Plex and its alternatives

However, due to a number of reasons, as of lately I am hooked to a brilliant open source Media Center initiative that is unique to Mac OS X called Plex. Triggered by my new Harmony One remote, of which I wrote in great detail in my former post, I had a closer look at the Plex software because of its unique capability to work brilliantly with the Harmony, bypassing many of the limitations of the 6-button Apple Remote. And what I found was that this software greatly enhances my TV watching choices, and on top doing so in a slick and very well designed manner. The reason for my shift? Online content.

Plex is derived from the well-known XBMC media center initiative. This open source project aims to provide a rich media interface for a number of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and even a number of modified game consoles, like the X-Box that gave the project its name. Since its inception, a number of independent new projects have derived from XBMC, so called “forks’. A well known XBMC-offspring is Boxee, available for a large number of platforms, including the Mac and even AppleTV.

I do think however that Plex fits my needs best, for a number of reasons. For starters, the project is focused solely at Mac OS X. While this is no guarantee that it is better than any of the others, my experience with multi-platform projects that get compiled for various operating systems, is that they generally do not support the features unique to that OS (have a look at OpenOffice or even Firefox to see what I mean). In Plex, we find this OS X specific behaviour in its integration with local and network-located iTunes and iPhoto libraries, among others. Plex easily works with these program’s naming conventions, albums and events, keywords and ratings, to name a few.

The modular video plug-in approach

But what really makes Plex special to me, is its very modular approach to watching online video. Although a lot of media center software supports the playback of Internet video in some way or another, Plex offers a plug-in structure that allows developers to create a hook into the software to support practically every video service out there. And because the software is running on a “generic” computer, it is not limited in any technical way to only support specific codecs or streaming formats, as is the case with proprietary media players (like the AppleTV). Plex provides a consistent wrapper around the video (including Windows Media, Quicktime, Flash, or heaven forbid even Silverlight), and plays it back in full screen, with its own on-screen information displays and user controls.

What really strikes me is the effort that the Plex developers have made to make the addition of new plugins to video sites as easy as possible. For this, they have added an App Store, as explained in this short video. Just select any of the available content sources, and install with one click. And just what kind of video sources are there to choose from? This ranges from the CNet technology videos and live video feed from TWIT, to TV series available for online viewing like South Park and The Daily Show. Of couse I found that having these videos available to me on my TV screen, selectable using my remote control, makes me much more willing to watch them compared to viewing them on my desktop computer.

Access to media from other people

But Plex not only lets you connect to any of these video services on the Internet, it can also use the network connection to access the media libraries from your friends. What’s more, your friends don’t even need to run Plex or any other media server software, as among many of the protocols supported by plex is plain old FTP. When simply allowed FTP access to the folders containing media files like movies, music and pictures, you can easily browse all content from your friend using Plex and the remote, and stream the video directly to your screen (even over FTP!). No lenghty download or any manual configuration is required.

I tried this with my friend, who has quite a large video collection stored on his home server, mainly to provide video content for his kids. Some of the videos were in iPod resolution, others were full HD transfers. We found my 10 Mbit/sec internet connection to be sufficient for streaming these 1080p videos to my Mac mini, however an occasional hickup did occure. Our best guest is that these minor problems could be resolved by allowing a greater buffer to be filled before starting playback of the video. All in all, having access to other’s media libraries also greatly enhances my viewing opportunities.

Superb control using the Harmony One remote

The whole interface of Plex is designed to be operated using a remote control. It works out of the box with the Apple Remote. Being a standard accessory for some Macs, or a $19 option from Apple, this forms an affordable option for most people to control the software.

However, the Apple Remote, originally designed for use with Apple’s Front Row software which offers far more basic user interface, quickly becomes limited. With its 6 buttons, navigation is not always easy, as it involves longer key presses to initiate different commands, and still then cannot offer access to many different functions at once. What’s worse, Apple designed the infrared receivers in its Macs to just receive commands from an Apple Remote, the receivers wouldn’t work with any other remote.

But here comes in the very clever thinking on the part of both the team resposible for Plex, as of Logitech. They utilize the fact that a single Mac can be paired with up to 6 remotes, each being able to uniquely identify itself to the computer. By programming all commands of these individual remotes into a single new remote, and by mapping the “keep pressed” state of the buttons to seperate buttons as well, several dozens of infrared commands can be send to the Mac.

For this to work, Logitech co-operated with the Plex team and created a new device called “Plex” in their online database of devices, so that it can easily be added to a Harmony remote, such as my Harmony One. There is no need to do any additional programming to the remote, apart from the normal customzing to make it fit your needs.

Using the Harmony remote with Plex gives you instant and always available access to things like bringing up the on-screen info display, transport controls (play/pause/search), navigation controls, aspect ratio selection, etc. But one of the best examples of the fine integration between the Harmony remote and the Plex software can be found when browsing long lists (for example with TV show episodes). By clicking any of the number buttons, you immediately jump to the letter assigned with that button (SMS-style, the letters are also printed on the Harmony remotes). Needless to say, this greatly improves operation, and makes the Plex software a breeze to use.

Getting access to Hulu and iPlayer using VPN

Those in the US, and to a lesser extend the UK, are blessed with an innovative and competitive market place in the field of video distribution over the Internet. Hulu, a joint-operation of NBC and Fox, is a very popular site that offers access to literally hundreds of TV shows and thousands of episodes, ranging from decades old sitcoms like Alf, Knight Rider and Who’s the Boss, up until recently aired material from such hit shows like Heroes, 24, ER, The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad and The Office. In the UK, the BBC offers a similar service for its content trough a service called iPlayer.

There is one major catch, however. Hulu and iPlayer are not available to viewers from outside the US and the UK, respectively. The services determine your location based on your IP address, and provideyou with a message indicating that you cannot play the video because your watching from an unsanctioned area.

Luckily, there is a way around this. It does involve some skills, but getting access to this wealth of TV programming makes it more than worth the effort. In order to get approval from the video site to play the video, you need to visit using a valid IP address. There are services out there, usually requesting a small monthly fee, that can access the sites with a valid IP address, and then redirect the data to you. This technology is called VPN, or Virtual Private Network, and is commonly used to set up a tunnel to a company’s network for employees accessing this network while on the move.

I used the service from a company called UKiVPN, which costs about 6 Euros per month with a 1 year membership. They provide both a number of US-based IP adresses, as well as several UK-based addresses. They provide easy installation instructions, which require no additional software at all, as all the VPN stuff that is needed is already built into Mac OS X. Enterting your details and connecting the VPN is all that is needed to let Hulu and iPlayer do their tricks.

The finishing touch: VPN selection from the remote

Selecting the appropriate VPN connection, or closing the VPN connection again, would normally require you to close Plex, as the software does not have any VPN-features built-in. This would be cumbersome, as you probably would need the mouse and keyboard to do so, making things unpractical in a media center setup.

Luckily, and due to some very clever trickery from people on the Plex forums, I managed to completely control my VPN connections using the remote, and get some notification feedback on screen to boon.

For this trick to work you have to create an AppleScript for each of the VPN connections, that start the connection when it is not yet active, or disconnect from it when it was active. Then, you can assign these AppleScripts to the function keys within Plex. And since all function keys are available from within the “Plex” device in the Logitech Harmony software, you can assign these function keys to a button on the remote. In my case, using the Harmony One, I have created two virtual buttons on the remote’s touch display, called “VPN UK” and “VPN US”, that let me simply select either one directly from within Plex.

But how to make sure that the VPN connection was established? Since Plex is unaware of any VPN business that’s going on behind the scenes, it cannot tell. Well, even for this the clever guys on the forum came up with a solution. Simply install Growl, the well known universal notification system for Mac OS X, and let Growl display a “VPN UK connetion established” window on top of Plex after the connection is initiated by pressing the appropriate button on the remote.

Brilliant. (As far a hackery and home-brew media center customization go, that is!)

This listing ranges from handy, but very focussed system add-ons and utilities, to full-blown productivity tools. They are presented in no particular order.

MenuCalendarClock (free / $19.95)
One of the first tools I install on a new Mac that I configure for friends and family. The tool replaces the standard clock in the menu bar, and adds two major features: it shows the full date next to the time, and it shows a month calendar once clicked. You can’t imagine how valuable this tool becomes once you get used to it. Just quickly looking up the date of a particular day becomes a snap. The registered (and paid-for) version adds highlights to the calendar view showing your iCal appointments.

Mail Unread Menu (free)
This one is about as basic as it gets. As a plugin to Apple’s Mail, it shows the number of unread messages against a red blob in the menu bar. The read blob disappears when there are no unread messages. Although you get the same info from looking at the badge of Mail’s dock icon, the menu bar blob is much to spot from a distance. When I am sitting on my couch, I can easily see the read blob appear, while the dock’s icons remain crowdy and indistintable from that distance. A gem!

Smultron (free)
Smultron is an advanced, yet clean looking editor for plain text files, such a HTML documents or programming code. I use it to edit some web sites. I really like Smultron’s Leopard-like interface, its minimalist buttons, and its powerfull editing and search tools. Furthermore, like any good editor, Smultron recognizes the type of file that is loaded, and applies coloring to the various pieces of the text, to make it easy to quickly identify variables, parameters, etc.

CyberDuck (free)
Although I do onw a license of the $29 Transmit, I still prefer CyberDuck as my FTP client. Again, it’s the more minimalist interface that I’m drawn to. Apart from the basic FTP functionality, CyberDuck can instantly edit a file on a server without the manual download/upload process. I must admit however that some cranky web servers that I unfortunately have to work on from time to time are sometimes refused by CyberDuck, but opened fine by Transmit. So I will keep a copy of that around.

AppZapper ($12.95)
Us Mac people keep telling that all we need to do in order to remove an application is drop it in the trash. This might be true to the extend that in Windows, deleting individual files from a program might cause serious trouble, and leaves behind entries in the system’s registry that slows down its operation. Truth is, Mac application also leave some stuff behind when deleted, although these XML-files generally take up very little space and don’t harm the system. One might even argue that leaving them there makes it easier to restore your settings when you re-install the app. Nevertheless, I use AppZapper to quickly erase all the files associated with a program that I want to remove. As I like a clean system.

1Password ($39.95)
These days, we have a lot of passwords, codes and numbers to remember. Let alone, managing the problem of securely writing them down. 1Password takes care of a lot of password stress, as it integrates with all your browsers and synchronises between them and as such allows you to use stronger, harder to remember passwords. However, I don’t use 1Password’s browser integration at all. Instead, I solely use it to store my site logins, passwords, user IDs, software license codes, etc., and manage them in a fashioned order. Biggest argument for me however is the 1Password iPhone companion (free), which securely stores all the information from the desktop version, so that I have all my passwords with me whereever I go.

SuperSync ($25)
As you can read in my post How I put my Mac mini server to use from last December, I have struggled for a while with the problem to keep my iTunes library from my iMac (which I use to manage and add music) in sync with the Mac mini (which I use to play back music in my living room). I have tried a lot of them, hoping that in an ideal situation, such a tool could take care of things without any user intervention. It were those “automatic” tools however that caused a lot of problems. SuperSync needs to run on both machines and manually activated to start the sync process, however it does this without any issues. I use Leopard’s screen sharing to operate the Mac mini from the iMac, so that I can still use one machine to do the trick. I am still looking for a more elegant solution, however.

Simplify Media (free)
Using Simplify Media, you can share your iTunes music with up to 30 of your friends who also run this program. Once configured and running, Simplify Media completely stays out of your way, and instead shows your friend’s music libraries under the “Shared” heading in iTunes. Brilliant. But what’s more, the Simplify Media iPhone app ($3.99) allows you to listen to not only your own shared music, but to your friend’s as well. This allows you to have access to multiple gigabytes of media, without needing to store them on your iPhone or iPod touch.

More iChat icons / More iChat effects (free)
iChat is already the best-in-class instant messaging application (if only more people in Europe would ditch the god awfull Microsoft Messenger and switch to an AIM-compatible client). It already provides a lot of visual effects, but after installing these, you get several dozen more. Guaranteed to add to the enjoyment of video chats with children (ah, who am I kidding, it adds fun for the rest of us as well). Similarly, the extra icons and smileys add to the number of ways you can express yourself in a text chat. But take caution: your IM partner needs to have those icons installed as well in order to see them (yes, I know, MS Messenger solved this problem more elegantly). Only use them with people whose configuration you know (or have set up).

Perian (free)
Do yourself a favor, and install the Perian preference panel. It will install nearly every audio and video codec known to man in QuickTime (except from the proprietary Windows Media codecs, whose WM Quicktime plugin is seperately available). Once you encounter a Divx, Vidx, FLV, AVI or Dolby file, you are sure you can enjoy its contents.

Quinn and Solitare XL (both free)
These are the only two games I ever play on my Mac. Usually to keep myself busy while listening to the ending of a podcast that I started when I was out and about. Both games are very visually appealing, which means half of the relaxation to me already! Quinn, a Tetris-clone, has had some legal issues in the past couple of years with the Tetris Company. Last year, its website featured the brilliant line “A game that, according to the Tetris Company, should not be named”. Solitare XL is like the Solitare game on Windows, but then done right (that is, with customizable card backdrops, and smooth animations).

Twitterific ($14.95)
My favorite Twitter client at the moment for but one reason: The others are worse. Twitterific is very Mac-like, has a nice, minimalist and transparent look to quickly show you your new tweets. However, it lacks simple things like showing the time a tweet was posted, or view the in-reply-to message in a discussion. Most irritating thing to me is that it shows your own tweet as “new”, once it does its 3 minute-interval of checking for new messages. However, it looks the best of the bunch and has the easiest interface. On the iPhone, however, Tweetie ($2.99) is by far my favorite. I consider it vastly superior to Twitterific, so I hope that they consider a Mac desktop version in the future.

Onyx and Secrets (both free)
Two tools for Mac OS X power users, that both allow them to tweak every tweakable setting on the system. Onyx is a long-time respected stand-alone tool, while Secrets installs itself as a preference pane. The latter one can also automatically download new secret settings once they are discovered.

There was of course one other company, which thought up a business model that was rather different. This company solely devoted itself to developing only the operating system, which it would license to any hardware manufacturer that was willing to pay for it. Obviously, this company’s flagship product, MS-DOS, became rather popular and soon evolved into the defacto standard for computer operating software. Although the system was among the least advanced of all operating software efforts of that time, as a result of not capable of doing much advanced stuff it required inexpensive hardware to run on. This quickly lead to a huge growth in sales, and hence in the availability of third party sofware. Microsoft laid the groundworks of its imperium, and formed the foundation for spin-offs of their popular DOS operating system in the form of its many Windows iterations. The companies that sold these DOS- and Windows-compatible computers (increasingly refered to as “PCs”) basically had no possibilities to differentiate themselves from their competitors on other things but price.

The general public quickly embraced this world of interchangeable, compatible and low priced computers, which in less than a decade lead to the fall of all computer companies that sticked with their proprietary hardware and software combinations. Most went bankrupt, in many cases after a short while of trying to jump on this PC bandwagon themselves. All companies, but one. Only Apple kept faitfull to its idea that a computer product is more than a generic piece of hardware equiped with a generic operating system. To them, the combination was more than the sum of its parts: by ingeniously crafting the hardware and software to work as tightly integrated as possible, they kept themselves alive in a world where all of their competitors had long given up.

Microsoft invented the “operating system as an OEM-product” and “operating system as an after market product” propositions, and became so successfull with it, that roughly 9 out of 10 of the world’s current computers run an iteration of their operating software. It is interesting to note however, that Microsoft is the only company that I know of which markets a proprietary, in-house developed operating system to third party hardware vendors. There is no other company that does the same thing (I don’t count the various Linux-distributions of recent years, as they are not developed by a single company nor marketed on the terms of a single company).

Because 90% of the world’s computers run an operating system that was not developed by the company that made the computer hardware, many people became familiar with the Microsoft business model. So much, in fact, that they began to believe that this practice (letting one company create the hardware and another one the software) is the only valid and ethical way of doing business in the computer world. They completely ignore the fact that, in the view of others, in order to present a customer with a complete and polished user experience, the hardware and software should not be seen as individual parts that can obtained from anyone, but rather as an integrated product developed by a single group of people.

In today’s world, Apple is the only major player left which markets its computer products based on this principle. This is a rather perplex finding on its own, as one would imagine that other companies would see the competitive benefits of developing and marketing their own fully in-house designed computer product. Alas, a practice that was common in the 70s and 80s has now died out, with the sole possible exception of that little company in Cupertino, California. Apart from some exceptions in its past (mainly during the period of Steve Jobs’s absence), it never sold computers with an operating system it did not develop itself, nor did it sell its operating system to other hardware manufacturers. This strategy makes Apple unique in the world, and proved to be very, very successfull for the company, both in terms of money (Apple is one of the richest computer companies) and product quality and user experience (Apple is generally considered to deliver the most well-crafted pieces of computer equipment in the industry).

However, as I said, many companies have grown so accustomed to the Microsoft-model of independent hardware and operating software sales, that they feel that Apple should do the same with their Mac OS X system: license it to other hardware companies. Of course, this would totally abandon Apple’s one and foremost advantage over its competitors. First, it would make their line of Macintosh-computers lose their prime unique selling point, and second, it would force them to create software to run on the wide variety of hardware platforms so that they would have to give up on the advantage of “knowing your system” to take maximum advantage of it. In short it would lead to an inferior product from both a commercial as well as a quality point of view.

It makes me wonder what people are thinking when they suggest that opening up OS X to other companies would benefit Apple, as it obviously would only lead to the problems that I stated above. However, what really hits me is when people say that Apple “has no right” to “keep its OS to itself”. It saddens me that those people have such a short term memory in that they forgot that combining hardware and software was common practice, until that one company successfully changed this idea. The Microsoft-way of thinking became so dominant that they now blame other companies, with other strategies, for not following Microsoft’s example.

I often think of other industries when discussing this issue. When I buy a car from the Ford Motor Company, I have no choice but to buy a completed product. I cannot “demand” from Ford to deliver me just the chassis of the car, since I inted to buy the engine from Renault and the wind shields from Volvo. If Ford, Renault and Volvo decide not to market individual pieces from their vehicles so that I can assemble my own car, I just have to respect that. Everybody undestands this.

But even in a slighly more computer-related comparison: What if I would ask Nintendo to deliver me the operating software from their Wii console, so that I could run Wii titles on the hardware of my liking? Or what if I like the menus and interface of my Philips TV, so I ask the company to sell me the software so that I could implement it in my Sony TV?

Almost everybody would understand that it’s up to the manufacturer of a product to decide whether or not they want to sell parts of their products individually, or just as a complete end product. And almost everybody would respect this company’s decision. However, due to the Microsoft doctrine, many people seem to believe that this does not hold true for a computer company and its hardware and software components.

And now, partly due to the fact that Apple switched to Intel-architecture in their computers several years ago, we have arrived at a time when several small startup companies are trying to bend public opinion and legal clarification to their benefit by selling computers bundled with the Mac OS X operating system.

Apple explicitly sells OS X retail copies for users of Apple branded Macintosh computers to upgrade their OS to the latest version, and it states this requirement in the End User License Agreement (EULA) that comes with the OS X product. Some of these companies argue that, at least according to EU legislation (which often tends to favor the consumer), a company cannot restrict what a customer can do with a product after he or she has bought it. In other words: When someone legally buys a retail copy of Mac OS X, he should be able to with it whatever he wants, including installing it on non-Apple hardware.

Although the verdict is still out on the legal value of these claims (both in the US with Psystar as the main vendor of Mac-clones, and in the EU with the new contender PearC from Germany), it got me thinking. If the fact that Mac OS X is sold as a boxed retail copy in the stores is in fact a large contributor to the believe of these companies that they can bundle these lawfully obtained DVDs with their non-Apple products, then why wouldn’t Apple simply stop selling OS X as a physical product trough retail?

The next version of the Mac OS, called Snow Leopard, will be a strange duck anyway. It is merely considered an upgrade to the current Leopard system. It will include a lot of under the hood optimizations to benefit from the current multi-core CPUs and the increasing, but often idle power of a systems graphics processor, as well as better integration with Microsoft Exchange servers, but it offers little to no “visible” new end user features. As a result, there has been a lot of debate in the Mac community on how Apple should sell this new version to its customers. Most agree that the usual upgrade fee of $129 is probably to much to ask for in this case. Should Snow Leopard be a free upgrade, of perhaps sell for a less than the usual fee? As Snow Leopard will most likely break the current pricing tradition, why not break with another tradition as well: the boxed retail version.

In this day and age, most people have a fast internet connection, so that it would be easy to deliver the upgrade over the wires. Most Apple customers already have an Apple ID for usage with the iTunes and App Stores, so the payment infrastructure for a digital delivery of Snow Leopard is already largely in place. And even if a user, for one reason or another, is unable or unwilling to download the entire upgrade over the Internet, Apple could set up a mail delivery program so that after the online payment is made, a user could request a DVD to be delivered to his house for a small handling fee. Compare this to the exchange program that Apple had in place for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, where users could requests CDs instead of the DVD that was in the box, in case they had no DVD drive.

In any way, this would eliminate the sale of the next version of Mac OS X to people who do not yet own a Mac computer. As a result, there is simply no way for Mac cloning companies to bundle a legally obtained retail copy of Mac OS X with their computers.

When done right, this should not harm sales. Every potential buyer of a Mac OS X retail pack already owns a Mac, so in essence every potential sale can be treated as an “upgrade” from the version that is currently installed on the Mac (please note the huge benefit that Apple has in this respect due to its combined hardware/software business model). And even the in-store impulse buy can be taken care of by selling “upgrade packs” that essentially contain nothing more than an authorization code to initiate the download (comparable to the current retail box for Apple’s MobileMe service). Just don’t put a DVD in a box that might give others the false idea of freedom to do with it whatever they want, such as bundling it with non-Apple hardware.

Please note that I fully understand that this would not impact the home tinkering of users trying to install Mac OS X on their PCs. These so-called “Hackintosh” projects will surely keep existing. However, also in these cases it is important to note that there is no way these users could have legally obtained a copy of OS X to run on these unauthorized machines, as OS X would simply no longer be available as an after-market product. This would make Apple’s case much stronger should it come to a court battle. But I think that this is not as much of a concern for Apple as is the sale of computers pre-equipped with Mac OS X. A court decision in favor of these companies completely destroys the entire business model that the company has built in 30+ years, with obvious dramatic effects.

Snow Leopard will bring some interesting times. Not only will it advance the world’s most innovative computing platform to yet again unseen levels of user satisfaction. I also think that Snow Leopard will mark an entirely new way for Apple to distribute major upgrades of its OS to its customers.

iPhoto offers a lot of very, very neat features. Its ways to quickly browse trough thousands of images it impressive. You can quickly “skim” over a group of pictures by rolling your mouse over the image that represents the group, resuling in a quick glance of all the pictures that are in it. Besides these image viewing and organizing features, iPhoto offers a lot of other neat functions, like the ability to quickly publish photos to an online MobileMe gallery, sharing pictures to and from other users on your local network, perform simple image correction tools, directly order printed materials like photo books, and the creation of very nice and sophisticated slide shows.

But most importantly perhaps, iPhoto is deeply integrated into the Mac OS X experience, and as a result into a lot of other applications. Every program on the Mac that allows you to do something with an image (such as adding an image to a web page in iWeb or pasting a picture in a Word document) generally offers you access to OS X’s media browser, directly showing you thumbnails from iPhoto, ordered in the same way as they are ordered in iPhoto itself. Furthermore, the iPhoto library directly syncs to the iPod and iPhone, and is available for viewing from Apple’s media playback application Front Row.

The latest version, iPhoto ’09, adds even more compelling functionality to this mix. It offers face detection and recognition, allowing you to identify who’s on a picture so you could later make selections of pictures for viewing or other purposes, based on who’s on them! Another new feature allows iPhoto to look for geographical information stored in the picture files by cameras (and phones) that contain GPS hardware, and let you select images based on the location where they were taken. If the pictures don’t contain this geodata, you can easily enter this information by hand.

Clearly, there are a lot of reasons to choose iPhoto as your primary image management tool. However, there is one little thing that has kept me for a long time from giving in to using iPhoto. It does not allow me to order my files in folders on my harddrive in a structure that I myself defined. Everytime a picture is placed in iPhoto, it is copied to iPhoto’s internal library. These photo files are not (easily) reachable in the file system. This wouldn’t be that bad if iPhoto itself offered me the possibility to create folders, subfolders and event names, and order my pictures in exactly the way that makes me happy. Instead, iPhoto creates “events”, which are essentially day-based time frames of pictures, and puts all these events on the same level. There is no way to structurize these events into sub groups, like “holidays” or “birthdays”. If you do a lot of shooting at very different occasions, you find that being able to categorize your pictures is absolutely necessary.

And yes, I know that I can instruct iPhoto not to copy the pictures from their original location into its library, but in that case iPhoto is still not able to take this folder structure into account. It will still show all “events” at the same level, essentially eliminating the need for iPhoto. And the “albums” that you can create only offer dynamic links to pictures that are stored in an “event”, so for example deleting a picture from an album still does not alter the image in the original “event”, so there is no way to keep an event in a folder without risking “sync” issues.

Compare this to how iTunes works. All the music in iTunes is ordered into a hierargy that is several levels deep. First there’s the music genre, then the artist’s name, then the album’s name, and finally the song’s title. What’s even better: Once you select “Keep iTunes music folder organized” in iTunes’s preferences, the program will automatically create folders based on the artist’s name, and folders within those folders based on the album’s title. Naturally, the actual music files are placed within that final folder, and the file even gets the name of the song. It serves both need that I have when organizing my music on my computer: it neatly displays my songs in a structured way in a very nice music playback application, and it offers me quick access to my song files should I need those files for one purpose or another. I don’t have to do a thing to get this result: just popping in a CD and copying its contents to iTunes makes this music immediately available in both iTunes and in my file system

I want the same for my pictures. Why not give iPhoto a “browser” similar to iTunes, and let me put event into categories (compare to genres), and even sub categories (compare to artist), and let me select my pictures that way. And when I downloaded the pictures from a memory card and assigned them to their appropriate destination in iPhoto, I want the files to be placed in a similarly named set of folders on my hard drive. I want both quick and convenient access to my pictures in iPhoto and every other program that supports the media manager, and I want to get quick access to my photo files in the file system, should I want to.

One could even go as far as thinking of adding iPhoto-esque functionality directly into the Finder. Think of being able to make “smart folders” in OS X based on iPhoto’s face and location indexing. When I’m in a folder that contains pictures, why not add a couple of buttons to the Finder window’s button bar that allow me to view a slide show or publish them to my online photo libraries (doesn’t Windows do this kind of “context sensitive” buttoning in the file explorer?).

Back to my personal sitution. Last year, I moved all of my photos into iPhoto, well aware of its limitations, trying to convince myself that the advantages should outweight my loss of manual ordering of files. It was hard. I kept looking at the MobileMe galleries, iPhoto’s impressive slide shows and the convenience of always having my 10 latest events on my iPhone. But I was very much waiting for the imminent release of iPhoto ’09, hoping that it would add some iTunes functionality.

But it didn’t. Now that I have played for some time with the new face recognition features, and the nice geotagging capabilities, I decided that this was not enough. Perhaps I am an organizational control freak, who’s unwilling to give up his traditional ways of working. Anyway, very soon I will begin transfering my iPhoto pictures back into folders of my choosing, becoming reliable of OS X’s Preview app again. Apple’s way of doing pictures sadly turned out not to be my way.

Trading up to a Mac to use as my server gave me a lot of other advantages (apart from no longer having to keep a Windows system safe and secure), the most obvious being Apple’s excellent integration. Now, I can far more easily take over the server’s screen from my work-iMac, it is automatically backed up, it contains the same passwords for apps and website as my work machine, and it offers some other advantages all of which will be explained below in this article.

My Windows server was located in an unused room in my house, due to its ugly appearance, but most of all because of the sound generated by its fans. When the Mac mini came, silent as it is, my friend Martijn suggested to put it in the living room next to my entertainment equipment, “because it is too beautiful to hide away”. As always, he was right. We soon realised that by placing the Mac mini next to my TV and amplifier, and due to the “allways on” nature of a server, it could also be used for other purposes more focused on delivering audio and video content.

In this article, I want to give you an overview of all the things that I use my Mac mini for. Partly to inspire others, but mainly because I hope that readers will inspire me by giving me suggestions on how to even better put the machine to work.

Online services

The Mac mini’s main purpose is to act as a server, giving me access to various kinds of data from my working machine iMac, my MacBook, my iPhone, and even from any other computer (at a friend’s, client’s or a public PC) by means of various web access possibilities. Let me show you what online services I have running:

• Mail
  The Mac mini’s main purpose is to act as a mail server for me, my girlfriend and even some other close friends and relatives. For this, I use Kerio Mailserver, which is an excellent mail and groupware server. It is fully compatible with Microsoft Exchange, meaning that any client that is comptible with Exchange (like the iPhone) can fully benefit from all of its features. And all of this at a fraction of the costs and complexity involved with running an Exchange server (the most important, of course, being that Exchange only runs on a dedicated Microsoft server OS). It also offers an excellent web interface, meaning that I can not only browse trough all of my e-mail on my iMac, MacBook and iPhone, but also on any Internet-connected computer in the world. Running your own mail server offers many advantages, but to me the most important of them are the fact that all of my e-mails (including the all the messages that I sent) are always available whenever I need to look something up, followed by the fact that message status (like read or unread, or the replies I sent) is always in sync no matter what computer or device I use. My advice in case you are unable or unwilling to set up your own server is to at least upgrade to an IMAP e-mail account (like Google’s Gmail). These days we use our home computer, our phone and for example our employer’s PC to access our e-mail, and not having synced these up is a real pain.
• Group Calendaring
  The same Kerio Mailserver software also holds my calendar, and that of my girlfriend. Being Exchange-compatible, it is always in sync with iCal on my Macs and with my iPhone. My girlfriend and I have access to each other’s calendar, and because of the push-technology built into the iPhone OS, the phone always shows up to date information. The minute I enter an appointment in my phone, she can see it on her’s. This has proven a godgift to us, as it allows us to make appointments where-ever we happen to be and immediately see if the other is busy that time or not (either to plan individual appointments on the date that the other one is also busy, and thus increasing the chance that we can spend other times together, or to plan events that we both like to attend). Let’s call it modern family-management!
• Contacts Management
  Finally, Kerio Mailserver of course also takes care of our contacts management. Not only does it keep all of my contacts data (like phone numbers and e-mail addresses) in sync between my own devices, it also allows us to share some contacts with each other. When I am somewhere and someone informs me that their phone number has changed, I can edit this information on my iPhone, which immediately syncs it to the server, and hence to my girlfriend’s iPhone. Neat, huh?
• FTP
  As Mac OS X includes FTP services right out of the box, it is not that hard to imagine that a Mac mini server can also be used to act as a file server to others. I need an FTP server for a client of mine to upload large documents for me to include on one of the web sites that I manage. However, configuring the FTP services of OS X can be limited or confusing. This is where the free PureFTPd Manager comes in. It allows you to configure things like setting up user accounts and accessability rights. Once done, PureFTPd Manager does not need to be running anymore, as it simply configures the built-in FTP deamon of OS X.
• Webcam
  As I told you before, the Mac mini is located in my living room, which motivated me to connect a webcam to it, pointing at the stairs that lead to my city’s beautifull gothic church, which is right in front of my house. For this I use the Evocam software, as it has many nice options such as superimposing a title or date over the webcam’s image, and best of all: it includes an integrated webserver, hence there’s no need to upload webcam images to a server or something. As the view trough my window is not that spectacular, I have not publicly announced my webcam, it is merely there for myself to have a peek once in a while when abroad. Have a look at the cam at www.stikkehezel.com (Stikke Hezel being the name of my street).
• Simplify Media
  As the Mac mini also contains my entire music library (covered in more detail later), I might as well make this music accessible to myself when I’m out of the house. This is what Simplify Media does. It allows you to access your library of music on any other computer that has the Simplify Media software installed with my login credentials. It also allows up to 30 friends to be set up as being able to access your music. But best of all, its creators have also created a Simplify iPhone app, which allows me to access all of my music through my iPhone. As my music collection is several times larger than the iPhone’s entire storage capacity, this comes in very handy at times.

Maintenance of the server

There are several “meta” services running on the Mac mini, allowing me to easily access and maintain my server, and allow others to do so.

• Dynamic DNS
  As I am connected to the internet via my local cable ISP, my IP address might change from time to time. This makes it very difficult to access my server from another device or computer. Luckily, this can be solved by using a “dynamic DNS” client. Such a client contstantly monitors my IP address, links it to an easy to remember domain name, and updates this domain information whenever my IP address changes. The best known company to offer this service is DynDNS.org. Most cable and ADSL routers allow for the DynDNS client to run in the router itself, however as the ones from Apple do not (and I use a Time Capsule as my router), I need to run the free DynDNS Client on the Mac mini.
• Screen Sharing
  Starting with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple has included excellent and easy means of accessing another computer’s screen on your network. All of the local machines show up in the Finder, and it is just a matter of selecting one of them and choosing Share Screen. The Mac mini’s display is shown on my working iMac as if I was sitting just in front of it. This means that no keyboard, mouse or even display needs to be connected to the server.
• Remote Management
  As my friend Martijn has multitudes more knowledge of maintaining Mac servers and all of their installed services (being the owner of an independent software company who does all of the system maintenance himself), it is very handy that I can let him perform upgrades and troubleshooting directly from his office. He is using Apple’s Remote Desktop software, the receiver’s end (in this case my Mac mini) does not need to have additional software installed as it is all part of Mac OS X.
• Statistics on iPhone
  I recently installed iStat server on my Mac mini, which enables me to use the iStat iPhone application to remotely inspect my server’s CPU and memory usage, disk space, network activity, internal temperatures and fan speeds. It gives me a clue of the server’s health while on the road. If only the program allowed me to see running OS X processes, or even let me kill or restart them, iStat would become the ideal server management app. (Yes, of course could use a VNC client on the iPhone to take over the mini’s screen, but that’s rill rather cumbersome on the iPhone’s small screen.)

Audio and video media services

As stated above, the initial reason to put the Mac mini in my living room instead of in the unused room in my home that previously housed the Windows server, was an eastetical one. However, as it was sitting there right next to my entertainment equipment, I could just as well connect it to my 37″ HDTV and audiosystem. Let me start by saying that I have never consumed movies from a computer. I do not download pirated movies (in part because of the hassle involved and the dubious quality of the videos, let alone some ethical issues that I have with it). I’m from a generation that still buys DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. That’s not to say that for my music consumption, daily usage has long since migrated to accessing my library from a computer and related peripherals. Let’s take a look at how I use my Mac mini as a home entertainment extension.

• iTunes synchronization
  My iMac is my main working computer. I also manage my music on this machine, as it allows me to easily connect it to my iPhone and sync music and podcasts over to it. And I have easy access to its CD drive to import new music. When I want to use the Mac mini to play my music independently, my library someway has to be stored on that computer as well. This process gave me some real headaches in the past. Simply assigning the Mac mini as the storage volume for my iMac library does not allow the iTunes on that same Mac mini to access and play this music by itself. Therefore, I needed to sync the iMac and Mac mini music libraries. After having tried various tools and methods, I am currently using SuperSync. It runs on all the computers you want to sync, and can check against more than 2 computers for “missing music”. For now, this allows me to easily port my music to the Mac mini. But if there are readers out there who might have a better solution (I’m still looking to automate this process in the background of both the iMac and the Mac mini), then I am more than willing to learn from them.
• iPhone Remote and Airport Express
  One of the beauties of having my music on my Mac mini is that I can play it back trough the connected amplifier without the need for turning on a display. This can be done trough Apple’s free Remote application for the iPhone. It shows a complete listing of all the artists, albums and songs on the iPhone’s screen, just as it would with the iPod application, and then allows you to select the music you want to hear. How’s that for convenience: choosing music from the comfort of your couch without a distracting computer display or television. What’s more: the remote app also let’s you select other playback devices that support iTunes’ AirTunes feature, such as an Airport Express. Since I have one of those set up in my kitchen, connected to a powered pair of speakers, I can choose what music to listen to even when I’m doing the dishes or cooking.
• MediaCentral
  Mac OS X Leopard comes with a very nice media playback utility that can be used with the bundled Apple Remote called FrontRow. However, FrontRow is limited to accessing music and video from iTunes and iPhoto. If you want to do a little more, you need to look out for a replacement. I found one in Equinux’s MediaCentral. Apart from all of the functionality of FrontRow, it can play back video content from the Internet (such as YouTube and a large selection of movie trailers) and offers a lot of other features, most of which I don’t use (such as the recording functionality when you connect a TV-tuner stick, effectively turning your Mac into a Tivo or PVR).
• Google Earth
  The most effective app for showing off a large high definition TV. ’nuff said.

Not everything is on this server

There are some services and applications that in theory could be handled by the Mac mini as a server setup, however for some reasons I choose not to do so. Mostly because other devices do these things themselves, or in a more effective way. Let me summarize.

• Backing up using Time Capsule
  I have not set up the Mac mini as a local file server or backup machine. As I use Apple’s Time Capsule as my network router, I use its internal 500GB harddisk drive in conjuction with Mac OS X’s Time Machine functionality. This means that all of my Macs (including the Mac mini) are automatically backed up every hour. In case of a disk failure in either the server or the Time Capsule, there is (hopefully) still one current copy left. I prefer the tight system-wide integration of Time Machine over other backup solutions, and since Time Machine currently does not allow backups being made to anything other than a local disk or a disk connected to an Apple router, I do not use the Mac mini as a backup server.
• MobileMe for web hosting and syncing
  Although I could use the built-in Apache web server of Mac OS X on the Mac mini to host my personal web sites, I choose not to do so. Instead, I have put my sites (such as Kennis Consultancy and Overstappen naar Mac) on my MobileMe account. For one, as I make them with Apple’s iWeb software, it is literally just a one-click process to put the site updates online. But furthermore, I realize that my ISP’s uplink spead is probably not high enough to serve websites in an expected fashion. Furthermore, I use MobileMe’s excellent synchronization functions that are so well integrated into Mac OS X to keep my system’s keychain (containing all the passwords for applications, networks, websites, and others), as well as my Safari bookmarks in sync between all my Macs and my iPhone. Please note: If you for whatever reason plan not to set up your own server, at least make sure to get MobileMe, as it offers some very neat mail/calendar/contacts functionality as well!
• Printer has integrated server
  My color laser printer has an integrated print server built-in (as do most decent printers these days), which means that I do not have to connect the printer to the Mac mini server and still being able to print to it from all computers. As a minor detail I’d like to add that the USB printer connectivity on Apple’s router devices is merely a “remote printing” functionality instead of a true spooling print server, which might give unexpected results when printing to it from different computers at once (but, I admit, the chances of this happening in a household are almost absent).

As I hopefully made clear in this article, there are many reasons to add one of those low-cost Mac mini’s to your system as a multi-purpose allways one solution. It can surely benefit your computing experience, especially when you have multiple computers and iPhones, or when you need access to your mail, calendar, contacts, music, FTP or webcam when away from your house. And when you plan on enhancing the computer experience for multiple people instead of just yourself, a dedicated server becomes almost a no-brainer.

Update 1/25: Added a portion about the iStat iPhone app under the heading Maintenance of the server.

For me as an Apple-enthousiast, this is a good thing. The more people who jump on the Apple bandwagon (either by using an iPod, an iPhone or a Mac), the better. I have explained this before in a previous post: more users means more income for Apple, which might spend even greater amounts on R&D than it does today, resulting in even more an better products for us to enjoy.

I think the growth of Apple’s market share is the direct result of more and more people recognizing the benefits of using its products: its extremely easy to use user inteface, its gorgeous software design, but most of all, the way everything is designed to work seamlessly together, from the hardware to the operating system to its core applications to its web services and now even to its companion devices like the iPhone.

There is only one single company in the entire world that offers its computers as completely in-house designed products: both hardware and software are designed by the same people. This is completely the opposite to how all other computer manufacturer’s work. They buy a generic operating system (which in 99% of the cases is Microsoft Windows), and build a PC using generic parts to run this OS. This leaves them very little room to differentiate themselves from each other, which generally comes done to competition purely on price.

For a lot of people, this is not a problem. To them, a computer is a device that shows a button labelled “Start” at the bottom left corner of the screen, and which has an icon in the shape of a blue letter E to represent “the Internet”. Most people are not aware of the meaning of the term operating system, let alone knowing that there are alternatives available to choose from. Therefore, it is no wonder that these people will compare PCs on hardware specs, having various brochures lying side-by-side to determine where they can get the most megahertzes, megabytes and megapixels for the buck. Not that they know what these numbers actually mean, or if or how they actually represent an increase in ease of use or productivity, but its an easy thing to compare bare numbers for anyone who has finished elementary school.

However, there seems to be an increasing number of consumers becoming aware of the fact that there might be an alternative to yet another PC from the local supermarket running Microsoft Windows. Apple is gaining enormous momentum, and I will be the last one to deny that this is in part due to the popularity of its other products, the iPod and the iPhone.

Like I said, I can only welcome those who are switching their computer experience to the Mac. The more souls, the marrier. But there is one thing that really, really annoys me in this regard. There are still far more people out there who have not yet experience the benefits of the Mac in particular and the Apple eco-system in general, and some of these people are quick to declare that Apple users “fell for the hype” to buy “overpriced products”. If there’s one thing that insults me as a Mac user, it is the fact that some people accuse me to have choosen my daily computing experience to make a “fashion statement” !

It is true that Apple has generated an enormous hype around its products. And yes, the company excels in its marketing efforts. However, this still does not mean that its products aren’t far superior to what anyone else in the industry has to offer.

Let’s reverse the “overpriced” sentiment for a second. Yes, Apple products are generally more expensive than those of other PC vendors, however instead of seeing this as “being fooled into buying expensive, over-hyped products”, one could also argue that Apple is in a unique position not having to compete on price alone. As the sole company to offer computers with this unique integrated design of hardware, operating system and application software, it has no need to. And exactly the fact that Apple doesn’t need to try to sqeeze out every possible Dollar of the design process, makes that its products can offer a sense of quality that no-one else can match. Apple doesn’t have to re-think a good design of a latch that closes a laptop just because a competitor made a quality trade-off at this point and offers an inferior, but cheaper design. Other PC vendors do have to take this into account, as after all, price is about the only thing they can offer the consumer as the reason to choose them. In contrast: Apple knows that its customers value good design and excellent engineering over a bargain, and hence it is able to produce its one of kind class of products.

This brings up the question: Why is there only one Apple? Why is there not a single other company in the entire world that designs its own hardware and software to work extremely well together, and offer this as an integrated end product to the customer? I would kill for another company like Apple. More competition would result in even better products, right?

However, reality quickly points me to the facts that it is one lucky combination of owning the right technologies for the last 3 decades, having the brilliant visionary of the company’s CEO and most of all: operating the company based on a proven corporate culture. No other company would be able to develop a new dedicated operating system to run on its own dedicated hardware, at least not within a time frame that makes economical sense. It’s funny to see that in the 70s and early 80s, it was common practice for computer companies to write their own operating systems for their hardware. Only Apple remained doing so in a world that became aquintanced to the model introduced by Microsoft some 25 years ago: get your software from one company, and your hardware from the other.

So there are some pretty rational explanations as to why people love using their Apple products. But this leaves one unanswered issue: What about the pretty fanatical appreciation, or in some cases even worshipping, of the company, its CEO and its products? I think this is easy to explain. As most people know, Apple had a hard time competing with Microsoft and the PC vendors in the late 80s and during the 90s. During this period, most Mac users felt the need to explain more often why they choose to work on such a “strange” machine, instead of using Windows like everyone else. People who feel like being forced to the wall in general respond more explicitly when having to defend their choices. Nowadays, the Mac market share is large enough not needing to be “defensed” anymore, however there is some pro-Apple behaviour that quickly becomes part of most people using Apple products. I think that most of this is largely “tongue in cheek”. I found that most Apple users have a great sense of humor and in general they have the great ability not to take themselves too seriously. There is no place on the Internet where there are so many jokes being made about Apple fanaticism as within the Apple community itself. Examples range from people replying to news posts that “just the announcement of this new update of Apple software makes my machine feel more snappier” to the great comics of the Joy of Tech web site.

So to summarize: Yes, Apple operates a great and successfull marketing machine. No, this does not influence their ability to market the most well crafted products of the industry. Yes, we Mac users do know of the Apple “cult”, and most of us are perfectly able to put ourselves into perspective. No, I do not use Apple products to make a fashion statement, I choose them because I want to enjoy the best computer products I can get.

Despite the generic sounding name, DisplayPort is a new standardized connector and protocol designed to connect computers to digital displays. It was developed by VESA, a group of companies working on defining various display-related technologies since the Super VGA era in the 80s.

In many respects, DisplayPort is a competitive technology to DVI and HDMI. The DisplayPort group claims various technical advantages over DVI, such as the protocol being packet based (similar to the TCP/IP protocol that is driving the Internet and most other networks), it is scalable so that it can be enhanced in the future without breaking compatibility, and it can daisy-chain multiple displays over 1 connector at the computer’s end. Most importantly, they claim lower cost, due to the lack of a step-in fee (like the $10,000 required for HDMI). And because of technical reasons that go beyond the scope of this blog and certainly my technical expertise, it requires less components in a display monitor, as the digital video format can be sent directly to the LCD panel, further reducing cost.

However, most of these improvements are bearly real advantages to general users, and I expect more political reasons to be the real motivator fot its supporters to push this standard over the DVI and HDMI conntectors. A different share of the IP fees and licensing are more likely reasons.

What does this all mean for the consumer? Well, for starters it is yet another connector bus, meaning new cables and connectors. DisplayPort connectors on a computer can optionally carry a DVI (and even VGA) signal as well, officially called Multimode by the DisplayPort group. This means that by attaching a suitable adapter (which might be a bit expansive, as some voltage level adjustment is needed to convert the signal), you can connect such a Multimode DisplayPort connector to your standard DVI, HDMI or VGA display. Thankfully, the new Apple notebooks offer such a port, so that you can still use your existing displays. Note however, that Multimode is not required by the spec, so some DisplayPort computers cannot be connected to non-DisplayPort monitors. Due to the higher bandwith of DisplayPort compared to DVI and by using the slightly more expansive adapter cable, all of the new MacBooks (including the 13″) can now even drive dual-link DVI displays, such as Apple’s big 30″ Cinema Display, up to 2560×1600 resolutions. Apple sells all the adapters.

Another thing to bear in mind is that such a converting adapter can be used to connect a DisplayPort computer to a non-DisplayPort display, but that such adapter are not available the other way around, as far as I could find out. This means that Apple’s new 24″ LED Cinema Display can not be connected to any of its computers other than the new 13″ and 15″ MacBooks, and this November’s new MacBook Air. I’m sure this will generate a lot of confusion, especially since Apple is not clearly stating this lack of legacy compatibility on its web site. I do think however that all of Apple’s computers (including the iMac, Mac Pro and whatever will finally succeed the aging Mac mini) will move over to DisplayPort in the near future.

And finally, it is worthy to note that Apple is using a conector they dubbed Mini DisplayPort. This is different from the standard DisplayPort connectors that are being advocated by VESA. For now, it is unclear whether this Mini variant is an Apple propetary option, or a format proposed by the DisplayPort group. In the past, the Mini DVI and Micro DVI ports (the latter of which only ever was used on the first generation MacBook Air) were also Apple inventions, and required an adapter to connect to a standard DVI port.

Let’s hope that DisplayPort will eventually be worth the hassle of introducing yet another connection method, that is only partly compatible with older equipment, and which will for sure generate a lot of confusion in the market place. Some manufacturer’s are also jumping on the DisplayPort bandwagon, including Dell, Lenovo and Nvidia, but by completely replacing the former connectors with this new one on all of its new laptops, Apple is making the boldest move. Then again, Apple has done things like this before, like abandoning serial, parallel and SCSI ports in favour of that new standard called USB when they introduced the first iMac in 1998. And we know how the popularity of that connection method eventually turned out.

Update December 1, 2008: Mini DisplayPort indeed seems to be an Apple development, however the company has announced that they will license the specification for free to other manufacturers willing to incorporate it into their products.