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I flew today just up and around the Puget Sound region, and my broadband connection came with me. I was invited with other journalists to take a trip in the Connexion by Boeing test plane, a craft equipped with Boeing's high-speed, in-flight broadband service that's currently available only on a handful of Lufthansa jets, but which mostly Asian and European airlines should start rolling out later this year and into the next.

Connexion by Boeing uses a satellite transceiver that's mounted on the plane's top on a gimbal controlled by on-board electronics that allow from 5 to 20 Mbps of download bandwidth and up to 1 Mbps of upload. On the test flight, we had 1 Mbps down and 128 Kbps up.

The flight was unbelievably gorgeous: Washington looks great from the air. We could practically touch Mt. Rainier, with just 2,500 feet of lateral and 3,000 feet of vertical distance as we flew around it, and likewise Mt. Adams.

But the view on board was quite good, too. I was able to use iChat AV and an iSight to push video to my dad (his iSight wasn't hooked up), video both ways with Adam Engst (his audio is screwy), and audio and video with Jeff Carlson (I could barely hear him and he heard the loud airplane noise). (I was inspired by an Apple employee who used this on a Lufthansa flight.)

I was also able to make some test voice over IP calls, but the airplane noise was too much: I tried a noise-cancellation headset that the Connexion folks had with a Wi-Fi telephone they were testing, and it was extraordinarily clear and with low latency: better than a cell phone in many respects.

The idea with Connexion is to reclaim lost time on long flights that businesspeople take -- typically over the Pacific or Atlantic, or trans-Polar. The cost will be from $10 to $35 depending on how much time you want to use and how long the flight is. The test flight is awfully convincing that having broadband in the air will be a compelling use of technology.

And, interestingly, the noise-canceling headset almost forces you to talk more quietly because it pushes some of the microphone input back into the headphone: I was talking at what I thought was an above-normal voice, and my seatmate said he could barely hear me.

adam-ichat-screen

cx_seat

plane_engine_connx

As much as I'm capable of getting around via the Unix command line, I won't pretend I'm fluent or comfortable in that environment. Usually, I just spend some time figuring out the command syntax and all the obscure little switches, then record it in NoteBook so I don't have to go through the process again if I don't remember everything the next time I need the command.

In that process of learning how to express a particular Unix command, I rely, like everyone else, on the Unix man pages. Just type "man commandName" at the command line and you're presented with documentation that at least approximates helpful information.

Unfortunately, since the man command uses another Unix tool called less to display the information, if the man information fills more than a screen, you can't easily scroll back up in the Terminal window to refer back to something at the beginning. Although, you can of course scroll around in less itself using the d and u keys - refer to the man page for less for details - I prefer to stick to Macintosh programs and interface conventions whenever possible. I also find myself jumping in and out of a particular man page while I'm figuring out a command, at least until I realize I'm doing and open another Terminal window.

So, if you're like me, and occasionally need to refer to a man page but are annoyed by the user experience of working with man pages in a Terminal window, check out Carl Lindberg's ManOpen 2.4, which is a free Mac OS X application for viewing man pages in normal Macintosh windows. It's a simple program, but has a number of useful features, including:

http://www.clindberg.org/projects/ManOpen.html

A list of all available man pages, presented both as one big list and broken up into a number of categories. This is helpful if you're not exactly sure which man page you need and want to browse through the possibilities.

An Apropos menu item that lets you search across all available man pages. If you're really not sure which man page you want, the Apropos command can help you narrow the choices.

A nice remapping of Command-O from Open File (which opens any text file) to Open Man Page, which lets you just type the name of the man page you want to open.

A hierarchical Open Recent menu that lists the man pages you've examined recently.

A button in every window that, when clicked, tries to open a man page whose name corresponds with the selected text. Since a lot of man pages contain a See Also section listing related man pages, this button simplifies the task of following cross-references.

A basic Find function that finds specified text within the open window, which is quite handy on longer man pages.

A Unix command line utility called openman that you can use at the command line to open man pages in ManOpen. Since you're often working at the command line when you think of referring to a man page, it can be more convenient to use the openman command than to launch ManOpen manually from the Finder.

As much as I appreciate how ManOpen improves the experience of working with man pages, there's plenty of room for improvement, should anyone be interested in working with the source code that Carl Lindberg provides. A few thoughts:

I'd like to see ManOpen automatically build links for words in man pages that correspond to the names of other man pages. That would make moving around within the document space of the man pages even easier.

It would also be nice if URLs were made clickable in the man page text; this is apparently already the case in the OpenStep version of ManOpen.

A drawer listing all the commands, with controls to switch between the full alphabetical list and a disclosure triangle-enabled categorized list would make browsing the list of man pages easier.

Including a permanent Search field at the top of every window would simplify the process of searching within an open man page window.

Although you can change the font and set the window size for new windows, ManOpen could be smarter about making sure the window is large enough to display its contents.

Despite these desires, ManOpen is plenty useful in its current incarnation, and I've installed it everywhere I find myself using man pages. It's a great example of how using a graphical interface can improve the Unix experience for those who aren't completely comfortable at the command line.

Since starting Take Control, I've been doing a lot more HTML work, and I'm continually struck by how often I want to maintain little chunks of text. Perhaps I want to copy the same bit of code from one file into a number of others, or perhaps I'm trying to see what a page looks like with and without certain text. When I'm working on actual HTML files in BBEdit, I have multiple Undos that help, but much of my work takes place in eSellerate's Web interface, where the text editing features are limited to what my Web browser provides (pretty good with OmniWeb, but barely acceptable with Safari). And no matter which environment I'm in, I find myself wanting to stash bits of HTML away, just in case I want to use them later. In cases where I really expect to reuse the code, I toss it into NoteBook, where I can be certain I won't lose it.

But a lot of the time, I'm saving a few lines not because I really think I'll need them, but as a backup, just in case I'm actually making a mistake by deleting them. There are of course a myriad ways to save a few lines, ranging from a text clipping to NoteBook to a temporary text file saved on my Desktop, but they're all too much work for the value of the text in question. What I want is something that protects me from deleting potentially useful HTML code without making me change my working habits at all.

I was lamenting this need while talking with Julian Miller of Script Software not long ago, and he said, "But that's exactly what CopyPaste does!" He was of course right, and I hadn't been thinking about CopyPaste in the context of saving bits of text because it was categorized in my mind as a multiple clipboard utility, something I seldom need in my everyday work. (Matt Neuburg has written about CopyPaste several times for TidBITS.) But CopyPaste also features a Clip Recorder that tracks everything you cut or copy. I immediately downloaded and installed CopyPaste X, set it to store the last 200 things I cut or copy, and promptly forgot about it.

http://www.scriptsoftware.com/copypaste/ http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00751 http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07078

A few days later, I was working on a procedure to import eSellerate order files into a test database managed by Panorama, ProVue's long-standing database. Once I'd assured myself that the procedure worked properly, I needed to copy it over to my production database, but in the middle was distracted by email and overwrote the contents of my clipboard. I was initially irritated with myself, since although I could have recovered the text, it was going to be a few minutes of unnecessary work, but then I remembered CopyPaste's Clip Recorder. And indeed, it had saved the copy I had initially intended to paste into my production database. A click on the appropriate line in the Clip Recorder Palette and my procedure was back in the clipboard and ready to paste.

Frankly, this is really cool, since all I have to do to make sure that some bit of text doesn't disappear forever after being deleted is to use Cut rather than the Delete key. It will eventually roll off the end of my 200-entry list of copied items, of course, but I'm unlikely to remember I cut or copied something more than a day or two after the fact.

CopyPaste has a plethora of other features, of course, and even though I still haven't found myself needing multiple clipboards (I have occasionally used Nisus Writer Classic's multiple clipboards as part of macros over the years), and although I was happy to restrict my use to the Clip Recorder, I just found another useful one. In moderating TidBITS Talk, I sometimes end up with a post that lacks proper email quoting. That happened just today, and as I was grimly setting about the task of inserting all those angle brackets, I remembered that CopyPaste had an Email Quote function. I selected the text in OmniWeb's text editing window (moderation of TidBITS Talk takes place via a Web browser now, since it's Web Crossing functionality), Control-clicked it, and chose E-mail Quote from the CopyPaste Tools menu.

I could get to like CopyPaste. CopyPaste X 2.0 for Mac OS X costs $30 shareware, the reduced feature CopyPaste Lite for Mac OS X is only $15. And for those people feeling left behind in the move to Mac OS X, there's a free version of CopyPaste that works in Mac OS 9, along with another that works in Windows ($20).

Apple's iTunes Music Store may be the current 800-pound gorilla of the online music industry (as far as paid downloads are concerned), but now Yahoo - possibly the most visited site on the Internet - is getting into the fray, paying $160 million in cash for MusicMatch, a Windows-only online music service.

Yahoo already offers an free online streaming audio service (called LAUNCHcast; it works with Windows and (badly) with Mac OS 9; Mac OS X has never been supported) which features user-defined stations with major label artists as well as independent artists from places like GarageBand.com. By acquiring MusicMatch, Yahoo gets an online music service with:

• a 700,000 song catalog (compare to 1 million songs for iTunes, 500,000 for the preview of MSN Music, and 700,000 for Rhapsody and Real Music Store)
  
  
• songs for sale at $0.99
  
  
• an $8/month subscription online radio service lets customers listen to any song in the MusicMatch library
  
  
• MusicMatch Jukebox, a highly-regarded jukebox application (Windows-only!) which supports many portable digital music players (but not the iPod!). One of the key things about MusicMatch Jukebox is that it makes it trivially easy to purchase a song you hear via one of its stations.

MusicMatch is privately held, but it has about 170 employees and its annual revenue is estimated at about $50 million. MusicMatch's all-you-can-eat music service has about a quarter million subscribers. Yahoo expects the acquisition to increase its online music audience from about 13 million people to nearly 24 million people by the end of the year.

I think there are a couple take-away points from the acquisition. One is that Yahoo isn't so much trying to compete with Apple's iTunes Music Store as gain a leg up on other Internet entry points - Google, MSN, AOL - by offering both digital music downloads and a streaming music service.

The second is that, if Apple wants to keep the iTunes Music Store vital, it needs to offer some sort of online streaming audio service (for free and/or on a paid subscription model) and make it simple for users to purchase tracks they hear on the streams. Further, if Apple wants to keep innovating with the iPod (and justify its never-declining sticker price!) it may have to look back to the days of transistor radios. Remember, Apple was the company which brought wireless networking to the masses. Can the day really be that far off when iPods sport wireless 802.11-whatever technology and are capable of tuning in online audio streams from your base station - or from hotspots in your neighborhood, your school, and your favorite coffee shop?

Ovolab's Phlink is a USB device that plugs into your phone line and, when bolstered by the Phlink software for Mac OS X, enables all sorts of fun telephony-related functions triggered by receiving a call. The recently released Phlink 1.5 adds a particularly cool and welcome feature that I've been wanting for a while - network caller ID, where a copy of Phlink running on a Mac connected to the Phlink device broadcasts caller ID information (you must have that service from your local phone company) for incoming calls to all other Macs running the Phlink software on the local network.

http://www.ovolab.com/phlink/

It's a brilliant feature, and in my limited testing so far, seems to work fine. The only confusing part of it is that the Phlink software erroneously implies, during installation, that it won't work without a Phlink device attached. One solution might be to have Phlink ask if it should install in minimal, network caller ID notification-only mode, if it doesn't detect a Phlink device during initial setup. As far as I can tell right now, the network caller ID notification is limited to a transparent window that appears and then disappears; the remote copy of Phlink doesn't seem to log the fact that a call came in or perform any actions based on the remote notification.

The primary competition for Phlink is Parliant's PhoneValet, which offers a roughly similar set of features, though PhoneValet doesn't yet have network caller ID notification.

http://www.parliant.com/ http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07380

One of my favorite graphics suites, CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT (see TidBITS 457), after years of undeservedly lukewarm public reception, having been recently updated to version 11, finally had its Mac development cut off in January. I thought this was the end of road - but not quite! Creative Essentials, a new package of graphics software assembled by Allume (formerly Aladdin), is a great opportunity for folks to obtain the Corel software at the jaw-droppingly low price of $150. Just bear in mind that bugs won't be fixed. Oh, and do use the fastest computer you can find, since the program can be a little sluggish. (This would go great with that iMac G5, wouldn't it?)

As if that weren't enough, Creative Essentials includes the 3-D landscape painter Bryce 5 and entitles you to upgrade pricing on the next version. (Corel also killed off Bryce, having acquired it from MetaCreations; now it has been picked up by DAZ Productions, who are actively developing it.) It also includes Toon Boom Studio Express, an animation tool, along with upgrade pricing for the full Toom Boom Studio. Plus it's got 25 Bitstream fonts.

Those of you who have been around for a decade or so probably remember Easy View, Akif Eyler's free text browsing utility. Easy View understood a number of text formats, including the setext format that we use for the text edition of TidBITS, and provided a three-pane view into TidBITS. One pane listed issues, the second listed articles in an issue, and the third large pane displayed the actual text of the article. Alas, Akif moved on to other things, and although he donated the source of Easy View to anyone who wanted to update it, nothing ever came of it.

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbtxt=Easy%20View%20Akif

Now, however, Kevin LaCoste of ZenVilla Software has released XBit 1.0, an Easy View-like utility that provides a triple-pane approach to viewing the setext issues of TidBITS. Although XBit doesn't have some of Easy View's flexibility in indexing multiple formats, it uses a better pane display, can mark articles and issues as read so you can keep track of your progress, and most importantly, it can download new issues from our FTP server automatically. XBit can search inside an article, but not across multiple articles.

http://zenvilla.com/

XBit isn't free; Kevin's charging $10 until 10-Sep-04 and $15 after that. You can download a fully functional, non-expiring demo. To be clear, I have no trouble with Kevin charging for this utility; he's not making money from TidBITS itself (which would be a no-no), and he developed XBit entirely on his own with no help or input from us. I don't know that there's much of a market for XBit, given all the other ways people can receive, read, and search TidBITS, but that's Kevin's concern. I do need to make clear up front that I can't guarantee we'll continue to use the setext format or provide issues for download via FTP indefinitely, although Kevin will always be able to access whatever public services we do provide just like everyone else. Still, if you're a fan of browsing text collections offline in a dedicated program, XBit is worth a quick look.

Who knew action figures were such a thing in the Mac world? After last week's opening of Microsoft's action figure sweepstakes, I was amused to hear about the DealMac Project, in which an action figure called the Mini iLeader (nominally a tiny Steve Jobs, I think) is sent from one member of the dealmac forum to another every few weeks. Each person takes pictures of the little guy and posts pictures of him to the forum before sending him on to someone else - some of the pictures are a hoot (he's even been photographed with Duran Duran).

Late yesterday, Apple released AirPort Driver Update 2004-08-31 (a 758K download, and also available via Software Update). It improves reliablity on networks with mixed 802.11b (AirPort) and 802.11g (AirPort Extreme) signals. The direct upshot, I'm happy to report, is that it's solved audio dropouts I was hearing when streaming music to an AirPort Express.

At home, I have an AirPort Extreme Base Station connected to my DSL modem. All of my Macs connect via AirPort, so when the AirPort Express was released, I had high hopes that it would be my solution for playing music in the living room. Before the update, I was only able to get solid playback by setting the AirPort Extreme's Mode setting to 802.11b Only. Now, I have it set back to 802.11b/g Compatible and am hearing no audio stutters.

Looking at the technical specifications of the G5 iMac, I see the usual dichotomy between Apple's desire to put a lot of power on the desktop and its attempts to differentiate between its Power Mac and iMac lines.

The G5 iMac comes with a fast G5 processor, a fast front-side bus, and supports fast memory. It even has 7200 rpm drives by default. But it only ships with 256 Mb of RAM, 10/100 Mbps (not gigabit) Ethernet, and FireWire 400.

It's obviously an attempt to trim costs: 512 Mb would add at least $100 to the retail price. Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire 800 would probably boost the price by $50 to $75. And the extended video support for another monitor (which Adam notes wanting below) is probably another $75 to $100 to include.