This MacBook and MacBook Pro firmware update addresses an issue where the first key press may be ignored if the computer has been sitting idle. It also addresses some other issues.

Once the update is download you’ll see the following dialog box:

Clicking update kicks off the update which took less than a minute on my MacBook.

I also received the Pro Applications 2007-01 and Pro Applications 2007-02 updates again. I suspect this was due to my install of the Aperture 2 trial software on my MacBook. My iMac did not receive the updates and does not have Aperture 2.

None of these updates required a reboot.

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Last week Bare Bones software released a minor update to Yojimbo. Yojimbo 1.5.1 is a minor update that contains 7 bug fixes. Click the thumbnail to see a list of fixes. I installed Yojimbo 1.5.1 on my MacBook first and ran it for about a week. I didn’t have any problem syncing with the slightly older version (1.5) on my iMac. I upgraded the version on my iMac last night. I haven’t had any problems with the upgrade. I use the basic functions of Yojimbo, filing, search, PDFs and tagging and haven’t encountered the situations described in the fixes.

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Apple describes this update by saying…

This update supports system software components shared by all iLife ’08 applications to improve their stability and performance. This update also supports important bug fixes for Aperture 2.0.

No computer restart is needed.

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The $199 price seems to be a price cut from version 1.5. I don’t keep track of these things but Amazon.com is still selling version 1.5 for $230 with a list price of $299. (So don’t buy from Amazon yet, they don’t seem to have Aperture 2 listed.) Amazon has Aperture 2 listed now.

If you work for a large company check and see if they have Apple’s “Employee Purchase Program” available. My company does, and Aperture is discounted about 18%, which is a lot for Apple. Since I would inevitably buy the upgrade so I just went ahead and ordered it.

Apple has identified 103 new features in Aperture 2 with the User Interface having the longest list (30). Like the Leopard list some don’t seem worth mentioning, like the “Reset All Warnings preference” feature.

The recommended configuration is a dual core 2GHz processor with 2GB RAM. Apple has a compatibility checker which will tell you if Aperture will run on your system and there’s a 30-day trial available. The compatibility checker is linked at the bottom of the trial download page. If you have a licensed copy of version 1.5 you need to go through a short process to install trial version which is why I’ll just wait for my full version to arrive.

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iPhoto 7.1.2 is described as:

This update addresses issues when publishing photos to a .Mac Web Gallery, improves overall stability, and fixes a number of other minor issues.

iPhoto 7.1.2 also contains a security fix to prevent arbitrary code execution.

The ProKit Update is described as:

This update improves reliability for Apple’s professional applications and is recommended for all users of Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Express, Aperture, Logic Studio and Logic Express.

I didn’t have a problem installing either update but I don’t use .Mac Web Galleries. No reboot was required.

Well, I almost had a week without an Apple update. But I think all my Apple software has been updated so hopefully things will quiet down.

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I haven’t installed the new version yet and since backups require a little more testing beyond just installing the app and making sure it runs, it may be a several days before I switch over to it completely. But it’s nice to see it finally released. The tribulations of getting Leopard & Time Machine compatibility were covered on the Shirt Pocket blog, although it is down as I post this. But the website is up and the software can be downloaded.

It’s a free upgrade to current users. There’s also a free version which provides the basic cloning features without expiration.

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But then iTunes for Windows came out and that’s what really made me a iPod fan. Not the iTunes store (which I avoided for the longest time), just iTunes as jukebox software that could manage my iPod. The killer feature for me was the smart playlists. They’ve evolved over time but here’s an overview of a few I have now. Screenshots are from iTunes for Mac but they should apply just fine to iTunes for Windows.

Rating Songs

I rely on the song ratings for some of my playlists so some background is in order. Every song is rated 2 to 5 stars but it’s not true that I like every 5 star some better than every 4 star.

A song with two stars means I don’t like it. It’s probably not synced to my iPod although there are exceptions if I like the song when played as part of an album but don’t want it to play outside the album.

Every song starts with 3 stars. Five stars means I like it more than most for that genre or artist.

Four stars means I liked it more than most. I may rate a song 4 stars instead of 5 if I have too many five stars for the artist.

One star isn’t used for songs, it means it’s spoken word and I’ve already listed to it.

Smart Playlists

Smart Playlists are created by selecting “File -> New Smart Playlist…” from the menu. They can be edited by right-clicking the list and selecting “Edit Smart Playlist”. Click the thumbnails for for full size images.

All Music

For the mother of all playlists I start with one called “Music Only”. This one is set up to only include songs and exclude everything else. If new file types are added I have to change it but at least I only have to change it in one place. All my playlists are set to include only checked items as shown here. If I don’t want a song on my iPod I uncheck it in iTunes.

While “Music” can be selected as a playlist this indicates what iTunes sees as the Music library. In my case this isn’t just songs so I need the Music Only playlist.

List of 5’s (by LRP)

This is an example of a playlist that uses my ratings, the All Music playlist and presents me the songs that I haven’t heard in awhile at the top of the playlist. In this case the “by LRP” means “by Least Recently Played”. The playlist criteria is shown in the screenshot. As you can see from the screenshot it picks files with a five star rating and is limited to my “Music Only” playlist so I’ll only get music.

It’s not checked, but you’ll see it’s set to limit to 700 items based on least recently played. This is a holdover from when my music didn’t all fit on my iPod. Checking the box would limit the playlist to the 700 songs and if this playlist was set as the sync criteria only those songs would sync.

As for the Least Recently Played Piece…

Save the Smart Playlist then sort by the “Last Played” field in iTunes by clicking on it until it’s sorted least recent to most recently play. If you need to add the field right-click the field header bar and select it from the list. The playlist will sync to the iPod in this order (at least it does for my 5G iPod) and any field can be sorted. Click the first column (numbers - no title) to return to manual sort.

I have similar playlists for my other ratings. It’s convenient to listen to songs of a certain rating and change the rating if my tastes have changed.

Best of…

I have numerous “Best of” playlists for specific artists. There are minor differences between the way they’re set up in order to either keep the number of matched songs relatively low or provide enough songs for a playlist. But they’re all basically the same and the screenshot to the left shows the basic playlist. Some artists may be limited to 5 stars while others may include songs from various bands they were in, which is covered in the next section.

Similar to the best of for artists I also have best of genre playlists. Simply pick Genre as the criteria instead of artist.

Grouping

The properties of every song contains a Grouping field on the info tab. This can be used to contain the artist name if they were in various bands. The example shows Buddy Holly entered into a song done by The Crickets.

To create a Best Of collection for Buddy Holly I can use the Group field and avoid some complex nested playlists. Smart Playlists can only “match all” or “match any” which can be limiting at times. The criteria is “contains” because there may be cases where several artists I like are in the same group and I want those songs to appear in each of their own playlists.

Unrated Songs

When I add a song to the iTunes library the first thing I want to do is rate it. So I have a playlist setup to identify unrated songs. This way I can easily play the songs and rate them. No star is selected, if you accidentally click a star you can clear it my clicking at the very left edge of the field.

One thing to keep in mind - if you are playing the list in iTunes and rate a song it will immediately drop off the list, even if it’s playing. If it’s the one playing then all playback stops. To prevent this uncheck “Live Updating” or do what I do and rate the song when it’s done playing. Songs can be rated on the iPod without affecting playback.

Playlist of Selected Podcasts

I like listening to podcasts while driving to work in the morning. I have a smart playlist set up that contains the podcasts I like to start the day with.

Podcasts can be selected by using the Album field.

Amazon MP3 Store

For me, the Amazon MP3 store has become a place to buy music since it’s all DRM-free and in many cases cheaper than iTunes. This smart playlist identifies the music that was bought from Amazon.

My Favorite Playlist

This is my most used playlist. I like the constant refresh of the music I listen to even if it does take several months to get through everything. Still, this playlist doesn’t contain every song. It’s limited to 250 songs so I can still do random play and only get older songs. It also excludes Classical and Jazz since I only listen to those when I’m in the mood for them. It also excludes all those lowly 2 star songs. Some people like shuffle but I prefer this list.

As for where I came up with the 250 number. It’s approximately how many songs I’d have to listen to each week to make it through the entire collection in 6 months.

Additional Playlists

Theses playlists are variations on the above themes so don’t really require any explanation once you see the criteria. Hover your mouse over each thumbnail for the list description and double click it to view if your interested.

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1. Transmit no longer stalls the UI when deleting files in S3
2. No longer have to manually refresh to make deleted buckets disappear under Amazon S3
3. Decreased memory footprint for multiple-file S3 transfers

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In Google Reader click on Manage Subscriptions at the bottom of your subscriptions list (or click on Settings long the top).

Then click Import/Export from the settings menu. You’ll see the screen shown below.

Click on the Export you subscriptions as an OPML file link and save the file to your hard drive. If your using Safari or any other browser that auto saves the file will be called google-reader-subscription.xml.

I decided to set up my feeds in the NewsGator web. I already had an account from an earlier trial of their software and I remembered the password.

Once you have the account click on the Manage Feeds link then select the URL & Import tab. Then click on Import followed by the Chose File button. Select the file you saved from Google Reader and click Import. These are shown in the next screenshot. follow the numbers.

The import maintained my Google Reader folder structure.

Each of the clients also has the ability to import the OPML file if you don’t want or need the web service. If you have multiple Macs you can sync using .Mac instead of the NewsGator web service.

The biggest thing Newsgator/NetNewsWire has going against it for me is I “grew up” with Google Reader. I had about a dozen feeds when I started using it and I’m now at 137. So my news reading conformed to the Google way as I expanded. I need to re-train my muscle memory but I found that NetNewsWire for the Mac was more in line with the way I’m used to than was FeedDemon for Windows.

One thing that jumped out at me is the ability to customize feeds in each client since it recognizing each client as a unique location. This will allow the feeds to be tailored to my environment, unlike Google’s every feed every place way of doing things. There’s still a web based feed reader for when it’s needed and everything has stayed nicely in sync so far.

You do not need to create the web account if you don’t want the web reader and don’t need to sync.

Shawn Blanc has a good review of NetNewsWire (the Mac RSS reader), written back in December. It’s based on the NNW 3.1 beta.

I couldn’t find any current and comprehensive reviews of FeedDemon (the Windows RSS reader), just lot’s of “it’s great” type comments. CNet made it an Editor’s Choice back in October 2006 as did PC Magazine in April 2006.

Any one else considering switching to the NewsGator/FeedDemon/NetNewsWire club now that membership is free?

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QuickTime 7.3.1 is available through Apple automatic update and a standalone download in four different versions. One for Windows, one for Panther, one for Tiger and one for Leopard. The QuickTime update contains three security fixes. All three vulnerabilities could allow arbitrary code execution.

While not a security update, GarageBand 4.1.1 was also released. It has the terse description: "This update improves overall stability and addresses issues with file export to iPhone."

I watched a couple of QuickTime movies and streamed a couple more videos without any problems.

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The release notes contain four Leopard specific fixes, the most serious (at least for me) of which was the "Edit With" menu showing apps on Time Machine volumes. This explains why "Edit With" displayed each app a half dozen or more times. It’s back to listing each app just once.

There were three fixes listed that were related to Amazon S3. One was "can now delete a folder with more than one thousand files inside". I’d had this problem in the past so tried again with the update. I had a folder on S3 with 92,222 files in it and while I could delete the files it was a bumpy ride. It took a lot a memory and time to list the files. By the time Transmit listed all the files Activity Monitor reported 961.15MB of Real memory and 2.23GB of Virtual memory used. The memory usage was unexpected and I was running a Windows VM at the time so the timing to list the files is irrelevant since all memory was used. I stopped the VM and there was plenty of free memory when I started the actual deletion and that took about 10 minutes. The deletion actually finished with an error, saying it couldn’t delete a file. All the files were still listed and a refresh did nothing. I disconnected and reconnected and the files were gone, so the delete did work. It’s the listing of files that seemed to take all the memory. With the delete in progress Transmit memory usage dropped and I was able to restart the VM without max’ing out the MacBook memory.

Under the Everything Else category of fixes was "File listing now updates correctly when deleting many items". This seems to describe the problem I just saw with the S3 deletion so maybe it’s not fixed. Or maybe my problem was S3 specific.

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New features include full support for images and spotlight will now index tags and all form fields. Yojimbo will now support the F16-F19 keys on the new Apple keyboards. Most of the other changes are minor and revolve around performance enhancements and fixes.

I upgraded Yojimbo on both my iMac and my MacBook. The upgrade also updates the database so be sure you have a backup of the ~/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo folder in case things go horribly wrong. I noticed a backup was also created in the ~/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo Backups folder. The first time I synced each computer it took a long time to do the sync but there were no problems and the next sync was quick.

The look and feel of Yojimbo hasn’t changed, beyond a new sidebar collection called "Images". I consider that a good thing. I like Yojimbo for it’s simplicity and flexibility so I’m not looking for a bunch of new features. This update improves what’s already there.

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It wasn’t available to me through automatic update. I’m not sure if that’s because I was too early or because I was running a beta. So I downloaded and installed the update. The download was a DMG file and there was an installer which did the upgrade without much input beyond accepting the license. The first time I started my Windows XP SP2 VM the Parallels Tools were installed. I had to confirm the installation but the rest was automatic. After the Parallels Tools install finished I needed to reboot the VM. This first reboot took longer than normal, with lots of (virtual) disk activity.

I was also able to start my Ubuntu 7.10 VM without a problem.

I had previously mentioned a couple annoyances with Parallels build 5580. When in Coherence mode the task bar still shows in all four of my Spaces even though I’ve assigned Parallels to Space 3. Opening anything from the task bar, even its own properties, displays in the assigned Space and not the one that had the task bar that was used. I no longer have the problem where the spaces bounce around when starting Parallels. It opens Parallels in the assigned space and goes there just once, just like any other app.

So far it’s been stable for me but there are some known issues listed in the release notes:

Stability and resources usage 
- Problems may occur when suspending a virtual machine with running OpenGL
application 
- Mounted USB device may seriously increase CPU usage 
Coherence 
- Small artefacts in Expose’ may appear 
- Parallels Tools  
- Parallels Tools Center sometimes may use 100% CPU after drag-and-drop
operation 
Video and 3D 
- SolidWorks 2007 operates wrong on Macs with ATI HD2600 graphic card 
- ArcGIS™ Desktop 9.2: ArcGlobe component operates wrong 
- Windows Media Player doesn`t work in IE on Vista 
Parallels Transporter 
- Vista Boot Camp migration via network may fail (if Vista launched in Parallels
Desktop) 
Parallels Explorer&Mounter
- Transmission between different columns with keyboard is not available yet 
Applications compatibility 
- TypeIt4Me causes unexpected operations in guest Windows

Parallels also announced Parallels Premium Edition. This is Parallels Desktop for the Mac bundled with Kaspersky Internet Security, Acronis True Image Home (backup software) and Acronis Disk Director Suite. The bundle is $99 while bust out retail for all the software is $254 (according to Parallels). While I never installed it, my Parallels upgrade included Kaspersky Internet Security so if you have Parallels 3 Standard you have that already. Kaspersky is included with Parallels Desktop for Mac Standard addition but it’s a 6 month subscription while the Premium edition has a 1 year subscription. The 3 windows apps go for about $125 at Amazon (assuming no rebates) so it does seem like a good deal if you want all the software.

Parallels is currently offering several bundles and promotions such as iTunes gift cards. Click the tile at the bottom of this page to see their promotions.

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Most of the improvements over the previous beta center around Leopard compatibility. I’d been having problems with Parallels under Leopard which had driven me to start using VMware Fusion almost exclusively. Most of my really annoying issues have seemed to revolve around Spaces in coherence mode. The release noted mention “multiple problems” in this area have been fixed.

The release notes (included in the download DMG file) lists several known issues that remain in build 5570. Some of them, such as “BSOD on resume” are rather serious and could result in data loss others are relatively minor.

So, I’ll be installing the updated beta and taking it for a spin in the next few days.

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