Latest Posts in Mac Word

Introducing the Mac Basics Superguide, Snow Leopard Edition

The readers of Macworld are amazingly diverse. Among our audience are some incredibly tech-savvy folks, and we're glad to have them. There are also some people among us who are relatively novice Mac users, who avidly read what we write in order to flex and improve their Mac skills.

For the past few years we've offered a book, the Mac Basics Superguide, that's been a hit with both audiences. And I'm happy to announce that we've just updated that book for Snow Leopard. If you’re someone who’s struggling with the basics of operating a Mac, or someone who’s a new user of Mac OS X (perhaps you’ve made the switch from Windows to Mac) this new 126-page guide will get you up to speed.

Written in an easy-to-follow style, the Mac Basics Superguide, Snow Leopard Edition will give you detailed tips and information about using the Finder and the Dock, switching between programs, using Apple’s Spotlight search tool, opening and saving your files, and setting up system preferences and user accounts. We’ve tossed in some basic security and troubleshooting advice to keep your Mac up and running smoothly. And our own Dan Frakes, who pens our Mac Gems blog and magazine column, has assembled a list of 20 great low-cost programs that will enhance your Mac experience.

But I said this book was for the Mac experts among us, too. Here's what I mean by that: It’s the book you give to the people you know who need a leg up on using their Mac—all of your friends and family members who use you as the be-all, end-all Mac resource. The reality is, a Mac expert can only be in one place at any given time. This book—available as a $12.95 PDF download (with no digital rights management of any kind—just read it using Adobe Reader, Apple’s Preview application, or even Quick Look!), or a $12.95 PDF on CD-ROM, or a beautiful $24.99 full-color, bound paperback book—can always be around as a handy reference when there’s no flesh-and-blood expert nearby. (I sent my mom a copy of the first edition of this book, and I like to think it’s reduced the number of questions she asks of me.)

You Mac experts out there might also appreciate the writers who contributed to this book: Christopher Breen, Dan Frakes, Glenn Fleishman, Rob Griffiths, Joe Kissell, Ted Landau, Harry McCracken, and Kirk McElhearn.

Want to see more before you shell out for this book? We’ve created a downloadable sample that includes the book’s complete table of contents as well as sample pages.

And yes, if you or your loved ones is still using Tiger or Leopard, we’ve still got the previous versions of those books available.

Also available in our Superguide series are the Digital Photography Superguide, the iPhone and iPod Touch Superguide, and the Mac Security Superguide. We think they’re really great books, and we hope you do, too.

Click here to get more information about how to buy the book.

Does Apple really want to sell magazines?

In all the speculation that abounds on the Web about the possibilities of an Apple-designed tablet device that would compete with e-readers from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the like, I haven’t seen a whole lot of discussion about one of the great mysteries of the idea: who would sell the content for such a device?

There are two likely answers to that question. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s take them in turn.

Apple sells content

It seems like many pundits are assuming that Apple is going to get into the business of selling books and newspapers and magazines just as it currently sells music and TV shows and movies. And it’s a possibility, given the existing iTunes infrastructure.

In this scenario, Apple’s devices (presumably not just a theoretical tablet, but the iPhone, iPod touch, and even the Mac) would gain support for reading “printed” matter downloaded directly from iTunes. On the iPhone and iPod touch (and perhaps the tablet), that support would most likely come in the form of an Apple-created reading-focused app. On the Mac, who knows? Perhaps an extension to iTunes or Preview, perhaps something new.

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iPhone Superguide comes to App Store

I’m happy to announce that we’ve released a new version of our iPhone & iPod touch Superguide, which compiles all our best information about the iPhone and iPod touch in one handy guide. Already available as an excellent e-book in PDF format for $13, the book is now also available (appropriately enough) as an iPhone app for $5.

We’ve never published a book specifically for the iPhone and iPod touch before, but we figured it might be useful for iPhone users to have our book with them as they’re out and about with their handheld device. It’s a bit of an experiment to see if people really want to consume this sort of reference material in this fashion. We’re using the same technology behind Lexcycle’s excellent Stanza e-book reader to present the content of our book. As a result, you get some of the great Stanza features, including the ability to set typefaces and font sizes, and even quickly toggle between day mode (black on white) and night mode (white on black).

Story behind the story

Now, as some of you may have read elsewhere, getting this app up on the App Store was not as easy as you might think it would be.

We submitted our app to Apple, and it was rejected. The app reviewer we spoke with suggested that there was a formatting bug in the e-book reader itself. We consulted with Lexcycle on this one, and resubmitted, confident that we had addressed the issue.

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Introducing Macworld's Total Snow Leopard Superguide

Every time Apple releases a new operating system, we pull together the most essential, in-depth, and up-to-date information about the Mac OS and create a new book that gives our readers access to it all in one place. With Snow Leopard now out and rapidly gaining acceptance, it's time for us to release Total Snow Leopard .

Following in the footsteps of our popular, everything-in-one-place guides to Mac OS X (Total OS X, Total Panther, Total Tiger, and Total Leopard), Total Snow Leopard is an information-packed 102-page book featuring just about everything you’ll need to know about Snow Leopard—all features, great and small.

We’ve taken the best of Macworld’s coverage of Mac OS X and distilled it into this book, including contributions from such luminaries as Christopher Breen, Glenn Fleishman, Dan Frakes, Rob Griffiths, Joe Kissell, Ted Landau, Kirk McElhearn, Rich Mogull, Dan Moren, Jonathan Seff, Michael Scalisi, Derrick Story, Ben Waldie, and Sharon Zardetto. The book includes information to help you set up Snow Leopard smoothly and take advantage of its most important features. It’ll also help you master the Web with Safari 4, get e-mail with Exchange, keep your Snow Leopard Mac secure, and increase productivity with text substitutions and the Services menu.

There’s a lot of stuff in Total Snow Leopard, to be sure. And it’s available in several different formats, so you can choose the one that works best for you. If you’re interested in a PDF (suitable for viewing in Preview or Adobe Reader), you can buy one and download it immediately for just $12.95. Or you can get it as a high-quality, full-color paperback book for $24.99. Don’t want to download the PDF? You can also get it mailed to you on CD-ROM for $12.95.

And if you want to see more before you pony up your hard-earned cash, I completely understand. So we’ve created a 10MB downloadable sample from the book for you to check out, just to give you a taste.

We think this book is a great resource for everyone who uses Snow Leopard. And as always, we look forward to your feedback, as well as suggestions for what e-books we should publish in the future. You can send both to ebooks (at) macworld dot com.

C4 notes: Pizza and pie shakes

The C4 indie Mac developer conference in Chicago is decidedly different. Different in that it’s the brainchild not of some conference and expo company, but of one guy — developer Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch. Different in that it’s in Chicago. Different in that it’s steadfastly a small event, happening over a weekend and with a relatively small capacity that makes it awfully hard to get into.

For those of us who are usually running ragged during major tech events in order to cover breaking news, it’s delightfully different in that there’s no news going on here. (Well, unless you count the attempts to declare AppleScript dead.) Instead, the few brave media folks who dared to join the developers at C4 get to take the time to talk to them, break bread (okay, deep-dish pizza) with them, drink beer with them. It’s a great respite after the madness of Macworld Expo and Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference.

Among the highlights at this year’s conference, which wrapped up Sunday, were:

• Briefs, a tool for letting designers rapidly put together tappable prototypes of iPhone apps with basically no code. I can’t wait to get this in the hands of our own designers.

• Titanium, a framework for building apps using JavaScript and HTML. This was the most controversial talk of the conference, with many attendees grousing about the speaker’s focus on technologies that are not the core competency of Mac and iPhone programmers. But Rentzsch delights in seeding C4 with speakers who offer a different perspective and get the attendees to think in a different way, and the Titanium presentation certainly did that, though Rentzsch chastised attendees for the tone of the Twitter comments being made by attendees during the presentation.

• The Cocotron, an attempt to port to Windows many of the core Cocoa frameworks that Mac and iPhone developers use to create their apps, thereby making it easier for Mac developers to make their apps run on both platforms.

• MacRuby, a project which is attempting to make a modified version of the Ruby scripting language into a tool Mac programmers can use to build first-class apps as an alternative to the Objective C language that currently rules the roost.

• Cocoa Boutique, a free project that lets developers embed online purchases right into their apps.

There were also provocative five-minute presentations on various topics, including the far-out (yet scarily realistic) investigation of what happens when cameras are so common and storage so cheap that we all just record our entire lives and index it for later access when we need to call up what someone actually said or did at any given moment. It would be easy to write off the talk as outlandish, but given the way technology is advancing, I think it’s not unrealistic at all.

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C4 notes: Is AppleScript dead?

Developer Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch kicked off his annual C4 indie Mac developer conference in Chicago on Friday night with a provocative claim cribbed from Steve Jobs: He showed a slide of the AppleScript logo in a coffin and declared it dead.

As with Jobs when he declared Mac OS 9 dead back in 2002, Rentzsch was making a point to a group of developers. In this case, Rentzsch was using JSTalk, a JavaScript-based method of scripting applications implemented by Flying Meat Software’s Gus Mueller in his image-editing app Acorn, as a call to arms for developers to embrace a new system for scripting applications and to stop focusing on AppleScript.

It’s an interesting point of view, and one that was tailored to Rentzsch’s audience, since adding AppleScript support to apps is hard and professional computer programmers are comfortable with more formal languages like, say, JavaScript.

I will admit that I’m deeply skeptical of the entire suggestion, not because I think AppleScript is a great language—though I use AppleScript every day, I am painfully aware of how difficult it can be to use—but because I’m concerned that programmers might not truly grasp that their customers aren’t as comfortable writing complex syntax full of brackets and semicolons as they are.

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Tracking Snow Leopard's upgrade rate

How quickly are Mac users adopting Snow Leopard? It’s hard to tell, but everyone’s got a guess. In general, Mac users are much faster to upgrade than their Windows counterparts. But Snow Leopard’s got one aspect that should drive upgrades (its $29 price tag) and another that might cause upgrades to lag (its relatively scant list of major new features).

Spurred on by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, I sorted through Macworld.com’s web statistics to gauge what the upgrade path of Macworld readers might be. As you might expect, Macworld users have been quite quick to upgrade—Snow Leopard users already make up the majority of Mac visits to Macworld.com.

The shape of Macworld’s chart is almost identical to that of Gruber’s, though users of Gruber’s site are a little bit more likely to run Snow Leopard than Macworld readers. Not surprising, really, given that Macworld draws a bit more of a mainstream audience than Gruber’s blog.

There are other sources to look at for upgrade data, of course. Clint Ecker of Ars Technica pointed out on Twitter that a majority of Ars users transitioned to Snow Leopard in 9 days. The developers of open-source chat client Adium offer some OS statistics that show about 24 percent of its users are on Snow Leopard. And software developers The Omni Group have a chart showing Snow Leopard usage at 23.5 percent.

I’m inclined to believe a number like Omni Group’s is probably a more realistic assessment of where the Mac installed base is as a whole, because users of web sites such as Macworld.com and Daring Fireball are much more active Mac users, interested in what’s going on with the Mac on the Web and therefore more likely to upgrade. There’s no such guarantee for the people using Omni Group’s software, since those apps report back data without any visits to the web being necessary.

Still, it’s interesting to see how fast some corners of the Mac world have adapted to Snow Leopard. Compare that to the adoption rate of Windows Vista, which was used by only 14 percent of PC World’s web visitors after an entire year in the market. It took Windows XP 11 months to surpass Windows 98 on PC World’s site. It took Snow Leopard about 20 days to do the same at Macworld.

Is this ironclad, scientific evidence? Nah. But I do think it shows that Mac users tend to be active upgraders, that people who visit Mac-related Web sites are even more likely to upgrade, and that Snow Leopard is an upgrade that is being rapidly embraced.

Apple's music event, in holiday colors

Media and user reaction to Wednesday’s Apple “Rock and roll” event has been pretty much what it is for most Apple events: full of shock that unlikely rumors didn’t actually come true and disappointment that what Apple announced was nice, but hardly earth shattering.

But think of the event from Apple’s perspective. Think in terms of red and green. As in Christmas colors. Or as in red stockings stuffed with iPods and big green wads of cash. Because Apple’s fall iPod event, which pretty much happens this time every year, is about one thing: priming the pump for holiday iPod sales.

I’m not sure if most people understand just what the holiday quarter means for Apple, financially. In 2008, Apple brought in $10.2 billion in sales that quarter, 25 percent more than the average of the previous three quarters. In 2007, it was $9.6 billion, a 41 percent jump. In 2006, $5.7 billion, up 38 percent. Or view it in terms of iPod sales: In 2008 Apple sold 22.7 million iPods in the holiday quarter, and 32.7 million during the other nine months of the year. In 2007, it was 22.1 million iPods compared to 30 million the rest of the year.

The holidays, whether you focus on iPod units or sheer dollars, are huge for Apple. And the purpose of the fall iPod event is for Apple to tell a story about the products it’s going to make available during that period. (It’s no mistake that the two most important product announcements at Wednesday’s event were accompanied by television commercials.) That’s why it’s useful to look at this week’s Apple announcements through that filter.

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AT&T's many missed iPhone opportunities

Who would have expected that Public Enemy Number One coming out of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference would be AT&T? I mean, nobody loves the phone company, or the cable company, or the electric company. (As a kid I did love “The Electric Company,” but these days as a homeowner my local utility features many more bills and much less Rita Moreno, thereby diminishing my enthusiasm.) But the outright booing of AT&T, egged on by Apple executives? I was shocked.

This is not to say that AT&T doesn’t deserve the criticism. Presumably Apple chose to single out its U.S. carrier partner out of frustration with AT&T’s intransigence, as a negotiating ploy, or a little bit of both. But the fact remains, Apple provided the set-up. First, by mentioning AT&T as an afterthought among carrier partners who would be offering MMS support on the day iPhone 3.0 shipped. As Apple’s senior vice president of iPhone software Scott Forstall said:

Now, MMS requires carrier support as well. Twenty-nine of our carrier partners in 76 countries around the world will support MMS at the launch of iPhone OS 3.0. In the United States, AT&T will be ready to support MMS later this summer. Next.

That strange singling out of AT&T as a laggard (to use a classic Steve Jobsism) produced more laughs than boos among the audience of developers and members of the media. The boos came on a later slide, when Forstall promoted the new tethering function of iPhone OS 3.0 — a feature announced in March that allows your computer to share the iPhone’s connection to the Internet if you’re somewhere without Wi-Fi. Forstall said:

Like MMS, this requires carrier support. We have 22 carrier partners in 42 countries around the world that will support this at the launch of iPhone 3.0, and more will be rolling out… later.

This time Forstall didn’t mention AT&T. He didn’t have to. The accompanying slide featured Apple carrier partners great and small, such as LuxGSM (Luxembourg), Telkomsel (Indonesia), VimpelCom (Russia), Telenor (Scandanavia), and Turkcell (Turkey), not to mention the European heavyweights O2, T-Mobile, and Vodafone and even much-maligned Canadian carrier Rogers. The familiar AT&T globe logo was nowhere to be seen. And thus began a cadence of boos along with plenty of derisive laughter.

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Don't look inside Apple's black box

Ask Apple what’s in the iPhone and they’ll treat it like a black box, albeit one powered by Apple’s special brand of technological magic. Or maybe elves. Or magic beans.

I exaggerate, a little. But the fact remains: when it comes to the iPhone (and its non-phone counterpart, the iPod touch), Apple doesn’t want the product to be described using the geeky tech language that we all use to discuss computers.

When I sat down with senior director of worldwide iPhone product marketing manager Bob Borchers on Monday, he was clear that “the usual speeds and feeds” aren’t the way Apple likes to talk about the iPhone. “Overall, it’s just a snappier experience. There are so many different facets to it — it’s just faster, better, quicker, snappier, and a great experience.”

All Apple wants you to know about the iPhone 3G S is that “the S simply stands for speed,” to quote Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller — speed at opening apps, speed at playing games, speed at downloading stuff on the network. How does that speed get in there? Let’s not go there.

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