This is still Flipboard

The app does a great job of telling you from the very first that it’s still Flipboard; it shares aesthetic sensibilities and principles of content organization with its big brother on the iPad. You won’t have to relearn the experience all over again for the iPhone, either, with the small exception of having to swipe up and down instead of left and right to navigate between stories.

This is different from Flipboard

Unlike Flipboard on the iPad, the iPhone version has to deal with a few limitations, the most significant of which being available screen real estate. It does so wonderfully, but refining the Flipboard experience to a point where it’s perfect for one-handed, casual navigation to quickly sift through and find stories of interest.

On the iPhone, Flipboard doesn’t even support landscape orientation, which actually works for the app since it’s clearly aimed at more casual browsing. One-handed operation is made simpler as a result, and buttons for sharing, starring and searching and interacting are all easily within reach. This is Flipboard for a hand-held device, and this guiding principle seems to be at work throughout the app.

 

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For those new to Flipboard

If you haven’t tried out Flipboard on the iPad, then you should still try using it on the iPhone. Even if you’re not necessarily looking for the content discovery features the app itself offers, Flipboard really makes a great barebones Facebook and Twitter client; something the iPhone version especially brought home.

By signing in with your Facebook and Twitter credentials, you create specific channels for content from those sources. Browsing those channels is akin to checking out both social networks with much of the “noise” taken out of the equation. You can view your stream in a more linear fashion, making you much more likely to actually engage with others. At least, that’s my experience.

Channel surfing for your phone

Flipboard also does a great job of being a news reader for people looking for the ease of browsing found in a newspaper, but with the freedom to cull from virtually unlimited sources. Plus, you can add more targeted content vectors, too, thanks to partnerships with National Geographic, Wired and many more.

Flipboard has done a good thing with this free app, by not just settling for a straight port of its iPad experience to the smaller screen, but also by making sure the things we already love about the tablet version remain intact. Whether or not you’ve been a fan in the past, you’ll likely be one now. Don’t just take my word for it, though; Apple SVP Phil Schiller also lavished some rare love on this iPhone gem.

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Awkward beauty

Yahoo’s interface for Livestand is fairly good-looking, but it isn’t necessarily the kind of visual appeal we’re used to seeing on the iPad. The interface is spare but not really simple, with some depth and animation effects that feel a little out-of-place on a device where grid views often prevail. Flipboard’s greeting screen, for example, works on a grid and offers less visual confusion in my opinion, whereas Livestand’s 3D effect can obscure tiles and just adds a step between you and access to content.

There’s also the problem of usability. The home page looks good and has the hallmarks of simplicity, but it’s actually quite tricky to figure out how to add content from the featured carousel to your library. That’s actually because you can’t do so without navigating first to the “explore all content” extended catalog. I assumed that there would be an option when I opened an individual app or magazine, or that I could drag and drop the square icons, but neither works.

Slick content formatting

The actual content of each applet, or “magazine,” you can subscribe to within Yahoo Livestand (all of which are free, by the way) is very nicely formatted. Yahoo has clearly paid a lot of attention to fonts and layout, and the ultimate effect is worthy of being used as a demo in college design courses. This is especially true for magazine content like Surfer‘s.

But the content formatting seems to come with a cost in terms of responsiveness. Delays while you wait for articles and subsections to load are common throughout the app, and though the spinning, glowing circle Yahoo has used to indicate a wait is visually impressive, you get really tired of seeing it after a while.

Multiuser design

Yahoo was smart to include the ability to register multiple user profiles in Livestand right from the beginning. You can add up to four users on a single device and sign in using either your Facebook or Yahoo credentials, or you can start using Livestand without any outside account. As Zite pointed out in a recent update, iPads are often multiuser devices, and the ability for up to four people to keep their content separate and jump in without an arduous sign-up process is nice.

Pretty but not deep

Livestand, unlike Flipboard, is not really a social news tool; it’s more about repackaging traditional sources of content in a way that feels more like newer delivery vehicles that draw from Facebook, Twitter and RSS. And that’s its biggest problem.

Yahoo’s concept of a self-contained virtual newsstand in the end doesn’t feel up to the challenge of delivering the future of news in the way that more-connected, more-personalized tools like Flipboard and Zite do. It looks good, but the superficial appeal is undermined by performance and usability issues, like the fact that it doesn’t work in portrait mode, for example. Some of the formatting and design decisions actually make me wish I could overlook its shortcomings and use it as my default news reading app on the iPad, but it just doesn’t have the brains to seal the deal.

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Zite found in a survey of  more than 330 iPad users that one-third share their iPads with a group of people. We’ve seen similar evidence that iPads are shared devices, with one study finding that even users living alone  share their Apple tablets with other family members. Zite found that of those who share their devices, two-thirds share with one other individual, while a quarter share it with two others.

Zite CTO Mike Klass said in a press release that Sybil is the result of customer feedback. “Time and time again, we have come across multiple people within a family who want to have their own Zite, personalized to them, but only have one iPad,” said. “So, we developed ‘Sybil,’ a solution for people who want to share their iPad with a significant other, sibling, parent or hidden personality.”

You now set up a user profile when first launching Zite.

Kevin Tofel wrote about how users find jailbreak workarounds to get around the lack of system-level account switching on an iPad back in July, but Zite’s app-specific approach might make more sense. After all, sharing info on many apps probably doesn’t hurt and actually could be beneficial, while for personalized content like Zite, multi-profile capabilities are ideal.

After Zite’s recent acquisition by CNN, some wondered whether it would be able to remain competitive as a distinct product and brand on its own. The addition of this great new account switching feature, which gives it an advantage over Flipboard, the biggest player on the block, helps prove that the acquisition is fuelling innovation to improve Zite as a standalone product.

Other recent improvements made by the Zite team include the ability to block specific sources entirely to no longer see their articles, as well as Twitter integration for iOS 5 devices, which allows you to automatically link Zite to your Twitter account. With the addition of Sybil, Zite is definitely making a strong play for the personalized news app crown.

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News apps racked up the longest average session length (how long a user spends in an app once its open) according to data taken from Localytics’ mobile app analytics platform, with users spending over 250 percent more time engaged with news apps when compared to the average time spent in any app. Close behind the news category in average time spent with an app per session were music (228 percent of average), health and fitness apps (210 percent) and reference apps (162 percent). Music apps tend to be turned on and then run in the background, which might account for their lengthy session times.

Games ranked much farther down the list, with users spending only around 75 percent of the average session length playing, and entertainment apps were last of all categories measured, with around 20 percent.

When measured another way, however, games rank very highly in terms of user engagement. Localytics also checked in to how many sessions per month users had with each type of app. Games accounted for the highest number of sessions per month, with an average of 13 per user. The next closest categories were news and music apps, which were both used an average of five times per month. Apps in the reference category, which showed a high per-session length, appear not to actually be opened all that often. According to both scores, entertainment and sports apps showed very limited engagement.

The results are good news for news app developers and publishers hoping to convert app downloads into lucrative contracts with advertisers and marketers, but I’m thinking it also might indicate areas where consumers have yet to be impressed with any currently available app offerings. I think many entertainment apps are too narrowly focused, and only fit the description in the loosest sense of the word, which is probably bringing down the average when compared to oft-used software like the iPad Netflix app. And many sports apps tend to offer little of value beyond the ability to check scores when your favorite team is playing, which isn’t likely to encourage much engagement.

My iPad usage echoes the Localytics findings: I use my iPad mainly for consuming news (from a variety of sources), and I occasionally open a game to kill a few minutes before dinner or while on hold, but I don’t spend as much time with these as I do with my news reader and periodical apps. Does the study ring true with your experience?

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For all the talk of social media services like Twitter and Facebook replacing RSS, I still find it to be the best way to get news quickly and efficiently, and it seems like Mac developers agree. A quick look at the Mac App Store shows quite a few RSS reader options, but here’s a look at three of the best: Reeder, NetNewsWire Lite, and Pulp.

Reeder ($9.99)

Reeder started its life as an iPhone app, got an iPad upgrade, and now finally has come to the Mac. This evolution helps explain why it looks and works like a Lion app already: It has fade-in scrollbars, multitouch gestures, and there’s even an option for monochrome sidebar icons, just like those found in the new Lion Finder.

Reeder only syncs with Google Reader, so you’ll have to set up a Google account if you want to use it. However, Reeder’s integration with Google’s web app is stellar. The keyboard shortcuts are exactly the same, and you can manage your Google subscriptions within Reeder by deleting feeds, adding new ones, or making folders. Sharing, starring, and noting articles can also be done in Reeder.

Reeder can share articles with numerous third-party services, including Twitter, Instapaper, ReadItLater, Readability, Pinboard, Delicious, and Zootool. Services can be individually disabled as desired, and you can add shortcuts for each in the toolbar.

Reeder offers a bevy of other customization options as well. You can change its appearance by choosing from two presets: one that looks like Reeder for iPhone, and another that uses standard OS X colors. These presets can be customized with a unique slider system, allowing fine-grain control over the UI. Keyboard shortcuts, multitouch gestures, and third-party services can also be customized to your heart’s content.

Reeder is a good app for power users and general users alike. It offers a lot of options, so power users can get their fix, but the interface is simple enough that new users should figure it out quickly. Since Reeder is also available for iOS, it’s a good choice for users with multiple Apple devices, since the Google Reader sync ensures your feeds and read items will be synced across platforms.

NetNewsWire Lite (Free)

Unlike newcomers Reeder and Pulp, NetNewsWire has been around since 2002, when OS X was still learning how to walk. Don’t assume that the app feels out-of-touch because it’s older, though. The latest release is a complete rewrite, and according to Brent Simmons, the developer, it’s the “best code I’ve ever done, by far.”

NetNewsWire has a more traditional interface than Reeder or Pulp, but it’s no more difficult to use, and it still looks great. It doesn’t sync with Google Reader, so all feeds are managed locally. The lack of Google sync could be a dealbreaker for some, but you can import and export your subscriptions in OPML, something Reeder can’t do.

Article Styles let you change the way articles look.

Another thing NNW has that Reeder lacks is Article Styles, which are six pre-defined CSS style-sheets that change how an article is displayed. You can customize these style-sheets, but it involves messing around in the app’s Resources folder, so it’s not exactly easy.

NNW has many limitations. It can only share articles with Twitter, Instapaper, and MarsEdit (a blogging app). It isn’t very customizable beyond moving buttons around and hiding the toolbar. It’s also 64-bit only, so it won’t run on older Macs with Core Duo processors. But if you just need a cheap, no-frills RSS reader, NetNewsWire Lite is your app. The little it does, it does well, and for free. It’s also worth pointing out that NNW is in a transition period, having been acquired by Black Pixel, and a more full-featured version should come out eventually.

Pulp ($9.99)

Pulp is relatively unknown compared to the other two apps mentioned, but it was recently featured in the Mac App Store. Rather than competing on features, Pulp’s big strength is its interface, which mimics a newspaper. It’s organized by pages and columns; each page can have multiple columns, and each column can have multiple RSS feeds.

Pulp is very easy to use, and offers a good alternative to using folders to sort content. However, the newspaper-like organization is less practical for users with lots of RSS feeds. I’ve had upwards of 4,000 unread articles in a single refresh, and the thought of trying to sort through that many with this interface is daunting.

Another unique UI element of Pulp is the Shelf, a wood-themed drawer that you can drag articles into for later reading. It isn’t going to replace Instapaper for power users, but for the average user, it works. Speaking of Instapaper, Pulp has it as an integrated service sharing option, as well as Facebook, Twitter, ReadItLater, and Readability. That’s not as many options as Reeder provides, but it should be enough to keep most users happy.

Like NetNewsWire, Pulp doesn’t sync with Google Reader, but it does have its own syncing implementation called Pulp Sync. Setup was painless, and worked as advertised on multiple Macs, even preserving my custom column configuration.

Pulp's article view wastes a lot of space.

The one thing I have to complain about in Pulp is how articles are displayed. There’s a huge chunk of wasted space devoted to displaying a reflection of the app’s main screen below the article. Clicking on the reflection brings you back to the main screen, but a simple back button would have sufficed. I’m not sure why the developer thought this was a good idea, and it’s disconcerting that it’s still there, since the app has already seen multiple updates.

Which RSS reader do you like the best? Is there one that isn’t on this list that’s better than these options? Tell us about it in the comments.

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Reeder for Mac is the desktop version of the popular iOS application, and it lives up to the terrific example set by its predecessor in all regards. The interface is clean, simple and intuitive, and the program loads and works with a snappy quickness that makes scrolling through long lists of articles a pleasure. It uses your Google Reader account to populate its content, but you can also register new RSS feeds to follow directly from within Reeder, and manage and remove your existing subscriptions, too. Note that making changes to your subscriptions in Reeder even syncs back to your Google Reader account.

Reeder also features built-in Readability support, which allows you to apply Readability’s distraction-free algorithm to any content from your feeds, and lets you set up full Readability synchronization if you have an account with that service. There’s also a built-in browser for viewing additional linked content in stories, and the app features lots of customization offers so picky users can fine-tune the experience to get it just right. There’s are two viewing modes, once of which is a compact view where all your browsing takes place in one pane, which can be very useful if you have limited screen space.

If you want a look at the future of OS X Lion Mac apps and you don’t have access to the developer preview, Reeder is a great place to start. The interface is perfect for using full-screen on a Mac laptop, and the multitouch gestures really add to the experience without being overdone or feeling clumsy. It’s probably the iOS roots of Reeder that make it such a nice fit for the iOS-inspired Lion, but you can definitely expect more iOS developers to follow suit when 10.7 arrives in July.

Like the iOS versions, Reeder for Mac isn’t free. It costs $9.99 in the Mac App Store, which, although more expensive than either of the iOS versions, is still a great price for what you get.

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Steve Jobs is known for his stance regarding sexual content in the App Store. Essentially, he wants to keep it clean, so that most content is family-friendly. There are notable exceptions, like the official Playboy app, but generally speaking, nudity and sexuality are a no-no for iOS apps. If that’s not enough, worried parents can lock their kids devices down, restricting access to certain types of content, or to the App Store or Safari altogether.

Apple’s ideas of what is and isn’t acceptable in the App Store have led to some controversial decisions regarding which apps get banned or disallowed in the past. For some, it seems inappropriate that a company can decide what you should and shouldn’t do with your device once you own it.

The new patent takes that a step further. If this tech ever makes it way to your smartphone, it could theoretically alert a user, admin, or other designated individual whenever objectionable content appears in a text message. In practice, that could mean a parent gets a text when their teenage son writes something racy, or that your boss gets a notice whenever you swear in an outbound communication.

According to the patent, the iPhone could also offer suggestions with which to replace the offending text, or just delete it outright as soon as you’re done typing so that it never gets sent in the first place. In effect, that means it could actually change what you’re going to say.

Now I’m not against parents protecting their kids from potentially dangerous situations. That makes sense. But putting this degree of control over something as basic as what you can say with a direct communication device frightens me. Sure, this would probably end up residing in the Restrictions section of the iOS Setting menu, but even just the fact that it would be there would invite things like use by employers to monitor employee texting even more closely than I’m sure many already do, something I definitely don’t approve of.

What do you think? Is this a feature you’d welcome, or an example of Apple going too far?

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I think people are willing to pay for content. I believe it for music and video, and I believe it for the media.

And how would this work? Jobs described it this way:

I can tell you as one of the largest sellers of content on the internet to date — price it aggressively and go for volume. That has worked for us. I’m trying to get the press to do the same thing. They need to do it differently than they do it for print.

The vision of an iTunes that served up paid-for newspaper and magazine content to millions of adoring readers has captivated the traditional media for some time. One of the most eloquent pleas for such a model came from New York Times media writer David Carr last year, in a column entitled “Will Someone Please Invent iTunes For News?” Carr described Apple’s success in selling music, and then said he hoped that someone like Jobs would come along and convince “the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.”

It seems like a slam-dunk idea in so many ways: If record labels can cut a deal with Steve Jobs that sees music sold through iTunes instead of being downloaded for free, then why couldn’t newspapers and magazines do the same thing with their content? Bundle it up, cut a deal with Apple to create an iTunes for news and watch the cash roll in.

But this vision has two fundamental flaws — one psychological and one economic. The psychological flaw is that news stories and other forms of content that appear in newspapers and magazines (with very few exceptions) are not the same as music or even movies or books, in the sense that users want to keep them forever and read or watch them repeatedly, as media gurus Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis have also pointed out. In addition, all of that content is currently available in a completely legal way for nothing, from the websites of the content creators themselves, whereas music and movies are not.

Both of these factors suggest that the price for news would have to be orders of magnitude lower than it is for music — pennies, or even fractions of pennies, instead of dollars. Is that really a viable model for these media entities?

The economic flaw, meanwhile, is that cutting this kind of deal would involve handing over control of a significant part of your newspaper or magazine’s destiny to Steve Jobs. Is that really a bargain that media outlets want to strike? It’s true that Apple has sold billions of songs through iTunes since the store launched, and that has done great things for one company: Apple. Record labels and movie studios, for the most part, haven’t seen truckloads of money come their way from the arrangement. If anything, iTunes pricing has put downward pressure on the prices they charge for CDs and DVDs.

The bottom line is that an iTunes for news might be in Steve Jobs’ best interests — primarily because it might help to sell iPads — but it’s not clear that it would be in media outlets’ best interests, as attractive as it seems. Nor is it obvious that it would even work, if it ever actually came to pass. More than anything, it feels like an industry grasping at any straw it can, in the hope of building a life raft.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of All Things Digital

This is the ultimate roundup of essential apps for your iPhone from 2009.

Best Game: Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid

The sequel to 2008′s Rolando expands on the tilt ‘n’ swipe platforming action of the original. This time round, we’re brought an entire troupe of colorful Rolando characters to protect, alongside a tropical island inhabited by new baddies and a lost Rolando tribe. The artwork is gorgeous, the gameplay is excellent and, thanks to NGMoco’s Plus+ awards system, it’s got bags of replay value too.

Runners-Up Best Game: Gangstar: West Coast Hustle, Doodle Jump

Best Social & Communications App: Tweetie 2

Having formed his own development studio after working at the Cupertino campus, Loren Brichter has established himself as one of the premier App Store developers. Brichter’s skill is feeding his experience at Apple into his apps, Twitter client Tweetie 2 is an impressive showcase of his ability to distill a feature-rich experience into an app with a clear user interface. The app also rolls in a few unexpected new features including video tweeting, profile management and improved location-based searches.

Runners-Up Best Social Communications App: Skype, foursquare

Best Use of Push Notifications: Boxcar

Despite the arrival of push notifications on iPhone earlier this year, it’s still taking many developers time to implement these handy pop-up notifiers in their apps. There’s no push for most Twitter clients, no Facebook push and not even native email push from Apple. Boxcar is the missing push notifier for your favorite apps. The app includes push for Twitter, email, Facebook, RSS and even Growl.

Runners-Up Best Use of Push Notifications: NotifyMe, Ping!

Best News App: Byline

Under the hood, the app updates with the latest news in seconds, syncing happily with Google Reader. Unlike other news readers, while Byline is updating with the latest news, you’re able to keep browsing articles without suffering from any lag. It’s certainly not the most feature-rich news reader, but Byline brings together a clean interface with a robust RSS reader.

Runners-Up Best News App: The Guardian, Newstand

Best Use of Content: NFB Films

The National Film Board of Canada have brought a vast quantity of their video content to the iPhone, all of it wrapped in an easy-to-use free app. There are over a thousand videos available to browse, soak up and send to friends: from documentaries and animations to shorts and trailers for forthcoming releases.

Runners-Up Best Use of Content: McSweeney’s, Panelfly

Best Video App: ReelDirector

Apple may be stalling on bringing iMovie to the iPhone, but that’s nothing to worry about thanks to ReelDirector. With it’s powerful features, the app enables you to edit video footage into your own shorts before sending your latest amateur epic to your friends. In particular, the selection of high quality video transitions really add to the wow effect.

Runners-Up Best Video App: UStream Live Broadcaster, iTimeLapse

Best Photography App: Photoforge

Just like ReelDirector brings video editing to the iPhone, PhotoForge does the same for your photography. First-time users will be drawn to the impressive array of filters on offer, including Blur, Tilt Shift, Simulated HDR and Lomo. Once you’ve got to grips with the filters, there’s also a selection of Photoshop-style tools, including smudge, clone and brushes in a variety of shapes.

Runners-Up Best Photography App: Flickr, QuadCamera

Best Sound App: I Am T-Pain

The year’s most over-used and perhaps abused audio-effect, the auto-tune, has landed on iPhone as Smule’s I Am T-Pain. The app essentially makes even the most cat-screechingly awful singer sound as perfectly tuned as Kanye West. Most importantly, you’ll need absolutely no musical ability to have fun with this brilliant sound toy.

Runners-Up Best Sound App: Mujik, Touch DJ

Best Productivity Tool: NotifyMe

If you’re all about organization and productivity, NotifyMe will keep up-to-date with your task list. Thanks to a sleek user interface and ultra-fast startup time, there’s very little friction between you and the app, meaning you can be entering tasks and then getting back to work in moments. When it’s time to get a task done, the app will send you a push notification, plus there’s even a snooze option (perfect for habitual procrastinators).

Runners-Up Best Productivity Tool: Quickoffice, Pastebot

Best Lifestyle App: Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals

Jamie Oliver brings cooking to the iPhone and true to his style, the entire app is friendly, fun and approachable. There are currently 55 delicious recipes in the app, each one can be whipped up in 20 minutes. To help you along the way, in addition to a range of quick kitchen tutorials recorded by Jamie himself, there’s an interactive shopping list tool and portion calculator.

Runners-Up Best Lifestyle App: Couch to 5K, I Am Safe

Best Utility: Dropbox

The Dropbox service brought off-site backup to the masses. On the desktop, it runs in the background, securing your files and even letting you share them with friends, colleagues and clients with a couple of quick clicks. Although long-awaited, the iPhone app didn’t disappoint. You can browse your Dropbox using the app, plus share files and even save specific content to your iPhone for quick access.

Runners-Up Best Utility: OpenMaps, TimeTuner

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A nice feature is the streamlined description area, which has been “tamed” for the developers who tend to abuse the area, filling it with excessive information and keywords in an attempt to gain favor in the App Store search results. The new system truncates the description past a certain point, allowing the rest to be disclosed upon clicking a “more” link.

New App Store Look

Also highlighted along the left side is a more organized view of the specifics of the app (version, developer and rating) as well as a quick way to see the most popular apps also by the same developer.

Recommendations based on other user’s purchases are now along the bottom, augmented by the inclusion of the app’s icon, which is a nice addition.

New Visual Recommendations

At the moment, featured apps that have custom designed pages (like Twitterrific) still use the original look, but it’s likely that Apple will migrate them over to the new style soon.

For comparison, check out the screenshots below of the same app. What do you think of the new look? Does it highlight the app better? Do you find it more useful or usable?

iTunes 8 & Earlier App Store Interface

iTunes 8 & Earlier App Store Interface

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The tablet isn’t doing any of the amazing things we’ve heard about, like acting as an e-reader for a new magazine format. Instead, its user appears to be shopping for IKEA furniture or something similar. Regardless, the UI and hardware design does look like something that Apple could’ve made. Note also the tantalizing images of past Apple products in the background, including the Apple Newton.

It could be an elaborate fake, of course, and the video quality isn’t terrific, but it isn’t bad either. So far, this is the best example I’ve seen of a tablet rumor that could turn out to be solid evidence of what’s to come from the Mac maker. Thoughts?

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Today it’s the foundation for all modern pre-installed Windows systems. It replaced the aging FAT (File Allocation Table) file system with a leaner, meaner standard. It’s more secure, more flexible, and has more built-in gadgets than a Swiss Army Knife. It’s NTFS, of course — the New Technology File System.

I grew up with NTFS. I was there when it was introduced with Windows NT, and I insisted on reformatting every Windows machine I ever got my hands on — wiping out stuffy old FAT32 — with a file system so much more capable and pleasing. Yeah, OK, I was total nerd about the whole thing, I know.

So it came as something of a surprise to me that I didn’t think about file systems when I was switching to the Mac. And I didn’t think about file systems when I took a terabyte hard drive from my old PC and put it in my Mac Pro. And I didn’t think about file systems when I first clicked around that drive’s contents in Finder.

I did think about file systems when I tried to save changes I made to an old document that migrated to my Mac along with the drive. I was rewarded for my Saving efforts with an unwelcome dialogue telling me I couldn’t write to the drive. And then the penny dropped. My big, new shiny Mac Pro was using HFS+ while that second HDD was formatted with NTFS. And then I had to go and have a lie down for a bit due to an acronym-induced headache.

You’re unlikely to have experienced this access problem unless you have an external drive you like to use for both a Windows machine and a Mac.

Until Apple gets around to building full read/write compatibility into its operating system (and let’s not forget Snow Leopard is right around the corner) we have to find third-party solutions that cajole our hard drives into getting along with each other. One popular (and free) solution is NTFS-3G: a reasonably simple, though somewhat fiddly, application that requires users mount their NTFS drives/partitions in order to have full read/write access to the data stored therein. This can become cumbersome if an external drive is improperly unmounted on another machine. It’s not impossible to fix, mind you, but not effortless by any means.

If you need a simpler solution that offers transparent, and deceptively native, interoperability with NTFS formatted drives, you could try Paragon’s venerable (though horribly named) NTFS for Mac OS X 7.0 (or NTFSMOSX7 as I shall now refer to it because that string of characters is marginally less cumbersome than the full name).

NTFSMOSX7 is a small download, at a little under 3 megabytes and, once installed, ticks away in the background. There’s no user interface or settings to tweak. This really is nothing more than a driver.

If you buy the full version of the software, the download will undoubtedly be larger, since the paid-for app includes Paragon’s MacBrowser software for Windows. I might have tested MacBrowser for the purpose of this review, but Paragon never responded to my emails requesting more information, so if you have used it, and have an experience to share, please add a comment at the end of the article.

The only real problem I had once the hard drive was once again mine to use and abuse, was a conspicuous lack of Spotlight functionality. This is because, by default, Spotlight doesn’t index NTFS volumes. It’s not impossible to do, but it’s also not easy to achieve. The Spotlight preferences panel is typically spartan, so it’s necessary to bypass the Spotlight settings GUI and get your hands dirty in a Terminal session.

For those of you interested, by the way, the syntax for manually adding an NTFS volume (or any volume, for that matter) to Spotlight’s index via Terminal goes like this:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volume/VolumeName

Once entered, Spotlight will begin indexing your volume, which means it’s time for you to go watch some “Galactica” or “Big Bang Theory” while you wait.

A lot has been made of the apparent (and the not-even-remotely-important) differences between NTFS and HFS+. While HFS+ was ahead of the game at a time when too many Windows users were still mired in FAT (no jokes, please), NTFS was, and remains, a sophisticated file system. In fact, it bests HFS+ in many ways. Overall, though, is it better? I don’t know for sure, and I suspect for 99 percent of everyday users the question “who cares?” springs to mind.

Sidenote: Exuberant Apple supporters — aka Wailing Fanboys — muddy the waters with their auto-hate for anything not intrinsically Apple, claiming time and time again on discussion boards that “NTFS sux.” Occasionally, a particularly tech-savvy zealot will talk about comparing streams and counting data forks and probably even get into a debate over which Enterprise Captain is the best.

None of that matters so long as you can access your data quickly and painlessly, and, at least on the Mac, NTFSMOSX7 makes that possible. If you have to use NTFS volumes regularly but can’t reformat them to use HFS+, the $40 asking price for NTFSMOSX7 is perhaps not so steep in return for the convenience of seamless data interoperability. If, on the other hand, you want occasional quick-and-dirty access to an old NTFS volume and the ability to write data to it is not a serious concern, $40 is much too expensive for what amounts to a simple driver, and I’d suggest you stick with a free alternative.

You can try NTFSMOSX7 free for 10 days by downloading it from the Paragon web site. You can see which Enterprise captain is superior by clicking here.

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In November of 2004, a few months after I got my first Mac (a PowerMac G5), I registered theappleblog.com not really having any big plans of what I’d do with the site. I was a senior design student in college and just wanted a new site to design and something to write about.

My first post was, shall we say, anti-climactic…but I had to start somewhere. Within the first week of the site being up, I somehow convinced three different people to write some 20+ posts, and within a month, with the addition of another couple writers, had close to 80 posts.

But I seriously doubt that TAB would have lasted for more than a few months had it not been for the massive amounts of effort put in by Dan Lurie, Chris Holland and Nick Santilli. Those three guys, plus the combined efforts of some 65+ contributors over the past four years, have made TAB what it is today. I was so lucky to find so many people who wanted to help out, and I’m truly grateful for every single person who has contributed over the years.

So, with all of the “I love you man” out of the way, I’ve got some really great news. As of Friday, Sept. 12, The Apple Blog is now a part of the Giga Omni Media family! Giga Omni Media is home to publications such as GigaOM and WebWorkerDaily, as well as the Mobilize Conference and the GigaOm Show.

So what the heehaw does that mean for all of you?

What it does not mean is that we’ll be making massive changes that will make us lame. Lame isn’t on the list of things we’d like to do with the blog…so have no fear. What it does mean is that we’ll be able to provide you with more iPhone/iPod coverage, more news analysis, more product reviews, more Mac tips and tricks, and more quality coverage in general of anything and everything related to Apple.

I’m honored for The Apple Blog to be a part of such a solid group of publications, and really look forward to where The Apple Blog will go in the coming months and years. I’ll be staying on board with the transition as will a number of our great contributors.

Finally, thanks so much for being a reader of The Apple Blog. It really means a lot to have so many people enjoying and getting a thing or two out of our articles. My hope is that we can continue to provide you with the content you want to read with the quality you deserve.

And, as a side note, if you’ll be in San Francisco for the Mobilize Conference (or just there in general this Wednesday through Friday), let me know. We could have a little TAB meetup.

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