ZDNET

Searching for data with Spotlight and the Finder provide Mac users with a capable base set of tools and features such as Spotlight’s Smart Folders (folders that show files from around your system without moving the files from their original saved locations) and the Finder’s Quick Look (that lets users view the contents of documents without actually opening them in their parent application). However, Mac users who really want to find data quickly may be interested in third-party tools that build on Spotlight’s technology, several of which were updated recently.

Managers who have content in prepress and other professional content-creation applications may be interested in Markzware’s PageZephyr 2.0 announced last week. The $199 Mac product searches a variety of “uncommon” file types (meaning something other than PDF, .DOC or text). PageZephyr 2.0 can index files from Adobe InDesign versions CS through CS4, Quark QuarkXPress versions 4.0 to 8.x and interestingly, Microsoft Publisher versions 2002 to 2007.

What is very useful about PageZephyr is that it doesn’t require you to have the original application to view documents and extract their content. Of course, Microsoft Publisher is a Windows-only app, so its use on the Mac desktop would require a Windows virtualization solution or BootCamp.

Here’s a bit from the company’s PR:

With PageZephyr 2.0, Markzware is essentially releasing 4 products in one: content searching, content viewing, content extraction and content distribution for these unique file formats. eDiscovery firms trying to find that ’smoking gun,’ or companies trying to manage risks while reducing the cost of maintaining content compliance will benefit from PageZephyr 2.0. Companies in various vertical markets having the need to recycle premium content contained in these document types to market their goods or services, especially through the internet, will find PageZephyr 2.0 invaluable.

PageZephyr relies on Mac OS X technology to work, in fact, current Leopard technology. While it will index both local and server volumes, they must be located on systems running Leopard or Snow Leopard; so, it can’t index volumes on Windows or Linux machines. This includes the .PUB files. All must be located on Spotlight-enabled Mac OS X 10.5.8 or higher volumes.

In addition, content is exported to text or RTF formats. And there are issues with font substitution when handling Publisher files.

Markzware said that until March 31, customers can use a web-coupon to purchase Version 2.0 for $149.

If you want to search for data stored on Windows volumes, then you should take a look at Group Logic’s ExtremeZ-IP AFP server solution. This is Windows-based software and for searching, it lets Network Spotlight connect to Windows Search (the technology formerly known as Windows Desktop Search). To the Mac user, Spotlight returns the search results as if it was from a Mac-based volume. (Of course, you should know what file formats are supported for that search. For example, not all info in PDFs are supported without special plugins.

For those focused on finding the right stuff on our local data, there’s Houdah Software’s HoudahSpot. Many of the company’s products are about search. When I spoke to the founder/programmer Pierre Bernard at Macworld Expo, he was pushing updates to his geotagging software HoudahGeo and a recently released iPhone search app called ACTRocket, which offers shortcuts to searching on various Web search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

HoudahSpot is really what Spotlight should be. It knows all the different criteria that are available to search for, or at times, not, since it lets you also restrict your searches as you drill down towards the right data. You can save your queries as a document, which not only remembers what you wanted to search and where as well as the layout of columns and sort order. And you can preview files with QuickLook.

Version 2.6.x offers Text Preview with highlighting, buttons for Boolean operators and support for Mac OS X services. A newer feature is that the program now remembers which inspectors were open and restores them on launch.

This software has such a spare interface that it’s hard to express all the things it can do. I suggest taking a look at the screencast videos that run down the elements of searching and HoudahSpot’s interface.

At the same time, most Mac users don’t know that Spotlight is extensible. There’s a download page that gathers together plugins for all kinds of special file formats, such as cataloging applications, image files and others.

A reader sent me this email expressing his frustrations about AT&T’s lack of iPhone tethering. I couldn’t agree with him more:

Where the heck is our AT&T tethering!?  I can’t believe that the iPhone still doesn’t have tethering in 2010!  Promise after promise, time just seems to pass with the same “coming soon.” We’ve heard that it will be out at the end of summer 2009 then at the end of 2009 but now it’s all just “coming soon.”

Blackberries do it, Palm Pre does it better (with a wireless hot spot!), my old Sony-Ericsson from 2003 did it. I understand the overwhelmed network argument to a point, since in some locales AT&T is just doomed with infrastructure inadequacies, but it is starting to frustrate.

It is time that they get their act together, with the iPad on the horizon how are they going to handle it? If there is going to be such network demand, that means there is a market for it and I can’t see why AT&T isn’t glad to take our money and run. Make the investment AT&T so we can finally catch up with the rest of the world.

Amen brother.

It’s obviously a concept, but this video by Orkin Design shows what could be in store for the future of tablet computing. The video reminds me of those futuristic digital paper concept videos that surface now and again.

The device of the flexible display allows a new concept in notebook design growing out of the traditional bookformed laptop into unfurling and convolving portable computer. By virtue of the OLED-Display technology and a multi touch screen the utility of a laptop computer with its weight of a mini-notebook and screen size of 13 inch easily transforms into the graphics tablet, which with its 17-inch flat screen can be also used as a primary monitor. On top of everything else all computer utilities from power supply through the holding belt to an interactive pen are integrated in Rolltop. This is really an all-in-one gadget.

Tip: monorail.net

The iPad went on sale this morning at around 8:35am ET via Apple’s Web site. The company limited pre-orders to two iPads, but if you’re willing to drive a little you can really order four. Here’s how:

The iPad pre-order Web site offered two options, a) have it shipped to you on April 3, or picking it up in a local Apple Store on April 3.

While Apple limits each order to two iPads, you can order two via delivery and two for in-store pickup, for a total of four.

What on earth will I be doing with four iPads you ask? As I told my fellow bloggers here at ZDNet: I’ll be taping them together into one giant Super iPad - wait, that just sounds wrong!

How many iPads are you ordering?

The iPad went on sale this morning at around 8:35am ET (at least by my clock) via Apple’s Web site. The site offered two options, a) have it shipped to you on April 3, or picking it up in a local Apple Store on April 3. Being an Apple freak, I did both.

Apple also imposed a two iPad limit per login, but you could order two for delivery and two for pickup for a total of four, which I did. One peculiarity I noticed about the shipping: after clicking Pre-order > from the online store > 16GB Wi-Fi, the order summary on the right hand side says:

Delivers on April 3rd
Free Shipping

What’s peculiar is that Apple also offers a “2-3 day shipping” upgrade for $12 (or $14 for two). Why on earth would anyone need to pay extra for “2-3 shipping” when the free shipping option “delivers on April 3rd?” Will ponying up the $14 make it arrive on March 31 or April 1? I doubt it, but I chose 2-3 shipping just in case.

If you didn’t already/don’t plan to order an iPad, check out this short gallery to see what you’re missing. If you did place an iPad pre-order today, what model did you choose? Any accessories? AppleCare ($99)?

Shall we start comparing order numbers in the TalkBack?

MacTech recently released a 7,500-word head-to-head comparison of Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion, comprising more than 3,500 tests on both single- and multiprocessor desktop and mobile Macs with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows 7. What more could we want?

How about a video of the graphics tests, running on side-by-side machines? Sweet!

Last week Apple announced that it would begin taking pre-orders for the iPad on March 12, 2010 - tomorrow - but it didn’t specify exactly when on the 12th. The devil is, as they say, in the details and the precise time the iPad ges on sale is a huge detail to the cult of Mac. Myself included.

Apple has confirmed (via TUAW) that its first tablet computer will be able to be pre-ordered at 5:30 am PT/ 8:30 am ET:

Customers can pre-order online at apple.com at 5:30am Pacific time on Friday, March 12.

I was kind of hoping that the iPad would go on sale at midnight ET so that I could place my order tonight and be done with it. However an iPad with my Friday morning paper sounds just as good. Just not to my morning paper.

See you in line.

Sources tell AppleInsider that Apple has developed a “full-on solution” to multitasking on the iPhone OS and that the feature will be released as iPhone 4.0.

People with a proven track record in predicting Apple’s technological advances tell AppleInsider that the Cupertino-based company has developed a “full-on solution” to multitasking on the iPhone OS but offered no specifics on how the technology would optimize resource conservation and battery life — two of the most critical issues surrounding the matter, alongside security.

Details are slim, but multi-tasking (a.k.a. background) apps are allowed to run after the home button is pressed (which currently quits most apps). Only a limited number of (mostly Apple) apps allowed to run in the background, including  Calendar, Clock Mail, iPod, Messages, Nike+, Phone and Voice Recorder.

Background apps would solve one of my main issues that I have with the iPhone, specifically, not being able to listen to apps like Pandora or MLB while doing other iPhone tasks. It would also keep up with Android, which has had background apps forever.

What’s your take? Are background apps critical?

Verizon Wireless announced that it has signed a four-year exclusive contract with the National Football League.

The National Football League (NFL) has joined forces with Verizon Wireless, the owner and operator of the nation’s most reliable wireless network, to provide fans with the deepest NFL experience on select mobile phones, it was announced today.  The new four-year agreement for NFL Mobile kicks off next month with coverage of the 2010 NFL Draft to be held from April 22-24 and continues with the NFL’s regular season…

As part of the deal Verizon Wireless devices will be able to stream NFL RedZone, NFL Network, live Sunday Night and Thursday Night games, amongst other features.

Among the programming that will be available for the first time during the regular season will be the wildly popular NFL RedZone channel from the NFL Network, which airs live look-ins of every key play and touchdown from Sunday afternoon games.  Fans also will be able to watch live streaming of NBC’s Sunday Night Football and NFL Network’s Thursday Night Football.  In addition, fans will receive the NFL Network channel, which airs seven days a week, 24 hours a day on a year-round basis, and is the only network fully dedicated to the NFL and the sport of football.

This means that only Verizon mobile phones will carry the NFL. Period, end of story. It’s bad news for iPad/iPhone users on AT&T (which is all of us, as of now) who will get no NFL — at least in its official goodness, like live video for example — for at least four years.

Let’s be real though, I’m sure that VZW was the highest bidder and/or simply offered the best value proposition to the almighty NFL. Can you really blame the NFL for going with their best offer? I hope that AT&T is using the money that it saved by not paying the NFL to beef up its network — which it appears to be doing with great success.

It’s another shutout for AT&T, who can’t seem to tie its digital shoes these days, and a coup for VZW. It’s just another reason why I can’t wait for the iPhone to come to Verizon. Please?

What about you? Do you care about streaming the NFL on your device? Or are you planted in front of the 50-inch plasma on Sunday?

The EFF has posted one of Apple’s most secret and most confidential documents – its developer agreement that all devs must sign in order to access the company’s iPhone SDK.

The EFF found a creative way to legally get and publish the document, an act that would surely invoke the Apple’s legal wrath. Noticing that NASA had an app, the EFF used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask NASA for a copy, “so that the general public could see what rules controlled the technology they could use with their phones.”

Originally NASA responded with a March 2009 version of the agreement but the story has been updated with a January 2010 version. Here’s a direct link to the 33 page PDF document. Great bedtime reading.

The contents of the agreement are hardly surprising, the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann summed up the highlights:

• A ban on public statements, forbidding developers to speak about the agreement.
• Apps made with the iPhone software development kit can only be distributed through the App Store, meaning rejected apps can’t be served through the underground app store Cydia, for instance.
• Apple indemnifies itself against developer liability surpassing $50, meaning if developers get sued, Apple will be liable for no more than $50 in damages.
• No reverse engineering, or enabling others to reverse-engineer, the iPhone SDK.
• No messing with Apple products. That means no apps that enable modifying or hacking Apple products are allowed.
• Apple can “revoke digital certification of any of Your Applications at any time.” No surprise there: Your app can be pulled even if it’s already been approved, which we’ve already seen happen a number of times.

Tip: EFF

A Silicon Valley startup just released a useful iPhone/Touch app to help connect you with your data — the data inside your head. Called Forget, it may even help you remember that you’ve got an app for that, whatever “that” is.

Infomato describes its app as “the forgetful person’s instant recall machine.” According to the company, it uses memory association and recognition principles to help you find the facts, names and stuff that we can forget. Of course, you have to click in the data first!

The app lets users create items associated with a word or person that we won’t forget. Say you have an work acquaintance but can’t remember all the associated bits: wife, kids, pets. Forget is a little database that holds those associations for you. But it can be for anything you want to remember, such as the medicines you take, things you need to buy at the store or whatever.

The inventor is Wayne Lo. Here’s a bit from the PR:

By tapping into the strength of recognition memory, FORGET provides an age-proof solution. Studies show that while our ability to deliberately recall details can drop to 50 or 60 percent by the time we reach age 65, the capacity of our recognition memory remains at the level of an 18-year old. “FORGET is specifically designed to establish a close complementary relationship with our brain, making use of associated lists to jog our recognition memory,” said Dr. Lo.

You don’t have to be 65 to have duh! moments, a couple of extra drinks the night before will get you there the morning after. Forget’s UI appears quick too, using a a look-ahead engine that starts presenting you with choices as you click in letters.

On the bottom of the site is this warning:

Warning for students: This software is intended as a study tool ONLY. Please do not use it during school exams. This is considered cheating in most schools. Check with your teachers and school officials if you are unsure.

This app looks interesting, useful and the price is right: free.

Last month, the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit announced Office:Mac 2011 and posted some screen shots of its future user interface. I finally got around to looking at them. Sorry to say, the productivity-killing Ribbon introduced with Office 2007 on Windows will make its way to the Mac. Sigh. But the silver lining is that we will get to keep our menus.

Office:Mac, like a number of other recent Mac OS X programs and especially Web-based apps, are making trade-offs in their application interfaces that ding power users and kowtow to the entry-level part of the market.

On the Mac Mojo blog, Han-Yi Shaw, the Macintosh Business Unit’s lead program manager, put a good Mac face on the Office:Mac 2011 introduction of the Ribbon, differentiating the Mac version from its Windows counterparts.

It’s called the “Office for Mac ribbon”, or as we refer to it internally, “MacRibbon”. The “Mac” part tells you that it was designed specifically for the Mac, with all of the recognizable attributes that Mac users have come to love; the “Ribbon” part signifies the shared lineage with the ribbon seen in Office 2007 and now Office 2010 for Windows.

What? So, the concept is that you say, “potato” and I say, “nobody likes the Ribbon, nobody, unless they work at Microsoft or have taken a deep pull on the draught prepared in the halls of Redmond for the brave heroes, aka the enterprise customers who have no alternative to using Office because Office is the standard and we all use Office here.” What does it matter that it’s called a Mac Ribbon because it’s running on the Mac? It’s still the Ribbon.

However, it was the very same Mac user community who expected a first-class ribbon implementation, who were at the same time crystal clear in their message: deliver a ribbon interface that’s built upon, not at the expensive of, the Mac user interface and native Mac OS X platform technologies. And as we at MacBU are Mac users ourselves, we empathized with this unequivocal request coming from our user community. Hence, the MacRibbon was born.

It began from user feedback — and every step of the way — we listened, iterated, and listened some more. And after two years of development — and having worked closely with our customers — we think we’ve landed in a happy place with the Office for Mac ribbon. And with that, here comes the exciting part: What is the Office for Mac ribbon?

Now, it is difficult for this longtime Mac user to believe that any Mac user (not on the Microsoft payroll) requested a first-class or even a second-class ribbon interface. While I am loath to doubt the word of Han-Yi Shaw, with whom I have had no word about this matter, perhaps we may infer that Microsoft bean-counters suggested that since the company owns the Ribbon interface and spent so much time and effort on it, naturally, all of its customers should gain the benefit of it, even on the Macintosh platform. And we should be happy for it.

Then again, out of the millions of Mac users, the ones who love the Ribbon would gravitate to Redmond or San Jose where the next version of Office:Mac is under development. Some of them, for example, newcomers to the Mac with fresh experience of Windows Office, might want the rest of us to share their pain.

Nadyne Richmond, a user experience researcher at Microsoft, explained this further on her blog Go ahead, Mac my day.  She says it’s an evolution from the Elements Gallery in Mac:Office 2008. And she explained that Office will remain a “good” Mac program, letting users see its menubar.

As we began our work on Office:Mac 2011, we had to make decisions about what the next generation of the Elements Gallery should look like. We made some great strides forward in improving discoverability, but there were still some improvements to be made. As we looked at our colleagues on the Windows Office team and considered what they had learned through their Ribbon work, we decided that we could do the Ribbon in a Mac way that works for our users.

Our single most important decision for the MacRibbon is that we’re still going to be a good Mac citizen. Our menus, not to mention the standard toolbar, stay. We knew that one concern that our users have is the availability of vertical screen real estate. As such, we quickly made the decision that our MacRibbon should be collapsible. If you’re using the MacRibbon, then you’ve got easy access to our features; if you’re not, then you can collapse it to get it out of your way. If you’re feeling particularly minimalistic, you can collapse the standard toolbar too, leaving you with every pixel on your screen below the menu bar to dedicate to your document.

We can all be glad that Mac users will still familiar access to tools via the menubar. However, even now, years after the introduction of Office 2007, I meet users who can’t find the controls and tools that they need with the Ribbon.

How bad is it? There’s a game called Ribbon Hero that is supposed to teach the interface. Here’s a post this week from Microsoft’s own Partners in Learning Network resource site:

When you install Ribbon Hero, it appears as an add-in inside Word, PowerPoint and Excel, and you get an icon for it – where else? – on The Ribbon. When  you click on the icon, you’re offered your first set of challenges, which you can attempt to complete with or without the helpful hints.

“Don’t hate the Ribbon, be a Ribbon hero!” To a longtime Mac user, this describes perfectly all over the Microsoft and Windows mindset and user experience. It’s the interface that eventually you will love to hate.

Another “advantage” of the Ribbon, according to Shaw, is how it gets rid of those nasty tool palettes.

And given that the Office for Mac ribbon is nicely anchored inside the application window, adjacent to the standard toolbar, gone are the days when you had to position and reposition the Formatting Palette to prevent it from covering your document contents or falling off the screen as it grows and shrinks during normal usage. The Office for Mac ribbon solves the common user complaint about “I like the Formatting Palette, but it can really get in the way” — and users who tested the Office for Mac ribbon overwhelmingly favored it.

This is part of an annoying trend over the past couple of years in the Mac community: the use of mono-screen applications instead of the longstanding use on the Mac of a “single document interface” (SDI) and floating tools in palettes.

In the SDI, the menubar and tools are always available on the top of the screen or on palettes, respectively. Each document has its own window.

Microsoft instead chose a multiple document interface (MDI) for Windows that presents a parent window containing both tools and multiple documents. Depending on screen real estate, the MDI can be useful. This approach makes it easy to show and hide windows relating to an application. If applications take over the full screen, as they almost always do on Windows, MDI works fine.

With Apple’s SDI approach, users can have many documents open on the desktop, which can become confusing. Apple has addressed this issue with a variety of ways to hide applications and related documents and palettes (Option + Click); Expose, which with a move of the mouse can provide various views documents as large “thumbnails” for navigation; and Spaces, which lets users group applications into a more narrow workflow. Expose always amazes Windows users with its elegance and simplicity.

Power Mac users have long taken to using large displays and multiple screens to expand their view of their documents and Apple has supported easy setup and configuration of multiple displays. They can group tools and documents across workspaces and create a sophisticated and power workflow.

Yet at the same time, Apple has undermined this interface strategy with an increasing number of applications that can only open one document at a time, such as iMovie and iDVD. Some other applications only have one window, including iPhoto, iTunes, and even the professional Aperture product. They function much like an MDI.

An excellent critique of this “one-window” approach was offered in a post by Lukas Mathis several years ago on his Ignore the Code blog. He says MDIs are bad for the Mac and looked at how Adobe mitigated its use of MDI.

Some implementations of MDI make it hard to remove palettes from the main window. This is bad because in a multi-screen environment, a typical setup is to move all palettes to one screen, while keeping documents on the other screen. Again, the CS4 UI allows for this, so no complaints here.

MDI takes away space on larger screens. After your screen reaches a certain size, it doesn’t make much sense to maximize windows anymore. Having an MDI means you always waste space with a ton of application chrome around your documents - space which could be used by other applications running at the same time. Again, CS4 has a solution for this; hitting tab removes the application chrome (although I wasn’t able to get it back easily - hitting tab again did nothing at all). Unfortunately, the application chrome is not hidden if the application is put in the background while in MDI mode.

I blame the influence of the browser for this trend. And the MacBook and the iMacs with smaller displays. Everything in a browser and browser-based app is contained within a single window. Over time we’ve gotten used to the browser being more than a content container. It’s made users comfortable with the MDI approach. At the same time, MDI appeals to computers with smaller screens, there’s not the expanded real estate of very large displays or multiple monitors.

So, Microsoft is moving its professional Mac suite to an MDI. I get it but don’t have to like it. There are many of us who find that tool palettes don’t “really get in the way.”

Check Out. Leopard’s Finder Cover Flow: Yuck!

First it was booby apps, then Wi-Fi stumblers, then cookie-cutter apps. Next Apple may take a hard look at the proliferation of “appbooks” in the App Store.

The lack of a formal mechanism to sell e-books in the iTunes Store has forced enterprising publishers to seek other creative ways to distribute their books in the App Store. Enter appbooks. They’re basically books distilled into single-purpose apps that allow you to read, but more importantly pay for them, using the existing App Store plumbing.

Books are a growing phenomenon in the App Store. Last week Mobclix, which does mobile advertising for apps, reported that books now outnumber games in the App Store — representing 27,000 of the 150,000 titles.

The theory (and it’s only a theory) floated by TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid is that appbooks conflict with Apple’s forthcoming iBooks app which will be available as a free download for the iPad on April 3. Kincaid also makes the point that the App Store could get too cluttered (or worse, confusing) if appbooks appear alongside iBook titles in search results.

What do you think? Will Apple ban appbooks next?