Category: Apple

On the way down to Jim Heaney’s wedding, we stopped overnight at my inlaws’ place in Lakewood, NJ. They own one of the four Macs in the family, an 800 MHz G4 iMac (one of the Luxo Jr models). I had bought Leopard as a family pack with the intention of upgrading everyone, but I hit a surprising snag: Apple’s Leopard Installer actually enforces the 867 MHz minimum clock speed cited on the box specs! So for lack of 67 MHz, the disk won’t install.

Fortunately, there are a few workarounds. One is, if you happen to have another Mac handy, to boot the iMac in target disk mode and install the OS that way. The problem is that I don’t have my MacBook Pro with me, and I’m not sure if the iMac even supports booting into target disk mode.

The second, which I’m doing now, is to make a patched copy of the install DVD that disables the speed check. The linked article helpfully explains how to do the patch (and provides an example file) and even provides screenshots to show the process. I am currently making a read-write disk image from the install DVD and once I get a double-layer DVD to burn it to we’ll be able to move forward.

What are the risks? Well, I think the biggest risk is that some of the new Core Animation features will tax the processor and slow things down. So we’ll have to watch that. But being able to remote into my inlaws’ computer and help them will be worth it, as will the putatively improved iChat experience. And a quick check of comments of people who have done this hack suggests that any degradation of performance on an 800 MHz machine will be minimal, so in this case I think the risks are outweighed by the rewards.

Wired: First Look: Delicious Library 2.0 Burns With Animated Cool. Looks like the 2.0 version (currently under development) of Delicious Library should address a lot of my criticisms of the program, as well as a lot of Core Animation goodness. Favorite features: publishing to templates, iTunes integration, export formats, library sharing, and smart bookshelves.

For comparison, here’s my Delicious Library feature request list from 2004. So far, it looks like they’re addressing #s 1, 2, and 5. I’d still like to see #6.

I have been running Leopard for about two hours now, having picked up the Family Pack this afternoon and backed up the MacBook Pro (first full backup since I bought the thing, frighteningly enough). Notes so far: seems snappier. I thought I’d hate the changed handling of folders in the dock (stacks?) but I actually really dig it. If you only have one mouse button and don’t want to do the two-handed right click, it’s a much easier way to work with the contents of folders in the dock, and a much better application of Fitts’ Law.

I ran into a minor Keychain issue that seems to be responsible for this update after the installation, but that’s the only glitch so far.

I did notice one interesting thing. Software updates, even those that required restarts, used to download and install before signalling for a restart. Now the restart signal occurs and the installs happen after the user desktop disappears. Cuts into the user’s productive time, but perhaps safer and easier for the update installer to handle…

(Title reference here… only much less violent.)

And that’s all I know, really. I can download small files from the iTunes Store, but larger files (e.g. a 98 MB movie) fail with the message that the disk I am downloading to is full (err: -34). The problem of course is that it isn’t full at all: 18 GB free on the primary drive, 60 GB free on the external drive where I keep all my music.

A little Googling led me to this support thread which suggests restarting the Airport Extreme Base Station, or copying a dummy large file then deleting it, as potential workarounds. We’ll see.

Just got an email about the new iPhone Dev Center, which so far is focused on optimizing web apps for the iPhone rather than the promised full SDK that will apparently hit early next year. Still, it’s nice to see official sample code and docs.

Zeldman poses the dashboard challenge, and in the process reveals some pretty cool looking widgets. Like the CSS Cheat Sheet, Entities, Color Theory, and Color Burn. Cool for the web designer.

I have been interested for a while in the Getting Things Done productivity methodology, but one thing that has stood in my way is my email. I have email messages that date back to 1993 in my archives. When I was in grad school I had separate mail folders for every class I was in, plus every club, plus … And as you can see from the screen cap on the right, it hasn’t gotten any better.

Enter Merlin Mann, whose 43 Folders site ran some recommendations this week on how to live with just a single mail archive folder. The one that I’m particularly keen to try is Mail Tags. I don’t think I could live in iPhoto without tagging; wish I could do the same in iTunes; and have been aching to try it out in Mail since forever. So we’ll give it a shot and see how we do.

I have long been an apologist for Apple on all things related to their music platform and their Windows software, particularly iTunes. I think it’s unsurprising that iTunes is the fastest growing software installed in the enterprise, simply because there is no better way to listen to music on a computer.

Where things get murky is Apple’s strategy to make iTunes the only way to get content onto Apple devices, including the iPod and now the iPhone. As the devices start to go beyond music and into other types of content that iTunes doesn’t manage directly, the footprint of iTunes expands further into the Windows desktop. Which is fine, I suppose, particularly if one is excited about getting one’s Outlook calendar on the thing (which I am).

But here is the problem: when one downloads iTunes, one is looking for music management. One is not asking Apple to install QuickTime, the Apple Updater, a Windows services, and now two Outlook add-ins.

I’m all for Apple putting software on the Windows platform. But they need to disclose that they’re installing this hodgepodge of executables and plugins and they need to give me the option of turning some of them off. Because I can live without iTunes on my machine (especially with an iPod docked to my speakers right on my desk), but I can’t live, professionally, without Outlook.

Those of us who won’t be getting an iPhone today have at least one good thing awaiting us from Apple: iTunes 7.3. Of course, the only new features are… iPhone compatibility, or as CNet says, “a painful reminder that you are leading an iPhoneless existence.”

I tried to update my work computer using the Check for Software Updates option within iTunes, but it crashed iTunes (probably a Vista thing). I was able to get the update by running the Apple Software Update application directly; it’s installed in c:program filesApple Software Update.

My inlaws and I are trying to figure out why they get such poor iChat performance. We videoconference with them often through iChat, and their sound cuts out, or the picture becomes so pixilated that they can’t see what is going on.

I just ran a Speakeasy speed test and it doesn’t seem that our connection speed is a problem—our speed to their servers in New York (very close to my inlaws) is pretty darned good:

So that leaves a few other possibilities. One is my inlaws’ speed—I know a few other people in their neighborhood have gotten cable modems. Another is iChat version—they are still on Mac OS X 10.3 and we have made the Tiger move.

Steve Jobs’s keynote today at WWDC is the sound of the other shoe dropping. All that griping about whether the iPhone would be opened to third party apps just went out the window. There is a third-party platform in the iPhone, and it’s called Safari. Which, incidentally, will now be available for Windows.

As a product manager, this sounds like my supported platform matrix breaking wide open. As a Windows user at work, this sounds like trumpets from heaven.

As a Mac user, it sounds like it did when iTunes and the iPod first came to Windows. New audiences for technologies on the Mac are a good thing because they tend to drive attention, and resources, to those technologies.

Back to the iPhone thing: this sounds strongly like Apple is making a bet on web application development being the future, at least for phones. Based on the explosion in Dashboard widget development, I’d say they may have a point. Being able to code in HTML+CSS+JavaScript has its advantages for a large number of tasks. Interestingly, games are not among the tasks that the AJAX stack has historically excelled at. I wonder if that means that the iPhone will be a games free platform, or if the partnership that Apple announced today with EA will bring further developments in that direction?

Yes, I know: Sudden Motion Sensor hacks are passé. But I finally got around to playing with one that invokes Exposé, and now I’m hooked. I ended up modifying it to invoke Dashboard instead, which required changing the script to call key code 111 for the F12 key.

So what does this do? Basically, if I want to see my Dashboard–which has weather and a couple other useful things on it, as well as some truly useless ones–I just tap the side of my laptop. Another tap dismisses it. Like I said: useless. (But very, very fun.)

…unfortunately, it wasn’t my most radical guess that got the brass ring. But I’m very glad to see, just a short time after Steve Jobs’s jab at DRM, that the vision is starting to come true with this new deal with EMI (higher quality, DRM free downloads at $1.25 a pop).

What’s not to like about this deal? Even at 256 kbps encoding, you’re paying for lossy copies of the music; for a typical 10-song album, that’s $12.50 for essentially a lo-fi version. But how lo-fi is it? I’d like to see the acoustic research; most of the benchmarking I’ve seen has only looked at 128 kbps AAC. And of course the fact that it’s unrestricted is the key.

Even better for all concerned, it comes with a 30 cent a song upconversion option. I’d better watch my wallet. I don’t have that many iTunes store purchases, but I could easily see a large bill if I just blanket-upgraded everything. (Not to mention the hit on my wallet for Complete My Album, but that’s another story.)

So now the remaining question is: how fast will the other labels follow suit in fleeing DRM?

New York Times: Speculation Is in the Air Over EMI and Apple. The obvious answer is: tomorrow, the Beatles will be on the iTunes Store. The not obvious answers are:

• DRM free downloads?
• A Yellow Submarine themed iPod?
• Apple buys its first music company?

…What? After all, EMI’s hoped for private equity white knight backed out back in December. And they were asking $4.9 billion then. According to their last 10Q, Apple had more than $7 billion in the bank—more than enough to pay for EMI the old fashioned way.

Hopefully it won’t happen. We’ve all seen what happens to tech companies that buy content businesses. But stranger things have happened.

Three last notes about the final (?) stages of the Great CD Project, which started with over 1000 CDs plus about 30 GB of digital music across two computers, and ended up with about 400GB of digitized music—over 23000 tracks worth—on a networked hard drive:

1. iPod syncing One of three scenarios I was concerned about was the ability to sync my iPod; since all the music was on the network, I would be gated by how fast the data could come from the remote hard disk. As it turns out, this wasn’t too bad a problem—compared to what I was coming from. I used to have to sync the iPod, a 5G video model that only supports USB sync, with my old PowerBook G4—which only had USB 1.1 connections. So syncing it was terribly slow. Syncing it with the new setup—hard drive over USB 2.0 to my AirPort Extreme, over 802.11g to the MacBook Pro, and then over USB 2.0 again to the iPod—is faster than I expected: it took about three hours to transfer 600+ songs, many of which were ripped losslessly, to the iPod.
2. Ripping CDs This was a big surprise. While nearly every other operation involving moving data to the AirDisk (the big disk connected to the AirPort Extreme) was pretty slow, ripping a CD with the music going to the network drive seemed to happen at a very reasonable speed—about 8.8x. I don’t know how Apple pulled this off—do they cache the data for later writes? If so they need to do the same thing in the Finder, because the performance seemed much more reasonable ripping than virtually any other write activity.
3. Playback This one puzzled me for quite a while. Yesterday was the first time I actually tried to play music through the setup, and it was awful. The sound cut out partway through the second or third song that I listened to, and I couldn’t get it to play again without restarting the whole base station—after which it played one song and quit again. For context, I’m still playing back music through an AirPort Express, so there are now two wireless hops involved—one to pull the music into iTunes and one to stream it back for playback. I did a ton of research and found that by switching the base station to a less crowded channel, and enabling interference robustness on both the base station and the AirPort Express, I suddenly got great performance again.

The best part of the whole thing is that I can use the MacBook Pro as a mobile music console without being tethered to the hard drives, and can use FrontRow to drive the music for a party—very slick.