Recently I had the unfortunate experience of my Mac dying on me, luckily the important stuff was backed up on an external drive and I was able to restore the Mac by wiping her clean and doing a fresh install of OS X. Everything went rather swimmingly as far as disaster recovery goes that was until I went to play my recently reimported music collection via Front Row and I noticed that all my beautiful cover art had disappeared! The music was there, none of that was lost, it was playing fine, all the Artist, Album and other tags were correct, but where had all my beautiful cover art gone? This would just not do and although I could easily download the artwork through iTunes’ “Get Album Artwork” feature I had the compelling requirement like any good nerd to find out what was really going on!

The Problem
Apple have been providing us with beautiful high resolution artwork from the day they started selling music in the iTunes Music Store but it wasn’t until the introduction of iTunes 7 and it’s new “Cover Flow” browsing feature that it allowed us to retrieve cover art for music we had imported from our own CD’s. For myself and every other anal retentive iTunes user that fastidiously manicures their iTunes library to perfection this made life a lot easier than scraping images from Amazon or Google and then manually applying them to relevant tracks in iTunes or using applications like Clutter and CoverScout. This was a fantastic feature and a very kind one on Apple’s behalf, even if only to make the new Cover Flow feature look nice to use, I could quite quickly and simply update my library with the correct artwork. One thing that Apple didn’t tell us however is that the lovely artwork its displaying isn’t actually embedded in the track’s file like it does when you manually add artwork, rather its stored in some strange little files buried away in your “iTunes” folder with a strange .ITC extension. This explained my loss of artwork when my main drive, storing the magic iTunes Library file and these strange ITC files, died it deleted my artwork. When I re-imported the raw AAC files those for which I had downloaded their artwork through iTunes no longer had it’s relevant ITC file for artwork.

So what’s an ITC file?
As far as I understand it no one is exactly sure of the ITC files in their entirety. It’s common thought that ITC may stand for “iTunes Cover Flow” or “iTunes Cover File” but even that’s not concrete. The files reside in a folder called “Album Artwork” which is then split into “Local” and “Downloaded”. Obviously it’s the Downloaded ones we’re interested in but its interesting to note that inside the Local folder you’ll find a cached copy of ITC files that are created from cover art that you have embedded in your music files. The thought behind this folder is that it’s used for Cover Flow to quickly access artwork rather than extracting it from your music as you browse through your albums.
Essentially an ITC file contains your cover art as JPG but there’s some other information in there that links the file to the relevant track/album in your library. If you were to open the file in a text editor you’d be greeted with a bunch of text that makes no sense at all, open it up in a hex editor however and you get some real information that although quite interesting doesn’t make life any more simple in extracting the artwork. There’s a great article over at Fasle Cognate that explains the file structure and naming conventions in-depth if you’d like to know more.

The Solution
Ideally what I would like is for all of that beautiful artwork to be extracted from the ITC files and then re-embedded into the AAC file itself, as you’d normally expect your artwork to be stored. Fortunately there are some clever people out there that have written a couple of AppleScripts to do just that, or there abouts.

The first script (link) allows you to drag the ITC file on to it and then rip out the JPG file to then recreate it on your desktop as “cover.jpg”. This is fantastic, we now have the actual artwork however the downfall is you then have to open up the file to see what album the artwork actually belongs to and then drag it on to the relevant items in iTunes. If your entire iTunes library uses nothing but downloaded artwork you can see that this would soon become a tiresome task.

The second (link) is the bees knees, this is script you’ll want that just does the work for you and makes everything happy again. It comes from our wonderful friends over at Doug’s AppleScripts, an excellent AppleScript resource for any Mac application. This wonderful little script will actually go through your iTunes library looking for tracks that are using downloaded artwork in an ITC file, extract that artwork and finally embed the image in its correct home being the music file itself.

Conclusion
To many people this may all be a little too much, “Why bother having your artwork embedded in the music file when iTunes can just download it again?” you might say. Well for me I like to know how things work, its interesting to delve into these little secrets but more importantly what if I want to play this music using another piece of software on another computer, Windows, Linux and I can’t use iTunes? There’d be no lovely artwork with the file would there and frankly that’d just be sad.

A few months ago I wrote an article for the unfortunately defunct “MacTalk Magazine” here in Australia. The premise of the article was to give you a few different things to do with your iSight beyond video conferencing.

Today it was posted to the largest online Australian community (10,000 members strong) and dugg to the front page of digg.com! w00t for me!

Check out the full article here [via Digg]

Hidden away in OS X’s Utilities folder is an application; Terminal is your doorway to the UNIX underbelly of Apple’s operating system. Personally I spend enough time mucking about in there that I moved the application to my dock but it wasn’t until I installed Ubuntu on a PC at work that I discovered something that can make life a little easier when working in Terminal land; colour!

Both Mac OS X (10.4) and Ubuntu utilize the bash command line interface (CLI) which has the fantastic ability to be coloured in any way you desire. Now before we get too far ahead of ourselves I’m fully aware that there is the option in OS X’s Terminal application to modify the foreground and background colours of the window itself; what we’re about to do is give different colours to files based on their type. eg. Directories in blue, symbolic links in pink, etc.

So how do we bring the wonderful world of colour to our screens? It involves setting some environment variables in your Terminal’s profile file that tell it what should be in what colour. You’ll see below a screencast for doing so but in case you want to print out the instructions here they are:

Instructions:

• Open up Terminal, you’ll find it in your Applications/Utilities folder by default.
• Edit your bash profile to add some environment variables

  	sudo pico ~/.bash_profile

• Add these environment variable lines

  	export CLICOLOR=1
  	export TERM=xterm-color
  	export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad

• Close and save your changes (Ctrl-X, then Y)
• Restart Terminal and now try typing

  	ls /

• It’s a different world!

The three lines beginning with “export” are our environment variables, the most important of these is the LCSOLORS. This variable tells us what type of file/folder should be in what colour. You can get a full list of the colours and how to set these by looking through the “ls” man page by typing man ls in Terminal. Essentially it boils down to every two letters representing a certain file or folder type; the letters represent the foreground and background colours and if they’re a capital it means the bold version of that colour.

The Terminal is an exciting and wonderful way to use and learn about your Mac. I highly suggest you take a look around at some introducing tutorials on the Internet if you haven’t had much of a chance to understand what it does. For those of you like me that have used it for so long and never known about this I hope you don’t feel as silly as me!

It has to be one of the most common questions I’m asked; “When is the right time to buy a Mac?”, “Is there something new coming out soon?”, “If I buy x will there be a new one next week?”. Regardless of the permeation it’s one of those eternal questions that no one bar Steve Jobs & his merry man can truly answer. I do understand why people ask me, I’ve worked with Macs for years now, hell I even sold them full time for a while but when it comes down to it I know nothing more than you do. With that in mind there are a great many resources available to you that will ensure you make an informed decision on your next Mac purchase and that’s what we’re going to look at today.

The salesman is not your friend
The Mac world has a reputation of everyone being great buddies and helping each other out regardless of which side of the sales counter you’re standing on. Truth be told you’re still dealing with a salesperson and these people live by making sales. In this world of ever shrinking profit margins in computers their main objective is to sell you what they have right there and then. Asking them about the likelihood of the current model being superseded is not a topic they will linger on long. My personal answer was always something along the lines of “I know as much as you, when something new comes out we find out when the world does.” This is a very true statement, but as a sales person they should also be aware of things like product life cycles and Apple’s stock levels but they’re never going to talk about them, well not if they’re going to earn commission that month.

Apple expos & shows
Gone are the good old days of Apple making their product announcements at one of their major Exhibitions/Conventions around the world. It used to be like clockwork, January - MacWorld San Francisco, June - World Wide Developers Conference, July - the now defunct MacWorld New York/Boston and September - Apple Expo Paris, each the perfect launching pad for Apple’s latest product be it software or hardware. Today we find Apple breaking the predictable mold somewhat; although most of these events still take place it’s more often than not they’re there to showcase previously announced items, and the actual announcement has happened weeks if not months before. It was common practice among Mac brethren to hold off buying anything Apple until after one of these events; sales crashing in the lead up. I’d imagine for that reason alone Apple has moved away from these shows being their announcement machines. I distinctly remember the quiet weeks leading up to a exhibition inside of the store I worked at; you’d spend two weeks twiddling your thumbs because everyone was too busy waiting. These days you’ll find Apple calling media events, sure they’re a little more extravagant than most, having U2’s Bono, John Mayer or some other celebrity, but the big thing is that they’re called randomly on no specific date each year and it’s because of this we can no longer rely on the big shows as reliable release/announcement dates to dictate purchasing patterns against.

The rumor mill
Apple is a strange brand in that there are so many dedicated users out there that relish in every tid-bit of information that may pertain to a new or updated product. There are literally thousands of websites out there dedicated to the Mac and a good majority of them focusing on the ever-growing Mac rumor mill. Rumor sites always need to be taken with a grain of salt. A lot of the information on them is journalistic interpretation, for want of a better description. “Market Analysts”, so called “leaked information”, disgruntled employees, and other erroneous sources provide the fuel for this fire. That’s not to say that they aren’t useful resources; it’s because of their fine-tooth approach that they often pick up on things the average consumer may miss, but be sure to not confuse solid evidence with wishful misgivings. Some of the best rumor sites with a more solid track record that I’d recommend viewing are:

• AppleInsider - http://www.appleinsider.com
• MacRumors - http://www.macrumors.com
• Think Secret - http://www.thinksecret.com

Product life-cycles
The life-cycle of a piece of Apple computing hardware is probably the best indication we have at the moment as to when a new model is to be released. The majority of products have a shelf-life between 10 - 15 months before being refreshed. This isn’t set in stone either I’m afraid but it’s a good point to start! How do you know how long a particular model has been around for? Well there’s a few great websites for this, the first “Apple History” (http://www.apple-history.com) contains a complete product history of every piece of Apple hardware released, it’s release configuration and it’s release date. The second, and one that I point any new Mac purchaser to, is “MacRumors: Buyer’s Guide” (http://buyersguide.macrumors.com). This site has been specifically crafted for what you should be looking at when purchasing a new Mac. It will tell you how long the current model has been in active sale, it’s recommendation on whether to purchase or wait and any rumour related news stories pertaining to that item that may affect your decision.

The Mac friend, or friend of a friend of a friend….
It never hurts to ask someone who has a little more experience with Macs than yourself. Chances are if they’ve been using Macs for a few years they’re going to know about everything I’ve written already and have a good understanding of the current news & rumors pertaining to Apple hardware. Another’s opinion is their own though and should always be used to compliment to your own research and buying position.

When it all comes down to it the right time to buy is when it’s the right time for you! If you need a new computer right away then waiting six months to see what might eventuate just isn’t an option. For those that can wait the key is research; ask a friend, check when the machine you want last had an update, perhaps wait until after MacWorld (if it’s close by) before laying out your hard earned cash. The only last piece of advice I can add is, you’re never going to win; just like any piece of technology its out of date the second it’s released, buying a new computer shouldn’t be a waiting game for life.