October 24, 2007

Classic is Dead

Still have MacOS 9 apps banging around on a PPC Mac, running in the Classic environment? As of MacOS X 10.5, they’re no more:

Classic applications do not work on Intel processor-based Macs or with Mac OS X 10.5.

[From the Apple Support knowledge base:]

Posted by jim at 07:04 PM

Leopard: Final Dock

Another good piece of news. MacOS X 10.5 Leopard has a new appearance for the Dock; it looks like a reflective 3-D shelf for your application icons. There’s been a lot of debate about this, centering around two arguments.

It flies in the face of Apple’s human interface guidelines in terms of the 3-D perspective and light-sources. If you aren’t aware of such things, then it just looks a little… wrong. If you’re aware of such things, it screams like a misused “it’s” to an editor.

It looks horrible at the side of the screen. Many users - especially those with multiscreen or widescreen setups - place the dock at the side of the screen. The sideways shelf looks really…. wrong.

Apple apparently listened. One last-minute change in the final release version of Leopard is an alternate appearance for the Dock that’s “flat” - avoiding the perspective and positioning issues of the Shelf appearance.

Whew.

Posted by jim at 10:14 AM

September 06, 2007

Pat on the back

I called it. Apple’s posted An open letter to iPhone owners from Steve Jobs. Long story short, Apple will offer a $100 Apple Store credit to early iPhone buyers.

The money quote?

Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

Exactly. Good response, Apple.

Posted by jim at 01:29 PM

September 05, 2007

What's missing from the iPod touch.

With today’s announcements and price cuts, the iPhone is the same price as the high-end iPod touch - $399US. They have the same screen, same UI, both have Wi-Fi. Looks like they both have the same annoying ultra-narrow sunk headphone jack. So you lose 8GB of storage buying an iPhone rather than a Touch… what do you get? Well the iPhone has:

Here’s something else the iPhone has that the Touch doesn’t. Email.

That’s right. The iPod touch lists “Wi-Fi Web Brower”, not “Breakthrough Internet Device.” No Mail. Go ahead, look around the Apple site. There’s no Mail button on the Home screen, no mention of email anywhere on the iPod touch site. Steve didn’t demo it.

While we’re at it - there’s no Google Maps application visible, no Stocks widget, no Weather widget. The iPod touch is an iPod first and foremost. Wi-Fi is there to allow you to get to the iTunes Wi-Fi Store, and Apple knew people would scream murder if they didn’t put in mobile Safari and YouTube.

Looks like Apple may try the road of differentiation by bundled software. We’ll have to wait and see if the iPhone and Touch share similar enough hardware that the hackers can migrate apps from one to the other but, until then… email only lives on the iPhone.

Posted by jim at 02:49 PM

Appease the Cult

Apple’s iPod revamp is impressive, but one of the announcements bound to piss people off is the new iPhone pricing. The 4GB iPhone is dead, dead, dead, and the 8GB iPhone has dropped to $399 from its launch price of $599. That’s a 33% price cut - $200 - just 2 months after launch.

Yes, you pay to early adopt. Price cuts are a reality of technology - costs of flash memory and other components have likely dropped since iPhone pricing was established earlier this year. Not to mention the price point had to be aligned with the iPod Touch.

But the scale of this price cut is pretty big - I’d hazard that $100 would have been easier to swallow. $200, to judge the responses so far, makes the early adopters - the “Cult” that has helped promote the iPhone to friends and strangers - feel stupid. It would be good if Apple could address this, even in a symbolic fashion.

And they can.

Every iPhone had to be registered with Apple via an iTunes account. Apple knows when each iPhone was registered. Apple could easily announce that any iTunes account that registered an iPhone before September 1st receives a credit for the iTunes Music Store - some placating amount - effective upon the launch of the wireless version of the store.

There’s the gimme. Acknowledge the early adopters, don’t piss off what Guy Kawasaki long ago described as The Cult.

Posted by jim at 01:37 PM

July 08, 2007

iPhone 1.x Update Wish List

So I didn’t even last 7 days - I bought an iPhone on Thursday thanks to the serendipity of window-shopping at the U Village Apple Store just as they got their “second wave” of iPhone stock.

Having used Apple products for well over two decades, I’m well aware of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. I know what to expect from 1.0 software running on 1.0 hardware. With iPhone, you can tell that Apple was very self-aware of their own history as well. What iPhone does, it does amazingly well. The screen is sharp (I was using it in full, cloudless, no-shade-for-yards sun without problem), hard to scratch, and very responsive as a touch interface. The apps work well, the connectivity works well, and I’ve had no problems with data input (then again, I’m not a hardcore long-practiced thumb typist of Blackberry or Treo vintage).

Apple hit it out of the park. The nay-sayers will rightfully have egg on their face, and Apple is gonna sell so many of these its gonna be scary.

However, as Mike Davidson said, it’s “like someone assembled the finest orchestra the world, but decided to leave out the trumpets.” That is - what iPhone does it does very well. But there are things that it just doesn’t do, and they stand out like missing trumpets. One gets the impression that the product team chose to omit features for the 1.0 rather than half-ass them.

Rather than focus on what the hardware doesn’t do such as GPS, or 3G, or memory cards, I’d prefer to focus on what the software doesn’t do. Because that can be changed - and I’ll wager that much of it will be changed in future updates, especially considering that Jobs has already been talking up what an excellent software platform the iPhone is. So without further ado, here’s what I’d like to see in some future iPhone 1.x software updates:

Arbitrary Selection: There’s no gesture in iPhone’s 1.0 repertoire to select. The tap is a double-click, it opens/activates the object. The tap/drag is a contextual action - it gives you the insert-positioning loupe, or moves around on a zoomed page. The flick moves between items in a series. However, you can’t select an arbitrary object on a page in order to perform an operation on it - such as cut/copy/paste, Save Image to Photos, Save Sound to iPod, Apply as Wallpaper, Download, and so on. Arbitrary Selection is a gateway feature and is a requirement for other potential software features such as: Save Images from Safari/Mail, cut/copy/paste, or meaningful document editing.

Document Management: This is another gateway feature - required if you want to store/edit/view supported document formats (Word, Text, Excel, PDF). Images are managed in Photos, Audio and Video in the iPod application. But there’s no analogue for… well.. Documents. With iPhone 1.0, the only place for this is in Mail, with your documents as attachments. (The Notes application isn’t even the beginning of an answer here - see Gruber’s comments on Notes in his iPhone First Impressions). If you want to be able to save a linked Word doc from a web page, use a PDF as a presentation, or have a reference file on your iPhone - you need a way to manage all that. I don’t see it on my iPhone yet.

Full-Resolution Image Support: I haven’t heard this mentioned much. iPhone’s image support seems to be limited to 320x480. Images synced from iPhoto are downsampled to 320x480 (or 480x320). Take a picture with the camera and view it in Photos - zoom in and it gets jaggy well before a 2MP picture should be jaggy. Receive an image as a mail attachment - same thing, regardless of actual image size. Same thing for images viewed on web pages with iPhone Safari. I haven’t gone back to the video of the WWDC SteveNote, but I seem to to recall that he zoomed in deeply and got sharp images during that demo - doesn’t seem to work that way on the 1.0 release. There are certain uses where this really stands out as an issues - images of diagrams, for example. Such as iSubwaymaps.com.

After those big three - which have a fairly broad impact - these others seem more like one-shots:

Disk Mode: We’ll probably see this when Apple figures out Document Management. Whether it’s a Disk Mode, or a Sync Folder between your iPhone and your Mac, I want to have a way to move Documents directly from my Mac to my iPhone.

Video Capture: Don’t quite understand why iPhone doesn’t do this yet. Don’t want to use the CPU/power to encode the captured video to an acceptable format? Don’t know, but I’d expect we’ll see this one added.

Video Out: Wow, that support for PDF files is nice. Wouldn’t you love to be able to plug your iPhone into a projector and make a presentation? How about show your videos or view your photos on a television like you can on your iPod? Yes. Video out, please.

Stereo Bluetooth Support: You’d need a stereo bluetooth headset that also has a good microphone on the market first - so look for this feature to hit when Apple has a product.

iChat: Perhaps omitted as a sap to AT&T (sell more text messages), or axed to make a clean 1.0. Seems a no-brainer.

MMS: Another one of those features that must have been chopped to make a clean 1.0, I’d expect to see it sooner rather than later.

Games: This will come when (not if) Apple creates a real SDK and method of iPhone Application certification.

Posted by jim at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2007

Leopard pushed back to October

Apple had said since their developer conference in 2006 (WWDC) that Leopard - the next version of MacOS X - would ship in Spring 2007. The timing of the 2007 WWDC (June) had everyone reasonably expecting that Apple would ship Leopard then.

Developers and other Apple followers had begun to wonder. Steve Jobs had alluded to unannounced (some called them “secret”) features in Leopard that weren’t part of the 2006 WWDC demo or subsequent Sneak Peak on the Apple website - yet nothing had shown up in recent developer builds. Moreover, recent advance developer builds still had a long list of issues, which didn’t forbode well for a mid/late June release.

Today, the other shoe dropped. Apple issued a statement pushing back the release of Leopard to October - a delay of four months. The statement attributes the delay to reallocation of resources to finish iPhone development - also scheduled for June.

Four months. Big deal, right?

Well, there are a few potential cascade effects:

First, the developers. Leopard has many significant features under the hood - enough that several independent developers have been planning on having their next major product releases be Leopard-dependent. This pushes their upgrade cycle back four months… and not every independent/small developer has four months of cash in the bank.

There’s also the educational market (I spent 14 years running IT in higher ed). Operating on a July-to-June fiscal year, education does the vast majority of their upgrades during the summer months and strives for a stable and relatively unchanging environment during the school year. With the school year starting in September, there’s no way that educational IT will do broad Leopard deployment in the 2007/2008 school year. This delay means that Apple won’t see broad adoption of Leopard in education until the 2008/2009 school year.

And lastly, there’s hardware. The rumor mill had bees discussing revisions to the laptop and iMac lines this summer - involving significant redesigns and potential new technologies such as LED backlit displays and solid state disks. New Apple hardware almost always requires the latest version of the OS, and it’s possible that new hardware was being developed with Leopard in mind. If that’s the case, Apple either has to rev Tiger to support the new hardware or push the hardware back to match the October date for Leopard. Again, a pushback would mean missing the lucrative education buying window.

Apple’s choice to devote resources to iPhone development at the cost of Leopard’s ship date - especially when that means missing sales windows for target markets such as higher education - shows just how important the iPhone is to Apple. Not to mention that it hints of signed agreements for certain ship dates.

I’d been assuming that there would be a lot of iPhone-related goodness in Leopard. That’s still likely to be the case, but the iPhone is still going to have to shine on Tiger this June…

Posted by jim at 03:13 PM

March 20, 2007

Parallels and Ubuntu 6.0.6 Server LTS

MacOS X 10.4.9 (Tiger) Parallels Desktop Build 3188 Ubuntu 6.0.6 LTS Server MacBook Pro 15" (C2D 2.16)

You'll find that attempting to install from the "server" ISO results in a VM that hangs just after kernel decompression. So...

Get the x86 "Alternate" ISO from here: http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/6.06/

In Parallels:

File > New...
Custom
OS Type: Linux
OS Version: Other Linux kernel 2.6
RAM: 512MB or greater (install reported to hang with less)
Create a new hard disk image, at least 4GB
Shared Networking
Name it whatever you like

When prompted to insert the install CD, Click "More Options", select "ISO image", and select the x86 Alternate ISO you downloaded earlier.

When you to the Ubuntu install prompt, enter "server". Let 'er rip.

Voila. Ubuntu 6.0.6 LTS VM. Parallels 3188. MacOS X 10.4.9.

Posted by jim at 12:39 PM

September 20, 2006

But sometimes bigger is better...

December of last year, Jenni and I were both using PowerBooks as our main computers. Me on a 15” PowerBook, she on a 12” PowerBook. As of this weekend, we’ve both shifted to iMacs at home: I’m using a 20” iMac, she’s using a 17” iMac with a second 17” LCD attached. The 15” PowerBook is my travel machine (I’m using it right now), and the 12” PowerBook is packed up and waiting for a buyer on Craigslist.

I’m reminded of the October 2005 Meet the Life Hackers article in the NY Times, where they discussed an experiment measuring productivity of people using a single 15” display against those using a huge multi-screen 42” setup:

On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user’s productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind.

It’s true - it’s a huge difference for anyone who spends their day flipping between web pages, email, editors, terminals, and a myriad of other applications. Today, using the 15” PowerBook after months of the 12” PowerBook, I’m surprised at the almost palpable sense of relief I feel - it’s almost as if I was cramped in some tiny space while using the 12” PowerBook, and have only now been allowed to get out and stretch.

I’ve always held that the display - not the CPU - was the single most important piece of hardware as far as most users were concerned. It’s what you look at, day in and day out. I’ve seen the difference in folks when they moved to a larger screen - or even just a clearer and more legible one. The Times article last year was something nice to wave in the faces of some people I work with who still consider CPU uber-alles and decent displays to be for the realm of metrosexual design geeks (or overpaid dot-com leftovers). Jenni’s glee at her new dual-display setup, and my own relief at going back to the 15” PowerBook just serve to put it all finally to rest.

Perception is reality, one of my earlier supervisors told me - and a nice big screen (or screens) just allows you to, well, perceive more reality.

Posted by jim at 04:15 PM

March 22, 2006

Windows Vista Delayed

Yesterday Microsoft announced that Windows Vista has been, you guessed it, delayed.

Vista will be available to volume-license business customers in November (even my own workplace, a Microsoft-centric shop with 1000 employees in the US, obtains Windows as OEM licenses with new computers). Consumer availability will occur in January 2007.

Right now, all the press is focusing on the impact to hardware vendors in the “all important” Christmas shopping season, as consumers hold off on new hardware purchases until they can get Vista with it.

But as I skimmed the Channel 9 boards and saw the comment, “Who releases product in January?!?”, I thought of something…

Apple does. MacWorld - usually in the first week of January - is an Apple showcase event. Based on earlier comments from Steve Jobs, we’re very likely to see the next version of MacOS X released in early 2007. By releasing Vista in early 2007, Microsoft can use their marketing juggernaut to try to defuse Apple’s now-regular domination of the tech press.

Now, I’m not saying that Microsoft would change their release schedule of Vista just to try to steal/minimize Apple’s thunder. But tell me - just try to tell me - that the people involved in marketing Vista aren’t relishing the chance…

Posted by jim at 10:32 AM

December 27, 2005

Score with iPhoto

I use iPhoto on the Mac to organize my digital photos. I try to assign keywords and such as soon as I download photos - nothing fancy, but enough that I can find pictures from one thing or the other without much fuss. Like pictures of Nathan from the past 12 months.

One of iPhoto’s other features is the ability to create and order photo books. Pick a slew of photos, pick a theme, tell iPhoto to do an automatic layout for you. Tweak the ordering a bit, add titles and such, and you’re good to go. Click “order” and it’s sent to a printing service that makes and ships the book.

So the year, for Christmas, I made up a keepsake book for my parents - a series of about 50-odd pictures of Nathan that spanned 2005. 8 1/2 x 11, hardcover, glossy paper, nice layout. Score. Not only are my parents raving about their book of grandson pictures, but I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that this is now the expected Xmas gift for the foreseeable future. Their friends are asking to borrow the book so they they can show their parent-of-grandchildren kids what they want for Christmas.

Score.

Posted by jim at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2005

Cool Things

Okay, two cool things - one for the homeowner in you, one for the mac geek.

Leafblower. Damn. I bought a $70 leafblower back in early November to deal with the plethora of pine needles that had carpeted our front driveway. And that was pretty damn cool. But on Sunday I took it up on the roof to clear the leafs, pine needles, and detrius-clogged gutters. Holy moly! Took less than half the time it would normally take to sweep the roof and hand-muck the gutters, and the gutters are clean.

CoverFlowCoverflow. I saw what looked to be a neat little app on Jon Hick's desktop, and googled for it. What I found was a "tech demo" of a neat little app that loads all your iTunes album artwork, and lets you flip through it like you're hunting through your physical CD collection. If it can, I'll go out and hunt down your artwork from Amazon (which has an amazing library of CD cover art). Apple needs to buy this thing up now and integrate it into iTunes - major cool factor.

Posted by jim at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2005

Newsgator buys Ranchero (NetNewsWire)

Wow. I’d thought that the state of the Mac online press had deteriorated since the founding editor of MacMinute departed, but I hadn’t realized how much.

This morning, Scoble posted a rumor (via Om Malik) that NewsGator was buying Brent Simmons’ company Ranchero Software in order to buy NetNewWire. By lunchtime the rumor was confirmed - and while there are now official announcements and an interview on the NewsGator site (nothing on Ranchero or Inessential), there hasn’t been a peep from any of the major “frequent update” Mac news sites (*)

Why is this a big deal?

“NetNewsWire is the premier desktop RSS reader for Mac OS X. According to some statistics, it’s the most popular desktop RSS reader on any platform, even though it’s Mac-only. It’s also one of the earliest desktop RSS readers - the first public version was released July 2002.”

Not to mention, Brent has been a very active - and proactive - developer for Mac OS X, championing new technologies, best practices, community, and good, clean UI design.

If you’re a Mac user, and you’re regularly reading sites via RSS, you’re probably using NNW. Maybe it’s not your primary reader (a lot of folks like NewsFire), but it’s certainly in your toolbox. One could argue that NetNewsWire has been something of a seminal work in news aggregators - on any platform.

Congrats to Brent. And for the Mac news sites out there - why did I have to hear about this from Microsoft’s lead blogger/evangelist, hrm?

Edit: While I was writing this, John Gruber of Daring Fireball - who is quoted in the NewsGator press release - posted about this in his Linked List section.

(*) Why didn’t I link/list to all those news sites? If they aren’t serving the news, why should I up their googlejuice? MacMinute, MacFixIt, MacRumors, AppleInsider, MacInTouch, MacSlash… miss any?

Posted by jim at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2005

Here it comes...

Remember what I just said yesterday (yesterday!) about the buzz ball being in Microsoft’s side and that, among other things, we’d see people publicly switching back to Windows based on the aforementioned buzz?

Here’s another backswitcher. Among the reasons? As he told Scoble in email, The corporate blogs that he reads convinced him there’s a future in the platform.

Posted by jim at 08:59 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2005

Buzz ball in Microsoft's court

In the “Apple vs Microsoft” camp of computing, it’s pretty hard to deny that the power of buzz has been on Apple’s side for at least a year and a half. As Microsoft stumbled - shutting down their engineering to focus on security (and still having some serious issues right after), “rebooting” their Longhorn (now Vista) development plans - Apple was getting all the good media buzz. Halo effect from the rampant success of iPod/iTunes, the Mac mini, Mac OS X 10.4, and several highly-visible “Web 2.0” personalities making the Mac their personal computing choice.

Well, the pendulum is swinging again.

Yes, the iPod nano is sweet. But the iTunes Phone was a non-starter. The record companies are, in their greed, ready to hamstring ITMS. There’s no new Mac OS X version coming down the pipeline for a bit, and it’ll be hard for Apple to excite people with new hardware until they truly get their Intel transition underway (the rumored dual-core Power Macs will still be G5s). The news isn’t bad - there just isn’t much at the moment.

In Redmond, however, Microsoft looks to be ready to blow out its constipated pipeline. Xbox 360, IE7, Vista, Office, Sharepoint v3, SQL Server, Longhorn Server - all this and more should be shipping over the next 24 months. Microsoft, for better or worse, looks to be embracing (and expanding) some of the technologies and practices they’ve been lambasted for ignoring (RSS, anyone? Blogs? Hi, Scoble!)

What does this mean? Lots of press about a resurgent Microsoft in the near future, with concomitant articles about an Apple being “under attack” (by MS on one side, and the labels on the other). People who switched from Windows to Mac OS X during the Tiger buzz will start to blog about having second thoughts or even switching back as they see news about the bright-and-shiny from MS (this is already starting). Microsoft diehards will let loose their I Told You So posts. Apple diehards will fall back into almost predictable zealot stance (shaolin monkey school).

That is, unless Microsoft fails to follow through on the proto-buzz they managed to generate in the past month (hitting a current high after PDC and the company meeting), or if Apple pulls something Big out of the bag at MacWorld in January (or at WWDC in July). Those are possibilities, sure.

But for now… I’m putting my money on a “resurgent Microsoft” theme starting in the tech media, and staying with us for a while.

Postscript: All I’m talking about it buzz here, kids. IE7? Summer 2006. Vista? Late 2006. First Apple Intel machines? June 2006. Office 12? Early 2007. We can judge the products when they ship.

Posted by jim at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2005

Google's Gmail Notifier

Google has finally come out with a Gmail Notifier for MacOS X, written by software engineer Greg Miller in his 20%. (All Googlefolk are expected to spend 20% of their work time on a project of personal interest).

Not that this niche hasn’t been addressed by the Mac community - most notably GmailStatus - but Gmail Notifier includes some spiff features, such as showing header excerpts of unread messages, allowing you to directly view only your unread messages, and the ability to make Gmail your default mail program. I’ll miss GmailStatus’ support for Growl, but Gmail Notifier has already taken over.

Also, a little side note. The new Google Desktop for Windows has a nice feature - not only does it index your desktop (and Outlook while it’s open), but it also indexes your Gmail account and makes that available. No Gmail importer for Spotlight on MacOS X 10.4 - so I went ahead and added a Gmail account to Mail.app, with a ruleset that marks any new Gmail messages as read it into a Gmail Archive folder. Voila - my Gmail messages are being archived by Spotlight.

Posted by jim at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2005

Wil Shipley on... everything.

Wil Shipley founded Delicious Monster, which makes the damn awesome Delicious Library (a media cataloguing program that has to be played with - preferably with an iSight - to be believed). He’s interviewed on DrunkenBlog, and you should really really read the whole thing. Management, Coding, Depression, Macs, and Extreme Gardening.

A lot of good nuggets in there…

[…] core hours aren’t as important as, say, having a clear vision and motivating your people.

You don’t adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when you’re small, because those mannerisms aren’t what made the companies successful.

They’re actually symptoms of what is killing the company, because it’s become too big. It’s like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, “I want to be rich, too, so I’m going to start walking with a cane and I’m going to act crotchety and I’m going to get liver disease.”

Depression isn’t like that, though. You don’t “snap out of it.” There’s a chemical missing in your brain, and your whole life is like those dreams where every action you try to take is hindered by a huge pile of invisible wet blankets.

Mac users love their machines; Windows users put up with their machines because they don’t believe there’s anything really better.

It’s depressing, really, because it’s like dealing with victims of abuse: “Seriously, there’s a better world out there, and you deserve it! You don’t have to put up with this! You can leave! Mac will treat you right!” And their response is right out of the textbooks: “Why would I trust Mac? I don’t think anything can be good after this.”

Microsoft has nothing to gain by making life better for small programmers. They have millions of lines of code written to the old, crappy Windows APIs, and they make all their money selling Windows and Office. If they actually enabled small programmers to do cool things, they’d be creating the very furry mammals which would be their eventual downfall.

If there’s one thing I’ve discovered, it’s that there is no stable state in life. There is no getting somewhere and going, “Ah, NOW I’m going to park myself down and just rake in the fat loot.” Change is scary, but it’s also the foundation of life and happiness. We need it. We get bored and lazy without it. Once more, into the breach.

Like I said - go read the whole damn thing.

Posted by jim at 09:50 AM

July 18, 2005

What's in a name?

Scoble wants people to “…call Longhorn all the bad names you can. Let’s get it out of our systems.”

Oh, yeah, and link back to his post so he can follow the link-tracking on Technorati, Bloglines, and the supah-seekrit blog-tracking thing he’s privvy too. Always nice to kill two birds with one stone.

Longtime was the name used in Wired’s fictitious article about Linus Torvalds being hired by Microsoft, and it’s still the name I use when speaking of it. And that includes when I’m speaking to my “featured in a MS Windows Server 2003 advertisement” CIO.

We could call it Copland. Or Rhapsody. Because I think that’s the more apt comparison. Microsoft is obviously struggling both to get Longhorn out the door (witness the long delays and last year’s Longhorn Reset) and to make it relevant (witness the Gnomedex ballyhoo about RSS in Longhorn and IE7) Even with the betas looming, there seems to be confusion about what Longhorn is going to be.

God help us when we find out what changes the server product will force upon us.

What’s hurting Longhorn is the same thing that has hurt every spoken-of-in-advance Microsoft strategic technology in the last decade - Microsoft. Too many back-door promises have already been made (“Just wait until Longhorn!”), too many products were delayed for Longhorn technologies (there wasn’t going to be an IE7, remember?), and too many projects (MS and non) are trying to get some Longhorn Importance rubbed off onto them.

It’s still a year away. Long enough for them to demonstrate support for security updates via podcasting, and announce “.Net on Rails”…

Posted by jim at 09:05 AM

June 15, 2005

Get out of my way

Several years ago, I came across an open-response question:

“If you could have only one superpower, what would it be?”

A lot of respondents wanted to fly, or be immortal, or see the future - but one person came up with a superpower that I keep going back to time and time again:

The power to make people get out of my way.

Line at the grocery? On hold? Crowded room? Traffic? Obstructionist bureaucrat? Get out of my way. The joy in the idea only underlined how much time we all spend with someone in our way - often for no good reason. Jenni and I still turn to each on regular occasion and chant, “I want the power to make people get out of my way.”

During a content-poor seminar this morning, I was pruning and cleaning the documents on my Windows laptop. And was marvelling at all the little ways that Windows kept getting in my way. Mix of mouse and keyboard to do simple tasks. Lack of visual cues. Terribly inconsistent interface. Obscured menu language. It got even worse when I decided to take some time to explore OneNote - which is supposed to be Microsoft’s let-you-do-things-quick freeform note-taking app.

The damn thing kept getting in my way until I shut it up and went back to my good old text editor. Maybe OneNote does neat stuff - but I couldn’t get the damn thing out of my way long enough to find out.

And I realized that I wanted my old favorite superpower, but applied to technology. That all the technologies and solutions and applications that I enjoyed using were the ones that - as much as possible - either stayed out of your way or got other things out of your way.

I’ve spent a lot of my career in technology saying that what I enjoy doing is providing cool solutions and elegant tools. But what is a “cool” solution or an “elegant” tool? I couldn’t find a succinct way of saying it. I have that now.

Tools that get out of your way.

Posted by jim at 01:10 PM

June 06, 2005

Weighing in NOW

I want to say these things now, so I'm on the record before the pundits weigh in.

I think Leander over at Cult of Mac nailed it: one of the big reasons Apple (Steve) is switching to Intel is to get hardware that will let him do the next ITMS - iTunes Movie Store.

I think Leander was also correct in saying that Transitive's binary translation technology is one of the huge roadblock removers for this to happen.

But what about the Osborne Effect? Who is going to want to buy a Mac G4/G5 now knowing that the entire platform will shift starting in 2006 and ending in 2007? More importantly, what about Apple's profits during that time?

Everyone will point to Apple's well-known 4 billion in reserves. But there's one other item that I want to mention: iPod.

The iPod division accounts for over 1/3 of Apple's profits right now. Right now - while iPod is still generating that kind of cash, is the best time for Apple to take it on the chin in their Macintosh division. iPod cash flow will help carry Apple during the coming lean times of Macintosh hardware sales.

So, why is Apple doing this?

What are the roadblock removers?

Posted by jim at 11:10 AM

June 04, 2005

See Change?

The Mac community is abuzz. The rumor of Apple switching to Intel processors has been around for years. It was an issue back in the mid-90s, when Apple tried licensing their ROMs and allowing other manufacturers to release systems that ran MacOS. It became a huge issue in 2001 when it become apparent that Motorola was unable to advance the speed of the G4 processors. It’s arisen again, with rumors that Apple has been talking to Intel due to problems that IBM has had advancing the G5 processors (while at 2.7GHz now, they were supposed to be at 3Ghz a year ago).

C|net just threw a lit match on the tinderpile, with an article claiming that, at next week’s WWDC, Apple will announce a phased migration to Intel starting in 2006.

I still think it more likely that Apple is talking about using Intel chipsets (not processors) for coming hardware, and C|net has been known to have their head up their arse regarding Apple in the past. We’ll see next week…

Posted by jim at 08:46 AM

October 08, 2004

[WWDC] Partial recant

When I returned from Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) back in July, I made a post accusing Apple of “shaving the edges” in several areas. Most of that post, I still stand by.

Howver, one area I mentioned was video. In 2003, all the sessions were taped, and DVDs of all those sessions were delivered to the attendees. This year, the big video cameras were absent from most of the sessions, there was no video available online via the Apple Developer Connection site, and there was no mention made of DVDs. I concluded that Apple had decided to forego the DVDs.

Things got better a few weeks later, when PDF versions of the slides (originally in Keynote) from all the sessions were posted. Those slides were, in most cases, more valuable than video of someone walking around on stage, but the contextual information of the presenter was still lost.

Yesterday, my DVDs (!) arrived - and now have I to take back all the nasty things I said in that arena. Turns out that while they didn’t videotape the actual sessions, they did tape the audio as well as the video that was displayed on the projection screen present in each room. My ten DVDs contain a nice little front-end application that lists all the sessions, and presents me with the ability to either watch a quicktime of the session (which is basically listening to the speaker while watching the slides in a 400x300 window), or I can view the slides myself at high-res (great for reference).

This is a lot more useful than a plain videotape of the session in progress. Great job, Apple.

Posted by jim at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2004

Do what you want to do.

After a month’s delay, Apple unveiled the new iMac G5 at Apple Expo Paris. There’s a lot to comment on, most of which has already been said elsewhere. Still, might as well sum a few things up:

That said, here’s something I really wanted to point out: if you watch the iPod-influenced introduction video for the iMac G5, you’ll hear Jonathan Ive (Apple’s much-celebrated VP of Industrial Design) make a comment at 1:27 in the video:

It just lets you do the stuff that you want to do.

Back in 1989, I had a phone interview with Apple Marketing. They were looking for people to be in a new college-student-oriented advertising campaign, and had been given my name by our campus rep. While I was ultimately passed over (because, although I used Macs extensively in school and work, I didn’t own one of my own), there was one part of the interview that I very clearly remember:

“So, why do you use Macs?”

After a rambling discourse, I summed up with the following:

“It lets me do what I want to do.”

They liked that. They liked it a lot. It really does sum up much of the apparent Apple design philosophy for hardware and software - letting you, the user, do what you want to do. I’m not so full of myself to think that my little phrase somehow was stolen by Ives - it’s just wonderful to hear someone at Apple saying, putting it on the table:

They make stuff that lets you do what you want to do.

Posted by jim at 11:43 AM

July 14, 2004

Bloggers & Bigfoot Take Over Apple!

Steve Ruben falls on his face by starting with a "best guess" that Apple has a policy against employee blogging and ending with an exhortation that "Apple needs to follow Microsoft's lead by quickly letting their employees blog."

Of course, he's wrong. Apple has no such policy. Numerous Apple employees blog - from the officially-sanctioned weblog of David Hyatt to the Apple bloggers who were almost half the attendance at the WWDC 2004 Weblogger's Dinner this year.

Foolishness.

Posted by jim at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2004

[WWDC] Shaving the edges

Apple definitely applied a regimen of slimming measures to WWDC, designed to cut their costs to throw the $1600/attendee conference and to even help generate profits. I've only been to last year's and this year's, but here are some of the things I noticed:

Granted, I shouldn't complain much. Our Apple Rep made of gift of 3 WWDC registrations to UW this year, and I happened to be a recipient - all my work paid for was travel. Still, it's obvious that Apple's trying to minimize the expense of WWDC - when they really should continue to be sucking up to developers.

Posted by jim at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, 2004

[WWDC] Photos and Metalist

I've posted my WWDC photos - with only a few exceptions, all are from the RSS on MacOS X "Birds of a Feather" session. No photos from the Apple Campus Bash, as they asked attendees not to take photos (and I respected the request). Some of the BOF photos are a bit blurry - in consideration to those present, I turned off the flash and used available light.

I'll have some more specific comments about WWDC (well, the stuff I can talk about) later. I was busy enough with sessions and events later in the week that I wasn't able to get a lot of blogging in. Until then, Buzz has some good commentary (including an RSS BOF rundown) - and he has a metalist of many WWDC bloggers here.

Posted by jim at 10:43 AM

June 30, 2004

[WWDC] Dashfabulator

One of the flashy new features of Tiger is Dashboard - a framework for miniapps written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. A lot of people - myself included - initially thought it was a near wholesale copy job of Konfabulator. But John Gruber, with his typical in-depth research and no-nonsense logic, has written what will likely be the definitive piece on the matter:

Obviously, Apple ripped off the idea for Dashboard. Stolen wholesale, without even the decency to mention where they took the original idea. Which, of course, would be the desk accessories from the original 1984 Macintosh

And there's a lot more. Too bad John isn't here at WWDC - I'd buy him a beer. Already bought a membership

Posted by jim at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)

[WWDC] Back Up

Networking at the show seems to have settled down, and has generally become more reliable than it was last year. This is a Good Thing - and should help address some of Brent's problems. It certainly helped mine and my workplaces - spent the morning solving problems ranging from a wonky web server to mucked mailing lists.

The day's been pretty light on Enterprise IT stuff, so I took the morning (what wasn't taken by remote work) to do a serious pass through the Vendor exhibition area (the fact that today is the last day for the vendors contributed to that choice). Ran into some good things, seeing that I'm hunting for information on backup products, and hope to get more information at a session on OSX backup solutions later this evening.

Tonight will be the RSS on MacOSX BOF, which will seem much like a reunion of the weblogger dinner - just without the pasta. There's a threat of evening beers, though.

Posted by jim at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2004

[WWDC] From the horse's mouth

Not breaking any NDA to say that Dave Hyatt was the primary presenter of the "Best Practices in Website Development" session, and that said session was chock fulla goodness. While he explored a few things that are coming in the new version of Safari, just about everything he talked about works just fine right now on "every single modern browser but WinIE". Heh. I love sessions that are focused more on "this is what you can do". Too bad I had to miss the Automator session for this one.

Had a great jam session transcribing session notes with a half dozen other folks using SubEthaEdit (note taking in parallel) but we still managed to miss some big chunks of code. Talked briefly with Dave afterwards and entreated him to post what he could of the presentation to his blog, which the PM seemed to think was okay. So who knows - you might see a nice distillation of various nifty CSS techniques soon over there.

Posted by jim at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)

[WWDC] Social

(Nothing technical in this one)

Todd and I went to Buzz Anderson's WWDC Weblogger dinner, which was an excellent time. We were a little tight-packed in Buca di Beppo, but it forced people to interact with each other ("pardon my elbow", if nothing else). Throw in a few people who were aggressive about introductions, and a lot of good cross-pollinated discussions resulted. Many thanks to Buzz for putting it all together.

After a regroup at the hotel, we made a jaunt down to Death Guild. On the way, we ran into hepkitten; she was outside the Metreon, passing out flyers for her Desktop Activist project. She's a fun person, who owes everything she is to shameless copying from Emma. Yep. Really. From there, we forged on to DG. Since Todd and I both had 9am sessions, we didn't push it into the wee hours. It's been years since I've gotten anywhere near the scene, and Death Guild was a wonderfully refreshing experience. Not something I want to dive back into - but a deliciously pleasant headspace to visit.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Mac Geek...

Posted by jim at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2004

[WWDC] Post Keynote

So, the more reliable portions of the rumor mill were right on the money. Save for the new displays (and the video card required to drive the 30" monster) no new hardware. The design matched "artist's concept" rumor sketches, and Apple is indeed going back to DVI for the interface. The Tiger screenshots that surfaced on the net were, apparently, legit.

Tiger (MacOS X 10.4) itself won't be shipping until "H1 2005" - meaning the first half of 2005, which could be as late as June of 2005. There's a fair amount of nice stuff in what Steve showed us (most all of which can be seen on Apple's site). Spotlight is Google for the desktop - it's really going to change the way people (don't) organize their files. Downside? By allowing people to easily find their stuff, they'll just dump it into one or two folders - and unless Tiger comes with some serious filesystem changes/optimizations, those humongous folders will be a huge performance sink everytime you try to open one.

Swag is good, though not as cool as last year. WWDC t-shirt, Developer release of Tiger, Tiger t-shirt, poster for the new displays, WWDC backpack (nice, but not as solid as previous offerings). The underreported surprise is the bundling of a copy of Apple Remote Desktop 2 into the Tiger package. Not sure if it's a 10-user or unlimited license, but the 10=user is worth about what last year's iSight was.

Network is, as usual, wonky. Still, providing reliable wi-fi for a few thousand laptop-toting geeks is tricky at best, especially when you insist on using your own hardware (which supports a max of 50 users/AP) - which is why I'm back at the hotel room, entering this on my pirate Wi-Fi.

Back to the conference...

Posted by jim at 01:15 PM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2004

[WWDC] Pirate Wi-Fi

The Marriott charges an outrageous $12.95/day for wired internet access. It comes with unlimited local and long-distance calling... like anyone carrying a laptop doesn't also have a mobile phone. I doubt I'll be purchasing this anytime soon unless the UW is willing to foot the bill.

However, from my room on the 11th floor, my PowerBook can barely pick up the free wi-fi of the Hotel Palomar - which is in line-of-sight of my window. The view I had from the Argent last year was nice, but I'll happily trade it for free wireless.

Did a walk by Moscone West (which was close for the night). A lot of Apple logo-work on the glass fronting of the building, and a largish billboard in the lobby that's still covered (thus hinting at product-to-be-announced). Billboards pimping Tiger - and dissing Longhorn - are visible on the second floor. We'll see if there's any meat to the claims at tomorrow's keynote.

Edit: Gizmodo has pictures of the banners. Redmond is the home of Microsoft. Longhorn (a cow!) is the code name for the next version of Windows, due sometime in 2006 - and touting several features that MacOS X already has.

Posted by jim at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)

Off to WWDC

Flight leaves in about 2 1/2 hours, and I'm off to San Francisco again for Apple's WorldWide Developer Conference. In addition to the standard Apple geekfest, I'll also be attending the unofficial WWDC Weblogger dinner, hooking up with Twid for a possible Death Guild outing, and generally trying to make the best of a trip on the company dime.

I'll blog as possible, but seeing as WWDC tends to operate under Fight Club rules, there might not be much outside the SteveNote to share. Not to mention, looks like MacRumors may have already stolen some of Steve's thunder.

Posted by jim at 03:35 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2004

Speedbumped G5s, no 3fer.

Most of the online Mac press leads with Apple's release of speed-bumped PowerMac G5s running at 1.8GHz, 2GHz, and 2.5GHz. All three updated models feature dual G5 CPUs using the 90nm process (smaller, cooler, less power consumption) - but things are still warm enough that the 2.5GHz model has a liquid cooling system. Much sexier (and quieter) than the ear-blasting fans of the original Xserve G4.

The good news (first update for the 11-month old G5 line) comes on the heels of Monday's well-received AirPort Express announcement - a tiny 802.11g access point that supports 10 computers, acts as a network print server for your USB printer, and (here's the kicker) allows you to stream iTunes directly to your stereo via a technology dubbed AirTunes.

Mac wags are still expecting an updated iTunes (4.6 to support AirTunes) later this week, and updated displays are thought to be on the horizon. The AirPort Express and 2.5Ghz G5 aren't expected to ship until July - then again, the Xserve G5 was announced in January and was supposed to ship in February. Yet the much-ballyhooed Virginia Tech Terascale Cluster (a mondo cluster of G5s) is still offline waiting for their Xserve G5 upgrades.

Getting just as much play is what we won't see soon - 3GHz G5s. When Steve jobs got up on stage at last year's WWDC to deliver the keynote, he stated unequivocally that Apple would reach 3Ghz on the IBM-manufactured G5 "within 12 months". A bold promise, and perhaps ill-considered given Apple's earlier problems with Motorola. When speedbumps to the PowerMac G5s didn't show in January, and the Xserve G5 was slow out the gate, people started to doubt. Sure enough, one of The Steve's minions - Tom Boger, Apple's Director of Power Mac Product Marketing - said that Apple is "[...] not getting to 3GHz anytime soon."

Boger's other "not-see" - no PowerBook G5 in 2004 - isn't surprising to anyone who's seen the heatsink on a PowerMac G5, despite the blue-skying that the Mac rumor sites have continued to bandy about the hope of one. (And I'd like a pony).

I was at WWDC last year, in the crowd bathing in Reality Distortion Field when Jobs announced the G5 and made the 3GHz promise. He's delivering this year's keynote as well - wonder if he'll do a mea culpa? Nah - more likely I'll get that pony.

Posted by jim at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2004

Get a Mac, already!

Any Mac geek knows more than a couple Mac Voyeurs. They'd never buy a Mac, oh no, but they love to kvetch about how much their Mac-imitating Windows programs suck, whine that Apple has only ported iTunes to Windows (and not iCal, iPhoto, iMovie, etc...), and consistently try out shareware hacks designed to make over their Windows machine to look like it's running MacOS X.

Just get a Mac, already, willya? Geez.

Posted by jim at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

Apple Update

Aw, hell. Apple just blew out a whole lot of stuff for NAB2004. Don’t even want to try to detail it all: new versions of most digital video editing apps, a new motion graphics app, updated wireless networking software, updated iBooks and PowerBooks, and a new networked storage technology.

If I was a digital video geek in broadcasting, I’d be pretty excited. But I’m still dinking around with iMovie and iDVD.

The new iBooks are pretty hip, because you can now get an iBook (14” only) with a SuperDrive for burning DVDs. You can also get internal Bluetooth in an iBook. You can get more RAM (up to 1152MB). And the slowest CPU is a 1GHz G4. Really, the only limitations of the iBook series are the somewhat anemic 32MB of video RAM, the 1024x768 display, and the firmware-imposed limitation to mirroring-only for external displays (meaning you can’t run an iBook with monitor-spanning). Of course, being a firmware-imposed limit, there are ways around it. But no way around 1024x768. Ugh.

Updated PowerBooks are pure speed-bump and options-made-standard. 1.33-1.5Ghz. AirPort Extreme is standard. Bump from Radeon Mobile 9600 to 9700 with 64 or 128MB. SuperDrive is 4x instead of 2x.

The important question is: Am I still happy with the then-top-of-the-line 15” PowerBook G4 that I purchase back at the end of February, or do I wish I’d waited for updates? Yes, I’m happy, not at all regretful.

Posted by jim at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2004

MacWorld Recap

Might as well get some Mac geekery out of the way.

MacWorld SF is going on this week, and Steve Jobs took the stage yesterday to give the expo keynote and introduce the usual bevy of new products. I'm going to try to be somewhat concise here...

iPod mini: This really should have been $199, and I'll wager it'll see that price point by Q3 2004. With only $50 difference between the 4GB iPod mini and the "low-end" 15GB iPod, the smaller size just doesn't seem worth it to me.

GarageBand/iLife '04: GarageBand is a damn cool music tool (mixing, looping, recording, you name it) - and Apple's going to have a lot of aspiring musicians (as well as coffeshop performers and regional bands) buy Macs just to use GB. That it's included free with all new Macs, and only $50 (as part of the iLife bundle) for existing Macs is sweet - maybe the iPod mini's high price is subsidizing GarageBand. The iLife upgrade looks strong, with performance and/or feature improvements on all the apps. iPhoto is no longer a free standalone download, but Apple was about to do this last year with the original introduction of iLife (and backed down at the last moment). Not unexpected, and the low price of iLife (heck, it's $29 edu!) is easy to swallow.

Xserve G5/ Xserve RAID: Boy, this really makes the 1st generation Xserve G4 here at the office look like a noisy pile. The RAID continues to impress, and I think Apple will start selling a lot of these to non-Mac shops.

Xgrid: very understated - but this will do amazing things for academic/research computing when it matures and leaves beta. An ad-hoc, self-managing clustering system that uses spare CPU cycles of local Macs? Come on - suddenly those computing labs, which can sit empty for hours at a time, turn into compute clusters. Apple needs to pimp this to higher-ed, and hard.

We'll probably see updates and speed-bumps to the Macs in the next couple months. There's been an eMac revision in the rumor mill for a while, and the Xserve uses updated G5 procs that should see light in a faster G5 desktop real soon now. Me, I just need to take care of a few financial things (such as a first pass at 2003 taxes), then I'm going to trade in that G4 desktop for a 15" Powerbook...

Posted by jim at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2003

WWDC Pictures

There are a few (three) lo-res pictures from WWDC in the Gallery...

Posted by jim at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2003

Day One of Geekdom

Well, those of you in the Mac fold already know the news. Those of you that don't, well, let's put it this way - the new G5 systems from Apple are demonstrably faster than the fastest P4 or Dual-proc Xeon that money can buy. We've been waiting a long, long time for the next step past the G4, and Steve Jobs has delivered in spades.

Panther's looking really good, too - good enough that I may even consider partitioning my Powerbook and installing it when I get home. Makes me wish I'd brought my iPod with me after all, to use as a bootable drive. Heh. Apple ships a big predatory cat - Panther - this year. Microsoft is already falling back to 2004, and probably will slip to 2005, to ship their big... uhmm... cow - Longhorn.

And lots of smaller stuff, too. New iChat that supports videoconferencing, new firewire webcam (very spiff), Safari 1.0, Xcode (kick-ass development environment).

Having a great time, when all is said and done. Now if the damned WiFi would just work around here...

Posted by jim at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

In the Queue

(More WWDC posting). I'm sitting in the line to get into the auditorium for Steve Job's keynote address. The Keynote is at 10am. The doors open at 9am. I got here a bit after 8am, and the line was already a long, sinuous beast that snakes around the second floor of Moscone West. The keynote is on the currently-forbidden-to-mortals 3rd floor.

They're treating the developer community nicely. On registration, I received my t-shirt and a very swank (if large) carrying case that will replace my combination of slim laptop case and messenger bag for the duration of WWDC. Airport network is a bit slow and somewhat overloaded - but free net access versus $10/day from the hotel is verra nice. And free breakfast - tables loaded with fruit, yogurt, pastries, bagels, and even Krispy Kremes are scattered about the 2nd floor.

The natives seem to be getting restless. It's 9am - soon they'll start letting us upstairs, and we can sit in chairs and wait rather than sit on the floor and wait. Heh. Better get one more coffee refill...

Posted by jim at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2003

Days of Geekdom

I'm sitting in an airport bar in Seattle with a nice big beer and about 2 hours to go before my flight to San Francisco takes off. This is what happens when traffic is clear from Ballard to SeaTac, and security is (strangely enough) on the ball. Of course, what really saved me was doing "Web Check-In" with Alaska Airlines. You have to have a boarding pass these days to even get into the queue for the security checkpoint, which means going to the ticket counter - which mean a line. Especially annoying if you've packed well and don't have to check anything. Web check-in got me a boarding pass online, so I went straight to security, breezed through that, and now I'm drinking beer. Life could be worse.

All that said, the geekdom is that I'm typing this - online - from an airport bar. $7 bought me all-you-can-eat WiFi access for the entire airport; a small price to pay for my net.addiction.

From here, I head to San Francisco, where I'll be until Saturday morning. The Apple WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC) is Mon-Fri, you see, and I'm heading to CA to commune with my tribe.

This is my first WWDC, and promises to be a big one if the rumor mill is to believed. In any case, there is supposed to be 'net access at the hotel (the Argent) and WiFi all over the WWDC, so expect regular blogging (although the WWDC seminars are, for the most part, considered NDA).

It feels strange, leaving Jenni and Nathan behind - I haven't traveled since a visit back to Ohio back in Jan 2002, and the longest I've been away from home and family in the past year has been the length of a work day. And it's not always easy going to work in the mornings, with Nathan starting to get all happy, smiley, and anxious to play.

But here we go. The Days of Geekdom begin...

Posted by jim at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)