Thankfully, there is a workaround as this post on Mac OS X Hints describes. I’ve now implemented the hack and it works very well. Thanks guys.

This issue first arose when the iMacs shipped last summer, but the lawsuit was launched only on Monday. Why? Because Apple recently settled out of court with MacBook Pro owners for whom, as professional photographers, the distinction is critical. One of the reasons, according to reports, that a settlement was reached in that case is that the plaintiffs’ legal representative had trouble finding other disgruntled MacBook Pro owners to join a class action suit.

As I made clear in this post, this isn’t an Apple issue. It arises from the fact that the company, like every other manufacturer of consumer TFT dislays uses panels which are only capable of displaying 6-bits per channel, rather than the 8-bits needed for true millions of colours. And I defy any iMac owner to tell the different between an image on a 6-bit display and one on an 8-bit display.

The only logical conclusion is that this iMac lawsuit is a crude attempt to cash in on the settlement of the MacBook Pro dispute. The key difference is that the MacBook Pro is a professional machine aimed at people who might reasonably be expected to do colour critical work on it. The iMac is a consumer machine designed for watching movies and surfing the web. Can any iMac owner really claim to have suffered because their display only pretends to show millions of colours?

What next? Can I sue the maker of my inkjet printer because it only prints three pages a minute rather than their claimed 20? And if I did, would the story make it onto the front page of The Guardian website as the iMac story did this morning.

The editing features are beautifully implemented. In addition to basic features like cropping, rotating and changing the exposure there are a number of other options ranging from the genuinely useful to what can best be described as novelty. Among the novelty group are PopColor which allows you to isolate a colour in an image and convert the rest of the image to monochrome, and Sketch which converts a photograph into, you guessed it, a sketch. Results from both tools are very good, however. Exposure correction and black and white conversion are also very good.

In all the tools, you click the tool to select it and are presented with a number of options, represented as thumbnails of the image, which have the effect or adjustment applied to varying degrees. Hover over a thumbnail to view the effect in the main image and then click the one you want. You can then apply other effects and adjustments. To remove an effect, you just untick the checkbox next to its name.

Effects and adjusments can be undone, even after saving the image by clicking on the drop down menu in album view and selecting Revert.

Here are a few more of my first impressions:

As you would expect from Adobe, the flash-based interface looks very slick. It is a little sluggish however.

The Upload feature which allows you to to upload JPEG images to your Photoshop Express account is well-implemented. It’s reasonably speedy – it took me a little over ten minutes to upload a 25MB folder of images over a cable modem connection and the progress indicators show how much of each file has uploaded.

There are links on the main interface to Photobucket, FaceBook, and Picasa to allow you to log into your accounts on those sites from Express, but no support for Flickr.

Albums are private by default but can be shared publicly at the press of a button.

All in all, it’s looking very promising.

According to an M:Metrics survey, 30.9% of iPhone users have watched mobile television on the device, compared to 4.6%, on average, for other mobile phone users.

That iPhone users are more video hungry than other mobile phone users is no real surprise given that there’s a YouTube application right on the home screen, but the extent of the difference is remarkable.

In related news, this post from Ian noted that iPhone users were responsible for a 3% increase in iPlayer usage following the release of iPlayer for iPhone. Another impressive statistic.

However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it.

To be fair to Narayen, that’s not a whole lot different from what he actually said, which was:

‘So we are also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone and we will work with Apple. We’ve evaluated the SDK, we can now start to develop the Flash player ourselves and we think it benefits our joint customers. So we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.’

Note the two references to working with Apple, which weren’t included in the coverage on the many blogs which mocked Narayen’s comments yesterday. Most commentators chose to home in on the ‘we’ve evaluated the SDK’ bit and then use that to make the assumption that Narayen was saying that the SDK provided all the tools and permissions Adobe needed.

You can tell this by the fact that there’s not a single quote from anyone in the story and the fact that the closest it has to a named source is ‘executives familiar with the negotiations’. In other words, the cleaner who happened to be listening at the door when someone floated the idea.

The FT doesn’t even say whether the executives are employed by Apple, the music companies, the analysts it refers to, or some other third party which has a vague interest.

Nevertheless, if there’s even a shred of truth in the story it raises some interesting questions. So lets assume for a moment that it is true.

Here’s the guts of it:

‘One executive said the research had shown that consumers would pay a premium of up to $100 for unlimited access to music for the lifetime of the device, or a monthly fee of $7-$8 for a subscription model.’

Would you pay £50 for an iPod if it meant you could download as much music as you want from iTunes at no extra cost? On the face of it, of course you would, so would I. Which is why the market research apparently returned such positive results. But there’s an important phrase in the story which could be crucial — ‘for the lifetime of the device.’

That means that when your iPod dies, so does the music. It also means that, presumably, you won’t be able to sync those tracks with a Mac or PC or burn them to CD. And, of course, it means the return of that nasty ogre we thought was slowly shuffling out of the room, DRM. In order to ensure that tracks or only available for the ‘lifetime of the device’ Apple will have to ensure that they can only be played on that device, which means DRM.

Now, would you pay an extra £50 in order to be able to download as many tracks as you want, over Wifi, directly to your iPhone or iPod touch if you could only listen to them on that device and with the knowledge that the music is locked to that iPhone/iPod? Suddenly it’s not so clear cut.

There’s one piece missing from the Time Machine jigsaw, though: the ability to boot directly from a Time Machine volume when your boot drive fails. There is a workaround as this tip on MacOSX Hints details. And it involves nothing more complicated than performing a Restore from your original install disc onto a fresh volume and then using that as your Time Machine volume.

Great as that trick is though, it’s not as neat as the Time Machine features in the just-released update to SuperDuper, v2.5. According to developer, Shirt Pocket Software, SuperDuper 2.5 lets you store bootable Leopard back-ups on your Time Machine volume, making that volume bootable, and

“copy your Time Machine backups to other disks, so you can back them up or upgrade to a larger disk without losing your history.”

Lovely.

For more Mac OS X tips, hop to the Tips page. And if you haven’t done so already, subscribe now. I’ve made it as easy as I can, just click whichever of the buttons on the right makes most sense to you.

‘If you can’t carry a second battery then Apple has screwed up bigtime in the main market for these things, which is people like me’

Er no, Jack. I’m not privy, sadly, to the inner workings of Apple’s product design group, but I feel I’m on fairly safe ground suggesting that when they put together thumbnails for the target user of the MacBook Air, they weren’t thinking of you.

‘Have a look at the ThinkPad X300….It’s faster than the AIR, better screen, better keyboard, removable battery, much better specification (bigger, faster drive; full set of ports; proper LV processor; optical drive) and yet it’s still LIGHTER than the Air.

Also, the IBM won’t make you look like a clueless fashion victim.’

Yes Jack, but how does the X300 feel to actually use? How does it do with all those little, but important details like dealing with a power cord that gets yanked when someone trips on it? And that keyboard, does it sense the ambient light and back light accordingly? What about the latch on the lid, break easily does it?

How does it compare with the MacBook Air when you carry it around and use it every day. What? Never used the MB Air? Surely not. I mean, you wouldn’t slate it without actually having seen it, would you?

With regard to being a ‘clueless fashion victim’, if that means caring about the way the tools I use on a daily basis are designed, that I care that the MB Air’s power cord just falls away when someone trips on it, that it doesn’t have a latch to irritate me or break, that downloading images from my camera only needs one click once I’ve connected it, I’ll happily wear a badge declaring myself to be one.

‘Apple has so many of the pieces of the jigsaw already in place – iTunes, QuickTime 7, the Mac – that it would seem almost a no-brainer for it to become the premiere conduit through which Internet TV is delivered to our homes.’

Three announcements this week make me think that we’re getting very close to that prospect.

1. AppleTV can now connect directly to the Internet to download content from the iTunes Store, view YouTube, and subscribe to video podcasts.

2. Ashley Highfield, director of the BBC Future Media and Technology Unit is apparently very enthusiastic about Apple TV’s new feature. He’s reported in MacUser as saying on the BBC Internet blog

‘This, coupled with Apple’s (long anticipated) move to a rental model, means that the we can look to getting BBC iPlayer onto this platform too, as we should be able to use the rental functionality to allow our programmes to be downloaded, free, but retained for a time window, and then erased, as our rightsholders currently insist.’

3. Digital Spy reports that Joost chief technology officer Dirk-Willem van Gulik has been appointed chief technical architect at BBC Future Media and Technology.

The Digital Spy story quotes Eric Huggers, controller of BBC Future Media and Technology as commenting

‘the BBC recognises that IP connectivity is quickly moving beyond the personal computer.’

And so say all of us.

If you want an in-depth analysis of how George Bush’s latest comments on Iran will affect the ’special relationship’, don’t look for it in The Star.

And if you want the most powerful and upgradeable laptop that your £1200 can buy, don’t pre-order a MacBook Air.

On the other hand, Starburst is a decent pick if you want something chewy and fruity. The MB Air is perfect if you want a light, slim, sexy notebook that will do pretty much anything you’re likely to ask of it.

And The Star…..well, let’s just leave it there.