Is it possible that the Mac is making inroads with Enterprise IT? Intel Capital announced at CEO Summit that it is leading a Series A investment round in Active Storage of Torrance, CA, which builds high-performance storage solutions for the Mac platform. Other investors in this round include Mission Ventures and Valhalla Partners. Intel Capital invests in companies that drive demand for Intel products, but it also looks to make money and apparently it sees money in enterprise-class solutions for the Mac.

Active Storage was born out of Apple’s decision to discontinue the Xserve RAID. Alex Grossman, CEO of Active Storage, and the other founders were previously executives in the Servers and Storage products group at Apple, Inc. They left to form their own company that would produce storage solutions of the same quality. While Apple has been pitching the Promise VTrack RAID as a replacement solution, Active Storage has developed its XRAID product line to be a lot more Mac-like with brilliant Mac-native management software. This is high-end gear for serious business — fibre-channel, redundant controllers, redundant power supplies, redundant cooling, etc — with an emphasis on performance. The XRAID comes in two flavors, the original XRAID with 16TB capacity expandable to 32TB and the XRAID ES with 4TB, expandable to 16TB.

All of this power is wrapped in a sexy package that feels very Apple like. The folks at Active Storage have put a lot of care into building enclosures with no sharp edges, tapered screws that sit flush with the chassis, thick gauge aluminum, and slick handles on the drive sleds that pop out with a light touch. I had a chance to take a look at the XRAID at Macworld Expo in January and the build quality on these units is astounding. Having been in a data center or two in my life, finding a polished product where attention has been given to every detail to make it simple to access from both the front and the back of the rack is a real joy. One of the coolest pieces is an iPhone monitoring app that gives you all the details you could want on how the XRAID is performing even when you are not near the data center. This is definitely a storage solution fit for a Mac.

The extreme ease of use in a Mac environment has made Active Storage popular in the entertainment crowd. When asked to explain further, Mr. Grossman explained that, “You may not know this because you aren’t in working with these systems every day, but feature-length movie production requires 50 to 100TB of storage. And that need doesn’t go away when the movie is finished either. There is a need for long-term archival storage as well. And it doesn’t always make sense to use tape backup, so disk-to-disk archiving is growing.”

Final Cut has made the Mac platform a common choice for film editing with some feature films like King Kong being composited and edited entirely on Macs. With the advent of HD, the storage needs for films are growing astronomically. Active Storage appears to be positioned to take advantage of that trend. It makes a great hardware solution in conjunction with Apple products like the Xserve, Final Cut Server, and Xsan 2.

The company currently has about 25 employees, but about 50 open positions on its web site. It is obviously looking to grow substantially in 2010, especially with this capital available to fund hiring and product development.

It is great news to see a well-respected investment fund like Intel Capital place bets on the Mac market, especially in a company that is focused on enterprise-class solutions for the Mac.

The iTunes App Store has reached its first birthday. This event deserves a moment of reflection on what Apple has achieved in its first 12 months of operating the App Store.

Tens of Thousands of Apps, Billions of Downloads

Apple celebrated the download of 1 billion applications from the iTunes App Store just this April. Anytime you have a one followed by nine zeroes, it certainly looks impressive, but the remarkable speed with which Apple reached this milestone makes the achievement even more noteworthy. It took just over nine months for the App Store to hit 1 billion downloads; there were also over 35,000 apps available at this time. Not quite three months later, and there are 58,000 apps available in the App Store and downloads are over 1.5 billion.

Love Me Some Apps

iPhone apps are a certified hit. According to a recent report from Compete, the App Store generates surprising engagement with customers. Twenty-seven percent of smartphone users have never installed any apps on their phones, compared with only 2 percent of iPhone users who have managed to avoid the App Store. Of those who have paid for apps, 86 percent have never paid more than $9.99, but 83 percent of iPhone users have downloaded at least six apps.

Seventy-nine percent of iPhone users have downloaded games for their device. Other popular app categories are Entertainment (78 percent), Weather (57 percent), and Music (55 percent). If we count all 21 million iPhones and 16 million iPod touch units worldwide at the time this report was released, these percentages mean that four out of five, or about 16.6 million iPhone users, have at least tried playing a game on their iPhone. If we assume a similar percentage for iPod touch users, then there are about 12.6 million more people downloading content for their device, or about 29.2 million users total who have downloaded at least one game from the App Store.

What should be even more exciting for iPhone developers is that the total installed base of iPhone and iPod touch units is set to nearly double within a year. At 7 million units a quarter, the market for the App Store will increase to 58 million devices by the end of 2009, or 65 million devices by April 2010, maybe 72 million to 75 million by the three-year anniversary of the iPhone and the two-year anniversary of the App Store.

The iPhone Marketplace is Huge

To get a sense of the scale and importance of the iPhone App Store, I went to Electronic Arts, a publisher with two titles on the all-time most popular paid apps leaderboard (Tetris and Monopoly: Here and Now). While it was reluctant to share specific numbers across platforms, it did have the following comment.

EA doesn’t share specific sales results, but the success of Spore Origins and SimCity being a No. 1 Top Paid App worldwide within a day of its launch speaks to the excitement around EA games on the iPhone and iPod touch. In looking at Apple’s game sales on the App Store in general, there are a few cases where Apple’s monthly sales have surpassed certain carrier sales for the same period. It is clear that the consumer is reacting favorably to the shopping, download and game-play experience that Apple and the publishing partners have brought to market. With over 60 percent of Top Paid Apps being games, EA is in an exciting category and we intend to apply our passion for gaming and our leading IP to this platform.

I think it is fascinating that the App Store has exceeded some carrier sales for EA. Of course, EA has games on other platforms, too.

EA continues to evaluate all current and emerging platforms and will launch on platforms that deliver great purchase and gaming experiences. EA has launched three games for the G1 on the Android platform, over 50 games in support of BlackBerry, and over 30 games in support of Windows Mobile.

I was a little surprised to learn there were so many titles on the BlackBerry. I have been a BlackBerry user for several years, but I don’t recall ever seeing an ad for software on the BlackBerry. The game market appears to be a leading indicator of the platform’s success. There are just 12 EA titles on the iPhone right now, but some big names are set to launch this year. If anyone had doubts about the viability of the app market, and more specifically the game market, those doubts should be gone.

Comparisons

There are not any clear apples-to-apples comparisons (pun intended) of mobile phone application marketplaces for the App Store yet, although that will change this year as Microsoft, RIM, Google and Palm all have launched or will launch marketplaces in 2009, but we can look at the existing online stores for the video game market to get a small sense of the scale of the iPhone market.

Xbox

If we compare the iPhone download numbers with Xbox Live, a successful online gaming marketplace for Xbox 360 owners, we begin to see how quickly the App Store has grown. Microsoft has sold about 28 million Xbox 360 systems (compared with 35 million Nintendo Wii systems, and 20 million Sony PS3 systems). Of those 28 million, there are about 17 million active Xbox Live accounts (about 56 percent of which are paid Xbox Live Gold memberships). A dedicated gaming system, with the best online marketplace in the gaming console business, that has been in use for four years, has only 58 percent of the active accounts of the App Store.

Nintendo DS

The iPhone platform is a formidable competitor to portable game devices, too. Nintendo announced just earlier this year that the Nintendo DS has now sold 100 million units. It took 3.5 years to reach this milestone. They are now selling about 8 million units per quarter, or slightly more than the combined 7 million iPhone and iPod touch units sold this last quarter. If Apple continues on its 7 million units per quarter pace, it will reach 100 million units about nine quarters from now, or almost exactly four years after the launch of the first iPhone. In comparison, the Sony PSP reached 50 million units after its first four years on the market. [Source: Kotaku]

Razr

The Motorola Razr, the hottest-selling mobile phone of the previous generation, took 1.5 years to reach 50 million units and had reached 110 million units after four years. The iPhone (by itself, without the iPod touch) will take about five more years (or 7.5 total) to reach 100 million at the current pace. Of course, the Motorola Razr benefited from being available on multiple carriers and having a subsidized price in the range of $50 to $100. If Apple can successfully move to multiple carriers in the U.S. and then worldwide, and lower the cost, then iPhone growth should accelerate. [Source: Wikipedia]

iPod

If we look a little closer to home, the iPod (across the entire product line) took 5.5 years to sell 100 million units and three years to reach 1 billion songs downloaded.

Why Comparisons are Never Fair

These comparisons are always unfair because of the amount of free content for the iPhone when you try to size that up against the predominantly paid content of the iTunes Music Store, Xbox Live and Nintendo DS titles. Still, the exercise gives a small indication of the sheer scale that the iPhone market has achieved in just 12 months.

So What Have We Got Here?

The iPhone and the App Store have created an enormous market. By the next anniversary, we should see 180,000+ apps available in the App Store, 72+ million iPhone OS devices, and 3.5+ billion downloads. The installed base of iPhone OS devices will quickly leap far beyond the installed base of Mac OS computers, meaning that there will be more Objective-C and Cocoa code running on non-Mac devices than Macs — a strange thought for sure. This next year will be interesting to see if the App Store continues its breakneck growth. I, for one, expect that the next 12 months will only see this trend accelerate.

What do you expect to see in the next 12 months from the App Store? More growth? Will the curve start to level out?

This past Saturday, July 11, marked the 1-year anniversary of the opening of the iPhone App Store. In that time Apple has simultaneously redefined the expectations of what a mobile phone can do, and fundamentally changed the way that software for smartphones is delivered to consumers.

There are now about 58,000 applications available through the App Store, providing everything from bird-watching reference guides, to live video of baseball games, to first-person shooters like Doom Resurrection, to Koi ponds. Just like the commercials say, whatever it is you want to do with your iPhone, you are likely to find an app for that.

The Good

In April, Apple announced that as of the end of its second fiscal quarter, it had sold a total of 21 million iPhones and 16 million units of the iPod touch. Also in April, Apple announced that one billion apps had been downloaded by consumers, representing about 27 downloads per device at the time. Three months later, at the end of this quarter, we should expect something like 1.3 billion downloads for 45 million devices, if the trends hold up. The App Store has been such a success that all the other major smartphone makers are launching their own app stores, for the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, and Google Android devices.

This new model for selling software, pioneered by Apple, is a significant shift for the industry. Previously applications for smartphones were either available from the carrier directly, or involved finding software to purchase from independent software companies or in specialty online marketplaces. These models suffered from significant hurdles. The carrier model held back a large amount — sometimes over 50 percent — of the revenue from sales for the carrier itself. The independent distribution model lagged because of a lack of awareness among consumers, and even marketplaces like PocketGear have taken years to develop a catalog that Apple enjoyed within nine months of launch.

The appeal to developers was an important factor in this growth. Apple has put together some decent tools in Xcode since the transition to Mac OS X in 2001. The Mac developers that were already familiar with the tools and the Cocoa frameworks were eager to develop for the iPhone. Coders outside of the Mac circle were also quick to jump on board because at a fundamental level, writing Objective-C code against Cocoa libraries is not that different from writing C++ code for any other framework.

This distribution model for the finished software is, I believe, the key factor to Apple’s success. Combined with the ability to access the store directly on the device and a dead simple install process, the iPhone model has encouraged customers to try out software. A low price point, of 99 cents, and many free apps have driven download numbers. Now the iPhone is far more than just a great phone with email and web. It can be almost anything. It is no surprise that Apple’s marketing features the App Store by reminding everyone that whatever you want the iPhone to be, “there’s an app for that.”

The Bad

And while I am still blown away by the fact that you can purchase an app for $10 that lets you watch live baseball games on your phone, there is a bunch of junk out there, too. While there was a big stink made about farting apps a couple months ago as the leading title of that genre generated some not-so-insignificant revenues for its creator, the interest in fart apps has (predictably?) fallen off in recent weeks. There is frankly a lot of bad software among those 58,000 apps that doesn’t do much or offer much value to anyone and threatens to choke out small quality titles.

And while other fads will continue to come and go in the App Store, this leads to a crowded marketplace where it becomes difficult to find any software of real interest. One can either use the search field, which isn’t particularly clever and easily gamed with keyword stuffing the app description, or one can browse the categories and Top 100 lists. Either approach is somewhat lacking.

The Ugly

The ease with which consumers can try software has also led to some problems for the App Store. There is a significant trend to price apps at the minimum 99 cents in order to try and reach the Top 100 lists, which convey a significant boost in sales as they are featured to everyone browsing for software. To a certain degree, this price floor limits the potential for developers to push the limits of the platform. It makes sense for many shops to try making several small, 99-cent apps that might enjoy a few weeks or months of glory rather than shoot for a more substantial project whose price may keep it off the top sellers list.

It remains to be seen what patience the market will have for casual titles and software toys as the novelty wears off in this second year of the App Store. I hope we will see some significant titles get the attention that they deserve. I cannot tell you how impressed I was when I first saw Super Monkey Ball at the iPhone Developer Preview event. That title completely changed my perspective on what iPhone gaming could be. Titles like Real Racing, Star Defense and Tiger Woods PGA Tour have continued to advance what is possible. I want to see developers push the envelope to bring us amazing apps that will blow our minds. But there needs to be the right financial incentive in place so that developers can fund larger teams to bring us this software.

At the beginning of the decade, Intel was imagining that by 2010 it would have processors with over 1 billion transistors running at a clock speed of 20GHz. As we move into the second half of 2009, the reality is that we will soon have 3GHz mobile chips with four cores on them and 2010 will likely see 4GHz desktop chips with six and eight cores. Ultra-fast processors running at clock speeds over 4GHz have just been too expensive to power — and to cool off. So the other solution is to have more processors.

These new processors, based on the Nehalem architecture, or the Westmere 32nm process that will follow, will also feature simultaneous multithreading (what Intel calls “hyperthreading”) to allow for two threads to be executed on a single core. So instead of a superfast 20GHz chip, you could have a Mac Pro in 2010 with 16 cores capable of executing 32 simultaneous threads. Apple is preparing for this massively multi-core future with features in Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) that can take full advantage of all this raw power.

Time for Software to Catch Up

The introduction of dual-core systems was a brilliant success. Even code that was not built or optimized for multiple cores would run at least a little faster because the OS would use the second core, leaving more processing power available to the foreground app. The dual-core systems were noticeably more responsive to the user, and we loved them for this feeling of instant power at our fingertips. Quad-core and 8-core systems have been confined to the Mac Pro line, partly for cost, but also partially because the average user does not have software that can really take advantage of all those cores. Many people would be disappointed to learn that their quad-core iMac did not really seem any faster. Software applications, like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, were designed by teams with significant engineering resources so that they could take advantage of a system with four or eight cores, and even then certain operations will still bottleneck the application.

What Have We Been Doing?

Multithreaded programming is not new on the Mac. We have had POSIX threads, or pthreads, (and NSThread on top of that) since OS X 10.0. The Mac has a scheduler that is multi-processor aware and can assign processes and threads to available CPUs as needed.

There are two ways that software benefits from concurrency (running multiple software tasks simultaneously). The first is to keep certain parts of the software, say the user interface for a financial management app, responsive while waiting for another task that is being processed, say downloading some stock quote data from the Internet in the background. The second opportunity is to design a function that can be parallelized, or split up into smaller chunks, like encoding a video by splitting it into sections that can each be encoded by a different CPU or core. The responsiveness of the app, and the performance of a parallelized function, are great for the end user. However, each developer is still responsible for managing the threads in the application and designing algorithms and functions for atomicity, parallelization and re-entrancy while avoiding deadlocks, resource starvation, deadly embrace, and so on. Concurrency is a challenging endeavor.

So Why Do We Need Grand Central Dispatch?

Grand Central Dispatch (PDF) is a new technology that will be available in Snow Leopard that helps developers more easily write software for multi-core systems. It does not make multi-threading automatic, or write thread-safe code for you, but it does add semantic and syntactic extensions to C, C++, and Objective-C to make code more readable and better organized with hooks into tools to analyze the multi-threaded performance of an application. Developer still have to do the hard conceptual work around figuring out concurrency in their application, but the implementation of those ideas is cleaner.

How Does Grand Central Dispatch Work?

The core functionality of Grand Central Dispatch is provided by organizing code into blocks and queues. A block is a self-contained unit of work that can represent anything from a simple step to a complex function with all the associated arguments and data. Queues are a method to schedule the execution of blocks and define the relationships between them. Instead of spawning and managing threads in the application, the developer marks sections of code as blocks and then places them in a queue. GCD steps in and manages all the queues and pulls blocks out and assigns them to available threads of the appropriate priority to be executed.

The Instruments utility in Xcode lets developers see how their code runs in GCD, so that they can learn how to improve performance. GCD also has a view of the entire system and the resources available to try to maximize efficiency across all running applications. It also relies on native hardware support for locking in Intel CPUs to implement some of its magic. This stuff won’t work on PowerPC, which is another reason why Snow Leopard is Intel-only.

What About the Users?

If you are an end-user, you will not benefit one bit from installing Snow Leopard and having GCD available unless the software you use is written to take advantage of it. It is not at all guaranteed that developers will jump to GCD. If a certain application would benefit from concurrency, then the developer has probably already started using pthreads to make the software more responsive and take advantage of current multi-core systems. If you look in your Activity Monitor, you will see that most applications have multiple threads already. Since multi-threaded code is hard to begin with, I do not see many projects choosing to rewrite all their pthread code to use GCD blocks and queues right away, especially since it means leaving all Leopard, Tiger and earlier users behind.

The low price on the Snow Leopard upgrade is a nice perk for existing Leopard users, but I think it is also meant to reassure developers that a very large percentage of their existing Leopard customer base will be able to run Snow Leopard-only software. If your app runs fine now using NSThread on Leopard, there is little reason to adopt GCD. So why build GCD at all?

I think the most obvious reason for building GCD is that Apple will be able to take advantage of it with all the system processes and included applications that people use all the time. Looking at my Activity Monitor right now, I see the kernel has 66 threads, Safari has 19, Mail.app has 18, mds has 16, SystemUIServer has 13, Spotlight has 6, and so on. Helping all those threads run more efficiently is going to pay off for the user experience on the Mac. If it helps a few other developers along the way, all the better.

The Future

Things get a little more interesting when you consider that future iPhones will likely have multi-core CPU’s and that Intel is advising developers to prepare for a future with “thousands of cores” available. Add in something like Larrabee, which presents dozens of additional cores to the system, and the wisdom of a systemwide approach to managing threads becomes apparent.

I have really enjoyed my Apple TV since the beginning, but I will admit that I enjoy it a lot more with the Remote application on my iPhone. Apple has updated the Remote app and the Apple TV firmware, making the Apple TV even better when used with an iPhone or iPod touch, and perhaps showing a lasting commitment to this hobby project at 1 Infinite Loop.

While the original Remote app allowed you to browse content and use the iPhone keyboard to enter text, it did not allow you to navigate the onscreen menus. This wasn’t such a big deal when playing your own media because you could just pick the song, movie or TV show from the list of files. However, when browsing through YouTube or Flickr, it was annoying to switch back and forth between the original white Apple remote and your iPhone. The new Remote app now has additional finger gesture controls to replace traditional controls, so you can finally control everything from your iPhone or iPod touch. The update adds a few new tricks to the media player as well.

Here’s what you can do with the new app…

Video Playback

• Flick or drag and hold to move the on-screen selection. Tap to select.
• Tap to Play or Pause
• Flick left or right, or drag and hold to rewind or fast-forward.
• Flick down to show chapter markers, then flick left or right to skip.
• Drag two fingers left for replay.

Audio Playback

1. Tap to Play or Pause.
2. Drag left or right and hold to rewind or fast-forward.
3. Flick left or right for previous or next.

In addition, you can move up the menu tree by holding your finger over the bar at the bottom of the control screen.

Apple TV 2.4 Firmware

The new firmware also adds new features to the Apple TV itself.

• Remote app directional control — Control your Apple TV with simple finger gestures via the Remote app. This feature requires Remote 1.3 running on an iPhone or iPod touch with iPhone OS 3.0.
• Flickr Search — Search Flickr photo tags to find recently updated photos of interest. Save searches to quickly find new photos or use as a screen saver for Apple TV.
• New view options — View movies By Genre, By Movie, or Unwatched. View TV Shows and Podcasts By Date, By Show, or Unwatched.
• Updated transport and chapter modes — During video playback, click right or left to fast forward or rewind. Additional clicks increase the speed. Click down to show chapter markers.

Boxee, et al.

There are conflicting reports on the Boxee forums, but the media software has been successfully installed by at least one user. Some have had problems, though, so you may want to wait a day or two for things to settle out before updating. ATV files will need to be updated for the 2.4 update. I’m waiting on the USB hack to get updated myself.

Hobby?

Steve Jobs has referred to the Apple TV as a hobby business (when compared with the Mac, iPod and iPhone businesses) on more than one occasion. But this new remote app, and the Apple TV update, shows some signs of life in the group. Also telling are at least two recent openings on Apple’s employment web site for Apple TV engineers (which have since been removed). A hardware update with a faster processor and a GPU capable of decoding 1080p H.264 (and compatible with OpenCL) would go a long way towards keeping the Apple TV alive and relevant for the immediate future. It is a great device for playing music (I have thousands of songs at my fingertips with the iPhone remote that I can control from anywhere in the house), but a hardware update with improved HD video playback would make this a more compelling device.

So Happy Together

The Apple TV and iPhone were made for each other. Now that the Remote app does everything you need to fully control the Apple TV, it is just brilliant. Seriously, if you have an Apple TV, you need to go buy an iPod Touch (maybe a used one?) just to get the remote app. It’s better than using the white remote, or even a universal remote programmed to replace it.

I’ll keep my eyes posted on conflicts with Boxee and ATV Files. Let us know what your experience is with the new update.

Despite all the advances in “Cloud Computing” over the last year or two, a large part of most people’s work is still contained in individual files like documents (Word, Pages, PDF), spreadsheets (Excel, Numbers), text files (HTML, text, notes), delimited data files (CSV), presentations (Powerpoint, Keynote), and images (JPEG, GIF, PNG). Finding the right file-sharing solution for your small team is still critically important to using your Mac effectively.

I would like to share some tips and tricks that I’ve picked up working with small businesses that may help you as you plan for, or make improvements to, your file-sharing system.

Why Small Teams?

I wanted to limit the discussion here to small teams because if you have a large organization, there are many solutions for file-sharing already available (Mac OS X Server, Windows Server, Sharepoint, Document Management systems, and so on). A large organization also probably has a dedicated IT team to implement all of these solutions. I want to talk about what you do when you do not have those resources. I am talking to the team of 3 to 5 people, maybe 10, that wants to share files effectively, and easily, to just get your work done and move on.

What is File-sharing?

File-sharing means being able to access electronic files that aren’t necessarily stored on your local hard drive but are accessible over a network connection. This also implies that different people all have access to these files, or a multi-user system. These people may have different permissions in this system to Create, Read, Update, or Delete these files over the network, or CRUD access controls. All the solutions that I will discuss have these three traits in common:

• Network Accessible
• Multi-User
• CRUD Access Controls

The Simple Solution is the Right Solution

If you are working in a small team, then simplicity is your technology mantra. Simplicity helps improve reliability, manageability and usability — all of which allow you to focus on the things that make you money, rather than wrestling with technology that gets in your way.

Host-based File-sharing

Host-based file-sharing, using a Mac to share files on the network, is a lot simpler with Macs than using a NAS box. For one, many NAS boxes do not support AFP, the Mac-native Apple Filing Protocol. You will likely have to use SMB (Windows Sharing). If you only have Macs, it will be easier to manage and simpler to integrate with your other machines if you share the files from a Mac. Not only will you save money, but you can ignore Windows file naming restrictions, path length problems, potential permissions problems, and so on that come with a NAS.

If you have both Macs and PCs, you can still use host-based file-sharing on a Mac and provide access to Windows or Linux PCs on your network by turning on SMB for those users. FTP is supported, too, but SMB will be easier for most to use.

Guest Access

Guest Access is a really easy way to make files available to anyone to read or to drop files on your computer. No usernames, no passwords. It’s easy. And easy is good, right? Well, I suppose it is good in some cases, but I really do not like leaving guest access turned on. It is just one more way for people to get access to my computer without any authentication required. I prefer turning it off in the Accounts system preferences. Just uncheck the box that says, “Allow guests to connect to shared folders.”

If you really need to share files with someone on a one-time basis, then consider buying a high capacity thumb drive as an alternative to Guest Access. If you need to share files on the network on a regular basis, then consider using a Sharing-only account.

Sharing-only Accounts

Mac OS X lets you create sharing-only accounts that can access shared folders from another machine, but cannot sit down at the keyboard and login to the computer itself. You can set file-sharing permissions individually by user. This is great if you need to give Tom access to one set of files and Harry access to another set. It kind of gets out of control if you also have Larry, Moe, Curly, Shirley, Laverne, Richie and the Fonz all in the office, too. If you’re in a small team where you can give everyone equal access to files, just create a sharing-only account with a common name that everyone uses.

This approach also has the benefit of avoiding permissions problems between co-workers who want to work on the same files. I’ve seen quite a few small design shops get stymied by permissions discrepancies that arise from creating a file on their local computer and then copying it to the shared folder compared with creating it directly on the share. When everyone has their own local account and their own server login, this problem can compound. In many cases, it is just simpler to have one login that everyone uses to access the shared folder. That way, anything created or modified on the shared folder looks like it came from the same user and everyone is able to use it.

If you need more granular control over permissions, then you could create multiple sharing-only accounts, but at some point, you’ll want to look at Mac OS X Server so you can manage all those accounts in one place for the whole network.

Large Teams Need Not Apply

If you have a large team, then you will likely have different needs. But if you are working in a small, tight-knit environment, give some thought to adopting these practices. They will make your life simpler, and I hope more productive as well.

Even though Apple builds great products for the consumer, the company often misses the boat with business users. Snow Leopard stands to make serious inroads with Mac users in wingtips and pinstripes with native support for Microsoft Exchange Server. Mail, iCal, and Address Book will all be updated to talk directly with your Exchange account and in some cases, may work better than Entourage.

The Long & Winding Road

It’s taken a long time to get to this point, but the Mac has a long history of working with Microsoft. I think a little history is interesting here to show how we’ve arrived at Snow Leopard.

The Mac has had Microsoft Office almost from the beginning (Word and Excel for Mac were first released in 1985). Jaguar added LDAP access to Address Book. Panther introduced Windows Printer Sharing and Active Directory support so that you could log into a Windows Domain from a Macintosh. Tiger introduced Exchange accounts in Mail (though with IMAP access only) along with much improved support for Samba and Windows file sharing. The move to Intel gave us virtualization of Windows apps.

Leopard brought Boot Camp, of course, but this did nothing to help integrate Mac OS X itself into a Windows environment. But under the hood some exciting things were happening. The Address Book and Calendar stores were updated to offer better programmatic access and the Sync Services framework was updated. The result was that Mail and iCal were better at sharing data with each other and we got to-do items that were shared between those two apps. iCal was updated to access outside CalDAV accounts and Mail got Notes that (eventually) were able to sync with the iPhone.

The iPhone OS 2.0 firmware update pushed Exchange integration to new heights because Apple chose to license the ActiveSync technology from Microsoft. This put the iPhone on a level playing field with Windows Mobile devices and Outlook when accessing information stored in Exchange.

Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard brings all of this together: integrated email, calendar, and address book (with to-do’s and notes) with access to outside accounts and the ActiveSync technology used in the iPhone. In fact, Apple is touting that the Mac will now have out-of-the-box support for “Exchange Server 2007, something that Windows PC’s don’t have.” The requirement to use Exchange Server 2007 might disappoint some that are still on 2003, but it makes good sense when you consider that 2007 has the new Business Logic Layer that provides a consistent view of your mailboxes from any device and takes a lot of work out of writing client software. In fact, Entourage has been testing a beta version that also requires Exchange 2007 in order to take advantage of this technology to make Entourage behave more like Outlook does on a Windows PC.

Entourage?

Personally, I hope for Entourage to die a slow and horrible death. Having been on the support end of things, I have seen how hard it is to make Entourage work reliably. And when it fails? Look out, because all of your email messages, contact info, tasks, calendar items, etc. are stored in one big database file. Lose that file, and you’ve lost everything. And backing it up with Time Machine means you have copied a multigigabyte file to your backup drive every hour.

Recovering from errors in Mail, where each message is an individual file, is much simpler and it works beautifully with Time Machine and Spotlight because of this file structure. I know there are people that like the consolidated view of all information in one application, but I suspect that this preference comes more from force of habit after using Outlook than any real advantage.

So can Mail, iCal, and Address Book replace Entourage? I think so.

Mail

Mail provides access to your Exchange account right along any other IMAP or POP3 accounts. As a Mac user, you get all the cool Mac features like data detectors, Spotlight, and Quick Look. I’m impressed that Quick Look can display previews of Office documents even if you don’t have Microsoft Office for Mac installed on your machine. This might be a good reason to give iWork another look.

Quick Look

iCal

iCal will seamlessly blend your personal local calendars and your Exchange calendars in one view. I liked how the WWDC Keynote demo showed how iCal could intelligently schedule meetings to avoid conflicts, just like Outlook. And of course it’s still integrated with Mail and Address Book so you can see your to-do’s here or in Mail, and you can auto-fill addresses from Exchange.

Address Book

OK, contacts are not very sexy, but I do like how you can access the Global Address List from within any app that can talk to Address Book. That means Mail will auto-complete addresses as you type messages and iCal will auto-complete names as you create meeting invitations. I suppose it might mean that other apps like Delicious Library that integrate with Address Book will let you keep track of DVDs that you loan to people at work, even if they aren’t in your personal contact list. I also like how smart groups can blend your personal address book with the Exchange contacts. Very slick.

The Future of Microsoft Office

I see a big problem coming for the MacBU at Microsoft. One of the primary reasons to purchase the full version of Microsoft Office (the only reason?) was to get Exchange support. Now that Snow Leopard will include Exchange support natively, I suspect a lot of people will choose to purchase the Home & Student Edition, despite the language in the license that prevents you from using it for work-related activities. A decrease in revenue would naturally lead to a decrease in funding for future development. Despite my feelings about Entourage, Office is pretty useful. I hope that Apple pushes them a little hard (iWork updates will help too), but I hope they don’t push so hard that Office is abandoned. I have felt like Entourage has languished along for a few years now and if I don’t get my wish for it to just curl up and die, then maybe we can get a better, more reliable Entourage for people who want to use it.

The Future of the Mac at Work

I suspect that despite my enthusiasm, the initial support for Exchange in the first release of Snow Leopard is going to blow. I would advise caution about committing to abandoning Entourage, or a large-scale migration from Windows PCs and Outlook in 2009. The bugs, and there will be bugs, will get worked out though, and 2010 could be a very exciting year for the Mac in the business segment.

Apple announced the winners of the 2009 Apple Design Awards last night at a special ceremony hosted by John Geleynse, director of Software Technology Evangelism, and Shann Pruden, senior director for Developer Relations. These awards are an annual affair to recognize “technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement in iPhone and Mac software development.”

The depth and breadth of submissions has been accelerating, as interest in the Mac and iPhone has picked up over the last few years. As a point of comparison, the iPhone awards last year were handed out to early pre-release apps because the App Store had not even launched yet. There were about 1,700 web apps in Apple’s online directory, and this year there are over 4,000 web apps and more than 50,000 native apps available in the iTunes App Store.

Rather than being split out into categories for best game, best user experience, best application, and so on as has been the practice in past years, this year’s awards were simply organized into Mac and iPhone showcases. Here are the 2009 winners.

iPhone Developer Showcase

MLB.com At Bat 2009 from MLB.com

Postage from Rogue Sheep

Topple 2 from ngmoco:)

Tweetie from atebits

Mac OS X Leopard Developer Showcase

Billings from Marketcircle Inc.

BoinxTV from Boinx Software

Things from Cultured Code

Versions from Sofa

Student Awards

Wooden Labyrinth 3D from Elias Pietil

Fontcase from Pieter Omvlee

iPhone OS 3.0

AccuTerra Beta from AccuTerra

This last entry is pretty interesting. We saw lots of exciting and innovative apps in the WWDC Keynote on Monday that take advantage of the new features of iPhone OS 3.0, but AccuTerra was not presented there. The technologies utilized in this new hike tracking app are pretty extensive, though. I’m definitely looking forward to checking this out when it becomes available.

For more information about this year’s winners, here are some articles from TheAppleBlog that mention a few of them…

Weekly App Store Picks: March 14, 2009 (Topple 2)

Tweetie for Mac Update: Now With Video Tweeting

Billings 3 Brings Welcome Updates, Fresh Design

BoinxTV: Broadcasting for the rest of us

BoinxTV Now Shipping

Task Management With Things

12 Subversion Apps for OS X

Keep Your Fonts Together With Fontcase

Fonts 201: Font Management Apps for the Mac

Task Management With Things

QuickTime has been around since well before OS X, dating back to 1991, but this old dog gets new life in the next version of the Mac OS. QuickTime X, as the new release has been named, follows the theme of Snow Leopard by incorporating both refinements and new technologies. QuickTime player has a new interface that simplifies playback and new capabilities that enhance performance and allow you to create and share video content.

Black Bezels Are the New Black

The new QuickTime X features a simplified and “uncluttered” interface for playback. The playback controls have been removed from the bottom bar and have been moved to an on-screen layer when you mouse over a video. The general effect is that you only see the black title bar in Snow Leopard and the rest of the interface disappears so you can focus your attention on the video itself. A nice little touch and I think very easy for most people that are used to the keyboard controls from previous incarnations of QuickTime Player or iTunes.

Video Killed the Radio Star

Or maybe video created the next YouTube star? In QuickTime X, the player application has been expanded to include video capture, either from the built-in webcam in your Mac or from a USB-tethered camera. QuickTime includes simple controls for trimming video so you can get just the right amount of lead-in for your next YouTube masterpiece, and then cut the lead-out just before your neighbor pops in to ask if they can borrow a cup of sugar. Just drag the yellow handles left and right to set the clip that will be exported.

Sharing these videos to YouTube, MobileMe, email, or your iTunes library is a one-click affair.

Technological Enhancements

QuickTime X is optimized for the critical HD codecs H.264 and AAC with a new foundation that should provide stutter-free playback on current computers. The player allows using hardware acceleration for H.264, which should help with HD video in that format. Also new is support for HTTP streaming, which allows QuickTime to stream content that is delivered by a web server, rather than just content from a specialized streaming server. This should help improve playback of videos from web accounts like MobileMe galleries. QuickTime X can also take advantage of new technologies in Snow Leopard like 64-bit addressing and Grand Central Dispatch to speed up performance.

Whither QuickTime Pro?

Absent from yesterday’s announcements was any mention of QuickTime X Pro. I am going to indulge my optimistic side and declare that the Pro version is no more and Apple is going to provide all the features of QuickTime Pro as part of the standard app in Snow Leopard. This is a welcome change in an age when multimedia playback, and even media creation, has been standard on the Mac platform for a good many years.

What About DVD Player?

I can’t help but wonder if DVD Player is going to get the same H.264 accelerated love from Apple, or if this feature is being folded into QuickTime Player. There is a new chapter navigation interface in QuickTime Player that would be great for DVD movies, too. Frankly, DVD Player needs to get caught up to the Blu-ray age and the H.264 improvements in QuickTime would be welcome in an HD-capable DVD Player.

In between new notebooks and fawning over the iPhone, Bertrand Serlet got up on stage to talk about Snow Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X. Apple took a few digs at Microsoft for stumbling with Windows Vista and trying to play catch-up with Windows 7. The picture that our friends in Cupertino are trying to paint is that Leopard has been a huge success and that Snow Leopard will be even better. After listening to the keynote, I find that I have to agree. I am over the moon about the changes coming to the Mac OS.

Revisions

Apple is justifiably proud of Mac OS X and the excellent combination of power and usability in Leopard. Serlet was quick to point out that in this release, Apple is hoping to build on their success with Leopard and add refinements that will make it even better. There are so many refinements that I will not attempt to list them all here, but will instead refer you to Apple’s page about the refinements in Snow Leopard (be sure to click on the “even more refinements” link at the bottom of the page to get even more details).

Of all these improvements, I am most excited about three of them: Finder, Speed, and Disk Eject.

The new Finder is completely rewritten as a Cocoa native application, built with 64-bit code and Grand Central Dispatch support. This should make the Finder more responsive because it will execute tasks faster and also be able to take advantage of the multiprocessing prowess of Grand Central Dispatch to offload background tasks efficiently to idle processors. Apple says that some operations like icon preview refreshes are up to 1.7x faster. This new Finder is going to breath new life into your computer by making it more responsive.

There are other speed improvements all over Snow Leopard. Time Machine backups are faster. Waking up from sleep, shutting down, and joining a wireless network are all faster. Even installing Mac OS X is faster with Snow Leopard. Just like Maverick and Goose, I feel the need… the need for speed. And Snow Leopard delivers.

And lastly, I am thrilled about the more reliable disk ejection in Snow Leopard. 10.6 will reduce the frequency with which the OS will prevent you from ejecting a disk, and more importantly, it will tell you which application is causing the OS to keep the disk mounted. It’s a small thing, but I cannot tell you how many times I have had to reboot rather than figure out what is holding on to my external hard drive.

New Technologies

Snow Leopard is fully 64-bit, along with a number of the included applications. Moving from 32-bits to 64 means that the addressable memory space is increased to almost 16 billion GB of RAM. This ungodly number means that you do not have to worry about software limiting the amount of RAM that can be used. In the short term, we still have to live with the hardware limits of Macintosh computers, but these will improve over time (as the new MacBook Pro’s demonstrate with an increase to 8GB RAM). And 64-bit goodness also means that some instructions will actually get processed faster on the 64-bit CPU’s that all Macs are built on. More interesting than the RAM limits of incremental performance gains, the new 64-bit memory allocation routines in Snow Leopard are also more secure and less prone to injection attacks.

Grand Central Dispatch (mentioned above as being supported in the new Finder) is a game-changing technology that works to efficiently distribute computing tasks among all available processors. For the last few years, increases in CPU clock speeds have been downplayed compared to increasing the number of cores available on a single chip.

Every Mac now has at least two cores, and some Mac Pros have 16. In the next year or so clock speeds will continue to hang in the 2.2-3.0GHz region, but the standard number of cores should increase to four and Mac Pros may go beyond 16. GCD is a software layer that developers can take advantage of in their applications to help schedule tasks across all these cores. If Snow Leopard can do this better than Windows 7, and developers choose to utilize the technology, then this could open a serious performance gap between the Mac platform and PC’s running the exact same hardware.

OpenCL is another new technology meant to better harness the raw hardware power that is already in your Mac. Today’s video cards or graphics processing units (GPUs) are capable of performing calculations for 3D graphics and modeling at an amazing pace. OpenCL is an attempt to let developers harness that power for use in other applications beyond drawing thousands of polygons on screen with fancy textures. Again, if developers take advantage of OpenCL, then Mac applications may run noticeably faster on Snow Leopard than on the same hardware running Leopard or Windows.

Exchange Support

The third piece of today’s announcement is the inclusion of Exchange support directly in Mac applications like Mail, iCal, and Address Book. Apple licensed the Exchange technology for the iPhone, which helped that device make inroads into corporate IT environments. Now that same technology is being baked into Mac OS X so that Mac users can integrate more easily with their corporate infrastructure.

Setup was demonstrated to be quick and easy using auto-discovery of Exchange services and applications were then immediately aware of your accounts and resources on Exchange. You can continue to drag-and-drop people onto iCal calendars to make appointments and so on. Many people will appreciate that you can blend your personal and business information in one interface by seeing both personal calendars and Exchange calendars or personal contacts in Address Book alongside the Global Address List from Exchange.

In my opinion, the new Exchange support is going to do more for bringing the Mac OS into the workplace than Intel processors, Active Directory integration, virtualization, and the iPhone have accomplished in the last several years.

Pricing & Availability

Snow Leopard will be available in September for $129. Special pricing is available to current Leopard users who can buy the new release for the very modest price of $29 for a single user or $49 for a family pack. If you buy a new Mac with Leopard today, you will be eligible for the Snow Leopard Up-To-Date program, which is only $9.95.

With this sort of pricing, I don’t see any reason not to upgrade to Snow Leopard. I’ll be waiting in line myself.

We had a sneak peek of the new QuickBooks Online back in January at Macworld Expo, and now the Mac community can start using the service. Intuit announced today that the new release of QuickBooks Online is finally compatible with the Safari browser and, thus, is available to Mac users.

QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online, which runs entirely through a web browser, is not a replacement for the full feature set of QuickBooks Pro for Windows, or even QuickBooks for Mac. Instead, QuickBooks Online is a separate product that is positioned as an alternative for those people who require maximum portability and remote access to their accounting information or for multiple users who work in physically separate locations. The main feature missing from QuickBooks Online is inventory management. Otherwise, QuickBooks Online Plus (a $34.95 per month subscription) is very close in comparison to QuickBooks Pro.

If you can get by with fewer features, there is a $9.95 per month option, as well as a free option.

In addition to the Safari browser support, QuickBooks Online has a web interface that has been optimized for the iPhone. Today’s announcement also reveals that the iPhone web app has been updated to allow for more editing on the mobile device than was previously possible. You can now edit customer, vendor and employee information as well as create and send invoices.

These changes to the app will make it accessible to Mac users, but will make it far more useful for those with iPhones, too. I would still like to see timecards in the iPhone app, as this seems like the natural place to do job timesheets for many service companies.

Safari 4? Firefox?

The current release only supports Safari 3.1. Firefox for Mac and the Safari 4 beta will not work. I did try setting the user agent to Safari 3.2.1 using the Develop menu in the Safari 4 beta, and everything seems to work, but Intuit will not support this configuration. Make sure you uninstall the Safari 4 beta, or just live with any potential quirks when setting the user-agent to a different value.

At Last! Multi-user QuickBooks Accounting on the Mac

The most significant reason to take a look at QuickBooks Online is that it finally gives Mac users true multi-user accounting from Intuit. Sure, you could use virtualization to run QuickBooks Pro for Windows or connect to a Terminal Server with Microsoft RDC, but this is a true Mac experience, even if it is online software.

For many, this will be a real boon to be able to share accounting data within a company that uses virtual office space to connect staff in different locations. The small business entrepreneur will be able to check up on things with their iPhone, or their Mac laptop at home.

Take a hard look at the feature list and see if it meets your needs. The problem for Mac users is that this is the only choice from Intuit for multi-user accounting, so we will probably approach it with a different set of needs than a Windows user who is considering it as an entry-level alternative to QuickBooks Pro. Still, $34.95 a month for multi-user accounting without the hassle of virtualization, Windows, etc., is a fair trade for many Mac users.

The Future of Mac Software?

I think it makes great sense for QuickBooks to provide multi-user accounting to the Mac platform through the online version. It has been frustrating to live without multi-user support in QuickBooks for Mac, but I imagine any problems will get fixed faster in QuickBooks Online than waiting for updates to the Mac version. If the Online product continues to grow, then I see how Intuit could eventually drop QuickBooks for Mac entirely. The differences between the Mac and Windows versions have always been frustrating, and by going online only, it would create a scenario where both Mac and Windows users are working with the same data without having to go through a conversion process. Mac users would finally be using the same version of QuickBooks as their Windows counterparts, something we were all hoping would happen on the desktop side first. But if it takes going online to do it, I think most will appreciate the benefits of leaving that Mac-Windows gap in QuickBooks in the past.

Yesterday, boxee released an update to their media center software for Apple TV and Mac OS X at a New York meetup. CEO Avner Ronen took the stage at Webster Hall to show some significant features in this latest alpha release including Pandora Radio, RadioTime, a new API for add-ons, an XUL-based framework for web-based video, and a PBS application from BoxeeHQ.

Pandora and RadioTime

The Pandora feature is absolutely brilliant. I had a chance to play with it for a while on Tuesday; it is the full Pandora experience on a 10-foot interface. You can log in to your account, select any of your channels, give a thumbs up or down, skip a song, and even create a new channel. I cannot begin to tell you how cool it is to listen to Pandora on my home theater sound system with the song information displayed on the big-screen TV, all thanks to boxee on the Apple TV. Driving this software with the free boxee remote iPhone app just makes it that much sweeter. Pandora on Apple TV is amazing.

The CTO of Pandora, Tom Conrad, got on stage at the meetup to talk about how excited his company was to be bringing their Internet radio service to the platform. You can get even more Internet radio by using the RadioTime application, finished just in time for the release, to listen to over 100,000 terrestrial radio stations. This app cleverly picks up your location by your IP address and presents you with a list of local stations. I found several popular FM stations (but not all of them) in the Denver area.

Developers, Start Your Engines!

The boxee API has big implications. The Pandora Radio service was built using it, and developers with Python and XML skills can build boxee apps with full control over the UI and the metadata for media playback. BoxeeHQ also released a PBS application in conjunction with the alpha release. This app updates every 30 minutes to pick up PBS shows as they’re added to the web site for viewing. If the excellent Pandora and PBS apps are any indication, we can look forward to really well-done add-ons for boxee.

Can We Get Hulu, Please?

The XUL-based framework for getting web content is built on the same technology as the Firefox browser. This should allow boxee to access just about any web-based video content, even Hulu’s RSS feeds. When asked about full Hulu support returning to boxee, Avner was noncommittal, but expressed hope that the pressures that prevented Hulu from working with boxee would fade over time. In contrast, ABC is working closely with boxee to bring their content to the media center software.

Will boxee Ever Reach Beta?

During the meetup, Avner also discussed some of what we can expect to see in the beta release. A lot of time was spent on the customizable home screen, which will allow you to arrange your favorite channels and content for quick access. There will also be more control over finding and adding friends, as well as over how you share what you’re watching with them.

I’m So Excited, and I Just Can’t Hide It

With apologies to the Pointer Sisters, I am about to lose control and I think I like it. Boxee just keeps getting better and better. The new radio features and the promise of the API and XUL-based framework have me really looking forward to the beta releases and an eventual 1.0 version. I am also fascinated by the evolution of the business plan. Avner was very sincere when he said that boxee is agnostic to the business model of their content partners — they just want to bring more people to content providers that are looking for more viewers. Netflix is one business model (access to content with a paid subscription) and ABC is another (free content with inline ads). I’m fascinated to see how this all works out.

If you watch the video loop of the presentation, be sure to hang around until they do the stupid human tricks contest at the end so you can watch the beatboxing performance that won the Mac mini giveaway.

Let’s say you’re trying to take over the world and bring all governments under your control. You have to keep records of all this stuff on your computer, of course. Now what if your plan is almost foiled because you chose a stupid password like the Egyptian variant of your Greek name? That’s not very smart, is it? You may be the World’s Smartest Man, but you may still want to look into password management software for your Mac to help you choose good, strong passwords and keep them organized.

In my business, I need to keep track of logins for clients as well as for my own use. I keep all my client information in Daylite forms or notes, where it’s linked to all the other information about that client. But what if you just want to keep passwords secure? And what if you want to share those passwords between machines? Or what if you want your password manager to integrate into your web browser? Or keep that info with you on your iPhone? Well then, here are five password management solutions for the Mac that may work for you.

1Password

I have been avoiding using a password management app for a long time. I guess I was a little suspicious of them, or reluctant to trust one app with all that info. I bought 1Password last year, and now I’m a total convert. The desktop app integrates directly into Safari and Firefox, as well as other browsers like Camino and apps like NetNewsWire. The plug-ins help you to capture login information as you enter it, or generate strong passwords as you create logins online. You can also quickly fill out logins and other forms with personal information like your address and/or credit card information that you store in 1Password. This integration with Safari and Firefox is what has me sold on 1Password. It’s so easy to use that I don’t notice it and I love that I don’t have to leave the browser to pull up my passwords like I do with the other solutions.

The iPhone app syncs with the desktop over Wi-Fi as long as both devices can see each other on the same network. The iPhone app implements a browser inside the app to enable auto-fill. You can also sync javascript bookmarklets to Safari that will launch in Safari on the iPhone and auto-fill your password on sites in the native browser. While this isn’t as secure as some other choices, it does make it possible to avoid having to switch back and forth between the password app and the Safari browser on your iPhone to type in a username and password manually.

You can sync your password file between multiple Macs by using the Mac OS X Keychain and MobileMe syncing (not recommended) or by using file-based syncing with Agile Keychain format (recommended). Instructions for file-based syncing using a couple of solutions are provided on the Agile Web Solutions web site.

1Password is $39.95 for a single user license or $69.95 for a five-license family pack. The iPhone app is free. There is a Palm OS app available as well.

SplashID

SplashID has been around a long time and is very well respected in Palm and Windows Mobile circles. The desktop app for the Mac provides password generation and syncing with the SplashID iPhone app. You can create items with custom fields and set the labels as you like. Several types are provided to group and organize items. You can launch web sites from within the app and it will auto-fill the form on the page (at least with Safari). It doesn’t capture login information from the browser like 1Password does.

While I was using it, I found myself missing the Safari and Firefox plugins from 1Password. The variety of items that you can store compares favorably, but I think the interface is a little rough. The iPhone app will sync with the desktop and includes a strong password generator. If you want to sync your info between your Mac and a Windows Mobile, BlackBerry or Symbian device, this is your only choice.

SplashID Desktop can compare entries between two password databases and sync the results to both copies.

The cost for the desktop app is $20. The iPhone app is $9.99. There is a free Lite version of the iPhone app that is limited to 15 entries to try it out.

Password Wallet

Password Wallet works with your desktop and iPhone. The desktop interface is minimal and unobtrusive. Some may like the narrow window used to list items stored in the wallet file. You can also keep multiple wallet files, each with their own master password, if you have need for that feature. Clicking on a URL will open the page in the default browser and hover a window with auto-fill options over the browser. This works great for launching sites from within Password Wallet, but I still resent having to leave the browser to start that process. Seriously, once you’ve tried 1Password’s method on the desktop, there is no going back.

The Password Wallet iPhone app implements its own browser in the app to enable auto-fill. If you want to use Mobile Safari, you’ll have to switch back and forth.

The Password Wallet desktop app is $20 and the iPhone app is currently free.

Wallet 3

Wallet is one of the most polished desktop apps on the Mac. The user interface is very accessible and will look familiar to anyone who has used Address Book on the Mac. It follows the same three-column layout with large “+” buttons at the bottom of the first two columns and an edit button below the third. You can create custom folders in the first column to group entries, but an entry can only belong in one group. You can use the notes to tag entries as the search bar will look in there along with other fields.

The desktop app will auto-fill login forms for your default browser if you launch the page from within Wallet. The iPhone app syncs with the desktop app through MobileMe. If you don’t have a MobileMe account, you are out of luck for Mac-to-Mac syncing. iPhone syncing can still be accomplished over Wi-Fi.

The Wallet desktop app is $20 and the iPhone app is $3.99.

KeePassX

KeePassX is an open-source GPL project that is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. There is no iPhone app and there is no integration with web browsers on the Mac. Still, the databases are compatible between different platforms so KeyPassX is a good solution if you need to copy your password database around for access from different systems. It’s also free, which could be a huge plus for some.

1Password is for Me

1Password is definitely the best solution for my needs. It lets me capture login information in the browser itself, I don’t have to leave the browser to use auto-fill, and I can use it for web forms that need other information like my home address or credit card (I’m still not using the credit-card section; old habits, I guess). The iPhone app will do auto-fill with an embedded browser or the native Safari browser with the javascript bookmarklet (less secure but more convenient). If you need BlackBerry or Windows Mobile support, check out SplashID. Wallet works great if you have MobileMe and KeePassX is perfect for those that want to keep their password database in sync across platforms.

If you’ve been holding out for something like RoboForm on Windows, 1Password is as close as it gets — at least until RoboForm finally fills this Senior Mac Developer position they’ve had open for a while now.

For the next versions of these products, I would love to see a tagging feature so I can keep a taxonomy of tags for entries rather than just free-form notes. I would also like to to see a system where an entry can belong to multiple groups so I could file an entry under both a client name, a project, and a service provider, though tagging would accomplish the same thing.

What password management app do you use?

WeatherCal may be a one-trick pony, but it is one nice looking pony all the same. This $10 release from Bare Bones Software marries weather data and iCal in a very elegant utility.

In a nutshell, WeatherCal creates calendar events in iCal with the five-day forecast for any location around the world. It starts out by finding the location in your “Me” card in Address Book, but you can add more locations by typing in the city and state or zip code. For locations outside the United States, you use the city and country (or city and province in Canada). Once you’ve added the location to System Preferences, WeatherCal will create a new calendar in iCal for that location and then inserts events for the next five days that show the forecast.

Data is provided by Weather Underground and the calendar events include a link to get more details on the Weather Underground web site.

Weather data is refreshed every hour to keep the forecast up to date.

Pro Tip: When entering a new location, you can also use airport codes.

There is no limit on the number of locations, but there might be a practical limit as iCal seems to have refresh problems with more than 10 calendars or so.

Rich Siegel, founder of Bare Bones Software, said that the idea came from one of their developers, Steve Kalkwarf, who simply had a flash of inspiration to solve a problem of personal interest. They had a look at a prototype around the office and decided that it was actually pretty cool. Rich also said that Weather Underground was great to work with and provided WeatherCal with a worldwide feed so they could address the needs of customers outside the U.S., which was a design goal from the start.

Bare Bones Software took some extra steps to deal with non-English characters like å, ä, and ö. You can type in “Luleå” or “Lulea” (in Sweden) and WeatherCal will find it either way. In my own testing, I found that the Russian text “Нижний Новгород” is not recognized, but the strict English transliteration “Niznij Novgorod” does work. I am used to some other transliteration schemes for Russian, but it’s a quick matter to get used to the way the data is formatted by Weather Underground. Users outside the U.S. will have to learn the English spelling or transliteration for their locations, but since this is essentially a one-time task, I suspect it will not be too onerous. If you have questions about a particular city, you can always go to the wunderground.com and browse through their maps and city listings to see how it is listed there.

There are other solutions for getting weather info on your Mac (dashboard widgets, etc.), but there is a nice practical advantage in having this info in local iCal calendars. Subscription calendars in iCal do not sync to MobileMe, but local calendars do carry over. Because your five day forecast is in a local calendar, WeatherCal provides a way for you to see the weather you are interested in checking on all your desktops, iPhone, iPod touch, and online at me.com.

Another practical reason was outlined by beta tester Jan Moström of Sweden:

Although I have other weather forecast applications on my Mac I tend to use WeatherCal the most … since I already have my calendar open.

The license allows you to install WeatherCal on any Mac that you own, but if you are syncing iCal with MobileMe, it is probably best to install the utility on one machine and let MobileMe sync the iCal data to the other Macs.

Pro Tip: If you are tracking a few locations, in Leopard you can create a Calendar Group (I named mine “WeatherCal”), and place all your forecast calendars in there. That way you can turn all your forecasts on and off with one click.

If you’re a big iCal user, then this utility is a really nice solution to having the weather forecast handy. There is a real benefit to having the weather info right where you schedule outings and activities in iCal. I really like how it is implemented as a local calendar so that it can sync to MobileMe. For $10, WeatherCal solves a particular problem with the polish that one would expect from Bare Bones Software.

There were a few additional resources that did not fit in our rundown on font management applications. So continuing our Font School series, here are a few additional apps and articles on fonts.

Some Reading

• Best Practices for Managing Fonts in Mac OS X – 5th Edition — This free PDF from Extensis is a great place to start to learn more about font management.
• Take Control of Fonts in Leopard — A $15 e-book from TidBITS publishing that is a wealth of knowledge about fonts and font management. I love how it walks you through finding all your fonts and organizing them. Highly recommended.
• Take Control of Font Problems in Leopard — A $10 e-book from TidBITS, this book focuses on fixing problems with fonts and is a great resource for anyone that supports designers.

Font Utilities

There are a few really important steps to fixing fonts — scan for corrupt fonts, identify font ID conflicts, and clear font caches. There are at least two dedicated utilities for this purpose.

• Smasher is included with FontAgent Pro and helps organize font suitcases and fix bad fonts. It is available for purchase separately as well.
• FontDoctor is included for free when you purchase Suitcase Fusion 2, or you can purchase it separately for $69.95. FontDoctor fixes common font problems and includes basic organization tools.

For most people, you would be better off to look at the professional font management apps like FontExplorer X Pro, FontAgent Pro, and Suitcase Fusion 2 which include these features.

Font Servers

The font management apps that I covered in the font management article are focused on managing fonts for a single workstation. If you need the ability to control fonts centrally to enforce uniformity or to track licensing so that fonts are only installed on certain machines, you may want to look into a font server. Here are the popular solutions, available from the same companies that make the desktop products included in the font management review.

• Extensis Universal Type Server Pro
• Extensis Universal Type Server Lite
• FontAgent Pro Workgroup Edition
• FontAgent Pro Server
• FontExplorer X Server

Technical Details on Mac OS X Typography

Apple publishes a fair bit of information on everything going on under the hood with your fonts in the Text & Fonts section of their developer web site.

Creating Fonts

If you are interested in designing your own fonts, then you will want to check out FontLab and see what they have cooking.

Web Typography

Rich typography on the web is limited to rendering out text as image files, or using CSS to specify certain fonts that you are reasonably assured are available on both platforms. You might also check out the sIFR project for another take on how to use your favorite font faces on the web. I also really like this reference article from Smashing Magazine on 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography.

Where Are They Now?

Some of you may be familiar with other font management apps and are wondering why I didn’t include those in my font management apps article. Here’s a list of apps that have fallen behind over the last few years.

• MasterJuggler was last updated in July 2005. A very good tool in its time, this utility from Alsoft (publishers of DiskWarrior) has been left in the dust by the competition.
• Font Reserve is owned by Extensis, the makers of Suitcase Fusion 2, and was discontinued January 1, 2007.
• Fontographer was last updated on March 31, 2006.
• Adobe Type Manager Deluxe, or ATM Deluxe as we all knew it, is no longer necessary under OS X. Yes, we all had it back in the day and I included it here more out of a sense of nostalgia and respect for how important this was to Apple in the 90’s. ATM Deluxe was probably the most widely pirated software of that era too. If you still need font management in Classic, you can download Adobe Type Manager Light for free.

If you know of any other font resources, please take the time to post a link in the comments below and share with the rest of us.

Who needs font management? If you have ever installed additional fonts on your Mac, then you do.

Because of the Mac’s wide adoption in the desktop publishing and design world, managing fonts in OS X has long been an important, if unpleasant, task. The Apple tools have always been meager, but Leopard has made important improvements to Font Book, the system utility for managing installed fonts. However, there are still circumstances in which you may want to enlist the help of additional tools to get your fonts into shape.

Continuing our Font School series, I will outline the areas where font management software can help. Also, be sure to read our overview of Font Management Apps for the Mac.

Why Do I Need to Manage Fonts?

There are two general reasons why you would want to enlist software to help manage your fonts. The first, and most obvious, opportunity is simply to get a better handle on the fonts that are available for use in your designs or documents. If you work in a group or team, then it becomes even more important that everyone have the same fonts so you can more easily pass work around without experiencing weird font substitution problems.

The second opportunity is to improve system and application performance. Mac OS X Leopard does just fine with several hundred individual font variations in a few hundred families. When you get beyond that, into thousands of fonts, the system starts to slow down and certain applications take forever to update font menus or even launch. You will want a tool that can activate only the fonts that you need to keep things running nice and lean. Also, some applications like Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXpress, and Microsoft Office manage their own fonts and font management tools can help you consolidate control.

When Fonts Go Bad

The other important reason for good font management practices, and good font management tools, is to provide you with some assistance in sorting out problems. The most common problems are the system locking up or dropping into a kernel panic when trying to load a bad font or in the event of a Font ID conflict. Good font management software should help you find corrupt fonts and ID conflicts and deal with them. Other problems are generally caused by bad font substitution (the system picking the wrong font and displaying gobbledygook in your email or browser) or corrupt font caches (gobbledygook characters written on top of each other and other nonsense). Good font management software helps manage these issues or at least helps clean up the mess.

Common Problems

Font Cache Corruption

The System, Word, and Adobe all keep their own font cache to speed up on-screen rendering. If the cache becomes corrupt, you will see all sorts of weird behavior. The symptoms include weird characters all printed on top of each other. The fix? Simply flush the cache. In the case of the system cache, you will need to restart the computer when you do so. Most font utilities include a tool to flush these font caches. I like the free Linotype FontExplorer X myself.

Font ID Conflicts

Font ID conflicts prevent the system from loading all the fonts properly. The most common symptom is that the computer will simply not boot except in safe mode. If the system boots, but then hangs when trying to login to a user account, you probably have a conflict (or maybe a corrupt font) in the User font library. Font management software can help you find ID conflicts and resolve them.

Corrupt Fonts

Fonts, just like other files, can become corrupt. If this happens, the system will often hang because fonts are loaded at such a low level in the operating system. There are a few font utilities that can scan for corrupt fonts. FontDoctor and Smasher are two that are available today. Good font management software will scan for corrupt fonts as they are added to the library and FontAgent Pro will also check as fonts are activated.

Font Substitution

Many times, documents specify the font that they are using in a non-specific way. A great example is a CSS stylesheet that asks for Times. There are several variants of the Times font and sometimes your system will pick the wrong one when trying to render the text on the screen. If you see nonsense text or characters in your email or your web browser, you almost certainly have a font substitution problem. The fix is to deactivate the problem font.

Pro Tip: If you see gobbledygook in email or in your browser, try deactivating Helvetica Fraction or Times Phonetic because these seem to be the most common problems. If you need more help, check out the very well written, and relatively inexpensive, e-book from TidBITS publishing titled, Take Control of Font Problems in Leopard.

With all the big announcements from Apple’s iPhone briefing yesterday, the web has been abuzz with talk about the impact this will have on the iPhone. I managed to corner a few iPhone developers that have paid releases out in the app store now to get their first reaction to the news.

Smule

The team at Smule, the people who brought us Ocarina, Sonic Lighter, and Zephyr, were featured in the briefing with Apple yesterday. They demoed a new app that will take advantage of the peer-to-peer API’s in the iPhone 3.0 SDK.

Yeah, we offered a sneak peak of our new product, Leaf Trombone: World Stage, the first massive multi-player social music game (that’s a mouthful sir). We demonstrated a duet over their new Peer-to-peer API. In effect, this allows to devices to discover and pair, regardless of wifi/cell, etc. The discovery capability is quite neat. And the bandwidth is pretty darn good.

Ge and David performed “Phantom of the Opera” as a duet over bluetooth on two iPhones, which everyone can now enjoy by streaming the presentation. Of course, we haven’t seen all the magic that has become possible with the iPhone 3.0 SDK.

We have held back some of the more significant components of the leaf trombone for when we launch the product…

Iconfactory

Craig Hockenberry is a principal at Iconfactory, the collective of creative minds that brought us App Store favorites Twitterific and Frenzic. When asked about his reaction to today’s announcements, Craig was most impressed by the forward momentum of the iPhone platform.

“The thing that’s most positive in my mind is that today showed us how serious Apple is about this platform. They are not resting on their laurels: this release includes major enhancements for users and developers alike. “

Gedeon Maheux, another princiapl at Iconfactory, expressed his excitement and concerns about the new SDK.

We’re very excited about the potential opportunities that 3.0 represents, but there are also the possibility of pitfalls such as creating “content-free” apps that need paid upgrades to really deliver.

When asked about other changes, Craig felt that it was going to take some time to see how the App Store in-app payment mechanism would affect their current and future products. When pushed for further reaction, no single feature seemed to elicit enough excitement to bring out the CHOCKLOCK today, but expect some ALL CAPS tweets once developer.apple.com is back up and Craig can get his fleshy palms on the 3.0 SDK.

GroceryIQ

Jason Boehle is the co-founder of Free State Labs and one of the developers behind GroceryIQ. The company has since been acquired by Coupons, Inc. and development continues on the next version of the GroceryIQ app which will include syncing shopping lists between phones.

The most significant new feature announced today for Grocery iQ is push notifications. For example, you can know when your significant other adds an item to your shopping list. We are working on phone-to-phone sync right now, and push notifications will make that feature more useful.

While Jason is relieved that cut, copy and paste and MMS have finally found their way to the iPhone, like many others, he was most impressed with the bright future for the platform.

The 3.0 software is hugely important for the iPhone platform, as it shows Apple is continuing to innovate and blur the boundaries between phone and computer. iPhone developers should be very excited, as Apple is allowing more access to the hardware and software inside the device, and is providing us with much better ways to monetize our apps over time.

Marketcircle

Alykhan Jetha (better known as AJ) is the CEO of Marketcircle, the Mac business software company. They are working to bring their Daylite productivity management solution to the iPhone with the imminent release of Daylite Touch. Marketcircle is keen on the push notification service for Daylite Touch.

I also think that cut & paste and Spotlight will make the iPhone or iPod even more productive for a lot of people. We are looking forward to see how apps like ours can participate in Spotlight as well as how the whole thing works.

Still, there were some disappointments too.

I was hoping for background processes, or even periodic background processes, but no luck with that. I think that for a lot of apps, being able to run in the background every 30 minutes (or X hours) when the user is not using the device as opposed to always running would significantly reduce the battery problem. These things wouldn’t have to run for long. For example our typical sync takes less than 20 seconds.

Double Encore

Dan Burcaw, CEO of iPhone development consultancy Double Encore, was one of the early movers in the iPhone market and led the team behind the Brightkite iPhone app. Dan was also on hand for Apple’s announcements and was still riding the Apple high after he left 1 Infinite Loop and spoke with me on the way to the airport.

This definitely keeps the ball rolling. It was going to be hard for competitors to catch the iPhone and the App Store anyways, but I think Apple said, “We need to be flexible so we can keep this snowball rolling.” Everyone I talked to, my peers, other companies, are saying, “this thing just got better in a lot of ways.” Sure, Apple addressed the specific things that people wanted to change, but this is a really solid, broad release.

Since Dan was in the briefing, I was curious about the announcement that got the most attention from those present.

<laughing> You know, the Apple people kept asking that question too. I’m not sure, but as soon as the video goes up, look for this… When the ESPN app gets a push notification, the alert sound is the ESPN jingle. Da-da-da. That was cool. iPhone 3.0 gives people new ways to extend their brand. The new business models are going to allow companies to extend their brand to the iPhone in a big way too. All these changes to the SDK will bring the big boys into the game that had been sitting on the sidelines, now that they can use their branding in a bigger, richer way.

If you haven’t thought about building an iPhone app, you might want to look into it. This thing is going to be a runaway train by the time 3.0 hits.

A Runaway Train

The strong consensus among all the developers that I spoke with is that the 3.0 announcements have renewed their confidence in the iPhone platform. With 30 million devices out there (iPhone and iPod touch) and the momentum of the app store, existing developers are probably more excited about the iPhone than ever. If I could share one insight, it would be to keep an eye on what happens with the new accessory communication options. I heard several rumblings that this opens up a whole new round of innovation for the iPhone.

While no one picked any one single software feature, API, or Core service as the Next Big Thing, everyone was thrilled with the breadth and depth of the changes to the SDK. A theme developed that these developers felt like the wide range of features announced today made a strong statement about Apple’s commitment to the future of the iPhone platform. A future that, frankly, I’m pretty excited to watch unfold as well.

If you are a designer, then you know the joy of having thousands and thousands of fonts available to use in your projects. You probably are also familiar with the despair of waiting for apps to launch, font menus to draw, and the horror of kernel panics when you get Font ID conflicts, the stray corrupt font, or your careful layout explodes when your app makes the wrong font substitution.

Font management has always been one of those dirty little secrets that no one really wants to deal with, but if you are serious about fonts, you need to enlist some tools to help you manage those fonts and fix common problems.

Continuing our Font School series, here’s the rundown on what font management apps are available for your Mac.

Font Book

Font Book has been included with OS X since Panther (10.3). The latest release in Leopard includes the ability to print out a book of fonts (so you have a ready reference for what the typefaces look like), validate fonts (to check for corruption), and the new ability to automatically activate fonts as they are needed (so that your documents display correctly even if the required font had been deactivated on your system).

Font Book manages your system and user fonts and helps provide easy activation and deactivation of individual fonts or collections (user-defined groups of fonts). Leopard also has a new feature to protect system fonts and replace required fonts if they have been removed by the user — something to be aware of when making changes with any of the following tools.

Linotype FontExplorer X

The only free option, besides Font Book, is the excellent Linotype FontExplorer X, which has just recently seen its last release. FontExplorer X improves on Font Book with better tools for managing fonts, auto-activation plug-ins for Adobe CS1-CS3 and QuarkXpress 6.5 and 7.x, and utilities to fix common font problems. You can buy fonts from the Linotype online store directly within the application.

I recommend Linotype FontExplorer X for anyone that needs font management and can live with the plug-in support (that is, you don’t need CS4 or QuarkXpress 8). Besides being free (a key factor in my recommendation), Linotype FontExplorer X is easy to use, gives you feedback when it is making changes (integrated with Growl, if you like), lets you clear font cache problems and quickly identify conflicts. I like how the application allows you to copy your fonts into the library and manage them in sets that can be automatically activated as needed for certain applications. The interface borrows heavily from iTunes, but this makes it easy to use.

FontExplorer X Pro

FontExplorer X Pro adds the fancy new suffix to its name in the latest 2.0 release along with a switch to a paid model. For $79 you get plug-in support for Photoshop CS3, the CS4 Suite and QuarkXpress 8. FontExplorer X Pro also works with the new FontExplorer X Server for central font management. Other improvements over the free version include a configurable toolbar and a new Quick Install feature that lets you automate the installation options to duplicate your settings on other machines in your shop. WYSIWYG view is relatively fast thanks to pre-rendered font previews.

If you have been using FontExplorer X, then upgrading to Pro makes sense if you need plug-in support for the latest Adobe and Quark apps. The server features could be nice in a shop that requires centralized control or licensing management. Otherwise, consider using the free version until you need the features in the paid version.

FontAgent Pro

FontAgent Pro 4 by Inside Software is another choice for full-featured font management, available for $99. This application has a very similar feature set to FontExplorer X Pro, including plug-ins for the current versions of Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXpress for automatic activation of font sets. FontAgent Pro does a nice job of automatically categorizing your fonts as it imports them and giving you options for organizing them.

The WYSIWYG view is reasonably fast thanks to background processing of font profiles and previews. The search feature lets you enter multiple conditions or use keywords to find precisely the font you need. These conditions are also used to create smart sets, or dynamic groups of fonts (think smart playlists in iTunes). You can buy fonts directly inside the application from myfonts.com. FontAgent Pro comes with the Smasher utility for organizing and fixing font suitcases.

Suitcase Fusion 2

Suitcase Fusion 2 by Extensis has a long history that goes back over a decade to its early days as Suitcase by Symantec. This latest version is quite good and much improved over previous incarnations. It includes many of the same features as the previous apps. You’ve got auto-activation, font classifications, smart sets, previews, printable font books, and more. Plug-ins are limited to InDesign and Illustrator CS3 & CS4, and QuarkXpress 7 & 8. If you want auto-activation for Photoshop you will want to get FontExplorer or FontAgent.

There are two small details that I really like in Suitcase Fusion 2. One is the preview windows for fonts or sets can be “torn” off and hover on your display. You can mouse over these preview windows and use them to turn on (or off) font sets. This is a great addition to auto-activation and gives you another visual clue about which fonts are currently activated. Another detail I like is that the auto-activation process is managed with a new system preference item. The other apps launch a background daemon and place it in your login items without really telling you what it is doing. This invisible daemon is difficult to turn off. Suitcase requires that its daemon be running in the background to operate (as do all these programs) but I really like that I could go to the System Preferences pane and turn it off if I wanted to, say, test a bunch of font management apps that would otherwise conflict. Suitcase Fusion 2 includes the Font Doctor utility for resolving common font problems.

Fontcase

Fontcase is the new kid on the block, only released this past January. For a 1.0 release, Fontcase shows a lot of polish and the price is reasonable at $46. This app does not have auto-activation or plug-ins to manage Adobe or Quark application fonts, but it does an excellent job of displaying your font library and allowing you to create sets (including smart sets). The font browser is the fastest of the bunch, especially in grid view (the font card view in the screenshot below). Outline view (similar to the views in the other apps) is a tad slower, but still faster than the other apps in WYSIWYG mode.

Fontcase offers a really polished interface for managing and interacting with your fonts. If you like the iTunes metaphor in FontExplorer X Pro, you will love Fontcase. I really dig the tagging system, which is perfect for fonts and a bit more accessible than the keywords or notes features in the other apps. The printed font books are beautiful and miles better than what is available in competing apps. The downside is that you are lacking some of the really useful and practical features of the other apps like auto-activation, tools to resolve font problems, and background operations for activation/deactivation. Those features are apparently being planned, but the current lack of tools may deter professionals that are looking to take active control of thousands of fonts. Many people will be better served by the free Linoype FontExplorer X.

One feature that many people will find useful is the Bonjour font sharing technology in Fontcase. You can share your font vault over the local network and other Macs running Fontcase can download fonts into their own vault. This provides a simple way to keep workstations in the same shop in sync with fonts. Fontcase does not offer centralized license management or monitoring like the dedicated font server apps do so you’ll have to watch things yourself to make sure that you are legal with your font usage in a design shop setting. Be cautious with this feature though — sharing of fonts around the office is what usually gets people into font management trouble in the first place.

So Which is Right for Me?

First thing is to check out Linotype FontExplorer X. If you are working with Adobe CS3 (or earlier), this is a no brainer. You get excellent font management, utilities to fix problems, and auto-activation with the plug-ins for your apps. If you are using CS4 or QuarkXpress 8, then you will want to check out FontExplorer X Pro. The other pro apps (FontAgent Pro and Suitcase Fusion 2) are comparable. I would encourage you to download the free trials that are available for all of them and check them out for yourself.

If you are a home user or just want pretty font books, then by all means check out Fontcase. It allows you to manually manage your font sets fairly well and I love the UI for classifying and organizing fonts, but the auto-activation and features in the other apps are a real life-saver for a design professional that is working with a library of thousands of fonts.

Which font management application do you prefer (and why)?

Over the next few days, I will be covering everything from font management apps to how to deal with font problems. By the end of the week you’ll hopefully have a solid handle on how to manage and troubleshoot fonts on your Mac. We’ll begin this series by taking a look at the history of fonts and the various formats that fonts exist in.

It might sound crazy today, but fonts were one of the first things that really got me interested in computers. Computer typography was a constantly evolving industry in the ’80s and ’90s. A certain part of my personal interest developed because I went to high school with a kid whose dad turned out to be a rock star of computer typography. You see, his dad invented a method to describe a font using a mathematical “language” rather than just a set of dots. John Warnock, along with partner Chuck Geschke, left Xerox PARC to start Adobe Systems to commercialize this breakthrough in computer science. The key to Adobe’s Postscript technology was the ability to describe a font as an outline rather than a set of dots. The bezier curves that made up the outline could be scaled to any resolution and then filled with the dots on the printer so that all the edges looked smooth. Totally tubular!

Steve Jobs got wind of Postscript and went to Warnock and Geshke to convince them to adapt their technology to make a printer language that would work with Apple’s forthcoming LaserWriter. The Mac was revolutionary, in part, because you could see fonts displayed on the screen that looked like the fonts you could output on a printer. What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) was a huge selling point for the Mac and the reason for its early dominance in desktop publishing and graphic design.

Fonts and the Mac

Because Apple was involved with fonts and typography from the very beginning, the Mac has support for a number of different font formats as they have evolved over the last 25 years. Here are the major formats that are found on the Mac that you can expect to see on your own machine.

Type 1 Fonts

If fonts were people, Postscript Type 1 Fonts would be the old men that sit around on the porch and gripe about how things used to be back in the day. The original outline fonts, Type 1 fonts are printer fonts (outlines) which must be kept together with their corresponding screen fonts (bitmaps) in order to render the text on screen. Even though they date back to the 80’s, Type 1 fonts have survived to this day and are still present in the font library of many designers.

Because of the problems caused by separate screen and printer font files, Adobe released Adobe Type Manager as a utility to render the outline fonts on screen. This was largely a response to TrueType and was successful in making all the designers who had invested lots of money in collections of Type 1 fonts very happy. If you have Postscript Type 1 fonts around today, you will want to make sure that you keep them with their bitmap fonts.

Type 1 Fonts have the file type LWFN. This type ID came from “LaserWriter font.”

Bitmap Fonts

Bitmap fonts are really out of use in the operating system, but remain as a legacy item. Bitmaps are basically fonts that are rendered at a specific size to be displayed on screen. They are not outline fonts, but rather a grouping of dots or pixels. You should only see these in conjunction with Postscript Type 1 fonts.

Part of the reason that Bitmap fonts stuck around is that font faces are typically adjusted by the font designer at small point sizes so that the proportions look correct. Bitmaps were carefully designed for each point size to look right at different sizes. Adobe came up with “hints” and in Postscript fonts to make these small adjustments on the fly and similar techniques have been employed in more modern font formats. Thus the need for hand-tweaked point sizes has diminished over the years and bitmaps aren’t really needed.

TrueType

If Type 1 fonts are the old men on the porch, TrueType fonts are having a mid-life crisis as they realize that they never really reached their potential and are being pushed aside by the new kids coming up. Invented by Apple and brought to market in 1991 along with System 7 to try and break the stranglehold that Adobe had on the desktop publishing and laser printer markets, TrueType fonts integrate the concept of screen and printer fonts so you only have to manage one file, called a font suitcase, which contained both. The format became widely popular for cheap or free fonts but, despite the sophisticated kerning and ligature features of Quickdraw GX and Apple Advanced Typography, never really took off among designers who continued to prefer the typefaces available in Postscript format.

Apple licensed the TrueType technology to Microsoft, so TrueType fonts are supported in both the Mac and Windows operating systems. Unfortunately, the fonts are implemented differently on each platform, so you will see Mac and Windows versions of the same font family in the TrueType format. Today, new TrueType fonts would only be released in the Windows format since the Mac also supports that format.

Because TrueType was envisioned as an alternative to Postscript, a number of TrueType fonts were created in character-width compatible sets for popular Type 1 fonts like Helvetica, Times Roman, and Courier. The familiar TrueType fonts that correspond to the venerable Postscript fonts are Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. One particularly frustrating aspect of font management is figuring out which fonts are simply replacements for the same typeface in a different format so that you can standardize your designers on the same font.

The Mac TrueType fonts have the type FFIL while Windows TrueType fonts appear as .ttf files. Leopard is moving towards the Windows format .ttf files as the standard (as is everyone else).

Dfont files are a special case of TrueType where the font data has been moved in the data fork to support some of OS X’s unix underpinnings. These are only used for system fonts and you should never need to mess around with them.

OpenType

OpenType was announced in 1996, but became available around 2000-2001. This technology was jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe to add additional capabilities to fonts and resolve the lingering conflicts of managing both screen and printer fonts. In particular, OpenType supports unicode character sets and non-Roman scripts like Arabic, though word processing or page layout software has to be written to expose those features to the user. At this time, Adobe’s entire library of fonts have been converted to OpenType and every other major font foundry releases their work in OpenType as well.

Although Tiger showed considerable support for OpenType fonts, Leopard goes much further and also includes support for Arabic script OpenType fonts.

OpenType fonts are .otf files in OS X.

Suitcase Files

In the old days of System 7, suitcase files held both screen and printer variants for TrueType fonts. The name still survives in OS X as a file type, but the implementation of font files in OS X has completely changed.

System Fonts

Mac OS X requires several fonts in order to display the menu bar and other UI elements. Because of this, OS X will often not boot at all if fonts are missing. Because fonts are loaded at a low-level in the operating system, problems with fonts can cause system crashes or performance problems. Leopard introduced the new concept of protected system fonts that will be replaced automatically if they are removed from the system font library to prevent such problems. If you remove some fonts and see them magically reappear, OS X may be helping you out by replacing the system fonts it needs.

Microsoft Word Fonts

Microsoft Office for Mac, partly because of Microsoft’s history of developing font technologies for Windows and partly to make Office documents more portable between Windows and Mac versions, includes a number of fonts in a standard install on the Mac. Some of these fonts are duplicates of fonts included with OS X and some are required by Office to render the toolbars and other interface elements of Office applications. These fonts were originally welcomed because they were better than the system fonts, but now the Leopard system fonts have surpassed the Microsoft fonts. Office 2004 and Office 2008 install fonts into different locations, so be aware of that as you try to clean up your fonts on your system.

Adobe Creative Suite Fonts

Adobe Creative Suite installs a large number of fonts in Mac OS X. CS3 and later put these fonts in the system library, but CS2 and the original CS placed them in an Adobe directory. If you are using Creative Suite, then you certainly want a large font collection, but you will end up with duplicates between Apple-provided system fonts and Adobe fonts. One of the most common font problems I see is a designer that has multiple versions of Helvetica installed that eventually conflict with each or simply cause confusion when choosing the right font for a project.

Get a Handle on Your Fonts

Tomorrow I will cover five software programs that help you manage your fonts: Font Book, FontExplorer X and FontExplorer Pro, FontAgent Pro, Suitcase Fusion X, and FontCase. In addition, if you really want an in-depth understanding of how fonts work in Leopard, I highly recommend that you check out two e-books from TidBITS Publishing: Take Control of Fonts in Leopard and Take Control of Font Problems in Leopard. Sharon Zardetto, who has been writing about the Mac for over 20 years, has created a really valuable resource for designers and support professionals alike. Tiger versions are also available if you are still supporting 10.4 in your shop. These books cover font technologies in far greater depth than I have here, and also explain how to fix a myriad of problems that may crop up.

While we were expecting new firmware for previous generation Airport Extreme and Time Capsule devices to drop this week, some will be disappointed that this update does not magically update the hardware as well.

Airport Firmware 7.4.1 enables the Back to my Mac disk sharing feature announced this week for previous generation Airport Extreme and Time Capsule devices. This release also updates the brand new Airport Extreme and Time Capsule devices with dual-band networking to fix a few bugs that were not caught in the initial release. It does not, however, enable dual-band networking or guest networking on older devices as that feature relies on the new hardware found in the Early 2009 versions of the Airport Extreme and Time Capsule. Airport Express users get no love (beyond bug fixes) as Air Disk sharing is not supported on those devices.

Here is the list of updates…

For AirPort Extreme (Early 2009) and Time Capsule (Early 2009) that ship with firmware 7.4, the firmware 7.4.1 update:

• Resolves an issue in which a client computer may be disconnected when waking from sleep
• Addresses an issue in which redirecting SMTP port services may disable IP-layer networking
• Improves the reliability of Back to My Mac-based disk sharing
• Includes recent AirPort security updates

For AirPort Extreme with 802.11n (Fast Ethernet), AirPort Extreme with 802.11n (Gigabit Ethernet), AirPort Express with 802.11n, and original Time Capsule models, the firmware 7.4.1 update:

• Enables remote administration and remote access to compatible USB connected drives via Back to My Mac (except on AirPort Express)
• Improves reliability when backing up to a Time Capsule via Time Machine
• Includes recent AirPort security updates

The Mobile Me features allow you to access files that are stored on a USB drive attached to your base station. I tested this earlier this morning with a spare USB drive. It could not be simpler to turn on the Back to my Mac feature in Airport Utility — you literally just type in your username and password. I then tried to hop on my neighbor’s Wi-Fi to see if I could see my drive. Unfortunately, my neighbor’s router does not support UPnP or NAT-PMP so I could not see my shared drive through Back to my Mac. I assume that if you are on two networks that support Back to my Mac, you would be able to see your shared drive just fine. Maybe I’ll wrap up my Airport instead of See’s Candies for them next Christmas.

You can still enable drive sharing over the WAN port as well, but this is a little different than the Back to my Mac sharing. Sharing over the WAN port just means filesharing via AFP or SMB, only enabled on the WAN ethernet port in addition to the LAN ports. The only disadvantage that this method has is that you have to know the IP address of your Airport base station to connect to it from a remote network. Back to my Mac gets around this by having the computer or Airport Extreme register their current IP address with the Mobile Me service. Your computer just checks in with Mobile Me to get the address of your Airport Extreme and then opens a connection to it.

The other advantage of Back to my Mac is that ISP’s often lease out IP addresses for a limited period of time, after which they may change. Back to my Mac will update the IP address automatically on any change. If you do not have the Mobile Me service, you can accomplish the same result by registering your Airport’s public IP address with DynDNS or a similar service. If the Airport is providing NAT services to your local network, you could even set up a computer behind your Airport to automatically update this entry if the public IP address were to change.

Beyond the cool new features, I am glad to see that Time Machine reliability has been addressed for the Time Capsule. I have one client that was never able to get Time Machine to backup reliably to their Time Capsule. I am looking forward to trying this new firmware release, and I will let you all know if this firmware update fixes their situation in the comments below. If you have your own stories with Firmware 2.4.1, be sure to share them here.