Jumsoft iWeb Themes
Company: Jumsoft
Price: $9.99 or all ten themes for $69.99
http://www.jumsoft.com
Requirements: iWeb 2 from iLife 08
As a long time user of iWeb I have become somewhat jaded with the themes that Apple supplies with their easy to use website creation program. So much so that I did a series of articles on how to use it and make your site look anything OTHER than yet another iWeb site. It’s relatively easy to do so, cut this piece there, add a little here, not entirely unlike gourmet cooking but with a Betty Crocker Easy-Bake oven.
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FS100 Digital Video Camera
Company: Canon
Price: $323.23 (Amazon.com)
http://www.usa.canon.com
I’ve been avoiding buying a new camcorder to replace the 8 year old DVC tape unit for awhile now. There were plenty of tempting offerings, but none matched the feature set and price point that I was looking for until I happened upon Canon’s FS100 model at an Apple Store. While giving it a once over there, I liked the light weight, the responsive and variable zoom, the microphone input, and that at $399, it was still very much reasonable in price. I almost bought it right there at the Apple Store, but resolved to sleep on it first and check out what other people were saying about it. I’m glad I did, and afterwards I almost gave it a miss but decided that no other camcorder available currently in the this price range would meet my needs.
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LaCie 1TB external Hard Drive, design by Neil Poulton
Company: Lacie
Price: $269
www.lacie.com
Hardware Requirements: G3/4/5 PowerPC/ Intel Mac with open USB1.1/2, FireWire 400, or eSATA port
Designer hard drives. Has it really come to this? A hard drive should be utilitarian, be robust and have oodles of space for all the stuff we want to put on it. Considering that we rarely look at them except over whatever icon is assigned to them (or that we assign to them ourselves) on our desktops to access information and data, who cares what they look like and I’ll be damned, DAMNED I say if I’ll buy a drive based on looks alone.
Except…
This drive looks cool. It’s all black in a Monolith/ 2001: A Space Odyssey kind of way. When it came in for review, my first impression was to dismiss it in the same way I dismissed those Ferrari-branded laptops from some time ago. The outside packaging gave me no reason to believe that this wasn’t just another average hard drive with pretensions.
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Ever heard of PsyStar? Prior to Monday, April 14th, 2008 I never had. This Florida-based company (it just HAD to be Florida) announced a Mac-compatible computer for sale called the Open Computer (renamed from OpenMac in the last few hours) and caused a %&#$storm of EPIC proportions.
Of course making a Mac-compatible computer is in itself not that big a deal. Since Apple went to Intel processors, Macs ARE PCs, their commercials not withstanding. For those that feel like going through the hassle there are tips on installing OS X on vanilla PC hardware at various locations all over the web (hint) OSX86 and Google is your friend (/hint). There are hardware guides, using AMD processors instead of Intel guides, software guides, hacking OS X guides, and all other kinds of tricks to make it work on something that doesn’t have a big Apple corporate label on the side.
Naturally you’re pretty much on your own for upgrades to OS X or making it actually DO anything, and if you ever, EVER try calling Apple for help, the last sound you will hear will be gales of laughter from the Apple support person and the sound of a click as your call is disconnected. In this case however, installing OS X on plain PC hardware was not the issue. PsyStar did something that guaranteed that Apple would definitely not be laughing. They advertised that they (PsyStar) would install OS X on one of THEIR computers and ship it to you for $399. Well, sort of. The computer was $399, but if you wanted them to install OS X there was an additional $155 charge making the price now $554 (this does include a retail copy of OS X and a restore disk).
The information was pretty sparse other than a listing of what hardware the Open Computer came with. This is what the basic model had along with listed options:
- 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (2.4GHz optional)
2GB of DDR2 667 memory (nothing on additional memory or what the max RAM is)
250GB 7200RPM SATA Drive (various larger capacity drives available)
Four total internal SATA ports (one taken by the standard Hard Drive and one by the optical drive)
20x DVD+/-R Drive with LightScribe capability
Integrated Intel GMA 950 Graphics (GeForce 8600GT with either 256MB or 512MB optional)
4 USB Ports (FireWire card optional)
Considering that one of the advantages of owning an Apple-branded Mac is built-in wireless networking in every model, I found it odd that no wireless cards were listed or even available as an option. I would assume that 10/100 gigabit Ethernet is standard as it is on most PC motherboards these days. No software was listed beyond OS X so that free copy of iLife that Apple includes with a new sale most likely wouldn’t be there either.
So why would anyone buy something like this? Apple’s very own Mac mini fits their low-end range and includes iLife 08. Seems like you would just buy the mini. Except PsyStar’s computer has a few option that make it stand out and make the mini look like the dead-end, what you see is all you get (WYSIWYG?) computer that it is. No offense intended toward the thousands of Mac mini owners out there as it’s a perfectly fine little computer, as long as you accept its limitations. As advertised, the PsyStar Open Computer is a superior machine in just about any way you want to look at it. The low-end model has a faster processor than anything offered in a Mac mini, it comes standard with 2GB of RAM (the mini still only has 1GB) with an option for up to 4GB not even possible with the mini. It has the same Intel integrated graphics as the mini, but has options for a card that equals or surpasses even the iMac. It uses a standard SATA 7200 RPM hard drive, while the mini uses a laptop drive and can’t even offer as much storage through options.
The only thing the Mac mini has going for it above and beyond the Open Computer is built-in FireWire (though it is available as an option) and built-in wireless networking which isn’t mentioned at all with the Open Computer, athough there certainly are a lot of wireless PCI based cards for sale elsewhere. You also don’t get the iLife suite which is for sale for $79 from Apple. If getting this for free (kinda) is important to you, you’re most likely not the target that PsyStar was looking at when they (if they have) built the Open Computer.
If you fully deck out an Open Computer, you’re looking at about $1000 (actually $945 plus tax and shipping) or so. However, the hardware would be closer to the equivalent of a high end iMac than a Mac mini. Here are the specs fully loaded:
- Intel Processor: Core2Duo/2.66GHz (+ $90.00)
Hard Drive: 400GB 7200RPM SATA (+ $95.00)
Graphics Processor: GeForce 8600GT 512MB (+ $155.00)
Firewire: 3 x IEEE 1394 (+ $50.00)
OS X Leopard: Installed (+ $155.00)
Memory: 2GB DDR2
The Open Computer has something going for it that no consumer model Apple builds currently does, expandability. Oh, not for swapping out video cards (though possible if NVIDIA or ATI ever decide to), but storage. My one biggest complaint about the iMac is lack of internal storage. Sure, FireWire and USB enclosures are cheap, but they take up a lot of room. A tower might take up even more, but it isn’t sitting on top of my desk with a bunch of USB and FireWire hubs to accommodate drives, printers, scanners, a keyboard, and a mouse.
Tell you what. Let’s move on from talking about hardware. This machine is almost exactly what I’ve been waiting for Apple to build for years. So I’m already sold with some caveats. Let’s talk about OS X.
Apple’s EULA (End User’s License Agreement ) is fodder for the sleep deprived and I wouldn’t dream of trying to copy and paste the whole thing here. For the sake of this discussion, what it does say is that it expressly forbids you from installing OS X on anything other than an Apple branded computer. What exactly does that mean? If I installed it into a toaster (work with me here), would Apple and its enforcement branch come swooping into my house, destroy the best damn toaster I’ve ever owned, and take me away to an iPrison (surrounded by iWalls, iGuards and bad iFood presumably)? No, because they can’t. The worst thing they could do is not offer me ANY support for my iToaster and probably hope I get iIndegestion. They could tell me I no longer have a valid license, but would that be enforceable?
Instead what Apple has done is sic their very impressive legal team on this company and threaten to sue them out of existence. This prevents anyone from challenging them legally since very few companies have lawyers capable of going mano e mano with Apple. So PsyStar will probably as quietly as they can remove any mention of the Open Computer from their website and deny that they ever offered such a machine in the first place with a classic bit of ThinkSpeak. They will most likely end up a minor footnote hardly worth mentioning in Apple history as written by Steve Job’s clone (blessed be His name) one hundred years from now. Except what has happened instead is that PsyStar has thrown down the gauntlet and is themselves threatening to sue Apple over its own EULA AND is now also offering a higher end machine they call the Open Computer Pro. The “Pro” machine offers performance that at face value is better than anything Apple offers in their consumer line and starts at $999. I again went to the site and fully loaded one with the following specs:
- Memory: 8GB DDR2 RAM
Processor: Core2Quad/2.6GHz
Hard Drive: 1 TB 7200RPM SATA
Video Card: GeForce 8800GT 512MB
Case: Mirror Finish
Installed OS: OS X 10.5 Leopard - Total: $2169
I won’t do cost or performance comparisons with Apple’s own iMacs since I don’t have one of these Open Computers (or Pros) to play with. Who knows what the build factor is like or how well it will hold up, or even if it will still work the next time Apple either updates 10.5 or releases 10.6. On paper it sounds like a pretty good deal.
So what happens next?
PsyStar is sounding tough but time will tell if they can hold out and support these machines. Even if the absolute worst happens and PsyStar disappears in an Apple generated category 5 hurricane that is targeted toward their Miami, Florida facilities. With this announcement something has changed. Someone with deeper pockets than PsyStar might see this as an opportunity. Someone with the guts to stand up and offer a machine for sale that will run OS X (pre-installed) and force Apple to a courtroom to explain why exactly it is that if someone buys a copy of OS X that they can’t legally install it once (and only once to stay legal) on hardware not designed and built by Apple. Why this company couldn’t offer their own support for software and hardware as long as it did not violate Apple’s software patents. Would you support and purchase a machine that ran OS X legally that wasn’t built by Apple?
Look at it this way, Microsoft sells OEM Windows licenses for a lot less than what PsyStar was charging for a pre-installation of OS X. I bet if they gave Apple that entire $155 that it would equal or be pretty darn close to what Apple makes on a typical iMac sale without them having to actually build anything.
Are we having fun yet? You’ve made a Master Page, set up your Welcome page, played around with graphics and page sizes, all without knowing a single bit of HTML. Now, we’re going to get into what sets iWeb apart from most other web page creation software. Sure if you know CSS, PHP, HTML, and other buzz words I just pulled out of my head, you can make a site that dances and weaves across a web browser like some bad 60’s hippy movie. Unfortunately you probably don’t know about those things (don’t feel bad, neither do I), but you want your site to look like you spent a lot more time on it than you did.
Dual 1.4 GHz G4 AGP processor upgrade
Company: FastMac
Price: $419.95
Fastmac.com
Why upgrade an older computer? Especially one that’s over 4-5 years old? Why not just get a new Mac and keep up with the Jones? I’ll tell you why. Macs are expensive. Especially if you’re talking about replacing one older tower with another. The price for a new Mac Pro without any bells and whistles is $2200. That’s bare minimum and adding anything like hard drives (which you’ll need new ones of as all new towers are using SATA instead of ATA) memory, wireless (yes the Mac Pro does not come with an Airport 802.11x card), etc, is going to drive the price up even more. You can certainly go cheaper than that. You can get an iMac or a Mac Mini for less, but if you’re used to the expansion option you have with a tower, remember that you’ll be forced to go to all external devices (which take up more room AND cost more as well) with either one of those choices. If you have options for upgrading your processor, and the cost does not exceed around 25% of the cost for a new machine, it can be more than worth it to extend the life of your current computer for a few years.
If you’re computer is REALLY old, say before the advent of the G3, then it just won’t be worth putting any real money into it. Bite the bullet, get either an Intel Mac or at least a G4 PPC Mac (and then upgrade it!) and join the ranks of the OS X family. On to the review.
First off, I owe Mike Lowdermilk of FastMac an apology for how long it took me to write this review. I met with him and expressed an interest in getting a dual 1.4 GHz G4 processor upgrade kit from FastMac LAST Macworld and we played telephone/email tag for a few months and it finally showed up in April just in time for a medical crisis to hit the family. After that one thing leads to another and here we are in December with no review written yet, Certain members of the MyMac family (cough…Nemo…cough) started to remind me that the 2008 Macworld was coming up and any promised unfinished reviews needed to be completed.
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Putting it all together
If you have stuck with me so far, I’ve talked a lot about how to use iWeb’s powerful built-in tools, how to make your own navigation bar, and how to set up Master Pages. What have I left out? Oh yeah, some other tools you may find useful and actually using the program.
What ELSE do I need? Continue reading »
In all honesty, you don’t really need any other tools beyond what iWeb and the other programs that make up the iLife suite provide. Apple has been kind enough to include very powerful text and graphic manipulation software to get you started. However, no man is an island and no web site worth it’s weight in pixels is typically made alone. As I said, iWeb includes some very good tools, but they are far from complete. For some other really cool and creative text and graphic manipulation, you may need to go outside the Apple enclosed world.
Finally getting to it
In parts 1 through 4 of this article we discussed iWeb and its interface and finally we are ready to start talking about making web pages! What you want your web site to communicate to your audience is entirely up to you but remember that if they can’t figure out how to navigate your site and read your content, you’ve failed to make a good web site. You’re welcome of course to have obscure pictures that fade in and out for your navigation (and yes that is technically possible in iWeb), but unless having the audience hate you is the look and feel you’re going for, standard internal and external links will probably do nicely.
Because most of the functionality I’ll be talking about in this part of the article is done through the “Inspector” window, when I talk about which part of the Inspector to go to, you’ll see something like this: Inspector/Page/Layout. The first part (in this case the Inspector) is the window, the second (Page) is the icon to choose within the window, and the third (Layout) is whatever other button within the icon choice is required. I’ll be doing much the same once we start talking about other floating menus (like the “Color” and “Media” windows).
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All right, this is the last part of looking at the iWeb interface. We finish off looking at the Inspector.
Metrics Tab
What’s up next is the icon that Apple calls “Metrics”. At first glance it might not seem all that big a deal as it doesn’t have multiple buttons and as compared to the other selections in the Inspector very few options. But Metrics is where you can fine-tune almost every section of each page in iWeb. If something gets lost behind something else, this is where you can start moving things around to find those items and put everything back to where it started. Don’t worry; we’ll get more on that bit when we get into making pages.
The first part of this section is a text box that tells you exactly what the file name is of the object you’re manipulating. Unfortunately you can’t actually change the name of the file (which makes little sense since iWeb saves every graphic in the Domain file kept in its Library), but you can view it.
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Inspecting the Inspector (expect the unexpected)
One part of iWeb that you’ll get to know very well is the “Inspector” window. This box is what makes almost all the changes behind the scenes. iWeb relies on this box and its sub-windows for almost everything you’ll need to do beyond dragging and dropping graphics and text boxes. So let’s talk a bit about the Inspector. Please note that the Inspector I’m talking about is the one for iWeb 2 (part of the aforementioned iLife 08) which added a few tricks not available in iWeb 1 (iLife 06).
The Inspector window has several tabs on it, each which performs various tasks. You can bring it up (if it isn’t already there) by using a menu command or by hitting the “Inspector” icon at the bottom of your site window.
Site Tab and Site Continue reading »
The first tab is the “Site” tab. This has two buttons on it; “Site” and “Password”. Under the Site button, you can name (or rename) your site, publish your site to a group, enter your email address, and see how much room is left in your “.mac” iDisk account.
Welcome back. In part two of “Using iWeb 08”, we’ll look at the main screen icons, and what they do. Check out part 1 here.
iWeb’s Basic Interface
Apple likes to create software with as many on-screen buttons as possible. This makes it easy to find commonly used functions and speeds up the workflow. The iWeb interface is no exception. While there are certainly many things you’ll need to do via the menu bar commands (or through keyboard shortcuts), you’ll find that most of the time you’ll be using the various icons or on-screen windows to accomplish your tasks.
The one you’ll use most often will be the “Inspector”, but we’ll get to that later. In this part we’ll talk about the icons on the bottom of your screen. Each one adds some functionality or allows easy insertion for common elements on to your web page.
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Most people who own Macs these days are using some version of OS X. If their Mac is of a relatively recent vintage, they probably also have a copy of Apple’s iLife. I won’t bother to explain what iLife is, you either have it or you don’t. Apple’s iLife 06 is the version that brought one new application that has wormed its way into my heart; iWeb.
The latest version of iLife as of September 2007 is iLife 08. If you have created sites using iWeb from iLife 06, be very careful. While Apple has updated iWeb 2, it still doesn’t always play nice with sites created by its predecessor. If you’re going to open a previous iWeb project in iWeb 2, make a backup copy of the “Domain” file first. See the section titled “Starting off in iWeb” which will tell you where the file is and an easy way to copy it.
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I just bought an iPod Classic. Well, not quite. My Wife bought me an 80 GB iPod Classic for my birthday. I could have gotten any of them, but the new iPod nano that is video capable was swallowed up in my huge hands and the click-wheel felt very fragile as compared to the previous versions. She also asked if I wanted to wait until the iPod Touch was out, but after playing a bit with its more expensive brother the iPhone, I decided against it. I use my iPod mostly in my car and the comfortable and easy to use click-wheel is better for what I wanted an iPod for.
So good for me, I now have a full-sized iPod. So what? Well, this is the first iPod I’ve owned that was video ready and this necessitated some changes in how I manage the media for it. I do have two iTunes purchased movies (Star Trek: Generations and The Sixth Sense) and a boatload of TV episodes (Heroes, 3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica, a few South Parks), but I keep them and most of my other QuickTime/iTunes compatible video files off my main drive. Why? Because they take up a LOT of room.
Ubercaster V 1.1
Company: Pleasant Software for the People
Price: $79.99
ubercaster.com
I’ve been following Pleasant Software for the People’s (no, I’m not making that name up) Ubercaster with great interest for some time. From the very first, the layout for workflow and the potential for what it could accomplish piqued my curiosity and as the betas flowed forth, I was with them every step of the way. Unfortunately each time I was disappointed by what it was actually able to do. I was greeted with crashes and poor quality recording, along with echos from some of the different inputs. Not much of a recommendation right? Well, I’m singing a different tune with the latest version. Before I go on, I’ll get what the program is out of the way.
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EH 150
Company: Sennheiser
Price: $39.99
http://www.sennheiser.com
After playing around with cheap headphones I came to the conclusion that many do with devices like this; you get what you pay for. That doesn’t mean you can’t get a decent set of headphones without spending a fortune though. Case in point, the Sennheiser EH 150 headphones. For less than 50 bucks, you get a pleasant sounding, easy to wear, and quite comfortable set of headphones that while you might not want to use them exclusively with a high-dollar audio setup, they work great with your laptop or portable media player.
The well-cushioned padding will fit around most ears and allow for some pretty decent noise cancellation as well for those who spend a lot of time say on planes or trains. They are light, but don’t fold so whatever manner you transport them in, make sure there’s enough room to store them out of the way while not in use.
Pluses: Comfortable, decent sound, light, good noise reduction
Minuses: Doesn’t fold, so you need some space to carry them
HarmonyAudio
Company: Miglia
Price: Varies quite a bit. Not more than $100
http://www.miglia.com/
The Miglia Harmony Audio is a FireWire based audio input device for your computer. It has a very simple design (which is a plus) for recording two devices as long as those devices use 1/4-inch input jacks. It interfaces easily with Apple’s GarageBand and (unlike most USB devices) allows you to have two unique tracks fully editable within that program.
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What? What’s that I see? I turn the page on the calendar from turkey overload to shopping chaos and I see it’s time for my annual (well, it IS my third) ChristHannaKwanzmas Holiday rant. I’m coming up on my anniversary for my third full year with MyMac.com and the writing fever has yet to leave me. I can’t speak for your reading fever naturally, but I hope you all enjoy these riotous wrangling of writing as much as I do making them. If not…well…NO SOUP FOR YOU!
What to rant about this year? Thankfully, things are looking up for us here firmly entrenched in Macland with computer market-share up, iPods still as popular as ice water in hell, and Microsoft is continuously doing its darndest to pull failure from the jaws of victory. I’m calm; I’m relaxed, and have no real complaints. Well, that’s not entirely true.
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iToppers Mac notebook cover
Company: iToppers
Price: $13.00 to $19.50 (depending on notebook model and color selected)
http://www.itoppers.com
Recently on the MyMac.com podcast, Tim, Chad, and I had discussed a certain product that can make an ordinary Apple notebook into something more individual. While Apple certainly has intelligent and talented design engineers, their notebook line has changed very little over the last few years as far as the way they look goes. So, if you have a G4 PowerBook or Core2Duo MacBook Pro, unless you look closely you’ll notice very little difference in outward appearance. Same thing for the G3/G4 iBooks and MacBooks. Of course while the MacBooks have a very different keyboard construction from their older iBook brethren and the size has gone from a 12 or 14-inch screen to a single 13.3-inch screen, they all still have the same white polycarbonate (or black if you feel the need to spend an extra $150 for the same machine) outer casing. So, your MacBook looks like his iBook, which looks like her MacBook and on and on. How can you show some individuality when they all look the same without spending a lot of money on getting your computer painted by a pro? Easy solution. Go to iToppers.comand take a look at the covers available for the iBooks and MacBooks.
A report by Gartner has been floating around the web calling for Apple to leave the hardware business and let someone else, like sayDell, make their Macs for them. While this is a preposterous proposal, parts of is not so ridiculous.
First let’s get the madness out of way so we can concentrate later on the parts that actually make sense. In the report, Gartner states, “Apple should concentrate on what it does best – create software – and make use of Dell’s production and distribution infrastructure. Apple should leverage its close relationship with Intel and team up with Intel’s closest ally, Dell. We recognize that this move would surprise and even shock many. We are aware that Steve Jobs cancelled previous Mac licenses when he took over at Apple and that he guards the Apple brand zealously. Apple’s margins for its Mac business, currently around 40 per cent, are only sustainable because component makers such as Intel choose to prop up the business.”
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Let me begin by saying that I have been extremely pleased with my iBook. I got it as a refurbished product right after the 1 GHz models came out for about $250 off its retail price. It is one of the 14-inch models with a built-in Airport (802.11g) card, a 32 MB graphics card, a 933Mhz G4 processor, built-in 56k modem, and a 40 GB hard drive. It has been a real workhorse over the last 2-3 years and has never given me a spot of trouble. It certainly can’t compare to one of the new MacBooks (pro or otherwise), but it has always served me faithfully no matter how much abuse I’ve put it through. Yep, what a great machine, except…..
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MyMac Podcast #403
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