Review - You Software
Last month You came to PMUG and demonstrated their suite of Mac utilities. The founders of You Software include people who originally ran Extensis and Now in their earlier days; it's a local Portland company. This suite brings back some sorely-missed add-ons and a lot of new ones. The programs work on Intel or PPC Macs and require 10.4.0 or higher, but there is a version of You Control (1.3.3) that works with 10.3.9. Leopard users will find beta versions available on their site.
You Control Tunes
This is free for downloading. It puts buttons for Play, Pause, FastForward (Skip) or Rewind (Skip Backwards) to control iTunes right in your menubar. Start iTunes and then click the amber button to put it in the Dock and use these buttons to control it without leaving your active application.
You Fonts
This puts a fonts menu in the menubar that displays all your fonts in their own faces, with a submenu showing styles and, below that, a submenu that lets you pick from five sizes. While a great idea, it does not work in all programs; specifically Eudora, AppleWorks, Photoshop 7 (which dies under Leopard anyway). At least it's smart enough to know - at the top of the menu it says Not Available in these programs. In Design 2.01 doesn't do either. AppleWorks is no loss because it does display a font in its own face in the menu if you tell it to in Preferences. Word for X does work, even though it isn't mentioned in the list below. The full list of supported applications from the web site is:
This is a utility that creates multiple desktops. There have been many variations on this over the years, some of which are still in use. Leopard incorporates a simplified version of virtual desktops within itself; but You Desktops adds features and functionality to what comes from Apple. It works under Tiger, so if you won't be going to 10.5 anytime soon, this is a good way to get that feature."Virtual desktops" is one of those ideas that you either get and love or don't understand why anyone would want it. The idea is that you have several screens that you can switch between, clustering like programs on each so you don't have a dozen overall windows and open apps to deal with in one place. I prefer simply typing command-H to make an application and all its windows invisible until I'm ready to use it again, coupled with Expos's single key to shrink all windows to the desktop, making it easy to pick the formerly hidden one I seek.(Some people have been using Tiger, and 10.3.x Leopard, for some time now and have never discovered how convenient Expose is. Right now, I want you to hit the F9 key, then hit it again to bring your screen back to normal. Then hit the F11 key twice. Start using this and you will kick yourself for not discovering it sooner, especially if you like to keep a lot of files and folders on your desktop. MacBookPro users will have to hold down the Fn, or function, key before typing F9 or F10.)
You Control
This is the kitchen sink of utilities. Most of us will use only a few of these. The first one I installed was a weather icon in my menubar that shows me what weather.com says about Portland right now. Click the icon and the menu gives me tons more info, including the 7-day forecast. This replaces a long-missed WeatherPop utility that no longer works in Portland, and not very well in many other cities.
What else do you get? Buttons in the left and right of the Menu bar, the screen corners, and definable hot keys. You can quickly access the calendar, address book, Mail.app, system preferences, recently used applications and documents, monitor the memory and the network, check stocks and switch between user accounts. You can build some or all of these and others into a single menu, and choose to mark that menu with an icon or text. I could go on and on about the features, but better to simply visit You Software and read all about it. You can download all of them from there and run some as a tryout before you buy.
Versions for 10.5 Leopard were released in mid-January.
Prices for the You-tilities are $69.95 for the whole set, or $29.95 each for You Control and You Desktops, and $19.95 for You Control Fonts. You Control Tunes is free.
I have been you-sing (sorry) these for a month now and have not found any conflicts or excessive strain on the system, although one of the options, a news/stocks ticker tape that runs in the menubar can amp up the processor quite a bit so You would want to disable that when running on your battery.
Keep Your G5 Clean
G5 Towers are very sensitive to temperature changes. This is partly because that chip pushes the limits of what the PPC architecture can do, especially under the heavy load of video editing, Photoshop, etc. To prevent potential problems, open it up and blow out any accumulated dust every couple of months; more often if you keep it on the floor. It doesn't take much for the sensors to register hot, which cranks up the fans, and brings in even more dust.
When the processor has been running at 100% capacity for an extended period, you can experience the sudden shutdown syndrome. This is absolutely a sign that it needs cleaning, but if it happens after you have cleaned the dust out, you may be experiencing a power failure. Contact AppleCare about the problem and they may send you a new power supply. This is a known problem and it affects air-cooled G5s as well as liquid-cooled models. When open for dust inspect carefully the area under the radiator for signs of leakage. If you see any, don't restart it at all; go straight to your favorite Mac repair shop and hope you caught it in time. This is why we always buy AppleCare. If your AppleCare is due to expire shortly, absolutely check your G5 over for any hint of possible problems and contact Apple immediately.
NeoOffice and WordPerfect
From a posting to the NeoOffice mailing list: "...I just installed the latest version 2.2.2 of NeoOffice on my MacBookPro Intel (OS X 10.4.10) and it worked perfectly to open and read a long, fairly complex WordPerfect document -- a two-column case report with formatting from WestLaw. Then, it or the Mac printed it to PDF so I could send it to my client."
NeoOffice is a free download; I would encourage all lawyers reading this who have been needing an alternative to WP go to NeoOffice.org and try it out.
MagSafe and MacBooks
Here's an obvious one I never thought of: particulate contamination of the MagSafe socket on your MacBook and MacBook Pro. Since the magnet is embedded in the socket, it can attract small particles of metal that can block the plug from seating properly, or worse, shorting out the contacts when the plug is attached. Zap!
Keep your desk area near the left side of your laptop clear so this doesn't happen to you. (Thanks, MacInTouch)
Western Digital Not Wonderful
That same issue of Macintouch was filled with reader reports complaining about the low quality and poor service from Western Digital external hard drives, and their policy of replacing bad drives with factory refurbs, not new ones. While most manufacturers have that policy, especially if the drive is more than 30 days old, the reports complain of incompetent service from their support department, long wait times for email replies, and the replacement drives dying just as quickly.
Since the replacements are refurbs, what could be on them from the previous user? If your backup drive dies and goes to WD for replacement, who gets your now-repaired drive with all your info on it? Sure, the drive may have been reinitialized, but that doesn't remove the data. Someone could recover that with something as simple as Norton Utilities.
There are many other comments on the site (which I recommend readers visit regularly), but I now recommend against WD-branded drives, especially the ones marketed under the MyBook name. If you have one, be sure to save your receipts and cross your fingers.
Another correspondent recommends the Glyph series of hard drives, marketed toward the pro audio crowd and reviewed by Sweetwater.com.
Yes, they are more expensive, but their guarantee is longer and the audio industry is a demanding one so if reliability and longevity is important, look at these guys. Meanwhile, I still recommend the LaCie D2 series drives, cheaper and pretty reliable. My own are going strong after three years.
Network Solutions Steals Domain Ideas
This may already be history, drowned in a sea of lawsuits, but it was discovered in December that the Whois domain search service at Network Solutions, one of the largest domain registration services, steals ideas from people who search for unused domains.
If you go to their site and type in a domain that turns out to be unused, they immediately and automatically buy and register it. That forces you to buy it back from them at an inflated price. If you instead search from local services (like dotster.com, which I use) then you can decide to buy the site later, assuming someone else doesn't stumble on it. While what NS does isn't illegal, probably, it certainly is unethical and you should avoid doing any business with the company at all. I am putting them on my permanent boycott list, regardless if they stop the practice or not.
Not A Peep About Macworld
Press deadlines being what they are, you will be reading the print version of this weeks after the Keynote and Apple's announcements. If you don't already know what happened at the Macworld Expo, visit any of the Mac blogs I have referenced over the years, or Apple itself. There's a copy of the keynote speech for you to watch in Quicktime.
Exceptions: Now that Apple has officially gotten into the movie rental business, letting you rent movies through the AppleTV, I wonder how long will it be before someone creates a utility like iPodDisk (which lets you copy songs off of foreign iPods as long as they aren't protected) that will let you copy movies off of the AppleTV onto your Mac within the rental period so they don't self-destruct.
Will I again violate my rule against buying the first version of anything and get the new MacBook Air? Gotta wait and see; it still has to be able to support an external display and replace my desktop like the MacBook did.
(Answer: no, I won't be getting one, even though you can drive an external display. It's just too small, too limited compared to my normal MacBook, and I don't travel enough to justify it.)
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.)