Macking 146-A

New Macs
At deadline time it's only a rumor, but goodbye to the Mac Mini and hello to the MacNano. According to MacOSRumors, the new model will be as small as an internal CD/DVD drive will allow, and about 2/3 the height of the Mini. The design will be strikingly different as well, it's claimed.
Also due soon is the Macbook Nano, a thin, light version of the MacBook. There is not much more to take out, unless they eliminate the hard drive, as is done in the high-end Intel model previewed earlier this year. This has been rumored for over two years now, but may finally be on track.

Leopard
Deadlines prohibit any experience with this, as it will be (was) released October 26. I will be getting it on the first day and upgrading my MacBook, so you can read my experiences with it next month. When it is released, plan on making daily visits to Macintouch and MacFixIt, especially if you want to be an early adopter.
Oh, and no, I have not gotten an iPhone. Apple is really being annoying, too, releasing patches and updates that eliminate or destroy any hacks that have been done to it. The latest threat is to outright kill a phone that has been hacked to use a network other than AT&T's. It was the software/firmware update 1.1.1 that you should avoid, unless you leave your iPhone absolutely stock.
I find it interesting that Jobs is so hostile to iPhone hacking because he started in business peddling illegal phone-hacking devices (Blue Boxes). More at Wikipedia.
If your iPhone is unhacked, there are useful features in the update, including security fixes of a hole that can let a malicious website force the phone to dial undesirable numbers, such as the long-distance scam numbers offshore that charge $50 per minute. More info on MacFixIt, or iPhone Atlas.

More Updates
Apple is so certain that people will have problems with the latest EFI Firmware Updates for Intel Macs that they have released a Firmware Restoration CD 1.4, which you can download from Apple. If the problem has already hit you, you need another Mac to make the CD with. No other Macs or Mac-owning friends? Visit an Apple Store. None near you? Well, that's why I warn you to avoid these updates for a few weeks to a few months after Apple releases them. See last month's column to find out where you should stop for good, at least until Leopard proves itself.

iTunes 7.4.1 Disables Your Ringtones
Apple quickly released an updated iTunes that seems to have no other function than to disable a simple trick that you could do in 7.4 - rename your AAC song files with an .m4r extension which would then let you load it as a ringtone.
NEVER update iTunes without visiting the Mac blogs first to find out what it does, and what it wrecks.
Interestingly enough, both the RIAA and Engadget's legal department agree: You have the legal right to take any piece of music you bought, whether ripped from a CD or from the iTunes Music Store, and make a ringtone out of it. Details at Engadget.
However, Apple's contracts with the record companies prohibit them from providing ringtones without charging extra. This legal loophole does not prohibit YOU from doing it, but forces them to try to stop you from doing it in iTunes. Hence, stupid modifications to the software to trip you up. Why does the RIAA support this? To quote the interview: "The RIAA wanted to be able to distribute ringtones of its artists without having to pay them big money to do so (surprised?), and it won a decision last year before the Copyright Office saying that ringtones weren't "derivative works," meaning they didn't infringe on the copyright of the songwriter. It's a little more complicated than that, but essentially, if the RIAA hadn't won, "ringtones would cost even more, since no one would be able to make them without a license from the songwriter."
Oh, and Apple released 7.4.2 while I was writing the previous paragraph. It fixed bugs introduced by 7.4.1. My advice? Unless you have the latest iPod, stick with 7.3.2 at the latest.

No Linux Either
Apple also blocks any program that isn't iTunes from accessing and controlling an iPod. Since they refuse to release a version for Linux, they are effectively telling Linux users "We just don't want your business." You could install Windows iTunes through VMware, but it isn't clear if it will work under WINE. Doesn't affect Mackers, but it just proves that Apple still wears their Stupid blinders. Or maybe they are just under orders from Microsoft to exclude Linux users, much the same way as Corel was ordered to kill WordPerfect for Mac if they wanted to keep making their products for Windows. What Corel is afraid of, I don't know; it's not like MS can prevent CorelDraw from working on Windows. Even Cheney wouldn't let them get away with that.
Linux users are, of course, busily writing their way around Apple's limitations, but they shouldn't have to.

AirPort
Did you know that mirrors can totally block the wireless signal? Neither did I until I read it in the Tips section of Macintouch. Other metal objects in the path can also block the signal. Where is your wireless base station and what's between it and your Mac? You might want to relocate it to improve range. Sometimes just moving it to the highest point in the room will do the trick.

New Photoshop Elements
But not until early 2008. Adobe is releasing version 6 for Microsoft now, but the Mac version will be delayed. Adobe is completely skipping over version 5, although the Windows version 5 has been out for over a year. All of this is consistent with Adobe's normal behavior; they have become more and more like Microsoft over the years: arrogance, monopolistic practices, little customer service and ever-higher prices.
All the more reason to use GraphicConverter instead.

Beware of Your Screen Saver
The Adobe CS3 installer dies if your screen saver kicks in while it's running. If it fails it won't let you do a partial reinstall to fix a missing component. Before installing CS3, set your screen saver timer to either Never or to at least three hours. Depending on which Mac you have, CS3 can take up to 90 minutes to install from the DVD. Part of the time is taken up by the fact that the Adobe installer first makes a temporary copy of the entire DVD on your hard drive and installs from that. Their installer is one of the worst in the industry. Move the mouse every few minutes, make sure you have quit all other programs, and do not do anything else while the installer is running (good practice during any installation, not just Adobe's).
There is another way to install CS3, especially in a networked environment, at the IrisInk blog. This is not for the faint of heart, but comments to the article praise it for effectiveness.

Fat Bits
Is your drive small enough? If you want the data to be stable over the long term, you don't want high density. Due to increasing demand for giant drives and a drop in demand for small ones, it's getting harder to find anything under 120 gigabytes in a standard 3.5" desktop drive.
The "perp" drives I have written about before accomplish their storage capacity by using ever-smaller clumps of magnetic media, crammed up close to each other. The closer and smaller they are, the easier it is for corruption to set in due to spontaneous demagnetization of the clumps (aka "bit rot"). Conversely, the old 800K floppies we used "back in the olde days" are still sitting around containing perfectly useable data (mine are). The higher density 1.4 Mb disks suffered more from bit rot and as a result became unreadable a lot sooner. This is the problem that plagued the alternative storage media that has largely disappeared - SyQuest drives, Jaz drives, SuperDisks. All had greater densities than the drives could manage to read effectively over time. Couple that with the inherent inferiority of some of the devices (Jaz, SuperDisk) and people got disgusted with the unreliability and moved on.
Now, since no other easily affordable storage technology has managed to keep up, most of us keep our backups on a second hard drive. But the problem of too-small magnetic clumps continues.
The answer is to stay as far behind the curve as possible. Buy the smallest hard drive you can that works for you. People who juggle movies and RAW image files have to have huge drives, and equally huge backup drives, but the rest of us can usually get by with 160 Gb drives or less. (Just try to find an 80 Gb these days.)
The 2.5" drives used in laptops and portable drives are proportionally smaller. Over 100Gb you get into perpendicular technology, so you should stick with 60 or 80 if you use those. Perp drives are up to 250Gb now, so if you have a laptop with anything over 120, I recommend you back it up to a 3.5" desktop drive, not a matching portable.
Most people use a simple backup program like SuperDuper or SilverKeeper to clone their internal to the external, which is usually fine. If you want to protect yourself should your building burn down or be visited by a blagger, you should keep an off-site backup, which would be another removable hard drive you store in a safe-deposit box or at least at home (or work).
A safer alternative to a giant external drive is a RAID 5 backup. This uses a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives to keep mirrors of its internal structure. Should one of the drives in the RAID die, you simply replace it with another and it replaces the missing data using a checksum and the duplicate information stored on the other drives. It costs about three times as much, but when you get to half a terabyte or more, you gotta figure on spending some money. To the backup program, a RAID appears to be a single drive.
If you set your backup program to Never Delete Files, it will save a copy of the files on the backup that you deleted from the hard drive. Sometimes this can rescue you when you mistakenly delete a file, but it can also fill your backup drive to capacity so keep an eye on the space remaining on that drive. This is especially likely if you manipulate a lot of big images.
One of the programs recommended for backup by version (keeping older versions of the same document) is Kronosync. I have not used it myself but I am told that if you run your first backup with SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner (to make the backup bootable, which is extremely important) and then do all future backups with Kronosync, you will have a backup set that can easily be searched with Spotlight (Command-F).
Retrospect, which I do use, is great for keeping older versions (versioning) but not so great when it comes to restoring a complete system. As a result I use both that and SuperDuper to keep a clone on a different backup drive. Retrospect has not been updated in three years and will be largely rendered obsolete by Time Machine, part of OSX 10.5. I have heard amazing stories of how powerful TimeMachine is, and it requires nothing more than an external drive to do its magic.
The rule of thumb to use when deciding what backup to use and how much effort you want to put into it, is simple: How bad would you feel if you woke up to a dead internal drive tomorrow morning? The answer should determine how much effort and attention you commit to protecting your data.

Software For Chiropractic Offices
Actually, this is for any medical practice. If you checked out MacPractice and were put off by the $1500 purchase price and further repulsed by the mandatory $1200/year updates, $1000/day consulting fee for someone to come set it up for you and other ridiculous charges, one of my clients has discovered a much better alternative in AcuBase Pro, built on FileMaker, that costs MUCH less and is run by people who are more client-friendly than MacPractice. Visit Trigram for more information. All I can say here is that it costs just $495 to buy and $295 for renewal fees after the first year. This covers all needed updates, and information the others charge for, like hospital CPT codes, are free.
If you're in the medical business and would like another reason to dump Windows, here it is. Oh, and the product is cross-platform as well. There are multi-user networked versions available as well.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)