Crashed Pips - Computers, politics, emetic trash

Friday, December 26, 2008

Why, In Comparison to 2007, 2008 Sucked

Filed under: Apple, Internet, Macintosh, Microsoft, The News, Web 2.0, Windows — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 19:14

 

2008 was designated the International Year of Planet Earth, as well as being International Year of languages, the potato, sanitation, the frog, and the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.

2008 was designated the International Year of Planet Earth, as well as being International Year of languages, the potato, sanitation, the frog, and the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.

So, it’s Boxing Day. And, in my opinion, good riddance to 2008. In some ways. In some ways, 2008 was brilliant.

In political circles, for example, we proved that a mixed-race gentleman from Hawaii could fend off a grumpy old man and a hockey mom who believes dinosaurs were around 6,000 years ago, and that the secret ballot is one of the things that’s “really cool” about America. We also managed to get the LHC started up (even if it did fail afterwards), and we showed that the eucharist is what everyone thought it was already: a cracker and some dilute wine. On the technology side of things, all was not doom and gloom either: the superior format won for once in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war, the MacBook got its first substantial update since 2001, WordPress got a brilliant new admin panel, Linux’s hardware support came along in leaps and bounds, and big media is finally getting the hang of using these modern TVs with typewriters attached to deliver media.

However, this was also the year the recession started to bite: with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, MFI, and, most recently, Woolworths, it’s been shown that the economy desperately needs some TLC. For the first time in my life, I found myself agreeing with George Bush on the financial bail-out plan - although it was unpleasant, it was necessary to stop things going from bad to worse. (As I thought that, Satan shivered and put on an extra layer of clothing, probably nabbed from the Woolworths closing down sale.)

In this blog’s métier of technology, not all has been very rosy either. Abit is to cease trading, and Microsoft is hurrying past the mess that is Vista and opening the pumps full-on to concentrate on Windows 7 - which is what they should have done with Vista. Ubuntu has released two rather disappointing releases, and Apple has also disappointed in some respects, even announcing it’s going to pull out of Macworld.

The games console front was not particularly healthy: with release after release of recycled Mario and driving material by Nintendo, who seem to have been attending the Peter Kay school of re-releasing and copying, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Wii’s programmers are starting to find their idea wells running dry. The PlayStation 3 has dominated, and Microsoft has failed to incorporate a Blu-Ray drive in the Xbox 360.

Now, I’m not famed for my gaming ability. I don’t even own a games console currently. The height of my gaming prowess extends to getting to Level 7 on Vortex, the iPod’s implementation of Breakout. However, I do know that Microsoft needs to do something about the Xbox 360 in 2009 to adjust it better to the world.

Firstly, it has to sort out the disk scratching problem, and it also has to rally behind Blu-Ray. There’s no point standing on a sinking ship: although the HD-DVD peripheral has been discontinued, they need to move to Blu-Ray. However, there’s something far more major than that.

In previous years, the Xbox 360 has had major releases every year. Call of Duty 2 and Gears of War in 2005/6, Halo 3 in 2007. This year’s flagship game, I think, was meant to be Gears of War 2 - but just compare that to previous years. Halo 3 was being released after years of hype, and Call of Duty 2 bathed in the post-launch honeymoon after the X360 was released in 2005.

So, a charismatic and historic game, about life-like soldiers from the most bloody war in Earth’s history, and a rip-roaring sci-fi adventure about a ’space marine with really cool green armor’ (their words, not mine) have been followed by a game about a fat man, whose face looks like Steve Ballmer’s office chair, where you have to look over his shoulder to see the damn targeting reticule. Ridiculous. They need to find a decent flagship game for next year.

Apple’s announcements have also been noticeably low-key this year. Steve Jobs seems to have been assigning a lot of the work at the Stevenotes to Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, and Jonathan Jony Ive, who appears to have changed his name by deed poll into something that makes absolutely zero sense when read and mispronounced.

Apple’s product turnout this year has also been noticeably smaller: last year, we had the iPhone, new iMacs, Leopard, new iPods, iWork ‘08 and iLife ‘08. This year, we had updates to the iPhone, the MacBook Air, the Time Capsule, updates to the Apple TV, new MacBooks and 15″ MacBook Pros, and the usual crop of new iPods. It seems that Apple misfired a bit this year, but with rumours circling of a new Mac Mini and new iMacs, and possibly a netbook, at Macworld 2009 (notably without Steve Jobs, presumably much to the disappointment of his stalkers) we can only hope it gets back on track next year.

All in all, therefore, a pretty sombre year for the technology industry - the only real source of excitement has been the sheer number of ridiculous web 2.0 startups. Was it the recession? Possibly. Here’s to a more exciting 2008.



Wednesday, December 24, 2008

L’ordinateur, il marche.

Filed under: Macintosh, My Computers, hardware — Tags: , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 22:40

Well, it’s nearly Christmas, and I have, if you’ve been following my Twitter feed, been having a spot of bother with my machines lately. After a drop that the Eee would normally survive, it mysteriously stopped working (I think it is either a problem with the screen’s power, or a BIOS issue. Either way, it’ll be difficult to fix.)

Never fear, I thought, as I reached over to boot up the iMac. To my horror, Tiger wouldn’t boot, hanging at the blue screen with a sporadic throbber, leaving me without a UNIX machine - and meaning that to fix it, I would have to resort to the horror of using a Windows Vista machine to find a fix.

My first job was to isolate the issue, which, as booting into verbose mode (Command and V at the startup chime - for a list of more of these handy shortcuts, see here) told me, was that coreservicesd kept crashing at boot with a segmentation fault. Googling told me that rebuilding the launch services register might help, so I ran the following command from single-user mode:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

However, this also exited with a segmentation fault. This created a problem - I couldn’t rebuild the LaunchServices register without lsregister, meaning that my OS X installation was effectively bricked.

The simple way out, as it were, would be to reinstall OS X. The major problem with that is that I didn’t have access to an OS X install DVD at the time, leaving my only option to find a hard drive with OS X installed on it, and to swap it in.

I eventually managed to find an old 6gB drive from a Power Mac G3 with a copy of Tiger on it. It worked. Although the screw was a little tough, and the hard drive takes a bit longer to spin up, the machine now works like a dream.

With all this in mind, I nearly forgot that it’s Christmas Eve. There’s very little I can say at 22:45, with only 75 minutes to go until the event, without sounding ineptly slow and out of date. All I can summon up the typing energy to do at this late hour is to wish all my readers, and the blogosphere, a very happy and peaceful yule. Have a good one.



Wednesday, December 17, 2008

More on Apple’s Macworld pullout

Filed under: Apple, Macintosh — Tags: , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 20:36

I think it’s fair to say that yesterday’s Apple announcement was initially a bit of a shock. Apple’s stock price went down in after-hours trading, and the whole announcement has again sparked concerns about the Dear Leader’s health.

However, I think that pulling out of Macworld may turn out to be a smart move for Apple in the future. Mac developers have long been complaining about the cost of hosting a stall at Macworld: a small booth, without Internet access and with only one power point costs in excess of $15,000. Want internet access? Somehow, that’s an extra $2,000. Want an extra power outlet? You have to pay a union electrician. That’s before we start to count travel, development and staffing costs. In fact, many believe that the end of the Apple keynote will spell the end of Macworld SF for good, leading some to speculate that Apple may begin hosting its own, more reasonably-priced, conference.

There’s another reason why Macworld’s keynotes may be a liability. Every January, Apple is expected to announce several major new products. It’s almost like a forced release cycle, and Apple doesn’t work well when pressed for time. It’s what nearly drove the company to bankruptcy in the 1990s. I think I first noticed this with the arrival of the Apple TV: it was initially a bit of a dud, and even Steve Jobs described it as a ‘hobby’. If it had been given another six months or so in the oven, it might have been more of a success. In the end, it was a bit of a flop.

However, another important factor is Steve Jobs’s health. While we all hope he’s OK, he’s evidently had a bit of a bad year (viz. his skinniness at WWDC) and Apple needs to prove its resilience, so that if something does happen to Jobs, Apple will survive.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Phil Schiller is a very competent businessman. His public persona is nowhere near as charismatic as Steve Jobs’s, but he’s very capable of steering Apple into the future, with or without his predecessor.



Sunday, October 19, 2008

Stevenote Post-Mortem

Filed under: Apple, Macintosh, iPredictions — Tags: , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 11:40

I understand I’m a little late with this. Well, very late. Oh well.

I’m impressed - mildly - with Apple’s decision to cut the price of the base MacBook to $999. Of course, due to the weakening pound (DARLING!!!) it’s actually become £20 more expensive this side of the pond, but hopefully, if the economy stabilises, the price will drop to a slightly more reasonable £649, or somewhere in that region.

Now, the newer MacBooks. Let’s get the most important bit out of the way first - there’s no denying they are beautiful. However, it seems a bit odd to me that Apple now effectively has a similar situation to that it had with the iMac in 2002-ish, when it was selling both the G3 and G4s at the same time.

This makes me think that Apple is planning something. The base MacBook is prohibitively expensive to a lot of people, so they’ve now dropped the price. However, in the post-keynote Q&A, the Dear Leader himself said, when asked if we were going to see a netbook:

…that’s a nascent market that’s still getting started.

Now, looking at Apple’s track record with ‘nascent markets’ (multi-touch smartphones, portable HDD-based music players) this is the sort of situation Apple loves to throw itself into. I suspect that Apple is preparing a cheaper ultrasub, which, I suspect, will be called the MacBook Mini, and will be announced at MacBook 2009. I predict it will be similar in appearance to the iPod Nano (with the colour options), have a 10-12inch screen, replace the white MacBook, and be priced at $899 (so, for us Brits, depending on whether Brown’s kept his mouth shut, between £499 and £599.)

The Mac Mini is also in desperate need of a revamp, so I think that will also be revamped at MW 2009. I suspect the two machines will be desktop/notebook partners - they’ll both have 2gB of RAM, be made of aluminium, be aimed squarely at the strapped-for cash family or student. If Apple can provide a real recession-busting product, then in my opinion, it’s guaranteed to be a winner.

Other points of note - the 24″ Cinema Display now has a webcam in it (how did it take this long?) and Steve Jobs’s blood pressure is 110/70. Steve certainly seemed better (I’ve yet to actually watch the video to see, but from the photos he looked more ‘healthy’ skinny than ’sick’ skinny) but the fact that he left a lot of the keynote to Tim Whatshisname and Jonathan Jonny Ive came as a bit of a surprise to some.

I think it makes sense though. This tells shareholders that although Steve is here to stay for now, Apple is planning for its future. There’s no denying that the Great Leader is getting older, and will eventually have to pack it in. It may not be for another five years - heck, it may not even be for another decade or two. However, Apple has to show that it can function without Jobs’s RDF; they certainly are trying to project, to the markets, the idea that it’s resilient. And, I have to say, I think it may well work.



Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Should Apple Charge for OS X Snow Leopard?

Filed under: Apple, Macintosh, Software, UNIX — Tags: , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 14:44

Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard, is due to appear on the prowl next year, is an interesting release for OS X. Instead of opening the feature floodgates from R&D’s lake of shinyness, a mere puddle of new features will trickle through. In the meantime, OS X has hired a personal trainer, and is now being honed by its developers to become faster, leaner and more modern.

The list of underlying new features that have been confirmed include:

  • OpenCL, allowing the computer to harness the control of the graphics card
  • SquirrelFish in Safari, to speed up JavaScript (this will also be backported to OS X 10.4, 10.5 and the changes will also appear in iPhone OS X)
  • Grand Central, a new parallel programming technology to assist in harnessing OpenCL and multi-core CPUs
  • Upgrades to Darwin meaning it can fully harness 64-bit CPUs, adding support for a theoretical 16tB of RAM.

Updates obvious to the end user will include QuickTime X, a new version of QuickTime, and Exchange 2007 support for Address Book and iCal. The Server version will also include full support for ZFS.

However, as yet, we don’t know how much Apple is planning on charging for this update. This represents a problem: OS X is speedy anyway, and many end-users may not see the benefit of something that has very few new end-user features. (It’s also worth remembering that Snow Leopard doesn’t support PowerPC Macs, and there’s still a large proportion of these around.)

I still think that Apple should throw in at least a couple of new features to entice users into buying the upgrade. There are still a few problems with Leopard’s feature base that Snow Leopard could provide an opportunity to polish and fix. These are simple things, like the eye candy: there could be a little more (functional) eye candy around the Trashcan and the Finder, for example. Leopard also has the problem of the 3D Dock having an incorrect perspective in comparison to the icons specified by Apple’s own Aqua design guidelines. They might also contemplate improving the virtual desktops (Spaces) feature, to remove it from the Dock and stick it up in the menu bar (IMO, they should do the same with the Dashboard and Time Machine by default, as it simply clutters up the Dock).

Alternatively, they could simply offer Snow Leopard as a free (or cheap) upgrade to all Intel Mac owners. This would be quite a popular move (Apple giving something away for free: OMG!) so I think it would certainly make good economic sense for Apple.

To avoid upsetting people on the other side of the Severn, Apple should also translate OS X into Welsh.



Wednesday, June 11, 2008

WWDC ‘08 Stevenote Post Mortem

Filed under: Apple, Macintosh — Tags: , , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 18:40

If you’ll recall, a couple of days ago, I wrote about what I expected would appear at WWDC ‘08. As it transpires, it was a rather surprising event.

  • The iPhone: This made up the bulk of the Stevenote, where Steve Jobs was also (unusually) assisted by Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller. The 2.0 firmware is almost complete and will appear next month - I was surprised it wasn’t complete by now, but I suppose they’re just being careful with a few final sweeps for bugs. The actual revised iPhone wasn’t surprising from a hardware perspective: 3G, lower price, GPS, similar case design… but I was surprised that the case is now almost all plastic instead of all aluminium. The new feature list is somewhat disappointing, although thanks to the iPhone’s nature it shouldn’t be too long to see a change to this. O2 are also going to offer it on a pay-as-you-go tariff, for an unconfirmed price. However, I can’t take much credit for this. The 3G iPhone was the worst-kept secret in history.
  • Mysteriously, the rumoured new MacBooks didn’t appear. This was surprising, although the amount of iPhone stuff they got through probably restricted what else they could get in the keynote.
  • Mac OS X 10.6 was announced - it’s called Snow Leopard, and not Cougar as I expected. I was right in that it’ll concentrate on polish and performance; however, it’s hard to see Apple resisting the temptation to shoehorn a few new features in, including a few aesthetic changes. However, it was only mentioned briefly in the keynote.
  • The Mac Mini and Blu-Ray SuperDrives were not mentioned, which is also quite surprising, particularly for the former. Said machine hasn’t been revised for around a year now, indicating a revamp of the line may be imminent. I suspect both the Mini and new MacBooks (if any) will appear at a similar event to the event the revised iMac appeared last year, so at this rate we could be looking at August.
  • MobileMe (a new synchronisation service which also features .Mac’s old functionalities) wasn’t much of a surprise: it would have been insane for Apple to build in the push PIM, synchronisation, remote kill, etc if it could only be used by enterprises with Microsoft Exchange. I also like the idea of being able to sync my Eee, my iMac, and my phone’s address book, although whether or not it likes Linux is another matter. I suspect it will.

Overall, the Stevenote was something of a disappointment. It was interesting to see what they had to show us, but it concentrated heavily on the iPhone. This is very surprising.



Saturday, June 7, 2008

iPredict for WWDC…

Filed under: Apple, Communications, Macintosh, iPredictions — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 12:13

The infamous iHype has been steadily growing in anticipation of Steve Jobs’s keynote on Monday at WWDC.

The Macworld offices are, evidently, very busy, with new rumours coming in left, right and centre. And this is not to mention the Apple rumour sites, whose editors must, judging by the number of rumours we’re seeing, be on forty caffiene tablets an hour.

Rumors include a tablet Mac, larger iPhones with 3G and GPS, 14-inch MacBooks with aluminium casing, and all manner of other goodies.

I have slightly different predictions:

  • It is almost certain we will see a 3G iPhone, although I suspect the case design will remain largely unchanged. We’ll see, at most, an all aluminium and glass design - I severely doubt the authenticity of the iPhone with white plastic casing. We’ll see voice dialing, a revised home button which glows different colours when SMSes, MMSes, etc are received, 802.11n, and the actual launch of the 2.0 firmware and the App Store. O2 will also offer the iPhone on a pay-as-you-go plan in the UK, charging 11p a minute for each call and SMS, and offering free Internet access (3G, GPRS, EDGE and Wi-Fi with The Cloud).
  • I suspect we may see new MacBooks and MacBook Pros next week. Both devices will be made completely out of aluminium, and the MacBook Pro will take on a more ‘brushed metal’ appearance, similar to the iMac. The MacBook will have a black surround around the screen, also similar to the iMac.
  • The first features of Mac OS X 10.6 will be revealed. It’ll be called Cougar, and will focus heavily on polish and reliability. One of the most immediately obvious features is Fairy Dust, a new set of graphical transitions that occur when a window is minimised, an icon is undocked, etc. This will mean that the Genie effect is revised, and now causes the window to ’sink’ as well as warp into the Dock, and that when the Trash is emptied, the Trashcan will glow and the items inside will appear to explode. Cougar will also include a new Terminal, which allows users to switch, using a menu, between the Bourne shell, the Korn shell, bash, dash, csh, tcsh, and a new, Apple designed shell called crash (Completely Redesigned Apple SHell). It’ll also have native support for ZFS and ext2/3/4. The new graphical enhancements will give Cougar the slogan ‘everything that happens is a blockbuster’, and therefore the new intro movie will reflect that fact, flying around a maze of historic Macintosh models while Ed Welch’s theme tune to Blockbusters plays in the background - additionally, the new intro movie will reveal that OS X has finally been translated into Welsh.
  • ‘One More Thing’ will be a new revision of the Mac Mini. It will include an all aluminium design, and will also have FireWire 800 on board, 802.11n, a SuperDrive, keyboard and mouse as standard, and a $200 discount off a 20″ Cinema Display.
  • There will be one more iddy-biddy thing: there’ll be Blu-Ray SuperDrives for Macs, which can be ordered separately and installed by hand, or added as a build configuration option for an extra $300-ish.
Even if I am entirely wrong, it’ll be very interesting to see what is revealed on Monday. Now I just need to work out what time the keynote starts, and what time it’ll be in London when that happens.



Friday, March 21, 2008

Distributed Building in Xcode

Filed under: Macintosh, Programming — Tags: , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 20:05

Building a programming project, especially a very big project, takes a long time, especially on older computers. This is because many files have to be compiled, linked and built. However, Mac OS X allows a way around this using Distributed Builds.

Distributed Builds distributes the workload across any Mac on your network that has opted in, speeding up the process significantly. This is a form of node computing, which operates almost all modern supercomputers. Distributed Builds divide the workload using the Bonjour protocol, using code that is based on Xgrid, which is Mac OS X’s grid computing system (used in System X, a supercomputer at Virginia Tech constructed entirely of Power Mac G5s originally, and now Xserve G5s). Even a little bit of added computing power will improve things drastically.

There are several prerequisites to this. Firstly, the other computers must be Macs running OS X. They must also have an equivalent or higher version of both OS X and Xcode as the ones installed as your main development machine. I’ll go into this in the instructions.

Firstly, however, you must have a suitable environment. You can carry out the build directly over the network, without any fuss whatsoever. It is a ridiculously simple process. If you have a Mac which doesn’t have AirPort which needs it, and is lying around doing nothing, then you can connect it using a relatively cheap Ethernet switch to a Mac which does have AirPort. You can then share the wireless and Internet connection over this subnet. For example, I have a spare Power Mac G3, which I’ve attached to Welchman, my iMac DV, in the following arrangement.

So, with that sorted, it’s important to check the prerequisites for doing a distributed build. In this event, both my machines are running Mac OS X Tiger, but I could also add a Leopard computer if I so wished.

Now, let’s go about setting the damn thing up.

  1. Install Xcode on all machines that don’t already have it installed. Xcode is Mac OS X’s excellent IDE. It can be found on your OS X CD, or can be downloaded from developer.apple.com. It can take up quite a bit of space, but if you don’t install the documentation (this can all be accessed online) it reduces the amount of space needed drastically. If you downloaded the disk image, you can also save some space by ejecting and then Trashing this afterwards.
  2. Open Xcode. By default, it is installed under /Developer/Applications. You might find it useful to drag it onto the Dock to work with later.
  3. On the main development machine, open Xcode preferences (Command-,). Go to the Distributed Builds tab, and check the ‘Distribute builds to…’ switch. Activate the ‘Share my computer with low priority’ switch: you may need to authenticate to do this.
  4. On your other machines, open Xcode preferences, and go to the distributed build tab. Authenticate, and tick the ’share my computer’ box(es). Everything is now set up.
  5. When you next build your Xcode project, the build will be distributed across the machines you have enabled to have the build distributed to.
It really is a cinch. You might have to allow it through the OS X firewall (it is a predefined option), and you might (if you have no DHCP server) have to assign IP addresses manually, but these are in rare cases. Otherwise, you should be just fine and ready to go. And, believe me, it really speeds up the build process.



Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The Windows User’s Guide to Dumping Windows for OS X

Filed under: Apple, Macintosh, Microsoft, Software, UNIX, Windows — Tags: , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 18:45

Internet entrepreneur and geek extraordinaire Chris Pirillo has announced that he’s finally started making the switch from Windows. Congratulations, Chris. Welcome to the real world.

(Of course, in true Pirillo fashion, he’s posted the obligatory unboxing video, memory installation video, hard disk installation video, first boot video, and an playing Also Sprach Zarathustra music video.)

However, this got me thinking back to September/October time, when an iMac DV (ancient, from 2000 - Chris, you lucky bastard) became my primary machine. There were a lot of things that I had to re-learn pretty quickly. Therefore, I present the Crashed Pips Complete Guide For Windows Users Who Are Switching To Mac OS X.

Part One: Buying Your Mac

You can buy your Mac, of course, directly from Apple. If you plan to buy a new Mac, that’s the route I recommend taking.

Also, they can be bought refurbished from Apple’s site, for reduced cost. Cheaper Macs can also be found on eBay: I have a friend who has a relative who purchased a G5 Power Mac from for 99p. (As I understand it, the buyer was offered to keep the penny’s worth of change from the £1 coin.)

Part Two: Plug In, Switch On

This bit is relatively simple. Plug in the power. Plug in the keyboard. Plug in the mouse. Unless you’re using wireless keyboards and mice, in which case you can just put in the battery and switch it on. Plug in the network (if you’re not using a WLAN network, in which case it will ask you for the SSID and key during setup). Plug in a printer if you have one. Plug in your external hard drive if you have one and want to use it for Time Machine. If you have an AirPort base station with an external drive, or a Time Capsule, then this will be set up later.

Press the ‘on’ button. You should hear the machine make a loud ‘bong’. If it doesn’t, check the power and then call technical support.

Follow the instructions the setup assistant gives you after the intro movie. Register your details - this is important for support. If you want, sign up for the .Mac trial - this is not compulsory, though. Enter your .Mac details if you already have them.

Check everything is working. Install your software, if you need to. Then set up any more accounts you need.

Part Three: Differences

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the menu bar is stuck to the top of the screen. It doesn’t stay in the window. You can’t access the menus with the ‘alt’ key - you have to use the mouse. It also pays to remember to hit Command-S instead of Control-S. Try to imagine the control key has shifted two keys to the right.

If you’re using Apple’s Mighty Mouse, you can either use Control-click to do a right-click, or enable it in System Preferences. In the corner of the window, the red button closes the window, the yellow button minimises the window into the Dock (the bar at the bottom of the screen) and the green button ‘zooms’ the window. Its behaviour is somewhat erratic.

If you need to get to an application that’s not on the Dock, click on the Finder’s icon (that friendly, smiley face on the Dock which look like either a face with schizophrenia or two people looking at each other) and press Command, Shift and A.

Command and the left and right arrow keys skip to the beginning and end of lines, á la Home and End in Windows. Alt (or Option, as it is known on a Mac) and the left/right arrow keys skips between words. Command and Q quits an application (which, just to make things a little more confusing, doesn’t close automatically when all its windows have been closed.)

Control and Space brings up the search facility, Spotlight. The trashcan is on the Dock, and to empty it, right (or control) click on it and select Empty Trash.

There are many more, subtle differences between the behaviour of Mac OS X and Windows. Don’t worry - these will iron out in time. It’s helpful, though, to remember the important rules about Command and Control - you’ll actually end up using these a lot more than you think.

(and just in case you were wondering, it is ls, not dir at the Terminal to list files.



Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Macworld Expo 2008: the Aftermath

Filed under: Apple, Macintosh — Tags: , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 21:52

So, after Steve Jobs once again has dazzled technology correspondents around the world with Apple’s latest creations, some felt a little deflated after his keynote at the Macworld Expo yesterday evening.

After all, we weren’t treated to nearly as many new toys as normal during this year’s conference. But in my opinion, that is more than balanced by the quality of the products that were announced.

Let’s start with the new AirPort base station come NAS device, the Time Capsule. Obviously, it’s designed to work with Leopard’s backup utility, Time Machine. It is also an AirPort wi-fi base station, with a wireless and wired router and switch.

Whilst I am pleased that Apple has finally made one of these, I’m more than a little disappointed that this means Leopard’s wireless backup feature will be restricted to the Time Capsule. The feature, announced at the WWDC in 2007, was dropped from the final release, and I have a horrible feeling that this is a bad example of a proprietary lock-in. While I don’t doubt the quality of the product, I am concerned about this possible lock-in.

Moving swiftly on, the iPhone has been updated with location detection on Google Maps, a customisable home screen, and several other revisions. This update should be being beamed to iPhone users through iTunes as we speak.

The iPod Touch also gets a software upgrade, and it finally brings it up to feature parity with the iPhone (excluding, of course, the phone). Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes and Weather are now installed by default on new Touches. However, existing users will have to pay £12.99 to upgrade their existing Touch. This is more than a little irritating, and seems to be a bit of a penny-pinching method in my view. However, it’s nice that the calls of hundreds of Touch owners have finally been answered.

I shall briefly come to the Apple TV. I am not so sure about this; while movie rentals over iTunes and the loss of need for a computer is great, I think there are several improvements to be made:

  • Offer DTT tuning and a DVD/Blu-ray drive. This will make it far more ‘integrated’, in my opinion.
  • Offer the box as a standalone box, or integrated into an Apple-made screen, with sizes from 22″ to 50″. I don’t see why not.
  • FFS allow the Apple TV to switch to the normal OS X shell. This feature is available on Windows and MythTV, so why not on Apple TV?

Now we come to the undisputed star of the show: the MacBook Air. Speculation had been surfacing of an aluminium sub-notebook from Apple before. And it turns out it’s true.

I can’t fail to be impressed by the size of the thing. 0.76 inches is ridiculously thin, and while it’s not the thinnest notebook ever (that prize goes to the Mitsubishi Pedion, which beats it by a factor of millimetres) it’s the thinnest notebook currently in production.

Even if the 64gB SSD drive is overly priced, it’s good Apple has made this an option, and while it and its 80gB IDE alternative are by no means large, they are certainly respectable amounts. I also like the backlit keyboard, and the multi-touch trackpad (normally I look upon them as an object of hate, so this is something). I also don’t mind the missing optical drive too much - you can hook up your own via USB (Apple will even sell you one, if you like) or hijack another Mac or PC’s drive using something called Remote Disc. I’m a little disappointed there’s no FireWire, and that there’s only one USB port, and that there’s no built-in Ethernet, but I still believe Apple should be congratulated for fitting a fully-functional, and quite powerful, computer into such a small case.

So, overall, I’m quite impressed by Apple’s line-up this year. I’ve still got reservations, but they’re mostly quite minor. And this doesn’t undermine the fact that the notebook is so damned impressive for something so small.



Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress 2.7 Comments are the responsibility of their respective author. The Rest © 2007-2009 Jonathan Rothwell, unless otherwise stated.