The short answer: Because I don’t refer people to things that I don’t think are worthwhile.

Yes, I have liked some of the things that MacHeist has done before, but this seems stupid. As if they didn’t have enough to play around with from their December 2006 and January 2008 bundles, they’ve now decided that they have to throw another bundle out the window once again. I mean, how many times do they expect us to throw $49 away? I know that these are large savings on totally random I-never-even-intended-to-purchase-this-otherwise selections of shareware, but it’s not like money grows on trees.

But now, apparently, they’ve decided to step up a notch and sell this as a retail package, but not before offering the same thing for sale online first. While I personally think that one defeats the purpose of the other, who am I to think things through logically?

But what’s crazy about this bundle is that NOTHING IS NEW. A few of the applications are from the original December 2006 bundle, but the majority of these are from the January 2008 bundle that was less than three months ago. I mean, who do they think they are kidding?

Well, they’re not entirely insane, in that they’re admitting this themselves. In an e-mail that they sent out to all of us longtime MacHeist members (I’ve been there since the beginning thanks to an invite that Larry sent me back in October 2006), they acknowledged this glaring fact:

“As an already registered member, we know you may own a lot of these apps, so in an effort to keep you interested, and involved in the world of Mac software, we’ve been hard at work putting together a truly awesome referral program. It’s time to call up those old friends… because this time around, we will be unveiling multiple tiers of software prizes, each crammed with several options.”

Well first of all, for the first part of that sentence, let’s correct “own a lot of these apps” by indicating that I own all of them courtesy of these geniuses. And so what they’ve decided to do is instead turn all of us into pawns in order to annoy our friends and family and website visitors to urge them to spend $50 on software that most of them don’t need, and on stuff that the majority of the concerned internet already has anyway. I seem to recall the January bundle having sold tens of thousands of copies, enough to raise $500,000 for charities in that go-around. So what makes this bundle worth it? No, they want to make us pawns to try to urge people not only to buy this software, but to use our referral links rather than someone else’s.

Well, I’m not going to play that game. I’m not going to try to refer people to something just for the sake of getting benefited for the referral, and I’m certainly not going to try to refer people to something that I think is completely pointless myself. That’s not the way I roll. I don’t know where MacHeist thinks they’re getting this idea from, but I don’t expect to see them getting anywhere close the the amount of participation that they’ve had in their last two bundles, because I think most people (except the people greedy for those referral apps) recognize that this is a pretty lame offering. Therefore, I’m not going to post a referral link for you to go get the bundle–consider this a “deferral” for the bundle. And if you decide that you still want to purchase it, go find someone else’s referral link and use theirs.

P.S.: I do think that MacHeist’s little “trailer” for the retail bundle is pretty cool though, kudos to them on that.

Tags: bundle, MacHeist, referral, retail, sale, shareware, Software, stupid

Contrary to my usual habits, I was very excited to get my hands on Mac OS X Leopard, to the point where I went ahead and pre-ordered it, thus officially deeming myself an “early adopter.” I then spent the month of November on Webmacster87.info with my so-called Leopard Feature Presentation. However, Leopard had a few disappointing attributes, which I summed up best in the following quote that I wrote on December 1st:

Leopard does have a share of downsides, and does suffer a bit from an “Apple knows best” syndrome in the fact that a number of features don’t come with preferences to allow the user to choose what he/she wants in his/her user experience, and probably the best example of this concerns Apple’s new desktop, translucent menu bar, and 3D Dock.
From Review and Final Recap: Mac OS X Leopard

Well, at long last, these downsides have been corrected. Three and a half months after Leopard was released, 10.5.2 was published, an 180 MB update that among making many, many bug fixes, also reverses some of the “Apple knows best” attributes.

For one thing, the translucent menu bar is no longer as translucent, but even better, they’ve added an option to turn off the opaque menu bar completely! What’s now there is a greyish gradient menu bar, which is actually fairly reminiscent of the rest of Leopard’s interface (and easier on the eyes than the white translucent menu bar type I was using before).

Also, I have finally fallen in love with Stacks. Apple has now made it possible for you to set the folder icon as the representative icon for the stack (instead of a “stack” of the top three files), and the pre-Leopard list view has returned–even better because you no longer need to right-click to get to it. While I’m going to keep using Fan mode for the Downloads folder, I love the list view so much more for Applications and Documents stacks.

As for the 3D Dock, the Mac developer community is so awesome that there are a large number of freeware tools available that let you switch to the 2D Dock style if you prefer, so I think that the complaints over the 3D Dock have died down (not that I ever had problems with it).

All in all, I’d say that now with 10.5.2, Leopard is finally truly an undisputed worthwhile package that I highly recommend everyone upgrade to. Apple may have taken three and a half months to catch up, but Vista has been out for 13 months now, and Microsoft still hasn’t fixed that!

Anyway, I’m very glad to see 10.5.2, and feel so much happier using my computer thanks to it. Now let’s see if perhaps it has the power to fix random shutdowns…

Tags: Dock, features, Mac OS X Leopard, menu bar, Stacks, update

Well, I’m fresh back from my trip to Macworld Expo, courtesy of the tech group at my high school that I’m an “honorary member” of. (The “honorary” part means that I don’t actually do anything with them due to my busy schedule.) But yep, we got to go to Macworld as a field trip, meaning we got to legally miss all of our classes today to do so. Oh, I can just feel your jealousy rising.

The general consensus among us was that there was too much stuff for the three and half hours that we were there. (We finished getting all registered by 10:40 AM, and had to leave at 2:15 PM.) It didn’t help that there were two exhibit halls in separate buildings, a block apart from each other. Obviously not the ideal setup, but Moscone North was hosting the United Motorcoach Association of America or something like that. Wow. So, my schedule pretty much involved registering at Moscone West at about 10:20, then going through the West Exhibit Hall at 10:40-12:15, then getting lunch nearby until about 12:45, and then spending 12:45-2:15 in Moscone South. Unfortunately, I only got to see about half of Moscone South’s exhibit hall, which is very, very big.

However, this year, I spent most of my time talking with the smaller developers, which took up the majority of the West Hall and most of whom were together in the Developer Pavillion (aka “Tiny Town”) in South Hall, behind Apple’s humongous booth. I actually really enjoyed that, because in general, the smaller developers are much more approachable than these huge companies with the humongous booths, and they’re much more interesting. I actually got exposed to quite a few new apps that I’m going to have to check out (look at wallet, here comes the fire…). So although I obviously didn’t get to see everything I had hoped (the MacHeist, Micromat, and Microsoft booths were all on my to-do list which I didn’t get to), I still had a good time, a much less stressful time, and came back with some great goodies.

Included in my goodies was the official Macworld San Francisco T-shirt, this time a black T-shirt with blue and white lettering. I also got a WireTap Studio T-shirt from Ambrosia Software. WireTap Studio just looks so cool, so I’m really going to have to try it out. One of the companies actually was interested in doing a promotion with PreviewCast, and gave me his card, so there may be some interesting news coming from that soon.

Oh, and I got OmniFocus, the totally-awesome GTD application from the Omni Group for only $30. The regular list price is $80, and I got more than half off through a Macworld discount and a student discount. I’ll definitely be spending some time trying out OmniFocus and you can expect a detailed review here soon.

Don’t worry, you haven’t heard the last of my Macworld experiences yet, but I thought that I’d share just some of what I did at the exhibit hall today. One of these days, maybe I’ll actually be able to spend a full week at the conference.

P.S.: Sorry, but I didn’t get any pictures there this time. But I did get something else just as good! Hint hint…

Tags: Apple, developers, exhibits, Macs, Macworld, Moscone, Omni Group, OmniFocus, PreviewCast, recap, San Francisco, School, trip, WireTap Studio

If there’s one way to summarize one of my biggest questions about what was announced at Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday, this has to be the best way. Overall, this year, I was never really excited about this year’s keynote, and there’s not much there to excite me. Time Capsule definitely looks interesting, and (when I can afford it) may actually improve my recent 1.5 Larry-head rating on Time Machine, although I’m not in a position to get it for the time being. I have a number of qualms about the MacBook Air, and as for the Apple TV, iTunes rentals, and iPod touch/iPhone updates, I’m maintaining a solidly neutral stance on those.

Now, hold on Douglas, you’re thinking, why aren’t you coming out and either praising or bashing Apple the way you normally do? Well, for most of these, I can see pros and cons on both sides, so for me, the jury’s still out on my opinions of these. I’m holding off until I get a chance to play around with things before I start to come to conclusions, and I will be sharing these conclusions on this weekend’s “Macworld in review” episode of PreviewCast, and later elaborating here on my blog.

As for trying them out, that’s what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! Indeed, tomorrow, I’ll be going with the Aragon group (about six of us in total, plus chaperones) to Macworld to tour the exhibit hall for the day. This will be my third consecutive excursion to Macworld’s Expo floor, and according to what all the websites are saying, we’ll actually be able to play around with the new stuff, rather than just looking at a rotating object in a bullet-proof* glass case. Which actually sounds exciting.
* I have no idea if the case was bullet-proof or not, and am just making this up.

However, this year, I hope to spend some more time talking to the people whom I really think should be the stars of the show: all of the little developers. (Merlin Mann likes to call the “little devs” section of the show floor Tiny Town.) It’s THEM that make the show possible, because it’s their contributions of their applications that helps the Mac platform succeed. So, I’m hoping to spend more time there this year.

I have one class tomorrow–Calculus, my first period class. After that, the group of us are carpooling up to the Millbrae BART station and taking BART to Powell Street, a block away from Moscone Center (and right next to the SF Apple Store). Last year, we tried to drive to Macworld and had the worst nightmare with parking. We’ll get there shortly after the 10 AM exhibit hall opening, get all checked in, and then have just under four hours to do stuff to our heart’s content. We’ll gather up around 2:15 to head back to BART and catch a 2:30 train back to Millbrae, and then we’ll drive back to school and get back there around 3:30.

I have not yet exactly decided what I’m going to do there. (Well, actually, I have, but I want to save some stuff to talk about in an “after Macworld” blog post!) However, I definitely intend to visit a number of booths. I plan to definitely check out Office 2008; after all, I don’t feel right truly making fun of something until I’ve had the chance to play around with it with my own hands, and I also want to find out, in plain English, what “Special Media Edition” means. I also want to find out if the Omni Group is offering any nice discounts on their new OmniFocus, which sounds like a really exciting app (and did you hear that it won a Best of Show award), and of course come home stuffed with a Macworld 2008 shirt. (I outgrew my Macworld 2006 shirt. As for my Macworld 2007 shirt, in February, it got a huge red stain after an alcohol thermometer broke in Chemistry class and splattered all over my shirt. Yeah, Macworld 2007 was just NOT a good one for me.) Oh, and I intend to gather up as many freebies and handouts as possible! There was some great stuff last year, so I wonder what I can scrounge up this year.

There’s also been lots of other things happening in my life recently, which I’ll try to catch up on in other blog posts, as it is time for me to hit the hay.

However, I will close by mentioning that this is my 300th blog post since I resalvaged this blog back in October 2006. My blog has had a number of incarnations before that, but I’ve never been able to keep a blog steady enough to keep going continuously for 300 full blog posts, which have been put together in 15 months. (You math whizzes can figure out that I’ve averaged out at 20 posts per month, or about 2 posts every 3 days. It’s not quite at one-post-per-day, blog365ers, but it’s pretty doggone close.) Thanks to the many of you who have been subscribing and sticking with my various ramblings. I do this blog mostly for myself, but it’s great to be able to bring you along for the ride and be able to share things that may interest or entertain you.

Tags: Apple, Aragon, BART, blog, exhibit hall, expo, itinerary, Keynote, Mac, MacBook Air, Macworld, News, opinion, plans, School, Time Capsule, Webmacster87.info

Well, it’s the morning of Steve’s annual Macworld Keynote, and this year, I seem strangely unenthusiastic about the whole thing. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve just been too preoccupied recently, or maybe because I think the name “MacBook Air” is the dumbest rumored idea that I’ve ever heard. However, fifty-three weeks ago, on the eve of the keynote, I posted some Stevenote Funnies for your pre-keynote enjoyment. I’ve got a few more for you this year.

Most of these videos, by the way, are from the All About Steve collection by rmoisescot, and I certainly don’t want to hog any credit for doing anything but turing this up in a YouTube search.

Boom!

Pixar (not that Steve has any conflict of interest…)

Woo!

The Best in the World (so why doesn’t the market share agree…)

Really Cool

Premature Specification

And finally, although it’s not necessarily a funny, here’s a look back at the intro of the Power Mac G4 Cube, a great idea that never made it for some reason.

Enjoy these videos, and hopefully the keynote! Me? I’ve got a very busy day at school today, so I’ll just be surprised when I get home.

Tags: funnies, Keynote, Macworld, Steve Jobs, videos

Cross-posted from PreviewCast.com:

Hello everyone,

With Macworld coming up this week, I thought I would take an opportunity to share what we have planned for our super awesome exclusive special stand-on-your-head-while-eating-deep-fried-pickle-hearts-and-singing-a-Mozart-sonata-at-the-same-time practically-drop-dead PreviewCast coverage of Macworld 2008: Absolutely nothing!

That’s right, PreviewCast is doing absolutely nothing in terms of live coverage. We will have absolutely no audio, no video, no photos, no tweets, no holograms, no SuperPokes, absolutely nothing to give you an experience of what it’s like to be at Macworld San Francisco 2008. Why? Because the entire internet is already doing the SAME THING!!!

Just hop on Google or Upcoming and take a look! Numerous websites and podcasts are doing lots of stuff at Macworld, whether it be tours and interviews on the show floor, interviews after the keynote from celebrities whom have had a significant overdose of exposure to the patented reality distortion field, and so many podcasted special events that you could get lost just in the few blocks surrounding Moscone Center and enough to force me to give my entire life’s savings over to BART if I was to try to take care of all of them and try to produce something for PreviewCast.

So guess what? We are not doing anything special for Macworld 2008 until after the show is already over and the initial hype over whatever Steve plans to spit out of his mouth on Tuesday has calmed down. PreviewCast #049, to be recorded next weekend, will be when we give our take on the announcements.

I will indeed be spending at least a day sometime at the Macworld Exhibit Hall, but guess what I’m going to do there? You’ll never believe it, but I’m actually going to enjoy myself! I’m not taking a camera (one disappeared there last year, and I’m still taking the heat for that), I’m not taking a microphone (unless I get the urge to record myself singing folk tunes in front of the Apple booth), although I am taking my laptop just to enjoy some free wifi, which is hard to find nowadays. But yeah, by eliminating myself of the burden of responsibility of recording and capturing the Macworld experience, I will actually be able to enjoy the Macworld experience! And isn’t that just what the point of it all is?

If you are interested in some Macworld coverage for you to get the illusion of being there, might I recommend practically every other site on the internet.

Enjoy the keynote and the festivities. And don’t worry, I will still be doing a bit of Macworld coverage, albeit from a distance, on Webmacster87.info. Stay tuned next week for PreviewCast #049.
–Douglas Bell
Co-Host and Editor, PreviewCast
http://www.previewcast.com

Tags: 2008, announcements, coverage, internet, Macworld, Personal, plans, PreviewCast, products, San Francisco, Steve Jobs

As of today, it has now been a full five weeks since I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook. It is no secret that I gave much more focus to Leopard than I gave to the iPhone during its late-June release, and that is because I am a Mac user and the first new OS X release in two and a half years is much more important to me. That’s why, during the week of the Leopard launch, I counted down to the Leopard release in my own way with my Tiger-to-Leopard series, which attempted to put the time difference between Tiger and Leopard into perspective. Then, for the 30 days of November, I wrote my Leopard Feature Presentation series, which selected one new feature per day from Mac OS X Leopard and reviewed it based on my experiences with that feature. Not only has it given me the chance to express my opinions about what I think of Leopard, doing the Leopard Feature Presentation has forced me to discover some of the other new features in Leopard that I might otherwise have overlooked.

So now that I have dedicated a full 45 (now 46) posts on my blog to covering Mac OS X Leopard, and have been using Leopard earnestly for the past 35 days, I will now make my final review of Mac OS X Leopard and do a final recap of the Leopard Feature Presentations during the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.
Continue reading »

Tags: Apple, features, innovations, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, operating system, recap, release, review

Sorry folks, but try as hard as I might, I was unable to get my hands on an external hard drive or on any friends who have a Leopard laptop with an external hard drive that has Time Machine set up. I even postponed the Leopard Feature Presentation on Time Machine to be the penultimate post for the month of November in the hopes that I could use it before then! Therefore, I have not been able to get my hands on Time Machine, and therefore, I cannot honestly review it. I could regurgitate how it works, but what’s the point of doing that? We ALL know how it works! I want to talk about my opinions based on using it, and how can I do that unless I get a chance to use it.

Therefore, although it’s kind of awkward, this post shall serve as an IOU. I promise, at my earliest possible convenience, to update this post with a full-fledged Leopard Feature Presentation for Time Machine as soon as I have been able to set it up, use it, and feel like I’ve worn out my back up lights. So, whenever that is, I will finish up the last little bit of this blog series. I promise.

Feature Satisfaction Rating: *insert random repetitive excusing explanation here*

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: backup, hard drive, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, portal, Quick Look, restore, review, safety, Time Machine

Automator premiered in Mac OS X Tiger, dubbed as “AppleScript for the rest of us.” Well, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but it hasn’t really seemed to have caught on for me. Maybe it was because some of the aspects of the UI were quirky, or maybe I just don’t do enough repetitive tasks on my computer.

Leopard only brings a few changes to Automator, which mostly acts the same as it did before. Now, one would pretty obviously guess that there’s now new Automator actions out of the box, which is nice, considering that Tiger’s Automator always seemed to leave certain actions out. Automator also now gives you access to variables, so you can easily drag in today’s date, or your short username, or a random number, for example, and these variables will automatically reflect the status when you run the action. And, like practically everything else in Leopard, you have an iLife media browser. (You know, I find it weird that practically all of Leopard has access to your iLife apps, but you STILL have to buy iLife separately!!!)

Probably the most notable new feature in Automator is the ability to record actions. When you click the new Record button in Automator, Automator is hidden and a floating window appears to let you know that Automator is recording. Then, you do your action, and when you’re done doing your action, you hit Stop. Automator creates a new action called Watch Me Do which lists your actions.

However, I repeatedly tried recording different actions, and found Automator to be VERY unreliable. Automator actually records your mouse movements, so when you play back these actions, it actually moves your mouse around. However, Automator doesn’t check to see if the mouse is doing the same thing to the same window, and almost always gets screwed up. (One action that I played back ended up selecting and deleting the text in a document, and then saving it, even though that’s NOT what I told it to do!) And sometimes, Automator completely ignored various actions that I did with my mouse. In short, this feature is horribly unreliable and I wouldn’t trust anything to it.

So Automator has a few new features, but other than for having access to some new actions, Leopard’s Automator is not going to be a reason for Automator-lovers to upgrade. And as for that Record button, Apple’s going to need to order some boxes of bug spray direct from the warehouse.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: actions, AppleScript, Automator, bugs, features, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, recording, review

Preview, Mac OS X’s PDF/image viewer, has always been kind of an iffy subject and its fate has been uncertain. When Panther was released, Preview was hailed as the fastest PDF reader on the market, but it still was a bit clunky, and for me, personally, the relatively recent release of Adobe Reader 8 persuaded me to make that my default PDF reader.

However, Preview in Mac OS X Leopard has been greatly enhanced with a significant number of new and enhanced features which really define it as a serious PDF reader, and also brings a few tricks up its sleeve that formerly have only been available to PDF consumers after the purchase of Adobe Acrobat Pro. So what’s new? Let’s take a look.
Continue reading »

Tags: editing, features, images, iWork, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, PDFs, preview, review, viewing