So I have this email signature. Actually, I have about three. One is the somewhat standard signature I use for all ATPM-related correspondence. The other two are personal sigs which vary only in the email address contained in the signature. One is for the address at this domain, and the other is my Gmail address. I have set up these signatures with keystroke shortcuts in TypeIt4Me, which I encourage you to check out. Without going in to too much detail, these three signatures are shorthanded "asig", "gsig", and "rsig", and this works very well. For the most part. I seem to have this memory muscle problem with the last abbreviation. The other two I can rattle off with nary a conscious thought going from my brain to my fingers on the keyboard, but the last has proven to be rather elusive. Instead of typing "rsig" I find myself typing "risg" instead. I even did it in the previous sentence, and had to backspace and fix it. The obvious and lazy solution is to create a new abbreviation in TypeIt4Me that automagically puts in the proper signature when I mistype the actual abbreviation, because there's little chance "risg" will ever be a real word in the English language, but that still doesn't help with why I'm mistyping it in the first place. Bizarre.

This post is coming to you from MarsEdit 1.1.3, the first release of my blogging app of choice since Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software acquired it from NewsGator. This update fixes my biggest druther with MarsEdit, where images flicker when you're previewing your post. Thanks, Daniel! Speaking of not taking long, Lee and I were chatting via IM last night while he watched the Oscars, and, of course, there was talk regarding the iPhone teaser commercial. I wondered jokingly how long it would be before some post showed up somewhere detailing all of the stars shown in the commercial. Lee provided the answer: two hours. And here I thought I didn't have a life. I'm sure there's now a post somewhere detailing each of the movies or shows featured in the commercial, but I'm too lazy to google it.

Bandwagon, going live in two days, is an iTunes backup for Mac users. They're offering free one-year subscriptions if you blog about them, and like Eric, I can be a cheap date.

Tired of Tetris™? No good at first-person shooter games? Want something quicker than world-building or war strategy games? Frenzic may be the answer you're looking for. A joint release from The Iconfactory and ARTIS Software, Frenzic is an addictive puzzle game that you can play solo or against others online. Jobs and company should seriously be looking at getting this game on the upcoming iPhone. Sorry, Windows users need not apply. Update, 1:00 PM CST: If you decide to register Frenzic, feel free to add me as a friend.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata, for the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

I praise Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, and I also curse it.

[...]

But after waiting five years — as in half a decade — for this thing, I think I should get something revolutionary, a PC operating system so astonishing it makes the competition look laughably primitive. The almighty Microsoft made this, right? So Vista--being released to consumers Tuesday--has to be jaw-droppingly superior, right?

Well, it's not. Vista hardly rocked my world during weeks of testing. It's a fine Windows upgrade, but it's also a shameless rip-off (and not quite the equal) of another major operating system, Apple Computer's Mac OS X.

That begs the question: Why not just use OS X?

Those upgrading from XP likely will have to get a new computer anyway because Vista doesn't work properly on most older PCs. [...] So, instead of purchasing a Windows PC, they could--and typically should--get an Apple Macintosh computer running OS X. [Emphasis in the original. --R]

The February issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. Kudos to Lee for this month's cover art. He ran the idea by me via IM one night, I thought it was great, and Michael gave it the final thumbs-up. Our thanks to Steven Frank for playing along. In case you missed the link, you can also get the cover art as a desktop picture this month. Well, well, well, well, well. What's that? Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld Expo last month? You don't say. Why, I believe that means Wes has to eat his hat. And given how another ATPM staffer is resident in the city Wes currently calls home, I'm sure we can arrange a photo shoot of the happy event, because let's face it Wes, tasting is not the same thing as eating. I'm sure we can find a nice Rachel Ray recipe wherein we substitute the meat of choice with the hat. Perhaps former ATPM staffer and amateur chef Tom Bridge can help us out in that regard. While we hammer out all of those details, Wes does have the blogosphere's coverage of Apple's next paradigm-shifting product, as well as weigh-ins on MacHeist and MacZOT. iPhone fever has certainly set in amongst the ATPM staff, as Mike Chamberlain attests to in this month's Mac About Town. He talks about some other stuff, too. I think. Did I mention the iPhone fever settling amongst the staff? Angus takes us on a safari of the Apple landscape, including, yes, the iPhone, but oh so much more as well. We welcome Ed Eubanks to the staff as we present Next Actions, a column devoted to to using your Mac to get things done. Lee presents the third chapter in the ongoing saga of Photoshop for the Curious, with a look at the application's menus and a tutorial on getting better grayscale (viz: "black and white", even though that's really a misnomer) photos from your color pics. Chris Dudar has a beginner's guide to the UPS, and no, he's not asking what brown can do for you. Reader David Kettlewell was kind enough to share some photos from Sweden's "Little Leaf Sea" for this month's desktop pictures selection. Cortland has junior-high flashbacks after a night of swing dancing with Angie doesn't go like he planned. Meanwhile, the chameleonesque Agent Smith arrives in town, palming a familiar-looking comm device... Ellyn isn't very smitten with Arctic Quest, but David is quite taken with MoRU. Our eastern seaboard surfer, Eric, tries out NetworkLocation, while Frank Wu beats me to a review of Booq's Python XL System. Matthew wraps up this month's reviews with a look at Eltima's SWF Movie Player. I remarked to Michael that this month's issue was our most content-packed out of the past few months, and we still had four writers unable to submit this month! (Hey, we have real jobs outside of ATPM, you know?) We're both very pleased, and our thanks go out to the staff for their efforts. As usual, this issue is available in a variety of flavors for your reading pleasure.

Turly's brought out a universal version of the venerable FinderPop, now a preference pane. I found with earlier builds of the OS X version of FinderPop that I wasn't using it nearly as much as I did under OS 9, due in large part to my use of Quicksilver. However, I can still find a use for FinderPop in my workflow, and I encourage you to give it a go and see if it has a place in your workflow, too.

Scott McNulty noted Tweet in his Twitter feed as well as on TUAW. I downloaded Ted Leung's Growl-modified version of Coda Hale's script. Coda has good installation and usage instructions in the original Tweet script, which you can use if you don't care about Growl support. Tweet combines the power of AppleScript with that of Quicksilver (you are using Quicksilver, aren't you?) to make posting to your Twitter account easier and faster than ever. Sorry, Windows users, but all of this, except the Twitter service itself, is Mac-only.

So let me get this straight: Apple sets new company records for revenue and profit, beats the Street's estimates, and ships 28 percent more Macs and 50 percent more iPods than they did this time a year ago, but because a bunch of analysts don't like future estimates, the stock price takes a dive? No wonder monkeys do just as good a job at the stock market as analysts.

Walt Mossberg reviews Windows Vista for the Wall Street Journal:

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple's operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.

There are some big downsides to this new version of Windows. To get the full benefits of Vista, especially the new look and user interface, which is called Aero, you will need a hefty new computer, or a hefty one that you purchased fairly recently. The vast majority of existing Windows PCs won't be able to use all of Vista's features without major hardware upgrades. They will be able to run only a stripped-down version, and even then may run very slowly.

In fact, in my tests, some elements of Vista could be maddeningly slow even on new, well-configured computers. Something tells me that the only Vista-running PC we'll see in our home will either be my wife's company-provided laptop, when their IT department decides the latest version of Windows is "safe" enough with which to conduct business, or if I decide to throw Vista on my Intel-powered iMac. The latter would, at most, be for web site testing, and pure kicks. I'm pretty much done with Windows PCs at this point. The Mac does everything I want, does it better, does it more intuitively and elegantly, and the Mac is safer. Sure, you can argue this locks me in to a single company, Apple, but then Windows users are pretty much locked in to a single company, too, aren't they? Oh, you can buy your PC from Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, or build it yourself, but you still have to go to Microsoft for the operating system. (Linux zealots are not invited to this discussion, so pipe down already. Besides, most of you are fawning over Ubuntu nowadays, which still locks you in to a single distribution/company for that particular flavor of the OS. Or you like SUSE, or Debian, or Red Hat, for whatever your reasons may be. And most people don't feel like hunting down drivers for their Sony notebook just so it can properly display all available resolutions or connect wirelessly to the Internet, things you still have to do with Linux variants.) For the record, in his review, Mossberg does acknowledge that as far as Windows itself goes, Vista is the best version yet. Which isn't surprising, since each version since the original has been successively better, with the exception of Windows ME (what a disaster that beast was). When the desktop PC I built my wife two years ago outlives its usefulness, it will get replaced with either a hand-me-down iMac, or a Mac mini. It's one thing to do Windows tech support for a living, but when it comes to home computing, that's something I'd rather not have to worry about.

I just received my shipment notification from Alsoft that DiskWarrior 4 is on its way.

Welcome to 2007! The January issue issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. With this issue, ATPM enters its thirteenth year of publication! I am very proud to be a part of this staff, and would like to thank all of the staffers for a great 2006. I'm looking forward to the next twelve months of celebrating "the personal computing experience" with all of you! Our thanks to Charles Anthony for this month's cover art. We're always looking for artwork, so if you're interested, please let the editors know. Recently, Michael and I had a discussion regarding sponsorships for the publication. ATPM has always been a free, volunteer-staffed magazine. We don't make a profit, and any monies generated by sponsorships or ad revenue is pumped back in to the publication's hosting costs. With twelve years of issues hosted online, the potential of high bandwidth costs is always hanging over us, and our parents taught us the value of being prepared for a rainy day. The result of our discussion is that ATPM will no longer accept direct sponsorships or advertising or advertising. The revenue generated by the Google and Yahoo ads you see on the site, coupled with those of our affiliate shopping links, is currently sustaining us. For those former sponsors and direct advertisers, we thank you for your sponsorship and enjoyed the many relationships they enabled. Our best wishes to your respective companies in 2007. If you enjoy reading ATPM, please help us cover our costs by clicking on the ads which may be of interest to you, and using the affiliate shopping links. As the new year dawns, we welcome two new staffers. Linus Ly will be assisting on the editorial side of the fence, helping lay down the grammatical law in the copy-editing trenches. Chris Dudar is very much in to 3D graphics, and will be covering applications in that realm. We're glad to have you guys on board! Mike kicks the new year off by exploring his hopes and dreams in the Macintosh realm for 2007. Lee continues the Photoshop for the Curious tutorial, with Palettemania! He also provides some outstanding fireworks photos for this month's desktop pictures section. Speaking of outstanding, er, out-stepping, er, stepping out--yeah, that's it, stepping out--Cortland learns that some times you have to swing in the right direction for the one you love. Wes reviews Audio Hijack Pro, a tool I've found quite useful in making my own MP3 ringtones. (You're not actually paying three bucks for a ringtone, are you?) I found coconutBattery, examined for the ATPM readership by David Thompson, fit the bill last year (wow, it really was last year) in diagnosing my PowerBook's failing battery. As noted above, Chris Dudar opens up the 3D realm to the ATPM readership, this month with a review of DAZ/Studio, better known as D/S, and this one's not from Nintendo. Finally, Lee's not as impressed with the iTalk Pro as he was with the original iPod recording unit from Griffin. You can always find ATPM in a flavor of your liking, and we hope we can serve many more appetizing morsels in the coming year.

If you've ever wondered what Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser sounds like when he's singing, you can find out from viewing the hilarious Buggy Saints Row: The Musical. (Caution: Some adult language in the songs.) [Wave of the phin to John.]

How would you like 20% off the best spam-killing app for the Mac? Or maybe 20% off the easiest disk image creator? Perhaps 20% off a professional text editor is more to your liking. Now that you've done all of your gift shopping for everyone else, treat yourself to discount savings on numerous Mac applications from top-notch developers with MacSanta.

So I purchased a copy of Parallels Desktop a few months back, when they were offering it at a reduced price while still in beta. I haven't gotten around to installing it since, mostly because I didn't have a legit copy of Windows to go with it, and I'm not much interested in dinking around with any Linux variants. Lately, I've been intrigued at the prospect of running Windows from a virtual environment on my Intel iMac, mostly for web browser testing. (My sites don't look nearly as nice in Internet Explorer as they do in, well, pretty much every other browser.) And long ago I promised I'd help out with some of our church's web stuff, and they use FrontPage (yes, I know--ick!). The question then is, do I get the latest version of Windows XP, or do I jump in to the exploratory waters of Windows Vista? Let me know what you think.

The December issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. We debut a new column this month, with Lee's Photoshop for the Curious. As he notes, this is not a "Photoshop for Beginners"-type tutorial, but rather a look at various elements of Photoshop that occasional users would benefit from. If you're a Photoshop Elements user like myself, you will find that many of the tips translate well. Mike Chamberlain offers his personal tour of the Macintosh blogosphere in this month's Mac of All Trades, while Miraz puts SeakMonkey through the web-accessibility wringer. Sylvester continues looking at Activity Monitor, this time using it to plug memory leaks. (Those would be leaks in the Mac's memory, not Sylvester's. His memory is just fine. At least it appears that way to the rest of the staff.) This month's desktop pictures are brought to us by our Mr. Chamberlain, taken on his European sojourn this past summer. We continue to see the genesis of Cortland's employment at Wieser Graphics, while dark forces prep their move to the Midwest. Lee has a double-dose of reviews this month, looking at Rogue Amoeba's Fission and the media device, iRecord. Matthew pokes around with OpenMenu X, while David notes one of my favorite iTunes utilities, Synergy. Finally, for all you gamers, Andrew rocks on some first-person shooters as he puts the Tankstick through its paces. As always, this issue of ATPM is available in a variety of reading formats for your enjoyment.

There are three new "Get a Mac" commercials: "Gift Exchange", "Sales Pitch", and "Meant for Work". The worst of the three, and probably the worst of all the "Get a Mac" ads, has to be "Sales Pitch". I really like "Meant for Work", especially the end when PC wanders off in disgust, saying, "I have got to go...listen to some emo." I'd probably feel the same way.

I just tried to mark as read all messages in a Mailsmith mailbox by hitting the K key, which is what you use to mark all messages as read in NetNewsWire. (For what it's worth, marking a message as read in Mailsmith is accomplished by Cmd-M.)

The November issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. Mike Chamberlain notes some of the odds and ends one might take with them for their mobile computing needs, based on his five-week European trip this past summer. Mark Tennent manages to weave together Keats, the MyBook Pro (yes, MyBook, not MacBook), the Honda Civic, and Mac OS X, as he looks at function versus form. Ted delves in to writing environments and their relation to outliners in this month's ATPO, including the one I'm currently using for NaNoWriMo. PageSpinner is the latest web development app to go under Miraz's web accessibility microscope, and Sylvester has a tour of an app on your Mac you may not even realize is there, Activity Monitor. Lee got some great shots at a butterfly garden, which he shares in this month's Desktop Pictures section. The misery of Cortland's search for work continues, leading him to Wieser Graphics and his first--and second--embarrassing moments with Angie. It's been four years since Lee first reviewed EarthDesk, and a lot has changed in that time, so he took the opportunity to look at this intriguing app again. He also looks at RouteBuddy, a mapping application for your Mac that can work with supported GPS devices that have USB. Finally, while the Spaces virtual desktops feature of Mac OS X is still on the horizon, David Thompson sees if one can get similar functionality now from VirtueDesktops. We're still looking for help in the editorial, writing, and art departments. If you would like to contribute cover art to an upcoming issue, have a keen eye for grammar and spelling to edit copy, or have an itch to write about the Mac world, drop us a line. As always, at ATPM we are proud to offer our readers choices in how they consume our product. Enjoy!

Once again, I've had the pleasure of being "present at the creation" of one of Michael's software endeavors. EagleFiler is an information collection and management application that's super easy to use. Dump whatever you want to in to this thing: plain text, rich text, PDFs, web archives, emails, images; pretty much any digital document you can create. EagleFiler differs from a lot of its competition in that it stores its library in Finder format, so your documents are not locked in to a database or someone's proprietary storage system. Did you dump a rich text file in to EagleFiler, but you want to do some heavy editing to it? No problem: you can open it in Word, TextEdit, or the word processor of your choice, make your changes, save it, and you'll see the changes in EagleFiler. As has been the case with pretty much all of Michael's software initiatives, this one was born out of his own desire for an app to do something that no other app was currently doing. He and I have talked about an application like EagleFiler for a few years now, mostly because nothing out there satisfied us when it came to email archiving. (Here's a secret about both Michael and myself: we're digital pack rats, and he's worse than I am. He saves every email he sends and receives. Every one.) We're both Mailsmith users, but the larger the app's database gets, the more of a performance drag it incurs. Offloading either individual emails, or entire mail boxes, helps, and EagleFiler is the first application I've felt safe with to do just that. I've been using EagleFiler full time since mid-August, when the first alpha version was released to the merry little band of testers of which I'm honored to be a part. It's been rock-solid for me every step of the way, even as the testers suggested, and Michael added, new features through the app's development. Go download EagleFiler and try it for thirty days, gratis. Then, show your appreciation for Michael's hard work by registering the app, and support a developer of quality Mac software.

Maury notes that Apple has posted three new "Get a Mac" ads: "Counselor"; "Better Results"--which will likely get a lot of buzz; and "Self Pity", my favorite, and the source of this post's title.

The October issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. Wes runs down the blogosphere traffic on the is-it-or-isn't-it AirPort hack in this month's Bloggable. Mike Chamberlain is one of two new staffers joining the ATPM ranks this month, and the first of his "Mac of all Trades" is a trip down memory lane. Mark Tennent comes to the realization that size really does matter. (Get your mind out of the gutter; we're talking about displays.) Miraz Jordan's look at web-accessibility capabilities in web development apps continues, and she's impressed with Nvu. Angus Wong muses on the effect of Microsoft's Zune on the Apple ecosystem, while Sylvester Roque offers a helpful look at that oh-so-mystifying document, the crash log. This month's Desktop Pictures are again courtesy of Robert Reis, and his trip to Germany earlier this year for the World Cup. Speaking of trips down memory lane, Cortland returns with a nostalgic journey from college to employment. Lee looks at A Better Finder Rename, a utility I'd use if I had a lot of stuff to rename, which I very rarely do. Chris wants to like the iWoofer, really he does, but...well, you've have to read the whole review. If you're thinking of doing music on your Mac, you may want to start with Making Music on the Apple Mac, which is what Sylvester did. Finally, our other new staffer, David Thompson, shows off the darling of PC emulation for the Mac, Parallels Desktop. As always, you can get your kicks on Route 66, but if you want to read this month's issue, you'd be better served other ways.

Macbook Egg Frying
Originally uploaded by Pieter Pieterse.

You've heard the expression, "hot enough to fry an egg". Pieter Pieterse decided to do exactly that, whipping up a little breakfast poultry with his MacBook Pro.

Windows has no users... Warning: adult language on page linked above. [Via the Fontosaurus.]

Rich Siegel, CEO of Bare Bones, confirmed earlier this evening on the Mailsmith-Talk email list that Mailsmith will not be seeing IMAP support. In an attempt to lay to rest much oft-repeated rumors about the company's email client, Siegel said:

Since we released 2.1.5, an enormous amount of work has gone into Mailsmith. Much of that work is underneath the hood, toward supporting new features and improving performance & stability. The version of Mailsmith in which I am typing this message implements a great deal of what has in the past been discussed on this list.

Most of the rework that we've completed was started with IMAP support in mind. After several false starts on the whiteboard, however, we put down the pens and carefully backed away. Despite our best desires and intentions and efforts, Mailsmith is not going to support IMAP. (The FAQ has been updated accordingly.) So if you're one of those holdouts waiting for the next rev of Mailsmith to support IMAP, so you can switch over, you can stop waiting. I have never had much need for IMAP, so this is no big loss for me. Mailsmith remains my email client of choice, and despite temptation to switch to Apple Mail, especially with the new Leopard version on the horizon, I look forward to Mailsmith's next release with enthusiasm.