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The Easter weekend saw about 300,000 or more (depending on what figure one accepts as true) iPads being sold in the USA. Some rather exciting announcements regarding software applications available for that application also came along, foremost among them a comic book reader by Marvel, Zinio magazine reader and the Kindle application for the iPad. Whilst I cannot wait to get my hands on an iPad, I fear couple of months wait are still necessary…

Hot on the heels of the iPad release, Apple has announced an event that will lift the lid on the new iPhone OS version. There is a lot of speculation as to what iPhone OS 4.0 will include – a new device may be on the horizon, too.

The iPhone OS 4.0 event is scheduled to take place on April 8.

Adobe’s latest version of its Creative Suite is set to be unveiled on 12 April. CS5 will provide updates to the popular software. For Mac users, the new release will be Intel-only, Cocoa and 64-bit native.

Exactly what features the new CS5 will contain remains to be seen. For most of us, it’ll mean one thing: upgrade time…

Firmware 2.0.3 was scarcely available for half a day when Canon posted an update to its latest firmware release. 2.0.4 corrects an issue that can occur with audio recordings for which levels have been set manually. The easiest workaround is to leave the audio level metering on automatic, but the best fix is to visit the for the Canon website and download firmware 2.0.4.

Quite possibly the fastest set of firmware updates we’ve seen for the Canon 5D Mark II...

A native Kindle reader is finally available for the Macintosh platform, having been released late last year for Windows only. The 8MB download contains the reader application. After the installation, the reader needs to be registered for existing content to be available and purchases to be downloaded.

The interface is pretty standard: existing books are displayed in the archive or downloaded for offline reading. If any other Kindle reader or Kindle has accessed any of the books, bookmarks and progress are updated to make the reading experience seamless.

Download the reader here.

Firmware 2.0.3 for the Canon 5D Mark II is available for download from the Canon website.

The firmware update includes the following five enhancements to the movie function and a fix to the manual sensor cleaning function:

Download from this link. While you’re there, be sure to download the latest, updated user manual. It includes additional information regarding the new features:

Canon delivered a pre-announcement of the anticipated firmware for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II last week. The new firmware release is to be available sometime in the next week or so and focuses primarily on extending the camera’s video shooting capabilities.

The update add will add 24fps and 25fps recording to the EOS 5D Mark II, as well as some improvements and modifications to the Live View shooting function and the histogram display.

Whilst these improvements are certainly welcome, I’m sometimes surprised by the fact that very simple, marginal additions to the existing firmware could provide a huge amount of functionality to standard shooting options. As an example, Canon DSLR cameras do not provide a built-in time lapse feature. That’s a fairly standard and simple addition, probably already existing in some shape or form inside the code of the firmware all the EOS cameras rely on. Yet, Canon seems to be unwilling to provide marginal firmware updates to add such useful features. Possibly, it’s their ability to charge for additional accessories that provide the features most photographers eventually want to utilize…

In any case, the free update to the EOS 5D Mark II firmware will be available on the Canon website soon.

With the arrival of the Squeezebox I’ve taken on a task I should have completed ages ago: cleaning up the mess that is my music collection. There is more than one – tons of MP3 files are sitting around on external drives waiting to be added to iTunes. Multiple copies of the same file have been placed in my initially carefully considered hierarchical directory structure, resulting in many duplicate titles.

Whilst there are various ways of trying to identify duplicate files, I wasn’t in the mood to rely on iTunes‘ ability to display duplicate tracks. There are command line utilities for checking and identifying duplicate files. Once again, that isn’t something I’m interested in: quick identification and easy deletion or archival where at the top of my list of priorities. A quick Google search resulted in me downloading the first program I came across on a legitimate link: Araxis FInd Duplicate Files. The application appeals because of a very simple user interface and an ability to check each file for its size and checksum, amongst other attributes. The fully-featured application is free to use for a couple of days. After a quick test, I purchased it at USD 15, a very reasonable price.

Find Duplicate Files provides a simple user interface: select the folders or locations to scan, then start the scan an walk away. Various preferences can be set that allow only certain file types to be identified and the action to take once duplicate files are processed.

One improvement I would suggest is that the list of found duplicates be populated in real-time. My current music library was roughly 340GB in size, requiring a fair bit of searching to run through – during the entire time, the results section of the application stayed empty, until the search operation had concluded. A minor gripe, but something that would alert the user to the fact that something is busy happening.

Once the identification of duplicate files has been completed, a list of all attributes is presented, with various colours being used to separate individual groups of duplicates. In the case of the music tracks, cover art is displayed if available.

I performed a few rudimentary checks to ensure the application had indeed found five or so examples of where I knew duplicates to exist. Instead of deleting the duplicates, I decided to archive them to another location just in case. Over 10000 duplicates existed, freeing up over 50GB of disk space. Not bad going, and certainly a great way to rid the iTunes library of additional burden.

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Whilst Apple‘s products are amongst the best-designed and most stylish in the world, that company’s interaction with its developer community is rather archaic and worthy of being called dictatorial. The process I followed to be registered as an iPhone developer started innocuously enough: log on to the developer website and start entering details. But whilst every other process of purchasing goods on the Internet permits immediate purchase by credit card, the Apple iPhone developer program stops its web workflow and requires a form to be printed out, signed and faxed to developer central. I am generally not interested in faxing anything and I initially attempted to mail a scanned copy of the completed form to Apple. No response. So, I went the way of the 1980′s and reticently faxed them the piece of paper.

A fast turnaround time, to be fair. I had a confirmation of my enrollment within a few hours, but attempting to activate my paid-for membership resulted in another disappointment: a request for identity verification, no less!

Once again, I need to print out a form and complete it. Attach a certified copy of a passport or similar identification document and then fax it off to Apple. It’s as though I’m trying to gain access to CERN‘s LHC complex instead of wanting to potter around developing an iPhone application or trying to see what options there are for iPad development. Requesting identity verification for a developer program is a joke, specifically if my payment has already been completed and accepted. Why not request identity verification together with the payment if that’s so important? The fact that the enrollment procedure doesn’t take place completely electronically is an inconvenience. The fact that Apple requires identity verification for the download and use of an SDK to support their products is an absolute disgrace!

Whenever I install all my collection of favourite software on a Mac, I have the same  conundrum to solve: connecting an iPhone results in the following notification:

Regardless how often I’ve managed to find out what is happening, I seem never to remember for too long… The issue with CameraWindow appearing has to do with the installation of the Canon EOS Digital Solutions software. That CD contains EOS Utility and Digital Photo Professional, amongst others. Since certain cameras don’t trigger the automatic launch of iPhoto or similar software on the host machine, Canon provides this utility to assist. Unfortunately, the software is installed without question and is not immediately easy to disable. Instead of living in the System Preferences, CameraWindow can be disabled only once iPhoto has been launched and its preferences examined.

Selecting a different action to occur when a camera is connected gets rid of the annoying CameraWindow notification. Now I remember. Again…

In my move to make a Mac my permanent computing solution, I am busy investigating various solutions and applications I’ll need to be free of Windows. No native port of the SAPGUI exists for Mac OS X, making access to SAP systems potentially problematic. Instead, the Java version needs to be used and this has been updated by SAP about one month ago. The 720 release of the PlatinGUI for Mac OS X can be found on SAP‘s ftp server. In comparison to the Windows native software package requiring at least 500MB of storage space, the PlatinGUI package is exceptionally light, requiring only the download of a single 32MB file.

There are a few base requirements that need to be satisfied before attempting the installation. A Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of RAM is required in the target machine. From a software perspective, either Mac OS X 10.5.7 or 10.6 has to be loaded and an updated Java SE. Below Mac OS X 10.5.7, Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 is required, whilst the Java SE 6 is already present in Mac OS X 10.6. The installation was rather uneventful, creating a program icon in the Applications folder. I find the creation of new connections to be simplest under the Advanced tab with the Expert mode enabled.

Create a direct connection to the SAP system using the connection string

conn=/H/<IP Address>/S/32<Port>

The Java GUI supports almost all functions provided by the native applications. There may be one or two complex, modern transactions that may be hamstrung, but in the technical area, everything I require works without a hitch.

No trouble getting to SAP from the Apple…