Category: Mac

I have found the first product I’ll buy from Apple after this week’s keynote—and it wasn’t even mentioned in the keynote. At MacWorld, Apple quietly announced a next-generation AirPort Extreme base station that supports a draft of the 802.11n protocol, meaning that it’s up to five times as fast and up to twice the range of the existing 802.11g base station from Apple. This is frankly a secondary feature for me, though, compared to the news that it supports sharing a USB2 hard drive over the network.

This is a Big Deal. The original plan for The Project, the big effort to move my over 1,000 CDs to a hard drive, called for placing that drive on the network as network attached storage. I didn’t want the drive to be permanently anchored to my MacBook Pro—which would kind of defeat the purpose of having a laptop. But the only solutions I could find for sharing a network USB drive didn’t support Mac disk drive formats. That’s way the capability of the new AirPort Extreme to share a USB hard drive out of the box is so cool.

In fact, the only fly in the ointment is that the AirPort Extreme’s included 802.11n Enabler, which upgrades the AirPort cards of currently shipping Macs to 802.11n, does not extend to my first-generation MacBook Pro, since that model doesn’t include what Engadget called the “secret draft-N cards.” But I think it will still be worth it. I can 86 the old PowerBook that currently powers my music, move the RAID array into the stereo cabinet along with the base station, and free up a lot of space in our guest bedroom.

And…and this is the ironic part…I won’t have to buy a Mac mini to do it, which was my original plan.

This may be my last iPhone post for a while, since the odds of my getting one are actually pretty small at its price point—but I couldn’t resist the iPhone User Guide on McSweeney’s:

Congratulations on your purchase of the 8-gigabyte iPhone from Apple Inc.! For the first time, you will be able to engage in all the varieties of human interaction through a single device. Please consult the table of contents below for an in-depth look at your iPhone experience.

…

VII. Using the iPhone to catalog your contacts

VIII. Using the iPhone to manage your calendar

IX. Using the iPhone to solve disputes between Moqtada al-Sadr and certain Sunni elements within Iraq without causing an escalation of hostilities, or the development of closer ties between Iran and Shiite militias

X. Using the iPhone to assist European antitrust authorities in understanding the difference between “tying arrangements” and “legitimate competition” in online music sales

XI. Using the iPhone to explain how the internal board committee of Apple Computer Inc. (before the name change) headed by Al Gore could exonerate Steve Jobs of any wrongdoing in the options-backdating scandal

XII. Using the iPhone to explain why Microsoft believed that introducing the Zune was either wise or appropriate, given the market for MP3 players in late 2006…

XVIII. Using the iPhone to learn whether superstring theory’s positing of 10 dimensions (or 11 in M-theory) is viable in light of recent discoveries relating to dark matter

XIX. Using the iPhone to learn whether Ehud Barak ever considered adopting Barack Obama and changing the Illinois junior senator’s name to Barack Barak

This is one of those “well, of course” things, but the capability to view composer data in the iTunes Music Store wasn’t obvious to me. But it’s so necessary if you’re looking at classical recordings. I was curious as to whether any of Yo Yo Ma’s work with contemporary composers was on his new Appassionata album, but couldn’t be sure from the displayed track names. So on a hunch, I used the View Options to turn on the composer column and there was the information I was looking for right in the store display.

Of course, the ability to browse by composers in the column browser is still missing, and you have to use the Power Search feature to search by composers. But the information is there.

This is what frustrates me about having more than 20,000 tracks in iTunes. Even though the options to store tons of metadata are present, you can’t do a text search by composer, or comment field, or whatever. But you can display the data!

Watching yesterday’s keynote and particularly the demo of the iPhone’s web browser surfing the New York Times, one thought kept recurring to me: It’s a Newspad.

The Newspad was the name given by Arthur C. Clarke in the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the small handheld devices that the crew carry with them around the ship. The description:

When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.

Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.

It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

Hmm. How about making it the size of a cell phone, doing away with codes, and putting the whole thing in a touchscreen interface?

Well. If the keynote coverage on Engadget is anything to go by, I may have bought my 30Gb iPod too soon. Also, all the naysayers may go and hang, apparently, because the iPhone aka touch-screen iPod aka mobile Internet device looks like it’s hit the ball out of the park. And really, the naysayers are looking pretty damned stupid right now. I’d love to read the reaction to the iPhone by Michael Kanellos, the CNet analyst who claimed that the phone companies had such a big lead in phone design. Especially nice: it runs Mac OS X natively, no “mobile edition”. The question, of course, is whether the pricing is too much of a premium for the market to bear. $499 is a lot for a phone, even if it is also an iPod.

Other keynote reaction: I’m still trying to figure out if the new Apple TV obviates my need for a Mac Mini to play back my music—can I just attach a pair of hard drives to it and access my library directly?

Finally: The Apple (just Apple, no A, B, Computer, or bloody D) website is slow, but I finally found the product pages for the iPhone and the Apple TV.

And I’m also pretty sure they don’t come with scroll wheels. (Courtesy Talking Points Memo; thanks to Greg for the pointer.)

The month of Mac exploits has kicked off, with yesterday’s publication of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the latest version of QuickTime. I for one welcome the discussion of possible vulnerabilities on Mac OS X. As a long time user and computer software professional, you can only secure things through design up to a point and the more that Apple and the industry openly investigate and fix these security vulnerabilities, the better off everyone will be. More discussion on Slashdot, including an interesting disputation of the findings—is it possible that the exploit is not as general as claimed?

Update: within 24 hours a fix for the vulnerability has been posted. Interestingly, the fix comes from a former Apple developer and uses Application Enhancer to fix the vulnerability at runtime.

I knew this was going to happen: the latest product from Apple has flown up the hype curve and crashed to the ground, and it hasn’t been released yet.

CNet analyst Michael Kanellos writes about “the Apple phone flop,” pointing out that it will be difficult for Apple to replicate their success with the iPod in the mobile phone market for a number of very good reasons (phone manufacturers are masters of style, existing smartphone products like the Blackberry are pretty good, phone makers innovate rapidly, quality of service is a make-or-break problem) as well as some non trivial ones that Kanellos didn’t raise (the carriers frequently get in the way of innovative products, disabling phone features that they can’t figure out how to monetize).

The article misses a couple of key things, though:

1. Apple hasn’t released a phone yet.
2. Even if it does, there’s no reason it has to conform to the rumored specs and price point.
3. Apple’s real genius is in integration. The iPod and the PC or Mac, the iPod and iTunes—none of these are about single-function stories, they’re about ways that you can combine activities that are unexpected and add more value. There are plenty of ways for Apple to innovate in the phone space that the competitors in the space can’t match.

For some perspective, it’s worth remembering that this meme has been kicking around for four years now, and some things are just as true today as they were when Daring Fireball branded the whole mess as iPhony. Armchair product management is a fun sport, but it’s important to remember where the chair is located.

A few months after I posted about not being able to use Keyword Assistant, my favorite iPhoto plugin, because it didn’t work on Intel Macs, I broke down and toggled iPhoto so that it would launch in PowerPC translation so I could use the plugin. It was slow, but it worked, and I could tag my photos—important, since I was starting to move my photos to Flickr.

Then Apple released an iPhoto update and broke the hack I used to launch it in Rosetta. I was about to Google the hack to reapply it, when on a hunch I looked up Keyword Assistant instead. Sure enough, a new version is out that is compiled as a universal plug in—and actually another version appeared today for the iPhoto 6.0.5 update.

It’s great to be able to tag photos and to do it quickly. Very very nice—thanks to Ken Ferry for a great utility.

When all content is digitized and free, it might feel a little like this: being able to play PC and Mac games that gripped your attention 10 and 20 years ago on the same platform.

Item 1: DosBox, a limited x86/DOS emulation environment that is focused on the gaming experience. Or more precisely, DosBox plus Thexder, the Sierra Online-published transforming mech warrior shoot-em-up side-scroller. Man, I used to play the Apple II version of this for hours when I was in high school.

Item 2: Abuse, a shooting side scroller published by Bungie in the mid-90s and now available on Unix and Mac platforms. Abuse and Marathon (Bungie’s other early hit, before they got bought by Microsoft and did Halo) together were responsible for many, many lost evenings when Lisa was in grad school.

Both now run on Mac OS X (as well as other platforms), and both are a pretty good nostalgia blast.

So in the middle of a broad battery recall for older Powerbook and iBook batteries (my machines weren’t affected by this one), I thought I’d follow up about my own battery situation. As you’ll recall, Apple is also recalling some MacBook Pro batteries, not for explosive reasons but because they apparently “don’t meet the company’s performance standards” (more on what that means in a second). And you’ll also recall that when I sent in my notice, I got a pair of iPod earbuds instead of batteries.

Yesterday afternoon I spent something like an hour and 15 minutes on the phone to Apple support waiting for an answer. Finally they put me in touch directly with a guy in Dispatch, who said, “I have no idea how that happened,” and sent the new battery out. This time I have a tracking number, so I have a high level of confidence that I’ll actually get the battery.

But back to the real battery recall: it’s funny how different news outlets are handling the news. While most are saying that it’s bad news for Sony, good old Business Week managed to spin the recall as a “more bad news for Apple” story… By contrast, the analysis in Forbes, which points out the technological and manufacturing issues underlying the problem, is much deeper and more insightful.

Finally, an article on iPodNN appears to tie the mysterious “high standards for battery performance” that were at issue in the MacBook Pro recall to the infamous MacBook Pro whine, which is only audible when the device is on battery power. We’ll see when my new battery comes in, but maybe this will make the laptop as quiet as the old G4 was…

I was surprised to come home last night and find a package from Apple waiting for me. I was even more surprised to find that it was … earbuds. Not the replacement MacBook Pro battery I had ordered under Apple’s recall. Earbuds. You know, the iconic little white headphones that come with iPods, of which I already have two pair.

Huh.

I called AppleCare this morning and straightened it out; my shipping label had gotten applied to the wrong order and so they resubmitted my battery recall order. I should have it later. The folks at AppleCare were very professional, and I’m glad they were able to clear up the confusion.

Still. Earbuds?

Apple has issued a recall for selected first-generation MacBook Pro batteries, like mine. For once, the issue isn’t fire, but “underperformance” (whatever that means). I put in for the recall today and they indicated I should get the new battery in about 4-5 working days, so I hope to be able to report some information by the end of the week.

On another note, or rather high-pitched whine, it looks like Apple may be finally acknowledging the noisy MacBook Pro problem. For the uninitiated, MacBooks Pro frequently exhibit a high-pitched noise when running on battery power, though disabling one of the two processor cores stops the noise for some reason (as does doing something that forces the second core to be used, like opening a webcam window). The one sentence note on the support site says “If your 15-inch MacBook Pro emits a high-pitched buzzing sound, please contact AppleCare for service.” Well, OK. I’ll do that later this week and see what the actual response is.

I alluded a few days ago to the fact that the Project has been stalled for a while because of a lack of disk space. Well, things may be about to get a little kick start. I ordered a 500 GB drive and a miniStack case from Other World Computing. In fact, I like the look of the case so much, I ordered a second one to swap my existing 300 GB drive into, so I can stack the two together. And the multiple FireWire and USB hubs that it will provide will be manna; right now I have to swap the old drive from FireWire to USB when I want to sync my iPod because the FireWire port on the external drive isn’t powered.

And the RAID part? Well, I’m considering combining the two drives together so that they form a single logical disk. Mac OS X provides the capability to create three types of RAID arrays: mirrored, striped, and concatenated. I’m thinking concatenated. A lot of the commentary on this option says that it doesn’t make sense: none of the security of mirrored and none of the speed of striped. I think the commentary misses a point: sometimes it’s just awfully convenient to not have to worry about accessing two separate volumes, for instance when trying to share music across a network or manage a large volume of digital music. Plus having the ability to add additional disks to the array without blowing it is really helpful.

Of course, making the RAID array without wiping out the data on the drive is tricky. I’ve identified two ways to do it:

1. Create a concatenated RAID array with just one disk—the new disk, copy everything from the old disk to it, then add the second disk to the array.
2. Use the command line version of diskutil to turn the existing disk into a RAID array without destroying the data, then add the second disk. This option is riskier—I don’t know for sure if the command will destroy the data, but this post on AFP548.com, which gave me the idea in the first place, suggests it should work.

The drives should be here in a week, then we’ll give it the old college try.

I haven’t finished The Project yet (latest stats: 12031 songs, 996 artists, 882 albums; 265.99 GB of lossless audio; 36 days, 13 hours, 22 minutes, and 17 seconds running time), but another audio project beckons: the Great Record Rip. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the recent owner of a Denon DP-45F turntable, and with an iMic I’ll have the capability to take audio from the record player and digitize it.

Except, like every other project, the devil is in the details. So while the Denon is at the shop getting tuned up after twelve years in a box, I’m trying to put the software pieces in place so that I’ll be ready to start ripping some audio (in addition to my never-released on CD David Byrne record, the Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, and other oddments, the Lucadamos have let me at their stash of vinyl as well) when it comes back.

So what do I need to rip records? The following links suggest some help:

• TidBITS: Why Go Pro (Audio Hijack Pro, That Is)
• Final Vinyl, which comes from Griffin and is supposed to be less capable than Audio Hijack but is at least free with the iMic
• About This Particular Mac, Got Vinyl? part 1, 2, and 3
• And, for something a little different, how to rip audio from a DVD into a format that can be played by iTunes