User, music universe expanding for iTunes

We're not so special any more. A week ago Thursday, Apple unveiled its free iTunes for Windows software, which allows PC owners to work with a virtually Mac-identical music-handling program and buy songs from the iTunes Music Store — ending a few months of Mac user downloading hegemony (www.apple.com/itunes).

Yes, there are other, Windows-only online music services that allow you to stream music for a monthly fee. Some allow certain forms of downloads, and certain songs can be burned, sometimes for an extra fee.

Apple stripped all of that away through what must have been complex and lengthy negotiations with music labels. Most songs are 99 cents.

Most albums $9.99. You can play any music you download on up to three registered machines.

You can burn them to CDs an unlimited number of times, but no more than 10 times with the same ordered set of songs in a playlist. And you can transfer the music to an unlimited number of iPods.

And it made us Mac users feel very special, with the best and simplest music store. Now, everyone has access — except users of older operating systems or Linux, Unix and its variants.

Apple's Windows announcement was coupled with a few other interesting updates: By next Saturday, the music store will have 400,000 titles, including music from 200 independent labels as well as thousands of audiobooks and radio-show archives from Audible.com.

The pricing on the spoken-word items is a little higher because many recordings are of longer duration.

To make it even easier for us to spend piles of cash at the store, Apple now offers gift certificates and an "allowance."

Parents — or anyone — can provide a regular monthly amount that's transferred into someone else's iTunes account. An Apple product manager said the allowance account was "about helping parents to wean their children off illegal file sharing."

An Apple hardware partner, Belkin (www.Belkin.com), unveiled two add-ons to the docking iPods: a tiny $60 microphone/speaker that plugs into the iPod's special audio jack, and a media card reader ($100).

The recorder can store hundreds of hours of sound, and voice recordings are synchronized back to the computer with which you use a particular iPod.

The media reader can take photos off Compact Flash, Secure Digital and other kinds of memory cards, and transfer them to the iPod for later synching with iPhoto.

If you're using a digital camera, you know how quickly even a 256 megabyte media card fills up.

This reader allows you to dump your card without a computer in sight and keep on shooting.

Panther strikes

If it's Saturday, it must be Panther. Apple's 10.3 (Panther) update to its operating system was released yesterday at 8 p.m. While it's not a blow-your-socks-off release, certain features will probably wow you individually.

With two Apple Stores in the vicinity, you can now get a personal or group demonstration and have questions answered.

Apple didn't make advance copies of Panther available for review, so I'll be writing more about it in my next column.

Give me that old-time e-mail

I like text e-mail. Forget that fancy, processor-cycle-wasting, not-always-correctly-displaying, tracking-code-embedded, optical monstrosity known as HTML e-mail. It has its uses, and marketing is usually the main one. (Forget spam: I'm talking about e-mail I signed up for, even.)

This desire to avoid HTML e-mail and the need for a fast mail-search feature for my gigabyte of e-mail led to Mailsmith, now at version 2.0. Mailsmith comes from the fine people at Bare Bones (www.barebones.com), a Macintosh software company that has been developing the BBEdit text editor since the early '90s.

BBEdit originally was aimed at programmers but has gradually broadened its user base and features to encompass anyone who has a primary interest in working with plain text using powerful search and replace features, as well as excellent formatting controls.

It's a great way to write HTML by hand when that's needed.

Mailsmith carries over some of these powerful functions, allowing plenty of reformatting and pattern-based searching. But because it thinks about mail as plain text, it's also fast and efficient.

I can search tens of thousands of messages in seconds in a coarse way or have a refined search looking for specific patterns (like a sequence of numbers 10 digits long starting with 206 or e-mail from anyone whose last name starts with "Finkel") and wait only slightly longer.

If you receive HTML e-mail in Mailsmith, it packages it as an HTML attachment that you can double-click and view in a Web browser. This gives me the best of both worlds.

Mailsmith is also tied into Spam Sieve for better spam filtering through word-frequency-analysis tricks and PGP for encrypted e-mail.

There's something about simplicity that speaks volumes when confronted with the increasing complexity and sophistication of e-mail. I'd rather choose when I need the full splendor of it all and when a little bit of text fully under my control is enough.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists