablet running Windows 7 will never have.

And that is freedom. Freedom to work outside the constraints of everything that came before. If that sounds like Apple-booster double talk for “STEVE JOBS HAS COMMANDED ME TO PROMOTE THE IPAD AT ALL COSTS,” well, sorry. It’s a vision of technology you can either buy into or not. The Macalope’s laid down the (metaphorical) cash, but he recognizes there are those who haven’t. For you people, here’s a mouse you might like.

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According to a survey published by online shopping comparison site Retrevo, users have lost interest in the iPad since Apple announced the new device last month. However, as Retrevo's past surveys have shown, statistics can be massaged to say pretty much anything

The company ran a survey of more than 1,000 randomly-selected users from its Website the week before the announcement, followed by the same survey (over a different population sample, which might raise eyebrows) a week later.

Survey participants were asked a series of questions revolving around their interest in Apple's new product, ranging from whether they were aware of it to whether they thought they would need one and whether they would want to pay extra for optional 3G data functionality.

The results seem to indicate a definite decline in the level of interest among respondents once details about the iPad were revealed on January 27: the number of people aware of the device's existence but not interested in buying it doubled from 26 percent all the way to 52 percent, while 61 percent of the respondents didn't think that they would need an iPad after finding out about it, compared to 49 percent before. Retrevo also claims that 59 percent of the people it interviewed do not want to pay the extra $130 required to purchase a 3G-enabled iPad.

This data, however, needs to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt (or two). The first survey was essentially asking respondents for their interest in a product that didn't event exist at the time—remember that Apple had not made any formal announcements about what they were going to present until Steve Jobs pulled his trademark black cloth from the iPad's surface at its unveiling.

By the time the second survey was conducted, the bubble of expectation that had built over the tablet had burst, leaving users answering questions about an unfinished product that nobody outside Apple (with the possible exception of Stephen Colbert) has had an opportunity to use for more than thirty minutes.

From this point of view, therefore, Retrevo's survey is more likely to measure the effect that anticipation and rumours have had on the market's expectations when it comes to the iPad than its actual sales potential.

One interesting fact, however, emerges from the report: a whopping 82 percent of the survey respondents were aware of the iPad after its announcement. Considering that the device is still weeks away from its actual launch, this clearly indicates that Apple's ability to raise awareness about its products is still second to none. Whether awareness will translate into sales is likely to remain difficult to gauge until the iPads is finally shipping and the consumers have had an opportunity to form their opinions.

According to our cousins at Computerworld, the developers of Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser are deep in discussions about the future of the program on Mac OS X Tiger. While the final nail has yet to be driven into the purest Carpathian wood of 10.4’s coffin, the writing for the striped cat appears to be on the wall.

Support for Tiger was dropped from the development version of Mozilla’s Gecko framework last September, but the required code for supporting 10.4 was left intact, in case that decision was changed. On Thursday, Mozilla developer Josh Aas laid out the case for dropping support for Tiger altogether, in order to take advantage of more modern features introduced in Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Mozilla's stats from January 25 of this year show that users on 10.4 account for about 24 percent of Mac users running Firefox 3.5 and about 12 percent running the recent 3.6 update—all told, almost 1.5 million out of more than 6 million Mac Firefox users. That’s not bad for an operating system that was released in April 2005, but even that will likely not be enough to earn Tiger support a last-minute pardon. Aas says that historically, Firefox has not lost significant market share for dropping previous OS X versions.

Were support for Tiger to go the way of the garefowl, users would be able to continue using Firefox 3.6 until Mozilla discontinues support for that, which is scheduled for several months after the release of the next major Firefox version later this year.

Mozilla would hardly be on the only developer to drop support for the five year-old OS; many new programs released these days require at least Mac OS X 10.5. In fact, as Mozilla’s Aas points out, the company is usually one of the last to support older OS X releases, sometimes to its detriment as Apple at some point stops issuing security updates for previous versions of OS X.

As of this writing, the thread contained ten messages and only one poster objected to the 10.4 removal, on the basis of not being able to personally afford to upgrade his equipment. It seems a foregone conclusion that support for Tiger will be on the next ship to the Grey Havens and, while some may mourn its demise, the vast majority of Mac users are likely to not even notice its passing.

MacFriendly, a company known for releasing bundles of apps at far lower prices than their combined values, has released its latest bundle of goods, MacFriendly 3. This latest bundle consists of 12 handy applications for Mac users. While the bundle is valued at over $400, MacFriendly is selling it for $50, which represents a savings of over 85 percent off the list prices. Of course, the catch is that you might not actually want to use all of the apps.

If a few of the bundled apps do happen to catch your fancy, you could be in for some pretty nice savings. For example, Twisted Wave, an audio-editing app included in the bundle, retails for $80 on its own—so if you're interested in just that particular app, MacFriendly will actually save you money. Other app highlights include CrossOver Mac, a Windows-to-Macintosh compatibility tool; Calico Panorama, an automatic multi-row panorama stitcher; and MovieSherlock, which lets you download and convert YouTube movies. The different apps have varying system requirements, but most seem to support OS X 10.4.x or higher.

MacFriendly is sweetening the deal even more by donating a portion of each sale to support animal rescue programs. MacFriendly bundles might not have everything you're looking for, but they're always worth checking out—if you're interested in more than a few of the apps, you're likely to save big. Alas, good things don't last forever, and this current offer will end on February 26th.

Editor’s Note: This story is excerpted from Computerworld. For more Mac coverage, visit Computerworld’s Macintosh Knowledge Center.

The iPad is too big and lacks communication capabilities, argued the former Apple executive who oversaw the demise of the company’s iconic-but-flawed Newton more than a decade ago.

And it’s no tablet, no matter what people say.

“The iPad is not a tablet, it’s another addendum to the iPhone, the iPod Touch,” said Andreas Haas, the CEO of Axiotron, a small El Segundo, Calif. company he founded in 2005. “It’s the Newton reborn.”

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