There is this free piece of software called the Prey Project. It’s completely open source, runs on Windows, OS X and Linux, and is basically magic. You install it right damn now, and it sits waiting.

So, you install this tiny lightweight piece of software. It hides down inside your computer, where a thief would never think to look. When your laptop gets stolen, you simply flick a switch on the Prey Project website, and then the next time your stolen laptop connects to the internet, BOOM, any number of rather awesome and CSIesque things begin to happen.

Detailed network information will get emailed to you, such as the laptop’s IP address. A complete Trace Route will be run. Both of these might help locate where the computer is at, if you hand them over to the authorities. But this isn’t really much, right? Prey packs quite a punch.

Screenshots are emailed to you. A list of modified files will be sent. The names of running programs and active connections will be thrown in too, for good measure. And here comes the good stuff – If your laptop has an attached webcam, it will begin snapping photos, and emailing them to you. Not only that, but it will attempt to locate the computer using any GPS equipment built into it, or by making use of the afore mentioned IP addresses and Trace Routes. It managed to pinpoint my house exactly. Scary, right? (Note that this software can also run on Android phones, most of which have a GPS built into them.)

Now that you know who the thief is, what he looks like and where he lives, Prey goes on the prowl. You can set an alarm off on your computer, that is immutable. You can alert the thief that you know who he is by sending messages and changing the screensaver. You can completely lock the computer down until a password is entered. And best off all, if you use your computer for a lot of internet banking and the like, you can hide all your emails and delete all your cookies. All remotely.

And the best thing about all this? It all happens at a time frequency that you set. Want photos every five minutes or every forty? Prey can set that up for you.

‘Sure’, you might say. ‘What’s the privacy in this? It’s all running through an external website that I have no control over!’

Well, I say, that’s a very valid concern. However, Prey can eliminate this if you so wish. If you run your own website, you can set up control through that, totally removing the Prey Project site from the equation. Now, is that cool, or is that COOL? I have it set up on my Macbook Pro as well as the desktop Mac.

One thing to note, if you are on a Windows desktop, is that the program won’t run unless you have a user logged in. It might be a good idea to set up a bogus account with no admin rights and no password, to lure the thief in. This, however, is not an issue with Mac or Linux.

Check out the Prey Project at http://www.PreyProject.com. It’s free, and it’s awesome for College students!

Thanks to The Big G, (or the G-spot, as he shall now be known) for pointing out an error in the linkage.

Tags: College, linux, Mac, snoop, thief, windows

Like many of you, I have noticed that Steam has finally come over to the Mac platform. The beginning for proper Mac gaming? I damn well hope so.

Anyway, I won’t get a chance to actually use it much until this Leaving Cert is over, but I tried opening up the Mac version of Torchlight, after playing it using Crossover Games for much of the Christmas holidays, on the Steam for Windows program. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Steam Cloud wasn’t working! That is to say, my saved game files hadn’t been transferred over to the Mac port of the game. Sad, right?

So, I searched through the internets, and found that Runic Games are aware of this issue, and don’t seem to be in any hurry to fix it, as they say that to do so would require a fairly hefty rewrite. Although they may change their mind.

Anyway, I worked out how to get it working.

What you need to do is navigate to the following folder on your Windows PC (or Crossover Games bottle) – C:\Users\your username\Appdata\Roaming\runic games\torchlight\ (please note that on copies of Windows prior to Windows 7, replace “Appdata” with “Application Support”.

Once you have that folder, you need to copy it into ~\Library\Application Support\runic games\torchlight, and run Torchlight! As if by magic, everything is exactly as you left on the Windows version, including all your settings. So you might want to mess around with those until the game looks good on your Mac.

Hope I helped!

Tags: Gaming, Mac, Steam, Torchlight

Over the last while, I bet that a whole lot of you picked up the wonderful Macheist Nanobundle, and received, among others, a copy of Rapidweaver by Realmac Software. This is a wonderful piece of software for creating both simple (like my Cian’s Letters to the Clubbers site) and complex (like www.CianMacMahon.com) websites with the greatest of ease. It’s basically iWeb on steroids, and after half an hour or so, you will probably be creating new sites, pages and such like the bejaysus.

On first opening Rapidweaver, you are presented with a wonderfully clean interface, with almost nothing to be seen. Here is a screenshot of it, along with helpful indications of what some of the more used items do. Click on it to see it larger.

So, it’s time to make your first website. In this post, I’m going to try to explain the basics of each built in Rapidweaver page to you, but please take a look at the help files and PDF manual that come with Rapidweaver. The Manual is wonderfully written, and you can of course search around the place to find the answer to the question you are asking. Over the next unspecified period of time I will be covering other parts of the Rapidweaver program, such as plugins, themes and such. I also plan to have a whole section on just the page inspector. You should note that on it’s own, while Rapidweaver can make some wonderful sites, you really need to start digging around in the plugins and themes available so that you can make full use of it’s power.

The Styled Text page

This is the most basic of Rapidweaver pages. It’s literally a giant page which you can pretty do what you want on. Drop in images, HMTL, videos, whatever you want. There is not much to say about this page. Really. Do what you want with this one.

The Blog Page

I don’t really like the inbuilt blog page in Rapidweaver. I find it very basic. However, for some people it is just perfect. I will be talking about the Wp Blog plugin later in this series, which is what I use, but I’m just going to talk about the basic blog page. Once again, click to zoom.

The screenshot above should pretty much explain the basics of this page. As I said, it’s not the most complex of blogging systems, and you can’t update it online, which isn’t good. But it does the job for some people, and depending on what theme you use, can look damn good. While I will be talking more about the Page Inspector for this page laters, you should go take a look in there now to see how you can create categories, tags, RSS feeds, enable comments and all that good stuff.

Note that every time you update a blog, write a blog or delete a blog, you have to publish the site by clicking the pretty publish button top-right of the window.

The Contact Page

This is another easy one. It allows you to build a contact form so that people can email you. Beware though: Spammers enjoy sending you long emails with random characters. I have no idea why they do this. They could at least try to sell you something. But no. Just lots of big strings of random texts. Plugins like FormLoom allow you to block them, but this is not the blog post to be chatting about plugins!

The File Sharing Page

This page allows you to upload files for sharing with people. They can be songs you have written yourself, your CV, short films you have made, whatever. They will create a page which people can go to in order to click on them to download. Awesome, right? Again, there are plugins which do this better, but this is great for barebones file sharing.

The HTML code page

In this page, you can “Use HTML, XHTML or PHP to create virtually anything”, so get cracking! You can even tell Rapidweaver to ignore the theme for this page, by heading into the Page Inspector and unchecking “apply theme”.

The iFrame page

This allows you create a window to another website on a page. Say I want to allow people to browse my Twitter page from my site. I can do that!

The Photo Album Page

This page can be a bit daunting when you first take a peak at it, but in reality, it’s wonderfully simple! It takes a look at your iPhoto gallery, and simply sorts out all your albums into separate folders. The easiest way to get started with a photo album is to just head straight into iPhoto and drag the photos you want to use into a new folder or album, then open up Rapidweaver and make sure that album is selected. Easy stuff!

The Movie Album

This works much like the Picture album, just you drag in each movie from wherever it is in your harddrive. You can also link to external movies on other servers if you so wish, although I don’t recommend it. Because that’s mean.

The Quicktime page

Like a Movie Album, just for a single video. Allows you add description and such, something you can’t do with the album.

Outbound link page

The last of the inbuilt pages in Rapidweaver, this allows you to simply link to another website. Easy stuff!

So, that’s all ten of the inbuild pages that come with Rapidweaver! With only these, you can build a pretty wonderful site in minutes! Note that you can drag pages around in the pane to the left so that you can order where they come in the menus, and you can even treat each page like a folder, dragging other pages into it. This allows you to create sub-pages, pages that can only be accessed by going into other pages first. Navigation heaven! To see how this gets set up on a very complex website with loads and LOADS of pages, check out my portfolio site at www.CianMacMahon.com.

So, there is our first run-in with Rapidweaver. It’s a truly powerful program, and it is pretty much wonderful for making websites. You can see why I use it for all mine! (Heavily modded, of course, but we will discuss that at a later date.)

Thanks for reading!

Tags: Applications, Mac, Rapidweaver

Let’s face it, we all thought Tweetie 2 was abandonware, but with the announcement on Macheist that a private bate is opening up soon for those who bought the bundle, it will finally see the light of day!

Now, a while back I moved away from the whole Tweetie system, iPhone app and Mac application, and over to Echofon. I paid for the full iPhone version and have been beta testing the Mac version, and let me tell you, it is pretty much wonderful. So here is a list of things Tweetie 2 needs to do for me to move back over blindly. (I will probably try it out for a few days either way, but ticking some of the boxes here would make the choice easier.)

1. Syncing between the iPhone and Mac applications. This is one of thise features that I didn’t know I needed until I found it with Echofon. It’s pretty wondeful, and allows you to pick up exactly where you left off on either your Mac or Iphone without having to do endless scrolling. This should also work across all the Macs you own.

2. All the new Twitter features like RTs, Lists, geotagging and such

3. Push updates on the iPhone. I know it’s not a feature of a Mac application, but this will be important for bringing me back into the whole Tweetie ecosystem.

4. We should be able to log into bit.ly and such so that shortened links go into our bit.ly accounts.

So there are my top four wants for Tweetie 2. I suppose I will have to wait until next month when I hopefully get into the beta like Macheist said I would. Hopefully they have learnt from the Cha-Ching mess though. Several years later I’m still awaiting my beta for that.

Tags: Mac, tweetie, twitter

You will remember that last week, I published a huge blog post on the topic of Online Backups, and mentioned here and there that I had a survey that I was conducting about how people backed up online. Well, It’s time to let that survey into the wild, with a grand total of 25 people taking it.

This question was designed to weed out the people who didn’t actually back up, so that I wouldn’t get a whole lot of useless data later. However, this useless data issue did come up, but not to the extent that it might have.

When somebody said if they backed up or not, I asked them to give a reason. The general reason that people gave was that they are too lazy, something that I don’t feel is an issue with backing up any more, what with Time Machine and the online services mentioned in my previous article. Just set them and forget them.

This data actually quite surprised me, as I never imagined that so many people would be using online backup services. While, predictably, the majority of people use a harddrive, there is a significant number of people who use the likes of Mozy and Backblaze. It should be noted that the people who marked “Other” were referring to the likes of Blu-Ray disks, DVDs and homebuilt servers. I should have thought of including them.

However, once we take a look at this data, things get starkly different. Out of the 11 people to said that they use Online Services for backup, only 4 of them said that this was their favorite method, and looking over the raw data, only two of these people were people who also selected the harddrive option. Not looking so great for the online services now! Other again referrers to homebrew servers and the like.

Not much commentary that can be done on this graph, to be honest, except that most people seem to have a LOT more external harddrive space then I do. I am impressed!

As we can see on this graph, Amazon S3 is the preferred method of online backup. (I’m discounting Dropbox, of course, as it is not technically a backup suite. However, I stuck it in there so everybody wouldn’t click “Other”. Interestingly, almost everybody who said that they used Dropbox also said that they used Amazon S3, further enforcing it’s popularity.

Amazon S3 wins again!

You may view the raw data for this survey at Google Docs.
Thanks to all those who took part!

Tags: backblaze, backup, dropbox, mozy, Online, Survey

This is part 1 of a larger article on Online Backup systems. In this part, I cover the different companies that I have tried out along with one or two that I have not. The second part of this series will be based around a survey that I am running about online backup systems. If you backup at all, online or offline, PLEASE fill this anonymous survey out so that I can get more data points. Thanks!

Recently, I have become more and more interested in the possibilities presented to me by online backup services. Places like Dropbox, Backblaze and Mozy offer huge (and often limitless) amounts of harddrive space in a building somewhere on the planet protected by armed forces and Minority Report-esque security features. However, for every advantage to using online backup, there is most likely a disadvantage. In Backblaze’s case, for instance, their datacenter, and thus, your datacenter, is located in San Fransisco, which means that tomorrow it’s probably going to be hit by an earthquake or something. Even though you can backup anywhere there is an internet connection, it’s gonna take a LONG time to get that first backup out of the way. (I’m 7 days into my first backup, and have uploaded about 42GB so far. Thankfully in the future Backblaze, the service that I am using, will only backup files that change. It should be noted, however, that these speed problems are likely not the fault of the backup provider, and more the fault of Vodafone and Comreg who are a bunch of incompetents when it comes to getting what speed broadband you are buying correct.)

“So”, you might say. “Why bother with this online backup rubbish? I have my harddrive sitting here next to me, which can do in minutes what might take days to do online.”

Let’s get something clear. Online backup should not be done, in my opinion, on it’s own. It should be supplementing a hard backup that you do every day at home, with a harddrive somewhere in your house. For Mac, this is redonkulously easy to set up, with the wonderful TimeMachine. Mac users simply have NO excuse not to go dig up an old external harddrive (or get a nice cheap one, places like Reads sell 1TB worth of delicious harddrive space for about €99) and just either leave it connected to your home computer 24/7, or just plug it into your laptop whenever you are at your desk. For Windows users, you will find a similer, perfectly capable backup system built into Windows 7. Online backup should be used for when you are out and about and accidentally delete a small number of files, or in case your house burns down in some horrendous oven accident, taking your harddrive backup with it. (Speaking of which, you did remember to turn the gas off, right? Better go check) However, the scope of this article does not include offline backup, and my good friend @SirJolt has written a pretty large article on this just today on the Komplett blog.

Mozy

The first of the lot I tried using was Mozy. I used it pretty much for two years solid, but never needed to use it to restore anything of great importance, as I was on the free account, and only used it to backup school essays and such. Nonetheless, I somehow have used 1.4 GB on it. Like all the online backup programs, you install a tiny little menubar application which just does it’s job in the background. However, it has a pretty low uptake among people who know lots about this subject, with a survey I carried out only showing 5% of respondents saying that they used it. Some complaints that can be found online are that the application (available both for Mac and PC) just sort of gunks up the system, makes everything run slow and tends to crash. I never suffered from any of these things, but I wasn’t backing up a huge amount of data, so I think that if you want some free backup space, go grab their 2gb offer for free, as it did the business for me. If you want to do a large amount of backing up, however, they may not be the best choice. Christopher Breen of PC world talks about some of the issues that he had in his PC World article. Another thing that I should mention is that Mozy won’t post your data to you on a harddrive, should you need it. They insist on sending you rather expensive DVDs or making you download everything. Which would take a while, I would imagine. However, as I said, Mozy are good, in my experience, for keeping an extra safe backup of those little important files. And remember that Mozy only ever backs up files that have been changed, meaning that after the first backup, everything SHOULD be nice and zippy, so long as you don’t fall foul of one of the weird bugs which will make your computer slow to a crawl. A year worth of unlimited Mozy backup runs you $54.45 per year.

Dropbox

Dropbox was the most picked online backup option, despite the fact that technically it doesn’t offer backups. Dropbox is basically a file synchronization service. You get a little folder in your Home directory (for Mac users, I suppose it is a network folder on Windows) called “Dropbox” and you just drop files in there. Instantly, all the other computers linked to your account download that file. It’s wonderful for what it does, again giving you 2GB for free. I use it a lot, again for school files. There is something just wonderful in knowing that no matter what computer in my house I write an essay on, it will instantly be on every single one of the other computers as well, as if by magic. It works stunningly fast, and has never once broken for me. It’s a real setup and go. However, can it be considered a backup solution? I don’t think so. Due to it’s synchronization backbone, once you delete a file on your computer (or it is deleted by a little kid who has run riot in your office) it deletes from the service as well. Not really a good backup solution, if you ask me. However, as I have stated in the past, Dropbox is basically what Apple’s MobileMe iDisk wants to be. iDisk constantly breaks, doesn’t sync and is generally clunky. Dropbox, on the other hand, is pretty much perfect in every way. If file synchronization is your deal, get a free Dropbox account, but I wouldn’t use it for any important files that you just HAVE to have backed up. While the first 2GB are free on Dropbox, a 50GB account will run you $99 per year, with a 100GB account costing $199, which means that per GB, you are paying $1 extra dollar for your second 50GB. Which is odd. But anyways.

Backblaze

Backblaze is the service that I am using at the moment. As far as I can see, it mixes the simplicity of Dropbox with the backup ability of Mozy. The entire client side of this system is contained in one insanely simple preference pane, which can get quite advanced if you want too. Unlike Mozy, Backblaze just automatically backs everything up (except for a few files, but we will get back to those) unless you tell it too, which includes any external harddrives you connect, as well as any flash drives connected. Which is kind of nice. You also get more control in how you throttle your upload speed, something which is important if you are uploading 50+GB. You don’t after all, want your network to grind to a halt for a week as you back up! Backblaze chooses not to backup some files, such as the system files (Not really needed, as you likely still have your OS disk for if something horrible happened) and Application files (which means that you will have to track down copies of all your programs, which should not be too difficult. However, it does keep the application settings files, so that once you redownload the programs, they will be working as they always had.) Personally, I have also set it up to not backup my downloads folder, as there are often huge files in there that are deleted within a couple of days. I imagine that I would tell the other options not to back these up as well. Another issue that somebody may have with Backblaze is that it doesn’t keep copies of any files bigger then 4GB. It does, however, keep all old copies of each file for 30 days, which turns it in to a sort of online timemachine. One interesting question I haven’t yet been able to get an answer to (due to my backup not yet being fully finished) is if Backblaze backs up all accounts. I don’t see why it wouldn’t, but I have not yet gotten an answer from the company despite getting in contact with them several times. However, I don’t see why it wouldn’t, as I can see Backblaze running from all the accounts on my Mac. Again, like Mozy, once the HUGE first backup is complete, it only backs up files that have altered, meaning that everything is zippy. This includes your iPhoto library, which although it looks like one file, is actually a folder pretending to be a file. This means it will be just as zippy as everything else. Backblaze don’t offer any free account, but they have a 15 day trial account and it is cheaper then Mozy per year, coming out at a round $50 for an account.

Others

For users who are more willing to get their hands wet in the world of Online Backup, a service like JungleDisk may well end up much cheaper. It connects into an Amazon S3 account, which means that along with the $2-$3 you pay JungleDisk per month for the use of their backup software, you will be paying Amazon a certain amount per GB transfer, data stored and such. The pricing system is sort of complex, so I suggest that you check it out yourself. However, it comes with the happy note that it can also be used to sync your data with other computers, much like DropBox. It got a solid 10% of use in my survey, and people seem to be happy with the lower prices. However, it is not a simply set it and forget it service, and you have to deal with two companies instead of one.

Some of the other companies in the big bad world of Online Backup are Carbonite and iDrive, both chosen by about 5% of surveyed people, but I never have actually had the chance to try either of these services out, so I can’t really talk about them.

Winner

In the end, out of the services that I have tried out, Backblaze is the clear winner. Sure, it doesn’t back up system files, but those are so big that it would take you ages to download them anyways. May as well just reinstall the OS if it comes to that.

Many of the links here are referral links. However, none of the services above are paying me to write this article. Any extra backup space acquired by you signing up to these services using my link will be put to good use. Also, any mentions of the survey are correct as of the 10th of February 2010. Full details on the survey will be released in Part 2. Again, please fill out the anonymous survey to help me get more accurate data!

Tags: backblaze, backup, dropbox, mozy, Online

UPDATE: Head to the bottom of this article to check out the CEO of McGraw-Hill totally outing Apple on their Tablet! It’s confirmed, people!

As we all know, tomorrow Apple is having a keynote. They are, as usual, keeping totally tight lipped as to what will be announced, but we are all pretty damn sure that it will be tablet hardware. However, hopefully they will do some software refreshes as well, and the following is what I want to see.

iPhone

Let’s be honest, here, people. The iPhone home screen is pretty difficult to get around. If you have lots of pages of apps, chances are you have to go flipping and flipping and flipping to find the one that you want. For instance, if I want to find one of my most used apps, “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application”, I need to flick to page 5 of my apps. And this takes time, time which might make my classy little joke a little late. And NOBODY want’s to make a joke late, right? This is what I’m thinking. You know Exposé on your Mac? I want to be able to do that for iPhone pages. If you are on any home screen, I want to be able to use three fingers to flip up or down, and then a 3 x 3 grid of homescreens will be displayed. I tap which one I want to head into, and boom. Easy access to “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application” along with all my other apps. Of course, if you had any more then 6 home screens, you could scroll down to see them. But if you have more then 6 home screens, you might need to get checked out. That’s 54 apps you have there.

[EDIT: Holy Crap, somebody pointed out that Steven Troughton-Smith, mentioned further down in the article, has developed THIS EXACT THING for Jailbroken iPhones! Apple! HIRE THIS MAN!]

While I’m on the subject of apps, I want some sort of auto-sort for apps I download. I want to say that homescreen 5 is my games screen, and have any games I download sent there automatically. Of course, this may get difficult when I fill up that screen, but it could then give me the option to dedicate another screen to games, which would be inserted, pushing screen 6 to screen 7 and creating a new blank screen 6, ready and waiting to receive my new game.
I want multitasking. Or if I don’t get multitasking, I want some sort of inbuilt push system. I want my RSS feeds to automatically update in Newsie, dammit! (More coming on Newsie in a later blog post.) While I’m at it, I want the Notes application to be able to sync over the air, like all the other MobileMe Push apps on the iPhone.

How about stacks? You know, those things that nobody I know uses that Mac OS X people can use on the dock? Basically, you click on it and a big drawer opens up, allowing you to place any application or document in it for easy access. Let’s have that on the iPhone! I want to be able to put a stack on the bottom bar of my iPhone, (a “cool games” one, for instance) and then just tap it so it springs open, allowing me open any app with ease. That would be nice. In fact, an Irish developer called Steven Troughton-Smith has developed a Stacks application for Jailbroken iPhones which is pretty much perfect. Apple! Buy it off him!

You know what would be really cool? I have my iPhone sitting here, next to my Macbook Pro. It’s on the same Wi-fi network, and has bluetooth. It can connect wirelessly in these two manors. How about I can send a text message from my Macbook Pro and have it routed through the iPhone to be sent? Hell, how about the laptop doesn’t even need to be on the same wifi network, but sends it over the internet to be sent, Push style, to the iPhone, which will then send it on. That would be spiffy.

iWork

There is one thing that pisses me off about iWork.com, Apple’s cloud document service. You can’t edit from the cloud. Take a look at the likes of Google Docs, and I imagine that Apple could bite a fairly huge chunk of this market from Google if they were to give cloud editing a shot. In fact, how about when you buy iWork and own MobileMe, we get iWork webapps? Online versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers that integrate into your offline version. Sure, they might not be able to pull all the fancy moves that the desktop applications can, but it would be pretty damn useful! Every time I save a document, I want iWork to, in the backround, update the cloud version of the file, and visa versa. You can even use my MobileMe space, if you want! There is a Documents folder in there for something, after all!

A big problem with iWork is that the documents are not easily viewable by people who are on Windows, or Mac users who haven’t bought iWork. Of course, you can always do a little jiggling about with the file and fish out a PDF (more on this rather cool process at TUAW.com) but I want something more. Apple, after all, like their stuff to “Just Work”. So how about, when the file is opened on a computer which doesn’t have iWork or is a Windows machine, a really barebones integrated PDF viewer is opened instead, and opens up this PDF file? Sure, there is no editing ability, but it allows me to send files to anybody, and have them viewed by anybody! Perfect cross-platform document sharing!

MobileMe

MobileMe doesn’t have a huge number of problems. As I mentioned before, I want to be able to sync Notes.app over the air.

HOWEVER, one huge problem that MobileMe has is iDisk. Let’s not mince our words. In comparison to services like Dropbox, it is utterly shite. It stalls all the time and it takes ages to update. It stops working for no given reason and, most suprisingly for a product that is supposed to be “embedded into the core of the operating system”, we can’t share files directly from the finder. Dropbox, on the other hand, is utter perfection. Seriously Apple. Buy Dropbox, or develop something that is even almost equal to it. If you do, iDisk will become perfect, and much more useful. Hell, what would also be nice is Apple giving us unlimited storage (with a MobileMe subscription, of course) and making some sort of cloud based Time Machine. The likes of Mozy would NOT be happy with that, but we are already paying more for MobileMe then for an unlimited Mozy account, so I suspect that Apple can afford it. Sure, limit the amount of non backups we can keep, but unlimited backups (for, say, a 30 day period) over iDisk would be lovely. And make it real easy to order a complete restore. Maybe send it out on a USB harddrive or something. In fact, just copy Backblaze for the restore process.

iLife

I have no idea what I would want in an iLife refresh. Much much faster iPhoto loading, maybe. Oh! Since I have already requested unlimited MobileMe space, how about all my iPhoto pictures automatically get sent to the MobileMe cloud? Build in some social network ability, and BOOM! Apple have just knocked Flickr out of the market, when it comes to Macs, anyway. The MobileMe iPhoto gallery is cute, but not really good for sharing with friends.

While I’m on a “Move Everything to the Cloud” rant, how about putting our iTunes libraries up there? You just bought Lala, a serious contender in music streaming, so you have the tools in front of you. Why not allow me listen to my iTunes Library wherever I am?

So, in general, I want Apple to cloudify everything. Of course, this would make most of the Mac population totally kill their bandwidth (I only get 100gb up/down each month) so that would have to be sorted out.

What do YOU want to see announced tomorrow?

UPDATE Some silly CEO has outed Apple on their tablet. Oh-Oh…

Tags: Apple, apps, dropbox, iLife, iPhone, iWork, MobileMe, mozy, Software, stacks

A while back, you may remember me showing you how too, with use of ASpell, get an Irish Spellcheck system up and running on your Mac for free. Well, while this was a free way of getting it, it did take a little bit of work. Snasta, a (as far as I can tell) new Irish software development company has come up with a solution for those not wanting to get your hands wet in something that could be a little bit scary for a novice user. It’s called MacLitriú, and costs a mere €9.99.

On installing MacLitriú, I uninstalled ASpell and set to work writing an Irish essay that was due for the day after. I noticed exactly NO difference. The ASpell way of doing things and the MacLitriú way of doing things, to the end user, are exactly the same. MacLitriú integrates directly into the OS, which results in it working in pretty much every single Mac program that allows you change the spellcheck option.

The one caveat I noticed is that when I installed MacLitriú, it seemed to change the system default spellcheck from English to Irish, a problem that was easily fixed by changing it back again in the settings tab. This might just have been a freak accident due to my use of various different profiles depending on what I am doing on the Mac, or it might have been a bug. I don’t know.

All in all, MacLitriú does exactly what it should, and does it well. If you don’t want to bother messing around with cocoASpell and such, I recommend giving this a go!

Please note that while I was given a copy of this software to check out, it was not under the condition that I review it. I decided to review it myself.

For the last four or so years, I have been doing all my school essay work on my Mac. For anything in English or French, I use the wonderfully capable Pages, but for Irish, I have to use OpenOffice, simply because Pages refuses to allow me add an Irish Spellcheck. Now, I know that there are people out there who swear by the piece of java abomination that is OpenOffice, and I will likely never be able to persuade them that the rest of the world really isn’t that impressed with it.  On a Mac it runs rather like a car might if it’s engine was replaced by a small boy who hasn’t been fed in days. It is just sluggish. It crashes. And worst of all, it seems to just fall asleep at random times which stop me from saving it.

But I had to use it, you see. I needed my Irish Spellcheck!

Well, yesterday, I got so annoyed at this that I spent another 20 minutes of my life trying to find a solution (bringing my time spent in this area up to a few days, I imagine). I failed. Not put off, I decided to make use of my AppleCare agreement, and rang up Apple. I got a wonderful man named Magnus on the other end, who was friendly, polite, but said that he personally couldn’t seem to find a way to add a language pack into Pages. It just didn’t seem to be a thing that could be done. He even went to find some of his Irish Associates who confirmed that they had never manage to get Irish Spellcheck up and running.

So, we spent a fair bit of time discussing all the different possibilities. Suddenly, he told me that he had found an application originally developed in 2001 that allows you add any language that you wish to Mac OS X. HURRAH! It was called CocoASpell and the developers claimed that it worked on Leopard. Of course, me being on Snow Leopard, I would be taking a bit of a risk. But he told me to give it a shot anyway, and then sent me an email with various links and things explaining how it could be done. Long story short, it worked. Magnus: You are my new IT hero. I want to buy you a drink. He left the phonecall by saying “Well, us here at AppleCare learnt something today! Thanks for calling!”. What a charming chap. Whoever trains the AppleCare employees needs to get working on the rest of the IT Support industry.

So, here is a step by step on how to get Irish spellcheck (or 73 other languages) working across your Mac, in any application. Exciting, eh?

1. Head to http://cocoaspell.leuski.net/ and download the version of CocoASpell that you need. This is broken into if you own an Intel Mac or a Power PC. If you have bought your Mac in the last 4 or so years, you are Intel. Once you have it downloaded, run the file to install the application. Nothing overly hard here.
2. Head on over too ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/ where you will see the list of possible spellchecks. Irish is marked “ga”. If you want to get any other languages, work out their two letter code. Click.
3. The instruction sheet that comes with CocoASpell reads “I would suggest you choose the dictionary using the following rule: prefer files that start with “aspell6″ over files that start with “aspell5″ over files that start with simply “aspell”. If you are interested in more details about the differences, see the README file at the ftp site.” so following that logic, you will need to download aspell5-ga-4.3-0.tar.bz2.
4. Once the download is complete, unzip the file, and drag the resulting folder into /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell.
5. Head into System Preferences, and on the bottom row, click “Spelling.” Tick “Irish” in the box to the left of the pane, and off you go!

Now just head into your application of choice, and set the language settings to Irish! For instance, for Pages, open up the Inspector by clicking the blue circle with the I in it. Click the Text pane, then More, then look near the bottom to find the language selection.

Enjoy your new-found Irish Spellcheck! And throw out that copy of Open Office!

Update

And enterprising individual has released an Irish Spellcheck for the Mac, which looks like it will save you all the bother of ASpell. It is called MacLitriú and can be bought for a tenner (which is cheap, but not free) from http://www.snasta.com/maclitriu/ . I hope to be getting a review of this online in the near future!

Tags: Apple, dictionary, Gaeilge, Gaelspell, Irish, iWork, Keynote, Mac, Pages, Spellcheck