Category: Mac

Yes, it’s a slow day at the office. But it’s a faster day on Mac OS X. Jaguar absolutely launches faster, multitasks better, and seems generally cleaner.

One or two complaints:

• While the Help engine launches much faster, it takes longer to retrieve help for an individual application the first time; second time is much faster. The Help Center is now a drawer, which is both good and bad. Good–you can jump to any help book you want at any time. Bad–they forgot a scroll bar in the drawer and to see additional books you have to resize the parent window.
• I very much dig the new address book. One or two glitches: it opens a “Converting” window on first run and takes forever to close it (stays with a full progress bar and the message “Saving…” for a long time). Not clear from the new UI how you have a card in more than one “group” at a time. I liked being able to categorize someone as “UVA Alum,” “Glee Club,” and “Old Friend”; this functionality appears to be gone.

Still looking at other things. Mostly I’m just glad my machine is working again.
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..but “it’s working! It’s working!!!!”

After verifying the hard disk repairs, I removed one big chunk of packaged software that I wasn’t using and had a CD for reinstall if I needed. I was concerned about not having enough free disk space to continue the install. Then I put the upgrade disk in, switched my boot disk to my OS X partition, and rebooted.

Sure enough, the installer came up and told me that I needed to insert Install Disk 2. As I write this, it’s finishing the installation of the additional applications.

I think I dodged a bullet.
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The longer I’m a Mac user, the more I’m convinced that disk repair utilities are like money. The more of them you have, the better.

As reported previously, during the install of Mac OS X 10.2 my OS X partition went blooey. I ran Disk First Aid repair three times, which still left three reported errors: “Invalid BTree Header,” “MountCheck found serious errors,” and “Volume header needs minor repair.” I pulled out an old copy of Norton Utilities and ran Disk Doctor. It appears to have fixed all the errors–I’m cross checking with Disk First Aid now.

What’s next? Well, I’m bloody well going to back up my user data. Then I’m going to try the upgrade again. This time if it fails I’ll have to wipe the partition and spend the weekend reinstalling applications.

I was thrilled to find my pre-ordered copy of Mac OS X 10.2 (“Jaguar,” or “Jag-wire” as Steve inexplicably likes to call it) sitting on my front porch when I got back from watching the game last night. Naturally I wanted to install it right away, but Lisa wanted to finish watching Fellowship of the Ring (she never saw it in the theatre), and my Powerbook is the only DVD player we have. So after the movie finished, I popped in the upgrade disk, went through the first reboot, and started the upgrade process.

The installer reported that I was about 100 MB short on my Mac OS X partition, but I deselected half a dozen language packs and the Lexmark printer drivers and kicked off the upgrade. Then I went to bed. Did I do a clean install? Did I at least opt to back up my old system? Heck no! I’m a statistical wunderkind! I won’t have trouble!

This morning I came down to find the machine on with the new gray Apple startup image and a frozen “progress ring” indicator below it. Uh-oh. I listened for disk activity–nothing. I crossed my fingers and rebooted. Nothing. I took the CD out and rebooted–nothing. No action at all. Despairing, I put the CD back in and rebooted. This time it booted the CD and went into the upgrade again. I tried to use the Installer’s built in disk repair to see if there was a problem. My hard disk didn’t show up.

A-ha, I said, or words to that effect (only more colorful), and tried to boot from an old copy of Norton. Too old for my machine, alas. Finally I powered it down and took it into work, where I tried to boot from the Apple Hardware Test CD that came with the PB. I didn’t hold down Command-C, and it booted the machine from my OS 9 partition. Thank God.

So I’m running Disk First Aid, OS 9 flava, and it’s reporting things I’ve never seen, like “MountCheck found serious errors” and “overlapped extent allocations.” The repair is going now; we’ll see what happens. When it’s done, I’m backing up my data (which I should have done to begin with, obviously), freeing up some more hard disk space somehow, and trying again.

I haven’t decided yet at which point I start making jokes about being co-dependent on this machine…
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Judging from an email in my inbox, Apple is starting to recognize that they need to put a little more push into converting free iTools subscribers to paid .Mac subscribers. I ponied up for the service because my various forwarding addresses point to my mac.com email address, and because I was getting ready to buy virus software protection and web hosting space anyway.

Today I received the following email:

Dear .Mac member,

Since we launched .Mac in July, we’ve welcomed thousands of new members into the .Mac community, and we can’t wait to add more. As an additional thank you to our former iTools members, we are announcing that when they convert to a paid .Mac membership before September 30, 2002, their first year of .Mac membership will automatically be extended to September 30, 2003.

As a full member, you’ve already qualified. Your membership will now extend to September 30, 2003, well past your original renewal date. And stay tuned for more membership benefits coming soon! Thank you for joining the .Mac community.

[signed–The .Mac Team] Apple Computer

The extension for me is about two months; for a non-converted subscriber it would be one month, or $99/12 = $8.25, about an 8% bonus. It’s not especially compelling as a “special offer.” What it feels like is an end of quarter sales push. It will be interesting to see in early October what the conversion numbers actually look like — and, since Apple hasn’t offered a plan to its investors to set expectations, how the Street will react.
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MacDevCenter: Jaguar: Time to Stop Pussyfooting Around. Derrick Story takes on a touchy point: the masses of Mac OS 9 (and 8???) users who still haven’t upgraded to Mac OS X. My dad is one of those users; he has a first generation beige G3 and less than 128 MB of RAM. While I would love to spend the time implementing one of the hacks that would allow him to run OS X, I can’t recommend it unless he ups the RAM at least.

Derrick says, “If you would have told me a year ago that we would have an OS as good as 10.1, plus all of these vital applications, and only a 20 percent conversion rate, I would have told you that you just don’t know the Mac community.”

Unfortunately we don’t know the whole story. How much of the remaining 80% is like my dad–stuck on old hardware without the discretionary cash to move to something more powerful? And it’s not just retirees, either; think about how underfunded your local school district is. Do you think their Macs are able to run OS X?

I want my family’s Macs to run OS X, because then I can write software for them. (By choice, all my Mac development has required features only available starting in OS X 10.1, such as XML-RPC and SOAP calls.) But I don’t have the discretionary income to upgrade all their hardware.
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My DVD-ROM drive in my PowerBook G3 (aka PowerBook G3 2000, aka PowerBook G3 FireWire… man, these things need model numbers) started slowly going south back at Christmas. I couldn’t watch Blazing Saddles on the DVD over Christmas without going through an elaborate ritual of rebooting the computer (yes, I was running X, but the drive wouldn’t be recognized again otherwise after it stopped working), listening to a few tracks from a CD, and then putting the DVD in.

As Linus once said, “You’re looking at me as though this weren’t a scientific explanation!”

Eventually the drive mostly cleaned up its act. Then when we moved to Seattle, it conked out completely. I looked for replacement options and ended up bidding on a replacement drive from EBay. It’s pretty close to a direct replacement, I think, from Matsushita, a Model SR-8171-B. I was pretty much able to drop it right into the caddy from the old drive, which came off by removing six screws. Though I did have to file down the door plate to get it to fit in the Pismo case. It works with DVD Player and iTunes, which is good enough for me right now.

Kudos to XLR8YourMac, which had posted an article a while back about
mounting a similar combo drive in the Pismo. Curses that I wasn’t able to find a combo drive being auctioned; I would have loved to have a CD burner too.
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I’ve been pretty good about the whole East Coast-West Coast time difference so far, but this morning it bit me in the butt. Yeah, Steve’s keynote was at 9 am this morning… EAST COAST TIME. So I missed all the fun. Also I forgot to download Quicktime 6 final, so I couldn’t watch the end of the live stream…

It looks like the rumor sites (including CNET) nailed just about everything though: Jaguar to come out in late August, ahead of schedule; new 17″ iMac; iTools to have a name change to .Mac.

What they missed, though is pretty important:

• iTunes 3 incorporates audio book technology from Audible and has gone OS X only
• iPod has gone up to 20 GB, now thinner, sports a remote on the earbud control and new software that does a calendar (plus earphones that won’t stretch your ears)
• Apple will charge for .Mac services
• iSync, a system level information synchronization architecture for devices, supporting BlueTooth
• iCal, a system level calendar solution

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Apple has released the long awaited Quicktime 6, incorporating MPEG layer 4 technology. This in spite of long standing disagreements with the MPEG group about the licensing terms for the codec. The final license apparently includes provisions that eliminate some of the license fees if you have less than 50,000 subscribers. Probably a good release to download if you want to watch the MacWorld coverage this week…
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Well, not really, but according to this Wired article, these guys are reselling some of the Think Different posters I have for a fair chunk of change. I’ll have to go through my stuff when it gets here and see what condition they’re in…

I’m surprised no one has pointed to this yet, but Apple quietly made its core JavaScript framework source code available on June 13, as noted on this mailing list. The source is available for download here.

It looks like they’ve based the core on the kjs JavaScript engine in KDE, which explains why it’s being released back to the community. The announcement also indicates that Apple hopes to get the framework into a public CVS tree soon, to allow other developers to make contributions.

This is pretty significant. If JavaScript becomes a robust system framework like Java and Cocoa (and AppleScript), it will add to the stable of languages that developers can use to write native Mac OS X applications. Of course, developers have had a form of JavaScript access to Windows (using JScript) since Windows 2000…
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Apple appears to have turned off SSL support on the mail.mac.com server again. I wonder if this is deliberate, or if they just don’t have the server configured to turn SSL support back on when something happens. If it weren’t for Webmail, I would have never known—Mail.app doesn’t go offline when the SSL server is down, it just sits there.
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Dave pointed to Silk today. I got around to trying it out. Holy crap. I installed it while going through my news queue in Radio, and when I switched back to Mozilla from installing it the text changed immediately from regular to antialiased. Unbelievably easy and smooth.
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Apple released Mac OS X 10.1.5 yesterday; I left the install running last night while we went for drinks with our friend Niall and his parents, who are over from Ireland. I think the fact that I let the install run unattended says a lot about how much better Apple’s update process has gotten.

The update seems to have fixed a longstanding problem I had with connecting to my iDisk from home; apparently the “added support for connecting to iDisk using default DNS settings of AirPort” did the trick. This is really good. I used to have to dial up directly or go to the network at school to be able to connect to my iDisk. Now I can connect and publish software updates with no problem.
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After a long delay, the first public beta of Quicktime 6 is available for Mac and Windows. This version bakes in MPEG-4 support (the format based on Quicktime’s own standard) as will as JPEG 2000 and some other interesting sounding things like “skip protection.”

All of which I will test as soon as I finish downloading the damn thing; the installer is about 9 MB, and I’m sure that installing will download other components as well. Boy, am I going to be glad when we get broadband again.
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