A few more thoughts on my iPhone, that I’ve jotted down since my earlier post:
Category: Mac OS X
Tools, tips, and observations covering Apple’s operating system Mac OS X.
One week with an iPhone
Last Friday I bought an 8 gigabyte iPhone at an Apple store. I’ve been using the phone for a week now, and overall, while there are certainly flaws and omissions, it is a spectacular synthesis of hardware and software excellence. No other handheld device I’ve used even comes close, including the seven previous iPods I’ve owned. It’s a major advance in mobile phones, and in computing generally, and while I certainly look forward to getting the 2nd generation product, I’m going to love this 1st generation device all on its own.
Beyond that general impression, I have a few specific things I thought would be worth writing about.
New tool: Audiobook Builder
I have not yet given it a try, but a new application for Mac OS X looks like it may be even better than Join Together 5, which I recommended back in July. Audiobook Builder appears to go quite a bit beyond what Join Together is able to do, including the ability merge individual CD tracks into chapters before merging the chapters into a chapter marked whole-book track, add artwork to each chapter, etc.
My initial suspicion, based solely on looking at the screenshots, is that it may be a little complicated if your needs are simple. For myself, I usually only want to merge entire CDs into chapters, which iTunes does if you use the %(itunes)Advanced > Join Tracks% command, and then join those into a whole book, with chapter marks and full audiobook format and metadata, which Join Together does quite ably, and very simply.
In any event, I’ll be giving Audiobook Builder a try in the near future, and I’ll post a full review then, but in the meantime, I wanted to point to it, and see what other people think.
Importing Audiobooks with iTunes 7
The most popular page on this site is my instructions for How to Import Audio CD audiobooks into iTunes. The process has changed slightly with iTunes 7, and while I’ve been meaning to publish all new instructions, with an improved process and additional details, it just hasn’t happened yet. So, in the meantime, and to answer the many reader questions I’ve received, here are the main differences you might run into. It really boils down to just three changes:
Change to Import Settings
One option has changed in the %(itunes)Preferences > Advanced > Importing% preference panel, what should iTunes do when you insert a new CD. There are a couple new options, and the one you want has changed, from Show Songs to Show CD. Here’s the updated settings panel for my Optimal iTunes Import Settings description:
Change to Start Import
The button for importing a CD has moved, from the top right corner to the bottom right corner. It no longer has an icon (it’s a text-only button now), and it only appears when you have a CD inserted and ready to import. Seems to have hidden itself from a lot of people.
Change to Expectations
When you import an audiobook using my instructions, it will appear in the Music source list, which is not what people are expecting. The expectation is that it will go into the Audiobooks section, but that won’t happen without more work.
I’ll provide more details in the revised instructions; for now, you can read through the FAQ for the information about putting tracks into the Audiobooks menu on the iPod; the steps involved are the same.
Moving to Apple Mail?
Well, after a long year+ of teasing and waiting, it seems that the Cocoa version of Eudora for Mac OS X was a chimera. Today QUALCOMM announced that they are discontinuing commercial development of Eudora, and working with the Mozilla Foundation to move Eudora onto the Mozilla Thunderbird platform.
This announcement comes as something of a shock to me. After holding on waiting for Cocoa Eudora, this shift in strategy feels like the rug being yanked out. It’s going to take some time to digest, and I suppose we should wait for a few days before forming a mob and see if further details emerge. I would especially like to hear more about what “using the Thunderbird platform” really means, and what will be happening with the Eudora code base, especially the long-rumored Cocoa Eudora code.
For now, we’re a bit light on details. The spin on the announcement is that Eudora is being released from the constraints that come from being a commercial product, freed to grow, change, and thrive as an Open Source project. Who knows, that may happen — but it’ll be 6 months before we see a release that might give a clue as to how well it will work out. I confess, I’m skeptical, and not optimistic, for a couple reasons:
Five things about the new iPod nano
Here are five things I’ve noticed about the new iPod nano I picked up yesterday (I bought the new 8 gigabyte nano, available only in black), which I have not seen anyone else write about yet:
- The packaging is not just smaller, it’s hard, clear plastic instead of cardboard. It’s a really clever design that holds the nano suspended in the front of the box. There’s a small label on the back of the bracket that holds the nano tightly, which illustrates how to flex the bracket to release the nano. Very clever design…but it took me a few tugs and pulls and a bit of frustration, before I turned the piece over, and saw the illustration.
The new nano looks and feels substantially smaller than the old nano, until you line them up right next to each other. The new nano is a teensy bit thinner, but virtually identical in the other two dimensions. The size difference is mostly optical illusion caused by the new rounded edges.
Speaking of rounded edges, the new nano comes with a new dock connector fit bracket. The new nano fits into the nano bracket of my Logitech mm50 portable speakers, but my old nano will not fit into the new Apple bracket. It’s a bit too thick, and doesn’t have the rounded edges. I suspect that the new nano will work with most products which fit the old nano form factor, but the reverse will be hit and miss. Products that support a perfect fit for the new nano will not work with the old one.
The new nano requires iTunes 7 to sync with a computer. Normally I like to wait a week or two before trying new versions of iTunes, but in this case, I had to install it. (Working wonderfully so far, knock wood.) A very nice set of improvements, including a few things of use to audiobook aficionados like me; more on those in another post.
The center select button, the “dot” in the middle of the click wheel, is very slightly concave (the button on the old nano is perfectly flat). It seems like such a tiny difference, and I’m sure by measurements it’s a small fraction of a millimeter, but it’s both quite visible as a real-world gradient, and a really wonderful tactile difference. You instantly know when your thumb is on or touching the button. Just another one of those aesthetic touches that only Apple seems to think of and consider worthwhile. They seem small, but they add up.
All in all, I think the new 8 gig nano is a terrific refinement to a device which I already thought was nearly perfect. And now that it’s sync’ed up with my audiobooks, I am looking forward to road testing it later today during my commute.
Thoughts on Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”)
I watched the Apple WWDC Keynote video stream last week, and have been following the reactions online about features demonstrated for the next version of Mac OS X, 10.5 (“Leopard”). A lot of people (especially non-Mac users) have commented that features like Spaces and even Time Machine have already been done on other operating systems, or as third-party utilities for OS X. They’re missing the point. What’s great about these new features in Leopard is their accessibility to normal people, i.e., their simple interfaces.
Eudora 7 for Mac OS X Progress?
In addition to posting a few beta versions of a minor patch release to Eudora 6.2, the current version of Eudora for Mac OS X, QUALCOMM apparently is getting enough inquiries about the long-anticipated (and overdue) Cocoa rewrite of Eudora to have recently posted an official statement about it.
It doesn’t sound particularly close, but making a statement at all seems to imply that there continues to be commitment and progress, and I consider it a positive sign. I’d love to see betas of the new version, too, but we take what we can get.
How to Join Together Audiobook Tracks
Update: This post contains useful information about the Join Together utility, but has been superseded by a new article that details additional options, for both Mac and Windows users. See How to join multiple tracks into a single audiobook file for the new information.
One of the top two questions I get asked about audiobooks by visitors to Aldo on Audiobooks is, after importing a bunch of audiobook CDs, is there any way to join the many tracks together to get a single track for the audiobook?
For a while I simply shrugged, and said I hadn’t found a good tool. Then I found a good tool, and added it to the FAQ, but didn’t advertise it too heavily because it was only available for Mac users. But with the latest release the tool has gotten so good, I feel the need to share and promote it. (Windows users, I am sorry, but I haven’t found anything for you yet.)
Doug Adams runs a terrific site called Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Now on its fifth revision, his Join Together tool has evolved from a basic AppleScript into a stand-alone application which gives you a terrific interface for combining tracks and adding the right metadata such as title and author, along with options to convert to different formats, and even add chapter marks to the resulting merged track:
!/images/audiobooks/join-together_v5.png(Join Together 5.0 user interface)!:http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=jointogether
It’s truly an outstanding piece of work. If you’re importing audiobooks on a Mac, get it now. And if you use it and like it, be sure to thank Doug with a donation!
RailsConf 2006
Last weekend I was in Chicago for the first ever RailsConf, a gathering of about 600 people focused on developing web applications using the Ruby on Rails application framework. Other people are posting lots of details and thoughts (try clicking the RailsConf tag below), so I’ll just add a few deltas:
Dude, You’re Getting a MacBook Pro
I’m sure a million people will be linking today to the Apple announcement of Boot Camp, a new utility that now makes it both possible and easy to install Microsoft Windows XP onto an Intel-based Mac. I’m also sure most of them will put their amateur analyst hats on, and tell people what they think it means. (Most will be wrong.)
My interest in and comments on the announcement are quite a bit less global in scope.
Add Sender to Address Book
I continue to use and love “Eudora”:http://www.eudora.com/ as my email client. This despite it being a little long in the tooth, and with a visual style straight from 1999. I’ve been waiting for a new version with some new features for a while, and I finally got tired enough of a specific missing feature to do something about it. Here’s an AppleScript to tide me (and possibly others) over.
Update: The latest version of the script is 1.1, released 15-Nov-2006. Download link below. See the ReadMe file and script version history for changes.
I continue to use and love Eudora as my email client. This despite it being a little long in the tooth, and with a visual style straight from 1999. It may look like a Classic application, and it might not have had a major release in a while, but it works, and is highly usable, especially for people like me, with a huge archive of email messages.
On the Windows side, a new version of Eudora was released late last year. From what I’ve read on the Eudora discussion forum, Qualcomm is working on an all-new release of Eudora for Mac OS X, which will bring a great many improvements, including one that I’m eagerly anticipating, use of the OS X Address Book to maintain the email contact list, instead of Eudora’s nicknames list (which is also confusingly called Address Book in Eudora, but it used to be called Nicknames in earlier versions, so that’s what I’ll call it here).
But, Eudora 7 for OS X is apparently behind schedule (it was supposed to start appearing in beta in the fall of 2005), and not having that feature is driving me nuts. Eudora can already read addresses out of Address Book, so all I need to tide me over is a way to easily add a new sender to the Address Book.
I looked for a while to find an existing AppleScript to add a Eudora sender to the OS X Address Book, but as far as I can tell, nothing exists. Indeed, it looks like people stopped writing AppleScripts for Eudora years ago. But by stitching together ideas and techniques from old scripts, scripts for Apple Mail and Address Book, and some new code, I was able to create a script which pretty much duplicates Eudora’s Make Address Book Entry command, except sticking the new entry in the system level Address Book.
!/images/clickscriptlarge.jpg(Download the Add Sender to Address Book AppleScript)! “Download the Add Sender to Address Book AppleScript”:/resources/dist/Add-Sender-to-Address-Book.zip
The distribution includes a ReadMe file with much more detail, but here’s the basics: To install, download and decompress the script distribution archive. Then move the script file to your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Eudora folder. To use it, select a message in your Inbox, or open a message, which is from someone you’d like to add to Address Book. Choose Add Sender to Address Book from your Scripts menu. Edit the sender’s name and address in the dialog, click Add to Address Book, and voila, Address Book should come forward with the new entry displayed. Add further information to your contact there, if you wish.
There are a number of limitations to the script; see the ReadMe file for details. Hopefully this will be useful to someone besides me!