In a notable about-face, Apple has changed its stance with regard to allowing Mac OS X Server to be run inside a virtual machine (VM), much as Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion make it possible to run Windows and other PC-based operating systems on a Mac. Until the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server, Apple’s software license agreement explicitly forbade running multiple copies of Mac OS X Server on a single Mac, preventing Parallels and VMware from including Mac OS X Server among the operating systems that could be virtualized legally. Apple’s Tiger Server software license agreement reads:

This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Mac OS X Server software (the ‘Mac OS X Server Software’) on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.

(Via TidBITS.)

Huge step in the right direction. Ship something VMWare. Please.

For the most part these templates are just plain ole’ fashioned HTML with a tiny bit of XML. So really the only requirements for editing or creating your own stationery is that you know a small bit of HTML. Some design skills wouldn’t hurt if you’re creating your own from scratch.

(Via The Apple Blog .)

This is a nice overview of how the new stationary works in Mail.app, but it is a tricky path to head down.

Designing HTML email that will pass through most email services and display reasonably well can be difficult.

Firing up Dreamweaver, iWeb or TextMate will get you started, but making sure the email messages sent are received and viewable can be an enormous task.

Here are a few links to chew on:

• A List Apart - CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree
• ThinkVitamin.com - HTML Emails - Taming The Beast
• Email Labs - 20 HTML Email Tips: Ignore at Your Own Risk
• Campaign Monitor - Optimizing CSS presentation in HTML emails
• Mail Chimp - Free Email templates

My rules are as follows:

• Keep it simple
• Host all images on a server, do not embed
• Make sure your HTML degrades gracefully
• No javascript
• Don’t forget to test for mobile devices (Blackberries will choke on CSS)
• Validate - Validate - Validate

Good luck aspiring Mail Stationary designers.

I have used numerous tools over the years to keep on top of my tasks and projects.

Omnioutliner, Backpack, Stickies (digital not real) and countless others.

None every quite worked for me. They never felt right, too much overhead or took too long to get the info into them.

When inspiration and motivation strikes, you need to get it down fast, before the next distraction takes the thought away.

So, when Hog Bay Software released TaskPaper, I looked at the screenshots and quickly dismissed it as yet another to-do list.

How wrong was I.

As my week grew busier, I decided to give it a shot and see how it might fit into my workflow.

Much to my surprise, it began filling up fast and I found myself actually using it features. Not just staring at a window full of text.

The beauty of TaskPaper, is that it is drop dead simple on the surface, with just the right features under the hood.

You can use keyboard shortcuts to create a project, or simply type the title with a colon after it, adding tasks equally flexible and fast.

Marking something done can be accomplished any number of ways and the cleaning up your lists is so simple with “archive done tasks”.

Today as I was engrossed in our daily video chat, organizing the weeks priorities with my partner, I discovered a wonderful gem hidden in plain sight.

If you click on the project text, it create a tab of just that project! So you can filter down to one list and quickly go home to see everything.

TaskPaper gets 5 stars in my book.

Well worth the $18.95.

Grab a copy and support a wonderful independent Mac developer.

”the N95 8GB handset is what the original N95 should have been.”

(Via Mobilewhack.com.)

I almost bought the new Nokia N95-3 (aka the US 3G model) last week, but Nokia’s seemingly erratic release cycle has me putting down my credit card and backing away from my web browser.

AppleInsider | NBC chief says Apple ‘destroyed’ music pricing: “BC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker on Sunday urged colleagues to take a stand against Apple’s iTunes, charging that the digital download service was undermining the ability of traditional media companies to set profitable rates for their content online.

(Via Apple Insider.)

Gee, based on the harsh words one might think Zucker has something to promote? Thats right, Hulu.

Jeff Zuker, you are a moron.

NBC, like traditional content providers, has more content than viewers can watch.

24 hours of content run every day on their network.

Which is then syndicated to run 24 hours a day again and again - all around the world.

Jeff, most of us are busy and don’t have time to watch all your content, and I will never pay more to download inferior quality content to watch on my Mac, iPod or iPhone, than it costs to buy it on DVD.

Hell, with thanksgiving sales coming up, I can probably get most of your series on DVD for $20 or less on DVD.

Yet you are whining over Apple and iTunes customers not wanting to kick down more than $40 a season for crappy quality DRM protected drivel? Please.

You are drooling over Apple’s hardware sales, wishing those numbers were yours like a greedy spoiled little child.

Go get a bunch of clever engineers and invent the next iPhone, iPod or OS and you too can make the big bucks.

Seriously, how about you quit looking at downloadable content to replace the revenue stream of broadcast, DVD sales and syndication.

You say you only made $15 million from iTunes last year. Thats $15 million more than you would have made.

Here are a few ideas to help you not be such a jackass:

1. Open up your vault of older content, ship that into the digital channels, and earn honest money from something not making you a penny today.

2. Offer content online at the same time as it airs on broadcast. You are losing sales to bittorrent, tivo and dvd burners by delaying digital distribution until days after the traditional broadcast.

3. Make better deals with tech-savvy marketers for product placement in your digital content.

Lastly, get a clue. Hulu may become a hit this season thanks to holding content hostage behind the slick veneer of a yet another flash player, surrounded by advertising.

But, when I want to relax and be entertained, I am not going to go sit behind my Mac and surf to your website to watch a show.

I want to watch something on my couch, while sitting in a airport, or while waiting at the doctors office.

Guess who made that convenient and possible for me? Not you and not Hulu.

Oh, one last thing, if you want us to value your content, quit putting it in the value bin at Walmart and Target.

“Gee, honey wasn’t that season of Alias $50 last week? Now its only $19.99!, guess we better wait for the sale from now on”.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (9A581) is now available to Select and Premier developers. Apple had last seeded build 9A559 to developers on September 21st, 2007.

Some developers had been critical of Apple withholding the final version of Leopard from developers. Keeping the final build of Leopard internal, however, did not prevent its leak in the days leading to its release.

(Via Mac Rumors.)

I was critical in comments over at The Apple Blog, but I had hope they would deliver based on past experience and they did.

Kudos to Apple!

So maybe everything isn’t totally rosy in Leopard world. Apple promised we’d be able to sync notes from our iPhones to Mail.app but it turns out this is impossible. The new Mail.app has a sort of “Note to self” feature which is actually an email generated to look and act like a little note. The notes appear in your mailbox as a mail message, provided you’re not using Mail.app, but appear as a separate entity in Mail.

(Via Crunch Gear.)

With Leopard shipping, I think it is safe to slink from behind Apple’s ADC NDA finally.

Based on how Notes and To-Dos work in Mail 3, I am betting that we will see an update to MobileMail on the iPhone that will bring some level of “syncing” between the iPhone and the Desktop.

In Mail 3 on Leopard, if you are using an IMAP account, the Notes and To Dos you create in Mail are stored on the IMAP server.

My guess is that a future update to MobileMail on the iPhone will bring the same functionality - at least for IMAP accounts.

It should since that takes care of the “syncing” to some extent. Unless Apple is totally lame and requires something like .Mac

Woot!

Scarcely a week before an existing ban on Internet access taxes is set to expire, the U.S. Senate late on Thursday voted to let it live on for seven more years.

…

The Senate’s bill was modified before the vote to include a section that says states can’t tax “home page electronic mail and instant messaging (including voice–and video–capable electronic mail and instant messaging), video clips, and personal electronic storage capacity, that are provided independently or not packaged with Internet access.”

(Via CNet News.com.)

The thing that boggles my mind though is the “Stack”. What in Earth are these people on? It’s a damn MESS. Step back, close your eyes, power through the distortion field and open them to take a good look at that screen shot above. It’s INSANE. You’ve got a grid of folders and icons with microscopic text thrown in a pile - that’s not useful or efficient, I don’t care WHO you are. It’s a mess!”

(Via Russell Beattie.)

This criticism is to be expected based solely on screenshots.

I don’t want to start a war of words, but his post is frankly, bull.

What Russell misses, is what most of us miss when flying our particular fanboy flags high. If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it.

Compare the two screen shots below, the first a typical Ubuntu window and the second a Grid Stack from Leopard:

Both are similar in appearance and usability. Typical “grids” of icons with tiny text beneath.

Where stacks is an improvement is when the directories begin to grow.

With Stacks, after the directory exceeds a certain number of items, it switches to a Fan mode.

For a download directory Fan mode rocks. The latest items are always quickly accessible.

While for a projects or documents folder I like grid mode, since I am navigating to a sub directory in most cases.

Right clicking on a folder in the Dock lets you customize the Stack behavior. You can switch from Automatic to either Grid or Fan mode as the default.

The usability difference between typical windows, in either Mac OS X or Ubuntu, and Stacks is subtle.

The experience I have with Stacks is, I find what I am looking for faster, with fewer mouse or key clicks. When I do find that certain item, the Stack gets out of my way without me doing anything.

Stacks is one of the small features that appears superficial, or even eye candy to some, but when used you find yourself rely on it more and more.

With regards to eye candy being implemented to drive hardware sales, give me a break.

Leopard compatibility update to MacRabbit’s amazing $30 CSS editor.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Linux is great. Really, it is. I used to use it all the time as a teenager when I got into programming. But now that I’ve matured (a little) and fallen into the world of Apple, I can see that Linux on a desktop PC is not a reality.

(Via Crunch Gear.)

Ah, yes. I feel the pain.

After my last post about Linux, a commenter took me to task as most fan boys (Apple, Linux, Windows, etc.) will.

I still stand my main point, Linux will not move beyond the geek crowd and masochistic user base until they focus on usability for the average person.

Sure some distributions, carefully tuned for a specific piece of hardware will work some of the time for most people - assuming they don’t want to do more than what it ships with.

Push it do more and the can of worms opens up. Drivers hunts, kernel updates and massive black holes of wasted time unspool before you.

I do want to state, I badly want Linux to conquer the world - become ubiquitous and common.

It would be a triumph of technology, freedom and innovation.

But the disparate nature of its evolution, combined by a blindness to usability by average consumers, hinder its progress.

A good article on why business should accept Paypal and Google Checkout.

..according to a recent survey by JupiterResearch. Among Internet users, 33% said they had a PayPal account and 23% called it their preferred way to pay.

…other benefits of accepting PayPal …of the 153 million PayPal account holders, 36 million have used PayPal in the past 90 days, suggesting a large and loyal cadre of PayPal users.

And many of them keep balances in their PayPal accounts, often accumulated through sales on eBay. At any given time there is $2.5 billion in PayPal accounts, and that money typically turns over every two weeks. Much of that gets spent online, and 18% of U.S. online shoppers in a recent PayPal-sponsored survey said they would not have made a purchase if the retailer had not taken PayPal.

(Via Workhappy.net.)

I have been using Paypal for a number of years and it has worked out very well, with one exception - subscriptions.

We recently moved from Paypal to Trust Commerce for subscription processing for MailTank.

The main problems with subscriptions at Paypal are:

1. Poor descriptions of errors and card expirations that terminate a subscription. You can’t tell easily whether it is the customer or some issue at Paypal based on the transaction records.

2. Difficult to identify what subscriptions are active from their transaction logs. Its possible but not easy or fast to do so.

3. No way to create a subscription manually. Some customers do not want to jump through the hoops of going to the Paypal site, creating an account and entering their information.

The opposite seems to be true for Trust Commerce. It was very easy to integrate, their API is robust and the the ability to create, view, modify and cancel subscriptions both through their API and manually is a real winner.

Not to mention, we can call someone up directly over there, unlike the telephone maze at Paypal.

I still use Paypal for one off purchases, such as MailTemplate and it works great.

As noted, Leopard comes out tomorrow at 6 PM, some people may be receiving it as early as today and it appears the gold master is already spreading across bittorrent.

The usual question is, when will developers get it?

As noted, a lot of indie developers are left in the lurch, having to endure the lines to purchase Leopard tomorrow if they want to be certain their software works on the gold master.

This is the usual song and dance Apple pulls with new releases. Its been going on since Mac OS X shipped and is my biggest complaint as an NDA-bound paying member of the Apple Developers Connection.

With each and every major release developers go through this.

When will Apple learn? It’s not the developers that leak their precious software.

Even if it was, there is legal recourse built into the ADC agreements if we did.

Developers deserve to have the gold master at the same time, if not a few days before the consumers get it.

Hell, Walt Mossberg got it a week ago to review!

Gee, wonder where that bittorrent leak came from? Apple, Walt or manufacturing perhaps?

Certainly not the developers whom are still working with a buggy pre-gold master seed.

Wonder if Apple will deliver tomorrow or just milk more cash from ADC members whom buy the copy they should have received already.

Nice! I love Tumblr. A lot of fun and quite well designed.

Tumblr, a blogging software startup that ascribes to the philosophy that less is more, has raised $750,000 in Series A funding, according to Private Equity Hub. The money came from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, with Spark general partner Bijan Sabet joining Tumblr’s board.

(Via Om Malik on Broadband.)

I would have killed for this idea back in the day at my corporate gig.

My pal, Mike Monteiro, is making good on his idea to try giving his team Meeting Tokens.

(Via 43 Folders.)

I sure would!

Check out Mobile Whack’s wishlist.

I use S3 on a number of project, the main one being MailTank.com, where we are securely storing an enormous amount of data for.

There is a lot to learn when integrating with S3 or any other remote web service. This article has a nice overview of the technical concepts.

Building on his Introduction to AWS for Ruby Developers tutorial, this second article from Robert Dempsey shows you how to efficiently make requests to Amazon S3.

(Via Use of Amazon S3 with Ruby on Rails.)

As you do more with S3, you will find yourself abstracting access away from the UI and doing a lot more in the background. Both to improve performance and also to manage costs.

This winter I will publish a detail article on what we have learned and how it has impacted our business.

Its safe to say, S3 gave us a huge leg up on our long term plans. Accelerating our product development roadmap, eliminating a huge expense and allowing us to get features to our customers much faster than we expected.

With fanfare Ubuntu 7.10 has been released and it looks like a solid update. My favorite by far.

As usual there is still a sense of working on an OS built with 1990’s sensibilities and kitchen sink feature-itus.

The community should consider setting forth a UI standard.

One comment I read this morning sums up why I think Linux is still stuck in the geek crowd.

When someone said they missing Quicksilver from OS X, the response was:

Quicksilver: learn shell programming and never look back.

(Via Switching From OS X to Ubuntu: 10 Things I Miss - Starry Hope Productions.)

Come on. That is like saying if you want to work in a fast and productive word processor, try emacs!

Joe blow is never going to learn emacs - ever.

I still do most of my work in OS X because it works faster and the UI is consistent. Quicksilver, Spotlight, CSSEdit, TextMate, MySQL, VMWare and every web browser under the sun just work.

I can set it all up from a fresh install in under an hour.

When I want to relax, iTunes, DVDs and most other media including the latest Flash just work.

No fidgeting with codecs, tweaking my X11 configuration, wondering why my laptop is not sleeping or waking from sleep.

These are all things that can be overcome I am certain.

But, if you think design by corporate fiat (Steve Jobs?) is bad, take a long hard look at design by the disjointed groups in the Linux world.

Some of which seem to lack a clear understanding of who they are building Linux for.

This is not to say their work is not amazing and awe inspiring. Linux is a triumph! But it could be so much more.

Here is hoping that version 8, 9 or 10 will bring the pieces together.

I had a 770, almost grabbed the N800, but decided to wait a couple weeks.

Good thing I did!

I think Nokia has a winner here. The addition of more memory, faster CPU, GPS and a keyboard are perfect.

My favorite part of that Nokia didn’t include GSM. This frees them from the constraints imposed by mobile carriers.

Between GPS, Skype and a Mozilla-based browser this may be nirvana for the traveller who doesn’t want to tote a laptop around.

We will see come mid-November.

One of my favorite things on my Mac is TextExpander, a PreferencePane that’s come up here before and which lets you use text shortcuts for pasting larger blocks of text and graphics wherever your cursor is without batting an eye. Well, SmileOnMyMac has recently released a 2.0 of TE, that adds several useful features, including one that really got my attention…

(Via 43 Folders.)

The dam bursts.

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers. [From Apple - Hot News]

Pricing web services is tricky and not always clear. This article food for thought.

In the world of free, pricing isn’t given much attention. But if you’re looking for a real, sustainable business, it’s unavoidable. Paul Farnell’s gone through it all with his app Litmus and breaks it down for you here.

Pricing is always somewhat of a black art, and a subject about which there is precious little written with regard to web applications. It’s something I’ve always been fascinated by. The question of how to price our web application, Litmus, was subject to countless hours of discussion. Here I’ll discuss some common factors and hopefully help spark some ideas which can help you decide upon the price of your own application.

(Via thinkvitamin.com.)

Competition for the iPhone is coming! 2008 should be exciting for mobile consumers.

Nokia sure isn’t sitting still with all of the iPhone hype going on these past few months. The largest handset manufacturer continues to make a strong push for feature parity and today shows the latest effort: the S60 touch interface. All About Symbian breaks the news and shares a YouTube video demonstrating the touch capabilities to be offered. Features include support for both finger and stylus input, haptics (tactile feedback that the iPhone doesn’t currently offer) and backwards compatibility.

(Via jkOnTheRun.)

Decided to give Ecto a whirl now that version 3 has hit beta.

It is quit nice!

MarsEdit recently released a new version is also quite powerful.

They both integrate with iPhoto and Flickr, I would love it if I could integrate with Amazon S3 for large media like movies and podcasts.

Very nice to see these tool evolving.

While the US model of Nokia N95 (with real 3G) seems to be trapped in the Nokia flagship stores in New York and Chicago, here are the things that would keep me satiated with the iPhone.

1. iChat with voice
2. Skype, Gizmo or Truphone
3. Copy and damn paste already!
4. Ability to download podcasts over mobile iTunes

Also, here is hoping that the next model includes at least a 3 megapixel camera if not higher.

Back on September 13, 2000 Apple shipped the public beta of Mac OS X.

At the time things were bleak for Apple, having been marginalized by their own mismanagement and miscalculations.

I myself, coming from the printing and publishing industry, was experimenting heavily with Windows and early versions of Linux. I was tired of the constraints imposed by Mac OS 8 and 9.

As a tinkerer and developer, I wanted to more and as Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server 1.2 (aka Apple-branded NEXTSTEP OS) arrived things began to change.

Looking back 7 years, there is one conversation I had with an Apple employee in the parking lot in Cupertino which keeps resonating with me.

He said, Mac OS X is not about the consumer, it is about the developers. They wanted to attract developers and not just from big companies, but the open source and independent developers.

Mac OS X would rise or fall on the ability of developer, both professional and hobbyists.

He asserted everything else would take care of itself, if they succeeded in that area.

Here in 2007, on the eve of Mac OS X 10.5 being released, my assessment is that Apple has delivered on much of that goal.

As a developer, 10.5 is very exciting. The foundation has been improved to include nearly all the tools I use. From Ruby to ZFS, and a lot in between. Not to mentioned some exciting Cocoa upgrades that will push the development UI applications to a new level of sophistication.

It is an exciting time to develop on this platform.

Recent comments in the Mac community, suggests that 10.5 will be a disappointment. The criticism being that the features being touted for consumers are lacking and don’t justify the 10.5 moniker or upgrade price.

At the consumer level, a lot of polish has been added. From the added sophistication to many applications like iChat and the Finder to the speed improvements in core systems like Spotlight.

Apple is delivering on their commitment to the vision I heard 7 years ago.

I expect next year to the be the best yet.

Apple will open up the iPhone and iPod Touch in some way and Mac OS X will continue to solidify its position a developers platform.

It is amazing to watch these talented people assault the walls errected by Apple. They are truly talented.

Since this JailBreak is dependent on a security flaw in the iPhone and iPod Touch, when Apple patches that security flaw and obviously breaks this technique, how will the community react?

Ae they just attempting to climb a crumbling mountain?

Engadget’s Ryan Block has confirmed that a beta test of the latest jailbreak method for the 1.1.1 firmware of the iPhone and iPod touch works.

The current method uses a vulnerability in 1.1.1’s mobile Safari to gain root access …

(Via MacRumors.)

Considering several of my projects now rely heavily on this service, which has been stellar to date, I am so happy to see their committment.

The Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement is in effect.

This SLA has been in the works for a while and we take the commitments made in this document quite seriously. We knew that S3 had to meet the very high performance and reliability goals set by our internal clients. We strongly believed that meeting this level of operational excellence would be good enough for our external users as well. Before we published our SLA, we wanted to get a better sense of how our external developers were making use of S3. With well over 5 billion objects under management, we now understand the usage patterns and properties needed to make an informed commitment.

You can read the entire document to see how this will work. Basically, we commit to 99.9% uptime, measured on a monthly basis. If an S3 call fails (by returning a ServiceUnavailable or InternalError result) this counts against the uptime. If the resulting uptime is less than 99%, you can apply for a service credit of 25% of your total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99% but less than 99.9%, you can apply for a service credit of 10% of your S3 charges.

We’re committed to providing a highly available service which meets the needs of current and future customers. This new SLA is our way of formalizing that commitment, letting you know what the minimum expected level of performance will be.

(Via Amazon Web Services Blog.)

A California man has sued Apple, accusing the company of violating California antitrust law because iPhone customers are forced to use AT&T, and iPhones that have been modified to work on other networks have been bricked by Apple, according to Computerworld on Monday.

(Via The Mac Observer.)

It will be interesting to see where this leads or if Apple settles.

My money is on a class action suit regarding Apple and AT&T not providing unlocks codes after 90 days, as recently happened.

I wonder how long Apple and AT&T can hold those customers at bay?

I smell an update coming down the pike, but in the meantime this is a good deal on the Nokia N800.

Plus jkOnTheRun is a great resource and deserves the support.

(Via jkOnTheRun.)

I have been playing with Skype, Gizmo and other solutions for a long time.

My favorite mobile VoIP client might make it to the iPhone - Truphone.com. It works great on the Nokia’s I have used it on.

But since the US version of Nokia N95 seems to be stuck in transit. Unavailable online anywhere and I would prefer not spending yet another $600 for a “smartphone”.

Speaking of which, why doesn’t Nokia sell an Wifi only phone with something like Truphone bundled?

I would pay for that in a heartbeat. It would be a great office/home VoIP solution.

Anyway, does anyone have any tips on why to choose one over the other?

Whoops! I got something very wrong in my post about Bricked iPhones.

I closed with, “Can’t wait to here Leo Laporte go ballistic over this, just as Russell Beattie did.”

Indeed Russell Beattie did not go ballistic. I should have described his reaction differently and it was wrong for me to lump him in with the irrational exuberance of most commentators on this issue.

I am sorry for that.

It seems my opposite opinion on the issue makes me the elitist snob upstairs in my Apple fanboy room while he is with all the friendly folks downstairs at the party.

I think its time to stop with the Apple vs everyone and Apologist vs. Righteous Rebel throw-downs.

My single point about the Apple update is that if you want live in the wild on the iPhone you had better realize that you are going to get burned if you don’t tread carefully when forewarned to do so.

Steve Jobs is insanely obsessive about the details, presentation and control of his company’s products. He will perpetually piss off people like Russell and other bleeding edge developers longing for more.

I chose a Mac as my business and development platform knowing that it is a dance with a devil.

But he is just the same devil as found in most successful organizations, like Gates, Stallman, Hansson and others.

We love or hate their products because they are opinionated and passionate.

That may make me an apologist for the ones I like.

I just don’t care for whiners.