March 7th, 2008
Well holy shit, it looks like we’ve all been carrying around 80% of a Macintosh in our pockets for half a year.
The Apple SDK for the iPhone exposes nearly all the guts of the system, as well as sophisticated integration with other apps, OS components, and hardware. Apple claims that my cell phone and my laptop are using the same kernel. (I guess we knew this but it’s nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth).
The jailbreakers will have their work cut out to compete.
The first “blessed” 3rd party iPhone app I’d like to see in June is a streaming MP3 player. I’d like to listen to DirtyRadio and my stack of various NPR stations whenever I’m bathed in WiFi microwaves. (Or, dare I dream, even an EDGE connection?). Based on what I’ve seen, this is plainly no challenge at all to someone competent to write any kind of media player. (by which I mean basically connect a network socket to an audio buffer and then go have a drink)
But Fuck! You could get fancy and use the iPhone to triangulate your geographical position and then present a list of regionally appropriate streaming radio stations. You could then animate an old-time tuning dial and probably even fade each one into the other with static overlaid in between. Literally you can do this on a god damn cell phone. Apple has videos explaining each component. You can go nuts!
The second app I’d like to see, I’ll try to write myself. Nothing too extraordinary but I’d find it useful about twice a week. It might even be easier to do as a web app, but I will endeavor to continue my Obj-C edumacation.
And have I missed something or is the Interface Builder half of this iPhone SDK still “Coming Soon”?
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February 5th, 2008
Now that I’ve installed Windows Vista on a second partition, I realize how Mac OS X can lend itself to certain abuses that would not be tempting on another platform.
Let’s imagine I IM my brother a link to a certain set of pictures on Flickr.
He says he already sent me that link yesterday.
I say get the hell out of here.
He says yeah he did, dammit.
How can a little brother be allowed to be correct? I do a quick Spotlight search in the Finder for logged iChat conversations in the past month whose filename contains my brother’s name and whose contents contain flickr.com.
Surprising to me, there is a hit. I had sent him a link to an Obama rally in Idaho.
As soon as I send the IM describing this incident, another logfile shows up in the search. It’s the log of my current IM. Wow, OS X doesn’t screw around.
No, says my brother, I sent you a link at digg.com. I change the search terms, discover he’s right, and begin to beat him violently. Too bad it’s all in my head since he’s 1,100 miles away.
Incredibly accurate instant search can lead to mild shame when it turns out you are wrong. Just keep an eye out.
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February 4th, 2008
I guess the moral of the story is: store your drinks away from valuable computers. And if you must spill, spill purified water. The MacBookPro works fine again. And compared to a full refund, I’m very pleased.
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January 31st, 2008
For being basically Dell’s hometown (well Round Rock is just a few klicks north), and having literally every classroom staffed with at least one rat’s nest of wires around some crappy refurbished Dell tower — and there’s often way more than one — you sure do see a lot of Mac laptops around the Austin Community College. Both Rio Grande and Northridge campuses.
They’re not even new ones, although there are plenty of black Macbooks. You’ll have your 12″ PBG4’s and iBooks too.
I might bring around my 1.83Ghz Core Duo MacBook Pro (the lowest spec of any MacBook Pro but what a price I got on it!) except only hours after installing Windows Vista on a separate partition, it was ruined by a water spill. At least it was only water.
Somewhere someone is watching. And they’re angry.
Since I’m sleeping with an Apple Authorized Service Technician — whose attempts to distract me induced this accident — I indicated with a subtle glance that I would like her to field-strip the machine to assess liquid damage.
She did so surprisingly quickly. I had forgotten that the Apple Store I used to work at was perpetually under-staffed with Geniuses so we shipped out stacks of portables to a repair depot every day. My AAST’s store is not over-staffed, but they do have a good In-Store Turnaround Time.
I have replaced hard drives in Titanium PowerBooks and in (plastic) Macbooks. But the number of screws required to open up a MacBook Pro really surprised me. Even so it’s apparently fewer than the PowerBooks of yore.
Once the roughly 20-something screws had been sorted into an ice-cube tray and the top-case left out for drying, a rambunctious kitten decided to help by jumping on the table and spraying microsopic laptop screws here and there throughout the thick carpeting.
Well it’s just as well I don’t have a concealed carry permit since I might have turned it on myself or maybe one of the cats. They all wanted to come play on the floor as we searched with flashlights for screws smaller than the grains of crystal cat litter our feline friends have already strewn about the room.
I must admit, I was very cruel in locking them in the bathroom and bedroom.
Somehow my Authorized Service Provider found most of the screws in the carpet. I thought I was good at finding shark teeth in the wash on a beach but I must be retarded by comparison.
So the machine re-assembles, and boots. And behaves fairly normally for a while except no down-arrow key. And then the whole keyboard goes crazy. And either the logic board or the power inverter whines while running Windows under low CPU load (again … this was a pre-existing condition but I thought the last logic board swap had fixed it). But now I have to convince Amex to fix it instead of Apple. And irony of ironies, they are apparently tempted to just refund me the entire purchase price.
But I can’t buy a MacBook Pro for a thousand bucks. I don’t want some crappy Macbook. Have they ever had a cardholder plead for them to pay for repairs instead of replacement?
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January 16th, 2008
Apple doesn’t advertise it yet, but the song in the new MacBook Air commercial is by Yael Naïm, from a self-titled album.
They’re getting really obscure, but I really dig the song. I wonder if I should get the whole album. It’s on iTunes Plus at 256kbps with no DRM.
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January 16th, 2008
The MacBook Air gives the Air Jordan a run for its money, huh?
I think we found the new laptop for a mister D. Woo unless he’s already gotten one. The Communists will be nothing but impressed by the way it hides its girth beneath its sightlines.
Although there’s not much girth there. Lithium Polymer batteries, nonexistent permanent storage, and a pliable chip manufacturer have made this Mac the closest to an iPod yet. If it succeeds (well even if it doesn’t) it’s the best endorsement yet for a switch to Intel chips. Not only did Intel deliver custom (although probably eventually widespread) miniaturized packaging for the Core 2 Duo, you probably couldn’t even fit a 4 year old G4 in this little bastard. Nevermind the chips IBM produces to burn up XBoxes.
MacBook Air may be the first Mac since 2000 to lack a FireWire port, but you have to go back farther to lack an ethernet port. And what’s the last Mac that didn’t have a CD drive? I know our SE/30 didn’t. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
MBA is the first Mac ever to lack any kind of removable storage.
Rumors just prior to the announcement wondered if “Something In The Air” (as the MacWorld banners proclaimed) meant a device that was always connected, like an iPhone or a Kindle. I’m glad the various pundits haven’t thrown up too much of a stink that this isn’t the case. It might be nice to build a notebook computer with constant roaming cell-network internet access. Someday. But this is too much of a burden on a new product today. WiFi is everywhere. Who wants to pay a monthly bill after buying a $1800 laptop. And hell any Mac can pair with a Bluetooth phone that will let it share a network (not the iPhone), or a MacBook Pro can have an EVDO or HDSPA card shoved in its left side.
… If the forthcoming iPhone SDK makes it possible to run a proxy server on the phone again, that will solve the problem too …
Frankly I’m not too worried. I’m only growing to love my iPhone more.
The EDGE internet access around where I live is quite pokey. And since with the new update, the iPhone thinks I live a mile south of reality, that might indicate where the nearest cell phone tower is.
But lately I’ve been spending a lot more time in Downtown Austin, and the iPhone’s EDGE network speeds are surprisingly much faster there. Today I even watched some of the Guided Tours of the new products on my iPhone in a sandwich shop without WiFi. Sure they were the lower bitrate movies Apple was careful to provide, but honestly I think they sacrificed more on sound than video. As long as I’m paying $20/month for unlimited data, I might as well be using it more, eh?
Maybe I’m behind the times, and people who complain about the iPhone are those thirsting for even harder and faster wireless internet. But I’m just appreciating what I’ve got, and realizing I’m only beginning to use my iPhone to its full potential.
Today I reordered my icons, added a web page to the home screen, and dropped a pin in the map. MacWorld 2008’s best product is from a year ago. And it keeps getting better.
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November 11th, 2007
Stacks in the Leopard Dock are totally broken, but here’s a way to clean it up a bit.
I’ve already been using aliases to the enclosing folder, named or date-modified to sort to the top and act like an overlay.
Custom Translucent Icons only sweeten the deal. (I don’t know if that’s the original maker of the icons since they’re from Japan and this is all the English you’re gonna get.)
[UPDATE] It looks like that site is overloaded or dead so here’s a backup of the icons themselves with a Japanese readme.
Here’s how to turn this:
Into this:
Using nothing but these icons:
And both old-fashioned and new-fashioned Mac trickery. (Aliases and a space before a filename to sort to the top are old-fashioned. Unix commands are new-fashioned).
Custom icons have worked the same way on a Mac for as long as I’ve used them. So if you’ve opened a Get Info window and copied an icon anytime since 1990, you know what to do.
The confusing part is remembering to customize the icon of the alias in the folder instead of the folder itself. (so paste the icon on the alias in /Applications that points to /Applications but is named with a leading space so it sorts to the top and appears first in the Dock stack).
The Dock offers to sort by “Date Added” but this isn’t available in the Finder so you’re best off sorting by Date Modified and then changing the modification date of the Downloads alias to some date far in the future so it will always sort to the top.
This unixy business:
touch -mt 202001010000.00 ~/Downloads/Downloads
will change the modification date of a file called “Downloads” that is in the user Downloads folder (in this case it should be an alias to its parent) to New Year’s Day in 2020, so that ought to suffice. I advise then using the Info window to lock the file so you don’t accidentally bring it back to the present. Do the same thing if you want a date-sorted Documents folder or anything else.
Having an alias to the parent folder also fixes the Leopard Dock shortcoming where it’s a hassle to open the folder in a normal Finder window!
The final step is getting the Dock to update. A unix nerd might just kill the Dock process. But this will maximize all your minimized windows and restart your Dashboard widgets.
A Mac nerd might be enjoying the FSEvents infrastructure built into the kernel. Just modify all the folders in any way at all (make an alias to a file then delete it) and the Dock will update instantly.
Christ, what a mess. Dock Stacks are the most idiotic thing about Leopard.
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November 9th, 2007
Exclude the Podcasts directory from Time Machine backup! Who cares if all that garbage is lost? After a few weeks it’s worth deleting anyway.
Maybe you can tell I’m trying to back up a 750GiB drive to a 500GiB backup drive.
Or as sane people not threatened by lawsuits might call it, a 698.6GB drive to a 465.8GB drive.
Exclude that Bit Torrents folder too, especially the Incomplete in progress one.
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November 6th, 2007
I use Preview all the time except for the past few days I’ve had Leopard.
But just now I find that it finally supports resizing images!
See you in hell, GraphicConverter!
There’s even the same awesome masking tools (used badly and drunkenly here) as you’d find in iWork 08.
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November 6th, 2007
I knew I’d find some crazy Leopard tricks after a while. Actually I’ve probably found a few, but you read about so much stuff online, who can keep straight what’s what. And who’s whose.
Well I have found one thing I haven’t read about anywhere (unless they already existed in Tiger, but I doubt that).
There are several hidden and non-activated Preference Panes lying in wait in a Leopard installation.
Preference Panes are the icons you click on in System Preferences.
But aside from the default set we’ve all seen, you can add more by downloading them from other developers on the web. Or, now, by finding them on your hard drive.
I found my first by accident, but then I went looking for them. By adding some (again built-in but hidden) search criteria to the Finder spotlight menu, I was able to create a search for files ….
whose filename extension is “prefpane”
and
System files status is “include”. (so Spotlight searches everywhere, not just user-visible parts of the disk). [as long as you're here, don't miss the option to search in "Spotlight Items" so you can do a Finder search or smart folder for items that aren't really files at all like emails, calendar events, visited web pages, etc. To be honest, they are files but that's an implementation detail.]
The results include all the pref panes you normally see in System Preferences as well as any that are downloaded and user-installed, and some that don’t match my installed hardware (Fibre Channel, Ink handwriting recognition).
But there are also a couple additions.
The first PrefPane I found doesn’t even show up in this search since it’s buried inside the application package of “Archive Utility”, the background helper app that is the default handler for most compressed archives (like .zip, .bz2, .tar, etc). If you open the app’s package and install the hidden pref pane, you can access the same preferences screen you get when you launch the app on its own and open the Preferences window.
You can set a surprising number of settings that are probably best left to their defaults, including handling of expanded archive files, destination of expanded archives, and even handling of archived files. If you want your source files to be automatically deleted when you compress them in the Finder, this is how to do it.
Double Click the prefPane to install it. It’s located at
/System/Library/CoreServices/Archive\ Utility/Contents/Resources/Archives.prefPane
•
Another hidden prefPane lies in the DiskImages.framework.
Burrow down into it and you’ll be able to install a PrefPane that gives the same Mounting and Encryption options as Disk Utility. Only now in another location!
At first I thought this was a silly duplication of Disk Utility’s own Preferences window. But then I looked and the Leopard Prefs have been really dumbed down. I haven’t used them much, but this is where the old preferences went to retire!
Find it at
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskImages.framework/Versions/A/
Resources/DiskImages.prefpane
I don’t know what’s the best way to represent such long paths here. If I don’t make a line break, it is obscured by the div to the right
•
The Developer Tools also installs but does not activate a Processor prefPane. Many people have seen this before since it’s been installed with the CHUD tools for years. To activate it, navigate to /Developer/Extras/PreferencePanes/
It lets you activate and deactivate various processor features such as napping, caches, and extra cores.
That last one’s not much of a secret but I think my first one or two are. I’ve already entered them in the MacOSXHints.com contest. C’mon, daddy needs a new pair of processors!
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