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I recently discovered to my chagrin that Apple Mail on my MacBook Air would no longer start. This was part of a much larger set of problems that this machine was starting to demonstrate including slowdowns, application lockups and other issues.

In doing some research on how to fix this problem, I discovered a series of threads I wanted to share with you. Many Mail issues can be resolved through rebuilding the index for Mail. Here’s how.

1. Open ~/Library/Mail where the ~ represents your user home folder
2. Drag the file called Envelope Index to your desktop
3. Make sure this file no longer shows in the Mail folder
4. Relaunch Mail
5. Accept the prompt to import messages
6. Review any messages telling you that your machine is out of sync with MobileMe and make the decision that best suits your data.
7. You’re done

If this doesn’t work for you completely, you’ve got a bigger problem, but it does solve a number of issues.

Every now and again I run across a little tool that is just killer. Thanks to the nice folks at the Mac Attack I learned about Secondbar by Andreas Hegenberg.

I have had dual monitors on my Mac Pro since the upgrade from the old PowerMac and I am very used to the side by side displays. On the left is a Dell 24″ and on the right is an Apple 23″ Cinema Display. But when you deal with this much screen real estate, mousing over to one monitor to get to the menu bar while hardly traumatic is very mouse intensive. Hence Secondbar.

Secondbar is a very simple tool that creates a menubar at the top of the second display. That’s it. No rockets to Mars or quantum mechanics, just a second menu bar. I love focused answers to problems. Since any Mac Pro or Macintosh laptop can be connected to a second display via cable, and since you don’t have to mirror the displays, this is just incredibly useful.

Download Secondbar at http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=79 The author and version number says that this is early code but you get used to it pretty quick and it’s such a timesaver that you cannot complain about free and working. Very cool.

First let me thank the MS dev folks for fixing UAC in Windows 7. The new default setting has nearly eliminated the twitching I got when I tried to use Vista. It’s still not perfect though. I have two apps that I use all the time, a screen rotation controller and the excellent Acronis True Image Home 2010 that continuously pop that Allow application to write… dialog box. I trust both apps and the Acronis one is even digitally signed so it should be simple, like on a Mac for example, for me to say ONCE that I trust this app and to keep trusting it unless it changes.

Nope, that’s not possible.

I found a number of very well-written posts on Technet and other sites about how UAC works and how to modify the settings. The net is a) Vista level homicide inducing annoyance b) what you have now c) what you have now without dimming the screen d) no UAC security at all. Funny, none of these do what I want.

The reputed workaround is to uninstall the app and then reinstall it in another folder structure other than Program Files. Maybe a folder called trickthereallyannoyingUACpopup. According to those who have tried this solution it works, or works for a while, or doesn’t work at all. Not going there. You could also create a new shortcut using the built in task scheduler service. Seems like a lot of work for what should be a simple enough selection. Most of the folks on the MS forums made real efforts to be helpful and most of the questioners were very cool, but as soon as someone suggested that the answer was not acceptable and that they wanted, well what I wanted, the answers got snooty from some folks fast. Too bad, because Windows 7 is really good. For Windows at least, and being snooty to people trying to use your product is really bad form.

Oh and in case you haven’t grokked the actual answer to how to do this, you cannot. MS knows what’s good for you so suck it up. Or switch to a Mac.

Day one with the new printer is done and overall I’m very pleased. While I bought the printer from my local Apple reseller, TRG in Aurora, it was delivered direct from Xerox by Purolator. The driver got the box to the front hall and I took it from there. The printer weighs about 60 pounds so once it was on the stand it was simply connecting power and Ethernet. Then I loaded the wax ink blocks into the proper trays (impossible to mess this up) and fired it up. I then put the install CD in the Mac Pro and launched the installer. It discovered the printer on the network without issue and installed the drivers and configured the connection. The test print failed from the installer software but one launched from the print queue directly worked perfectly. I then ran Apple’s Software Update and it fed me new drivers automatically.

The printer is nearly silent unless printing and consumes little power at idle. It generates a bit of heat because it keeps the wax liquid, but no worse than a colour laser. Print quality is incredible, better than any colour laser I’ve seen using toner and nearly as tight as a photographic inkjet printer. Paper handling so far has been trouble free.

What is amazing is how fast this thing is. I have been using an older Minolta QMS Magicolor 2210 for a few years and while it’s been a good unit it’s starting to go through parts. I was becoming frustrated with it because graphics rich PDFs or Keynote presentations were taking a long time to print. I ran a 20 page analyst report, double sided, through the Xerox and had beautiful rich output in under a minute. The colours are bright and snappy, the tables are sharp and the charts just pop.

The unit uses wax blocks with excellent longevity in four colours, black, cyan, magenta and yellow. You buy block kits like toner. The colour kits include 3 blocks and the black kit comes with six blocks. Each kit is about $140 from Xerox (cheaper from Amazon) and delivers several thousand pages. Xerox posts all in prices per page of from 2.9 cents for a business letter to 25 cents for a full blown graphics page. Their models include all the consumables not just the ink, so a fairly accurate overall costing in my opinion. Prints last well but could fade in sunlight according to my research.

The only issue I ran into with the unit had to do with the Windows 7 driver install. I tried the install both from the CD and from Xerox’s Web site. It took a really long time to discover the printer and when it installed the management console something caused the printer to freeze. Since this happened more than once and only when I tried to get the Windows 7 drivers working, I think that the problem is related to the driver. I’ll try again without installing the console since it seems of little use anyway. It’s not a big deal for me because we’re finally all Mac here at the castle, except for the test machines needed for Windows and Linux.

This is only the first day so stay tuned for further updates, but so far I’m very pleased.

Apple has made Aperture 3 available an by all data it’s an upgrade worth buying. However, I and many other people have had the upgrade result in Aperture constantly crashing on launch with a dump of messages that are not very helpful. One poster noted that he spent over an hour with Apple’s usually superb technical support yet never had the issue resolved. i discovered a potential solution that worked for me in the forums at DPReview, the superb digital photographic site.

Here’s how to fix the problem and what you’ll need.
Your Aperture 3 serial number (full version) OR
Your Aperture 3 upgrade serial number and your Aperture 2 full serial number

1. Aperture should be installed but is crashing on launch. If not, this tip isn’t the one you need. Don’t trash Aperture
2. Open the Library folder at the root of the hard disk (not the library in your user folder). Then open the Application Support folder followed by the ProApps folder. In this folder you will find .id files that correspond to whichever Apple Pro Apps you have installed. Move the aperture and proapps .id files to your desktop, ensuring that they are gone from the ProApps folder.
3. Launch Aperture. Even if you’ve entered your information before you’ll need to do so again.
4. Enter your Aperture 3 serial number. If your install is an upgrade, you’ll be prompted for your full version serial number. This is where you enter your Aperture 2 serial number.
5. Register your software if you have not already had this happen (unlikely).
6. Launch Aperture and let it upgrade your Aperture library. Be patient, this takes a while for large libraries.
7. Accept or not to use the places feature (your choice).
8. Exit Aperture and relaunch it to be sure all is solid.
9. If you have other ProApps installed, now would be a good time to launch them to ensure that they still launch properly.
10. Run Software Update. At the time of this writing, there was already a slideshow patch posted. I expect that there will be more based upon the volume of issues reported with the 3.0 release.

Of course if you have no issues with your install or now that things are fixed, dig in, it’s a solid upgrade and an excellent product overall.

While I frequently like Logitech’s hardware, their support of the Macintosh platform waxes and wanes. As of this writing all the Mac specific kit is gone from the website. This week Logitech released LCC 3.2 If you, like me, use a Logitech windows keyboard with your Mac, you probably don’t want to install this update since it breaks the key mapping standard for Macs, swapping the Command and Option keys and once active prevents your Keyboard System Preference from doing any key mapping. I got quite attached to the Illuminated keyboard despite its Windows centricity, but switched back to the diNovo Mac when LCC 3.2 screwed up my settings. Logitech doesn’t offer old versions on their website of their driver software so before updating make sure you keep a copy of the old version in case you need to revert. I had done a cleanup and needed to resort to a web hunt to find the 3.1 release to reinstall.

As an Apple customer and reasonably proficient user of Apple products, I’d been waiting with anticipation for the announcement this past week of what we now know of as the iPad. I was on the road on business, and so must send a big thank you to my buddy Paddy Hynes, who kept me up to date on the announcement from the live blogs he was watching while multitasking.

When I got back to the hotel I tried to watch the stream from Apple, blaming the hotel connection for my inability to do so and later discovering that the demand was so great, no one was getting a good stream. Testimony I suppose to the level of interest. Certainly every Apple oriented and most other tech blogs/podcasts/netdenizens made some note of the announcement as did most of the bigger print outlets.

By now we should all have the gist of the iPad. It runs the iPhone OS, allegedly a build called 3.2 and supports not only the majority of the 140K apps out there but also has a new SDK to leverage the near 10 inch display. It has multitouch and to some extent is a larger iPod Touch. While some see this as negative, the iPod Touch has been incredibly successful and has a very short learning curve. The new device when it arrives will come in six versions, two sets of three, the first group having WiFi connectivity and the second group having both WiFi and 3G connectivity. Both groups will offer 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flash memory options. The most inexpensive is $499 USD and the most expensive is $829 USD. Apple beat the estimates and have produced devices and pricing that could create a brand new category of personal interactive devices. They aren’t PDAs or Smartphones and they aren’t computers either. Some are calling the device a netbook, I don’t see that myself. The OS is too light to compare with a Moblin or Windows and the form factor makes it not a PDA. Everyone who got hands-on made note that the device is very fast, surprising considering a 1 GHz CPU given how pokey Netbooks with 1.6GHz CPUs are. It’s still at least 60 days before I’ll see one, so this post is very preliminary but here goes.

The Good Stuff

1. The unit is by all accounts fast. To have been slow, like my iPhone 3G would have been the spike through the brain at start. The screen looks sharp and the responsiveness to tap, drag, swipe looks really good.

2. The ability to use existing apps creates both an economy and a user base at launch, and there are a great many very useful iPhone apps out there, flashlights and gas passing notwithstanding.

3. I like the size. It reminds me of the Kindle DX, in that it’s large enough to get decent amounts of content on the screen without being so large to be cumbersome. The onscreen keyboard looks good in portrait mode and as a touch typist I expect that it will be usable. I’m not sure about the landscape iteration of the keyboard as the key spacing shifts meaning that there will not be common acclimatization between views.

4. I’m glad that there is a mic jack and a built-in speaker and that it will use the 30pin dock connector that is well known in the marketplace. I was disconcerted about the seemingly large border area, but then noticed where my hands fall on my Kindle II and see the design logic therein. It makes the screen look bigger than it really is, and your digits won’t block content while you use it.

5. Apple was good enough to allow their own Bluetooth keyboard to connect to the device, a missing from the iPhone and iPod Touch that they still need to rectify.

6. The small dock with attached keyboard looks pretty but I will have to wait to get hands-on to determine its usability. Gut check says the keyboard is too close to the screen and the screen will be too low for proper ergonomics. I know that a stilt or post would make it unbalanced and also ugly, but I’ll have to wait and see.

7. Hooray for external display support. Yes it requires a proprietary and likely expensive cable but at least you’ll be able to output to an external screen which is good because…

8. iWork retuned for touch. I am a big fan of iWork although I confess that my Numbers launch count is still less than 10, and my Pages launch count is less than 25. My Keynote launch count is a much bigger number. Keynote is a fabulous presentation tool and my favourite by far even though I am not allowed to use it at work for reasonable cause. I was hugely disappointed to hear CNET’s Brian Tong refer to Keynote as sort of a PowerPoint thing. Keynote is like PowerPoint like your grade one Jolly Numbers book is like, well like Numbers.

9. I like that the old apps work and that the SDK is already available. The company I work for full time has already updated our MonoTouch toolkit to build apps for the iPad. Encouraging the developer community is smart. I expect though that the iPad apps on the AppStore will cost more than the iPhone apps do today. Because they’ll drive a bigger screen. Kind of like changing the knobs on the Marshall so they go to 11.

10. Tap to change pages. When I saw the swipe to change pages in the demo, I cringed. My Sony PR 7XX eReader had that swipe to change pages. Unlike the 5XX series that had no touch screen, the 7XX did (resulting in lousy contrast and a horrible reading experience) and let me assure you that the swipe gets old fast. Fast like in ten or fewer swipes. Very glad to see the page change can happen with just a tap. It will be interesting to see how deliberate that tap will need to be.

The Seeming Disappointments

I accept that I may not the target audience for the iPad. I love the iPod Touch and my iPhone (except for data roaming charges, hopefully the Canadian carriers will stop assaulting travellers soon). I have two big displays on my Mac Pro, I chose the 17″ MacBook Pro and will again, and even was an early adopter of the MacBook Air (an action I am unlikely to repeat as its performance and storage are sadly lacking). For me, and for now, there are some significant missings on the iPad, that may actually keep me off the first generation buyers list. In no particular order;

1. No cameras. Yes I mean plural. The device needs two, one facing you and one facing opposite. Digital video cameras are very inexpensive and Apple could have kept the top end unit under a grand and put two cameras in it. There certainly is enough space. Given that they stuffed a video camera in the latest Nano and a still/video camera in the iPhone 3Gs, this is just a miss. I would certainly want to use this device for adhoc video conferencing.

2. Micro-SIM slot. Is space a problem on this thing? My iPhone takes an industry standard, universally available SIM card. The iPad takes a completely different micro SIM that most carriers don’t offer yet and that is not yet required by most any other device. Did someone get paid off to “think different” Dumb move.

3. Storage. 64GB? Max? Really? I cannot fit my iTunes library or Aperture library on my 64GB iPod Touch and I have no interest in doing even rudimentary photo editing on the small screen. The bigger screen could make this viable, but there simply isn’t enough space, nor is there any option for storage expansion. Instead of Micro SIM, they could have added a micro USB connection for use with an offboard storage unit. 500GB portable disk drives are highly affordable and I could use it for the lion’s share of content that I wanted close but don’t need live on the iPad.

4. No stylus. An iPad should have a stylus. Like the Wacom Cintiq idea but leveraging the touch interface. I would love to have one of these devices as a pad that I could take jot notes on or draw sketches or virtually whiteboard. When I saw the paint splotch invitation my hopes ran away from me.

5. I love the idea of the iBooks and the iBookstore. I also surprised myself after my Sony experience with how much I have come to love and depend upon my Kindle II. I do like the backlighting for low light conditions, the one place where the Kindle falls down. Some have said that the iPad is a Kindle killer because the cheapest unit is priced alongside the Kindle DX. Don’t forget that Whispernet is with your Kindle forever at no extra cost to you. Even if you could get by on 250mb per month with a device as rich as the iPad, it’s still an extra $180 per year for the equivalent of Whispernet. Plus the Kindle is designed as an appliance to do one thing, read books. I agree that the newspaper and magazine options on the Kindle are lacking, but you need to consider the cost of operation. We also have no idea what the books in the iBookstore will cost. Amazon is annoying customers by increasing the price of digital books. Apple has never been known as a price leader. Can we expect yet another DRMed ebook format? Oh boy.

6. Apple loves America. International deals coming. No dates, no costs. I understand selling to a target rich environment but do remember that there is a world outside the United States folks. You didn’t need to repeat the same crappy rollout of the iPhone on a global basis.

7. Ports. Where are they? When I first saw the pictures I mistook the speaker openings for USB ports. I think I’m still disappointed that they are not. A device likes this begs connectivity. We have no idea if it will support Bluetooth file transfer although given the lack of ports it had better.

8. I love seeing the enhancements to iWork. When pray tell will there be an update to iWork on the Mac? The only comment was documents will be compatible. I love the idea of Keynote on the iPad but I would really like more functionality in Keynote. Or even putting functionality back into Keynote that disappeared over the last couple of versions. Like Flash export.

9. Speaking of Flash. I’m not a fan of Flash not because it’s bad but because so many web designers use so much of it, and do so badly. HTML 5 may be the emerging standard but there is a lot of stuff out there that needs Flash and while Mr. Jobs may think Adobe is lazy, the customer could care less about his opinions on Adobe. Safari supports Flash on the Mac and on Windows. If it slows things that badly (I see it does) hop up the horsepower or provide some mid stream converter. I won’t be sad to see the bloat of Flash turn fishbelly white and float down the creek, but it won’t happen next month.

A number of people have rang me up to ask what I think of the iPad, and while I suppose it’s a decent first cut, I’m underwhelmed so far. Will I buy one? That will be highly dependant on the level of abuse the carriers in Canada will be seeking to apply for 3G always on connectivity including international use. I’m in the US very often and the idea that I would not be able to use 3G data without a second mortgage is highly unappealing. I would not go with the WiFi only unit because WiFi is neither as ubiquitous or as cheap as the mcmarketing professionals would have one believe. I think that the amount of onboard storage, lack of storage expandability and lack of video are all showstoppers for me. I use my kit to its maximum, and while I would love an iPad it reminds me too much of the MacBook Air, additional equipment instead of alternative equipment. Oh I will probably buy one when they come available, but I won’t be salivating waiting for the day. Unlike other reviewers who cannot see a use for an iPad, I can see several uses, but in the current form it doesn’t surface my needs well.

All images used in this post are the property of Apple Inc.

As noted in a prior post, I have had issues getting eSATA drives recognized off the motherboard eSATA connections, as have a lot of other people.  In my case, the motherboard is the well respected Asus P6TD Deluxe but I could not get a Western Digital MyBook to be seen at all.

I had the same issue on the Mac Pro with the new Drobo S so I bought two different eSATA PCI-e cards, one for each machine.  The one in the Mac is the Sonnet Tempo E2 and the one in the Windows box is a LaCie SATA II 2E.

Both systems work great, but to focus on the Windows issue; the BIOS on the Asus Board immediately recognized the card as a SATALink and enabled it.  Windows 7 needed to start up completely without the drive connected to install its own device drivers.  I’m glad it did as the drivers in the box from LaCie were pretty old, and once again the Microsoft drivers did the job.  As soon as Windows told me my device had been installed, I powered up the WD drive and Windows 7 found it and mounted it properly.  Now instead of FireWire 400 I have an eSATA connection at 3GB/s.  So if you are thinking about an eSATA drive for your Windows 7 machine, factor in the requirement for an eSATA card, about $50 and things should be good to go.

I’m a big fan of security as well as of screen savers, but not necessarily together. In fact I find entering the password every time the screen saver kicks in to be a major pain, but I do want to be able to lock the screen, preferably with a click.

Well today I learned you can, courtesy of an older post at Macworld. Here’s how to make it easy.

1. Open the Utilities folder, usually found in your Applications folder.

2. Launch Keychain Access

3. Open Keychain Access | Preferences

4. Click the box to show Keychain Access in the menu bar

5. Verify you see the little black unlocked padlock in the menu bar, then close the Preferences panel and exit Keychain Access.

Now to lock your screen with a click, just click the padlock and select Lock Screen. It’s that simple. This is going to be a huge time saver for me. Hope it is for you as well.

As frustrated as I get with the often bloated nature of Adobe Acrobat, it’s hard to fault the incredible usability of the PDF format for document interchange. It works efficiently, has readers for most all platforms and at least now you have the capability to create PDFs from applications in addition to those from Adobe. From OpenOffice to NeoOffice to OS X natively amongst others, it’s easy to not only open a PDF but to create one. But what about the middle space where you want to edit a PDF and do something like fill out a form or check a box on an application? I’m going to focus on OS X and review two offerings.

The first offering is called FormulatePro. You can download it here. It easily opens PDF documents for reading and editing. You can add text, check off buttons, draw on the document using a tablet or a mouse and even drop in a graphic like a scan of your signature. It’s licensed under the GPL and is free. If you like it please make a PayPal donation to support the nice folks who build and maintain this code. Requires OS X Tiger or later. RECOMMENDED.

I have been a long time user of PDFpen from the great people at SmileOnMyMac because it just works. You can add text, images and signatures directly to a PDF and even alter text in the flow. PDFpen includes basic OCR (optical character recognition) as well as tools to manipulate the page order in a PDF including adding a new page, deleting a page or combining PDFs together. You can paste rich text and retain formats when you do and also copy across multiple columns. If you use the same image regularly such as a signature you can save it in your PDFpen library. Forms fill in is a breeze, although I miss the simple checkbox marker in FormulatePro. Maybe I am just missing it. There’s a Pro version if you need to make cross-platform editable forms with fields and the like. PDFpen sells for $49.95 USD. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The full version of Adobe Acrobat is a very rich and powerful tool, but may be much more than you need for the work you need to do. Hopefully you find one of these tools useful.