Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.4.6 Update — Just as we were finalizing this issue, Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.6 Update, which appears to be a massive, miscellaneous bug-fix update. Numerous bugs and inconveniences that we’ve experienced are said to be eliminated, including a Mail crash, the mysterious "we are using special permissions" reports when repairing permissions with Disk Utility, the misbehavior of the Calculator percentage button, the Help Viewer blank window, problems saving Microsoft Word 2004 documents across a network, and many others. The update also includes iSync 2.2, which provides synchronization support for additional mobile phone handsets; however, iSync users should perform a full synchronization of all devices before installing Mac OS X 10.4.6.

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html? artnum=303411>

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html? artnum=303419>

As usual, you can use Software Update or download the update installer and run it manually; and in the latter case, you can download a delta updater (updates 10.4.5 to 10.4.6) or a combo updater (updates any Tiger installation). The updates are massive, with versions available via Software Update clocking in at near 46 MB, and standalone and Combo installers ranging from 65 to 191 MB. Apple also warns that (for reasons not revealed, but likely revolving around the login-related fixes) PowerPC-based Macs will automatically restart twice after the installation. The 10.4.6 update is available for both client and server versions of Mac OS X. [ACE]

<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/>

Listen in as Apple Turns 30 — On April 1st, 1976 – 30 years ago this last Saturday – Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer, and the intervening years have seen its fortunes rise, fall, and rise again. But no matter what its stock price or market share, Apple has never been boring. More important, despite the fact that the company never attained the size or raw power of Microsoft, Apple’s influence on the computer industry and on popular culture has been immense. To commemorate this anniversary, we encourage you to sit back, tune in, and listen both to some of Apple’s earliest employees and to a number of writers who have been covering Apple since the earliest days. In SFGate.com’s Chronicle Podcasts, reporters Matthew Yi and Ben Pimentel interview Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, John Sculley, Steve Capps, Guy Kawasaki, and Mike Boich. And then in a pair of MacNotables podcasts focused on the past, present, and future of Apple, host Chuck Joiner talks with Chris Breen, Bryan Chaffin, Jim Dalrymple, Dan Frakes, Andy Ihnatko, Ted Landau, Bob LeVitus, Dennis Sellers, and Jason Snell, along with Tonya and me. As difficult as it is to look far into the future, here’s hoping we see another 30 years of innovation from Apple Computer! [ACE]

<http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/category ?blogid=5&cat=508s>

<http://www.macnotables.com/archives/2006/ 632.html>

<http://www.macnotables.com/archives/2006/ 633.html>

Interarchy 8 Adds WebDAV, Widgets, and Bonjour — Peter Lewis and Stairways Software have released Interarchy 8.0, a major upgrade to the powerful file transfer and network monitoring application. Significant new features in Interarchy 8.0 include support for WebDAV (including Apple’s iDisk), Automator (Download, List, Upload), local FTP server detection via Bonjour, Dashboard (in the form of Bookmark and Network Status widgets), FTP/SSL-TLS, HTTPS, and HTTP Authentication. Changes to Interarchy’s interface are also notable: The Connect to Server window encapsulates all the steps necessary in an Automator-like interface, there are Action menus everywhere with available actions, there’s an option to select new tabs as they’re created, tabs can be permanently colorized, and the Transfers window behavior has been improved. Mirroring of local and remote folders has also been enhanced with a combined Mirror Reports window and Mirror Dry Run option (in Interarchy’s Mirror preferences) that lets you see what will happen before committing to a long file transfer. Interarchy 8.0 requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, including Tiger, and it’s now a universal binary for people using Intel-based Macs. Upgrades are free for those who purchased Interarchy 7 after 01-Jan-06; otherwise upgrades cost $20 and new copies are $40. It’s an 8.4 MB download. [ACE]

<http://www.interarchy.com/>

Universal Final Cut Studio Now Shipping — When Apple introduced the Intel-based Macs in January, I was frankly surprised to hear that the Final Cut Studio suite would be available in universal binary form as early as March. After all, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and Motion are all heavy-duty professional applications that rely on processor performance (multiple Oscar winner Walter Murch edited Cold Mountain and Jarhead using Final Cut Pro, for example), and late last year Apple was pushing the idea that consumer hardware would be the first to include the Intel processors. True to their word, Apple is now shipping a universal binary version of Final Cut Studio, which is available as a $50 crossgrade. This is good news for owners of MacBook Pros who use Final Cut, since the existing studio applications wouldn’t run on Intel machines at all.

<http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/>

<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004555/>

<http://www.apple.com/universal/crossgrade/>

Final Cut Studio 5.1 also contains some important bug fixes and changes (for example, some Final Cut Pro problems with the Media Manager are resolved, and you cannot open version 5.1 projects in earlier versions of the program), but the universal version appears to be the only upgrade; owners of PowerPC-based Macs don’t have a downloadable upgrade option. Perhaps Apple will explain more at this month’s big National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference, but for now the fixes are available only to those who pay the $50 crossgrade price. [JLC]

<http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Final_Cut_Pro_ 5.0_lbn_z.pdf>

<http://www.nabshow.com/>

DealBITS Drawing: Disc Cover Winners — Congratulations to Damian Burke of gmail.com, Ronald Jore of jore.com.au, and Jonathan Baumgarten of frostbaumgarten.com, whose entries were chosen randomly in last week’s DealBITS drawing and who each received a copy of BeLight Software’s Disc Cover. Even if you didn’t win, you can still save 15 percent on Disc Cover through 12-Apr-06, bringing the price of the download edition (which has only about 900 clip art images from the full set of 23,000) to $29.95 and the CD edition to $33.95 plus shipping and handling (about $43). Order using the third and fourth links below to receive your discount. Thanks to the 653 people who entered, and keep an eye out for future DealBITS drawings! [ACE]

<http://www.belightsoft.com/disccover/>

<http://www.tidbits.com/dealbits/disc-cover/>

<http://usd.swreg.org/cgi-bin/s.cgi?s=31176& amp;p=31176311762802&v=2&d=0& amp;q=1&t=&a=tidbits>

<http://usd.swreg.org/cgi-bin/s.cgi?s=31176& amp;p=31176311762802&v=2&d=1& amp;q=1&t=&a=tidbits>

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08468>

Apple has released a software update which, along with fixing a handful of bugs, enables users to set a maximum volume limit for their iPods. The 28 MB update supports both Mac OS X and Windows XP/2000, but applies only to Apple’s fifth-generation video-capable iPods and the iPod nano.

<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ ipodupdater20060323.html>

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html? artnum=303414>

After installing the update, users can configure a maximum volume setting for their iPod: once set, the iPod displays a padlock icon when it reaches the configured top volume. Users can assign a password-like combination to the setting, which will enable parents and others to set a maximum volume that another user of that iPod won’t be able to exceed. Apple has also published a set of informational guidelines about sound levels and iPod use.

<http://www.apple.com/sound/>

The update comes amid growing concerns that high music volumes from iPods and other portable music devices may be contributing to hearing loss, particularly for folks who use the devices for extended periods of time. iPods (and most other digital music players) aren’t necessarily any louder than other consumer electronics devices with headphones, but users tend to listen to iPods in noisy environments, and crank up the volume to drown out the noise around them. The noisier the environment, the louder they want their music, and the greater the potential for hearing loss.

Apple is currently facing a lawsuit over claims of hearing loss caused by iPod use, and French concerns over hearing loss caused Apple to alter the design of iPods sold in France to lower their maximum audio output.

When I began my duties as TidBITS Senior Editor recently, one of my first official functions was to order some business cards for myself. Although I could simply have plugged my contact info into the existing TidBITS business card template, Adam and Tonya wanted to come up with a new design that incorporated information for both TidBITS and Take Control. So they sent me the graphics and suggested that I see what I could come up with in each of two business card design applications: Business Card Composer from BeLight Software and SOHO Business Cards from Chronos.

<http://www.belightsoft.com/products/composer/>

<http://www.chronosnet.com/Products/sohobc_ product.html>

Designing business cards is not exactly rocket science. I’ve done it before – without the benefit of any special software – and I fully expected that either of these two applications would make it a completely painless and speedy process. While I found a lot to like about both packages, though, I found them to be surprisingly different. I also discovered that first impressions can be deceiving; SOHO Business Cards, the more polished-looking program, was in fact much less capable of producing good results easily.

Business Card Basics — Both Business Card Composer and SOHO Business Cards start with roughly the same fundamental model: choose a design from one of their many premade templates, and then tweak the colors, graphics, fonts, masks, and other elements to your liking. (You can opt to start with a blank card, too, if none of the existing designs meets your needs.) Tools are also included for drawing lines and shapes, for aligning elements, and for moving them forward or backward with respect to other elements. The applications automatically fill in fields such as name, address, phone number, and email address from a contact you select in Address Book. When you’re happy with the final design, you can print it to business card blanks you can buy for your own printer (both programs support a wide variety of brands and styles), or create a PDF that you can send to a commercial print shop.

Business Card Composer includes about 420 designs; SOHO Business Cards comes with more than 800 (for each of several card sizes). Both applications also include libraries of clip art that can be used for backgrounds, logos, and ornamentation. On the whole, I found the premade designs and artwork in both packages to be attractive and useful, a few lemons notwithstanding – though Business Card Composer’s designs struck me as more creative and visually appealing, even if there were fewer of them. In my case, however, because I was starting with my own logos and had fairly specific ideas about what I wanted, I decided to start with a blank card in both programs, and then return to the templates later on to design cards for my own company, alt concepts, inc.

<http://alt.cc/>

Business Card Composer — The design process in Business Card Composer was straightforward, albeit with a few quirks. For example, one of the first things I wanted to do was resize a graphic I’d dragged in. I assumed that, as in virtually every other application, holding down Shift while resizing would maintain the graphic’s original proportions. But no: As I discovered by trial and error, the proportions are kept the same by default, and pressing Shift turns off that constraint!

Similarly, a few features I expected to see were bafflingly missing. You can align elements with each other horizontally but not vertically. Although alignment guides appear as you move objects on the canvas, the alignment applies only to the edges of an element’s containing box; in the case of a text block, baseline alignment would have been much more useful. Similarly, I could find no way to put text in small capitals. (SOHO Business Cards suffered from neither of these limitations.)

Despite these quibbles, Business Card Composer was generally quite solid. It helpfully separates your canvas into a background layer, for elements common to multiple cards, and a foreground layer, for information specific to each person. In addition, you can have a single file that holds designs for both the front and back of a card (which we decided to use for TidBITS and Take Control); you can switch sides with a single click.

To add Address Book data, you choose a contact and design your card with actual data from that person’s record (all of which is editable). If you then want to use the same design for another person’s card, you can select a new Address Book record with a couple of clicks. You should be aware, though, that if you edit a piece of data (say, a phone number) for a contact, switch to another contact, and then switch back, your edit will be lost. Business Card Composer’s Address Book fields work best when Address Book contains exactly the information you want on the cards; otherwise, your best bet is to add custom text manually.

After working up some sample double-sided TidBITS/Take Control cards from scratch, I looked for a design that might work well for my own company. After finding one I liked, I plugged in my contact information, changed a couple of colors, and was ready to print within about five minutes. In short, the happier you are with an existing design and the less fiddling you need to do, the easier the program will seem.

SOHO Business Cards — I thought I would like SOHO Business Cards better, because it has a slicker interface and comes with a much larger library of graphics, fonts, and templates. But as I used it, I discovered that its frustrations outnumbered its benefits.

For example, I quickly found it infuriating that in the Design pane – where you can resize and reposition elements – you can only see blocks representing where text from my Address Book will be placed, but not the actual text itself. You have to switch to the (non-editable) Preview pane to see what your design will look like with its text. Because the Design view gives you little sense of how the final block will look when filled with contact data, the design process becomes one of incessantly switching panes, a real annoyance.

SOHO Business Cards has a special Fields palette that’s designed to give you extra control over layout and typography. You can specify, for example, what happens if the text in an address field is too wide: the box can expand to the left or right, or the text can shrink to fit the block. The latter choice sounded like just what I needed, because one of the lines in my address is much longer than the others. But to my dismay, I found that when I switched to the Preview pane, only that one line of my address had shrunk; the rest stayed at their full size.

In fact, SOHO Business Cards’s fundamental reliance on so-called smart fields to hold and format Address Book data is misguided. The idea is that you choose a smart field with exactly the combination of Address Book data you want, set up its characteristics, and then watch as it automagically reformats itself to display the data of each new contact. Unfortunately, SOHO Business Cards provides no convenient way of printing cards for multiple contacts at one time; you must manually select the Address Book contact used to insert data into any given card design. Furthermore, you can’t edit data inserted from Address Book; if something is not quite right, you must either change the data in Address Book itself or manually insert a custom text field. In other words, in one respect SOHO Business Cards’s design is optimized for constantly changing data, but in another respect, it assumes you’re working with just one set of data. Those two design imperatives are very much in conflict.

On the bright side, SOHO Business Cards does have the full range of horizontal and vertical alignment options I expect from a good graphics application, making layout of graphical elements a breeze. It offers extensive typographical control (unlike Business Card Composer) and lets you adjust attributes like drop shadows, transparency, and rotation of any element with great ease. Unlike Business Card Composer, which lets you adjust the zoom level of the canvas only to a handful of preset magnifications, SOHO Business Cards has a slider that instantly zooms to any arbitrary size.

In the end, however, it took too much effort to get the result I wanted. Furthermore, SOHO Business Cards doesn’t support double-sided cards directly, so each side had to be a separate file. And although many of the templates provided were quite handsome, none of them was a good fit for my own company’s cards.

Printing — Since my printer – an aging inkjet on its last leg – can no longer be coaxed into producing crisp text, professional printing was the only option I considered. Both SOHO Business Cards and Business Card Composer use the same technique: choose File > Print Online (SOHO Business Cards) or File > Order Cards Online (Business Card Composer) and you’ll be taken to a Web page with instructions to save your file as a PDF and send it to any of several recommended print shops. That process worked, but I still had to visit each of the printers’ sites, evaluate their options and prices, and then manually send in a file. I had been hoping for more of a seamless printing process such as the one iPhoto uses for making photo albums and prints online, but no such luck.

Final Thoughts — If you’re prepared to be happy with one of the applications’ built-in designs, and if the information you want on your business card is identical to your Address Book card for yourself, either application should get the job done. But if you want to color outside the boxes, Business Card Composer will make your job far easier. Business Card Composer costs $40 for the boxed edition; the downloadable edition, which I tested, includes fewer graphics and templates, sells for $35 and is a 17.7 MB download. SOHO Business Cards costs $30, and is a 17.7 MB download.

The TidBITS staff has been spending a vast amount of time and energy thinking about how we want to recast our collaborative editing system, but we haven’t been able to come up with a solution that meets all of our needs and wants. In the past, we’ve gotten great advice from readers that, for example, helped us set up a search tool (see "TidBITS Macintosh Search Tool Shootout" in TidBITS-368) and choose a content management system (see "Help Us Choose Among Content Management Systems" in TidBITS-675). Let me explain what we’re contemplating, and then I’d like to see if you can suggest anything.

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00721>

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07143>

Our eventual goal is to create a system that enables us to create new TidBITS articles, have multiple people be able to edit them, and post the final result to a content management system. It sounds simple, and in fact, conceptually, none of the pieces is all that difficult. The three parts are:

• An easily accessible Internet file storage site for sharing articles

• Change-tracking across multiple iterations of an article

• A combined format/technology solution for uploading finished articles to a content management system

  
  

A company called Near-Time created a program called Flow that addressed all of these problems. It provided an interface to "spaces" that could be shared with other Flow users over the Internet. Each space held documents that could be created with standard Cocoa text editing tools, bolstered by extra-textual comments. Flow handled version tracking by default, updating itself every few minutes and optionally showing the changes from one shared version to another. Once an article was finished, we could post it to a weblog on our Web Crossing server via the MetaWeblog API, and Flow would also pull down articles that others had posted.

Flow was by no means perfect, though. It had an interface that required significant training, many additional (and unnecessary, in our view) features that cluttered the interface, and some key bugs. More worrisome for those of us who like to control our own services, Flow relied upon a Near-Time server and used SMTP and POP to synchronize versions. I refer to the program in the past tense because although Near-Time hasn’t officially killed it, you can’t find any mention of it on their site and they’re focusing all their efforts on a Web-based service that provides weblog, wiki, and shared calendar capabilities.

<http://www.near-time.com/>

Anyway, here’s what we do now and possible alternatives we’ve come up with.

Internet File Storage Site — Any small group that’s attempting to share files needs some sort of centralized file store. Our current solution relies on AppleShare over IP running on the one Mac I have with a static IP address. On that file server, which all of our editors can mount in the Finder, there are two folders: IN and OUT. Files available for editing live in IN; those that someone is working on are moved to OUT. We also add metadata to article file names for more information. In other words, a version number in the file name is incremented by each editor, and each editor appends his or her initials to the file name after editing. So, this file starts out life as DocumentCollaboration-1.ace in IN. When Jeff wants to edit it, he moves it to OUT and renames it to DocumentCollaboration-2.jlc. That way we all know who has it checked out, and we know not to mess with it until he puts it back in IN.

This solution works fairly well, but has some problems. Most notable is that AppleShare over IP can be troublesome when used over the Internet. It’s not uncommon to have troubles with the Finder, and having the volume mounted can slow down any activity that queries the available volumes. Plus, it’s sufficiently slow that most people choose to copy a file locally before working on it; that’s extra work and can engender mistakes.

We’ve hit upon two solutions to this problem. First is the Subversion version control system. Matt Neuburg, who’s familiar with Subversion as a programmer, set up a shared repository for us and has helped train everyone in what’s necessary to use the main Mac OS X Subversion clients, svnX and BBEdit. Overall, the Subversion setup works well technically, but despite loud claims in the Subversion documentation that it can be used for any sort of file, the entire system is designed by and for programmers and falls down hard in terms of usability. The free svnX offers a graphical interface, but it’s obtuse, and BBEdit’s interface is essentially a long list of similarly named menu commands. Most annoyingly, there’s no built-in way in svnX or BBEdit of saying, "Just keep my local copies of the files up-to-date at all times," forcing us to update manually over and over again.

<http://subversion.tigris.org/>

<http://svnbook.red-bean.com/>

<http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/community/ subversion/svnx/features/>

<http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/>

I came upon another possibility that’s a bit reminiscent of Flow, the weblog editor Ecto. Once properly configured to see our Web Crossing server via the MetaWeblog API, Ecto automatically showed me all the weblogs we host, and it’s trivial to create a new article or edit an existing one, regardless of who first created it. Using Ecto, I could create a new article in a private weblog, Jeff could edit it, and I could add more later. When we were done, there’s an easy way to transfer an article from one weblog to another. Although Ecto doesn’t automatically refresh its listing of posts on a schedule, it’s easy to do and could likely be automated by AppleScript, and overall it provides a nice interface. (Another program that provides roughly the same feature set as Ecto is MarsEdit, by Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame, but on the face of things, Ecto seems a bit more full-featured.)

<http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/>

<http://ranchero.com/marsedit/>

Change Tracking — So what’s wrong with Subversion and Ecto? In both cases, it comes down to tracking changes and commenting. Because we have a number of people editing articles multiple times, we need a simple way to view changes.

Right now, we use Nisus Writer Classic, and we all know to mark notable changes in green and to make comments (prefixed with three asterisks) in red. Obviously, this sort of change tracking is more work than the way Microsoft Word does it automatically, but paragraphs aren’t cluttered with lots of very minor changes, and we don’t have to think about who made any given change. A Word document that’s been through a few edit passes is generally a cacophony of color, which makes it hard to read, and it’s difficult to tell which changes were made when. If one of us edits an article multiple times, it’s impossible for others to tell which changes were made in which edit pass. Also, we’ve noticed over the years that Word’s change tracking often sets up an antagonistic situation ("How dare he change that word!") where none really exists, and its accept/reject approach doesn’t match well with what we generally want to do, which is to accept all the good changes (so it would be nice not to have to do this manually) and tweak all the bad changes (seldom does anyone just reject a change).

Flow got this right by storing each version of the document that was shared and providing a comparison feature that could be applied to any two versions. It wasn’t perfect; sometimes it declared an entire paragraph was changed when only a word or two were different, but it worked pretty well. Better yet, you could compare versions whenever you wanted, but the changes weren’t in your face all the time as they tend to be with Word (and yes, I know that Word’s change tracking display can be modified, but it’s clumsy).

Subversion, because it’s designed for programmers to share code, is great about maintaining multiple versions of documents. But even though the versions are present, there’s no good way to see the differences between them. BBEdit can compare files, of course, but it can do so only at a line level and shows the comparisons in a separate window from the latest version of the document. With prose text, a line is a paragraph, and adding a single comma marks an entire paragraph as changed. There’s also the FileMerge utility that comes with Apple’s developer tools. It can do character-level comparison, but it’s such a horrible text editing environment that it’s essentially unusable. Plus, neither BBEdit nor svnX offer a halfway decent interface for seeing all the versions of a document and comparing them.

While bemoaning BBEdit’s lack of any control over the look of individual characters, we realized that BBEdit can do some colorizing of text when the document in question is in a particular programming or tagging language like HTML. In BBEdit 8, this colorizing is configurable via "codeless language modules," simple XML files that define tags for BBEdit to recognize. I created a codeless language module that understood that .tb files used lines starting with three asterisks as comments and would colorize text between backslashes (a subtle character we essentially never use in TidBITS). In essence, this solution recreates what we had in Nisus Writer Classic, though we must add backslashes around notable changes and remember to remove them at the end. Again, it’s a functional solution, but it’s more work than would be ideal, and is generally inelegant.

Ecto has no versioning capabilities at all, which means that the only way to track changes in a document would be to use the colored text approach we used in Nisus Writer. That’s not unthinkable, but colorizing text via the Colors palette isn’t a fluid action. I don’t know if there’s any way to make a keyboard shortcut for applying a color, but none has jumped out at me. One of the planned aspects of our next-generation content management system is the capability to maintain multiple versions of articles (Web Crossing can already do this via its wiki plug-in); it’s possible that this capability would help during the editing phase as well.

Final Format — The third aspect of the problem is the format in which we write, and how that interacts with our content management system. Currently, we use a variety of styles in Nisus Writer Classic, and when Geoff Duncan has finished the final edit pass on the issue, he uses some age-old Nisus macros I wrote to turn the styled issue file into the setext (structure enhanced text) format we send out in email, and an HTML version that he then imports into his database (which subsequently generates the HTML edition that’s also sent out via email, along with the text and HTML announcement editions). Although we have to be highly accurate about the styles so my macros can do the right thing, it’s easy to apply them and edit the document with them applied. Unfortunately, this system is entirely dependent on Nisus Writer Classic, and we simply can’t be relying on a Classic application any more now that Intel-based Macs don’t support Classic.

In rethinking this part of the problem, it would seem to make sense to create articles in HTML, since it has become a common file format and would import easily into our next-generation content management system as well as our current one. But we don’t want to have to write in full HTML code, since it makes editing difficult and is prone to error. Plus, HTML can be difficult to render down to something simple like setext for email.

Ecto addresses this issue by allowing styled text editing and sending HTML out when articles are posted, but any conversion to something like setext would have to be a server-side function. In the next-generation content management system, that’s likely, but styled text-to-HTML doesn’t help us much at the moment.

We’ve also considered swapping our Nisus Writer styles for writing in something very much like setext – John Gruber’s setext-inspired Markdown language. John designed it to be easy to use while writing, and he provides a Perl script that can be installed into BBEdit to convert Markdown format into HTML. Plus, it appears that Ecto automatically understands Markdown as well when previewing articles, so if we can create scripts in Ecto to convert Markdown into setext and add Markdown support to our next-generation content management system, we could have a solution for both the present and the future. This may sound like a good approach, but changing all of our systems will be a fair amount of work, so we don’t want to move further until we’re certain it’s the best approach.

<http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/>

Putting It All Together — If I had to make a decision today, I’d pick a private weblog as the Internet file storage site, with articles edited in Ecto using the Markdown format and colors for change tracking. Our setext and HTML issues could be generated in BBEdit using Text Factories until such time as our content management system can kick those issues out semi-automatically.

But the more I poke at these different programs, the more picky little details I come across, and the more I wonder if there might not be other approaches that could work even better. For instance, although I found that Ecto can send an article to BBEdit for editing, that method of transferring the data always converts characters that are problematic in HTML to their corresponding entities, even though we want angle brackets, for instance, to remain angle brackets in the setext version of TidBITS.

A discussion I had with Chuck Joiner on a recent MacNotables podcast generated a few suggestions from listeners that I haven’t yet had time to investigate fully, but which look promising. In particular, we’re checking out Writeboard from 37signals and AdventNet’s Zoho Writer, though the latter works only in Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox and Netscape. Both are essentially online word processors, leading me to wonder if writing in a Web browser instead of a real Macintosh text editor would be acceptable, if the services would be sufficiently reliable in both daily uptime and in the long run, and if we’d run into troubles with needing to work in too-many offline environments like airplanes.

<http://www.macnotables.com/archives/2006/ 631.html>

<http://www.writeboard.com/>

<http://www.zohowriter.com/>

So I welcome your thoughts and suggestions about alternative solutions that we might be missing. Feel free to send them to me directly, and if appropriate, I may forward some to TidBITS Talk for further discussion. Thanks!

"Macworld Digital Photography Superguide" Released — Our latest ebook is a bit different from anything we’ve done in the past, and in fact, it’s not even a Take Control ebook! Instead, it was written by our friends (some of whom also write for Take Control) at Macworld Magazine. Called the Macworld Digital Photography Superguide, it’s a 102-page collection of the best of Macworld’s coverage of the wide world of digital photography. In 21 detailed sections, you’ll learn how to take great shots, make them even better with image-editing tools ranging from iPhoto to Adobe Photoshop, move them to something you can hold in your hand, and protect them against mishap.

Now, you might be wondering why we’re selling an ebook from Macworld rather than writing our own. Quite simply, they did a great job, and we couldn’t see any reason to duplicate their effort when we could work together instead.

The Macworld Digital Photography Superguide features a sleek full-color layout, lots of illustrative photos, and the features you expect from a good ebook, including internal links, bookmarks, and links to referenced Web sites. But what really matters is the content, and that’s where it especially shines – we’re sure you’ll learn a lot! (We encourage you to download the free 15-page sample to see what it looks like and how it prints, since it is rather different from our Take Control design.)

We’re selling the ebook by itself, or in a special bundle with our 107-page Take Control of Buying a Digital Camera (discounted 25 percent), which gives you an in-depth discussion of the process of purchasing a digital camera, in classic Take Control style.

<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/mw-photo.html? 14!pt=TRK-0033-TB24-TCNEWS>

<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/buying- digicam.html?14!pt=TRK-0015-TB824-TCNEWS>

The first link for each thread description points to the traditional TidBITS Talk interface; the second link points to the same discussion on our Web Crossing server, which provides a different look and which may be faster.

Creative Commons License Upheld in Dutch Court — A reader provides more details about the case that Adam wrote about last week. (1 message)

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2945>

<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/777/>

Comments on: Apple versus Apple — Geoff Duncan’s article about the Apple Corps lawsuit against Apple Computer prompts discussion of the case, including the reasons Apple hasn’t pre-loaded music on iPods. (9 messages)

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2946>

<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/778/>

How to reset printing under 10.4.5? An inkjet printer stops responding correctly under Tiger, but readers have a few suggestions for fixing the problem. (3 messages)

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2947>

<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/779/>

Apple, iTunes and France: The Reality — Readers discuss Kirk McElhearn’s article looking at France’s proposed legislation that could force Apple to open its FairPlay DRM or pull the iTunes Music Store from the French market. (6 messages)

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2948>

<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/780/>

Hard Drive Backups and Retrospect — Someone whose been lax about backing up asks for experiences using Retrospect, Mac OS X, and recent hard drives. (4 messages)

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2950>

<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/782/>

Best standalone recorders for podcasts — If you’re looking to record audio on the go without hauling a PowerBook or iBook, check out these suggestions for recording units. (5 messages)

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2951>

<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/783/>