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Here’s what I’m expecting for Macworld 2009- “the finale”

Apple State of the Union- A general update on the health of Apple.  With Phil Schiller on stage, he may try to justify the action of effectively canceling MacWorld.  (Something Steve would never do.)  A painful move for the community, but necessary for the health of Apple.

Updates on holiday Mac sales- I wouldn’t be surprised to see some growth from last year.

State of the iPhone- Unit sales, marketshare & of course- the phenomenal app store.

Snow Leopard aka Mac OS X 10.6- Probably the bulk of the keynote will be devoted to this important release.  Perhaps we’ll even see a few new gee-whiz features.

Mac Mini- Time for an update on the underdog of the Apple lineup.  Look for a refreshed design to bring it in line with the rest of curent Apple “iPhone” design scheme.

Apple TV- We’ve seen an update around this time for the past couple years. This year should continue the trend.

17” MacBook Pro- I’d love to see “Lapzilla” come back and quad-core would be a good bet.

iLife ‘09- Perhaps some new effects and refinement or better online integration?

iWork ‘09- The buzz is that this gem is going online and into the cloud as a web app.  This doesn’t strike me as one of Apple’s core competencies, but it would be a timely move.

iPhone Nano- A lower-lost version could certainly move more units, but a decrease in screen size would cause incompatibility with the 10,000+ iPhone apps already out there.  Of course, the screen rez could probably be increased to handle this issue, but it would leave users with even smaller on-screen buttons to tap.  The solution to that would be a physical keyboard.  Or why not a new form-factor?  We’ll see.

iPhone Tablet- Ever since first playing with the iPhone, I’ve expected to see this.  Supposedly this is where the iPhone concept came from- “Safari Tablet.”  Personally I’d love to see one, but I think it is still a ways off.

Apple Media Server- This seems to be logical progression of the iTunes sharing and Time Capsule lines.  Most power users have rolled their own solutions to enhance the sharing and backup solutions, but I’m not sure that the average consumer really needs or understands either of these two technologies as a base to build a new product upon.

I just caught my first MacWorld banner in San Francisco.  Let the excitement of the final event begin!

Hard to believe I haven’t written about FileChute before.  I’ve recommended it so many people offline that it almost seems redundant to write here.

FileChute is simply THE solution for sending large files on the Mac.  This “Software of the Gods” is so good that it really should be built into the OS.

Just drag a file and drop it on FileChute. FileChute puts the file on your FTP/MobileMe/WebDAV account and generates a web link for retrieving the file all in one step. Click the generated link and a new email pops up with the link in it- ready for your recipient to download.

You can even drop multiple files or folders at once. FileChute automatically creates an archive in the format of your choice - it supports dmg, zip and tar - and sends the archive file.  You’re only limited only by disk space and bandwidth.  And, it can “expire” and delete old files- keeping your file server nice and tidy.

Yes, I could do this by hand- zip the files, ftp to server, get http url, test and email, but why bother when this whole process is boiled down to drag, drop & email?

I saw this one when doing a bit of Christmas music maintenance in the Finder.  As soon as I’d snapped the screenshot, it was gone.

I know there must be a clever one-liner for this.. “Heavenly States,” music playing backward, Santa, Devils…

The LaunchAgent file “com.google.keystone.agent.plist” is used to activate the Google Updater on each boot and every 2 hours while logged in.  The file is located here:

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist

Pretty sneaky to slip it in as a LaunchAgent without notifying the end-user, but hey- it gets the job done.  I’d guess that Keystone was the internal code name for the product.

In my daily read today I came across this disturbing article at CrunchGear entitled MacBooks enter a golden new age of anti-piracy cruft: HDCP for all.

I’ve been crossing my fingers, but expecting this to happen for a while now.  HD video content is protected with 128-bit, encrypted, High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) technology to ensure that only authorized devices can play the content.  This means that you won’t be able to play protected HD content without an “authorized” display and MANY HDTVs are not going to work. 

In the past, this really only meant that you were out of luck if you were using a Blu-ray or HD DVD player with an inexpensive HDTV.  But now, Apple’s inclusion of DisplayPort on the MacBook has extended this content protection to computer screens and TVs.

Looks like my days of renting movies on the iTunes store with my Mac Mini and playing on my HDTV are numbered.  Let’s hope my current Mini continues working without the dreaded “This movie cannot be played because a display that is not authorized to play protected movies is connected” message,

Update: Ed Sutherland over at Cult of Mac has posted: “MacBook Owners Enraged As Apple Blocks Some Displays”

A while back, I posted a review of Netflix’s lackluster PC streaming support.  Since then, they’ve moved the service to Microsoft’s Silverlight technology and added Mac support.

Silverlight is similar to Adobe Flash in that it’s typically deployed as a browser plug-in.  Like Flash, it can display animation, audio, video and interactive applications.  In this case, it’s used for a bit of each.

The Netflix player is built entirely Silverlight and protects the video content with Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM.  This prevents users from doing anything but watching the streaming content.

After a simple opt-in on the Netflix website:

and an extremely brief buffering screen:

you’re treated to a nearly instantaneous video presentation:

An immense improvement over my previous experience!  Now if we could only get a better selection of video content, HD and offline viewing…

Today, I noticed that my Transmit favorites were not properly syncing across computers.  Upon closer inspection, one machine did not have the “Transmit Favorites” entry in the MobileMe PrefPane. 

I fixed this by unregistering, then re-registering the sync client using the following two commands.

~/Library/Application\ Support/Transmit/TransmitSync.app/Contents/MacOS/TransmitSync—unregisterClient

~/Library/Application\ Support/Transmit/TransmitSync.app/Contents/MacOS/TransmitSync—registerClient

The ever knowledgeable jokers at Apple Support have posted: “How to clean your Mighty Mouse.”

My favorite line: “Although your Mighty Mouse never needs to be fed or watered, you may occasionally find that you need to clean it.”

Personally, I’d recommend a techno soundtrack for the somber video and a nice one liner to finish: “Make sure to watch for mice who’ve soiled themselves.”

Our team struggled for days on this one. We purchased Quark 8.0 and found that we were not able to print from the app under MacOSX 10.5.5.  Print jobs were submitted and just never came out of the printer.  No error messages whatsoever.

The solution was to download and install a Quark-supplied patch (intended for Quark 7 and MacOS 10.5.4).
After installation, restart your machine and try to print from QuarkXPress 8.

A few other troubleshooting tips (that actually weren’t necessary in our setup):

1)    Navigate to the File>>Print>>Printer window
2)    Go to the Tab at the center of the window and choose “Paper Handling”
3)    Check the “Scale to fit paper size” option.
4)    Now try printing and it would print.
Also, you can try going to file -> print in QuarkXPress and choose the “Advanced” option in the print window, then choose the post script level as 2 as well as 3 to print from QuarkXPress 8.

Thanks, Beth.