Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

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.

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…

You may have heard the stories concerning an ASUS exec letting slip that there’s an Apple tablet in the works. This may or may not be true; I’m sure that they’re constantly developing (say, eighty percent production ready) gadgets of all kinds.

Apple’s quest to put us at ease with technology
By Alice Rawsthorn
International Herald Tribune

…Ive is lucky in that advances in technology have accelerated throughout his career. Having already had new polymers and composite materials to play with, and pioneered the transition from cathode ray tubes to flat panel displays in desktops, he is now excited by the possibility of replacing hard drives with smaller, more robust flash memory in laptops. “When everything is new, it’s a huge amount of work because you have to validate the most rudimentary assumptions,” he said. “Otherwise you can go a long way down the development path only to find that the product doesn’t work.”…

All very tantalizing. What would an Apple tablet really be like?

If we look at past Steve keynotes when he’s introducing an entirely new product, step one is pointing out what’s wrong with what’s already out there. If Steve where introducing Apple’s Tablet he would first show how the current crop use clunky pens (Ours uses your fingers, just like the iPhone, and also just like the iPhone – it uses the familiar iPhone keyboard and gorgeous glossy real glass display).

He will show how the current crop use tiny scroll bars that are hard to point to, and then show iPhone-style flick and pinch scrolling and Coverflow and QuickLook for file management. The display will be seven inches; just big enough to make a great book reader and web browser, and just small enough to mean you’ll always take it with you…

Ok, so what’s the killer app?

One might be how you could carry it around the house all day on a single charge, accessing your internet connection; viewing shared files on your network; controlling your Apple TV. One might be that your wireless keyboard talks to it, for serious editing. Or, that it would work as a great additional input device when back at your Mac…

Trouble is, none of the above is really a one sentence – gotta have this – compelling justification for the great unwashed to buy the thing. People who use current tablets either like the scribble with a pen modality that Apple would never condone because the whole idea is just too “ugly”, or they like the twist and fold versatility of the more complex models; definitely a non-starter.

So, no. My take is that the Apple Tablet is still just a research project. I would buy one (”You paid how much for that Newton?!?”), but unless this device which will be regarded as a consumer product and not a “computer,” talks just as easily to PCs as to Macs, and does something amazing that folks didn’t realize they craved until now, then next year’s Macworld will be about new studio displays.

And perhaps the 11 inch flash-based MacBook Svelte.

Apple Tablet “confirmed” by Asus? - Engadget

 
I know, it has nothing to do with Macs, but, Wow!
 

NASA: Spacewalk will have ‘higher risk than usual’ - USATODAY.com

Funny thing about rounded corners. You either love them or you hate them; I’m quite schizophrenic on the subject. When I first built the Andrew’s Mac Tips site everything had rounded corners.
 

 
Lots of people liked them and wanted to know how I did it. I liked them too, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble; but eventually I decided that they didn’t really serve any purpose, and they looked a little too “whimsical.”

Then I went all sharp edged and simple and square.

Mac OS windows have rounded top corners as a rule and I can understand that; there’s a lot of history to them, and they — in a subliminal way — suggest that if you want to resize a window: don’t look here, do it at the bottom-right corner.

As for the menu-bar: I was a little peeved — when I first saw Macs — that it too was rounded, but I came around. When Panther gave way to Tiger they went for a shiny title-bar, but it looked (and still looks) more like a smudge than a sheen to me.

Now Leopard has a new title-bar; all the focus has been on the fact that it’s semi-transparent. But look! No more rounded corners!
 

 
The Mac OS just lost its trademark. If the new title-bar reminds me of anything, it’s the title-bar of the iPhone. Are we slowly transitioning to the iPhone paradigm — one notch at a time?

I’m doing my best to keep this blog updated and relevant, but I have to wonder if there’s anyone actually reading it. So, if you are, and you have a moment, drop me a line in the comments.

Even if it’s only to say, “Get a real job.”

Anyone?

I suddenly found that Safari would quit if I clicked a button or control on a Web 2.0 site like LooseStitch or Back Pack.

A while back when I was trying Getbuzzword, an Adobe installer popped up and installed a new player plugin, so I suspected that; dreading the thought of somehow reverting to an earlier version.

Turns out though that the fix was to re-visit the PithHelmet preferences where I recently switched the block mode from Safer to (the less safe) Faster.

That’ll teach me to be impudent.

Hark at me with all the panicking– this is the first glitch I’ve had in months!

I go into the local department store where the iPod Touch is finally in stock. I ask the salesman if I can handle one and we head towards a Chinese salesman showing the only demo unit to a couple of other Asians. We ask if we can look on as he demos the unit and the three Chinese huddle together and hide the iPod from us — all the time glaring at us like we’ve got the plague or something.

I cross the street where there’s another department store with a Touch in a glass cabinet. I ask if I can handle it before buying. I need to know if it can do a couple of crucial things that are not mentioned in the manual. He says I can’t touch it, only buy it (in broken English). I argue that the selling point of the Touch is what happens when you touch it. How will I know if I want it without touching it first?

This goes right over his head.

I’m now back home, Touchless and none-the-wiser. Effing local Apple resellers…

I suddenly like the idea of an iPod Touch at my side. I think it would make the coolest notepad, ever.

I hate paper. Whatever I write on paper it gets transcribed to my Mac at some stage anyway so why not write once and let automation do its thing? I’ve tried so called hipster PDAs, and plain old paper pads, but they are so last century.

Right now I am writing this on my Dell Pocket PC and that’s fine and good, but even after years and years of using a stylus on a soft plastic screen, there’s always that nagging fear at the back of my mind that a particle of grit is going to find its way onto the screen and get dragged by the nib — leaving a scratch. It’s a real shiver down the spine feeling that once experienced you never want to repeat.

The screen of the Dell is flawless, but there’s always that fear. So, turning our attention to the iPod Touch, it has a glass screen and the input method is my squishy thumbs. I could hammer away for hours, during a dust storm if need be.

This is huge.

Yes, I know there is no Notes app on the Touch. It does have Contacts though, and new contacts can be created and synced back to the Address Book on the Mac. Those contacts have a Notes field and that’s where the “Think outside the box” killer app resides. I will of course need to try out this theory on a demo Touch to see if it all actually works as hoped. If it does then hello ultimate notepad. Oh, and it also includes music, movies and Safari…

YouTube - Create an offline To-Do list on your iTouch