Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Different way of shopping on Amazon.com
Browse and search Amazon.com online stores using intuitive and straightforward interface of this desktop application. You can easily find your favorite books, electronics or other items.

Mac Amazon Browser

My regular iPod is that first generation nano, the one that was notorious for being easy to scratch. Mine is as near-flawless as a nano can be. I really baby it. I recently started using an iPod Shuffle as well, the intention being that it would be my, who cares if it gets dinged, knockabout model.

It’s great in that role, and I also really enjoy the way I can easily access the various controls by feel alone. However, in using the Shuffle I also discovered another stress relieving side effect: I no longer care about the state of the battery.

Even though the battery meter on the nano is grossly inaccurate, I found that I was constantly mindful of my remaining state of charge, and wondering whether I should plug it in just to top it up, or wait until it was in the red zone in order to prolong its overall life.

With the Shuffle I just don’t care. I plug it in, often two or three times a day to re-sync the status of my podcasts and audio books, and I really have no idea whether the battery is near full, or near empty, and neither do I care. It’s never run out on me.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that great technology is indistinguishible from magic, and so it seems that way with the Shuffle and the way it “just works.”

When Apple marches on | Software | Editors’ Notes | Macworld

Apple didn’t get to where it is today by standing still. Generally, it gives its users time to move from old to new—the Classic environment and AppleWorks are two shining example. And when it doesn’t and instead releases a whatchamajigit for a specific kind of user—and I’m thinking the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and third-generation iPod shuffle here—you’re welcome to just say no, thank you. If enough people do, Apple will try again with something possibly more appealing.

And if you choose to not follow, great, you’ve found your happy place. At that point, however, it’s a bit much to ask more from the people who manage Apple. They served you five years ago. And for them, the meal has grown cold.

Mmm. Well. I was kind of right about the nano, totally wrong about iTunes and missed the Touch thing altogether. The best news, and it’s kind of hidden away, is that there are new headphones with remote controls for volume, skipping, pausing and making voice notes.

The Touch now has a real speaker built in, instead of a piezo beeper speaker, so that makes the countdown timer and alarm imminently more useful; should be good for listening to podcasts un-tethered as well.

The Classic line has been reduced to one model, as thin as the 80 gig, but with 120 gigs capacity. Perhaps that same drive will go in the MacBook Air, giving it a 50% boost in capacity.

Ok. Apple special event time again tomorrow morning. Here are my hunches/predictions:

1. iTunes will have a major revamp and it will be renamed iMedia or some such thing, to reflect the fact that it’s just as much about movies and iPhone apps as it is about music.

2. There will be a music subscription service where for $15 a month you can download all the music you want, but when you stop paying, that music disappears.

3. A new iPod nano, like the generation 2 model, but with the wheel at the bottom and the rest of the front taken up with a vertical screen. Flip it sideways for screening movies and the new orientation of the wheel is reflected by a virtual wheel that appears on the screen whenever you touch the real one.

4. Announcement that 10 million iPhones have now been sold. Thanks for coming. Goodbye. Event ends with some hip band playing live.

A great way to gather text together in one place…

The MacTipper Blog: Save Selected Text To a TXT File

I recently tried Leopard on my system. I didn’t need Leopard, but I felt that if I didn’t make the jump then I’d be forever falling behind the state of the art. It installed easily over Tiger as an archive and install. I made sure first that most of the applications that loaded at startup were temporarily disabled and one or two that were deemed actually dangerous to Leopard were removed altogether.

So, the installation went smoothly, and everything worked as advertised. But there were one or two nagging things that eventually caused me to change my mind about the upgrade: One was that the system was simply working too hard now for my liking; even though I have plenty of ram installed, the Finder was constantly rebuilding its cache of preview icons in order to drive Coverflow — in fact it was rebuilding even in list view. It worked, but it just wasn’t snappy any more on this G5 machine.

The second problem was that several of my favorite add-ons weren’t ready for primetime use under Leopard. They included PithHelmet, Mega Zoom, Sogudi and Menu Master. All told, the loss of these — and a couple other helper apps — made for quite a step back in productivity.

I knew I had to wipe the drive to go back to the previous system. I didn’t have a backup drive available to stow all my data so I decided to take the opportunity, while reverting to Tiger, to take stock of which data was essential and which was superfluous. I threw out everything that was there just for entertainment and managed to archive the rest (the really important stuff) on just a dozen or so CDs.

My plan was to wipe the hard drive, then install Tiger from the original disks, then rev it up to version 10.4.10 (10.4.11 was too buggy in my opinion). This I did, followed by the installation of all my archived data and my essential apps.

Then BANG, it broke.

It booted to the Desktop and everything I did in the Finder was fine, but every app that launched immediately quit, including System Preferences. I recalled reading some Apple forums where it was theorized that Leopard was writing to the disk in some low level way that the earlier Tiger OS wouldn’t recognize, even after a simple wipe; now I was thinking that theory might just be right. I started again with the Tiger install, only this time I had it write zeros to the whole disk to completely blank it before formatting it again.

Second time was a charm and over the next couple of days I slowly built up just the system that I wanted. Then BANG, it broke again. It was that sickening “Engine splutters while flying over open water” feeling you get with a totally random kernel panic. It took me back to a time when I went through three dodgy logic boards in six months (thank God for Apple Care).

Two more panics, and some hardware testing and swapping out of RAM showed that one of my two pieces of RAM was faulty somewhere in its higher regions; chucking the RAM (leaving me with one gig) fixed the glitch. Was that RAM always faulty and I’d never used that region before now? I don’t know.

I do know that it seems to run just as well as it ever did, with just the one gig. Maybe with the two gigs in the past, it was constantly correcting for the error and not running at optimum speed. Is UNIX that clever? Like I say: I don’t really know.

On top of all that, my internet connection was down for the past few days. So it’s been quite a week. And what has all this taught me?

I like Leopard a lot. It’s great, but I can wait a few months before attempting the upgrade again, until more of the bugs are ironed out. Even then I’ll think long and hard as the current setup is just so “right” for what I do. As with previous gadgets and systems I’ve adopted, I think I’ve reached a point where I’m more or less at the top of the curve as far as enhancement to the experience goes; more tinkering now is just for tinkering’s sake, and could be a little dangerous (I say that now…).

The other thing this experience taught me is that I was too ruthless in what I chucked out. I went past lean, to rudimentary. I now miss being able to, with a couple of clicks, call up some old TV episode, or piece of music, just for the hell of it.

Next on my wish list: That external drive…

I have an iPod nano and I usually charge it up using the USB connection to the Mac; only thing is, this only works while the iMac G5 is awake. I rediscovered just recently though that I can also charge it from the Mac via firewire, while the Mac is asleep.

Hooray!

I may have heard also that one of Leopard’s 300 new features is that they turned on USB charging while asleep as well…

I’m always a little nervous when it comes to OS updates. On the one hand it’s always nice to be up to date, but on the other, why risk breaking something that’s so stable in its current state.

When I looked at the specs of the 10.4.11 update the list of fixes looked very arcane, and not particularly exciting or relevant to my situation. But there also was included the final and supposedly stable version of Safari 3; and this was the only way to get a hold of it. I bit the bullet, induced by the prospect of exploring the new Safari.

I installed the upgrade and had no problems at all with the OS side of things; it was Safari itself that caused what grief I had. None of my SIMBL driven hacks liked it; several keyboard shortcuts had been changed — screwing up some of my Butler macros, and to me, it seems slower. Worse still, it was now here to stay (shades of the whole Microsoft IE embedded into the Windows OS brouhaha, but that’s another story).

This is the price one pays for tinkering, I guess. I don’t mean tinkering as in doing the upgrade; I mean tinkering as in having a pimped Safari to be upgraded. When I think back on all the software platforms I’ve used, PC, Mac and handheld, there was always some third party add-on that made each one “just so.”

Speaking of upgrades, have you noticed that Apple is more and more in the habit of adding some gift with each one? All of the iPhone and Touch updates, and the latest revisions to iTunes, have been primarily designed to stomp the latest hack, but they all add some new cool functionality that (probably) should have been there all along.