Well after suffering for a long time with my quality eMac, my employer sprung for a new MBPro for me. Everything seems fine so far, allthough I have noticed some display issues. Now that I have a processor that can handle it, I have been using a bunch of new applications. I’ll try to get some reviews and links up in the coming days. Now check out this quality pic! (The camera I used was so old it stored the files on a floppy)

I recently had a situation where I need a dialog box to pop up and a certain web page to load whenever something was printed. This was pretty simple to do by scraping the CUPS error log. The command sed '$!d' /var/log/cups/error_log will return the last line of the log. By monitoring this last line, one can determine when a print job has been executed. Here are the key elements of the Applescript I used.

-- when the application opens, store the last line of the log as the variable old_entry
on run
     set old_entry to do shell script "sed '$!d' /var/log/cups/error_log" --intial value
end run
-- loop to compare the stored value old_entry with the current value
on idle
     set new_entry to do shell script "sed '$!d' /var/log//cups/error_log"
     -- Because the error log is written to more often than just when print jobs are executed, I had to add the "and" statement here.  I found that the last line added to the log when a job is printed is  "Started backend /usr/libexec/cups/backend/lpd"
     if old_entry is not new_entry and (new_entry as text) contains "Started backend /usr/libexec/cups/backend/lpd" then
          -- do stuff
     end if
     -- returning 1 waits one second until the loop re-executes
     return 1
end idle

I made this a stay open application, and using Drop Script Backgrounder, kept it out of the sight of my users. A big thanks for Jacques for his help and Macscripter.net. Here is the discussion thread.

MacWorld San Fransisco was kind of a strange one this year. Not so much about the Mac, but more about Apple, Inc. (yeah, they dropped “Computer”). First they introduced Apple TV. It’s cool. You can download content from the iTunes store right to your TV. You can also stream content from your computer. Movies, music, TV shows all from one spot. Now I don’t mind paying a buck or two to get the shows I want to watch, sans commercials, when I want to watch them. That’s great. However, until iTunes carries every show I want to watch I still need my Media Center to record shows. I am reluctant to add more hardware when what I have can do what AppleTV can do, albeit a little more complicated and much uglier. I see the market, but I’ll need it to be more feature rich. I am excited to see the advances in the Apple TV product line.

Next was a quiet release of the new Airport Extreme. The new extreme supports 802.11 draft-n, with twice the data rate and range of standard 802.11g signals. Apple adopted the mac mini form factor for the new airport, which was a good choice. The 6.5″ square white box has become an Apple signature. There are 3 10/100 network ports (where’s the 1000 Apple?) for wired devices. There is also a USB port that can be used to share a printer or turn any USB hard drive into NAS. Hopefully we will see PoE and gigabit interfaces soon with the new form factor.

Finally the iPhone. There was so much speculation on this one. Most of us thought we would either not see it, or it would be the mark of true Apple snobbery. Luckily, it’s here (kind of) and it is for everyone. The interface is very cool, centered on a touchscreen. This touchscreen solves one of the biggest problems with cell phones, static UI. When the buttons are truly dynamic, new functionality can be added and interface flow can be customized. The music, web, mail (free push IMAP!) and chat interfaces are very much OS X in appearance and hopefully performance. It seems that the iPhone handles voicemail much more logically. It appears VM’s are pushed to the phone instead of held on a cell provider’s server, allowing you to access each voicemail independently instead of having to go through 10 messages to listen to the 11th. This phone seems to be truly innovative, but you’ll have to wait until at least June ‘07 to get one.

Now the bad news. Can you use the iTunes content you have as a ringtone? Nope. Well that blows. All this technology and I have to go back to standard ringers? Ouch. Open development of widgets? Nope. Apple isn’t going to allow us to make widgets for the iPhone. Again, that blows. And finally, no VOIP. So definitely no Skype widget on this thing. These downsides probably don’t mean much to most people, but for something that has all these abilities, I hate to see these handicaps. I’ll still buy one and it will still be cool, but the overwhelming excitement I had when the iPhone was announced is gone. Someone once told me, “If you think something is too good to be true, it probably is.” That man was Gary Coleman. Maybe Todd Bridges. The 80’s was pretty much a blur.

Every year communication seems to get easier. Well maybe not, but it should right? Being a tech geek, I am pretty well connected. I can be reached with: AIM, Yahoo IM, Jabber IM, Skype IM, home phone, cell phone, work phone, SkypeIn phone, and countless email addresses. While that sounds ridiculous to some of you, it’s not as unusual as you think. Applications like Trillian do a good job of combining chat services, but what do you do about phone numbers? Enter my new favorite startup, GrandCentral.

GrandCentral’s tag line is “One Number…For Life”. And that is exactly what you get. When you sign up for an account, you get to pick a traditional phone number. It seems they have expanding coverage based on their blog, and I had no problem getting a number in my local area code. You then record your voicemail message (this will also become your only voicemail btw) and even upload and MP3 for people to listen to as a ringtone when they call your phone. Next you will add entries for each of your current phones. For me, I have my home phone, my cell and SkypeIN which I use (primarily) via my Sony Mylo. That’s it for setup. It took me 10 minutes to do, most of which was searching for the proper ringtone.

Now have someone call your new GrandCentral number. Since this is the first time they are calling from that number, they will be asked to record their name. (And a contact in the address book is automatically created!) Then all of your specified phones will ring (preserving their caller ID). You can pick up any of your phones and will get a message stating: “You have a call from..”, and the person’s recorded name. You can press 1 to answer the call, or send the call to voicemail. One of the premium services available during the beta period allows to you to send them to voicemail, and listen as they leave their message. You can press a key to interrupt the message and jump into the conversation. Awesome – call screening has officially gone high tech.

So let’s say you decide to answer your home phone and 10 minutes into the call you need to leave the house. Normally you would have to call the person back from your cell. With GrandCentral, just tell the caller to hold, press *, and your other phones will ring. Pick up your cell and continue the conversation.

Your voicemail notification comes via email, and the web interface is awesome. After using the beta for 2 days I am sold. I will be a life long customer. When I am at work, I have no cell signal and have to go VoIP with SkypeIN. When I am in the car, no VoIP so cell is the communicator of choice. And when I am at home, incoming calls are free so I might as well pick that phone up. Until now, everyone would call my cell at all times. I can’t expect them to keep my 3 numbers and know when to call which. Thank you GrandCentral. You have really made my life easier.

A couple suggestions for GrandCentral to tackle: (UPDATED based on reading their FAQs)

• Scheduling Options – Right now, all I can find is a checkbox that stops my home phone from ringing from 8a to 6p. What if I don’t work those hours? What if I want my home phone to ring from 5-6a, then my cell and my SkypeIN from 6-7a, etc. I’d bet that a cool little GUI could be made for this.
• Voicemail Notification Options – There seems to be SMS and email notification options. Personally, I’d prefer IMs. I use IM constantly, and have multiple applications notify me of things via IM. I’d imagine others would appreciate IM notifications as well.
• SMS forwarding – I’d hate to have to give out “one phone number” that didn’t forward the SMSs to my IM, cell phone, and/or email. (UPDATE – “We’re not compatible with standard text message services (yet), but it’s definitely on our road map.”)
• Number of rings based on device – I have an answering machine at home and voicemail on my cell. I don’t want them picking up the “You have a call from” calls and recording them. I also don’t want to set them to pickup for 10 rings, as people will still call me on those numbers. If I could specify how many rings for each of my devices I could avoid this entirely. (UPDATE – While I wouldn’t consider this a solution but more of a workaround, GrandCentral says: “GrandCentral will disconnect a call from your forwarding numbers after it is answered if no action (pressing 1, 2, 3 or 4) has been taken within 15 seconds. Therefore, to prevent the GrandCentral message from being recorded by your cell (or other) voicemail systems, all you have to do is record a voicemail greeting that is at least 15 seconds in length, before the beep.”)

An Integrated service for anyone to tackle:

I don’t want another address book. I don’t want to export mine from outlook. I don’t want to import mine into Thunderbird. I don’t want Gmail to try and build one for me. I want one that is easy to use and compatible with multiple devices. Think del.icio.us style. Let my phone automatically pull my contacts down from the internet. Let my computer do that too. And let me provide account info so GrandCentral can do it. Let me right-click any email address and add it as a contact with a contextual menu. Same with a phone number. I now have one app for IM and one phone number. One address book please. I am willing to put work on this project if someone else is willing to be the primary. People will use this. Google do you hear me?