MacZealots editor Justin Williams will be on the expo floor Tuesday - Thursday to see what is new in the Apple universe. If you're a company demoing a product you'd like us to see or just want to meet up for some food and drinks, email justin@maczealots.com to schedule it.

This is our fourth trip to the Expo and hopefully the best. See you there!

He tries to restart his computer, but gets nothing. His hard drive is dead. So is his paper. So is his grade.

His friend two hours north at Purdue University has the same thing happen to him. The only difference between him and his friend is that the Purdue student had a backup of his paper on an external hard drive. Obviously, the Purdue student is smarter.

Murphy's Law states if anything can go wrong, it will and it most likely isn't going to be an opportune time. Because of this, you need to take precautionary methods to ensure that you are not going to be caught in a bad place with no backup of your important files. Imagine losing not only your term paper, but all of your family photos, the iMovie you created of last Christmas at grandma's, or that 10 gigs of files you have buried deep on your Mac's hard drive.

This article is not an in-depth review of a single application, but an overview of several Mac backup solutions. Like most pieces of software, there isn't a single solution that is a perfect fit for everyone. Each backup solution I look at in this article has a unique feature set to help it stand out from the competition.

In compiling this list, I had a few criteria in selecting each of these applications.

1. Affordability
2. Ease Of Use
3. Features

This is why you won't notice expensive solutions like Retrospect on the list or explanations of how to create a cron job to use rsync and ditto to backup your drive.

SuperDuper

SuperDuper is the application I have been using as my backup solution of choice since I reviewed it on MacZealots a little over a year ago. Developed by Shirt Pocket Software, it has a drop-dead simple interface that allows you to run a backup with three clicks: select a source, select a destination and click Copy Now. SuperDuper, by default, supports doing a complete backup of your system or just your Users folder. You can also customize the directories you want to backup by creating your own copy script.

Beyond basic simplicity, SuperDuper is also a powerful application that allows you schedule a backup for any defined period you desire. Scheduling allows you to run a backup in a completely hands off fashion. One caveat is that you must be logged into your Mac for a backup to run.

SuperDuper also has support for running scripts before and after a backups. If you aren't interested in backing up caches or other temporary files, you can create a script that deletes the data before the backup is run. The application also gives you the option of turning your backup into a standard Mac OS X disk image.

SuperDuper costs $27.95 and is worth every penny if you're looking for a no frills backup solution.

Synk Backup

Since we last looked at Synk on MacZealots, Synk has grown substantially. Beyond just expanding from a single developer, Decimus Software has also expanded the Synk platform to three different versions -- Backup, Standard and Pro. With the addition of the two additional versions of Synk, Decimus has added support for features such as 2-way synchronization, rule-based backups and encrypted backups to name a few. You can compare the features of the three versions of Synk on the Decimus Web site. We'll focus on Synk Backup since it has enough functionality to do the basic backup we are looking to implement.

The Synk Backup interface feels a bit dated with its use of classic Brushed Metal, but don't let that deter you from testing the application's functionality. Synk Backup offers all of the options most people are looking for: incremental backups, control of file deletions, scheduling, and a log of the activity the application performed.

Backing up with Synk is straightforward. It features four options to choose from. You can backup just your home directory, the entire /Users directory or the entire System. For those that want a more fine-tuned experience, you can pick and choose folders as well. If you need a more advanced selection of files, you would want to upgrade to Synk Standard, which has support for a rules engine.

Synk offers a technology called ZeroScan, which eliminates the need for Synk to scan your entire hard drive for changes before running your backup. ZeroScan works by running in the background while you are using your Mac. Each time you make a change to a file, ZeroScan makes note of it. When your backup is run, Synk is able to read the information gathered by ZeroScan to make a backup of only the files referenced. The benefit is a faster backup experience compared to other applications, but it only works on the local machine. If you have a habit of editing files from a secondary Mac over the network, you won't be able to take advantage of this technology.

Synk Backup costs $25. If you need support for rules or other more advanced features, Synk Standard costs $35 and Synk Pro runs for $45.

Apple Backup

If you are a .Mac user, Apple has included a backup application appropriately named Backup. Backup aims to simplify the process of backing up your most important data. When you first launch it, you are given the option of selecting from a number of backup plans. For example, Apple bundles a plan for backing up your entire home folder, your iLife data or just your iTunes purchases. You can easily customize what else you want backed up and where you want it backed up to: iDisk, removable media (CDs & DVDs), or another drive on your machine.

Backup also has an optional scheduler that lets you choose between a daily or weekly backup that is scheduled at a certain time. The backups done by Backup are incremental like the other applications, so you aren't going to be wasting many resources with each supplemental backup sending the same data over and over.

Backup has its critics, and many power users have complained about its restore procedures. You can read more about it here. If you are looking to backup more than just a sparse amount of personal data such as bookmarks and calendars, Backup should be fine, but for larger jobs, I would recommend another solution.

Backup is free to .Mac subscribers. .Mac costs $99 a year and also gives you iCal, Address Book, and Safari bookmark synchronization, iDisk, and Homepage among other things.

iBackup

For those looking for a free backup solution, be sure to have a look at iBackup. iBackup allows users to setup multiple backup profiles, each with a unique data set, schedule and backup location. iBackup works as a front-end to several command-line tools bundled with Mac OS X. It uses the rsync and ditto commands for backup and restoring data, respectively. This is not a knock on iBackup to say the least. Both of these tools are powerful with a knowledge of the Unix terminal. iBackup makes these commands accessible for anyone.

One of the features I liked most about iBackup was its ability to backup to a WebDAV server such as iDisk or a Bingo Disk. Using the application, I was able to create a profile that backed up my Clients folder every night to my Bingo Disk and then did a full system backup to my Firewire drive. Having an offsite backup of your most mission critical data is an important part of any backup strategy after all.

Performance-wise, iBackup feels very sticky on even the most high end of machines. On my Mac Pro, clicking on a checkbox took two to three seconds to register. Another curious thing I found with iBackup was that it came bundled with plug-ins that were nothing more than plist files that link to popular application setting files. iBackup uses these plist files to determine what application settings to backup. This can be frustrating if you are using a lot of applications that aren't included in the default set because you will have to manually select the excluded application setting files you are wanting to backup. I'd much prefer if the application would just copy my entire Application Support and Preferences folder by default.

iBackup is free for personal use, but donations are requested. Commercial users should contact the developer for pricing.

CrashPlan

CrashPlan is a different breed from the other backup applications highlighted. The main difference is that CrashPlan's niche is that it allows you to do offsite backups with minimal setup. CrashPlan, besides being a piece of software, is also a cross-platform Web service. For only $5 a month, you can store 50GB of data on CrashPlan's server. If you need more storage, CrashPlan offers it for a dime ($0.10) per megabyte.

If you don't want to use the CrashPlan service, you can either store your backup on a second Mac by installing CrashPlan on another Mac or Windows machine or on another friend's computer. If you're worried about security and space concerns on the other machines, rest assured that CrashPlan encrypts and compresses the data before transmitting it. If you're storing mission critical data on your Mac, however, you are doing yourself a disservice by not using CrashPlan's offsite functionality.

CrashPlan costs $20 for the regular version and $60 for the professional version. If you want to use the CrashPlan online backup solution, that costs a $5 a month for 50GB.

Coming Soon: Time Machine

You may have heard by now that the next version of Mac OS X, Leopard, has a backup solution built into the operating system. Apple's Time Machine works by keeping track of the changes you make to your Mac and archiving them a secondary drive connected to your Mac. What makes Time Machine so interesting is its interface. The Time Machine browser features a cosmic background with a copy of your currently selected Finder window on top. Behind that is the same physical window, but the contents may differ depending on the date of the snapshot.

If you happen to lose a file, or want to revert to a previous version, you can navigate through your backup set to find the version of the file you want to restore. Time Machine takes full use of the Mac OS X Leopard Quick Look by allowing you to preview the file's contents before restoring it. If you have an Airport Extreme Base Station, all the Macs in your house can use Time Machine to backup to the drive. For the paranoid, Time Machine also supports encrypting your backup data.

Time Machine is scheduled to ship as part of Mac OS X Leopard in October 2007.

Conclusion

No backup application is perfect for every user in every instance. While you may find one to be great for you, your neighbor may like something else. My personal recommendation is two-fold. I prefer SuperDuper for backing up my entire machine to an external drive connected to my Mac, but I also recommend using a service like CrashPlan if you are are storing mission critical data on your Mac. SuperDuper can save you from a local hard drive crash, but having your data stored offsite with CrashPlan can save you from fire, natural disaster or any other situation that is out of your control.

When Leopard is released, it remains to be seen if Time Machine will be able to dethrone SuperDuper from its spot at my backup application of choice. If you have used any of these applications, leave a comment telling us what you think of it. If you think I missed an application, and want to suggest it for other readers, leave those comments as well!

Hardly. With the announcement of the iPhone SDK being based on Safari, Apple was forced to put Safari on Windows, so they could attract Windows developers to build iPhone applications. By having the barrier to iPhone development as low as, building a Web application, it wouldn't make sense for Apple to only allow Mac using developers to build those applications.

Safari is a gateway to iPhone development.

Going On A Windows Safari

As part of my day job, I'm required to keep a copy of WIndows around to test Web sites I build for clients. I decided to take Safari on Windows for a spin, so that you don't have to. Who wants to run Windows anyway?

Apple bundles Safari in a standard Windows MSI Installer along with Quicktime and Windows-based Bonjour support.

As you can see, there's not much of a different look. It's still a bit eerie though. One thing you'll notice is the extra fat toolbar at the top.

RSS Support is the same as it is in Mac OS X. There doesn't seem to be a way to set a default third-party aggregator as you can on the Mac, however.

Bookmarks doesn't really offer anything new or unique.

The Preferences window is accessible via the Edit menu and has the same look and feel as it's Mac counter-part.

And for the geekier in the group, here's a listing of all the files in the Safari directory. DLL hell anyone? Notice there's a CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics and CFNetwork DLL.

It should be noted that I was unable to modify the Defaults file to show the Debug menu using the standard IncludeDebugMenu key that works for the Mac. If anyone figures out how to enable the Debug menu, please share it in the comments.

If you want to install the Safari beta on your Windows machine, you can download it from Apple's Safari Web site.

An example of how much work actually goes into preparing a keynote can be seen just by looking at the presentation book put together for Jobs. Rather than having a stack of note cards or short notes written on a piece of paper, Apple's CEO has a bound book put together that contains not only the notes for the speech, but visual cues such as tabs and icons to give him a visual cue of what he is preparing to speak on. Jobs even has the book professionally wire-bound.

Today, the ultimate group of Mac fanatics, the platform's developers, gathered in San Francisco for Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). WWDC is a week-long training session that is filled with presentations on how to build great software on the Mac. Besides the presentations, WWDC also gives developer's direct access to the people behind the scenes at Apple who are building the developer tools and frameworks in use by millions of users worldwide. As is customary, WWDC always kicks off with a presentation by Steve Jobs where he discusses the growth of Apple and the Mac platform.

More important than reflecting on the past, the WWDC keynote is also used as an avenue to introduce new products and give users a look at what's coming in the future. Going into this year's WWDC keynote, we knew that Apple would be unveiling what was dubbed a feature complete version of Mac OS X Leopard, the next version of the Mac operating system. Jobs officially unveiled Leopard at last year's WWDC, and gave an early preview of what was coming in the future. At that keynote, Jobs told everyone that he was not unveiling everything related to Leopard because he feared the competition, Microsoft and Vista, would steal it.

With speculation at a high, developers filed into Moscone West and took their seats to see what Jobs had to offer.

The Return of Games

The first major announcement coming from Jobs' keynote was that Electronic Arts would be returning to the Mac platform with several of its first and third-party titles. EA announced that Command & Conquer 3, Battlefield 214 and Need For Speed Carbon and Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix would arrive on the Mac this summer. EA chief creative officer, Bing Gordon, also announced that popular sports titles such as Madden 08 and Tiger Woods 08 would make their debut on Mac OS X soon. Having a major game publisher such as EA producing titles on the Mac again is a testament to the growth of the platform. EA is a heavyweight in the gaming industry, and having them rejoin the Mac platform could bring others to the table in the future as well.

Jobs wrapped up the gaming portion of his presentation by having John Carmack of id Software on stage to demo the new rendering engine technology he has been working on. id Software is the producer of popular titles such as Wolfenstein, Doom and the Quake series.

Mac OS X Leopard

The Mac OS X Leopard section of the keynote was a mix of previously announced features and some interesting new additions to Mac OS X Leopard. As has been stated before, Steve Jobs announced that Leopard would be shipping this October. The Leopard presentation was broken up into ten different sections that focused on an individual feature that is new to Mac OS X Leopard.

The New Desktop

Jobs started off his Leopard demo by showing off the biggest changes to the Mac OS X experience we have seen since the initial switch from OS 9 to OS X. The new Leopard desktop features a new semi-transparent menu bar and translucent Dock. These are subtle changes, but if you watch the demos on Apple's Mac OS X page, you can see how elegant it really looks.

Another new feature to the Mac OS X desktop is Stacks. Stacks has been a rumored addition to Mac OS X since before Tiger was previewed, and it's finally here. Stacks let you group files into a grouping that you can quickly access from your dock. The goal of Stacks is to eliminate desktop clutter.

Jobs demoed a new Downloads stack that stores all files you download via Safari or attachments you save from Mail.

As Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch said via Twitter: only Steve Jobs can make a downloads folder look sexy.

An All New Finder

One of the main feature requests you will always see from power users is a request for a new Finder. Apple has delivered. Steve Jobs showed off the new Finder and its more refined interface. The Finder sidebar is now slimmer and chock full of information. It closely resembles the Playlist menu for iTunes.

Also like iTunes, the new Finder sports a Cover Flow view that let's you preview your files by browsing them much like you would album art.

As part of the Finder demo, Steve showed off a new feature called Back to my Mac that makes it easy to share files over the Internet with all of your Macs. This is a feature that is only available for .Mac subscribers. Back to my Mac works by watching for your network address to change and then registering that change with .Mac. This eliminates the need to use a third party DNS service such as DynDNS to easily access your remote machines.

No word on whether the Finder is Cocoa. Not that it matters in my opinion.

Quick Look

Quick Look allows you to get a quick preview of a file without having to open the application associated with it. For example, if you are browsing through a folder of PDFs, but don't want to have to open each one in Preview, you can use the new Quick Look feature to see what content is inside of the file.

Jobs also demoed a Keynote presentation using Quick Look. It showed the slides on the left and the selected one prominently on the right: much like you'd see in the Keynote application itself. Quick Look by default supports all the popular file types, and developers will be able to add support into their application.

64-Bit For All

Mac OS X Leopard will be the first consumer operating system to be 64-bit from top to bottom. While Mac OS X Tiger allowed for command-line applications to be built as 64-bit applications, Mac OS X Leopard brings that support to the entire operating system, and third-party Cocoa and Carbon applications. Jobs demoed the power of 64-bit computing by running image filters on a 4GB photo. The 64-bit powered machine wiped the floor with its 32-bit counterpart.

Core Animation

Core Animation, in my opinion, is the game changing feature in Mac OS X Leopard. Core Animation allows developers to easily integrate animation effects into applications. Core Animation uses your Mac's video GPU rather than your actual processor so that performance degredation is at a minimum. Core Animation supports the animation of text, 2D graphics, OpenGL renderings and even video by layering effects on top of each other, much in the same way you would edit a Photoshop file.

Core Animation is going to change the way we see user interfaces in Mac OS X Leopard. I'm looking forward to seeing what developers have to offer.

Boot Camp

By now, you've most likely heard of Boot Camp, Apple's solution for dual booting Windows and Mac OS X on Intel-based Macs. When Boot Camp was announced last year, it was released on Tiger as a public beta, but being touted as a shipping feature of Mac OS X Leopard. As we get closer to that time, not much has changed with Boot Camp. It will support both Windows XP and Vista as before. Job did tip his hat to both VMWare and Parallels for their virtualization products. He sees these tools as an excellent complement to Boot Camp.

Spaces

Spaces is another feature that was demoed last year. It allows you to have multiple virtual desktops on your single physical screen. Jobs demoed having four spaces, with one running a game of World of Warcraft. Jobs explained that if you run a game in a space, if you switch to a different one, the sound on that game will be muted: very slick.

Spaces is nothing new to computing. If you want to have Spaces in Mac OS X Tiger, check out CodeTek VirtualDesktop Pro.

Dashboard

For his Dashboard presentation, Jobs showed off a new Movie Times widget that let's you see the times for showings at your local theaters as well as a synopsis and trailer of the film. You can also use the widget to buy tickets from Fandango.com if your theater supports it.

Jobs also demoed a feature of Safari called Web clippings that allows you to turn any part of a Web page into a Dashboard widget easily. As an example, he demoed creating a widget of the daily Dilbert column.

iChat

Probably the most boring part of the keynote, for myself, was the demonstration of iChat and its new features. Jobs demoed all of the new iChat AV features that allow you to use Photo Booth effects inside a chat. He also demoed sharing a Keynote presentation with another iChat user. While these are all great features, its not anything we haven't known about for the past year.

One humorous moment from this section of the Keynote was Phil Schiller morphing his lips onto a picture of Steve Ballmer and sticking his tongue out. Any gratuitous bashing of Microsoft will always be approved on a site called MacZealots.

Time Machine

Apple demoed Time Machine in much the same way they did last year. Jobs demoed Time Machine by explaining how easy it makes backing up your entire Mac: you just plug in a second hard drive and assign it to Time Machine.

Time Machine works with both your local Mac as well as network servers you may be around. A new feature announced for Time Machine is the ability to hook up a hard drive to your new Airport Extreme base station and have it backup your data via the network.

Jobs wrapped up his Time Machine demo by showing the 2001: Space Odyssey style, history viewer built into Time Machine. Using it, you can browser through different revisions of files and folders on your machine. Time Machine is to regular data backup what software version control systems like Subversion are to the developer community.

More Ice Water In Hell: Safari On Windows

At the D: All Things Digital Conference, Steve Jobs remarked that putting iTunes on the Windows platform, was like giving ice water to people in hell. As his one more thing announcement, Steve Jobs introduced Safari for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Safari for Windows has all the same features as its Mac OS X Leopard counterpart, including built-in Google search, RSS support and draggable tabs.

Jobs claims that Safari on Windows is the faster browser in terms of rendering Web pages and JavaScript. In demos, he claims it is twice as fast as IE, and about 25% faster than Firefox. You can validate these claims yourself by downloading the Safari beta today.

iPhone: Developers! Developers! Developers!

To start, Jobs announced the iPhone would be available at 6PM on June 29th. Start camping.

He then admitted that he has heard the rumblings from the developer community that third-party support for the iPhone is a must. The solution announced by Apple is not one I necessarily understand or like. Rather than developing a full iPhone SDK, Jobs announced that using the iPhone's Safari browser and Ajax technologies, developers can build applications that are custom tailored to the iPhone platform.

These applications will have full access to the phone's services. Third-party applications can make calls, send e-mails and more from within their application. Jobs touted this as a secure solution to the third-party problem because it will run in the same way as a bank transaction or purchasing a book from Amazon: remotely.

While I'm glad to see Apple embrace third-party support, I was hoping for a more traditional SDK such as those offered by Windows Mobile and the Palm platform. Apple's solution does not allow for any sort of offline applications. You must always be connected to either the AT&T network or via WiFi.

Conclusion

WWDC 2007's Keynote offered everything I expected from it. I'm excited about the new Finder, Stacks and the refinements to Mac OS X Leopard since it was last demoed. The new Finder alone is well worth the upgrade price in my opinion.

You can get a more in-depth look at the features discussed in this article by visiting Apple.com, which was just redesigned. The Mac OS X section features more photos as well as videos of the new features in Mac OS X.

What are your thoughts on the new features in Leopard? Are you excited about the direction the iPhone is taking with respect to third-party development?

Tell us in the comments.

To support this workflow, Aperture's libraries are complex. Versions are collected together into albums, and albums and masters are stored in projects. Two different kinds of folders allow albums to be organized inside projects and projects to be grouped together. Thumbnails and previews assist the rapid display of images for navigation, and a database provides fast access to a very large number of images. Metadata, such as captions, keywords and ratings is stored alongside image data as well as in the database.

This sophistication and flexibility brings with it some challenges. The first is that of horsepower. By deferring image processing to the moment of display, Apple has ensured that its customers will want the fastest computer they can find, especially one that can process adjustments in hardware. Another less glamorous but equally important challenge is how to protect Aperture's library against loss or damage. Destructive workflows with embedded metadata make backing up simple but very space-hungry: just copy every version of every image. Aperture's library doesn't have most of the images, just masters and recipes, and metadata is stored separately from the images. So what is the best approach to backing it all up?

Make A Copy Of The Library

The icon for an Aperture library looks like a box (or even a front-loading washing machine) and one approach to backing up the data it contains is simply to treat it as a monolithic chunk of storage and use the Finder to make a duplicate. That could take a while: 40,000 12MB images will fill a 500GB drive and take three to four hours to copy. And as soon as the library exceeds the size of the drive it will either have to be split into separate libraries -- very inconvenient for finding images-- or put onto an even bigger drive. Since the whole purpose of a back up is to have a recent copy of valuable data, copying the library is a task that will have to be completed often. However, the size of a typical library will likely prevent more than one copy a day being made.

Introduced in Aperture 1.5, support for referenced masters addresses some of the limitations of library size. By default, master image files are stored inside the library as managed masters. The benefit of managed master, as the name suggests, is that Aperture takes care of all of the file management. However, the cost is a very rapidly growing library. Referenced master image files can be stored anywhere: on any fixed, removable, or remote disk volume that the user chooses and with any folder structure imaginable. In this situation, the Aperture library stores only references to those files. This keeps the library at a much more reasonable and convenient size (still not exactly small -- it contains thumbnails and previews for all the image versions), but at the cost of an added file management burden for the photographer.

A library with referenced masters will be faster to copy than one with only managed masters, but the duplicate will not include the referenced master images themselves. That must be done separately. Use of referenced masters makes backing up more complex and thus more prone to error (and neglect).

There are two ways to restore images from a copy of the library. The first, quick and risky, is to make the backup copy the current Aperture library by just double-clicking it to launch Aperture. Then export the project or images that are needed and close the library. This is risky because Aperture writes to the library as part of its normal management function, leaving the backup no longer an accurate copy. The second way to restore, slow and safe, is to copy the backup (and any external masters) onto another drive and then open the new copy.

Because of the amount of time consumed, neither backing up nor restoring by copying the library look like an appealing way to protect valuable image data. Fortunately, Apple's product team has designed in a better way: vaults.

Use A Vault Instead

Aperture provides a handy way of backing up in the form of a feature called vaults. Any number of vaults can be created for a library, each one containing a complete copy of all the critical data in the library. By providing for multiple copies, Aperture allows the photographer to keep one or more back ups on removable drives and so stored and rotated off-site. A vault omits all the image thumbnails, all the previews and the database. It's a bare-bones version of the library and is somewhat smaller and faster to copy.

Vaults also have a trick up their sleeve. In the user's Library folder is the Application Support folder. That contains a folder called "Aperture", and inside that are several files that store all the centralized settings that Aperture needs. These include the keyword lists, keyword sets, watermarks, plug-ins, custom folder naming presets, adjustment presets and metadata presets. When a vault is written, all of that is written into a folder on the vault called Settings. Copying a library does not preserve this information because none of it is stored inside a library. The effect of this is that a vault will contain all the keywords in the keyword HUD, not just those stored alongside the images in this library.

Vaults also support incremental updates. While synchronizing with the Aperture library, only the updated information is copied, allowing even very large libraries to be backed up frequently once the initial vault has been created and filled. One final chance for the careless photographer is also provided: all deleted images are put into folder alongside the vault so even an accidental deletion followed by a vault synchronization is not a total loss.

Unfortunately, an entire vault must be imported to get back as little as a single image. As of Aperture 1.5 there is no way to restore anything less. That's potentially a huge amount of data -- only a little less than the library -- so it can be very time-consuming. Worse, since vaults omit the thumbnails, the previews and the database that the library contains, restoring from a vault requires a lengthy rebuilding step to regenerate the missing information. This can be a shock to a photographer working on deadline and trying to dig himself out of a hole. Even at a rate of one preview and one thumbnail per second, 40,000 masters will take more than eleven hours to process.

And vaults don't include referenced masters. Those are still the responsibility of the photographer.

How About Exporting Projects?

Aperture projects typically contain between a few to a few thousand master images, depending on how they are used. The photographer defines exactly what a project represents for their workflow: a few shots of one person, a day's shooting, an entire trip, a visit to one client by three people, a city, a package delivered to a client or practically anything that needs to group master images together. Alongside the masters, projects also contain albums (groups of versions), metadata, light tables, web sites, books, previews and thumbnails. It is natural to want to back up and restore these very reasonably-sized and complete collections of valuable work as a single chunk of data.

By using the Export Project function, any Aperture project can be exported very quickly to any mounted volume. The export is fast because it's just a copy of a piece of the library. The only material difference between an exported project and the original in the library is that the exported project also contains extra masters that are needed to recreate images from other projects that are used in its albums.

As a back-up, a project is a good choice. Projects are usually kept fairly small because that helps with speed and flexibility in Aperture, and that also makes it much easier to fit onto back up media than a copy of the entire library. One disadvantage of backing up with projects is that unlike vaults Aperture does not support incremental updating, so making frequent project back ups will take some time -- a good reason to keep projects small. Automator cannot be used to automate the process either: it has no ability to select or copy an Aperture project, so projects must always be manually backed up.

Another advantage over vaults is that projects with referenced masters can be exported with all the masters included. Just select the option in the export dialog to consolidate all the masters into the export:

Note that the option appears even if the project contains no referenced masters. A little confusing.

Restoring images from an exported project is straightforward and fast. The entire project can be imported into the library simply by dragging and dropping onto Aperture's library pane. And because a project already contains all the thumbnails and previews there is no wait while Aperture recreates them, as it must with a vault. The project is ready for use as soon as the data has been copied. A fairly large project with 1000 12MB images would take only about five minutes to restore from a Firewire drive. One small downside to restoring a project is that if a project comtaining images in its albums that come from masters in other projects is imported, then those extra masters will come in, too. This will result in duplicates of master images already in the library, which can be confusing if it is not expected.

The Paranoid Do Much More

So far I have made the assumption that restoring all the Aperture-specific information is sufficient for full image recovery. This is not the case if Aperture itself is lost or cannot be used. Even without being able to run Aperture, a library can still be opened and examined easily on Mac OS X. Control-click on the icon and select Show Package Contents to browse with the Finder and locate the master image files.

If high resolution JPG previews have been generated for image versions, then those will be in the library, too, each stored in the same folder as the master, so for greater security it can be worth spending the time and disk space to generate previews for the best images in each project.

For the highest level of paranoia, masters and versions should be exported from Aperture at full-size and depth in a portable, lossless format such as TIFF and stored on a universally-readable medium such as a DVD or a FAT32 hard drive. This, however, will be very time consuming and use a huge amount of space: ten versions of one image in Aperture use only a little more than the space occupied by one, the master. If exported, the ten images will use a full ten times as much storage. Exporting does have the advantage that it can be automated with Automator, and there is full control over the size, type and quality of the images.

Alongside the images, all the metadata can be exported from Aperture as an XML file or a spreadsheet. However, exporting versions will omit one potentially important piece of information: how were the versions created from the master? That is encoded in the library, and that data is only useful to Aperture.

A copy of the Aperture folder inside the Application Support folder should also be made: that includes the keyword list and keyword sets.

There is also the issue of organization that should not be glossed over. If exported images are used for backing up, then file naming and folder organization will have to be very carefully managed or else there will be no connection to the existing library contents, especially as time goes on and more and more images are added. To help this, Aperture offers automatic folder organization and image naming as part of the export process.

Backing up images only by exporting them is not wise, but as a complement to exported projects it adds another level of security.

What Do I Recommend?

There are several good ways to back up Aperture images.

The simplest, but definitely not the fastest, is to upload them to a service like Flickr, Amazon's S3, or Digital Railroad. Now that export plugins are available for many online photo services, the price and convenience make this an attractive option. However, the modest bandwidth of most internet connections prevents this from being a universal solution. That 40,000 image library I have been using as an example would require more than 100 days of non-stop uploading to transfer over a 512k DSL connection.

Often a significant amount of work has just been completed -- such as a series of adjustments, or key wording, or a light table layout -- and it would be very valuable to make a quick copy to guard against any sort of crash or corruption (or stupidity). I recommend making a copy of that project every once in a while, either on the desktop, or on a fast local drive. Start it before you go to get coffee, and by the time you are done, it will be done.

For full back ups, forget about Aperture and duplicate the whole disk to at least a pair of Firewire drives that are rotated off site. Any time that widespread image loss has occurred, the disk almost certainly has other problems so you will want to restore everything on that drive anyway. I use a utility called SuperDuper! to clone my drive each day. It works quickly, reliably and automatically and creates a copy of my drive that I can boot from immediately. Best of all, it is incremental, so each daily back up takes only ten to thirty minutes. It has rescued me from two drive failures and several instances of stupidity over the last few years.

For the most complete and paranoid procedure, do all of the above, but for highly-rated images also export versions as TIFFs and include all the metadata in an XML or text file. Add JPG thumbnails at various sizes so that the back up itself can be indexed and browsed later on any platform.

Ultimately backing up is only one of a number of tactics that you should employ to protect your images. It is important to have a workflow that extends before and beyond Aperture so that the collection and archiving of images are also carefully managed. People failures contribute to at least as many disasters as do equipment failures, and worse, their timing and outcomes are far less predictable. Part of the rationale for backing up is to gain insurance for the unexpected as well as the unpredicted.

For one of the first times ever, Apple CEO Steve Jobs offered a look behind the curtain at what was coming down the pipeline from Apple. Apple started the hype machine at Macworld by keeping the iPhone locked behind a glass case so that users could only see, but not touch the device. The momentum was followed up with the Hello ad during the Oscars in February featuring characters from famous television shows past and present answering a phone. The pre-announcement of iPhone was necessary since the device would have to undergo intense FCC scrutiny in the coming months. For 6 months, Apple fanatics and doubters had ample time to both praise and dismiss the device without having laid their hands on it. And people did talk! Google News had nearly 22,000 articles on the iPhone -- a device that very few people had ever touched.

The hype machine picked up substantially in the thirty days preceding the iPhone's launch. Apple announced June 29th as the birth day for iPhone and began releasing more information about the device. Between the television ads and how-to videos posting on Apple's site, iPhone fever began to hit the country.

Now that June 29th has come and passed, thousands of people around the country have iPhones. I've spent the past few days using the iPhone as my cell phone, Internet communicator and iPod.

Phone

The main reason I wanted an iPhone was because I have never been completely satisfied with the user experience of the cell phones. The iPhone aims to eliminate the complexity and confusion that has surrounded the cell phone by changing both the interface and user experience.

Weighing in at just 4.5 inches tall, a little less than half an inch thick and a mere 4.8 ounces, the iPhone features a single button on its face, which takes the user back to the home screen of the phone. There is no send or end call button. Instead, all interaction with the phone takes place via tapping and dragging on the 3.5" screen with your finger. Apple has removed the primitive keyboard found on Blackberrys and Treos and replaced it with an on-screen keyboard that appears when you tap on a text field.

When you first connect your iPhone to your Mac, it launches iTunes and walks you through activating your AT&T account. This involves selecting your voice plan, tying your iPhone to your iTunes account and porting your phone number from another carrier if necessary.

The iPhone is completely useless without activation, so if you have plans to just use the iPhone without activating an AT&T account, you are out of luck. I ran into this issue because it took AT&T over eight hours to activate my account. After waiting in line for eight hours in front of an AT&T store, it was very frustrating to come home and not be able to use my phone until the middle of the night when the phone was finally activated.

As a cell phone, the iPhone contains almost all the functionality you've come to expect from a mobile phone. You can make and receive phone calls, send text messages and synchronize all of your contact information with either a Mac or a PC.

Once your phone is activated, the iPhone synchronization process is similar to that of an AppleTV or iPod. You are able to select the music, videos and photos you want to synchronize to your iPhone. The iPhone also syncs your address book, Safari bookmarks and iCal data seamlessly.

As a cell phone, the iPhone is fantastic. The voice quality through both the iPhone itself and through the small microphone on the earbuds is fantastic. The person you are talking to sounds crystal clear, and there have been no complaints about my audio quality either.

When I first saw the iPhone, I was worried about having it up to my ear to speak since the entire screen is a touch surface. The iPhone detects when it goes up to your ear, and turns off the screen, so you won't accidentally press a button with your cheek.

By far, the best experience I have had with the iPhone is with text messaging. I am an avid SMS user who sends and receives upwards of 2,000 messages a month. SMS messages on the iPhone are displayed in chat bubbles exactly like they would be with iChat on the Mac. The combination of the iPhone's keyboard and dictionary make writing messages much easier than using T9 on my previous phones. While I'm not nearly as fast as with my old phone, I am gaining momentum as I get used to the interface.

If you're a multimedia message sender (MMS), however, you will be disappointed that the iPhone does not support the technology. Instead, iPhone wants you to send your photos via e-mail, which isn't an ideal solution for non-smartphone users.

One of the unique features to the iPhone's mobile experience is its support for visual voicemail. With other cell phones, listening to voicemail is a linear experience, but the iPhone allows you see a listing of all the voicemails in your box and select individual ones to listen to.

iPod

The iPhone is the most powerful iPod Apple has ever produced. Like the 5G Video iPod, the iPhone is able to play audio and video and view photos and slideshows. The iPod functionality takes full advantage of the iPhone's gesture-powered interface.

Navigating through your music involves flicking your finger across the screen to find the tune you are looking for. If you rotate the iPod horizontally, it will switch to Cover Flow view, which allows you to navigate your library by its album art. Clicking an album cover flips the cover and provides a listing of songs to choose from. CoverFlow is fluid even with a large iTunes library.

My music listening experience has not been without a few issues. Each day, I download podcasts to my iPhone so I can listen while at the gym. The file I typically use is over four hours long, so I have it set to remember playback position in iTunes. Several times, the iPhone has not passed my playback position back to iTunes, which leads to me having to find where I was previously.

Another issue with the iPod functionality is its inability to dynamically resize video content to fit the screen. For example, I have several video podcasts that are formatted at 640x360 because I also have an AppleTV and want to view my video in widescreen. Sadly, these won't sync to the iPhone without converting it for use with the iPod.

Probably the most frustrating of the iPod features is its use of a proprietary headphone jack that forces users to purchase $10-$20 adapter to use many third-party headphones and auxiliary jacks. I'm unable to use my iPhone in my car until Apple ships the adapter to me. Most headphone jacks are too thin to fit into the iPhone and establish a connection.

The final issue with iPhone functionality is the lack of support for several iPod-made accessories. Things like the Apple FM radio module and the Nike+ kit are not presently supported by iPhone. Apple never claimed these devices would work with iPhone, but it would be nice to see support in the future -- especially for the Nike+ device.

Overall, while I'm satisfied with the basic playback functionality of the iPod feature set, it's my least favorite part of the iPhone's functionality pack.

Internet Communicator

Besides making phone calls and playing music, the iPhone also triples as a full-fledged Internet device. The iPhone connects to the Internet either via WiFi or AT&T's EDGE network. If there is an open WiFi network within range of your iPhone, it will use that connection over the AT&T network because the speed is substantially faster.

EDGE is incredibly slow compared to WiFi or AT&T's more powerful 3G network. Apple opted to go with EDGE because it is more widely available throughout the country and because it drains the battery less than the existing 3G chipsets. AT&T has spent millions improving their EDGE network over the past six months to prepare for the iPhone launch, but those speed increases are only seen in larger cities such as San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia. If you are in the middle of Indiana, you're not likely to notice much of a speed difference.

No matter what connection you use to get online, you will enjoy the iPhone's Web browsing experience. Apple includes a full version of its Safari rendering engine on the iPhone so that you can view Web pages just as you would see them on your Mac. When you view a page, it shows the entire site on the screen. You can zoom in on a section by double-tapping the screen.

The only caveat to the browsing experience is the lack of Flash and Java. Not having Java eliminates the ability to run hundreds of Java-based cell phone applications such as Google's Gmail or games. Not having Flash is both a blessing and a curse. Viewing ESPN.com is now a sane experience because the annoying Flash ads and instant playback videos are not functional.

In addition to the full version of Safari, Apple bundles a mobile version of Mail.app that synchronizes your e-mail accounts from your Mac onto your iPhone. Typing and sending e-mails from MobileMail is seamless, and using IMAP, all my sent messages are passed back to my Mac. Unlike the full version of Mail, there isn't a unified Inbox, which is frustrating if you are using more than one email account.

Missing from Apple's MobileMail application is a junk mail filter. If a message hits my iPhone before my Mac's filters, I am bombarded with Viagra spam. If you use Yahoo! e-mail, you can take advantage of PUSH email. Sadly, there is no support for the IMAP IDLE extension, which gives PUSH-like e-mail to IMAP servers.

My favorite aspect of the Internet Communicator aspect of the iPhone is the Google Maps application. It really is as easy as the Calimari commercial makes it out to be. Anything that you can find using the full version of Google Maps is available in the maps application. You can view it on a standard map or in satellite view, which gives you an overhead satellite view of the location. I wouldn't recommend trying to work with satellite view when on the EDGE network. It's far too slow. The regular map view is quite usable over EDGE though.

Google Maps supports driving directions, but it's not as automatic as I would like. You have to tell the iPhone when you pass a marker that is set by Google Maps so that it can give you the next direction. Since the iPhone doesn't have GPS, this is the only way directions could be accomplished. Hopefully Apple will add GPS in a future revision.

If you are a YouTube addict, you'll definitely enjoy the YouTube application that comes bundled with the iPhone. Apple has gotten YouTube to convert their library to the H.264 codec instead of their standard Flash. Currently, the entire YouTube library isn't available on your iPhone, but it is supposed to be available on both the iPhone and AppleTV by fall 2007.

The YouTube application isn't usable on EDGE, but it's a great time killer when connected via WiFi.

A Picture Is Worth...

The iPhone comes with a 2 megapixel camera attached to it. The camera takes decent photos when there are normal lighting conditions, but the quality of the photos deteriorate when lighting conditions are poor. The iPhone camera also lacks autofocus, which can be frustrating in certain photography situations.

You can see a nice sample of iPhone photos on Flickr.

Speaking of Flickr, one thing that annoys me about the iPhone's camera application is that it doesn't preserve the photographs EXIF data when resizing a photo for e-mail. EXIF is the format that is used to store information about each photo you take inside the actual photo.

After you take photos, they are stored in iPhone's pictures application. This application syncs your iPhoto or Aperture library in the same way the iPod Video and Nano do. iTunes processes smaller versions of your photos to synchronize to your iPhone so that photos do not take up too much space. This is especially beneficial for someone that shoots in RAW or uses a high megapixel camera. Unlike the original iPods, however, photos are far more useful and fun to view on the iPhone thanks to being able to scroll through them with your finger. I always found the iPod's scroll wheel too sensitive when scrolling through a library of photos. The iPhone has found a perfect speed to scroll through photos with.

Any photo in the Pictures application can be emailed or set as the desktop wallpaper. When you choose to mark a photo as your wallpaper, iPhone prompts you to size the photo to your desired size and position if the photo doesn't fit entirely on screen. The process is seamless and really helps to show how the iPhone's touch interface shines.

The Kitchen Sink

I've only touched the surface of what the iPhone offers in its initial release. There's plenty more available for the iPhone including several applications. The iPhone comes bundled with a Weather application that allows you to get a six-day forecast for as many cities as you'd like. You can swap between cities by sliding your finger from side to side on the screen. iPhone also comes bundled with a stock application that mimics the Tiger Dashboard widget.

There is also a Notes application that has a look that matches Leopard's Mail notes feature. Notes do not sync in anyway with your Mac at this point, but I would bet that Apple adds support for that feature once Leopard ships.

The Clock and Calculator applications are pretty boring, but useful. Calculator let's you perform the basic four functions. The Clock application lets you keep the time of several different cities from a single interface. You can also use it as a stopwatch or countdown clock. Both of these applications work as you would expect.

Third-Party Support

At WWDC07, Apple announced that the developer kit for the iPhone was Safari. Apple doesn't want to open up its new mobile phone platform to Mac developers because they are trying to preserve the iPhone experience. Rightfully so, many developers balked at this. Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile and Blackberry all allow developers to extend the functionality of their smartphones through third-party applications. Many have predicted that Apple will open the iPhone platform down the line, but the APIs aren't in a state to be publicly usable.

I'm not opposed to keeping a semi-closed platform. If Apple established a Widget platform for the iPhone, I'd be satisfied. Telling users and developers that the iPhone is extensible by bookmarking a few Web applications in Safari is disingenuous. Offering a way to move those applications out of the bookmarks and giving them a front row seat in the iPhone interface would help solidify Web 2.0 as the iPhone development platform.

What's Missing

There are three things that I think the iPhone is missing that would make it a perfect experience.

1. RSS: Apple has an iPhone RSS reader, but it's not an experience I find intuitive. There's no easy way to subscribe to an RSS feed without manually entering the feed's URL. I would much prefer having a mobile version of NetNewsWire that syncs between my Mac and iPhone. Alternatively, I have found that Google Reader is a decent compromise if you just want to have a small subset of feeds.
2. iChat: The iPhone is absolutely begging for an iChat client for instant message conversations. Every smartphone platform out there has an IM client, and the fact that the iPhone is missing it is disappointing.
3. Movies Widget: While this isn't as big an issue as the other two, I think a movies widget to compliment the Stocks & Weather widget would be great. I'm a movie buff, and having one-click access to the show times at my local theaters would be a killer feature.

Conclusion

I know it's become cliché at this point to go on about how great the iPhone is, but it really is worthy of all the praise it has received. Apple aimed to change everything you hate about your cell phone and the mobile phone experience, and they succeeded. From the iTunes-based activation to actually using the iPhone daily, I can't explain how worthy of the hype and price the device is.

Though the device is not perfect, I am willing to lose a bit of functionality other phones might offer in exchange for the iPhone experience. There's also a chance that missing functionality can be added via software updates. Although there's no software update that can fix the slow speeds of AT&T's EDGE network, there has been talk that Apple plans to add things like Flash, iChat and other Leopard-only features in the coming months to the iPhone platform.

A little over a year ago, Google released it's own calendaring solution, cleverly dubbed Google Calendar. Google Calendar allows you to keep your calendar information online rather than in a desktop application like iCal or Entourage. You can view your Google Calendar data in iCal by subscribing to your calendar from iCal, but you can't make any changes to your Google Calendar data from within iCal.

As you can decipher, there doesn't seem to be a decent two-way calendaring solution that allows a user to manage their calendar online, but also keep that data online as well as editable remotely. This is important to me, and I suspect many other road warriors. As an avid Gmail user (MacZealots manages all of it's email using Google Apps), I wanted to use a solution that would allow me to keep my calendaring data inside Google Calendar so that I can easily deal with meeting invitations that are sent via Google, but I don't want to lose the convenience of working with a desktop application like iCal.

Enter Spanning Sync. Spanning Sync allows for two-way synchronization between Google Calendar and iCal by integrating with Google's Data (GData) developer API. Using the GData API, developers can write applications that integrate with the suite of online Google applications such as Blogger, Google Spreadsheets and, of course, Google Calendar.

Installing Spanning Sync is seamless as you would expect from any Mac application. Running the Spanning Sync installer, installs a standard Mac OS X preference pane in open /Library/PreferencePanes/, the standard location for third-party panes. Once you've completed the installation process, Spanning Sync launches System Preferences so that you can begin setting up your synchronization.

As you can see, Spanning Sync's interface is drop-dead simple. The first thing you need to do is provide your Gmail login and password. Spanning Sync supports both standard Gmail and Google Apps For Your Domain, which is a major feather in their cap. While there's millions of Gmail users, more and more small businesses are adopting the Google suite of applications to manage their business.

Synchronization

After you authenticate your account with Google, you'll be given the option of setting how often you will synchronize the data between Google and iCal. Spanning Sync lets you as often as every ten minutes all the way up to weekly. If you'd rather manually synchronize your calendars, you have that option as well.

Spanning Sync gives you the option of synchronizing only the calendars you. After you place a checkmark next to the iCal calendar you want to synchronize, you can determine which Google Calendar you want to synchronize it against. Like iCal, Google's calendaring application let's you setup different calendars for the different aspects of your life. Synchronizing an iCal calendar to a Google Calendar is a one-to-one prospect meaning that you can't synchronize two different calendars in iCal, Work and Personal, for example to a single Google Calendar.

The initial synchronization process can take anywhere from three minutes up to ten minutes depending on the amount of data you have on both your Google and iCal calendars. Since the process runs seamlessly in the background, the Spanning Sync experience should be seamless after the initial setup. Spanning Sync launches a daemon that runs in the background (located in /Application Support/Spanning Sync) that handles everything for you. The daemon uses minimal memory, so you shouldn't even notice that it's there.

Besides just the time and event name, Spanning Sync is able to synchronize the location and notes you may have stored in iCal as well. Google Calendar and Spanning Sync don't seem to support synchronization of iCal reminders, but you can create a set of default reminders for a calendar in Google Calendar and have that data inherited in iCal. For example, I setup a Google Calendar called "Super Important" that I store my most important events. I set this calendar to send an SMS notification to my cell phone 30 minutes before each event on this calendar. If I add an event to this calendar inside iCal, when it syncs back to Google, it will automatically add that SMS notification requirement. Very slick.

Spanning Sync doesn't support comments added to an event via Google Calendar, nor does it support any sort of attendance information being sent back and forth between Google Calendar and iCal. This is a feature I'd love to see as a former Microsoft Exchange user, but for a small group or a single user, it might not be an issue.

Conclusion

Spanning Sync seems to be the holy grail for calendar junkies and those wanting a more dynamic experience than what .Mac's online calendaring service offers. In future releases, I'd like to see support for managing attendees. Until Apple decides to overhaul the .Mac service and make it as usable as the offerings from Google, I can't recommend Spanning Sync enough.

You can purchase Spanning Sync for either $25 for a one-year subscription to the service or purchase a permanent license for a one-time fee of $65. Both licenses give you updates to the Spanning Sync application for the duration of your license.

The problem with knowing these details is that Apple's Airport status menu doesn't give you much information about a wireless access point aside from it's name. Just from looking at it, I can't tell how close the signal is and whether or not it's an open connection.

For several years there have been third-party solutions such as iStumbler I could launch to test a signal, but for many situations, the data provided by iStumbler is overkill. I just need to know the signal strength and whether or not it's an open connection.

I recently found a solution to my plight from a small company known as TastyApps. TastyApps specializes in small utilities that make simple tasks in our lives much easier. For example, they have a Safari plug-in called Red Snapper that takes screenshots of a Web page you are viewing. They also offer the ability to save embedded flash video to your Mac with their FLVR application.

The Tasty application I was most interested in enjoy was WiFind. WiFind that allows you to see whether a wireless connection is locked or unlocked as well as it's signal strength before you try connecting to it. WiFind, like several of the other Tasty applications, uses SIMBL, a system hack that allows developers to write plugins for Cocoa application that do not have a plugin architecture. SIMBL was originally developed by Mike Solomon for use in his Safari ad blocking plugin, Pithhelmet.

Usage

Installation of WiFind is as simple as running the application's installer. The installer installs the SIMBL bundle if you don't have the latest version and the WiFind bundle in your /Library folder. I'm personally not a fan of having system-modifying plugins insering themselves in the user experience of all the accounts on my Mac. I tried moving the WiFind bundle to my home directory's Library folder and restarting, but was unsuccessful at getting WiFind to work.

After installation is complete, you probably won't notice much different about your Mac. The Airport menu still looks the same. Clicking on the menu, however, reveals the changes that WiFind implements to the menu as you can see in the screenshot below.

Each visible WiFi hotspot appears just like before but to the left is an indicator that let's you know how strong the signal is as well as a lock icon. A red icon means that the access point is not open and requires a password. A green icon means it's open for public consumption.

System placement gripe aside, WiFind is a nice supplement to my Mac. It makes Apple's Airport status menu infinitely more useful and eliminates the mind numbing task of click and pray when it comes to trying to access remote WiFi connections. If you are against system hacks such as InputMangers, SIMBL or APE, WiFind is probably not a solution you are looking for. If, however, you don't mind a little code injection in your diet, be sure to give WiFind a try. It's definitely worth the $8 price tag if you are a road warrior like myself.

The result of their work was released as Chimera and quickly gained ground on IE:mac thanks to it's faster page loading, better rendering of more modern Web pages and it's support for, at the time, a killer feature known as tabbed browsing. While the Chimera name was retired due to some legal conflicts, the browser the band of Netscape employees set out to build still exists today as Camino.

The Camino project is an open source Mac OS X based Web browser that features the same browser rendering engine, Gecko, used in Mozilla's popular Firefox Web browser. A rendering engine is the brains behind your Web browser that takes the HTML and CSS code and renders it into a viewable Web page. If you're a user of the Safari browser, the rendering engine it uses is known as WebCore.

Unlike Firefox, Camino is a 100% pure Mac OS X application based off Apple's Cocoa frameworks. Firefox, on the other hand, is based off a cross-platform scripting language known as XUL. While this gives the powerful browser the advantage of being cross platform, many Mac users, myself included, complain about the stickiness of the UI and the fact that it doesn't necessarily have the look Mac users have come to expect from their applications. Camino also is able to use native Mac OS X features such as the system's built-in spell checker, the services menu and system Keychain.

In addition to it's rendering engine, Camino features all of the functionality you've come to expect from a Mac browser. It has support for tabbed browsing, which enables you to open multiple Web pages in a single browser window.

Camino also has support for RSS feed detection, so any page that has embedded a tag that describes it's RSS feed, will show an RSS icon allowing you to subscribe to the feed in your preferred news reader. Unlike Firefox or Safari, Camino is not a feed reader itself.

New to Camino 1.5 is a session saving feature that allows you to reload all of the pages you were viewing the last time you quit Camino with a single button click. In addition, if Camino happens to crash, it is able to restore your previous browser state, so you don't lose any pages you might have been viewing. This feature is a life saver that isn't possible in Safari without the use of third-party plugins.

Daily Browsing

I've spent the past few days using Camino as my default Web browser instead of Safari and I am happy to report that the transition was seamless. When you launch Camino, you are given the option of importing your bookmarks from another browser such as Safari or Firefox. In addition, if you have a bookmarks file from another browser (or another platform) Camino can try to parse it and import your bookmarks from it.

Bookmark management in Camino is a direct descendent from the management methodology implemented in Safari. Instead of having a long menu of bookmarks as you would in IE or Firefox, Camino features a bookmark management view that gives you an overview of all of your bookmarks in an organized hierarchy. You can browse your bookmarks, modify them or search for that obscure link you just can't remember but you know you archived in the past. One unique feature to Camino's bookmarks manager is the Top Ten List, which lists your ten most popular bookmarks based on how many times you view them. The top ten list is also used, by default, as the list of bookmarks available in Camino's dock menu.

Beyond bookmarks, the most important aspect of a Web browser is it's rendering speed. I didn't notice any discernible difference in page load speeds using Camino instead of Safari. One issue I have noticed with loading pages in Camino is that it doesn't initially draw the page until much later in the loading process than Safari. Several times I thought a page was stalling since nothing was rendering on the page, but would find that, with patience, the page would most certainly render beautifully on the screen. In addition to the page drawing issue, I also have found it difficult to see how far along the rendering of a specific page is since Camino lacks the visual title bar progress indicator that I have come to love in Safari. Camino does show the progress in a small progress indicator in the lower-right corner of the window, but I can't seem to train my eyes to look down after typing in a URL. I expect to see the progress right in front of me.

My only other major complaint with Camino as a daily browser is the lack of .Mac synchronization of my bookmarks between multiple machines. I have come to expect this after using Safari for so long. I have developed a workaround of using Everyday Software's BookIt to keep my Camino bookmarks in sync with Safari. I honestly don't use offline bookmarks nearly as much as I did three years ago since online services such as del.icio.us make it so easy to store that information on the Web, but for private links or stuff that you just don't think is worthy of sharing with the rest of the Web, being able to sync local bookmarks is a must.

The Verdict

If you're a casual browser or even a power user Camino is an excellent choice for a daily browser. Those that rely on Firefox extensions or Safari plugins such as Saft or SafariStand may not enjoy Camino nearly as much since they may lose certain functionality, but I don't believe Camino was developed to match those power user's desires. While Camino does have a plugin architecture, the choices available aren't nearly as vast as those in Firefox. Nonetheless, you should check out Pimp My Camino to see the list of available plugins.

I am going to continue using Camino as my default browser at least until Mac OS X Leopard ships. As a longtime Safari user, I grew tired of the massive memory leak that would bog my system down after several hours of usage. Camino is fast, responsive and beautiful: all the things I look for in a Mac application.

When Leopard ships, I will reevaluate my decision, and we'll see if Safari can regain it's position in my Dock.

Topping out at just over 1600 pages, Mac OS X Internals covers just about everything you could ever want to know about Mac OS X. The Amazon synopsis says:

Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach is the first book that dissects the internals of the system, presenting a detailed picture that grows incrementally as you read. For example, you will learn the roles of the firmware, the bootloader, the Mach and BSD kernel components (including the process, virtual memory, IPC, and file system layers), the object-oriented I/O Kit driver framework, user libraries, and other core pieces of software. You will learn how these pieces connect and work internally, where they originated, and how they evolved. The book also covers several key areas of the Intel-based Macintosh computers.

A solid understanding of system internals is immensely useful in design, development, and debugging for programmers of various skill levels. System programmers can use the book as a reference and to construct a better picture of how the core system works. Application programmers can gain a deeper understanding of how their applications interact with the system. System administrators and power users can use the book to harness the power of the rich environment offered by Mac OS X. Finally, members of the Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unix communities will find the book valuable in comparing and contrasting Mac OS X with their respective systems.

Mac OS X Internals focuses on the technical aspects of OS X and is so full of extremely useful information and programming examples that it will definitely become a mandatory tool for every Mac OS X programmer.

The description is definitely accurate. Singh starts the journey into the depths of Mac OS X by investigating the history of Apple’s attempts to replace the original Macintosh OS (remember TalOS?) and then follows with discussion of all the versions of Mac OS X up to 10.4 Tiger. The next chapter outlines the internals of Mac OS X itself, covering topics like firmware, the kernel, software development and security. Singh makes sure to go in depth on each topic he covers leaving the user with almost too much information. This book is definitely not for the faint of heart. For a software developer who needs to know how the underpinnings of the operating system they are writing for, this book is wonderful.

Besides just Mac OS X itself, Singh covers the hardware architecture of Macintosh computers. He breaks down the Power Mac G5 and discusses the G5 processor, the system bus, how it manages memory and more. I should note that throughout the book Singh provides code samples to show what he is discussing. One of the most in-depth chapters I found was his discussion of Open Firmware. Going above and beyong, he explains what Open Firmware is and its purpose in the Mac, but also shows some of the powerful features that were a part of Open Firmware.

If you have ever wondered about the file systems that are a part of Mac OS X, Singh covers the topic exhaustively. In what is a far more resounding review of this book, Dominic Giampaolo said,

This book has to be one of the most comprehensive treatments of any operating system ever. I read through the sections with which I am most familiar (file systems, Spotlight and HFS). The level of detail and understanding expressed in those sections is very impressive. I thought I might find some errors or at least niggling details that weren’t quite right but I could not find any.

Who is Giampaolo? He is one of the fathers of Mac OS X’s Spotlight technology and a part of the OS X file system and Spotlight group.

The only downfall to this book is that it is not entirely up-to-date. There is not much discussion of EFI: the Open Firmware replacement for Intel based Macintoshes. If you want more information on that, you can visit the book’s Web site for more discussion (http://www.osxbook.com/). Knowing a bit about the book publishing business now, I can only assume that since production-ready Intel Macs were first released in January, it was probably too late to include the topic in the book.

Overall, I recommend this book to anyone that wants a deeper understanding of the internals of the Macintosh. If you are a developer, this is a must-have book. I hope that future revisions of the book will include more information on the new Intel Macintoshes. Until then, Singh keeps the topic covered on the Mac OS X Internals Web site.

Book Details

Title: Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach
Author: Amit Singh
Date Published: June 2006
ISBN: 0321278542
Buy It Online: Amazon

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