JungleDisk Launches Online Backup For Workgroups

JungleDisk, online storage software provider which we’ve covered previously in Shuffle, as an easy way of backing up photos online, has introduced their Workgroup Edition. Before you could only use a JungleDisk account with one user but now you can use it with several users, like everyone in your family, and all back up to the same JungleDisk/S3 account. For small organizations and businesses this makes JungleDisk a very attractive option for online backup. I have been using JungleDisk for over six months for my own personal backup and I’ve signed up for the Workgroup edition and will over the coming weeks add all Macs we have at home to the account so they’re backed up. It’s also a solution that we’re looking at for our office, but there a really serious problem is the sometimes huge file and folder sizes that our employees have on their computers. One thing that works in JungleDisk’s favor for us in the office is that it’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Since we have all three environments present this could work as one unified backup solution.

The Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition is $2 per user per month, plus 15¢ per gigabyte per month for storage on Amazon S3 with no minimum or maximum. For personal users, the Jungle Disk Desktop Edition is available for a one-time fee of $20. Prices are very reasonable and the flexibility should be very appealing to many individuals and companies.

  

Secure Your Mac With VirusBarrier and NetBarrier

As Mac users we’ve been almost exempt from problems with viruses, worms, and other malware, at least since the arrival of Mac OS X. Lately there has been more announcements of these nasty things becoming available but we’ve yet to see anything in the wild, attacking scores of users. If you want to already now go ahead and make sure your Mac is safe take a look at NetBarrier and VirusBarrier. You can buy VirusBarrier for $69.96 and NetBarrier for $49.95 or both together for $89.95.
By Magnus Nystedt

VirusBarrier
If you want reliable and fast virus-protection for your Mac today the only commercial choice is VirusBarrier X5 (http://www.intego.com/virusbarrier/) as far as I’m concerned. It’s simple, fast, doesn’t get in the way, but it has a non-standard Mac interface. But even if the interface looks a bit strange the functionality more than makes up for it and it’s actually pretty easy to use. It scans files quickly, automatically in the background or when you tell it to, and it doesn’t seem to affect the other things you do. My MacBook kept humming along very nicely even when VirusBarrier was scanning the entire hard drive. The interface shows you what it is doing in a very nice overview. When you buy VirusBarrier you get a one-year subscription to virus updates from Intego.

NetBarrier
NetBarrier X5 (http://www.intego.com/NetBarrier/) is like VirusBarrier an incremental upgrade to an already very good product. And it must be hard for them to come up with new things to cram in. To put it simply, NetBarrier is an extension of the firewall built-in to Mac OS X. It gives you more options, more functionality, and should provide better protection. Especially it’s anti-vandal functionality sets it apart from what comes with Mac OS X already. It protects you from potential exploits from the outside and there’s also functionality for cleaning up your tracks online, like removing cookies, saved passwords, etc. Like with VirusBarrier it sits nicely in the background and doesn’t bother you unless there’s something important you need to know about, or take down your Mac’s performance. For many users putting money on NetBarrier is a bit harder to justify compared to VirusBarrier but for total peace of mind, it’s a good investment.

Wide Open Leopard Spaces

When Leopard was released I was one of the few Mac fanatics who kept it at arm’s length. Seeing how disappointing Vista was to the rest of the world, I was worried that the much hyped Mac OS X 10.5 would somehow find itself in the same basket.
Those doubts were put to rest though when my new iMac arrived as the New Year was starting and I fell in love with both Leopard as a whole, and its specific but powerful and important, little features.

Spaces is one such feature; the others being Stacks and Time Machine.

The idea of multiple desktops on a single machine is nothing new; I remember having four desktops on my Linux box ages ago in Mephis and Ubuntu. It is also a staple of Red Hat and SuSe Linux. What sets Spaces apart from the rest is its interface and its cool sister application, Expose.

Let’s get into why I believe this is a feature you can’t live without, and how to make it even more amazing. Starting at your desktop choose “System Preferences” then “Expose and Spaces”. Choose the “Spaces” tab and you can pick any amount of desktops, from 2 to 16 spaces. This is of course dependent on how much clutter actually fills up your desktop. Mine is set to four, partly because I am an average computer user and partly because I think having four large rectangles, rather than say eight smaller ones, is a really cool effect for what comes next.

Now click on the “Expose” tab and notice the “Hot Screen Corners” section. I have mine set as it shows in the image. I like having both Spaces and Dashboard available with a single “swish” of my mouse, and having the sleep function handy is good for when you need to run away from your Mac when life starts calling. Choose what works best for you.

Close up the windows and start using your Mac as you usually would. The way mine is set up, all you have to do to change from desktops is perform a cool and fluid movement of your Mighty Mouse to the lower right corner.

Try it, especially with non-Mac users watching! The movement to switch to Spaces and choose the specific one needed takes all about one second, maybe less. It is a revolutionary take on an old and widely used idea; having many computers in one, and being able to separate business and personal work. And having a lot of fun doing so is a must in today’s demanding world, especially if you’re a neat freak like me who hates having multiple windows and applications open all at once.

Leave it to Apple Inc., the father of creative computer design, to come up with an amazing design for this as well. I’m confident that you will find using Spaces in this manner (or any other really) so impressive that not only will you start using Spaces on a constant basis, but your friends who see these changes take place - these switches on the fly - will flat out agree that if nothing else, it is the coolest thing ever. Or at least far cooler than anything their new malfunctioning Vista boxes can dish out.

by Christian Sullivan

Flock Around Web Services

When it comes to web browsers we are spoiled for choice. But it’s not always easy to pick. Safari is a pure Mac OS X joy to use, Firefox is very extensible with add ons, and Shiira is full of cool new stuff. So why would you want to add yet another browser to your Applications folder? Flock (http://www.flock.com) is squarely aimed at users of web sites such as MySpace, FaceBook and more. These are often referred to as “Web 2.0” sites. And it’s all about keeping up with friends and family online – interacting with them, and sharing things with them. Flock is built on Firefox’s code but offers a lot that the other browsers don’t. Let’s have a look at some things Flock has to offer.

Using iPhoto to Share Your Photos Online

As digital cameras get cheaper, storage gets bigger, and internet connections get faster, the ability to easily share photos online becomes increasingly more desirable to people. Seizing this opportunity, there are almost as many ways to share photos as there are sites offering free email. In this article we explore three ways to use your Mac and iPhoto to publish your photos to the web. While iPhoto is the central application used in this article, each of these methods can be done without iPhoto.
iPhoto + .Mac
If you haven’t already created a .Mac home page for yourself, now would be a good time to do so. Open iWeb, and create a basic site. Add a blank page to your site, name it something obvious, for example, “Photos”. Publish the site, then open up iPhoto. Within iPhoto, create an album for the pictures you wish to upload to your .Mac site. Add the photos you want to upload, and click “Web Gallery”, located in bottom right of main window. Presto! Your photos are on their way to your .Mac account. But you aren’t done yet. Go back to iWeb, and on the “Photos” page you created, click on the icon labeled “Web Widgets”. You will see an option for “.Mac photo gallery”, and then you will be able to select which gallery you want. Arrange this to your liking on the Photos page, perhaps add a text box with a brief description, then press “Publish” again. This may seem like an awful lot of steps, but now the real magic takes hold. Back in iPhoto, go to “Preferences”, and select the “Web Gallery” tab at the top. You will see an option labeled “Check for new photos:”. Change this from “Manual” to something else, perhaps every hour. From now on, any photos you add to your Web Gallery album in iPhoto will be automatically added to your .Mac account, and the Album will be viewable from your .Mac homepage. Visit this articles page on http://hanzo.emiratesmac.com for a cool way to take this a step further and automatically grab photos from your camera or iPhone and publish it to .Mac with iPhoto. Note: this depends on a .Mac membership which is $100 per year. If you do not have a .Mac account, you can sign up for a free 60 day trial to see if it’s right for you.

iPhoto + PicasaWeb
Picasa may not be one of the bigger photo tools out there, but it certainly is worth a look. Google snatched Picasa up a while back, and since then the services features have grown exponentially. What we are focusing on is PicasaWeb, the online extension of the Picasa application. Picasa, for those interested, is an iPhoto like application for Windows computers. If you don’t already have a Google account, you will need to create one. Google uses a universal login, so any exisiting Google service login will work fine: Gmail, Calendar, Documents, Groups, etc. Next you will want to download the PicasaWeb tool for Mac (http://picasa.google.com/web/mac_tools.html). Note that before installing, make sure you have iPhoto closed. Once the PicasaWeb tool is installed, open iPhoto, and create an Album to share online. Add the photos you want to upload, click “File” and “Export”. You will notice that there is now a PicasaWeb tab available, click on this. You will be prompted to sign in to you Google account. Sign in, set up the export options (Album name, etc), and press “Export”. That’s it, easy as can be.

iPhoto + Photobucket
The third sharing solution covered today is PhotoBucket. PhotoBucket is an online sharing service competing directly with Flickr.com. While sharing photos from iPhoto with PhotoBucket is quite simple, of the three options presented, it’s also the most tedious. To start, you will need to create a PhotoBucket.com account. Next, you will have to install a third-party tool for uploading directly to PhotoBucket. I recommend PictureSync, for a few reasons. Beyond PhotoBucket, PictureSync supports more than a dozen other services, making it the most flexible of the options. Facebook users in particular may find it especially useful. Facebook and PhotoBucket both have native integration with recent versions of Flock. Flock also includes a tool for uploading Pictures, see “Flock Around Web Services” in this issue of Shuffle for more information. Download and install PictureSync (http://picturesync.net). Be aware, however, that the unlicensed (“Free”) version supports only *one* service at a time. If you wish to use multiple services, you will need to purchase a license for $15 USD. Launch iPhoto, create an album with the photos you want to upload. Highlight the album, and start PictureSync. By default it’s installed in Applications.
The first time it starts, you will need to authorize PictureSync with PhotoBucket.com. This is a painless process, follow the instructions on screen, sign in to PhotoBucket, and you are set. Once this is done, click the “Open” button in PictureSync. It should detect that you have an album selected in iPhoto, automatically adding the photos to the upload queue. Once you are satisfied with the list of photos to upload, click the “Upload” button in PictureSync. Congratulations, your photos are now online.

So which is the best service?
There really isn’t a “right” answer to this. If you are already a .Mac member (or considering it), use .Mac. However, if you are simply looking for an easy and free way to share your pictures online, PicasaWeb is probably your best bet. If you don’t mind a couple of extra steps, and you make heavy use of Social Networking applications like Flock and Facebook, it may well be worth your time to investigate PhotoBucket and PictureSync. But don’t feel locked in to any one service. Each of these are free (taking into account the .Mac free trial), so there is no reason you shouldn’t try all three out for yourself.

by Christian Sullivan

Links

http://hanzo.emiratesmac.com (For all of these links and additional photo sharing tricks)
http://www.mac.freezerpants.com (My .Mac homepage)
http://picasaweb.google.com/hanzov.v69/PhiladelphiaPA (My Picasa gallery)
http://picturesync.net/ (Download Picturesync)
http://photobucket.com (PhotoBucket)
http://flock.com (Flock Web 2.0 Browser, built on Firefox)

Unleash the Powers of Preview

Adobe Photoshop is a wonderful application that can do pretty much anything you need it to do and more. Apple’s iPhoto is great for simple editing and for organizing photos. But for a lot of uses they are both overkill, and you could use something a lot simpler. In your Applications folder resides a little program called Preview, which I’m sure you have all used at some point. What we’ll do in this article is take a look at what Preview can offer us in terms of simple editing and management of photos. We used the Mac OS X 10.5 version of Preview, so if you still run Mac OS X 10.4 your experience may be different.

Tools for editing
Although these tools are fairly basic, they can help you out in a pinch. In the Tools menu you find tools that can help you crop, resize, flip and rotate.

Adjust photos
This is borrowed straight from iPhoto. With the adjustment palette you can adjust exposure, brightness, contrast and more. This actually rivals expensive software and can take you quite a long way toward professional-level photo editing. If you don’t like to adjust things yourself, there’s even an “Auto levels” button that makes a guess as to how the photo can best be adjusted.

Remove backgrounds
You can even remove background areas from an image. From the Select tool drop-down, choose “Instant Alpha” to give it a try. This is the same feature you can find in iWork 08.

Batch process files
This is not something Preview can do on its own, but partner it with Automator and you have a formidable tool for batch processing photos. You can, for example, set up a workflow that automatically resizes photos to a specific size for easy emailing or publishing to the web.

Open PSD and EPS files
You may be unaware that Preview can open files in Photoshop PSD as well as EPS formats. This is very convenient if you happen to be sent a Photoshop file that you have to look at but don’t have the real application installed. So, just as TextEdit can be a savior for opening Word files, Preview can save the day for graphics files.

EXIF Information
The information your digital camera saves about your shots, you can see with Preview. You can see aperture, shutter speed, etc.

So next time you need to do something quick and easy to a photo, consider Preview. It may be just what you need.

by Magnus Nystedt

Quick Tip: Mosaic Screensaver

One of the most impressive new features in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is the Mosaic screensaver mode. My guess it’s made possible by the improvements in the Core modules that Apple has made in Leopard. This screensaver is pretty taxing on the computer. At lest my MacBook often fires up the fans when it is on. But it is one great conversation-starter. People want to know what that “cool thing” is. To turn it on, look in the Screensaver System Preference pane and select any of the picture modes on the list on the left. Then you will see a small button on the right that looks like a grid. Click it and you have the Mosaic mode. Basically Mac OS X will take a number of pictures and form them into a mosaic. It will then constantly zoom out of this picture to reveal the underlying mosaic that makes up the whole. The other pictures are being used to make up the different colors and shapes in a very impressive way. You may want to play around with what albums you include - some types of photos may work better than others. Also remember that if you use this screensaver in a public environment where others may see it, select your photos more carefully.

How To: Create an Encrypted Disk Image

A disk image is a file on your Mac’s hard drive that very much acts like if it was a regular disk that you can write to, read and delete things from, etc. Disk image files typically end with the “dmg” extension and are common in the Mac world, especially to distribute software on. But what we’re going to do in this brief “How to” is to create an encrypted disk image. This will be like a part of your hard drive that is password protected and which prevents access to what’s on the disk image.

STEP 1
Start Disk Utility (in the Applications > Utilities folder).

STEP 2
Click on “New Image”.

STEP 3
Type in the name of your new encrypted disk image.

STEP 4
Select the size of the disk image in the “Size” drop down menu. Select a predefined size or select “Custom” and enter your own size.

STEP 5
In the “Encryption” drop down menu, select “AES-128 (recommended)”. In Mac OS X 10.5 



Leopard you will also be able to select 256-bit AES encryption, which is slower but more secure than 128-bit.
STEP 6
In the “Format” drop down menu, make sure “read/write disk image” is selected. A “read/write” image will be of the size you select, whether it’s full of data or not. A “sparse image” will basically only take up the space of the data it holds. So if it’s largely empty it will not take up the full space. Personally I’ve had problems with sparse images in the past so out of habit I stay away from them and create only fixed-size disk images. Your experience may be different.

STEP 7
Click the “Create” button.

STEP 8
You will get asked for a password. Make sure it’s as long and random as possible. You may also want to take off the selection in the “Remember password” box so that others can’t just get into your new encrypted disk image if they get access to your computer.

STEP 9
You’re now ready to use your new encrypted disk image. You only need to mount it when you want to read from or write to it. If you really have something sensitive stored in the image, make sure you eject it once it’s used. If you leave it mounted, other users on your machine may get access to it if you stay logged in.

by Magnus Nystedt

May I have a word please? Remembering Leopard’s Heritage

Since this is our anniversary issue you would probably expect me to write about this significant event in this column. However, instead I thought I would discuss with you the big news - that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has been released. We’ve lived with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger for almost three years. Tiger was released in April 2005 and back then it was a major step up from Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Panther had followed on from Jaguar (10.2), Puma (10.1), and Cheetah (10.0). I don’t know how far back you go with Mac OS X but I first used Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah back in the summer of 2001, shortly before 10.1 Puma came out in September of the same year. Let’s be honest and recognize that those early versions were not really usable as production environments; they were incredibly buggy and unstable. It wasn’t really until 10.2 that Mac OS X became usable on a daily basis. But these early versions were so exciting for Mac users who had got tired of the OS 8 and 9 code base which was going nowhere fast, and also tired of Apple’s failed attempts at developing their own future OS in the Copland project. Remember that Mac OS X is based on NeXTSTEP (really OPENSTEP as it was called then) which Apple got as a part of their purchase of NeXT in 1997 (NeXT being the company Steve Jobs founded after he had left Apple in 1986). This means we have Mac OS X to thank for a lot of things. It’s at the core of why Apple is where it is today because it’s a critical part of what brought Steve Jobs back to Apple, which turned the company around after being close to going belly-up in the 1990s. Mac OS X is also at the core of some of Apple’s latest ventures; remember that Apple TV runs Mac OS X as does iPhone. It seems clear that Apple will be depending on Mac OS X in various products, not just Macs, for a long time to come.

by Magnus Nystedt

First Spots on the Leopard

Some time ago we got the chance to try the latest beta release from Apple of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It was the version released to developers at WWDC, which is supposed to be “feature complete”, according to Apple. Since then a more recent version has been released by Apple, but we’ve not had a change to check it out yet. We won’t be showing you any screen shots, because we don’t want to get into trouble with Apple, but we wanted to share our first reflections.

Leopard
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is due to be released next month (October) and we know that many are waiting with great anticipation for this new version of Apple’s operating system. It’s been delayed and although we officially don’t exactly know why, Apple said that the iPhone and Apple TV had consumed so much resources in terms of software engineering that something had to suffer.

Dock
The Dock is new, mostly it seems in appearance. Now it looks like the glass floor of a room, where the room reflects in it’s shiny surface. So windows and other things on the screen reflect in it. Personally I don’t like this as much as the old Dock, I find it even annoying. It’s also really hard to tell whether an application is running. What used to be a small black triangle is now a small shiny blue and blurry dot. This dot, depending on the application’s icon, can be hard to see.

Stacks
This seems like a feature I would use a lot. I don’t like a cluttered desktop but I often end up with one anyway. With Stacks I can put related files that normally are on the desktop in a sort of folder in the Dock and with one click, the files “slide” out of the Stack and I can select the one I want. This should make organizing files much easer and I look forward to using Stacks on a daily basis.

Menu bar
The menu bar is now translucent, so the background shines through. This takes some getting used to and I’ll see what I really think about it after using Leopard for an extensive period. My initial reaction is I don’t particularly like it. Related to the menu bar is that there is no more brushed metal look. Apple has decided to unify the Mac OS X look and it’s now all void of the brushed metal look we’ve grown so used to. All windows are now of the smooth gray type that we’ve seen in some recent Apple software. This is a change for the better I think. I like this look better and it’s good that Apple is trying to unify the interface.

Quick Look and PDF improvements
A new functionality is Quick Look which makes it easy to preview a wide range of file types, including Word. You right-click on a document, select “Quick look”, and you can preview document in a floating palette window. This promises to be a really useful addition to Leopard. There are new options when creating PDF files. In Leopard you can enter title, subject, keyword, and also set security options, like password for opening the PDF. Icons of documents can have a live preview of the actual content

Mail and iChat
Both Mail and iChat are getting updated. In iChat the big news are effects and remote presentations. You can show a KeyNote presentation or show photos to a remote Mac via iChat. In Mail the main news are personalized stationary, to-do lists and memos. Mail in Leopard promises to be a good PIM (Personal Information Management) tool.

Time Machine
Time Machine is a great new feature and arguably the one with the most potential to affect regular users in a positive way. Apple could have done it easier though. Let’s say you could right-click on a hard disk’s icon on the desktop, then choose “Enable Time Machine for this volume” or something. And then pick a destination. Now it’s an icon in the Dock that leads to a System Preference panel, which in itself is a bit confusing. I’ve never liked the mix of applications an preference panels in the Dock.

Spaces
This is cool and one feature that I predict I’ll use all the time. For me I see me setting up one space for web development, one for web browsing, one for email, etc. Keep related windows and applications in one space and switch easily between them. This functionality is not really something new and you can already before Leopard get it with third-party applications, but Apple’s implementation of Spaces is nicer than the other ones I’ve tried.

Final word
I’m excited about the upcoming Leopard release, but after trying the early version I’m a bit disappointed. It’s not as dramatically new as I would have anticipated. But I reserve to give my final judgement obviously until it’s officially out. Look out for a future review in shuffle once the Leopard has been let out of its cage.

Next Page »