Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

I have a PC and its sole purpose is to give me a platform for two simulators that I enjoy; one lets me fly planes that I could never otherwise afford, and the other does the same thing with cars. One day I’ll have an intel Mac and I’ll be able to run these on that machine via Boot Camp. For now I set up the PC once a week and have a fly, or a drive, then pack it away again.

I may now be getting a little jaded though, because the weeks are turning into fortnights, and then months. It’s just becoming too much of a hassle to set the thing up. It all comes back to that Mac difference that I’m always trying to put a finger on. Yesterday I read a new blog by Stephen Fry. In his blog he says:

Design matters

By design here, I mean GUI and OS as much as outer case design. Let’s go back to houses. The sixties taught us, surely, that architectural design, commercial and domestic, is not an extra. The office you work in every day, the house you live in every day, they are more than the sum of their functions. We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say “well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do” is like saying my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it’s got a kitchen too, and a bathroom.”

Thank you Stephen. I know know what my problem is. I have sick computer syndrome.

Stephen Fry

Just an hour after posting the entry below where I lament being part of a free service, that same free service emails me and explains their technical problems.

So, bear with me while I bear with them, and soon we’ll have pictures to go with the words…

Apologies for the missing images in some posts. I recently signed up with a local provider that offered a free 50 megs of web space as a sort of “Giving back to the community” kind of deal. I was intending to use most of the space for a portfolio of photographs and somewhere to park my CV. In the mean time I used it to host some images for this blog.

I read their fine print and saw nothing that said I couldn’t link to images from outside; there were just the usual provisos about offensive and copy-write material and massive traffic loads.

So, maybe I’m being punished for being cheeky, or, maybe the service is just plain broken.

My actual ISP also has a “Giving back to the community” thing. Even though I pay them, the measly 10 megs of space that they give me is regarded as a free gift. So, when it breaks down and I complain, the response is basically in the vein of: Seeing as how the web space service is free, you can’t expect us to give it any sort of priority when it breaks…

Car makers don’t advertise that the car comes with a free engine (not covered by warranty). There’d be an outrage.

End of grizzle.

Tumblr is an online service for creating and maintaining a blog. What makes it different from many other such services? Its sheer simplicity. There are no tags or comments or categories.

How can a lack of features be a good thing?

You may want to set up a blog just for your own use, as an online scrapbook or notebook. If you own an iPhone, or the new iPod Touch, you now have somewhere to write notes and store them, and then later access them via your Mac for further editing.

Unlike many other blogging services Tumblr lets you choose not to advertise that your blog exists, so, unless someone happens to stumble upon it by accident, it’s pretty much your own online space…

Tumblr

If you are running a slideshow in either Preview or iPhoto, you want the image being shown to be exactly sized to your screen. Images from almost all modern cameras are much larger in pixel dimensions than your Mac’s display, so they will be interpolated down to fit. When they are resized on the fly through interpolation they never look as crisp or pristine.

When I import images from my Nikon to the Mac, I keep them outside of iPhoto and at their original size, as an archive from which I might eventually produce some prints. From there I choose the best examples that I want to display onscreen and copy those out of the archive for processing. Each one of those favorites that I’ve chosen is then tweaked in an image editor (I use Gimp Shop ‘cause I’m cheap) and the final step before sharpening is to resize it down to match the dimensions of my display.

My iMac is 1440 by 900, so if an image is narrower than that ratio I scale it so the height is exactly 900; if it’s wider I scale it so the width is exactly 1440. After these tweaked and resized images are finished I import only those into iPhoto. Then when I run a slideshow they are displayed exactly at their original size (not stretched or shrunk to fit the screen) and the difference is stunning.

Trust me on this; they really pop!

When I listen to Mac Break Weekly, or Mac Notables — particularly after product announcements — there’s often a lot of speculation in their discussions about “When are they going to make something geared more towards the enterprise market?” Or, “When will there be one-button Upload to Flickr?”

Probably never.

I think the simple answer to these questions, and others covering features that aren’t there, is that Steve speaks the truth when he says they design products that they themselves would love to own.

Take the iPhone. I bet that during its development, Steve was, among other roles, the “Battery Czar.” Whenever anyone suggested a new feature the first thing he would ask is: “Will it still go a whole day on a single charge?” If the answer was no then that was the end of it.

Flickr is a great service and has solid community-based features, but Steve looks at it and sees something as ugly as hell; end of story. It’s the same with Google: he loves what their back end can do, but hates how it’s presented on the web.

Copy and paste would be great on the iPhone, but it’s just too many steps away from just “whipping it out and using it.” Same with the idea of multiple selections. On the one hand you could have extra capabilities that are invoked through clever but sometimes hard to remember combinations of buttons and gestures (the sort of features that might require another trip to the handbook), and on the other hand you have fewer (sometimes quite cumbersome in the number of taps) capabilities, that are at the same time — always obvious.

The best scenario to please advanced users would be a set of basic obvious features with a more advanced subset underlying them. The trick would be to make those advanced features available to those who hold the “magic key” (hold this while tapping that, or whatever) while making it impossible for the casual user to accidently stumble across them and get lost within them.

For now such a scenario isn’t worth the effort. It’s all too new — just like the original Mac with its deliberately arrow key-less keyboard.

To summarize: they are leaning towards features that can be explained in a sentence, rather than a paragraph; look at Boot Camp as an example: “With Boot Camp — you reboot and you’re running a Windows machine with no sign of the Mac. Then you reboot and you’re back to your Mac, with no sign of Windows.” Simple.

Now try to explain the other Windows virtualisation options such as Parallels in a sentence without getting an: “Eh? Say that again” reaction.

It’s the old three plus four thing: There’s an urban myth that says that phone numbers are broken up three plus four (555-1234) because people can easily remember or digest three things; somewhat easily remember four things; and have no hope at all of remembering five or more.

The iPhone is three devices in one; those three devices do four things really well. When those things are automatic and ubiquitous is when the really cool second-level stuff arrives.

The new Nano looks a little odd in the pictures but the real proof with be in seeing one in the metal. Personally, I would much rather that they put the click wheel to the left of the display and made it a wide device instead of a square device. But then, I tend to use mine left-handed, so most of the audience would disagree with me.

Turning to the touch iPod, I love everything about it except that it doesn’t have any note taking capability that I can see. If it has an onscreen keyboard for filling out forms in Safari, why not extend that by having a notepad as well; after all the iPod went beyond being a mere music player years ago, what with clocks, games, calendar etc.

Maybe the notes app really needs the predictive and intelligent keyboard software that is one of the real differentiators of the iPhone, and they’re not yet ready to share that with the lesser brother that is the iPod.

It seems that every time Apple introduces something new, I’m reminded of some other product in another field altogether that’s equally cool. The rub is that I can never place that other product; I rack my brains, but it never comes to me.

Maybe there isn’t some other product in another field at all. Maybe it’s just a reminder of some ancient low level part of the back of my brain where appreciation of just-rightedness is stored. These design elements appear to look familiar, but in actual fact, they just look “right.”

In the overall scheme of product evolution, there are some products that are revised and refined over time (and there are some that start out being refined) to a point of being just right. Then a strange thing happens; it’s almost like a sort of chaos theory — applied to design; they (according to some) become refined to the point of being perceived as boring, or bland. Then, all of the un-written rules of radius and angle and intersection go out the window… And something new and funky is born.

What pisses me off is the phenomenon whereby the funky version becomes the hit. Usually a whole new group of “fashion conscious,” or “lifestyle” users arrives and usurps the first group who really knew what was there in the first place.

This does not happen in the case of Apple, or at least Apple in the last decade or so. There are no plain stupid, or “funky” revamps, just continuous kaizen-like refinement and evolution.

The guy in the iPhone instructional video says that in the end you just have to trust in the intelligence of the software, and go ahead and type. After a fews days you’ll just fall into the intended design of the thing.

That’s how it is with the products themselves. Just trust them to know what’s best; the new nano might look fat and squat right now, but I’ll reserve judgement until I have one in my hand — hopefully then it will all make sense.

For now my delight quotient is being more than filled by the new aluminum keyboard. I can’t get over how I’ve owned this thing for several days now, and it still looks even more gorgeous every time I see it.

Not only are all the sizes, proportions and angles just right — no matter how closely I look, the construction is literally flawless. This from what’s probably the cheapest peripheral that they make.

I think I get it…

I love the new iMac, but I’m a long way from needing one. When I tried one out in the store I was just as impressed by the keyboard, so I bought the keyboard without the Mac.

Some folks love it and some hate it. I love it. The short quiet travel of the keys, the low profile, the solidity of the thing; I swear I’m typing about fifty percent faster and more accurately.

And I now have all these extra function keys — waiting for assignment…