Category: Mac

Lifehacker: Call your Mac to hear a song. Brilliant Applescript + iTunes + Mail + Skype + Automator hack that allows you to text a song title to your Mac and get a callback that plays the song.

This may be the thing that pushes me over the edge and actually gets me to install Skype.

Interesting collection of tips about using Apple’s Mail, iCal, and Address Book to provide low-end “contact relationship management”. Includes a few tips that are new to me, including the Notifications area in iCal, which I had never seen before.

He’s back, and this time he’s in your Dashboard (on Tiger, that is). The infamous Jared, the Butcher of Song, is now available for Mac OS X 10.4 as a Dashboard Widget. From the release notes on the Freeverse blog:

Jared has long been an affront to the senses, an insult to the diatonic scale, an inappropriate “yo-mama” joke told over-loud at the elegant dinner party of internet culture, but never has Jared been as much of a waste of hard drive space as he is as a widget.

For full background on Jared, you’ll have to go to the Wayback Machine, or this old feature article from Wired. Briefly, though, Jared is a little round smiley face who lip-syncs to a wonderful, wonderful Guatemalan song, performed as though cats were being tortured in the vicinity. (Actually, his original biography stated, “Never has the mating of cats sounded so melodic as after one has listened to ‘El Carnicero de Canciones,’ the ‘Butcher of Songs,’ as Jared was known in Guatemala.”)

The Windows version of Jared appears to have gone the way of all flesh (the version I found on line doesn’t even run in Windows 95 compatibility mode under Windows XP), but if you download the Mac OS X version to a Windows machine, you should be able to unzip it, go into the directory, and play the song for yourself. Should you really wish to torture yourself, that is.

(Footnote: when I was working for AMS, I wanted to stress test our ability to embed arbitrary Windows files as documents in our procurement document management software, so I uploaded the WAV file of Jared’s song into our database. I wish I had thought to route the thing along for approval to my co-workers. I almost succeeded in embedding him as an Easter egg in the app, too, but cooler heads prevailed.)

I’ve had some time to reflect on yesterday’s Apple-Intel announcement and the subsequent commentary, including the surfacing of my offhand comment about delaying a Mac mini purchase on a BusinessWeek blog (thanks to Dave’s quoting it, I suspect). My conclusion is that, from a customer perspective, I shouldn’t be worried about the move—should in fact be celebrating, cautiously. Why?

First, Apple wouldn’t be making this move unless it knew it could deliver serious price/performance benefits to its customers. After all, as Intel’s CEO was kind enough to point out on stage yesterday, they are having to eat a fair amount of crow over this deal. So the new machines are going to be freakin’ awesome.

Second, as Dave and others point out, the choice of processor inside is a non-issue to many customers, as long as their apps still run—and quickly. Along those lines, my potential Mac mini purchase, which I wanted to get for a home music server, is an excellent example of a machine that would deliver the same benefit to me today with a PowerPC chip and a year from today with a Pentium chip.

Third, if Apple has any brains at all they’ll avoid an Osborne effect by doing a good job of telling a forward migration story … and discounting existing PowerPC based models. On the former point, I was impressed by both the purported ease of porting and the promised emulation layer (mostly—see below for some caveats); Apple needs to keep the momentum going by publicly tracking apps that are proven forward compatible and by working with developers to ease migration paths for customers of apps that have problems.

The potential caveats I mentioned? First, there is a risk that some existing apps won’t move forward. Daring Fireball points out one potential source of problems, found on a page in the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines: AltiVec code, code that inserts preference panes in System Preferences (my God, what is it about System Preferences?), kernel extensions (didn’t Apple just announce that API?), applications that explicitly depend on a G4 or G5 processor being present; and Classic (this just in: Classic is still dead, finally).

Another potential source of problems is the whole “endian” issue, which affects files containing binary data, and which Microsoft Mac BU’s Rich Schaut explains much better than I can do here.

As a user, I still think that I’m right to be enthused, and Dave is right—the upper layers of the OS is where most of the excitement is. But not all. And I think we’re all still permitted a moment of silent mourning for the demise of some great technologies: Classic, AltiVec, and Open Firmware (thanks to Steve Kirks for the last pointer).

Okay, enough mourning. Time to start watching for Mac mini prices to dive.

I found Paul Boutin’s liveblog on Engadget from the WWDC just in time to read these words:

10:28am PDT – “It’s time for a third transition. And yes, (puts up slide that says): It’s true.” Next slide is one word: “Why?”

10:29am PDT – “I stood up two years ago and promised this (3.0G PowerMac), and we haven’t been able to deliver.” Steve says it’s bigger than that, though. No roadmap for the future based on PowerPC – they can’t see a future.

10:30am PDT – Intel offers not just increased performance, but reduced power consumption. Transition will be complete by WWDC ’07.

10:31am PDT – PowerPC – 15 integer perf units (not sure what) per watt. Intel does 70 per watt. “Mac OS X has been living a secret double life” for the past 5 years.

10:32am PDT – Satellite shot with crosshairs shows building where a team has been working on the “Just in Case…” scenario. Every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for Intel for the past 5 years. Here comes the demo!

10:33am PDT – “As a matter of fact, this system I’ve been using here…” the keynote’s been running on a P4 3.6GHz all morning”

Pretty big news. Sets the conventional wisdom on its head.

Makes me want to put those plans for a Mac mini purchase on hold.

It’s good to see that even in this brave new world, some things, like the hilarity of Theo Gray from Wolfram Research, remain unchanged.

(Update: here is the official press release.)

It appears that the WWDC keynote isn’t being streamed over Quicktime (at least, not that I’ve been able to find). However, MacRumors has set up a special auto-refreshing live site where they’ll be posting the latest keynote coverage (technical details of their AJAX based approach here). There’s also an IRC channel if you can’t wait for a schedule refresh, or if you like your news piping hot and mixed with lots and lots and lots of chatter.

With all the discussion about what Greg called the Pentiac rumor—the rumor that Apple is imminently going to announce a switch from IBM to Intel chips, or a new product line based on Intel chips, or that it just had lunch with Intel, or something—I couldn’t resist pointing to a leak about the real announcement to come today. Thanks, Steven Frank, for the laugh (make sure to click the link for the full sized image). (And thanks to MacSlash for the link.)

Pending a judge’s approval, Apple has settled pending litigation pertaining to the lifespan and playtime of the batteries in older iPods (such as the one I got for Christmas in 2001). A claim form can be downloaded from the law firm of Girard, Gibbs, and De Bartolomeo.

(Confidential to Carie: I think this is what you were asking about.)

Daring Fireball: WaitingForLoginWindow. To get your very own login window to pop up at any time, go to the Terminal and type /usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow. And enjoy the hilarity. The link at Daring Fireball explains how it works, and how to kill it.

I didn’t have much chance to do anything with Tiger last week while I was on the road, but this morning I finally started playing with Smart Mailboxes in Mail, which is one of the features I most eagerly anticipated for this upgrade. And it is fantastic, even with just one or two smart mailboxes created.

Originally I had anticipated replacing some of my 150+ mail rules (I have a hierarchical mail folder structure that takes a lot of care and feeding) with smart mailboxes. While I may still investigate doing that, I found that the first smart mailbox I implemented is probably the most useful one I’ll create: Unread Mail. The mailbox has a single condition: collect all unread mail messages. This is great for me because of all the mail rules I’ve implemented, which spread a typical day’s mail across a bunch of different mailboxes. That’s generally a good thing for scoping messages for later retrieval, but less good if I just want to read my 30 or so new mail messages at one sitting without changing context between ten different folders. The Unread Mail smart folder allows me to just read all the mail without worrying about filing it, because it’s already filed. I used a system like this on Outlook when I was running Office 2003 at Microsoft, and that folder plus one for flagged mail completely revolutionized my workflow.

I’ll be playing around with some more smart mailboxes in days to come, including one for recent messages (everything sent or received within the last week). It’s nice to have some tools that actually improve my productivity.

Yesterday’s update to Tiger does not address the iChat issues that many newly upgraded users are having, and this new support article, “iChat AV 3.0: ‘Insufficient bandwidth’ messages,” indicates why. The article suggests that iChat’s newly added QoS features are (irony alert) breaking the iChat experience for many users, since the DSCP used to implement the feature is blocked by some ISPs.

Question: what do you call a change to an application that breaks existing functionality for many users? Where I work, we call that a regression bug, not a feature.

The iChat issues I wrote about persist, despite the now-total absence of Virex from my machine. These threads on the Apple discussion board suggests that it is a fairly widespread problem. I’ve read every suggestion, from the mundane (do routine system maintenance and try again) to the exotic (delete some entries in the iChat plist file, make sure your correspondents apply all system updates), to the just plain superstitious (make sure you start iChat before you start any other application).

Me? I think this smells like insufficient testing on Apple’s part, and I’m looking forward to seeing the first post-Tiger iChat update.

I’m starting to wonder a little about what I will do on my Mac for virus protection since Virex 7.5.x isn’t Tiger compatible. I’m apparently not alone in wondering. MrBarrett.com neatly summarizes the current Mac antivirus marketplace, and points out a few contenders I hadn’t considered, including Sophos (which is apparently only available to business customers) and ClamAV, which may be the only option to fill the gap between now and the vaporous release of Virex 7.7.

Tonight we tried to talk to Lisa’s parents over iChat, and it didn’t work. I kept throttling the bandwidth of the client down, and it kept reporting “Insufficient bandwidth to maintain the connection.” I thought, huh? Then I checked online.

Thanks to the magic of Google, I found it: Virex 7.5.1, not compatible with Tiger. The good readers of Macintouch had already flagged it as an issue with iChat. I had forgotten about the reported incompatibility until an iChat reader pointed out that processor utilization was pegged by one of the vshield processes. Sure enough: killing the process freed up the CPU.

The Virex issue is troubling: it’s software that was provided by Apple, via the .Mac subscription service. Surely they would have thought to test it? Or for Apple to let Network Associates know that they ought to test it?

My copy of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) arrived yesterday, finally. So far? Well, the upgrade went smoothly enough. That’s about all I can report, really; I got home at 9 pm last night and had just enough time to run a backup, verify and repair some minor permissions issues on my hard drive, and kick off the installer before going to bed.

One thing that almost bit me in the butt: hard disk space. I have habitually been down to less than 2 GB free disk space for about the past month—blame digital music—and the installer told me it didn’t have enough room to install Tiger. I was able to proceed by deselecting a bunch of printer drivers. I would have deselected some language files instead, but it appears that, at least with Tiger, there is no way to opt not to upgrade a previously installed language pack. (Incidentally, it makes me nervous that by deselecting drivers from eight or so printer manufacturers, I was able to reclaim nearly 800 MB of hard disk from the install. What do they put in those things—encyclopedias?)

At any rate, in the morning I checked the install after walking the dogs and found that it had happily rebooted and was waiting for me to log in. I did so, watched it slowly proceed, decided not to wait for it, and got in the shower. When I got out the login had finished and I could play with Dashboard and Spotlight.

Spotlight is cool: it fished up a bunch of stuff I didn’t know I had, including iChat logs, when I typed in my wife’s name. However, the short results list (which appears in a dropdown menu as you type, along with the option to show all results) is going to suffer from the same search challenges as Internet search engines: given a potential universe of content, how do you decide which content to surface as most relevant?

In this case, the problem was, I think, Spotlight’s result categories. By default, Spotlight returns categorized search results. Amazon and Microsoft.com both used to do this. The problem with categorized search results is that they interfere with the relevance ranking of the actual results list. For instance, if the four most relevant results for the query “doc searls” included a chat log, an Address Book card, a mail message from him, two more chat logs, a bookmark, and another mail message, how should the search results be categorized? If your first category is “Chat,” including the first, fourth, and fifth search hits, the Address Book card and mail message appear lower in the search list than they should, making the search results appear incorrect. In my case, I searched for “lisa” and the system returned a bunch of information, including an address card. But it wasn’t Lisa’s address—it was the address card of one of her friends, on whose card I had entered “Lisa Jarrett” in the Friend field.

I have a suspicion that some of my issues with Spotlight were related to the fact that it was still indexing my hard drive. This also caused Dashboard to be less responsive than it could have been. I can definitely see the joy to come with Dashboard, though; just having one-key access to a good dictionary and to Wikipedia is a killer benefit.

I had to go to work, so I left Mail importing my 44,000+ email messages (Mail in Tiger uses a new file format to store mail messages, so there’s a one-time hit for translation and indexing). More reports tonight.