Breaking Windows

When developers start taking features out of programs, it is really baffling. Microsoft does this all the time. Office 2008 no longer has support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) for example, leaving many people with intricate VBA-based workflows scratching their heads.

Office 2008 is a joke of an upgrade from 2004. In four full years they have not made one year of improvements. In a nutshell, that is my review of Office 2008 as an entire package.

One thing they decided was important to delete was access to the Scripts menu from the right-click menu of Entourage 2008 via the Execute Script sub-menu. I use SpamSieve, it is a great product. When you want to train a message flagged as "spam" to be "good" you right-click the offending message and go to Execute Script > SpamSieve - Train Good.

In Entourage 2008, Scripts no longer shows up in the contextual menu, why? You have to go to the actual scripts menu in the menu bar at the top of the screen. What a pain. The only way to get the Scripts functionality back is to write a Rule that performs an AppleScript, because of course you can use the right-click menu to apply a Rule.

Office came out of the oven half baked, from privelege errors to file permission errors, and many other known issues. I sure am glad I am not using 10.5 yet on my G5, because AppleScript and Automator Scripts do not work in Entourage 2008 under Leopard.

According to Entourage 2008, every link in an email might be a fraud, it seems.

So very annoying. Now, not every link you click on gives this dialog box, but I have found that links in HTML formatted newsletters, like the Basecamp newsletter used in this example, always provoke this dialog.

Microsoft, this is not a phishing attempt. 37 Signals is not trying to hijack my identity. They are, in fact, tracking how many click on their email newsletter. You see, I can tell the difference. If your software cannot, then this new "feature" in Entourage 2008 is worthless to me.

Now, how do I turn the damn thing off?

At first glance, Adobe's pricing structure for Creative Suite 3 is insane. They are no longer offering two versions -- oh no -- they now have six different configurations to chose from. Creative Suite 3 comes in Design Premium and Standard, Web Premium and Standard, Production Premium, and the one box to rule them all, Master Collection.

Why would they do this? Well, for one, they bought Macromedia and are rolling out CS3 versions of (most) all of their acquired goodies. Why didn't Director get the CS3 treatment? Who knows, but Flash, Dreamweaver, Contribute and Fireworks did.

Foxmarks is an extension for Firefox that synchronizes bookmarks across multiple machines. It uses a system similar to how .Mac and Safari work - only without that $99 a year charge. Using the Foxmarks server is free, and syncing is easy.

Considering I now dominantly use Firefox, this is one of the greatest extensions I have found for Firefox.

Safari has its own extendibility - although it may not have the developer community behind it like Firefox has. Pimp My Safari lists all the latest Safari plugins. As the homepage suggests: Saft, PithHelmet, and SafariStand are the best plugins to get.

This promotion is only good for January. You do not get ALL of the features of a paid account, but you do get most. I personally like VersionTracker but free is free.

MacUpdate, for those who do not know, "watches the latest Macintosh software updates every day, all day long, so you can keep your software up-to-date with the most current bug fixes and features." MacUpdate keeps track of Mac OS 9 and OS X software. In contrast, VersionTracker keeps track of Mac OS 9, OS X, Windows, and Palm software.

Both charge too much if you ask me.

Citing "business priorities," Microsoft will no longer develop Windows Media Player (WMP) for the Mac. This comes days after Microsoft announced continued Mac support for Office at the Macworld Keynote. That agreement only dealt with Office, giving them free reign to axe anything else. Microsoft already dropped Internet Explorer for Mac.

Rob Griffiths has an iWork '06 first look piece online. It looks like the new bullet feature alone is worth the cost. It has a lot of other nice new features of course.

...What it also offered, but didn't bother to disclose, was the addition of a bit of spyware to the iTunes interface. As reported on boingboing and other sites, the new iTunes mini store, which appears directly below the song list area in the main iTunes window, spies on your listening habits.

You will also notice on Hints that Rob has been told that Apple (by Apple) is not mining any data from you. Which is good. But thanks Apple for putting that "feature" in the update note!

You disable the mini store by just collapsing it. But I find it a cool feature. Even if it has Big Brother written all over it.

Microsoft stated two years ago that support for Internet Explorer for Mac would end in 2005. It has finally been two years. Two very long and painful years if you ask me.

In a note posted to Microsoft's Mactopia Web site, "Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer for Mac on December 31st, 2005, and will provide no further security or performance updates." This is already the case, but only unofficially. They will also pull downloads of IE for Mac as of January 31st, 2006.

Just wanted to say thanks for the fix of the Acro PDFMaker toolbar. Holy &*#$!, that was ticking me off!

Next time I'm in town I'll buy you a beer.
Corey

I have been a .Mac user and supporter for years. But alas this time around I cannot justify the $99 a year price tag. This is because of a number of factors. The main problem I have is that .Mac services are duplicated in cheaper services I pay for. I have a web host, and I have grown to not use the iCal and iPhoto integration of .Mac. With the advent of bigger USB thumb drives I find I do not even use my iDisk anymore. That was the last straw.

When I heard that Apple was going to make an announcement to coincide with the PhotoPlus Expo in New York City, I expected to see an advanced version of iPhoto. What I got was something so much more exciting—a pro-level application that promises to finally make working with raw images as easy as working with JPEGs.

If anyone can make the RAW format easy to use it is Apple. But is Aperture a Photoshop killer? Priced at $499, it could cut into Adobe's Mac sales. I wonder how Adobe will react to this one?

This is most commonly due to installing Photoshop CS before doing an archive and install of Mac OS10.3.

The easiest solution is to reinstall Photoshop CS after you have installed Mac OS10.3 or OS 10.4 Easiest way to reinstall Photoshop without disturbing the original install is to install to your desktop. after the install is done just trash the Photoshop folder on the desktop.

Another mystery solved! This is such an annoying problem that I now know how to fix at work.

...individual .Mac accounts now offer 10GB of data transfer—up from 3GB previously. And for those who purchase an additional 1GB of storage space from Apple for $50 a year, the total bandwidth is 25GB. With these greater limits, I think few .Mac users will have problems with bandwidth from now on. And for that, I say good job.

As if the 1 GB of combined iDisk and email storage was not enough, you now get 10 GB of bandwidth a month for your $100, not to mention all the other features you get. A lot of Mac shareware developers use .Mac to host their downloads, and it is really annoying when they have no more bandwidth left for that month.

I personally pay for .Mac for seamless sync of my PowerBook and my G5. The upgrade to 1 GB of file storage was enough of a reason for me to renew my membership this year.

Toast 7 is really great. It is a big improvement over Toast 6. There seems to be a bug with the PSP Video export feature in Toast 7.0.1 however. Toast crashes every time you try and export to PSP Video. I have been in contact with the Roxio technical support lead after posting and receiving feedback on the Roxio forums.

When it's time to burn music, photos, or movies to CDs and DVDs, many Mac users turn to Toast, which has just undergone a major overhaul from Roxio. Sure, this latest version bears some resemblance to Toast 6, but Toast 7 Titanium features some of the most substantial changes to the program in years.

Why write a review when someone else has done it already? But Peter is right. One of the other most substantial changes is that it has a manual. Make that a printed manual. I don't remember seeing such a well put together manual (read: more then 5 pages) since Toast 3.

Roxio at the end of the month will release a new version of their CD and DVD burning software for the Mac — Toast 7 Titanium. While the new release looks similar to its predecessor, it features extensive changes under the hood, including support for the DivX video compression format, the ability to browse iLife content and many other changes.

Forget iPSP - which last I checked was not that great - I will use Toast 7 for all my PSP video needs. I rely on Toast for all my other burning needs as it is. Buy.com has Toast 7 for $78.99, by the way.

It will be interesting to see how this DivX support in Toast 7 is, as he official DivX site says the latest version of the DivX codec is not compatible with QuickTime 7, and therefor OS 10.4.

I am also glad to see that Roxio added all the goodies that are in their Popcorn app to Toast 7.

Data spanning is another welcome feature. This is a big upgrade from 6.0.x, and I am really looking forward to it.

Just wanted to drop a line and give a big THANK YOU for helping me get rid of that super annoying toolbar. I owe you a beverage of your choice if you're ever in Atlanta. :)

I did notice that the file path for the .dot, .ppa, and .xla file is slightly different than what you have laid out in your article. I found the path to be Hard Drive/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/ Office/Startup/App. No biggie, but if you're still updating the doc, I thought you might want to know. Thanks again for the help!

David

Thanks David, when I wrote this, it was for Office v. X. When I updated it for Office 2004 I guess I missed the change in the path. So thanks, I fixed the path for good now (I hope).

As you can see I have had a lot of "thank yous" on this one. From both Breaking Windows, and on Blogcritics. I even got hit by Slashdot for this post. You are very welcome, I am glad to help.

Yahoo! Inc. on Monday will announce the acquisition of Konfabulator... company executives said they would also be giving Konfabulator away for free.

Yahoo! said the reason they purchased Konfabulator was that they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo! Web site.

It looks to me like Yahoo! has out googled Google. It sounds like a great idea - to be able to mine Yahoo! services with the Konfabulator GUI. Giving it away for free is a nice touch. Now I will download it for Windows and see how much that messes things up.

Ken,

I found your post concerning Entourage and error 17099. I received this error last night for the first time. I teach an online course and was sending an email to a group (created a group in address book with students email addresses) and blocking their email addresses from being seen. I had done this several other times and it worked fine.

Once the progress window completed, I rec’d the error message. Thinking that it had not gone out, I left it in my Outbox to try again (every five minutes). A couple hours later I heard from one of my students – she’d rec’d the message 29 times.

All other functions in Entourage are working fine. I receive and send email with no errors. But, I just tried to send another group email and the same error occurred. I assume that the email is going through, but am vexed by the error message.

Did you learn anything else about this situation? Was your similar? What to do?

Sorry for the long email – just wanted to be thorough – not trying to bore you.

Thanks,
Jane

Thanks for the email Jane. I got that error once and once only *knocks on wood* so I still do not know what it was all about. I send emails to groups of upwards of 7,000 people using Entourage 2004, and that has never triggered the error. So I am also still looking for the answer...

Neometric Software has released PHP Studio 1.0. The software lets users write, visualized and test PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) code. PHP Studio costs US$25 to register and requires Mac OS X v10.3 or later.

I wonder how it stacks up to Zend Studio 4, which costs a lot more, but is a lot more complete.

But the $25 price tag is great for casual PHP work. If you don't use Dreamweaver, or Zend Studio, this might be something to look into.

PHP Studio has a searchable Functions Browser that is nice. The Help Browser is nothing more then a window that loads the documentation on php.net. But that is still helpful nonetheless.

I have had it with Virtual PC 7
I have been meaning to review Virtual PC 7 for some time now. So I guess you could call this a review of the latest and greatest version of Virtual PC. I must admit up front though, it is by someone who is very pissed off about wasting so much time and money on a promise.

Macworld recently reviewed Adobe Photoshop (Adobe talks), Illustrator (Adobe talks), InDesign (Adobe talks), and GoLive (Adobe talks), all part of the CS2 suite. Macworld has also posted an "Adobe talks" series that goes further into the new Creative Suite, this series has a good bit of information.

Today they added a review of Adobe Bridge and a piece on Bridge and VersionCue.

I am using Office 2004, Mac OS X 10.3.9.  I get the following error when sending an email:

Temporary local problem - please try later

Mail cound not be sent.

Error -17099

I am able to send using my GMail account, but nothing else in Entourage.

This problem went away a couple days ago and has never come back. Really strange. The microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage newsgroup didn't seem to know either, as I have not yet gotten a reply there.

There are a lot of software titles that are gearing up for Tiger (which is very worth the price tag, by the way) but none with quite the list of updates and bug fixes than Delicious Library. One of my favorite apps has been bumped to 1.5. It has a number of Tiger-centric features, and some welcome changes and bug fixes.

I really like the new way of selecting items once scanner or input. You can choose what country catalog to pull the information for. This is a great UI enhancement. The list of possible matches also does not take you to another window like in 1.1. It now displays the list of possible matches with the rest of the Enter Item options. This cuts down on mouse clicks if you have to go back or need to manually edit something. It is a small, but nice touch.

The edition of correctly sized PSP and DS game boxes is also nice.

I wish I could rearrange the shelves. I am also hoping for a nice web export that has more options then DeliciousExporter, although that does a heck of a job as it is.

When I got up Monday morning, turned on my computer, and saw the headline in my inbox “Adobe buys Macromedia,” I just thought, “Isn't April Fools behind us?” But a quick check of the New York Times, Adobe and Macromedia Web sites confirmed the $3.4 billion deal. If all goes according to plan, come this fall, Macromedia will be no more and Adobe will own not only its own stable of graphic design applications, but also a barrel full of complementary and competitive programs. Adobe Flash, anyone?

More opinion on the Macromedia buyout. I agree with it, and really hope his prediction of Dreamweaver's future is true.

Adobe Systems Inc. has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia Inc. for US$3.4 billion in stock, the company said Monday.

And then there was one...

This is a bombshell, and is not good. Not good at all. Competition fuels creativity. Look what Adobe has forced Quark to do. If InDesign was never released, we might not be seeing Quark 6.5, much less Quark 5.0 at this point. Think of how many years Quark 3.3 and 4.0 were out. With no competition, development gets stagnant, and that is not good for the customers.

The same could be said about a lot of companies. Why the NFL wanted only one license holder is beyond me, but now we only get NFL games from EA. That is just great (sarcasm). A different market for sure, but EA holds a monopoly akin to what Adobe now has.

Just as expected, Apple has updated its Pro video software at this year's NAB conference. Production Studio has become Final Cut Studio. Not only do we have new versions of Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack (now Pro as well) and Motion, but Shake 4 made its debut too.

MacCentral has a write up on the new features in Final Cut Studio and Shake 4.

I guess you could say that Apple went to Vegas in style this year. But NAB has been known for the venue to show off Final Cut Pro.

All the new features seem pretty standard fare. The addition of Logic Pro features in Soundtrack Pro is an interesting choice. DVD Studio Pro's technical specifications for HD playback requires version 10.4.1 of OS X is also peculiar. This leads me to believe they are adding HD DVD playback in the first dot rev of 10.4.

PSPCasting on the Windows side is fairly well documented, achieved by combining Videora and PSP Video 9 to pull down videos via BitTorrent and convert them to MP4 format for transfer to the PSP. There isn’t a single solution yet for achieving the same on the Mac side, but with some very minimal manual intervention we can automagically download and prepare a bunch of new video content for our PlayStation Portables using the ANT RSS video aggregator in combination with the PSPWare syncing application.

Engadget has full details, so check out the link.

Right on the heels of Sony's North American release of its PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld game console, Information Appliance Associates has released PocketMac for PSP. The software enables users to synchronize music, photos and contact information between their Mac and PSP.

Now we have iPSP, PSPWare, and PocketMac for PSP, all trading punches for Mac PSP owners. iPSP is down right unusable. PSPWare is a simple and elegant application - and works, unlike iPSP. Now PocketMac for PSP will convert your contacts into JPEG images for display on your PSP. I must investigate...

There is no demo. Forget that. It also looks as if there is no backup utility in this app. I am sticking with PSPWare.

Setting up a PSP with an Apple Airport is a bit different then going down to the local Grounds for Thought (simple setup). The reason is those places, coffee shops, usually do not use WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) and in my apartment, I do.

I was really looking forward to using iPSP to turn my PSP into a personal multimedia gadget. Now it looks like I would be better off doing it myself. The reviews on MacUpdate sound horrible. It looks like there are other PSP related apps in the works for the Mac though.

PSPWare looks like it might be the way to go. I will check both of them out, but am already leery of iPSP.

... POPFile won a Jolt "Productivity Award" -- so I guess we are all award winning developers now. Cool. It's not the big award of the night, as there were 3 productivity awards in each category, but I am still thrilled.

That is pretty cool. I love POPFile. I could not live without it. With 125,680 emails classified, it is 99.83% accurate.

Apple on Thursday updated the two apps it bundles as iWork '05. The presentation software Keynote has been updated to version 2.0.1, while Pages, Apple's new word processing application Pages has been updated to version 1.0.1.

In both cases, the updates address “isolated issues that may have affected reliability for some customers,” according to Apple. The updated version of Pages also resolves an issue related to deleting complete pages.

I find it interesting that both Apple in its release notes and MacCentral in its article did not make a big deal about the biggest addition to Pages 2.0.1. Apple added a delete pages feature to Pages!

Hello? Bueller? Bueller? Adding this feature, which should have been included out of the box in 1.0, makes Pages that much more usable. Someone forgot that feature when they were developing Pages. Its great that they added it, even if it took a couple months. Pages is much more usable now.

Popwire on Friday released Windows Media 9 Export Component, which exports content in Windows Media Viewer 9 format from any QuickTime-based application. Verified to work with QuickTime Pro 6.5.2, Final Cut Pro HD 4.5, iMovie 4.0.1 and Discreet Cleaner 6.0.2, the software features one-pass CBR and VBR encoding, 32 presets and automatic de-interlacing, with support for fractional frame rates and natural key frames. Pricing is US$29.95 and Mac OS X v10.3.5 and QuickTime 6.5.2 are required.

This is good news. Don't look at your monitor like that! It is great news, it really is. When I worked at CTLT one of the things we had to deal with was Windows users who did not have QuickTime, or who preferred Windows Media. If this software was available at that time, we would have bought licenses for all our compression machines. Being able to create Windows Media versions of your content is very important to your audience, and this looks like a great app to do that.

Until we see Delicious Library 2.0, or 1.5, or whatever the next version is, we have to look elsewhere for the most wanted feature of this award winning piece of software.

DeliciousExporter exports your library into web pages. It is a simple point and click application. But it gives you very extensive options for templates if you explore. Oh and it is free.

Its almost a given that the next version of Delicious Library will have HTML export, but until then we have DeliciousExporter, and it does a fantastic job.

You can see my movies, music, books and games. I have to update it, as I finally scanned in my entire video game collection (I know I do not come close to you Matt, but few can).

I will probably never be able to get all my music scanned in, as I have such a large digital library. But as I have bought new albums I have added them to Library. There is a very beta program to import your iTunes Library into Delicious Library, but it does not work for me. I figure that is because of the size of my music collection. Maybe we will see iTunes integration into the next major release of Delicious Library. We can all hope.

You may recall my February 12th opinions on SwapTop 2.0. It is now February 18th and VersionTracker no longer allows you to download version 1.9.2. If you go to the 1.9.2 page and click "Download Now" you are pushed to the Zonic site.

This is total bull crap if you ask me. Older versions of software should stay available. Especially if you drastically change the use and features of said application.

There still are a number of places to grab SwapTop 1.9.2, Softpedia being one of them. I am willing to bet that Zonic had VersionTracker take version 1.9.2 down. How long until they tell all the other software directory sites to do the same?

Zonic is trying to force people to pay $25 for SwapTop 2.0 which is not the same application that SwapTop 1.9.2 was. Zonic must like to tick people off. I don't know about you, but I don't like to be forced to use any software. I don't care who the developer is. Bad move Zonic. I urge you to email Zonic and tell them how you feel about this. I have already done so.

Thanks to my Dad for stumbling on this problem as he was trying to download SwapTop 1.9.2 to archive (something I suggest you do if you use SwapTop 1.9.2).

Panic today announced the release of Transmit 3, a major update to its award-winning Mac OS X FTP client. Transmit 3 adds a great deal of new features--many of which MacMinute covered last month--including: column view; tabs for multiple connections; a Finder-like sidebar (including per-server folders); redesigned Favorites; search; a new preview drawer with support for more image types and thumbnail zooming; dock status; spring-loaded folders and tabs; server to server transfers; linked folder navigation; improved synchronization; and full iDisk/WebDAV support.

They had me at tabs.

I emailed Panic about Transmit 3 not importing Fetch bookmarks, as well as a duplicate favorites feature (I have many bookmarks to the same server, but pointed to different directories) and got an email back from Cabel Sasser saying they would consider the duplicate favorite feature.

Its a shame my Fetch bookmarks were not imported. I have a ton of them.

Read the rest of that MacMinute artice for more info on the new version of Transmit. Its got an impressive list of additions. Panic is really a first rate developer. I use Unison, and used to use Audiion back when it was competing with SoundJam.

Transmit is a really great looking app. I am about to switch from Fetch. If I can get my bookmarks into Transmit I will switch. Re-entering them all would be a pain.

I have only had 10 minutes to play with Transmit 3 but wow it is nice. Its a lot nicer then Fetch 4. It also costs more. But it has a much nicer feature set, not to mention a very nice UI.

I can't believe Boinx is giving this away for free. It is really nice to see too. Most Mac developers think their little one trick pony should cost at least $10 - this happens all to often.

Mouseposé is a free tool that, when activated, dims the screen into a silhouette allowing the user or audience to focus on the cursor easier. You can change the opacity, diameter and color of the silhouette.

Currently you can only select F-Keys as the keyboard shortcut to use. Some might say this is a limitation. Fine. Add more options to make a hot key. For me? I like the simplicity of using a F-Key to trigger Mouseposé. You can also use Speakable Items to trigger it, or use Salling Clicker. That is a lot of choices. AppleScript and Speakable Items support are nice touches.

Delicious Library has become my new favorite app, I am sure there are many others out there that feel the same way. I can't wait to see what those 'Monsters' have up their sleeves for version 2. If there is one thing that annoys me with Library 1.1, it is how slow it gets if "Sync with My iPod" is checked in Preferences. I like having my lists on my iPod, but not when I was seeing spinning beach balls of deaths every couple minutes. Just turn this option off when you are filling your Library. Turn it back on when you want to update your iPod.

Problem fixed.

British developer Zonic on Friday released SwapTop 2.0, a revival of the product that the company introduced in 2001 to fill the gap left by the demise of Webshots, which provided desktop images and screensavers from its servers on a rotating basis. Webshots was a casualty of the problems at Excite@Home, which laid off many employees in mid-2001 and simply killed the service. Zonic introduced the first version of SwapTop at that time, but at the end of 2002, Webshots returned as a CNET Networks product, which prompted Zonic to convert its software into a free download and cease development.

Source: MacCentral

I really do not understand this. The last version of SwapTop before this 2.0 release was an application that connected to Webshots and allowed you use their photo galleries. I have SwapTop 1.9.2 on both my PowerBook and my G5 to handle my Webshots photos. This is because the official Webshots OS X client a) is really bad, and b) doesn't work in the latest release of 10.3.

Webshots costs me $23.88 a year. I just renewed it on the 8th. SwapTop's rival service costs $24.95. With Webshots there is a web site with a huge library of photos, not to mention member libraries, such as my Dad's photos. With SwapTop you get no web site to search through, and a very limited amount of photos. You get no preview of the images. Unless the demo of SwapTop's service is nothing like the paid membership, I do not see how this is going to fly.

SwapTop 1.9.2 is free. It trys to be shareware with a Register listing in the SwapTop menu, but it never nags you, and does not prevent you from using the thousands of Webshots photos.

I just don't get it. If you are going to compete, I would think you would have to undercut Webshots, since they clearly have many more photos, and features over SwapTop 2.0. Am I missing something here?

I see that you can no longer get the old version of SwapTop from their site, but you can get it at VersionTracker. SwapTop 1.9.2 will also be available for years from anonymous FTP pubs.

But maybe I am missing the point with Zonic's reinvention of SwapTop.