Macintosh

Holy moley! I had thought Sofa Control was a great app for the old Mac mini, but it comes nowhere close to Remote Buddy. The latest release—Preview 6—includes a “construction kit” where you can make your own behaviors and actions for any app with only a basic concept of coding.

Each application control command can be a sequence of keystroke commands, applescripts, pre-defined global Remote Buddy actions, and even mouse-wheel commands (oddly enough). Within minutes, I had my own actions and behavior set up to control Transmission from the sofa. Duly impressed.

Not to mention: the app works properly with screen savers, dismissing them when they are active (unlike Sofa Control which sends its commands to the “background”), and even works within MediaCentral—making the promise of using both it and Front Row together a possibility (Sofa Control will launch the app but will disable itself in the process since it conflicts).

Totally worth the 10 euros I spent on it. If you own Remote Buddy, you can download my Transmission definitions below.

John Gruber makes an adept observation — While Apple is doing extremely well in the digital music market, they’re not really selling all that many more Macs than they used to. That seems right to me, since the energy is really strong and there’s a lot of developer and *NIX-fan focus on the platform now, yet it just doesn’t feel like Apple is any larger than when they were big a decade or so ago.

Gruber puts the numbers together and — surprise — that is indeed what comes out of the equation. So it seems that the success of the Mac today isn’t around the current masses of PC or UNIX users switching, but is about getting back to the cultural relevance and support where that switching might actually start taking shape.

Just a short comment on Apple officially enabling the dual-booting of Windows XP on Intel-based Macs:

If the halo effect of people starting with iPods and then moving to Macs wasn’t enough, this will certainly add to it.

And considering the workflow issues of dual-booting, the only market this will eat away is a very extreme niche one — one that is still best served with two computers and a KVM switch.

Here’s a fascinating promotion: the authors of AppZapper are going to be giving away the application for free on macZOT!—a kind of woot.com for Mac software—if enough bloggers mention it on their sites.

For those who don’t know, AppZapper is a rather nifty uninstaller for those of you out there that love trying out new software but hate having to manually remove preferences files, etc. once done testing the beasties out.

The app itself is very slick and OS X-like, and it’d be a nice bonus to be able to get it for free, so… sign me up. Go check out the app and then check out macZOT! afterwards. But you only have until the end of today, PST.

Yojimbo is a new organizer app from Bare Bones, and I’ll tell you the novice users will love this sucker. For an advanced user, however, this seems to sit right on the line between needing to be more DragThing-like and more full-Finder-replacement. Full spotlight integration? Yep, Finder. All those collections on the side? Configure the Finder sidebar with some custom folders and icons. Passwords and encrypted notes? Fire up Keychain Access. Bookmarks and web archives? Safari does them both. Etc. etc.

That being said, these associations are easy to make because it’s making these kinds of features that are buried in the OS really, really easy to find and use. That’s why I personally have no use for it but I still think it’s great. It may be too small a sandbox for me, and I’d worry about the ease of exporting this data out later to the aforementioned core Mac applications, but for a lot of people I’ve seen—the types who seem to keep everything on the Desktop (and I do mean everything)—this kind of thing might suit them perfectly.

Seriously, WTF — I do not understand why everyone is so worked up over the new laptop’s name.

1. The growth for Apple is in getting the non-computer person comfortable
   • “The computer for the rest of us.”
   • It’s a simple name — people will understand it immediately
     • …and in informal tests, so far the non-techies like it
     • Don’t forget: Simple is what got the iPod up to 14 mil last quarter
2. The “Mac” name is very valuable. Jobs wants to take advantage of that
   • He also gets to create a naming convention for product lines
     • Perhaps i* = solutions, both hardware (iPod) and software (iLife)
     • Perhaps Mac* = computing platforms (MacBook, future fun like MacPad)
   • If by chance people make a notebook = MacBook association, even better
3. If the name is the main deal-breaker for you, then you’re a moron

Anyway. As far as #2 goes, the only problem is the Intel iMac doesn’t fit into this unless we look at it morphing into a media center product later in it’s life cycle. That is, something easy for the home that integrates primarily as an i* solution platform and not targeted for those with full computing needs.

Or it may just be an issue of still figuring out how to reposition the iMac since it is still such a powerful brand that it has both “keywords” in it.