Yesterday Apple Australia kindly flew me up to Sydney for a look around its corporate headquarters and for a very interesting two-hour press presentation from Mr iPod and Mr Hardware. (Mr Software is at WWDC, so I didn’t hear from him.)

In the course of the day, I discovered four new things about Apple that I didn’t know before.

1. The black MacBook is intended to be a 12″ PowerBook replacement

I had the chance to ask Mr Hardware as he was presenting the now complete range of Intel Macs whether anything was coming to replace the 12″ PowerBook.

He told me that Apple has received a lot of feedback from users about the need for a small notebook with a “more professional look”. Apple made a conscious decision to meet that demand with the black MacBook, giving those users the look they wanted at the cost of a slight hit in performance and features. Is that why they cost more?

2. Only 26% of Mac users do backups, 4% use automated solutions.

Of course, you know at one level that the numbers are low, but it is still a shock to see just how low they are.

Those who have watched the keynote will know that Leopard’s Time Machine is designed to increase these numbers dramatically.

Will it work? I don’t think so. The current ability to automate backups with Backup 3.0 and the plethora of third-party automated backup options haven’t brought large numbers of users to the party. This won’t either. It’s not the technical ability that’s missing; it’s the personal habit.

Dear reader, for the love of God get yourself into that 4%. Don’t read the other two things I didn’t know about Apple. Go now and check out Dejà Vu or BackityMac or SuperDuper! or, if you have a .Mac account, Apple’s own Backup.

3. iTunes prints really nice CD covers.

I use iTunes a lot, but it never occurred to me to visit its Print menu. Mr iPod demonstrated how easy it is to make jewel case covers in iTunes and how nice the final result looks:

4. Steve Jobs doesn’t trust people who use words as a tool of their trade

At the airport I picked up a copy of Jeffrey Young and William Simon’s iCon: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005) (Amazon ) to read on the plane.

On the homeward flight I discovered an answer to the mystery about the lack of communication between engineers and development teams at Apple and journalists, bloggers and third-party developers (after all, code is words).

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and became Interim CEO in 1997, he

…quickly saw things that he didn’t like. His predecessors in the CEO’s office has never figured out how to take the reins in a commanding manner…. He set about changing the culture of Apple. Some of the changes were small (no dogs at work, no smoking), and some where whoppers, such as the absolute ban on talking to anyone outside the company who uses words as a tool of his trade. (The one exception: it was okay as long as you has a public relations dog-watcher sitting at your side and yanking your leash whenever she wanted you to stop talking.)

apple, steve jobs, itunes, not apple mail, macbook, words, culture change, backup, thanks Fiona, iPod

This morning on TUAW I read about Griffin’s Proxi, which has been released as a public beta.

Griffin is using it as a utility for working with its various hardware products like the PowerMate and Radio Shark.

But the reach of the app is much wider. Proxi is in fact a kind of FastScripts / HotKeys / Growl / Quicksilver mash-up. It performs some of the functions of all those utilities, without totally replacing any of them.

Proxi comes with pre-built scripts and “blueprints” to interact with a number of apps—iChat, Mail.app, iTunes and Skype—as well as general AppleScript and application launcher abilities.

Because this is Hawk Wings, we are interested mainly in Mail.app. After the jump you will find some screenshots and two quick suggestions on how it works with Mail in useful ways.

(more…)

Pierre Igot at Betalogue got the Red Hot Chilli Peppers promotional email from the iTunes Music Store today.

It prompts him to provide a good / cranky summary (depending on whether you are a plain text / HTML person) of reasons to dislike HTML emails.

He also wonders whether emails like this are a sign that plain-texters are on the verge of extinction:

…it’s yet another sign that plain-text e-mail is becoming more and more neglected…. Sooner or later, I guess that I too will be forced to switch to HTML e-mail. It really annoys me, because I believe that my reasons for preferring plain-text e-mail are perfectly valid and will remain so for many years to come. But if plain-text e-mail becomes less and less usable, we simply won’t have any other alternative. And Apple will have a certain amount of responsibility in this.

email, plain text, html, RTF, mail.app, apple mail, itunes

Mail.app offers you the option of not displaying images in HTML emails. You can find the option in the Viewing pane of Apple Mail’s Preferences.

It a great feature and it’s a good idea to use it for a number of reasons.

But not everyone is wild about it. Email marketers in particular are frustrated, especially as their industry statistics show more and more users deciding not to view the images in their emails.

Check out this post about image suppression with screenshots of the infamous iTunes email that fails the email marketing test of “usability”.

Ever wondered exactly how spammers / advertisers (and everyone in between) try to hook you on the content of their HTML emails with sneaky, sneaky tricks / clever design?

An article on Campaign Monitor (“a place for development news, tips, tricks and talk on email newsletters and list management”) outlines “the key email design trends and guidelines” for marketing with HTML emails.

Perversely, some of it is interesting.

You can see Apple’s iTunes newsletters get a roasting for poor design.

You can learn that 75% of people who use preview panes like horizontal ones and only 25% prefer the vertical “Outlook 2003″ layout and discover which email clients and ISPs block images and which do not.

You can read the comments (which are a bit of a hoot).

You can ponder again the many reasons why HTML email is a bad idea.

Robert Daeley at O’Reilly’s macdevcenter has written an AppleScript that will give you notification of new mail in Mail.app by playing your choice of song in iTunes.

He provides instructions on how to modify the script to specify the song, the playlist, and the start and end point in the track.

The script is then linked to a rule in Apple Mail.

Is this a good idea? Not in my house, but it might be in yours.

UPDATE: And as TUAW sensibly points out, you can do something very like this through Apple Mail’s Preferences without needing to enter the fraught world of applescript at all.

Hallon is an open source utility that extends the idea of bookmarks from web browsers to apps like Apple Mail, Address Book and iTunes.

It adds a raspberry icon to your Statusbar, which controls a drop-down menu storing all the bookmarks you create. Bookmarks can be edited and note or alarms added to them:

It currently supports Apple Mail, Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, Terminal, Finder and Safari. Additional plugins for Entourage, iPhoto 5 and Firefox have already been added with the promise of more on the way.

You can read more about it and download it from Hallon’s Sourceforge page.

[Via TUAW]