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Dottiness is a family affair

By Garry Barker
July 15, 2004

Ah, we are such an honest lot, here in Macintosh land. Do not pirate music, we tell each other. The legal stuff is better quality and easier to get. And so it is.

And so, when the Ayling family, a slightly extraordinary mob that has had greater effect upon Australians than most realise, developed Dot-Pod, software that allows iPod tracks to be shared in the home or office, or anywhere in the world via the internet, the first admonition they offer is, "don't swap stuff illegally".

Dot-Pod is not peer-to-peer software. It is a closed system, demanding username and password.

It is but one of several MacOS X applications the Aylings have developed as part of their impressive drive into 21st-century technology. They also have Dot-Tunes, Dot-Photos and Dot-Addressbook, all developed on a dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac, mostly for themselves, but now offered to the world.

The names of each describe what they do: Dot-Tunes allows iTunes tracks to be swapped, same for Dot-Photo with pictures from iPhoto and for Dot-Addressbook with entries in OS X's Address Book.

Jeff Ayling, son of WAM Communications Group founder Geoff Ayling, says Dot-Pod came about because of the company's need to move music loops, jingles and stuff around their organisation.

Peter Jackson did it with the rushes of The Lord of the Rings and probably moved several terabytes of data during the movies' production.

At first, the Aylings carried their iPods from place to place, "but driving from home to the studio wasted time. That's why we built Dot-Pod," Jeff says. "Now we are collaborating and sharing music by iPods across the web."

Broadband connection is better but the system works on dial-up. "We work with a bloke in the UK who has about 15,000 music samples. They are only about 100k each, so a dial-up modem is good enough," he says.

WAM offers a free demo of Dot-Pod on its website that allows people to publish 10 tracks. After that, registration costs $A29.

"We are not like Napster or Kazaa," he says. "The only way you could share my music is if I gave you my address to put in your browser. It is a closed system that can be protected by user name and password."

Jeff says the iPod, being a portable hard drive, has revolutionised their business. "You can take your iPod to a computer you have never used before, plug it in, and you can share your music through it," he says. "The software can run on the iPod itself. We don't use any of the Mac web tools. We created our own web server. You just fire up Dot-Pod and it will do everything you need."

So, what does the WAM Group do? Well, do you remember hearing, throughout your childhood, the jingle: "Goodonyer Mum, Tip Top's the One"? It is like a bush fly. Once it latches on, you can't get rid of it. And that is exactly what Geoff Ayling intended when he wrote it more than 20 years ago.

They have done hundreds of others and you may be surprised (elated, depressed, enraged) to know that every piece of brain adhesive this family has hurled onto radio and TV waves was created on a Macintosh.

"We have been Mac people for as long as I can remember," says Jeff Ayling. "I started on an Apple IIe and I now have a dual 2GHz G5."

They are now into offering a slew of web services, including FinalWebPro, a sort of auto-design service for web pages.

"Rather than pay someone to design a website, anyone can come to our site, where we offer 265 designs, the best we have been able to get," Jeff says. "People click a few boxes, send the results to us and we customise and set up the site for them within 24 hours."

Another product puts together press-ready PDF files for real estate agents to make up their newspaper advertisements.

Apart from being a full-on Mac OS X developer, Ayling is an expert on jingles and highly critical of many of the current crop.

They don't promote the product properly, he says. "For instance, everyone knows the 'I feel better now' jingle. But can you remember which health insurer it is advertising?"

(It is MediBank Private)

"Or what about the TV ad of the tongue that goes out hunting for beer? Everyone has seen that, but do you remember the brand of beer?" (It is Tooheys Dry).


Macs are not immune to viruses, but so far as is known, and despite various alarms about a recently disclosed "vulnerability" in OS X, not a single piece of malware (geek-speak for internet nasties) has been launched on to the web to plague us.

However, it is possible for a worm or trojan horse to ride on an email from a PC into a Mac, where it may lie unable to do harm until the unwitting Mac user forwards the email to a friend with a PC. Thus, according to the ancient rules of personal hygiene and the Black Plague, an infection.

Subscribers to .Mac get Virex 7.5 as part of the deal and can scan all files for known viruses - all 95,000 or so of them.

Alternatively, Sophos, a British anti-virus company, has just released an updated version of its anti-virus protection for Mac OS X 10.2 and above. It is available in five languages - making it useful for multinational and multiplatform organisations - includes automatic updating and uses the SMTP client in Mac OS X to send alerts.

If you have any queries about Macs, contact Garry Barker at
