Mac Stuff

Bullet points not appearing correctly in OpenOffice.org on the Mac

I've been using OpenOffice.org in it's various Mac versions for some time now and am currently using a version of 2.0.2 under X11. It has proven to be very reliable, but today an outstanding issue with the display of bullet points came to a head for me and I decided to try and sort it out.

I trawled the usual places and got snippets of information but surprisingly little by way of a complete solution.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the consensus is that Microsoft Word stores bullet characters in a representation which does not convert easily to UTF-8 and relies on the presence of a suitably coded Symbol font that presents these characters correctly.

The standard Symbol font installed on a Mac does not have the correct encoding to display these symbols, but the URW (whatever that might stand for) version of the Symbol font which is distributed with TexMF and apparently with Ghostscript, is suitable.

I found that I had the font on my machine within my teTeX installed (installed with DarwinPorts). The font was in a file called "usyr.pfb".

I copied this file into the truetype fonts directory inside my OpenOffice.org installation inside the openoffice.org/share/fonts/truetype folder.

However, this isn't enough, because OpenOffice.org continues to use the other Symbol font installed in my case as a series of files prefixed with the name Symbol (surprise surprise!). So I removed those files.

Now I just restarted OpenOffice.org and opened a previously temperamental Word document to find that the bullet points had returned. Indeed, even the exported PDF files displayed correctly.

Virtual desktops update

I've just started trying out FileMaker 8 and discovered an unfortunate incompatibility with CodeTek VirtualDesktop Pro. I'd previously blogged on my move to Desktop Manger when Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) arrived, but when CodeTek fixed their incompatibility I moved back as I really liked the facility to be able have some applications appear on all desktops, and others only on one. I also find the pop-up panel for displaying virtual desktops and dragging windows to be very useful in CodeTek's implementation.

Well, unfortunately I've discovered a very big screen refresh issue with using FileMaker 8 and VirtualDesktop. Given the general compatibility of VirtualDesktop with other applications I'm inclined to deduce that the problem is more likely to be FileMaker's than CodeTek's. However, it's going to leave me virtual desktop (with a small 'c') free for a while until something is fixed, or I find a working alternative that works for me.

Graphing software - Plot

I've just made another one of those exciting discoveries of a piece of really useful well developed software that I've never noticed before. It's called Plot and it's a Mac OS X graphing package with a scientific flavour and lots of flexibility.

Okay, I've only just noticed it and tried it for about 2 minutes. But I'm already fairly impressed. The example graphs look good, it outputs to a good quality vector PDF or EPS for effective use in packages like OmniGraffle or Keynote, and it supports error-bars amongst many other things.

If that wasn't enough, it is free, it has some substantial documentation, and it has a whole plethora of features including MySQL data importing and perl scripting.

So far I've spotted two negative points, but given all the other features of the package, I wouldn't be surprised if these are fixed quite quickly. Firstly, if you resize a graph window, the labels don't move with the rest of the graph. (Note, however, that this isn't a problem when you export to PDF and then resize.) The other problem is that the exported graphs have non-transparent backgrounds, so you can't use them as easily and effectively in packages like Keynote when you want to have graphs on a standard presentation template background.

Transitioning from iView Media Pro to iTunes 6 (iLife 06)

I've been getting frustrated with iView Media Pro for quite a while now. My initial years of extolling iView's great features have been followed more recently with serious speed problems and frustrations over their more recent upgrade pricing policies. So, I decided I would give iPhoto another shot with the new version 6 (iWork '06) version.

The first significant discovery for me was the fact that iPhoto 6 allows you to import photos without copying them into you iPhoto library—so you don't have to compromise the way you store your photos. When you import a photo iPhoto creates an alias to the original and then makes a local thumbnail.

My next discovery (which won't be new to anyone who's familiar with iPhoto) is the ease with which you can create a backup onto CD. You just select you're photo's, click burn, and it creates a CD which, when mounted, appears as an album in iPhoto. The pictures retain the keywords you gave them, and also retain their originals if you edited them in iPhoto, though you have to copy the pictures into your working library to use the 'revert to original command'.

Unfortunately, the backup CD doesn't appear to retain a copy of the albums that pictures were sorted into at the time you backed up - so you can't sort pictures into albums as a mechanism for providing metadata.

Also, there's no clear way of retaining a local copy of thumbnails of backed up CDs to make it easier to find pictures that are archived away. Indeed, I discovered that iPhoto doesn't really cope very well with importing images (without copying) from removable media. If you try to view the images, iPhoto asks you to insert the media they were on, but doesn't tell you anything about the media - like the CD name.

So, although it may appear that I've found a lot of problems with iPhoto, I'm actually much happier with it than with iView. It is working reliably, the interface is very consistent and effective, and, well… it's just nice.

Finally, I noticed Keyword Assistant that looks like it will be useful once it's upgrade for iPhoto 6.

Exporting TV to DVD with EyeTV and Toast

I've just made one of those little discoveries that I probably should have known if I'd read a manual, but which I'd failed to notice and has caused me a considerable amount of unnecessary activity.

When I want to take a television programme recorded with EyeTV and record it onto a DVD the normal process I go through is:

1. Set it to record (by one means or another).
2. Come back later and edit out the extra bits at the start and the end (and the adverts if it's not BBC).
3. Press the compress button - compressing takes quite a while.
4. Come back later and export to Toast.
5. Come back later and drag onto Toast and burn, which itself goes through some lengthy multiplexing process before actually writing the data.

Aparently, if I upgrade to Toast 7, then step 4 is unnecessary, and hopefully, but I can't find any info anywhere to find out, step 5 is quicker.

But what I hadn't realised is that I don't have to do step 3. The compressing to disk part is totally unnecessary. As long as you mark the edit points, the export to Toast function function will only export the bits you need.

That's it!

Educational software for the Mac

As my son's 3rd birthday approaches I think it's about time I got round to finding some educational software for the Mac that he can use, both for his general educational development and for familiarising him with computers. Most people who know me will probably be shocked and surprised to realised that he hasn't got to use a computer yet!

Well, here's my first scan at what I could find.

1. The learning company [1] is a US company that appears to be well established with some well reviewed software. The web site is divided by age, subject or brand and when you get to the individual titles it indicates whether it works on Mac and whether it works directly on Mac OS X or on Classic.
2. SuperKids [2] — an educational software review site which appears to be independent, but it's always hard to know for sure!
3. Amazon.co.uk [3] — I underestimated how well Amazon caters for the Mac users looking for educational software. Go to the front page, click on the "software" category (currently a bar on the left), then click "Education & Reference", then click "Macintosh Education & Reference", finally you get to choose software categorised by age/stage, brands and subjects. This looks like it's going to be one of my first points of call from now on.
4. Learning & Teaching Scotland [4] and The National Grid for Learning Scotland [5] are, as I understand it, supposed to be the official government funded gateway to educational resources in Scotland for teachers and parents. When I looked for software for pre-school, all I could find were three titles produced by Learning & Teaching Scotland themselves which were (unsurprisingly) well reviewed. Perhaps I'm missing something here. If you can find anything more useful on this site, please let me know!
5. National Grid for Learning [6] — given the limited differences between early years education in Scotland and England I decided that I should probably look at the (English) National Grid for Learning site for a wider range of software options. Amazingly, I haven't been able to find any software at all, indeed when I look at their extensive index pages the word "software" doesn't appear anywhere! However, when I seached with the word "software" in their freetext search facility I was pointed to…
6. Becta Educational Software Database [7] — listed on the National Grid for Learning as a resource for software for pre-school to further education, and also listed as being for 16+ only(!), this site is a bit more promising. It lets you search by subject, keywords, age, platform (but doesn't distinguish between Classic and Mac OS X) and by format (e.g. Floppy, CD-ROM, Download, etc.). Maybe I'm unlucky but there appeared to be broken links to most of the software I was interested in, and when the link did work the Becta site had set it up so that the web site appeared in a new window without a URL entry bar and buttons which made navigating the linked sites very awkward. Can I ask why!
7. SETT exhibitors [8] - I resorted to asking someone I know very well for some advice and they also suggested that I look up the exhibitors at the SETT conference and follow their web pages for information. I've not had time to do that yet, but it should provide up to date links to educational software providers relevant to Scotland.

So, there we go. That's where I've got so far. Currently, in review, I think the amazon site is probably the most practical starting point.

[1] http://www.learningcompany.com/
[2] http://www.superkids.com/
[3] http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/1067898/
[4] http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/
[5] http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ngflscotland/
[6] http://www.ngfl.gov.uk/
[7] http://besd.becta.org.uk/
[8] http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/sett/exhibition/exhibitordetails.asp