Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Last week, I picked up the new O'Reilly book Mac OS X Hacks by Rael Dornfest & Kevin Hemenway, not quite sure what to expect.

Wow. This is a real must-have book for Mac OS X power users. The term "hacks" is usually not quite the right term. Sure, there are techniques for controlling iTunes via the Web and altering your user interface. But for the most part, it's a tour of many of Mac OS X's capabilities that I didn't know about, or seemed harder to access than they really are. (And this is coming from somebody who has used Unix for almost two decades and is a regular reader of MacOSXHints!) Instead, it's more of a "How-To" book.

Some randomly selected highlights:

• How to remove stubborn locked files
• Setting up an MP3 streaming "radio station"
• Sending SMS messages via Address Book
• Saving Terminal settings to presets
• Turning your Mac into a router to share internet connectivity
• VPN/SSH tunneling
• Setting up an IMAP server
• Using Perl, AppleScript, PHP from Apache
• Setting up MySQL and Postgres databases

It's much, much better than many other OSX books, including O'Reilly's lightweight Leaning Unix for Mac OS X.

Unless you've been focusing on more important issues, you're probably aware of Apple's new online music service. Apple says it is "revolutionary" and it's making the music industry be "reborn."

I say it was inevitable, and quite the opposite of what I would have hoped Apple would do. It really is more of a Microsoft kind of thing to do.

Apple used to be about empowering the "little guy" to do creative stuff. Desktop publishing and iMovie are great examples of this. Apple's music service, on the other hand, does just the opposite.

Why? It is a clearinghouse for the big music labels -- the same megacorporations that are stagnating. Chances are next to nil that I'll ever find a lot of the artists in my collection, such as Bay Area-based Eastern European vocal ensemble Kitka, my three-year-old daughter's favorite David Jack, MIDI Guitar wizard Mark Dwane, Oakland-based electropop band The Lovemakers, Italian superstar crooner Laura Pausini, or ambient/trance Delerium.

And yet I can go to the bands' web sites, my local record store or even amazon.com and get their music.

If Apple wanted to do something and revolutionary, they could have done something much more extraordinary that would have not only included the big names, but also allowed the "little guys" to make their music available over iTunes. (Robb Beal recently posted a reminder of a possible model for such a system, posted a couple of years ago.)

Come on, Apple. Think Different.