Jarrett House North: Mac

Is Apple evil? Maybe, but not the way Wired says

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:31:21 GMT

I was going to take a shot at ripping apart this Leander Kahney article in Wired magazine on how Apple is the anti-Google and therefore evil, but I figured if I waited long enough that John Gruber at Daring Fireball would do it for me. Gruber didn’t disappoint, noting that “by Kahney’s logic, any company that is different from Google – and clearly most companies are far more different from Google than Apple is – is evil. I can’t tell if Kahney is being willfully obtuse or is simply a shithead.” Heh.

The accompanying list of 5 ways that Apple “breaks the rules” makes me wish that Gruber had gone after it as well. Software should be decoupled from hardware, huh? So it can run on just any phone or computer? We have a name for that kind of application. It’s called a web application. You know, the kind of application that Apple encouraged people to develop for the iPhone, and that all the pundits said wasn’t sufficient. Now Kahney slams Apple for encouraging people to build apps that run on the iPhone natively. What does he really want? Maybe Kahney is really asking for the iPhone OS to run on any old phone hardware platform. I can tell you that I can think of no surer way to ruin the user experience, and the brand, than to cram the iPhone software onto a piece of crap like the Sony Ericsson phone I just got rid of, or even onto my wife’s Blackberry Pearl.

The third point, that every Mac is preloaded with Apple software, makes me laugh. You think PC users like having a bunch of crap applications preloaded on their machines? Windows Media Player, which is preloaded on Windows everywhere but the EU, is an OK media player and it’s the default, unless the OEM changes it. But that has nothing to do with the OEM’s concern for the end user’s experience, and everything to do with the revenue they get from the partner from whom they are bundling the software. To be fair, Apple chooses not to bundle competing products, but they have bundled third party software, notably Quickbooks and trials from the Omni group. On both Windows and the Mac, the user can change the default music player (or any other default program) very easily. Would Kahney prefer that Apple shipped with no default player and made the user download one?

And the whole point about the iTunes/iPod closed loop is such a piece of crap. One word: MP3. Available on every platform. You can rip your CDs to MP3s, using iTunes, and put the MP3s on your iPod. One point in favor of this argument: iTunes for Windows doesn’t support syncing to non-iPod players, but there’s a free plugin to fix that.

The fourth point, love your customers, sounds like a page from the Good Product Manager blog. How to be a bad product manager: give your customers whatever they want and ask for in your product, regardless of the cost of support and regardless of whether the resulting product actually does what your customer wants it to do. How else to explain Kahney’s inexplicably picking on the “no floppy drive in an iMac” decision, which in retrospect was not only one of the smartest things that Apple ever did but also created the market for USB thumb drive storage? And the MacBook Air “no optical drive” situation has been covered over and over again. It’s called making intelligent trade offs. It’s what every product manager does.

I enjoyed the Fake Steve Jobs smack-down on Kahney, and wish that he had gone farther. There’s a lot of good lessons to learn in the article for a product manager with half a brain; you just need to dig in and question every assumption that Kahney makes.

Bleah

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:41:48 GMT

I’ve been fighting it, but now it seems the cold, or rather miscellaneous bug of the week, is upon me. Too bad, too, because it’s a nice day and I can see the future of my iPhone getting much brighter.

There is an article to be written about the effectiveness of Apple’s product management—introducing the iPhone as a purely consumer device, then creating a massive developer ecosystem in a single announcement yesterday—but I kind of like Fake Steve Jobs’s take on the announcements even better.

iPhone SDK, plus Exchange support too

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:25:19 GMT

I came into Gizmodo’s liveblog of the iPhone SDK announcement a little late, but the good stuff has already started, beginning with the announcement of native Exchange support for the iPhone. If I just worked in a Mac world I wouldn’d care so much about this, but with one too many IT administrators who don’t care to open up MAPI on their Exchange servers—plus the need to get access to calendars and address books—I’m thrilled that this is coming.

The internals of the SDK are really interesting, too. Of course the hacker community has known about this stuff for a long time, but seeing the full list of what is supported on the phone—certificates, Bonjour (aka ZeroConf networking), the Keychain, SQLite, the address book, threading support, location management, audio mixing and recording, video playback, 2D Quartz, plus a touch-optimized version of Cocoa.

And the development tools stack looks great too, including a true iPhone Simulator. Question: What about test automation? It’s been a long time since I looked at Xcode; does it include a test automation framework?

And I would never have expected a heavy emphasis on games on the first demo of the SDK, but all of a sudden it makes sense. The iPhone is not just a Windows Mobile killer, it could also be a PSP killer.

Now. What I’m waiting for is guidance for IT administrators so I can go have a conversation with my IT guy. And, of course, for the first iPhone apps to show up.

Update: SalesForce.com client!

To try out: Remember The Milk

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:07:02 GMT

An interesting article on using GTD with the iPhone led me to a web based task management service called Remember The Milk. It features a clean iPhone interface, email and Quicksilver integration, location based tasks, and all sorts of other goodness.

Which begs the question, I suppose, of how many features a task management service really needs.

I’ll try to work with it and see how things go.

Automated application testing has deep roots

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:24:17 GMT

My current employer is built around a couple of concepts: certain kinds of needs are better served on demand than by buying a tool, and certain kinds of software testing (in our case, application security testing) can be automated. There are other concepts that come into our business model, but those are kind of at the core of what we do.

Like so many other things in the world, our concepts aren’t new (though we do have some unique tricks that make them uniquely valuable). Automated testing, in particular, has a long lineage. I didn’t realize how long, however, until I came across a reference to MonkeyDA on Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org, a collection of stories about the creation of the Macintosh.

MonkeyDA was a Desk Accessory, a tiny program that could be run without forcing another program to quit. (Desk accessories were a response to the lack of multitasking in the early Mac OS, and the many use cases of working with a modern graphical computer that essentially demanded having two programs open at once. They ran on top of the currently running program in a different memory space.) But it was a “special” DA. It simulated user interactions with the Mac, by feeding a random stream of events to the OS resulting in the cursor moving on the screen, text being typed, menu items being selected, etc. It was kind of designed to see if it could break the Mac OS or its applications by subjecting it to all sorts of abuse—just like a monkey banging away at the keyboard and mouse would. If the program crashed, it meant the Monkey had found a condition that a user might eventually find. The Monkey is no substitute for human testing based on test cases, but it’s an important complement.

The punch line, of course, is the size of the Monkey program. Written back in October 1983, its binhex is only 2791 characters long. That’s less than 3K of compressed code. That you could create that much mayhem with that small a program is a reminder that code has power, and that you never know what someone else’s code is going to do.

Extending Screen Sharing in Leopard

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:18:53 GMT

Nice article by MacOSXHints’s Rob Griffiths on Macworld about how to unlock some of the hidden functionality in the Screen Sharing application in Mac OS X 10.5. I particularly like the Quality slider.

Mo' memory, (no) mo' problems

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 05:29:31 GMT

My first-generation MacBook Pro (1.83 GHz Core Duo model) is now running with a maxed-out complement of 2 GB of RAM. It wasn’t easy.

The MacBook shipped with a gig of memory, which I thought would be plenty since my G4 had been reasonbly OK with 1 GB. But I hadn’t reckoned on two things: the enormous hunger of iPhoto, and Leopard. Both combined to make the move to a maximum memory profile (2 GB) seem advisable.

So I ordered a 2 GB upgrade kit (a pair of 1 GB DIMMs) from Other World Computing. I’ve done business with this company since 1995, when I bought my PowerMac 7200/90 and a reconditioned Radius monitor from them. I last bought a memory upgrade from them for my mother-in-law’s iMac, and that process went extremely easily.

Upgrading the memory in the MacBook Pro, on the other hand, gave me heart failure. The process of getting at the memory was easy enough, theoretically: remove the battery, and remove the cover from the battery compartment, then swap the DIMMs. But first, I had to find a P0 Phillips screwdriver—not easy, even with a full toolbench. Then I had to unseat and reseat the new DIMMs about three or four times before the machine would boot.

But, now that it has, it’s slick, slick, slick. The Finder is more responsive; iPhoto feels snappy. Leopard loves some RAM. And at $50 for the upgrade, I wish I had done it about six months sooner.

iPhone day 2

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:06:55 GMT

A few quick impressions of the iPhone over the last few days:

I spent most of the first night I had the phone cleaning up the address book. My old Sony Ericsson had made a mess of my addresses because it didn’t support separate first and last name fields, and synced a bunch of duplicate contacts back with a blank first name and the full last name. I was finally able to clean that up on the new phone.
Walking the dogs outside our house takes on a whole new aspect with a pocket Web browser. In related news, our WiFi hub is reachable down to the corner and across the street.
Interestingly, the iPhone doesn’t sync the playcount of tracks that were played on it back to iTunes. This could be an advantage or disadvantage.
The unit gets very warm when it’s doing data operations over the AT&T EDGE network. I used it to delete 30 or 40 email messages yesterday and it was quite warm to the touch.
It worked with my Monster iPod car FM transmitter, though it warned me that there might be some noise and offered to switch it into airplane mode. I ignored the warning and heard no noise. It also behaved very nicely when a call came in, fading down the volume in about a second and resuming iPod playback immediately upon hanging up. It would have been cool if the sound came through the car speakers and not the iPhone speaker, though.

And yes, it is a very very cool phone.

iPhone Market Share; doing my part

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:28:15 GMT

Interesting report (via Fake Steve Jobs, of course) that the iPhone has a higher market share (as measured through browser usage) than Windows Mobile. Of course there are lots of caveats with such a study, such as whether browser usage is the right metric to measure smartphone penetration (hint: how often do you browse the web on your phone?). But it’s still broadly suggestive of one thing: Apple got the mobile browser experience right.

And starting tonight, I will be doing my part to grow that market share. I picked up my iPhone this morning and will be activating it tonight (when I get to my home computer). It’s very cool, even turned off .

URL enabled Leopard Mail

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:13:11 GMT

Apparently, as of Mac OS X 10.5, Apple’s Mail client provides a new URL protocol: message:. Good article at Daring Fireball that explains the message: protocol and how to get the information from it. What use is it? Well, any third party app that wants to index and point into the mail store can simply use a URL, which really opens up the types of development environments you can write those things in and the portability of the data.

Bottom line: the format is message:%3cmessage-id%3e, where %3c and %3e are the encoded values of < and > respectively, and the message-id is gotten from the Message-ID header and can be viewed by dragging the mail message to TextPad or another drag-compatible client, or by using AppleScript.

Cool stuff.

Fixing Leopard stack icons

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 17:32:27 GMT

Via Daring Fireball, an easy solution to the stack icon problem. What stack icon problem? The one where the stack, when collapsed into the dock, takes on the icon of the first item in the folder so you have no stable reference point for what it actually is—that stack icon problem.

Looks nice in my Dock:

Reported problems with Tiger on 800 MHz iMacs

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:51:55 GMT

Forget the hack that I posted earlier. A quick review of various threads about Tiger on the 800MHz iMac seems to indicate that the video card in that model has problems keeping up with demand, and that iChat in particular may have some real problems in the upgraded system. Since iChat is the main reason that my inlaws use their Mac (along with Mail), I think we’ll hold off.

Details: MacOSXHints on experiences with hacked Tiger installs; sleep problems; sleep problems 2.

Installing Leopard on an 800 MHz G4 iMac

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:13:19 GMT

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

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

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

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

Delicious Delicious Library 2.0

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:26:59 GMT

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

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

Leopard of the Yard

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:55:29 GMT

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

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

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

(Title reference here… only much less violent.)

iTunes craps out with err: -34 on large downloads

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:38:07 GMT

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

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

Breaking: iPhone Dev Center

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 02:49:33 GMT

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

Designer Dashboard downloads

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:02:24 GMT

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

On the brink of Inbox Zero

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 20:12:35 GMT

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

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

More disclosure for iTunes installs

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:13:58 GMT

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

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

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

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

iTunes 7.3: Consolation Prize

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:02:25 GMT

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

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

iChat and broadband speed

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:58:20 GMT

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

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

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

Safari for Windows, and for the iPhone

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:08:24 GMT

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

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

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

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

Smack my Mac up

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 15:30:42 GMT

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

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

Well, I guessed right...

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 22:29:36 GMT

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

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

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

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

EMI and Apple?

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:12:57 GMT

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

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

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

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

Wireless jukebox follow-up

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:37:30 GMT

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

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

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

Airport Extreme update - some successes

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 05:30:17 GMT

After last week’s post about the difficulties working with the new Airport Extreme 802.11n base station, I decided to pick up the pieces and put some things together. I ended up going down a path that led to some success:

Borrow a 500 GB drive from work
Set my library location for iTunes to the borrowed drive
Back up the contents of my RAID disk to the borrowed drive using the Advanced | Consolidate Library command
Break the RAID set and reformat as two separate drives; connect the 500 GB to the Airport Extreme
Set the library location for iTunes to the networked drive
Back up the contents of the borrowed drive to the networked drive using the Consolidate Library command

And darned if it didn’t work. There was one directory that didn’t get transferred successfully, possibly because the borrowed drive was FAT32 and the artist name had an accent in it; fortunately it corresponded to a CD I still have.

So now I’m using the set up. Benefits? One iTunes library, one laptop. Disadvantages? Working with changing data on the networked drive is slow; for instance, updating cover art for 30 tracks can take up to five minutes. Based on what I’ve read on line, only part of this is explained by the fact that my first gen MacBook Pro only has 802.11g; a larger part of it appears to be due to very slow write speeds to the networked drive. (This might also explain why the last step in my project took a week.)

Other issues? The drive apparently falls off the network every now and then; in fact, it’s not accessible via the AirDisk utility at all. I have to browse to it directly using the afp:// protocol. This may be a broader problem with Bonjour on this network; AirTunes isn’t working right now either. Curious how all this stopped working when I dropped the new AirPort into the network...

Airport Extreme Disappointment

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 06:01:39 GMT

My new Airport Extreme (the 802.11n model) is set up and humming, and everything looks good—better range, easier setup, better form factor. So why am I extremely disappointed?

Because it won’t share my RAID disk, and Apple won’t help me figure out how to make it happen. In fact, I had to go to their support forum to find out that the base station appears to have issues with RAID disks.

The good news is that I don’t have even 500 GB of content on the RAID disk, so theoretically I can back up the data, break the RAID set, and rebuild everything on the 500 GB volume.

The bad news: Back up the data to where? Hopefully I can find a way to move the music to a loaner disk or something.

And of course that’s just the first step. Next comes moving the iTunes library file off the old PowerBook, rebuilding it so that it points to the new disk—hopefully without losing all my playcount data this time! Then testing: synching the iPod, ripping a disc, copying music to the remote disk. The real question is, how many iTunes scenarios are bearable with a remote disk across an 802.11g network? And: will Apple or someone else come out with an 802.11n compatible card for the first generation MacBook Pro so that I can actually use the 802.11n features of the base station?

What blows me away, of course, is that this was a completely avoidable thing. The Mac has had support for software RAID for many years, and with a lot of people embracing digital lifestyles thanks to Apple, the likelihood that there are going to be a few people caught by this is pretty high.

Gettin’ nothing but static

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 19:26:37 GMT

Monday was a really crappy day: my Passat factory tape deck stopped auto-reversing and would only play side A. This was a Big Problem because I only listen to my iPod in the car and the tape adapter that I use only plays on side B. And of course the Passat factory radio doesn’t include an aux in.

Originally I had hoped to wire the iPod to the head unit directly, but I simply don’t have that kind of time right now. So, with some trepidation, I decided to see if I could find an FM transmitter that would work. I’ve had bad luck with these devices in the past. I bought one in 2001 for my first generation iPod, but after I almost ran off the road trying to tune the frequency to an unused station I stopped using it. The problem, too, was that the unit was underpowered—even when I found a relatively clear spot on the dial it would get swamped by static. I had the same trouble with a Griffin iTrip and my second iPod.

This time I bought a Monster iCarPlay Wireless Plus. This thing has no problem punching through static on empty channels, though there is still intermittent bleed through of noise. It’s also easier to tune. I noticed that the sound isn’t as clean as what I used to get through the cassette adapter, but that’s my only complaint. Nice product.

Finishing the Project--with an AirPort Extreme

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 17:59:44 GMT

I have found the first product I’ll buy from Apple after this week’s keynote—and it wasn’t even mentioned in the keynote. At MacWorld, Apple quietly announced a next-generation AirPort Extreme base station that supports a draft of the 802.11n protocol, meaning that it’s up to five times as fast and up to twice the range of the existing 802.11g base station from Apple. This is frankly a secondary feature for me, though, compared to the news that it supports sharing a USB2 hard drive over the network.

This is a Big Deal. The original plan for The Project, the big effort to move my over 1,000 CDs to a hard drive, called for placing that drive on the network as network attached storage. I didn’t want the drive to be permanently anchored to my MacBook Pro—which would kind of defeat the purpose of having a laptop. But the only solutions I could find for sharing a network USB drive didn’t support Mac disk drive formats. That’s way the capability of the new AirPort Extreme to share a USB hard drive out of the box is so cool.

In fact, the only fly in the ointment is that the AirPort Extreme’s included 802.11n Enabler, which upgrades the AirPort cards of currently shipping Macs to 802.11n, does not extend to my first-generation MacBook Pro, since that model doesn’t include what Engadget called the “secret draft-N cards.” But I think it will still be worth it. I can 86 the old PowerBook that currently powers my music, move the RAID array into the stereo cabinet along with the base station, and free up a lot of space in our guest bedroom.

And…and this is the ironic part…I won’t have to buy a Mac mini to do it, which was my original plan.

User's guide to the iPhone

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:17:59 GMT

This may be my last iPhone post for a while, since the odds of my getting one are actually pretty small at its price point—but I couldn't resist the iPhone User Guide on McSweeney’s:

Congratulations on your purchase of the 8-gigabyte iPhone from Apple Inc.! For the first time, you will be able to engage in all the varieties of human interaction through a single device. Please consult the table of contents below for an in-depth look at your iPhone experience.

...

VII. Using the iPhone to catalog your contacts
VIII. Using the iPhone to manage your calendar
IX. Using the iPhone to solve disputes between Moqtada al-Sadr and certain Sunni elements within Iraq without causing an escalation of hostilities, or the development of closer ties between Iran and Shiite militias
X. Using the iPhone to assist European antitrust authorities in understanding the difference between "tying arrangements" and "legitimate competition" in online music sales
XI. Using the iPhone to explain how the internal board committee of Apple Computer Inc. (before the name change) headed by Al Gore could exonerate Steve Jobs of any wrongdoing in the options-backdating scandal
XII. Using the iPhone to explain why Microsoft believed that introducing the Zune was either wise or appropriate, given the market for MP3 players in late 2006...

XVIII. Using the iPhone to learn whether superstring theory's positing of 10 dimensions (or 11 in M-theory) is viable in light of recent discoveries relating to dark matter
XIX. Using the iPhone to learn whether Ehud Barak ever considered adopting Barack Obama and changing the Illinois junior senator's name to Barack Barak

Cool: viewing composer information in iTunes Music Store

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 20:18:40 GMT

This is one of those “well, of course” things, but the capability to view composer data in the iTunes Music Store wasn’t obvious to me. But it’s so necessary if you’re looking at classical recordings. I was curious as to whether any of Yo Yo Ma’s work with contemporary composers was on his new Appassionata album, but couldn’t be sure from the displayed track names. So on a hunch, I used the View Options to turn on the composer column and there was the information I was looking for right in the store display.

Of course, the ability to browse by composers in the column browser is still missing, and you have to use the Power Search feature to search by composers. But the information is there.

This is what frustrates me about having more than 20,000 tracks in iTunes. Even though the options to store tons of metadata are present, you can’t do a text search by composer, or comment field, or whatever. But you can display the data!

The iPhone is the Newspad

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 22:50:54 GMT

Watching yesterday’s keynote and particularly the demo of the iPhone’s web browser surfing the New York Times, one thought kept recurring to me: It’s a Newspad.

The Newspad was the name given by Arthur C. Clarke in the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the small handheld devices that the crew carry with them around the ship. The description:

When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.
Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.
Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.
It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

Hmm. How about making it the size of a cell phone, doing away with codes, and putting the whole thing in a touchscreen interface?

iPhone: Holy crap

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:06:04 GMT

Well. If the keynote coverage on Engadget is anything to go by, I may have bought my 30Gb iPod too soon. Also, all the naysayers may go and hang, apparently, because the iPhone aka touch-screen iPod aka mobile Internet device looks like it's hit the ball out of the park. And really, the naysayers are looking pretty damned stupid right now. I’d love to read the reaction to the iPhone by Michael Kanellos, the CNet analyst who claimed that the phone companies had such a big lead in phone design. Especially nice: it runs Mac OS X natively, no “mobile edition”. The question, of course, is whether the pricing is too much of a premium for the market to bear. $499 is a lot for a phone, even if it is also an iPod.

Other keynote reaction: I’m still trying to figure out if the new Apple TV obviates my need for a Mac Mini to play back my music—can I just attach a pair of hard drives to it and access my library directly?

Finally: The Apple (just Apple, no A, B, Computer, or bloody D) website is slow, but I finally found the product pages for the iPhone and the Apple TV.

I'm pretty sure Apple isn't announcing this tomorrow

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:23:05 GMT

And I'm also pretty sure they don’t come with scroll wheels. (Courtesy Talking Points Memo; thanks to Greg for the pointer.)

Let's be careful out there

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 21:11:29 GMT

The month of Mac exploits has kicked off, with yesterday’s publication of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the latest version of QuickTime. I for one welcome the discussion of possible vulnerabilities on Mac OS X. As a long time user and computer software professional, you can only secure things through design up to a point and the more that Apple and the industry openly investigate and fix these security vulnerabilities, the better off everyone will be. More discussion on Slashdot, including an interesting disputation of the findings—is it possible that the exploit is not as general as claimed?

Update: within 24 hours a fix for the vulnerability has been posted. Interestingly, the fix comes from a former Apple developer and uses Application Enhancer to fix the vulnerability at runtime.

iPhone: Genius! Flop! Unreleased!

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 19:21:42 GMT

I knew this was going to happen: the latest product from Apple has flown up the hype curve and crashed to the ground, and it hasn’t been released yet.

CNet analyst Michael Kanellos writes about “the Apple phone flop,” pointing out that it will be difficult for Apple to replicate their success with the iPod in the mobile phone market for a number of very good reasons (phone manufacturers are masters of style, existing smartphone products like the Blackberry are pretty good, phone makers innovate rapidly, quality of service is a make-or-break problem) as well as some non trivial ones that Kanellos didn’t raise (the carriers frequently get in the way of innovative products, disabling phone features that they can’t figure out how to monetize).

The article misses a couple of key things, though:

Apple hasn’t released a phone yet.
Even if it does, there’s no reason it has to conform to the rumored specs and price point.
Apple’s real genius is in integration. The iPod and the PC or Mac, the iPod and iTunes—none of these are about single-function stories, they’re about ways that you can combine activities that are unexpected and add more value. There are plenty of ways for Apple to innovate in the phone space that the competitors in the space can’t match.

For some perspective, it’s worth remembering that this meme has been kicking around for four years now, and some things are just as true today as they were when Daring Fireball branded the whole mess as iPhony. Armchair product management is a fun sport, but it’s important to remember where the chair is located.

KeywordAssistant, now for Intel

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 05:00:48 GMT

A few months after I posted about not being able to use Keyword Assistant, my favorite iPhoto plugin, because it didn’t work on Intel Macs, I broke down and toggled iPhoto so that it would launch in PowerPC translation so I could use the plugin. It was slow, but it worked, and I could tag my photos—important, since I was starting to move my photos to Flickr.

Then Apple released an iPhoto update and broke the hack I used to launch it in Rosetta. I was about to Google the hack to reapply it, when on a hunch I looked up Keyword Assistant instead. Sure enough, a new version is out that is compiled as a universal plug in—and actually another version appeared today for the iPhoto 6.0.5 update.

It’s great to be able to tag photos and to do it quickly. Very very nice—thanks to Ken Ferry for a great utility.

Infinite emulation

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 14:07:36 GMT

When all content is digitized and free, it might feel a little like this: being able to play PC and Mac games that gripped your attention 10 and 20 years ago on the same platform.

Item 1: DosBox, a limited x86/DOS emulation environment that is focused on the gaming experience. Or more precisely, DosBox plus Thexder, the Sierra Online-published transforming mech warrior shoot-em-up side-scroller. Man, I used to play the Apple II version of this for hours when I was in high school.

Item 2: Abuse, a shooting side scroller published by Bungie in the mid-90s and now available on Unix and Mac platforms. Abuse and Marathon (Bungie’s other early hit, before they got bought by Microsoft and did Halo) together were responsible for many, many lost evenings when Lisa was in grad school.

Both now run on Mac OS X (as well as other platforms), and both are a pretty good nostalgia blast.

Battery update (again)

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:12:20 GMT

So in the middle of a broad battery recall for older Powerbook and iBook batteries (my machines weren’t affected by this one), I thought I’d follow up about my own battery situation. As you’ll recall, Apple is also recalling some MacBook Pro batteries, not for explosive reasons but because they apparently “don’t meet the company’s performance standards” (more on what that means in a second). And you’ll also recall that when I sent in my notice, I got a pair of iPod earbuds instead of batteries.

Yesterday afternoon I spent something like an hour and 15 minutes on the phone to Apple support waiting for an answer. Finally they put me in touch directly with a guy in Dispatch, who said, “I have no idea how that happened,” and sent the new battery out. This time I have a tracking number, so I have a high level of confidence that I’ll actually get the battery.

But back to the real battery recall: it’s funny how different news outlets are handling the news. While most are saying that it’s bad news for Sony, good old Business Week managed to spin the recall as a “more bad news for Apple” story... By contrast, the analysis in Forbes, which points out the technological and manufacturing issues underlying the problem, is much deeper and more insightful.

Finally, an article on iPodNN appears to tie the mysterious “high standards for battery performance” that were at issue in the MacBook Pro recall to the infamous MacBook Pro whine, which is only audible when the device is on battery power. We’ll see when my new battery comes in, but maybe this will make the laptop as quiet as the old G4 was...

MacBook Pro battery recall, take two

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 19:12:14 GMT

I was surprised to come home last night and find a package from Apple waiting for me. I was even more surprised to find that it was ... earbuds. Not the replacement MacBook Pro battery I had ordered under Apple’s recall. Earbuds. You know, the iconic little white headphones that come with iPods, of which I already have two pair.

Huh.

I called AppleCare this morning and straightened it out; my shipping label had gotten applied to the wrong order and so they resubmitted my battery recall order. I should have it later. The folks at AppleCare were very professional, and I’m glad they were able to clear up the confusion.

Still. Earbuds?

MacBook Pro: one-two punch

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:14:00 GMT

Apple has issued a recall for selected first-generation MacBook Pro batteries, like mine. For once, the issue isn’t fire, but “underperformance” (whatever that means). I put in for the recall today and they indicated I should get the new battery in about 4-5 working days, so I hope to be able to report some information by the end of the week.

On another note, or rather high-pitched whine, it looks like Apple may be finally acknowledging the noisy MacBook Pro problem. For the uninitiated, MacBooks Pro frequently exhibit a high-pitched noise when running on battery power, though disabling one of the two processor cores stops the noise for some reason (as does doing something that forces the second core to be used, like opening a webcam window). The one sentence note on the support site says “If your 15-inch MacBook Pro emits a high-pitched buzzing sound, please contact AppleCare for service.” Well, OK. I’ll do that later this week and see what the actual response is.

The Project goes RAID

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 08 May 2006 05:26:26 GMT

I alluded a few days ago to the fact that the Project has been stalled for a while because of a lack of disk space. Well, things may be about to get a little kick start. I ordered a 500 GB drive and a miniStack case from Other World Computing. In fact, I like the look of the case so much, I ordered a second one to swap my existing 300 GB drive into, so I can stack the two together. And the multiple FireWire and USB hubs that it will provide will be manna; right now I have to swap the old drive from FireWire to USB when I want to sync my iPod because the FireWire port on the external drive isn’t powered.

And the RAID part? Well, I’m considering combining the two drives together so that they form a single logical disk. Mac OS X provides the capability to create three types of RAID arrays: mirrored, striped, and concatenated. I’m thinking concatenated. A lot of the commentary on this option says that it doesn’t make sense: none of the security of mirrored and none of the speed of striped. I think the commentary misses a point: sometimes it’s just awfully convenient to not have to worry about accessing two separate volumes, for instance when trying to share music across a network or manage a large volume of digital music. Plus having the ability to add additional disks to the array without blowing it is really helpful.

Of course, making the RAID array without wiping out the data on the drive is tricky. I’ve identified two ways to do it:

Create a concatenated RAID array with just one disk—the new disk, copy everything from the old disk to it, then add the second disk to the array.
Use the command line version of diskutil to turn the existing disk into a RAID array without destroying the data, then add the second disk. This option is riskier—I don’t know for sure if the command will destroy the data, but this post on AFP548.com, which gave me the idea in the first place, suggests it should work.

The drives should be here in a week, then we’ll give it the old college try.

The Great Record Rip: preparation

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 02:13:19 GMT

I haven’t finished The Project yet (latest stats: 12031 songs, 996 artists, 882 albums; 265.99 GB of lossless audio; 36 days, 13 hours, 22 minutes, and 17 seconds running time), but another audio project beckons: the Great Record Rip. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the recent owner of a Denon DP-45F turntable, and with an iMic I’ll have the capability to take audio from the record player and digitize it.

Except, like every other project, the devil is in the details. So while the Denon is at the shop getting tuned up after twelve years in a box, I’m trying to put the software pieces in place so that I’ll be ready to start ripping some audio (in addition to my never-released on CD David Byrne record, the Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, and other oddments, the Lucadamos have let me at their stash of vinyl as well) when it comes back.

So what do I need to rip records? The following links suggest some help:

TidBITS: Why Go Pro (Audio Hijack Pro, That Is)
Final Vinyl, which comes from Griffin and is supposed to be less capable than Audio Hijack but is at least free with the iMic
About This Particular Mac, Got Vinyl? part 1, 2, and 3
And, for something a little different, how to rip audio from a DVD into a format that can be played by iTunes

Reasons it's good to be a co-founder of Apple

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:37:26 GMT

Number one: free 65-watt power adapters. I think I speak for PowerBook owners everywhere when I say it’s too bad that this courtesy doesn’t extend to all PowerBook G3 and G4 owners; certainly my experience with the dreaded M7332 adapter suggests that many of us might have benefited, not just the Mighty Woz.

I don’t begrudge him his power adapters, though. Since every home computer that I’ve ever owned (//c, SE/30, 7200/90, Pismo, TiBook, MacBook Pro) and a few my friends had on which I learned computers (][e (and IIe platinum!), //gs, PowerBook 170) has benefited from his work (and in the case of my friend’s //gs, actually been signed by him!), he probably deserves free Apple hardware for life.

Hell freezes over, again: Windows on Macs, with Apple's help

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 20:22:08 GMT

NY Times: Apple Allows Windows On Its Machines. Apparently Apple pays attention to its user community. Following the hack contest to get Windows running on the new Intel Macs that ended with a $13,000 prize and a successful hack, Apple has announced beta availability of Boot Camp, a free download that enables installing Windows XP on Mac OS X and switch-booting.

Looking at the Boot Camp page, it’s a little bit fiddlier than the average grandmother would want to mess with, but still really straightforward for a utility of this kind. The utility helps you to partition the hard disk (which is required for this kind of switch boot) and burns a CD with Windows drivers for the appropriate Mac hardware. Interesting note, though, that the Windows XP install might not find the right partition and could accidentally delete your Mac partition... After that, the switch-boot mechanism appears to be exactly the same one that enabled booting into OS X or OS 9 back in the early days of Mac OS X Public Beta and 10.0: hold down the option key at start time and choose the appropriate partition.

And I think it will perform the same function for new Mac OS X users: it will provide them with a safety net so they can gradually transition off Windows and onto their new machines. The question is, will it be good for Microsoft, good for Apple, or good for both? For Microsoft, it probably means that Virtual PC will never be ported to Intel Macs—though running multiple virtual machines is a very different usage scenario from switch booting, it may not be a common enough scenario to justify the investment. But Microsoft may get a lift in Windows XP license sales. And Apple should see a few more Windows users buying their hardware, lured by the prospect of totally cool, totally compatible hardware.

Happy Mac text geeking

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 20:14:06 GMT

Via MacOSXHints, a great article about Cocoa’s text bindings and the Amazingly Cool Things you can do with them—like, implement a standard keystroke to wrap a piece of text in some HTML formatting in every Cocoa text field in your whole system. Also a list of default bindings as shipped in Mac OS X, and a list of all the usable selectors that you can combine with keystrokes to get some really cool things to happen.

Hmm. Or, the downside of Mac on Intel.

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 03:46:03 GMT

I have a very brief report on the quality of the PowerPC emulation layer (Rosetta) built into the new Intel based Macs, like the MacBook Pro. It’s good—it’s very good. I haven’t found any native Mac OS X apps that didn’t run correctly with it.

Except. There is a small catch, which is that plug-ins that are not written to support Intel based Macs won’t load if an application is started in Intel native mode. Apparently the Rosetta functionality only applies to the main process, not plug-ins. This means that productivity plug-ins like Keyword Assistant in iPhoto and (apparently) Sogudi, the search enabler for Safari, won’t work until new Intel versions are released.

Ah well. This has been a small price to pay. There have been Universal binary versions of other important Mac applications, such as MarsEdit 1.1.2 (with which I’m blogging this) and the public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1 that was released today. Now all I need is Office and I’m good to go.

Honestly, though, there have been enough pleasant surprises with the machine that I’m not going to complain at all. For one thing, Spotlight and the Dashboard work and are really fast. For another, so does Quicksilver. I finally see why Merlin thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It was unbearably slow to invoke or operate on my 1GHz, 512 MB PowerBook G4. Amazing what an extra half-gig of memory, 0.83 GHz of processor, plus a new processor architecture will do.

Something else I can do on my new MacBook Pro

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 17:50:25 GMT

Ars Technica: Windows XP on Intel iMac: confirmed. Yeah, thanks but no thanks. Still, interesting to note that the level of effort involved is fairly low and involves modifications of only a few files.