The db60 Bluetooth speaker

November 12, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

Db60 speaker

If you’re looking for a nice, greatly designed audio product, you may want to back the db60 Bluetooth speaker on Kickstarter, a beautiful and functional speaker created by DNgroup.

From the Kickstarter project page:

The db60 is a wall mounted, mains powered Bluetooth speaker that connects to your phone or music player, allowing you to play music wirelessly. Designed for great user experience, REAL Plug n’ Play with a NO BUTTON design, optimal sound performance and great aesthetics. […]

What makes db60 different?

The speaker is wall mounted and mains powered — no more running out of battery. It offers a neat resting place for your phone/device while playing — protected from children’s reach. It can recharge your phone/device — so no more running out of battery there either. NO BUTTON design — Auto standby / auto wake — everything is controlled from your device. We designed the speaker with a beautiful minimalistic touch — which we believe fits nicely with many different decors.

Compared to other Bluetooth speakers, the db60 features a generous, high-quality audio output. It is powered by a 4‑inch coaxial driver, with a 1‑inch ventilated port. And with 20 Watt RMS and 40 Watt peak, the sound produced by the db60 can easily fill large rooms.

Apart from its timeless design and the genius idea of the wing/shelf, I also love the fact that it supports non-Bluetooth devices thanks to its Aux-In connector, and included in the package you’ll find a nice coiled Aux cable if you want to connect your old portable CD player, Walkman, pocket radio, etc.

If you’re planning to get a Bluetooth speaker for your home, I think you should consider backing the db60. The Kickstarter project page is very detailed and you’ll find all the information you need there. From what I’ve seen, this product will undergo a serious, high-quality manufacturing process, so I believe it won’t disappoint. At the time of writing, £11,593 have been pledged of the intended £98,300 goal, and there are still 33 days to go. This is a project that deserves to be successful.

(Full disclosure: my endorsement is completely disinterested — I have not been previously contacted by the manufacturer, nor have I been promised anything by writing this. I saw the speaker mentioned in an article while browsing my Flipboard and I simply decided to spread the word.) 

The little iWork ’13 mystery solved

November 6, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

iWork 13

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading MacStories’ Overview: Apple Updates iLife and iWork Apps, Makes Them Free for New Customers, and this bit in particular caught my eye, near the end of the article:

If you purchased iWork or iLife in a box (iWork or iLife ’09): You probably have either because you have an older Mac. You’ll have to purchase the new versions in the Mac App Store unless you buy a new Mac. As Macworld reports, this isn’t the case as it’s a bug in Apple’s system. Customers who purchased iWork and iLife ’09 and up on disc should be able to upgrade via the Purchased tab in the Mac App Store. Older versions of the software will require paid updates. 

Both the article at MacStories and the linked Macworld article made me wonder. Could I be eligible for a free update of the iWork suite, having received it in bundle when I purchased my MacBook Pro in July 2009? On the one hand I was thinking: Well, I haven’t purchased a Mac ‘on or after October 1, 2013’, so the Mac App Store is right and I should purchase the updated apps at full price. On the other I was also thinking that maybe I was eligible and that I was affected by the issue Macworld mentions in this bit:

If you own iLife ’11 or iWork ’09 apps for the Mac but did not purchase them from the Mac App Store: You should be able to download the latest versions for free by going to the Mac App Store and tapping Update, though you may need to first visit the Purchases screen, where you might see a box called “You Have [number] Apps to Accept.” This ties apps you have on your computer to both your Apple ID and a hardware identifier on your computer, and it should allow you to download free updates to these programs from any computer associated with your Apple ID.

Some users (including yours truly) are reporting issues where the Mac App Store doesn’t recognize their copies; when they click on an iLife or iWork app’s price, they receive the following alert: “[App] is already installed and was not purchased from the Mac App Store. Do you want to buy [app]?” Macworld spoke with an Apple spokesperson who noted that there’s currently an issue with some legacy customers, and the company is working on a fix. That fix appears to have been implemented; on Thursday, several users told Macworld that they were getting the Accept Apps prompt.

A few people in the comments, equally affected by this issue, talked about a workaround to fix it: make sure that English is set as your primary language in OS X Mavericks, restart the Mac, download the iWork Update 9.3 and re-apply it (even if you already did in the past), and when you go back to the Mac App Store you’ll see the new iWork apps as pending free updates. 

Well, I did just that and it worked for me. Now even the Aperture 3.5 Update shows up.

Your mileage may vary, but I just wanted to share and clarify that, yes, if you regularly bought a boxed copy of iWork ’09 or if it came bundled with your Mac even if you purchased it as far back as 2009, you should get the updated iWork suite for free.

I haven’t updated yet, but I’m told that the update doesn’t overwrite your old iWork ’09 apps.[1] Which is a good thing, considering the loss of certain features. It’s also a good thing because users can take a look at the new iWork ’13 and familiarise with the new interface of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but they can go back to the old versions if they need backward compatibility or if the new versions are a bit too streamlined for their tastes.

 

 

  • 1. Confirmed: the new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are placed in the Applications folder, while the older versions remain in their previous location, in /Applications/iWork ’09. ↩

 

Jason Brennan: Who Wants a Stylus?

November 1, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Take your time, and go read Who Wants a Stylus?, because it’s a very interesting contribution that deserves your attention, especially if you’ve always criticised the stylus a bit too dogmatically. 

Jason muses:

I have a hard time thinking of things I can do with a stylus because I’m thinking in terms of what I can do with a pencil. I’ve grown up drawing and writing with pencils, but doing little else. If the computer is digital paper, then I’ve pretty much exhausted what I can do with analog paper. But of course, the computer is so much more than just digital paper. It’s dynamic, it lets us go back and forth in time. It’s infinite in space. It can cover a whole planet’s worth of area and hold a whole library’s worth of information.

But what could this device do if it had a different way to interact with? I’m not claiming the stylus is new, but to most developers, it’s at least novel. What kind of doors could a stylus open up?

As a long-time Newton user (12 years or so), Jason’s article has been quite inspiring for me. First, I can say that when you get accustomed to, and progressively experienced in writing with a stylus on the Newton (on the MessagePad 2000/2100 models in particular), you can get rather fast at writing and — at least in my case and with my setup — sometimes writing notes using a stylus and the Newton is even more comfortable than typing on the virtual keyboard of a touch device such as an iPhone or iPad.

But, more importantly, the stylus on the Newton is also used to select, cut, copy and paste text, and select parts or whole drawings:

Newton selecting text drawings

I guess if you use a graphic tablet as input device instead of a mouse or trackpad, you’ll find these methods of selection to be rather similar. Now, as someone who handles a lot of text on lots of devices, here’s a stylus-based application I’d love to use: some sort of powerful writing environment in which I could, for example, precisely select parts of a text, highlight them, copy them out of their context and aggregate them in annotations and diagrams which could in turn maintain the link or links to the original source at all times, if needed. 

Similarly, it would be wonderful if groups of notes, parts of a text, further thoughts and annotations, could be linked together simply by tracing specific shapes with the stylus, creating live dependences and hierarchies. Picture this environment/application as the combination of software like Scrivener and Scapple, where you can create, organise and annotate your projects using the stylus as a powerful connection tool. You can use the stylus to generate active links between parts of the project whose information and references you want to keep in sync. Imagine writing a story (for a novel, a screenplay, a comic, an adventure game, etc.) where you need to keep track of the relationship between characters, places, chronology of events, and so on. You can set links with the stylus like you would on a piece of paper, but the pieces of information you choose to link together stay linked and update throughout the project when you make changes to any of them. 

In this instance, a stylus would be a much more precise and fine-grained tool for selection and text management than using your finger (think of how text selection and copy/paste are implemented in iOS — the method is truly ingenious, but it quickly becomes impractical when you need to routinely handle longer texts), and it would feel natural, like when you use a pen to point, select, circle, highlight and join different parts of a text or project. This is, in part, a feel I already experience throughout NewtonOS and when I write in its Notes application or in the word processor module of the Works suite, but I think it’d be great to bring this experience to a whole new (and more ‘augmented’) level.

Labels vs Tags

October 29, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

One of the new features OS X Mavericks introduced in the Finder are Tags. Judging from the reactions since this feature was revealed back at the WWDC, many people seem to like Tags a lot. While I have no doubts that tags may be a useful way for some people to organise their files, I am rather underwhelmed by their visual implementation, and find that the previous Finder Labels had a visual immediacy that rendered them more intuitively practical, for lack of a better expression. I’ll try to explain my point with a few simple examples.

Here’s a Finder window in Mac OS X 10.4.11 with some preference files in column view that I highlighted with different colour labels:

Finder labels

They stand out, right? Well, that’s the point. With folders containing dozens of files, by colour-coding some of them with labels you can differentiate those files from other regular (or less important) files; but it’s also a way to find specific items more quickly when navigating folders and subfolders full of files and documents. Inside a few crowded folders I frequently browse, I assigned a yellow label to certain files to have them work as visual markers. In other folders containing documents I’m translating or working on, I used labels to mark each document’s current status: grey for review, yellow for in-progress, and green for completed.

Mavericks turns the old Finder labels’ way of highlighting the entire file name into a simple coloured dot. Maybe some will find it a more elegant and visually pleasing change. I find it a bit of a usability step back. 

Here’s a Finder window in Mac OS X Mavericks:

Finder tags 1

In icon view especially, the little dots are more difficult to locate at first glance than labels, and the folders they should mark as important or different from the others, well, sort of lose that importance. In other words — at first sight, everything in this folder seems to have more or less the same importance. Nothing really stands out.

Compare tags in a Finder window (column view) with the old labels you saw in the first image:

Finder tags2

I don’t find them as visually powerful and effective as the labels they replace. Imagine if you were to highlight a passage from a textbook by making small dots with a highlighter near the beginning of a paragraph instead of highlighting all the sentences you need to find at a glance and memorise when browsing. 

Oh, and here’s what happens when you slightly resize the same window:

Finder tags3

It would have been nice to have a Finder preference to toggle the way Tags highlight files: new-style dots or old-style label highlights. I’m sure Finder Tags have a greater degree of flexibility in how they work when compared to the old Finder Labels, but I’m really disappointed by their loss of visual impact. In this regard, Labels are much more effective.

Mavericks’ Multiple Displays feature and MarsEdit’s wandering windows

October 27, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Display arrangement

This is how I normally use my MacBook Pro in a desktop setup: I hook it up to a 23″ LG Flatron monitor, and use the MacBook Pro’s display as a secondary screen (I keep the laptop on a stand on my right). Obviously, most of my work happens in the primary monitor area (1), while I usually keep the smaller MacBook Pro’s display (2) for things I need to keep in my peripheral vision, so to speak. 

I didn’t find Mountain Lion’s display management particularly problematic, though I admit it was annoying not being able to have two full-screen applications running side-by-side. So the changes Mavericks introduced in this regard are definitely welcome.

However, I’ve run into a small, but rather annoying issue with MarsEdit, which I’ll try to describe the best I can.

In MarsEdit, my window configuration when I write an article is as follows:

Appwindows d1

This is happening in my primary display (the external LG monitor). The blog entry editing window occupies most of the screen real estate, and I keep the Preview window aligned on the right. When I add pictures to an article, usually the Media manager window remains hidden in the background behind the other windows. No app window is usually visible on the MacBook Pro’s display: I keep them all gathered in the primary monitor.

Here’s what happens in Mavericks: when I move to a full-screen application (usually Safari or Chrome, because I may have to check a few things while I write an article) and then go back to MarsEdit, the primary monitor where MarsEdit windows reside loses focus (the menu bar gets dimmed), the MacBook Pro’s display gets the focus, and looks like this:

Appwindows d2

That is, the Blog entry editing window remains where it was (as it should) on the primary monitor, but the Media manager and the Preview windows get displaced and assigned to the MacBook Pro’s display like you see in the figure[1]. I have to manually drag the Preview window back to where it was (aligned alongside the editing window) and resize it every time, because when the Preview window is moved to the MacBook Pro’s display it gets automatically resized to fit the MacBook Pro’s screen height (900 pixels versus the 1080 of the external monitor).

This behaviour is reproducible, and windows get (dis)placed in the exact same position every time I move to a full-screen app and then return to MarsEdit.

I don’t know if this behaviour is limited to MarsEdit or if it happens with other applications which use multiple windows in their typical workspace configuration. So far I’ve noticed the issue with MarsEdit only — most applications I use have just one main window, so it’s something a bit difficult to verify. Applications like TextEdit or TextWrangler, where it’s normal to have multiple documents open, seem to keep their document windows well arranged.

Has any other MarsEdit user with OS X Mavericks and similar dual-monitor configuration noticed this issue with their setup? I’ll let MarsEdit’s developer know about it, and I’ll update this article with whatever new information I may gather.

Update: Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, developer of MarsEdit, told me via email that he’s working on a fix for this issue. He passed me a beta release of MarsEdit for testing and the issue appears to have gone. Expect the fix to come with the next MarsEdit minor update.

 

  • 1. It’s not a badly cropped picture: part of the Preview window is actually off-screen. ↩