Category: Apple

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.
more…

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.
more…

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.
more…

Apple: Winners of Apple Design Awards. Glad to see the Omni Group continue to get recognition. Disclosure: I did not get a nod in the student category.

Interestingly, the winner, MacJournal, is a non-web-enabled diary program. Seems like Dan Schimpf could easily hook in the Blogger API and web-enable that puppy. How about it, Dan?
more…

Looks like I’m listed in the Mac Products Guide for Manila Envelope. This means nothing, except I didn’t get a hit from the page until today, though the page has been up for a month. Wonder who’s looking?
more…

Then there’s the radical Christian fringe, who since their pal John Aschroft came to office have been almost too quiet. No longer: Evolutionism Propaganda spills the beans about the secret agendas behind PBS, Pokémon, and Apple Computer!!! From the article:

“The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called… Darwin! That’s right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don’t advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an “Open Source” license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, “lickable” buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.” [emphasis added]

It gets better, but you have to read it for yourself. After all, this “Atheist and Pagan” Presbyterian is dedicated to making sure you think for yourself and come to your own conclusions, which is, I suppose, as “godless” as it gets.
more…

Wired: Where Old Macs Go Off to Thrive. I can’t go any further than this picture of an old SE/30 upgraded with a G3 running OS X on a monochrome screen.

The SE/30 was my first computer (if you don’t count the family’s Apple //c). We had it tricked out with 5 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive. I learned how to do desktop publishing, Excel macro programming, telnet, and Kermit file transfer(!) on that little machine.

more…

I sympathize with everybody involved in this CNet story about Apple hiking pricing on the new iMacs by $100. It’s certainly easy to feel sympathy for the customers and the retailers. It’s harder to feel sympathy for Apple, but they’re really caught in a classic bind.

In my system dynamics class, we were talking about the rise and fall of the low-price airline People Express. My professor suggested that they made a product that was so attractive and cheap that their growth spiral grew out of control. They didn’t have a large enough supply of qualified staff, so their product kept getting worse and worse until they started racking up massive losses since they lost all their customers. A conclusion was that a price hike might have made the product less attractive and given the company more breathing room to fulfill expectations.

The iMac price hike shows the other side of that story. Sometimes hiking prices just pisses everyone off.
more…

The announcement from MacWorld Tokyo that Apple will support Bluetooth is interesting. Bluetooth, the little “standard that isn’t,” has been having some problems getting traction. Will Apple’s move to support Bluetooth do the same thing for this standard that earlier decisions did for USB and 802.11b wireless networking?

Probably not. At this stage, Apple is committing to support Bluetooth only via a plug-in USB adapter. That’s very different from bundling the technology with all your new computers.
more…

…is out. The latest installment of Ambrosia’s space opera game clocks in at 75 MB, explaining why Ambrosia’s site is essentially unreachable. Looks like I now have something to do with that short break between my last class this week and our flight to New Jersey on Friday. 🙂

I was seriously addicted to the previous installment in the series, Escape Velocity Overdrive, a few years back. This should be really good.

Lisa decided we needed a DV camcorder a while back–we’ll be moving to the other side of the country from our families, and we could send back video greetings with it. Then her bonus came in…

Yesterday we brought home a new Sony DCR-PC9 DV camcorder. It’s compact, lightweight, and takes both still photos and video. We tested the integration with the Mac this morning–it just works. Using iMovie, you can control the playback of the camera from the computer over its FireWire (aka IEEE 1394, aka iLink) interface. I didn’t have much hard disk space free, so I was alarmed to notice that importing 5 minutes of video took up about 1.5 GB, but I was able to trim it down after importing it and free up some of the space again.

And when I connected the camera via USB, it started up iPhoto and downloaded the photos on the camera’s Memory Stick automatically. I may get some photos on this site yet…
more…

Disney is acting hostile to consumers on behalf of the motion picture industry, and apparently made some snarky remarks about “rip, mix, burn.” Then Leslie L. Vadasz, Executive VP, Intel, steps up to the defense:

Another major point of misunderstanding is our differing perspectives on the role of the PC in the hands of the consumer. Mr. Eisner’s characterization of the phrase “rip, mix, burn” as emblematic of our industry’s perspective on piracy is utterly false. What the content community fails to recognize is that these utilities – the ability to copy content, remix and manage it and port it to other storage media for personal use in a protected fashion – are features that consumers have come to expect. The ability to rip, mix and burn in a protected manner is not piracy, it is simply fair use of content as permitted by law.

The music (and movie) industries need to hear this. If you’re at war with your customers, at war with their rights under the law, then of course CD sales will fall. If you persist in implementing ham handed and insulting copyright protection on your media that render it unplayable and remove features that consumers like, you’ll render yourselves irrelevant and illiquid in less time than it takes you to cut loose quality acts like Wilco, Tori Amos, or Cowboy Junkies–or for one of your innumerable teen pop bands to peak, fade, or be forgotten.
more…

More proof that we Mac users are a weird bunch: Undress your Mac for thrills. I’ve never taken pictures, but I confess that when I got my PowerBook G3 a year and a half ago I set up a big work area, reverently unpacked each of the pieces, and, salivating, turned on the machine to hear the chime. I’ve never ever said anything like this, however: “I’m pretty sure it’s as close to sex as you can get with a machine. I mean, look at this photo.”
more…

Ken Bereskin, Apple VP, lists the contents of his Dock and wants to know what’s on mine. I have:

• Finder, Mail, Sherlock, System Prefs, ThermoInDock, BBEdit Lite, Eudora, Mozilla, iTunes, iPhoto, Fire, Terminal, Palm Desktop, Radio, Manila Envelope, and OmniOutliner; plus a selection of Apps, Utilities, Development Apps, Manila Envelope.pbproj, and my folder for this semester’s course files.

more…

Wired: Mac Cluster’s Last Stand?

“If Apple were to offer a scalable, high-density hardware solution, I would push hard for a platform switch,” said Patrick Gavin of the University of California at Santa Cruz Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering . “The PowerPC architecture is vastly superior to anything else out there in terms of power consumption versus processing power.”

It make sense that this point would come. Apple under the second coming of Steve Jobs has had a laserlike focus on the consumer and pro graphics markets. But they have other customer segments too. If nothing else, the reception that the guy demoing Mathematica at MacWorld got might convince them to pay attention to these genomics researchers. Then there’s the big BLAST story….