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Drug trafficker gets 20 years thanks to emails he never sent
A UK man has been convicted of 20 years for drug trafficking conspiracy thanks to Yahoo emails in draft he thought were deleted, according to Motherboard. While already in jail, Russell Knaggs devised a scheme to have an accomplice write a draft email and save, but not send it. Another partner located in Colombia would then read the draft, delete it, and write another in reply. The idea was to avoid sending emails that could be seen by cops, but the traffickers didn't realize that Yahoo keeps the deleted drafts for a long period of time.
Reflow: A music composition and notation app for Mac and iOS with iCloud sync
Reflow for Mac (US$19) and iOS ($5.99) is a tool that makes composition and practice of music easier. A few weeks ago you may have seen TUAW's Editor-in-chief Victor Agreda, Jr. interview Sébastien Bourgeois, creator of Reflow, in our Origin Stories series. The interview spiked my curiosity about the app, so I took a closer look. While there are some great music notation apps out there for Mac (Tabular) and iOS (Weezic), what caught my attention about Reflow is that it supports both Mac and iOS. Plus, Reflow takes advantage of the latest Mac OS X and iCloud sync features. Let's say you're composing a song in Reflow on the Mac. Reflow (which supports fullscreen mode) will automatically save your work as you progress with autosave. And if things take an unsurprising turn, simply engage versions (just like you would in Pages, for example) and go back to the last iteration of your work that suits you best to carry on from. Finally, Reflow takes advantage of iCloud support, meaning you can be working on the Mac one minute and switch over to your iPhone or iPad and carry on where you left off the next. These simple features make a huge difference to the creative process by letting you focus on the music. But all of these great features would be meaningless if Reflow didn't have the basics to make a fantastic music notation app. Fortunately, it does. The app's beautifully simple interface lets you build multi-track (guitars, bass, keyboards, drums) compositions with musical notation or tablature. It's as easy as clicking or typing in a note or beat, playing on a MIDI keyboard or, for guitarists, dragging and dropping chords in from the extensive chord diagram database. Of course, you can create your own chords, too. Furthermore, Reflow gives you an audio representation of your work using a lightweight audio engine, so you have a great idea of what your composition will sound like before the real players step in. And you can modify and edit your work during playback. Reflow also lets you build and re-arrange your own song structures, so if you suddenly decide the intro sounds better as a middle-eight, just drag it over. Finally, Reflow also supports Guitar Pro and Power Tab files for import. Export your compositions in Guitar Pro, PDF, Wave and MIDI files, or share by email. For songwriters and composers looking to write for a typical band, Reflow has all the tools you'll need. But where Reflow stands above the rest is in its creative process and workflow. With iCloud support, Reflow allows you to transition work seamlessly between Mac or iOS and takes the worry out of saving your work as well as going back through previous versions.
This is the Modem World: Please fix two things
Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology. We can all agree that technology is pretty cool. It allows us to communicate with one another, entertain ourselves, meet new people, learn new things and even find love and health. We love to discover new technologies, see it do amazing things and get a glimpse of the future. We, the early adopters, are pioneers, beta testers and happy to be first in line. This is all good. But despite our hammering, our pleas and our shouts from the tops of the greatest blogs we know, some bad things just don't change. When I say "bad things," I'm talking about two annoying little facts of technology that, in my opinion, don't need to be so painful. These are things we can and should fix. Perhaps we're not heard loudly enough, or perhaps the technology isn't there to fix what we want, or maybe the manufacturers have better things to do. Whatever it is, let's list those things out here, perhaps so that some engineer or product designer will read this and think, "Why, yes... Yes. I should fix this."
Lion's Auto Save vs. Save As
Apple's OS X Lion introduced Auto Save, and eliminated the Save As feature from several apps as a result. Not everyone is happy about the switch, including Pierre at Betalogue: I have already talked about the totally unnecessary (in my view) elimination of the 'Save As...' command in Apple applications, including the iWork suite. The 'Duplicate' command that replaces it is simply not a good enough replacement, and the change irremediably breaks well-established workflows that cannot be adapted to the new command." Amen, Pierre. He goes on to illustrate the various stumbling blocks that Auto Save and its Duplicate feature introduced. It's worth a read. [Via Daring Fireball]
Mac 101: Locating the root path of a Pages document in Pages
Here is a Mac 101 tip for novice Mac users. Running Pages in Mac OS X Lion means you never have to worry about saving a document, it just happens automatically. While this is wonderful, this new feature has caused me to scratch my head a few times while I acclimatise to this simple, but quite different way of saving documents. In previous versions of Mac OS X, when working on a document, very often I would hit "Save as..." from the File menu to (double) check where I had saved my document or to rename my document as it went through various titles. The problem I've found with Versions and Auto Save in Lion (or where I've struggled to adjust!) is that once you've created and titled a document by saving it, you're left with "Save a Version," which means you can't locate where you've saved your document or rename the title of your document from within Pages. Fortunately, there's an older feature of Mac OS X that helps you easily identify where you've saved your document. And I'm not talking about going to Finder or Spotlight to search for it. You can view the root path of your document right from within Pages. Simply hit and hold the Control key on your keyboard (or right-click on your mouse) and click on the title of your document at the top of the Pages window. This will bring up the root path of your document so you can easily see where you document is stored on your computer. Note that you must aim carefully when clicking on the menu bar. If you're in an app that supports Versions, a click on the right-hand side will reveal the Versions menu, and that's not what we want in this instance. If you see the disclosure triangle appear beneath your cursor, move a few pixels to the left.
Emulate Lion's Versions in Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word does not support Lion's "Versions" feature yet, but there's no reason to panic. There are a few options that you can use to cobble together a work- around until the Mac BU team updates the Office suite. Also worth mentioning: although I am focusing on Microsoft Word, the same technique can be used in just about any word processing or text editing application. "Does the app provide any auto-save settings?" The first thing to check is whether the application that you are using offers any auto-save or auto-recover options, even if it doesn't support Versions specifically. Microsoft Word offers two auto-save options. To find them, launch Word, then go to Preferences -> Save and check the options shown below: The middle underlined option is the most important: it says to save auto-recover information every minute. I think the default is every 10 minutes, but a lot can change in 10 minutes. The top checkbox is optional, but creating a backup means that you have another way to recover if something goes wrong. Options never hurt. These backups are stored in the same directory as the original, and the filenames end in "~" which is a long-standing convention for backup file names. The third is also optional, but personally I prefer the older .doc format simply because it's more compatible with other non-Microsoft applications. The XML-based .docx format also got a bad rap previously for compatibility issues with Dropbox, although if you're running the current version of the cloud storage utility you shouldn't have any problems. (That said, .docx is the better format, not to mention the more modern format. I think of the ".doc or .docx?" choice sort of like choosing between .mp3 or .m4a: the newer formats have technical advantages, but not as many applications support them. The difference, of course, is that it's usually pretty simple to convert between .doc and .docx.) "Where does the app store files?" Some applications automatically store files in a certain folder structure, and you can't move them (at least not without getting into creating links, which may or may not work well). Text editors and word processors, however, generally let you choose where to store files you create; Office also has settings for default folders for saving and auto-recovery under Preferences -> File Locations: Note that setting the default for "Documents" does not mean that you can't change it for individual files later, it just tells Microsoft Office where to start when opening or saving new files. You can also change the location of the AutoRecover files. I put mine into ~/Dropbox/Backups/Microsoft Office/ because if the computer I'm on dies completely, I can access the data from any other Dropbox-connected account. Is this an unlikely scenario/edge case? Absolutely. Does it hurt to set it anyway? Nope. "But my application doesn't have those settings!" Check out Default Folder X which, as the name implies, can set the default folder for just about any application (plus other things). Dropbox No doubt you noticed that I suggested using Dropbox to save the files. That's not just because they are available online or on any iOS device. Dropbox also keeps every revision for the past 30 days. That means that every time you hit "Save," a separate version is saved on Dropbox. Browsing Dropbox revisions isn't as visually slick as using Versions on Lion. To view them, select the file in Finder, and then use the Dropbox icon on your Finder toolbar, or Control-click (right-click, or two-finger click) on the file and use the Dropbox contextual menu. That will launch the Dropbox website and show you a listing of all the versions, and give you a chance to download them (some file formats can even be previewed online). While Dropbox only saves 30 days' worth of revisions, Dropbox Pro users also have the option to add the Pack-Rat feature which will keep revisions indefinitely. With every save, you are creating an off-site backup of your latest work, so even if you only use one computer, Dropbox is the place to save your most important and most often changed files. "But what if I forget to press save? My app doesn't have any sort of auto-save functionality!" Don't fret if your app doesn't have auto-save; you can add it to any application very simply by using Keyboard Maestro. It's as simple as creating a macro which says "If I am using {insert application name here}, and there is a 'Save' button, press it every X seconds or minutes." I've created just such a rule for Microsoft Word here: This rule will only run when Microsoft Word is active and there is a menu option for "Save" (which will be disabled if you don't have any files open). If it does find the Save menu item, it will select it. (You could also tell it to press "⌘ + S" but I prefer selecting menu items to keyboard shortcuts.) With this rule you never have to worry about spending an hour on a Word document only to lose it all when the app crashed and you realized that you had forgotten to save it. If the file isn't saved when the Keyboard Maestro macro runs, it will prompt you to name the file. (There are other applications like Keyboard Maestro which support the same kind of features, but Keyboard Maestro is the one that I know and use. If you would recommend others, let us know in the comments.) Versions is great, but there's no need to wait for your app to support it Versions is a great addition to OS X, and I love not having to remember to save, but only a handful of applications support it at the present time. If you want to (or are required to) use another application, take a few minutes to check out your auto-save options. There are few things more frustrating than losing unsaved work, but the good news is that there are fewer and fewer reasons for that to ever happen.
OS X Lion Version control, the File menu, and me
I love Lion's idea of consumer-grade version control, which Apple calls Auto Save and Versions. I'm just not particularly happy with its GUI. That's because it relies on a new vocabulary of menu choices and on users understanding what's going on under the hood. Take the save options for example. You can "save a version," "duplicate," etc. These are very good tasks to do. My question though is if these are the right tasks and the right names for the typical Lion user. If you go out and ask a bunch of people what the "save a version" menu item means, you're going to get a lot of answers, many of which don't agree. In Lion, this menu option creates a new revision point for your document, committing your changes into the version control system for your file. After saving a version, you can later revert to that save by browsing versions or by reverting to the most recent commit point. It's like Time Machine for document edits, and it's very, very handy. As a developer, that's familiar ground. We've been doing this stuff for aeons. For consumers, it's new. It's somewhat ground breaking. It's really putting the consumer's needs first. This is what Apple should be doing, where it should be innovating. The problem is this. That "save a version" description doesn't really communicate what's going on. This is why you get all those diverging and conflicting "explanations" of what the menu option does. It's not expressing itself well. I personally think Apple should have left the menu item as "Save." Save describes what's going on with the file, and communicates that in just four characters. "If I click Save, the computer will save this file." If Lion passively creates versioned backups, all the better. Not only am I using a simple 4-character command, Lion's adding value to that 4-character command for me. Awesomesauce. Engineers shouldn't feel obliged to differentiate new features when people can keep on using them as if they were the old ones. Apple could have just used the original name and added value to it behind the scenes. The old save was good. The new save is better. But Apple really should reconsider that menu option.
OS X Lion: Auto Save and Versions to the rescue
Some of us have Command-S wired into our hands. Whenever we write a few words or enter a couple of cells into a spreadsheet, our hands twitch and we compulsively type a Command-S to save a document, just in case... A new feature of OS X Lion is Auto Save, which is going to stop a lot of Mac users from doing the Command-S twitch. Versions is another related feature that keeps copies of different versions of your documents for posterity. Auto Save takes a snapshot of whatever you happen to have open on the screen in an app at any particular time, and saves it for you. Let's say that you have TextEdit open with three different documents, all scattered about on your 27" display. None of the documents have been saved, and you suddenly realize that you need to leave for a meeting. You quit out of TextEdit, and the familiar "Do you want to save the changes you made in...?" dialog doesn't appear. No problem. The next time you launch TextEdit, all three of those documents open up in the exact same locations on your screen that they were in originally. Another cool feature of Auto Save is the ability to revert to a last saved version of a document. That's helpful when you're working on a document, add a lot of changes, and then suddenly realize that what you've added is ... crap. Just select Revert to Saved or Revert to Opened from either the File menu or a disclosure triangle next to the title of the document, and you're back to your original document. What's fascinating is that Auto Save and Versions keep all of the different versions of your document in one file. There's no folder full of saved versions with time and date stamps -- instead, you just see the file and all of the magic is done internally. What if you don't want a file to be accidentally changed. That's where the Lock feature comes in handy. Two weeks after the last time you edit a document, Lion auto-locks it for you. The next time you try to make a change, Lion asks if you want to unlock the file or duplicate it to create a template. Versions brings the power of Time Machine to individual documents. In many Lion-savvy apps now, there's a "Save A Version" menu item that takes the place of the previous "Save" item. This is where that muscle memory that you built up doing Command-S is going to come in handy. As you write a document, you can continue to use Command-S from time to time to save a version of a document. When you want to go back to a previous version, choose "Browse all versions" from the drop-down menu near the title bar of the document and a very Time Machine-like window appears: The Versions window provides a side-by-side comparison of your current document version with all of the other saved versions. If you find a previous version that you want to copy something from, just do a copy and paste between the two. There's also a Restore button for making a previous version the "live" version of a document. At this time, Auto Save and Versions are only usable in specific Apple apps, including iWork 9.1 (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers) and TextEdit. As more apps are updated to take advantage of the many new features of OS X Lion, we're sure to see the convenience and security of Auto Save and Versions become commonplace.
iTunes and iWork updated for Lion, add full-screen support, and resume
What good is an OS update without some software that can take full advantage of all its fancy new features? Naturally, Apple's got your back, and today you'll be getting some spiffy new versions of iTunes and iWork to compliment that fearsome Lion upgrade. iTunes 10.4 finally ushers the music management app into the 64-bit era, and adds support for OS X 10.7's full-screen windows. The iWork Update 6 also brings along the distraction-free functionality, as well as resume, auto-save, and versioning for all your important docs. Not everyone is seeing the updates just yet, so be patient, it shouldn't be much longer before you're interrupted by that slightly annoying, but oh so satisfying, Software Update window.
EverSave adds universal autosaving
Auto-save has saved my bacon several times with Word and I really miss it in apps that don't offer the feature (Apple's Pages, for example). Now a third-party solution has popped up that supposedly offers autosaving in any application. EverSave runs in your menubar and allows you to save either at a particular interval or when you switch applications (or both). You can have it run for all applications or pick particular ones. In my testing with Pages '08 it worked just as advertised. I set the save interval for 45 seconds and as shortly after I opened a new Pages document it brought up the save dialog. I put in some text, waited a few seconds and then simulated a crash by force-quitting the application. When I reopened the document, my text was there. Unfortunately, I've found that EverSave does not work quite as well with all applications. With TextMate, for instance, it insists on bringing up the save dialog box every time it saves, making it too annoying to be useful. Nonetheless, if you use iWork and miss auto-save, EverSave is a must-have. EverSave is a free download (donations requested) from Tool Force Software. [via Macworld]
