An Explanation

Marco Arment, writing about customer culture:

This culture of compromise has been cultivated by Apple’s relentless pace of forcing progress and killing legacy support. Apple’s implicit message is simple: “We know what’s best. If you do things our way, everything will work very well and you’ll be happy. If you don’t like it, that’s fine with us.”

People who aren’t willing or able to compromise on their needs regularly are much more likely to be Windows customers. The Windows message is much more palatable to corporate buyers, committees, middlemen, and people who don’t like to be told what’s best for them: “You can do whatever you want, and we’ll attempt to glue it together. It won’t always work very well, and you might not like the results, but we will do exactly what you asked for.”

I (being someone who tends to fall squarely into the Apple camp) have observed this before, but was never able to put my finger on what it was. I think that this description of The Windows Culture hits the nail on the head.

Windows 8′s “Ribbon UI” in Explorer

I’m also quite fascinated with the responses to Improvements in Windows Explorer. While I felt that the Ribbon UI was a huge improvement for Microsoft Office 2007, I find the new Explorer UI in Windows 8 to be both appalling and downright backwards-minded. I was quite surprised to read how many positive comments there were.

WOW! this looks great!

Recently I moved to a TabletPC (Acer Iconia Tab W500). I normally use a FAR Manager for my file operations, but this is because I am a keyboard guy. However on a tablet I immediately moved back to explorer (I user WIndows 7 now). What I notice is a lack of things you can do by clicking your finger:) – this includes lack of Up button and other things. I think what you doing here is great! [...]

Thank you! I hope windows 8 will fit into 2 GB of ram and 30 gb of HDD and I can install it on my Iconia at some time.

No plugins in Metro IE

Conversely, Microsoft recently discussed Metro style browsing and plug-in free HTML5. I think that this will be a fantastic improvement for users of Windows 8 Metro on upcoming tablets. They’ll be more secure, they’ll have better battery life, and browsing will be much faster. This is an excellent move on Microsoft’s part. However, in the comments… [emphasis mine]

Wow…. you know one of the defense of Windows is the fact that it’s a full OS, not a mobile one. Doing this makes IE10 essentially a mobile browser. Sure these plugins are security risks and do drain battery more, but it’s ultimately up to the user to install the plugins. How about Microsoft regulates the plugins with the app store to make sure they aren’t security liabilities and what not. Killing off Flash effectively kills off millions of cross platform applications that run through web browsers. I think being able to run Flash the best out of the bunch has been a highlight of why these Mobile browsers are behind. This article just uses video for its argument, but not web design or application/game development.

The arguments being made in this comment are so completely foreign to me that I don’t even know where to begin dissecting it, but this is common thinking among those who have embraced The Windows Culture.

The next few years of the mobile space will be very interesting.

“Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

This quote in particular is one that Steve Jobs has brought up on numerous occasions, and is far more revealing about Apple’s internal culture than I think most of us realize. It is certainly the most salient explanation for Apple’s intense focus at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.

Mobile

Over the past couple of years, I’ve started paying an increasing amount of attention to Apple and it’s competition — mostly in the mobile space. Before 2008 when I bought my first iPhone, I really couldn’t have cared less about mobile. I’d had a couple of feature phones, then moved up to a BlackBerry Pearl in 2006.

When Steve Jobs got up on stage at the Moscone Center in January 2007 and introduced “[…] an iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices!” I was stunned. I’d heard the rumors about an alleged phone from Apple, but this thing was simply astounding! Over the next 6 months, the blogosphere worked itself into an absolute frenzy over the iPhone. Ultimately, the iPhone has gone on to be a raging success — raking in two-thirds of all of the profits in the entire mobile industry.

Hardware and software

Since Apple makes both the hardware and the software for all of their products, when you buy an iPhone (or iPod, or iPad, or Mac) you know that the hardware and software work together seamlessly. With the exception of HP/Palm (up until recently) and RIM, Apple is the only company that does this. Even Google’s Nexus line of phones is actually made by third-party handset makers (HTC for the Nexus One and Samsung for the Nexus S).

In order to properly establish a baseline showing how Apple completely rocked the mobile industry in 2007, we need to break the competition down into hardware and software categories.

Hardware

Here’s what the competition shipped in late-2006/early-2007:

• 
  RIM BlackBerry 8800
• 
  Motorola Q
• 
  Nokia E70
• 
  HTC Excalibur
• 
  HTC Touch
• 
  Palm Treo 755p
• 
  Palm Treo 700wx

Software

Here’s what the competition shipped in late-2006/early-2007:

• Palm OS 5
• Windows Mobile 6
• Symbian OS
• Android

Queue the industry scramble

People in the mobile industry knew this was going to be big, huge, EPIC. Phone makers began scrambling to create products that could be the next iPhone-killer. Motorola, HTC, LG, Palm, Microsoft, Nokia and others were knocked completely sideways by the iPhone. It was so far ahead of anything at the time that nobody knew where to begin.

As the first touchphones started hitting the market, they all failed. Utter, complete failure. But why? Their phones had all of the same features, so why weren’t they selling? Arguably, the exact same discussions are happening now — especially since tablets are joining phones in the mobile space.

There is no tablet market — only an iPad market

Verne G. Kopytoff and Ian Austen of The New York Times note:

“Computer makers are expected to ship only about 4 percent more PCs this year than last year, according to IDC, a research firm. Tablets, in contrast, are flying off store shelves. Global sales are expected to more than double this year to 24.1 million, according to Forrester Research. More than two-thirds of those tablets, however, are sold by Apple. Sales of its iPad pulled in $9 billion in just the first half of the year, or 30 percent more than all of Dell’s consumer PC business in the same period. The joke in Silicon Valley is that there is no tablet market, only an iPad market. (That was also true of Apple and the iPod market.)

The other observation that is no joke: Apple is the only maker with strong PC growth. Spending on desktops and laptops grew 16 percent in the latest quarter, while Dell’s consumer product sales increased 1 percent.”

Here’s what John Gruber from Daring Fireball had to say:

“I’m not trying to cherry-pick data. I’m simply observing, based on Apple’s sales data and Google’s activation data, that the tablet market doesn’t today look anything like the smartphone market ever did. The iPad didn’t enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad’s role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod’s role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone’s role in the 2008 phone market.”

And Marco Arment:

“There’s an iPad market, and the iPad could be classified as a tablet, from a hardware-centric viewpoint. But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad, which isn’t nothing, but it’s close enough to nothing that Apple doesn’t need to worry about it.

How many people do you know who wanted or received an iPad for Christmas?

Alright, same question, but this time, for the Samsung Galaxy Tab or any other tablet that’s not the iPad. (Kindles are not tablets. The new Nook Color might be. You can count it if you’re arguing with me.)

Now, from both groups, exclude those who know what RSS is, because we don’t represent the bulk of the market. How big is that second group now?”

Others are saying the same thing. But why? Companies like Samsung, Acer, Motorola and others have been making consumer electronics for years. Microsoft has been kicking around the idea of the tablet computer since at least 2000. Why is the iPad (which debuted in the spring of 2010) eating everyone else’s lunch?

The reason is something so blindingly simple that you’re going to feel stupid for missing it. Ready?

It’s the ecosystem, stupid!

The fatal flaw of Android phones, TouchPads, XOOMs, Playbooks, Galaxy Tabs, and pretty much everything else on the market today is the lack of a cohesive ecosystem around the product. These handset and tablet makers — for all intents and purposes — seem to think that the experience stops at the phone or the tablet. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I bought an HP TouchPad during their firesale. When reviewing the product, I compared it to my iPad. I’d purchased it for my kids so that they’d have something to play with so they’d leave my iPad alone. What happened? They decided that they didn’t like the TouchPad. They wanted the games, the books, the movies, the music and everything else that my iPad has.

Now sure, the TouchPad can technically do those things… but its not a cohesive experience. It’s not simple. It’s not easy.

When you buy an Apple product — whether it be a Mac, an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad or an Apple TV — you get all of Apple’s ecosystem working together in harmony along beside you.

• Syncing your digital media from iTunes to your iPod, iPhone, iPad or first-generation Apple TV (which uses syncing; Apple TV 2 streams instead of syncs), it all happens very seamlessly with very little effort on your part.
• Industry-standard audio and video (MPEG-4/H.264/AAC) is fully supported at the hardware level for each of Apple’s devices which means that videos play smoother and battery life is much better than competing devices which don’t support these standards at the hardware level.
• The iTunes Store has over 18 million songs; thousands of movies, TV shows, videos, podcasts, and books; and over 100,000 virus-free apps — all of which are available in just a few clicks/taps. You can also rip your own CDs and DVDs, as well as convert your favorite content into ebooks if you want.
• iTunes Home Sharing allows you to share all of your content between all of your devices either by syncing or streaming.
• AirPlay (née AirTunes) allows you to stream your music to any speakers that are either connected to an AirPort Express or support the AirPlay protocol.
• You can stream your movies, YouTube videos and other video content to any TV connected to an AppleTV also using AirPlay.
• You can control what’s playing in iTunes or AppleTV using your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad as a remote control.
• Apple’s third-party cottage industry is second-to-none with tons of integration options for home audio, car stereos, device cases, sex toys, knick-knacks, doo-dads and the like.
• Apple devices are supported with updates for a very long time. It wasn’t until iOS 4.0 that the original iPhone was dropped, and the iPhone 3G wasn’t dropped until iOS 4.3. Everything that supports iOS 4.3 will also get iOS 5.
• Apps are targeted at OS versions, and sometimes by device (iPhone/iPod touch vs. iPad). iPads can run all iPhone apps (although non-optimized apps run at the iPhone’s resolution). For example, Netflix runs on all iOS devices running iOS 4.0 or newer (everything except the original iPhone and first-generation iPod touch).

Compare all of this to, say, Android.

• First of all, there is no Android-based equivalent to the iPod. Smaller form factors are (so far) all phones. Larger form factors are (so far) all tablets. There’s nothing small and cheap that you can plug headphones into and jam with it in your pocket.
• Some Android devices have hardware decoders for audio/video playback, some don’t. Burn battery, burn!
• There is no equivalent to the iTunes Store for Android devices. Yes, Google has Google Music, but it’s brand-new, untested, and it’s not a store where you can easily purchase whatever your heart desires in just a few taps.
• Android viruses, malware and fly-by-night operations are on the rise: “Android Malware Explodes, iOS Remains Safe”, “Android-targeted malware jumps 76% in Q2, McAfee says”, “Why Android Viruses Are Growing, and How To Stop Them”, and “Warning: Fake games in the Market today”.
• There is no equivalent to iTunes Home Sharing for Android devices. You have to sync everything from one device to the next. Can’t store your entire media collection? Too bad.
• There is no equivalent to AirPlay for Android devices. You can burn a CD and put it in your home CD player, or take your ripped movie and put it on your PS3 or Xbox 360 for playback, but that can be an awful lot of work.
• There is no equivalent for remote controlling playback of your media content for Android devices.
• What Android cottage industry?
• Updates? Good luck with that. Maybe the manufacturer will release an update, maybe they won’t. Who knows?
• Apps are targeted at whatever the easiest-to-support devices are. For example, Netflix only runs on a small subset of devices based entirely on that device’s capabilities.

Apple’s Strategy

Apple’s ecosystem strategy didn’t come out of nowhere. Apple didn’t just wake up one day and decide to make the iPhone or the iPad. These products have been several years in the making. In fact, Apple talking about the digital hub dates back to at least 2000 with the iMac and their Rip, Mix, Burn campaign. iTunes was just coming out for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X hadn’t launched yet and the iPod was still a couple of years away.

Over time they launched:

1. iTunes (2001)
2. Mac OS X (2001)
3. Apple Retail Stores (allowing people to walk in, play with stuff, ask questions and get help; 2001)
4. iPod (2001)
5. Bonjour (née Rendezvous; 2002)
6. iTunes Music Store (2003)
7. AirPort Express (2004)
8. iLife (2004)
9. Added video capabilities to iPods and added video to the iTunes Store (2005)
10. AppleTV (2007)
11. iPhone (2007)
12. iPhone Music Store (2007)
13. iPhone App Store (2008)
14. iPad (2010)
15. iCloud (2011)

All of these products work together in concert to provide a seamless experience across the board. It’s this ongoing seamlessness and support that has allowed Apple to earn my trust as a consumer — something that Samsung, Motorola, RIM or Google hasn’t yet earned.

Skating to where the puck has been

Right now, everyone in the entire industry is chasing Apple. Everyone.

• Microsoft was chasing Apple with Windows Vista and Windows 7 (although with Windows 8, they’ve decided to go to crazy-town).
• Google, RIM and Nokia are chasing Apple with Android, BlackBerry OS and Meego, respectively.
• Google, Acer, Samsung, Sony, Lenovo and others are chasing Apple in ultra-portable notebooks.
• Motorola, RIM, HP, Samsung and others are chasing Apple in tablets.

As technophiliacs, it’s easy for us to go down a rat hole about this tech or that tech (see: iOS v. Android flame wars).

Aside from Apple (and arguably HP/Palm), vendors have a bad habit of shipping second-rate products in a variety of (mostly incompatible) configurations using a marketing strategy that is equivalent to throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. For example, Samsung now offers 2.8, 3.2, 3.5, 3.7, 4, 4.3, 4.5, 5, 7, 7.7, 8.9, and 10.1-inch Android devices. Really Samsung?

In “Dear tablet makers: You’re doing it wrong“, Zach Epstein writes:

“Repeated cold and lukewarm launches will either push vendors out of the tablet space or open their eyes. Consumers don’t need oversized smartphones. I’ll type these all-too important words a second time: slapping Android on a slate and shoving it out to market simply isn’t an effective strategy. The real problem might be that OEMs are looking at Android wrong. What might happen if vendors stop rushing duds out to market and actually concentrate on using Android as a platform rather than a complete solution?”

These products are soulless knock-offs of the original. Apple put its heart and soul into the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and it shows.

Skating to where the puck is going to be

Robert S. Andersen recently tweeted:

“Every product is an opportunity to create joy in someone’s life. If you’re not doing that then you’re in it for the wrong reasons.”

Apple has invested in constantly growing and constantly improving its ecosystem of products so that they all work together in concert. The experience is delightful.

It’s not that Google, Samsung, Motorola, RIM and others aren’t competing — it’s that they’re not even playing Apple’s game. Apple’s game is one of putting the user’s experience first, eliminating as much frustration from the process as possible. If you put the customer first, the sales will come. If you put making the sale (or grabbing at market share) ahead of the customer experience, you’re no better than a used car salesman. How many used car salesmen are you excited to buy from again?

I’m going to end with a quote from one of my favorite shows, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip:

Harriet: I got a laugh at the table read when I asked for the butter in the dinner sketch. I didn’t get it at the dress. What did I do wrong?

Matt: That’s one laugh out of thirty you’re going to get tonight.

Harriet: What did I do wrong?

Matt: You asked for the laugh.

Harriet: What did I do at the table read?

Matt: You asked for the butter.

If you’re a tech company, let me give you a piece of advice: Stop trying to be Apple. Nobody is Apple but Apple. Be yourself. If you suck, if you’re boring, then don’t expect your date to like you.

The only way to even come close to competing with Apple is to start working on your overall ecosystem of products. Make them seamless. Make them compatible. Make them Just Work™. Building knock-off hardware and slapping a second-rate OS on it won’t help you compete.

Yes, you might have enough checkboxes in the feature list to pick up a sale. Congratulations. But they’re not buying your product for you — they’re buying it because it’s close enough to an Apple product for what they need.

Think about that for a second and tell me how sad that makes you feel about yourself.

Update: HP Envy (2011-11-16)

If I forgot to add them before, let’s go ahead and add HP to the list of Apple wannabes. They just released the new HP Envy.

I feel like I’ve seen this somewhere before…

Update: Fun with numbers! (2011-11-24)

In his piece entitled “Fun With Numbers”, John Gruber from Daring Fireball analyzes an NPD Group report about tablet sell-through numbers (i.e., real sales numbers to consumers, not the fake we-shipped-zillions-to-stores-but-don’t-know-who-actually-bought-them numbers).

That’s one way to put it. Another way is that 92 percent of U.S. tablet buyers considered an iPad, and 89 percent bought an iPad, which means 97 percent of tablet buyers who merely considered an iPad bought an iPad, and if not for the 8 percent of tablet buyers who for whatever reason did not consider an iPad, none of these companies would have sold even 100,000 tablets over the first nine months of 2011. […]

PC manufacturers are not dominant in the tablet space. Companies that provide a complete ecosystem — hardware, software, app stores, movies, TV shows, books and periodicals — are. PC manufacturers are utterly failing in the tablet market.

He finishes off his analysis with the following food for thought.

The only thing you can learn from NPD’s report is that tablet market share numbers sure do look different when you don’t count any of the tablets that people are actually buying.

“At the 25th hour, Jobs returned. He quickly re-installed his vision. And this time, the timing was exactly right. His vision seemed perfectly in line with the world at large. The result was a 14-year run that took Apple from near-death to the most valuable company on the planet. It wasn’t just hit after hit after hit. It was homerun after homerun after home run.”

One More Thing… by M.G. Siegler.

Preface

I feel that I should start by saying that I’m an Apple guy; or more specifically that I’ve always been an Apple guy. I was converted to the Mac platform back in the early 90′s when my Junior High school’s library got a new shipment of Apple Macintosh LC IIs. I’ve never really looked back.

That said, this certainly isn’t a blind love for Apple. Over the years, Apple has earned my trust by providing high-quality products, software and support that puts the consumer first. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve liked every single decicion they’ve made, but all-in-all I have Apple’s back because I believe that Apple has mine.

Let’s look at the competition:

• RIM: RIM is dead. Sell your stock.
• Microsoft: Irrelevant in this day and age.
• Google:
  1. They’d screw me in a second if they could sell more data about me to advertisers.
  2. Google values engineering above all else. Unfortunately for Google, Design > Engineering.
  3. Andy Rubin has as much dumb stuff come out of his mouth as Steve Ballmer.
  4. Google recently kicked off a whine-fest because they lost a patent auction.
• Palm: CEO was a high-ranking lieutenant at Apple in charge of the iPod. Lots of former Apple engineers. Sweet new OS for mobile devices. Hmmm…

Piqued Interest

I have no interest in Android. I’m a bit of a quality snob, and an ease-of-use snob, and most of Google’s products are just not there. Android in particular (and Microsoft’s Windows CE, palm-sized PC, PocketPC, Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Phone Edition, Windows Mobile, Windows Embedded Handheld, Windows Phone 7 Series, Windows Phone 7 devices) all suffer from what’s called The Paradox of Choice (TED video) (Wikipedia summary). The short version is that while people like Steve Ballmer and Andy Rubin are all touting how wonderful it is to have a plethora of devices available, it’s actually harmful to the customer experience.

So when Palm/HP announced the TouchPad, I was intrigued. I’d always thought that Palm’s webOS was a clear stand-out among mobile OSs, but the faulty Pre hardware and a poor at-launch partner (Sprint), and terrible marketing all worked in concert to kill Palm’s chances of making a dent in the marketplace. Palm also was in the poor position of needing a serious influx of cash if they were to continue operating. That kind of split focus is never good for a company.

Seeing some gorgeous screenshots of the OS and devices on Sebastiaan de With’s blog pretty much sealed the deal for me: I was a webOS fan. Unfortunately for Palm/HP, there was no way I was going to spend money on a TouchPad when I could get an iPad.

Comparing the TouchPad and the iPad 2

I ordered my iPad 2 at the end of July, so I’ve only had my iPad 2 for about 3 weeks. I also have an iPhone 4, so picking up and using an iPad was effortless. Because of this, the iPad has set an awfully high bar in my mind.

After spending a little less than 24 hours with my new 32GB HP TouchPad, here are my thoughts:

Pros

• Palm/HP definitely got the packaging right. It’s the most Apple-like experience for any non-Apple product I’ve ever seen.
• webOS is gorgeous, with an emphasis on black/charcoal colors, the Prelude system font, and high-quality iconography derived from the circle shape (Palm owns the circle). If you believe (as I do) that a software environment should look as good as it works, webOS is fantastic.
• The TouchPad hardware is nice to the eyes and the touch. It has a sturdy (although somewhat plastic-y) feel to it.
• Neither Netflix nor Hulu are filtering the TouchPad’s user-agent string. Hulu seems to maintain a black list for devices (Hulu has to pro-actively block devices), while Netflix seems to maintain a white list for devices (Netflix has to pro-actively allow devices). While I can watch Hulu content on my TouchPad (which comes with Flash), I can’t watch Netflix content (which requires Silverlight).
• The bezel/cards UI is awesome.
• Built-in support for several third-party accounts, including Skype and Dropbox. While iOS (and Mac OS X Lion) also has this, webOS’s integration seems to go a lot deeper — specifically in being able to do a decent job of merging contacts together across the various services.
• The Facebook app (developed by Palm) beats the pants off of the phone-only iOS Facebook app. The closest competitor available for the iPad is an app called MyPad+.
• The Last.fm app is also designed for the TouchPad, easily beating the phone-only iOS Last.fm app.
• The photo app has built-in support for Facebook photos and videos built right in.
• The on-screen keyboard has digits as part of its first screen. You don’t need to tap shift to get to them.

Cons

• It’s a lot heavier than my iPad 2.
• The screen and iPhone 3G-ish style back attract fingerprints like its their job.
• The UI doesn’t track finger movements as quickly as iOS, so the touch/scroll responsiveness feels laggy compared to the iPhone 4 and iPad 2.
• Actually, the whole OS is a bit laggy. It’s as if it takes a moment to “spin-up” after I launch an application or switch from one screen to another.
• The TouchPad uses a non-standard Mini-USB cable, so my cache of leftover cables from my BlackBerry Pearl days are still as useless to me as they’ve been since I upgraded to the iPhone.
• It doesn’t seem to charge when connected to my computer, so I need to disconnect it, climb down underneath my desk, and plug it in to get it to charge.
• Ever heard of BeatsAudio? It’s the technology that powers the Beats by Dre headphone that are so freaking awesome. Yeah, not feeling it here. The iPad 2 speakers are better.
• The app selection is downright awful. All of the apps that I take for granted on iOS (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Twitter, Instapaper, Flipboard) are nowhere to be found on the HP App Catalog.
• While the photo app supports Facebook, it doesn’t support Flickr which is where I have a 6-year investment in photos.
• Although the webOS browser is based on WebKit (the same engine that powers Safari and Chrome on the desktop and the web browsers built into iOS, Android and Blackberry OS 6), it is much slower than those other devices. As a matter of fact, I’ve been trying to run through the Browserscope test suite for the past couple of hours and it’s still nowhere near complete.
• The UI doesn’t change between portrait and landscape modes. iOS understands that the portrait orientation is narrower than the landscape orientation, so it adjusts the UI accordingly (see Mail). In webOS, it simply takes the UI and squishes everything together in portrait orientation.
• Syncing sucks. Even with the HP Play software that you can download, it’s still a pretty awful syncing experience.

Conclusion

All-in-all, the TouchPad is a mixed bag.

I think that the core of the experience (i.e., webOS itself) is a good OS with lots of potential. Remember iPhone OS 1.0? Or even 2.0? webOS 3.0 is clearly a better user experience and I believe that with more resources, webOS could definitely be a contender in the mobile space.

Unfortunately, the rest of the experience is pretty poor. The hardware — while feeling and looking good — is too slow to be of any real use to anybody. The TouchPad doesn’t charge over USB from my computer (early 2011 MacBook Pro), and doesn’t support standard-sized Mini-USB cables. The selection of apps is so paltry that it only took me about 15 minutes to look through every single app in the entire store catalog.

Would I have paid $499 or $599 for one of these? Not a chance. How about at $100 off like they were last week? No way, José. But $150 for a 32 GB model still feels like a good deal. Maybe a touch high ($129 would feel like a more appropriate price), but I don’t really have any regrets about yesterday’s purchase.

A couple of years ago, the kids would play with mine and Sarah’s Nintendo DSs when we were all in the car. Unfortunately, we only had one copy of New Super Mario Bros. and they would constantly fight over who would get to play it. In the end, we decided to spend $40 on a second copy of the game. The result was the wonderful peace and quiet that came from two happy children playing video games in the back seat. Totally worth it.

Likewise, I bought the TouchPad primarily for the kids to play with so that they stop stealing my iPad from me. When we’re at home, one of them is typically playing video games in the living room while the other is playing with the iPad. I think it was money well-spent to have two movie/music/game-playing tablets available for trips and long car rides. My daughter, Julianna, is also getting to the age where a computer is starting to feel more appropriate, so I think that the TouchPad will be a great device for her.

If you’re looking for a tablet for yourself, though, I would definitely say to skip the TouchPad and every single Android Honeycomb device out there. Spend the $499 on an iPad instead. You’ll get a better value per dollar spent with an iPad than with anything else right now.

Epilogue: Side-by-side Photos

In this first photo, you can see their shapes. The TouchPad has a much larger border radius than the iPad. In both cases, the displays are nice and bright.

Here they are at a slightly different angle with the displays turned off.

Here is a comparison of their thicknesses. As you can see, the TouchPad is roughly twice as thick as the iPad 2.

(Photo credits: First photo by HP/Palm. Second and third photos by Sebastiaan de With. Fourth, fifth and sixth photos by Ryan Parman.)

Update: Micro-USB (2011-08-25)

Thanks to a comment below, I’ve learned that there is apparently a new USB port size du jour called Micro USB. The TouchPad uses the Micro-B flavor, which is why my Mini USB cables didn’t work. However, I would argue with the commenter’s assertion that Micro USB is “the primary standard for every single other device on the market.” I have plenty of other devices at my fingertips that don’t use Micro USB.

Update: Hulu (2011-08-25)

Over the past couple of days, Hulu has now added the TouchPad to their blacklist. Sorry, but no more Hulu for TouchPad users.

Update: Preware (2011-08-25)

Last night, while I was digging through webOS-related resources, I discovered Preware. Preware allows you to install homebrew apps, much like Cydia and Rock Your Phone for jailbroken iOS devices. The difference here is that because of the relaxed sandboxing that webOS uses, you don’t need to jailbreak anything to use it (Palm/HP is actually quite OK with this community).

As part of digging around, I found a write-up by Jeffrey Van Kamp of Digital Trends entitled “Got a slow HP TouchPad? Here are 3 easy ways to speed it up.” The first thing you learn is that webOS does a ton of logging in the background. While potentially useful for debugging, it also uses up a tremendous amount of system resources. The article discusses how to turn it off by enabling developer mode, installing Preware, and then installing a homebrew package that disables the logging. Also, if you’re interested in squeezing even more juice out of your TouchPad, the article also discusses how to overclock your TouchPad from 1.2 GHz to 1.5 GHz.

Another article by John Biehler entitled “How to install Preware onto your HP TouchPad on a Mac” suggests a few other packages you can install to improve the general responsiveness of webOS on the TouchPad. There are a few others you can install to just make life a little simpler as well. I chose to install the following patches:

• Advanced Reset Options
• Faster Card Animations HYPER Version
• Increase Touch Sensitivity and Smoothness 10
• Just Charge By Default
• Muffle System Logging
• Private Browsing
• Remove Tap Ripple
• Unthrottle Download Manager

That last one is interesting. I had wondered why downloads seemed so slow on the TouchPad compared to my iOS devices. As it turns out, webOS throttles download speeds down to 64 kbps. Applying the patch to unthrottle the download manager sped up my TouchPad downloads dramatically.

However, the 3D snake oil salesmen from Hollywood want you to believe that Apple is going to build this low-quality tech into their next iPad. Sylvie Barak, writing for RCRWireless, reporting about a rumored “glasses-free 3D” iPad 3:

“The fact that the iPad 3 is 3D is a dead cert,” one Hollywood insider close to the big movie studios told RCR, adding that the screen would be the real magic. She went on to say that the big film studios were currently running around like blue arsed flies trying to gear up to release plenty of 3D content in time for Apple’s next launch.

There’s only one problem with this rumor — well, only one that I’m going to point out: With the notable exception of James Cameron’s Avatar, 3D sucks, and Apple does not ship crap.

Eric Mack, writing for CNet, picked up the story and had this to say:

I’m left wondering if this anonymous source might actually be Charlie Sheen [...]

I’m left wondering exactly the same thing.

Snow Stacks

(Can’t see the video? Watch it directly.)

Image Fly

(Can’t see the video? Watch it directly.)

For starters, I’m an avid Mac user. I’ve spent many years on Mac and Windows systems, and I overwhelmingly prefer Mac. One of the biggest problems that I had as a Mac + BlackBerry user is that the syncing tools suck. PocketMac is a disaster, and the Mark/Space app (whatever it’s called) only works about one day per year. I ended up having to install the Google sync app on my BlackBerry and move my iCal calendars into Google Calendar, then re-import them with Google’s CalDAV support. A messy solution at best, and it still doesn’t solve the issue with my contacts.

iPhone 3G, however, syncs with my Mac flawlessly (as expected). Because I have a MobileMe account, my contacts and calendars sync within minutes (faster if I force a push). On top of that, I have all of my email accounts routed through Gmail, so the mail client’s IMAP support makes configuring and managing my email simple.

Beyond that, there are all of the custom apps that are available now that the iPhone OS 2.0 software went live. The apps I find myself using most (besides Contacts, Calendar, Phone, Safari, and iPod) are Brightkite, NetNewsWire, Things touch, Twitterrific, Apple Remote, Klick, TV Forecast, 1Password, Facebook, YPmobile, and nearly a dozen time-wasting games. I’ve even created a ringtone from the Dr. Horrible theme song.

All-in-all, I’m happy with the phone. The on-screen keyboard responds and auto-corrects as quickly as I can type, which makes typing MUCH faster than it was on my BlackBerry. The only irritation I have is that I can’t tether it to my MacBook Pro as a 3G modem without jail-breaking it. This is more due to AT&T’s policies than anything else. The only other thing is that I haven’t found the right setting yet in Handbrake or VisualHub to convert my DVDs into a format that works with both my Playstation 3 AND my iPhone at the same time. Let me know if you find the right combination of settings.

I give it five stars, over and over again.

1. Install MacFUSE. This is a Google project that allows you to mount other file systems on your desktop, including even things like SSH and FTP.
2. Install the NTFS-3G plugin for MacFUSE, which will allow us to not only read, but also write to NTFS drives.
3. Install the Mac OS X Developer Tools. They should be an optional install on the Mac OS X install disc, or I believe you can download them manually.
4. According to Garbage In, Garbage Out, simply copy-paste this line into your Terminal, and press Enter:

   /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /Volumes/Untitled; killall Finder;

Your Boot Camp drive icon should be hidden from your desktop, but may still show up in things like open/save dialogs.

Cinemanow bills itself as “the #1 legal movie download store” and sells movies a-la-carte, but for the same price, if not higher, in some cases, than actual DVDs, killing part of the incentive for purchasing a digital download.

Why would anyone want to spend more on a movie in a format that is significantly less flexible than a DVD? Yeah, I’m not sure either.

I flew from San Jose to Omaha last month, with a layover in Minneapolis. All-together I was on a plane for roughly 5 hours. I had my Powerbook, PSP, and iPod 5G with me. I had some videos I’d purchased from the iTMS on my iPod, and a couple of DVD’s for my Powerbook. While I was waiting for my flight to leave, I went to go find a UMD video to watch on the plane, since the iPod gets about 2 hours of battery life when playing video, and my Powerbook (with a 2-year-old battery) gets about 45 minutes of juice.

I walked up to the counter, looked at the selection, and found a couple that I’d've liked to watch. Then I saw the price: $32. Excuse me? Thirty-what? With a DVD, I can watch it on my TV, watch it on my computer, I can rip it to my iPod or PSP and watch it from there. With a UMD disc, I can only watch it on my PSP. Why would I want to do that? Since the format is so limited (along with any sort of “legal” (read: DRM’d) movie downloads from an online store), how on earth does it make sense to charge more for it? It doesn’t, and that’s why the format is failing. It isn’t because it’s a bad idea — it’s actually a very good idea — but they need to drop the cost to 50% of the price of a DVD.

Seriously, if most DVD’s are around $17-$22, then they should sell the UMD’s at $8-$12. Paying $30 for a 10-year-old movie is completely out of the question.

Sony (and all other movie companies), if you’re not willing to drop your prices on your UMD movies, then it’s definitely time for the format to go the way of the Aibo, Mini-Disc, BetaMax, ImageStation, Connect Music Store, and all of the “iPod Killers” you guys have had in the past.

If I’m interested in some new software whereby using it I’d have to change my habits (such as changing browsers, or text editors, or mail clients), I’ll install the new software and promise to use it for a week. If after that week I decide that I like it better than what I’m currently using, I’ll make the switch. I figure a week is a good chunk of time to try something out because any irritations and possible solutions for those irritations will have surfaced by the end of the week. I have faith in this system for myself, because this is how I found Mozilla 0.99, Firebird (later Firefox), Adium, Transmit, FlashFXP, Topstyle, and other constantly-used bits of software.

I’ve had my eye on Camino for a while, but I wanted to wait until it hit 1.0 (which happened last week) before I tried it out. Having a browser with the rendering engine of Firefox, but had an Aquafied UI was very tempting to me. Instead of switching between Safari (my default browser on my Mac) and Firefox (which I use for viewing the source of RSS feeds), I could switch between Camino and Safari; Two browsers that feel Mac-like. Unfortunately, I ended up finding more things about Camino that I don’t like, so Camino has now been uninstalled. Here’s why:

1. No support for extensions. You mean, no Firebug? No Gmail Notifier? No Greasemonkey? No Reveal? I might as well be using Internet Explorer then.
2. No DOM Inspector. If it’s there, I couldn’t find it. For someone who does as much development as I do, I need to have my DOM inpector and my JavaScript console… especially if I can’t run Firebug.
3. No live bookmarks. This is one of my most used features of Firefox, and to a certain extent Safari. I need to be able to have 1-click access to certain feeds from within my browser. Or at least the ability to detect them.

There are some things, however, that I really did like about it.

1. It’s crazy fast. A Gecko-based browser that’s as fast as Safari? Camino’s right there.
2. Favicons in the bookmarks bar. Mmmm… favicons….
3. Something else. I’m sure there was something else, but I just can’t think of it right now.

If you don’t care about any of these things, then I suppose Camino is as good a browser as any other. But it seems like Camino is roughly on par with Firebird 0.6. It can render pages just fine, and it’s got some speed to it, but it simply does not yet have the feature set to make it a viable alternative for web developers. Maybe Camino 2.0 will have the features it needs to compete, but Camino 1.0 simply isn’t there yet.

And it’s all a matter of money. Stupid lawsuits brought on by stupid lawyers are really dragging our legal system through the mud, not to mention using up my tax dollars to do it. Maybe Apple really should discontinue sales to stupid people…

Okay, so have I ever mentioned how cool my wife is? Yeah. I had my 26th birthday last week, and when I got home that night, I had one of these awesome little toys waiting for me. The 60GB model. Yeah.

But that one was broken.

So I exchanged it for a new one, and that one has been awesome. Combine that with Tivo, Tivo AutoPilot, and a few hours of patience, and I was watching Tivo’d episodes of Alias, Lost, Veronica Mars, and the Mind of Mencia on my iPod the next day (which came in handy because I had a lot of riding-in-a-car to do that day).

I seriously have the best wife ever.

This has actually been up for about a year, but was never made public. This is where the Standalone Internet Explorers, latest Firefox releases, and other bits of software will live too. Actually, part of my goal for this is to be an unofficial mirror for the Firefox 1.5 release.

There’s lots more to come in the coming weeks. Some of it will be old stuff with a fresh face, others will be new things all together. And I’ll finally have a place to showcase all of the Ajax demos I’ve worked on over the past few months.

At the moment, I have the latest copies of the Macromedia Studio 8 Trials, Nero 6.6 Ultra trials, OpenOffice 2.0, and more. Have fun!

I found these floating around online, and presumably they’ll be free at some point, so I think it would be reasonable to assume that it’s okay to pass these around. I didn’t see anything in the zip file to tell me otherwise, so that’s what I’m going to believe. If someone at Microsoft has a problem with this, let me know and I’ll pull them offline.

« Update » It was suggested to me that it would be wise to remove these links. I’ve decided to heed that advice. Sorry folks!

I have tons of clippings from old Mac magazines like MacAddict (back when they were still edgy and cool) still plastered on walls and binders left over from high school. To name a few:

• [MacAddict] Fighting back for the Mac – 225 MHz! “Let’s kick Intel’s ass…”
• [Power Computing] We lost our license for speeding… (the last ad due to Apple’s purchase of Power Computing and subsequent revocation of the Mac Clone license)
• [Apple] Mac OS 8: An operating system so advanced, it could only come from Apple.
• [MacWeek] Have a look at Apple’s new system… Mac OS 8 (with screenshots of the ill-fated Copland project)
• [MacWorld] BeOS: Apple’s Next Operating System

When I heard the news that Apple really was switching to Intel — and not just Intel, but Intel x86 — I felt completely deflated… sick to my stomach even. PowerPC’s are awesome processors, and Apple has invested a ton time and energy into this architecture, but although the switch was a surprise to some (including me), it’s not all that far-fetched.

NeXTStep (including OPENSTEP, Rhapsody, and the Mach Microkernel) ran on multiple architectures including PowerPC, Intel x86, SPARC, and even the old Motorola 680×0. Although Apple “officially” discontinued the x86 development after Rhapsody DP2, we now know they didn’t. NeXTStep (which Mac OS X is a direct relative to) was built to be cross-platform after NeXT moved from PowerPC hardware to x86 back in the 1990′s.

Now, having the Mac OS run on an Intel chip has been long-rumored since the days of the Star Trek project, and since that project was abandoned then we know that running Classic on x86 isn’t going to happen. Although I’m a bit disappointed about Apple leaving the PowerPC (which is really Motorola and IBM’s fault), I must say how impressed I am that Mac OS X runs so well on a Pentium 4, and I think that it’ll be interesting to see how this transition plays out for Apple and all of us Mac users.

Actually, this isn’t even the first time we’ve seen the “little checkbox thingie” that Steve Jobs mentioned when discussing the compiling of applications for both architectures. We saw this feature in Rhapsody builds of Project Builder (left over from the NeXTStep days, and was later was renamed Xcode). See for yourself:

The only remaining questions I have (being the detail-oriented, organized person I am) is what on earth are they going to call the new systems? The G-series has always been a PowerPC nomenclature. G6? Gi686? Gx86? PowerMac²? We’ll have to wait and see.

Since the last time I talked about my Tiger experience, I’ve reinstalled Tiger using the “Archive and Install” option as opposed to the “Simple Install” option I used the first time. This cleared up my problem of the phantom ClamAV user account I’d mentioned before. As a bit of context, I have a 1.33 GHz 17-inch PowerBook G4 with 1GB RAM.

Tiger Features and Applications

Safari 2:

Super, super, super fast. Far and away the fastest browser I’ve ever worked with (Firefox Deer Park Alpha 1 for OSX is second fastest). It’s also standards-compliant so I never have to worry about how sites are going to look switching between Safari, and my Windows browser of choice, Firefox. I’m also running the current nightly build of Safari, thanks to the recent open-source release by Apple of the WebKit CVS repositories compiled with Xcode 2.1.

I’ve left Safari set as the default RSS reader on my system (so that clicking on the RSS icon will allow me to read selected feeds in Safari RSS), although in reality I still use NetNewsWire synced with Bloglines (which, in turn, syncs with FeedDemon on my Windows machine).

Tiger Mail (Mail 2):

Tiger Mail is not too shabby. I switched from Thunderbird to Panther Mail back in April in anticipation of a smooth transition to Tiger Mail. Everything has gone flawlessly since the move. Smart folders have made my email organization much more productive.

Now, for all of you complaining about the new UI in Tiger Mail, quit complaining. If your beef is with the violation of Apple’s own Human Interface Guidelines, fine. But from an aesthetic point of view, Tiger Mail looks a lot better than earlier versions of Mail.

Spotlight:

I use this feature constantly. For any application that isn’t in my Dock, it’s just a command-space away. But the normal Spolight search, although useful, isn’t as helpful as the new Spotlight-powered Smart Folders.

Smart Folders:

I’m a neat, organized person, who likes to keep all of my applications and utilities organized away in intelligent groups and subfolders within the Applications folder. The main problem with this is using Software Update, as most Apple applications won’t update if they aren’t currently residing in their Apple-approved homes. In other words, Apple’s “application dump” style organization goes head-to-head with my neat-freak organization style.

So, I decided to do the next best thing: Create a “Smart Applications” folder where I run all of my apps from, that I can keep organized however I want. I dumped all of my apps into the Applications folder, and all of my utilities into /Applications/Utilities/. Then, I tagged the Spotlight comments of each item with a special code (@org-utilities-network, @org-graphics), appropriate for the group(s) I wanted the app to be associated with. From there, I created Smart Folders for each group of applications, telling them to only search in the Applications folder, rather than the whole drive. This speeds up performance considerably.

Automator

Organizing all of my apps this way by hand would have been a total pain, but Automator made it a piece of cake. After taking the time to build the appropriate Automator app, I was able to just drag-and-drop whole folders of applications and have all of the items set with the appropriate Spotlight comments.

I also have a bit of repetitive image manipulation that I do rather frequently. It used to take forever to do each image manually with Fireworks, but now, I just drop a folder of images onto my Automator app, go get a glass of milk, come back and it’s done! Brilliant!

The only thing missing for me is the Automator equivalent of Folder Actions from Mac OS 9. I want to be able to fire an Automator action on an item whenever that item gets dropped on a folder. Anyone know how to do that?

iChat 3:

Still haven’t used it much, but I’m planning to give it an honest go-round. Adium and Gaim don’t seem to write my buddy lists back to the server correctly, so my iChat buddy list is all messed up. I need to fix that.

Burnable Folders:

Finally, a better way to burn data CD’s. Instead of having the Finder copy all of the files I want to burn to a temporary folder, it simply creates aliases, then resolves them during the burn. This allows the whole CD burning process to go much faster on Tiger.

Due to this limitation in Panther, I began using a nifty little app called Burnz. Burnz was a lifesaver during the Panther days. Since my car stereo plays MP3 CD’s, I burn a lot of them, and Tiger just made it easier for me.

iCal 2:

I honestly have no idea what the difference is between iCal 1.5.5 and iCal 2.0, but hey, as long as it works. The only problem that I’ve had is that in Panther, I was able to sync my calendars with a PHPiCalendar installation. Now, it doesn’t work anymore. I can, however, sync with .Mac.

iSync 2:

Before I got my new Motorola v330 phone, I just used iSync to occasionally sync my contacts and calendars to my iPod.

After I got my phone, I found out that with a little hacking, iSync will support my new phone. I did the hackjob, and it worked. So, I synced all of the phone numbers between my computer and my phone. Problem was, I ended up with double numbers in my phone (as I already had many of my contacts in there), and nothing new in my Address Book.

So, I deleted all of the numbers in my phone and decided to start over fresh. Big mistake. Between the two devices, the most recent modified date was on my phone, so when I synced, I wiped out all of the phone numbers I had in my entire world. This was a sad, sad day. It toook me about 8 hours worth of phone calls and digging through my wife’s Palm to get all of my numbers back. I finally realized that I had a month-old backup on my iPod, so I was able to pull most numbers from there. iSync saving me from iSync.

Now, iSync and I are friends again. Couple that with BluePhoneElite, and I’m a happy camper.

.Mac:

I had an iTools account back in 1999 or 2000. That expired back when Apple changed iTools to .Mac and started charging a subscription fee. Nowadays, I use this about 95% for syncing and about 5% for using the iDisk to exchange data between my personal PowerBook and my work PC.

QuickTime 7:

The coolest thing about QuickTime 7 is the super-huge trailers available from the HD QuickTime Gallery. Beyond that, the improvements are completely lost on me. It’s awesome to see fantastic clarity when I play an HD trailer in full-screen without it looking like crap.

Address Book:

As with Panther, I use my Address Book constantly. It was a huge help when I wiped out all of my phone numbers (read the iSync section above). I created a set of Smart Groups that listed people in my Address Book that were (are) missing entries for phone number, address, IM name, etc., so I always know who I need to pester about getting information from.

Unified Theme:

I’m a big fan of OSX’s “Aqua” theme, paticularly Panther’s Aqua. On the other hand, I can’t stand “Brushed Metal”. I think it’s a horrible theme, and should be killed. So when Apple came up with the “Unified” theme (which I’ve referred to as “toolbar-in-titlebar” in the past), I was pleasantly surprised.

Unified is basically a “smooth metal” version of Aqua. It takes the toned-down pinstripes of Panther, the multicolored close/minimize/resize buttons and throbbing blue buttons of Aqua, and combines it with a sleek metallic toolbar-in-title bar look. I think it’s fantastic, and I’m a big fan.

I think that from here, Apple should add system-level theming — much like the feature of Copland that didn’t quite make it into Tempo, although all the architecture was already in place. The preference panel would allow users to choose whether they want Classic Aqua (Jaguar and older), New Aqua (Panther), Brushed Metal (iTunes and Safari), Pro (Apple’s Pro line of applications), or Unified (Tiger-style Aqua). This setting would persist across all applications in the OS, so that all apps would have a consistent look across the board (much like the UI consistency in Mac OS 9 or Windows XP).

A good overview of the “many faces of Mac OS X” can be found at Rob’s Observatory.

System Performance:

Tiger made my PowerBook feel snappier after the Simple Install I did, but it feels even faster after the Archive and Install I did two weeks ago. Beyond all Microsoftian comprehension, Tiger runs faster on the same hardware compared to Panther. How sweet is that?

Any Problems?

Just two. Sometimes my phone doesn’t sync right unless I turn it off then back on again. I think that has more to do with the fact that my phone isn’t officially supported by iSync yet.

The second is that I can’t browse to my Windows SMB shares without locking up the Finder. I can connect via IP, but not by browsing to the share. I’m hoping that this will be fixed in 10.4.2 coming up this week or next.

What has Tiger enabled me to do over Panther?

• Organize my apps and utilities more intelligently
• Launch (almost) any app, (almost) straight from the desktop
• Save myself from myself with iSync, .Mac, and Address Book
• Save time and stay organized better by automating several repetitive tasks
• Burn data CD’s faster
• Sync devices and data easily and automatically
• Watch full-screen trailers that actually look good full-screen
• Surf the web at blazing speeds with incredible response time
• Organize my email more intelligently
• More stuff that I just can’t think of right now.

At this point, I’d say that any “laggards” that haven’t yet upgraded to Tiger should do so ASAP. Once you figure out how to make features like Spotlight and Automator work for you, you’ll be amazed by what all you can accomplish.

Depending on your phone’s level of compatibility with Bluetooth and such, you can:

1. Have an alert show up on your screen when someone calls you, listing their name, phone number, and picture — pulled straight from your Address Book!
2. Send SMS messages straight from your computer!
3. Show you your signal strength and remaining battery life in either your dock, your menubar, or both!

Now, my Motorola v330 isn’t officially supported by iSync or BluePhoneElite. However, I hacked in support for my phone into iSync 2.0 last week. When I installed BluePhoneElite, it picked my phone right up — no problems.

Very, very cool.

After reading MacWorld articles about the new system back in 2000, I actually remember seeing these screenshots. Does this look familiar to you?

Heh… old skool. Just for copyright’s sake, these images are from Ars Technica. Follow the links below to read about the growth in each successive version of Mac OS X.

1. Rhapsody (Mac OS X Developer Preview 2)
2. Rhapsody (Mac OS X Developer Preview with Aqua)
3. Mac OS X Public Beta
4. Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah)
5. Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma)
6. Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)
7. Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)
8. Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

If you (1) have Tiger, (2) are looking for an iCal Widget, or (3) haven’t already purchased Konfabulator 2 (which includes a state-of-the-art iCal Widget), you should definitely give this one a try. iCal Events.

Thanks so much for the widget, Ben!

« Update » Ben has asked me to remove my customized version of his widget. If you want to make the changes yourself, you can open the widget package, edit the CSS file, change all references of Helvetica to Verdana, and fiddle with some of the font sizes so that everything fits nicely.

1. Video Playback Option: In the advanced preferences, there’s an option for how video files should be displayed. Can we look forward to movies in iTunes 5?
2. “Now Playing” Artwork: I’ve been looking for an AppleScript to do this for a while, but never found one. In the album art preview pane, there’s a little arrow that allows you to see the album art of the currently playing track (assuming you’ve added it of course). Granted you need to have a lot of your album art in place for this to be useful, and I do. Yippee!
3. Digital Rights Enablers: iTunes 4.8 doesn’t take away my fair use rights that I’ve enabled with JHymn… which is good, because this is a deal-breaker for me.

Anyone else have any thoughts to this minor iTunes update?

What do we need?

Before we get started, we need to make sure that we have everything we need:

1. Either a Windows 2000/XP PC or a Mac running OSX
2. A TV (which I think just about everyone has)
3. A Networked TiVo Series2 with system software 7.1 or better
4. iTunes
5. TiVo2Go Software (Mac or PC)
6. iSee iTunes software (Mac or PC)
7. Airport Express
8. Speakers of some sort that are connected to your Airport Expres

This next part is the initial setup that you’ll need for the method that I’m about to explain.

Prepping your TiVo

If you haven’t already, you’ll want to begin by connecting your TiVo to your home network. You can get started by going over the TiVo Network Setup Instructions. This will involve purchasing either a wired or wireless (11 Mbps; 802.11b) network adapter for your TiVo. If you’re going wireless, remember to allow 802.11b devices on your network, and understand that TiVo only understands WEP security — not the newer WPA. I was ready to rip my hair out over this before I figured out what the problem was.

Next you’ll need to get system software version 7.1 (or newer) installed. Assuming you know how to work a TiVo, go into the System Settings screen and check what software version you have. If it’s older than v7.1, you’ll have to request the update. It can take up to 3 days for your TiVo to receive the software update.

After you’ve got version 7.1 or newer installed, you have to enable a hidden mode called the HME mode (which I think stands for Home Media Entertainment, although I could be completely wrong). Instructions taken from this page are as follows:

You can tell that HME is activated if on the Main TiVo Screen the “Music & Photos” menu option is now called “Music, Photos & More”.

You will need to re-enable HME every time your TiVo Reboots.

If HME isn’t already enabled on your Tivo running Software verson 7.x or above go all the way into the System Infomation screen and enter CLEAR-CLEAR-0-0 on your remote (there will be no direct feedback that it did anything).

Return to the Main TiVo Screen and you should see “Music, Photos & More” listed.

Prepping your computer

Go ahead and connect the Airport Express to your home network, if you haven’t already. The instructions for that are outside the scope of this posting. Connect your speakers (home stereo or surround sound system, preferably) to your Airport Express.

Launch the iSee iTunes application and allow it to start up. On Mac OS X, I had to open a port to make it all work properly. Open up the “Sharing” System Preference, and go to the “Firewall” tab. Create a new entry called “iSee iTunes” (or whatever you want to name it), and set the port value to 7288. Hopefully it’s the same on your system. If not, you can run Rendezvous Browser (OSX-only) to find what port iSee iTunes is wanting to run on.

Bringing It All Home

Launch iTunes, and start playing the music through your Airport Express to your home stereo (or whatever you’re using to play the audio through). I assume that it will be in the same room as your TiVo’d TV (since that would make the most sense).

Turn on your TV, and bring up the TiVo main menu. Choose “Music, Photos & More”, and then “iSee iTunes on <server name>“. When the iSee iTunes menu comes up, choose the “Now Playing” option, and iSee iTunes will display the track name, artist, rating, and album art on your TV. The forward and back buttons work the Next/Previous track in iTunes. You can even pause as necessary.

There! You now have your music playing on your home stereo and a visual layout of the track info and album art all together. (Almost-)instant Home Media Center!

Alternate Method

An alternative method that I’ve tried out worked well since I have a PC and TiVo’d TV in my bedroom, and I have some 5.1 Surround speakers connected to my Windows XP machine. I launched iTunes, iSee iTunes, and Nicecast on my Powerbook. I broadcast a signal (via Nicecast) to iTunes on my PC, and had the audio play through my fancy speakers. Meanwhile, I used iSee iTunes to display the cool music info on my TV screen. Not quite as fancy, but still works well.

Luckily I didn’t have any kind of earth-shattering problems. The only problems I’ve had so far are minor annoyances — nothing I wouldn’t expect from a point-oh release… but I’ll get to those later. Let’s go over some of the features.

Discussion of Features

Here’s my experience with the most notable new “features” of Tiger.

Spotlight:

Post-install, it only took about 20 minutes to index about 60GB of data on my 1.33 GHz 17″ Powerbook G4 with 1GB RAM. Not bad. I’ve spent a little bit of time playing with it, and it seems like query results are cached because subsequent searches for the same query are much faster the second time around. I’ve heard people complaining about the moving “Top Hit” while the results come back, but that just plain makes sense. AJAX anyone? Hello? Asynchronous?

Dashboard:

Still looking for the be-all-end-all widget, but it’s been very useful already. Weather is usually pretty bi-polar this time of year, so the weather widget has been cool. After hacking the phonebook widget, it’s also proven useful already.

Other cool widgets are: Air Traffic Control, Album Art (a complement to the iTunes widget), Bloglines Notifier, Capture, iTunes Connection Monitor (if you share your music on a network), JiWire (for finding wireless hotspots; US-only?), NowPlaying (for your networked TiVo), Transmit widget (drag-and-drop FTP), Whoisdget (a whois querier), and Yahoo! Traffic. Most of these you can get from Apple’s Dashboard page, but others you can probably Google for.

Another point is made about the potential for destructive widgets and a new form of adware/spyware on the Mac platform. It’s worth a read.

I still have Konfabulator installed, however. Konfabulator has the ability to display widgets on-screen at all times (which is useful with the iCal Events widget). It also has a much larger library of widgets than Dashboard. Konfabulator will definitely be around on my system for a long time to come.

iChat 3:

Still can’t get on the other popular protocols, so it’s of little use to me. I use Adium primarily on my Mac (Gaim on Windows). iChat opens multiple buddy lists for Jabber and AIM protocols, which is pretty annoying. It also still doesn’t support tabbed windows. *sigh*. I’d like to say that the upside is that audio/video conferencing is pretty awesome, but I haven’t the chance to try it with anybody yet. Ah well.

Safari 2:

Super-freaking-fast. The RSS features are cool too, but since the new beta of NetNewsWire now supports Bloglines (like Feed Demon does), that’s my current RSS reader of choice. It does, however, also tie into Tiger’s new RSS Screensaver. Check it out! Also, you can swap Safari’s Brished Metal appearance for the new Tiger titlebar-in-toolbar theme using Safari Unify.

Mail 2:

Eh. That’s about all I can say. The new interface is slick, but doesn’t match anything else in the system, which is generally bad UI practice. Apple needs to pick one UI (Aqua, Brushed Metal, Mail 2, or Tiger’s new titlebar-in-toolbar theme) and just stick with it… period.

The addition of Smart Folders is a huge plus for me. I get tons of email everyday, so setting up various smart folders has been a big help. Good job with the system-level searching system, Apple.

QuickTime 7:

I like the HD trailers made possible by the new H.264 format, but other than that it seems to be the same as every other QuickTime release since 3.0.

Address Book and iCal 2:

There aren’t enough good things I can say about iCal, and Address Book has always been a helpful utility. Now you can add birthdays from the Address Book to iCal automatically, which is helpful. I used to sync my calendars to a PHPiCalendar installation, but that doesn’t seem to be working for me anymore for some reason.

Address Book now supports Smart Groups which I’m currently using to let me know who has a birthday coming up in the next month. I’m sure I’ll do more with it in time, I just haven’t yet.

Overall System Performance:

The Tiger feels a bit snappier than Panther did… at least when running Apple applications. Most of the other apps feel about the same, but I’m sure newer versions will be faster as they’re built using Tiger API’s and such.

Other Stuff:

Apple lists over 200 new features on the Tiger site — some of which I’ve played with and others I’ve not. Many of them aren’t particularly news-worthy though.

Problems So Far

There are a few quirks that I’ve run into thus far. Hopefully they’ll be fixed in 10.4.1 due out soon.

New ClamAV User:

For some reason, I now have a second user listed on my login screen (I’m only supposed to have one). The name is clamav, which is the name of some open-source antivirus software being bundled with Tiger Server (no, I don’t have Tiger Server… just Tiger). However, I did have the ClamAV software installed prior to upgrading to Tiger.

Visiting the ClamAV FAQ, I see the following:

How do I remove the clamav account from my MacOSX server 10.4 (Tiger)?

The clamav user was set up by Apple and we don’t know anything about it.

What is the password for the clamav user on MacOSX server 10.4 (Tiger)?

The clamav user was set up by Apple who has not told us the password they use, please contact Apple support for help. You may find that sudo password clamav in a terminal session helps to change the password, however we cannot support the option.

Windows SMB Sharing:

I can still connect to my Windows shares by typing in the IP address, but using the browse utility causes Finder to hang and crash. That’s no good.

My Menubar Clock is in the Wrong Place:

Minor annoyance, but annoying nonetheless.

Wrap Up

So that’s it! Overall my experience has been pretty positive. If you haven’t upgraded yet, and features like Spotlight and Dashboard aren’t compelling enough to upgrade at the moment, I’d say to wait until 10.4.1 or 10.4.2 comes out. Don’t get me wrong… you should definitely upgrade, but hopefully some of the minor quirks will be worked out in an upcoming point-release.

Now, there’s no easy way to import your Thunderbird email into Apple Mail. After about 30 minutes of Google searching, I came across the simplest way to convert my mailbox from one client to another. After the initial import, it took some tweaking to get everything organized the way I wanted it, but overall it was a relatively simple process considering that there is absolutely no Thunderbird import feature. Hopefully, when my copy of Tiger comes in, the upgrade will be smooth and I’ll be able to immediately take advantage of the new Mail 2.0 features.

In terms of my web browser, I’ve been using Omniweb 5.1 for the last few months. I liked the side-tab layout as well as the per-site settings that Omniweb offered, but after hearing about all of the speed improvements in Safari 1.3, I had to give it another whirl.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Safari 1.3 flies! That, and for some reason, things just look a little nicer and a little smoother in Safari. Don’t even get me started on Firefox for OSX. Firefox for OSX is about as ugly as Netscape 4.x for Windows 95. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but it’s still pretty ugly on OSX.

Back to the point, I went ahead and re-imported my bookmarks back into Safari, and reset it as my default browser in OSX. The new features in Safari 2.0 will be awesome, I think, and hopefully Firefox 1.1 will get its long-awaited “Aquification”.

Anyways, my copy of Tiger is on track to be shipped on April 29th. Is yours?

Now, I feel like a bit of a bonehead for not figuring this out earlier considering how much networking I’ve done over the last few years, but I’m thrilled that I finally figured out how to print a document from my wireless Powerbook to the printer connected to my Windows XP desktop.

First off, here’s how everything was setup and configured, before I tweaked it all to do what I wanted it to:

1. The phone cord comes out of the wall, and into the DSL modem (well, duh). The modem has a built-in, non-configurable IP of 192.168.0.1.
2. The DSL modem plugs into my 4-port wired Linksys router, which then splits the internet signal. The router’s address is 192.168.0.2, and that keeps things simple.
3. From the router, slot 1 plugs into my desktop PC running Windows XP, and assigns an IP (range of 192.168.0.4 – 192.168.0.10) via DHCP.
4. Slot 2 is a loose wire that plugs into my laptop when I’m sitting at my desk. This also gets assigned an IP within the same range listed above (of course).
5. Slot 3 is connected to a cable that runs from my bedroom where my PC is into the living room where I keep my TV, video games, surround sound system, and namely my Airport Express, which allows me to listen to my music on my surround sound system, and gives me a better wireless signal when I’m in that part of the house. The Airport Express is manually assigned 192.168.0.3, and spits out IP addresses in the 192.168.1.x range.

Most things worked great. I could get on the internet all right, I could connect to my printer, as well as my PC’s share when I was plugged in with the loose cable from slot 2, but not when I was wireless. It’s been kind of a pain at times, but nothing too huge.

This weekend, I found myself needing to print something from the living room, but couldn’t, and didn’t feel like disconnecting my printer from the back of my PC and plugging it into my Mac. So I decided to do some fiddling.

To tell the truth, I’d've probably just left it alone had I not had an idea of what to do (you like my double-contraction there, don’t you? “I’d've.” You know you do…). I got tipped off by reading somewhere about iTunes playlist sharing, which I do at work regularly. <gloat>Well, really, most people share from me as I have the largest MP3 collection at work so far with over 5000 legit songs.</gloat> But what I read was that it used to work via any IP, but because some people were irresponsible with it (stealing music), Apple restricted this functionality to those network users on the same subnet.

Hmmm… now I know that it isn’t exactly the same as having subnet, but what if I changed the settings on my Airport Express to assign IP’s in the same range (192.168.0.x) as my wired router? I figured I’d give it a try, and sure enough, it worked. After setting my Airport Express to assign IP’s in the 192.168.0.200 – 192.168.0.254 range, I was (finally) able to see my PC’s shared resources without having to manually type in a specific IP address. I added the shared printer with no problems, and am finally able to print wirelessly from my Mac to my PC’s desk printer.

So kids, that’s the trick. If you’re at home with 254 or less IP-needing devices (I believe that 192.168.0.255 is reserved for something or another), you can tell your routers to assign certain ranges of IP’s all in the same happy little group.

I hope this can help at least one person out there someday.

Normally, I don’t post about the latest updates to the Mac operating system, but this time is special. This is the most special of all updates because it fixes the two major problems that I’ve had ever since I bought my Powerbook G4 over the summer.

1. “…a problem in which, on rare occasions, a PowerBook G4 would wake from sleep with a black screen and not respond to keyboard or mouse input” which I have been a victim of at least 50 times since June, and…
2. “…also deals with ‘jumping cursor’ issues that might occur while using one’s thumb or the side of one’s thumb to navigate on a laptop Mac”, which has also plagued me time and time again since I bought my Powerbook.

Apple’s “geniuses” haven’t ever been able to figure out why this has been happening to my Powerbook. Now it’s fixed! I’m so happy!

…which was rather clever, I thought. As I got towards the bottom of the page however, I began to laugh out loud much to my co-workers’ bewilderment. This is what I read:

It’s an amazing world we live in, isn’t it?

Introducing my new iSight. With the 15 minutes I’ve had to play with it, it’s very cool, and will make chatting my long distance friends even better. I called my best friend Eric to see if he was home and could come online so that I could see this thing in action, but he wasn’t home. Grrr… I want to play.

The only drawback I currently see is that it doesn’t work with Adium. But using iChat AV isn’t a big deal either. I just have to switch chat apps, that’s all.

I’m sure I’ll be writing more about it as I get more and more chances to play with it. If you’ve got an iSight, tell me what you think of it. Is there any cool stuff I should try? Maybe I could even get a chance to voice/video-chat with some of you out there (scary! — my wife says that I can’t talk to any naked hot females though. *frump*)

First an iPod, then a PowerBook, now an iSight. What’s next? I’m gonna shoot for a dual 2.5 GHz PowerMac G5 with 8GB RAM, 500GB of hard drive space, and an nVidia 6800 Ultra powering a new 30″ cinema display. Please excuse me while I wet myself.

Anyways, thanks for reading. I’m gonna leave now to go show my wife how cool I think she really is… *grin*

When used with AirPort Express the Express Remote provides a powerful way to locally control music being streamed from iTunes on a remote PC or Mac.

It’s due to be released in November sometime. I think I’m gonna get one. Let’s just hope that it’s everything it seems to be.

• Windows Installer
• Mac OS X Disk Image
• Linux Installer

The Mac platform just doesn’t work the same. I suppose I could just leave the app open, but I have a habit of quitting apps when I’m done with them. Because it always takes Firefox so much longer to start up than Safari, usually I just use Safari for normal surfing, and only open Firefox if I need to do something that requires better JavaScript/DOM/XML/Whatever support than Safari provides.

But today I came across something very, very cool. Firefox builds that are optimized for the PowerBook G4. Instead of waiting the usual 6-7 Dock bounces for Firefox to start up, it only takes one, and everything else about it is significantly faster than the default builds.

I came across the forum for optimized builds over at MozillaZine.org. Here is some linkage:

• Firefox optimized for OSX on a G4.
• Firefox optimized for Panther (OSX 10.3.x) on a G5
• Other Firefox builds optimized for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Firefox is now running zippier than ever on my PowerBook. I hope these’ll help you out!

Also, for those using Panther, v10.3.5 is now available from Software Update. The only problem is that it doesn’t set the disk permissions properly. To fix this, go into Applications » Utilities » Disk Utility, and choose to repair permissions. Voila!

My biggest issue is just wanting to play the music that I’ve purchased anywhere I want. Hymn is a very good DRE (digital rights enabler) for iTunes Music Store files.

The first is Gaim. Gaim is an IM client for Windows/Linux that can log into AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, and others. I know that a lot of people use Trillian, and it already does that. Two features that make me suggest Gaim over Trillian are: (1) You can give people real names (you can set aliases), rather than being stuck with screen names. (2) You can group multiple screen names together as a single person. This is very helpful if some of your buddies have multiple screen names, or are logged on to multiple services at once. Instead of listing your best friend 5 times, you only see them once in your buddy list. Very handy.

The next is Adium X. Adium X is an IM client for Mac OS X. It is very customizable, and the development team seems to want to create a fun product… which is what they’ve done. You can customize sound sets, smileys, IM message display, the Dock icon, and a few other things.

For RSS readers, I’d suggest Feed Demon for Windows and Pulp Fiction for Mac OS X. Both of them cost money, but they both seem to be worth it. I’ve been using Feed Demon since November, and absolutely love it. I just started using Pulp Fiction tonight, but it’s already better than Shrook and NetNewsWire Lite. There’s a 15 day trial for PF, so I’d recommend checking it out.

Flash FXP is a terrific FTP client for Windows. I used to use CuteFTP and FTP Voyager, and Flash FXP is far better than both. Transmit was recommended on Whitespace a couple of months back for Mac OS X. I gave it a try, and I love it.

That’s enough promoting for tonight. I’m going to bed. G’nite.

After two days, my memory chip came in and I went to install it. I opened up my PowerBook manual, and read that I’d need a Philips screwdriver, size double-zero. Essentially, the smallest screwdriver ever created in the history of the world. Reading through the page in the manual, I came across the following warning:

Warning: Apple recommends having a specialized Apple technician install new memory into your PowerBook G4 laptop computer.

…or something to that effect. Digging through my toolbox, I pulled out the smallest screwdriver I had. It was still too big. My internet wasn’t working at that particular moment, so I couldn’t go online to look up screwdrivers of that size.

I opened up the phone book and started looking up computer places that might have screwdrivers that small for laptops. Of the big computer stores, CompUSA doesn’t answer their phones and the people at Fry’s Electronics are dumber than a box of bricks. I called a few of the smaller local stores to no avail.

I thought about calling up hardware stores that specialize in screwdrivers. Home Depot couldn’t figure out what I was talking about, but Orchard Supply Hardware (OSH) did. Luckily they were right around the corner from me, so I took the minute-and-a-half trek over there to see what they had. After about 20 minutes of digging, I found a Philips screwdriver, size double-zero. I bought it, took it home, and sat down again with my laptop. Still too big.

I called up the Apple Store at Valley Faire Mall in Santa Clara, CA. They said that they could install the memory for a $30 fee, and that they were open until 9:30pm. Reluctantly, I got into my car and drove the 25+ minutes to the mall, parked, and walked into the Apple Store which was clear across the mall from where I’d parked.

Walking up to the “Genius Bar”, I saw one person in line ahead of me, so I sat down in a chair and waited. After the guy ahead was finished, he left, and I walked up to the bar. “I’m sorry sir,” the Genius told me, “but have you checked in?”

“Checked in?” I replied.

“Yes. You can go to any of the computers along the wall, double-click the Genius Bar icon, and fill in your information.”

“Okay,” I said. I walked over to a computer by the wall, double-clicked the Genius Bar icon, and filled out the webpage form. The webpage told me that the next available appointment was at 8:45pm. This was at 8:31pm. I walked back over to the Genius Bar, and the Genius told me it would be a few minutes. Nobody was in line, but apparently since my “appointment” was at 8:45, then by golly I was going to wait until 8:45.

At 8:45, the Genius asked what he could do for me. I told him that the information in the PowerBook manual was incorrect. The double-zero screwdriver was too small. And although I’m perfectly capable of installing my own RAM chip, I can’t find the appropriate tools anywhere, so I’m stuck coughing up $30 to have them do it. He looked at my PowerBook, then at my Crucial.com RAM box, then at me. “I’m sorry sir, but we can’t install that RAM.”

“Why not?!” I asked, clearly fuming from irritation.

“We can only install memory that you buy here, and we can’t allow anyone to use our tools. That’s our policy.”

“Wait a sec,” I began. “I’ve been using Macs for 12 years. I’ve spent much of the last 12 years evangelizing for Apple. I’ve successfully convinced 22 people to buy Mac over PC in the last, oh, 7 years. At around $2000 per computer, we’re looking at $44,000 that I have put into Apple’s hand… not including people that might have bought Apple later on that I don’t know about. In the last four months, I have personally given Apple $3400 of my hard-earned cash — not credit — cash that I spent several months saving up, I’m trying to pay you money for a task that I am perfectly capable of doing myself, and you won’t let me borrow a microscopic screwdriver for five freaking minutes because I decided to pay $120 for a RAM chip that costs $400 from the Apple Store — because of some stupid policy?!”

“Yessir. That’s right.”

Even as a Christian, I found it difficult to not reach across the Genius Bar and rip his larynx out of his throat while swearing like a sailor who just smashed his finger with a hammer.

“Then do you know of anyone, anyone, who has a screwdriver that is the right size?”

“Well, you’ll want to check out some of the jewelry stores here in the mall. They should have something of that size.”

For the next 45 minutes, I walked from jewelry store to jewelry store, asking the rich women at the counter for a screwdriver and getting nothing but strange looks or blank stares. Apparently, jewelers only have flathead screwdrivers, and not Philips.

Finally, I came across a Lens Crafters eyeglass store. I went through the process of explaining how small the mythical screwdriver is that I need, and was wondering of they either sold them or would let me borrow one for five minutes. Nope, and nope. However, one of the technicians just happened to walk by and over hear me talking to the clerk at the counter. “Will this help?” he asked.

I sat down with it, and in 5 minutes I was looking at the “About this Mac” dialog that listed 1 GB DDR SDRAM. “Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou!” I said. He said he was glad to help. I asked him where I could find a screwdriver like that. He suggested hobby shops and a company called Sadler whio apparently makes them. I haven’t checked out the website yet, but hopefully they sell them there.

I went back into the Genius Bar an hour after I’d left, walked right up to the Genius and told him where to direct people in the future. He nodded and said okay, but I doubt he’ll tell anyone about it. As I walked out, and older woman told me that she thought it was very nice of me to have come back to tell them what I did about the Lens Crafters store. I told her that it was just because I didn’t want anyone to ever have to go through the same kind of frustration that I had that evening.

I talked to a friend of mine a couple of days the next day, and he said that he had a horrible experience at that same Apple Store while trying to purchase a new iMac. He ended up leaving and going to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, and had a significantly better experience. He thinks it’s because Steve Jobs is said to visit that store frequently… which I’d heard before too. I just didn’t want to drive that far.

If you happened to be inside Valley Faire Mall in Santa Clara, CA on Friday evening (July 2nd) and saw a guy frantically walking around the mall with a 17″ PowerBook in-hand, that was me. If you ever need to visit an Apple Store for any reason, stay away from the one at Valley Faire.

• Tiger is a fully 64-bit OS… which is gonna allow the PowerMac G5′s to move so fast that they catch fire.
• “Expose for Widgets”, which is super similar to Konfabulator
• “Spotlight” which sounds an awful lot like the planned database-style search integration in Longhorn.
• 30-inch (wipe off your drool) displays
• RSS intregration in Safari

I was able to keep up with the play-by-play via Mac Minute, Apple-X, and Mac Update. You can read more about Tiger from Apple.com.

Lastly, I was able to get copies of these images before they got pulled from the MacMinute.com site. They’re awfully clever.

I got a GMail invite today. I haven’t used it much yet since today was a very busy day at work, but I like how I’m told I’m using 0% of 1 Gigabyte. Also, Yahoo! Mail bumped up storage space to 100MB for the free accounts (2GB for the paid accounts), and 10MB per email. Teriffic. Now I can email my dial-up friends 9.8 MB emails.

The power went out at work today, so I got to come home a little early. My best friend Eric, who is in the US Air Force, is moving to Texas on Friday for his Navigator training. For those who don’t know what a Navigator is, he’s essentially Goose instead of Maverick (for those who’ve seen “Top Gun”). He came to visit me last night, went to San Francisco to visit his cousin today, and will swing back through on his way back to his parents house where he will be staying until Friday morning when he leaves. =(

I’ve been so enthused about my new PowerBook G4 that I haven’t even tried to get Windows XP re-installed on my desktop computer yet. I need to do that because that’s where all of my web development and graphics software is. And I still miss my Feed Demon (Nick, please start doing cross-platform development on it!).

Lastly, my big redesign that fell through the cracks a couple of months ago when I got a new job and had to start commuting is now back in development. My focus for this redesign is more about the structure, availability, and presentation of data than it is about a visual redesign. However, you should expect a visual change. I’m not too sure how much yet, but there will be a change. I plan on keeping multiple stylesheets, including the one from this current design. My favorite is the current “Default” stylesheet, while I’ve been told that other people still prefer the “Classic” stylesheet. Which of the two should I keep as the secondary or tertiary stylesheet?

It’s the middle of the week (almost). The weekend is right around the corner!

Because there hasn’t been a native “Aquification” release of OpenOffice, I started reading directions about installing XDarwin — an open source version of the X-Windows X11 windowing system. Time to fire up the old command line. Woo-hoo!

I’ve spent a bit of time fooling around with both BeOS 5 and Red Hat Linux 8.0, so the Posix-compliant shell isn’t new to me. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time in MS-DOS, so that isn’t much of a problem.

After downloading the necessary .tgz files, figuring out how to run the Xinstall.sh file as ‘root’, and getting everything worked out, I’d get the dialog box asking me if I wanted to use Full Screen or Rootless mode, and as soon as I’d choose one, XDarwin would close. No explanation or anything.

Welcome to the world of Unix.

I then downloaded and installed OroborOSX. What I didn’t know was that OroborOSX requires XDarwin… and XDarwin kept crashing. Well crap.

I did quite a bit more digging around, and came across information on downloading Apple’s semi-open-source X11.app. Voila! OpenOffice was able to launch with no problems! The only thing I don’t like about it — which is extremely minor — is that the X11.app doesn’t minimize when Open Office starts.

The other thing is that it looks way more like Unix than it does Mac OS X. I was under the belief that OroborOSX adds some cool OSX-like widgets, but I could never get it to run.

This Mac OS X stuff is cool! I’m off to do more of it! Anyone got any insight about getting XDarwin to work?

The first would definitely be the lack of Feed Demon (my absolute favorite RSS reader) for Mac. I got NetNewsWire Lite installed, but ease of use and features aren’t even comparable to Feed Demon. *sigh*. I need to get my PC up and running again.

The second would be a lack of a really good hand-coding tool that has code coloring. I’m using BB Edit to type this right now, and it’s beginning to drive me nuts. I used to use BB Edit Lite 4.1 back in the day, but aparently there isn’t even a Lite version anymore. Argh.

One thing that I love is the iLife Suite. I’m having some minor issues going between my Windows iTunes to my iPod to Mac iTunes. My genres are all messed up. I’ll have to mess around with them. A good thing, though, is that the music I bought from iTMS on my PC still works on my Mac.

I’m having trouble getting Apache 1.3.x installed. I downloaded the Mac OS X binary from the Apache site, installed it, but couldn’t get it to start. After Googling around to figure out what might be wrong, I found out that Mac OS X already has Apache installed. Now I’m trying to figure out where all the Apache files live between the two versions (the manually-installed version is showing up on my localhost).

I don’t anticipate any problems getting PHP or MySQL installed, and after that I think I’ll be ready for some full-blown web development while I ride the train to work everyday. I’m wanting to finish up the 0.7 final for Feed Parser. I just need to implement support for the Creative Commons metadata in RSS 1.0 and add support for the RSS 1.0 Content Module. I’m trying not to get behind the FP roadmap too much.

It will also allow me to move forward with some of the really, really cool features of Blocker 2.0. I’ve got a whole slew of new features I am (was — before my computer crashed) working on for the next release. An early alpha of Blogroller will be available as soon as I have some time to get to it.

Anyways, I’ve rambled enough for this posting. I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff lately, that I’m wanting to post about here. We’ll see what I have time to write.

The other thing in front of me was a suprise from my wonderful, beautiful wife: A 17-inch Widescreen PowerBook G4.

I almost wet myself as I opened the black box and saw the words “Made by Apple in California”. The only Macs I’ve ever had were at least 10 years old when I got them. I’ve had a thirty-three MHz Performa 550 with twenty megs of RAM for quite some time now. But, I’ll tell you, System 7.5.5 isn’t nearly as elegant and beautiful as 10.3 is.

I was up until 5am last night toying around with everything: getting iLife installed, installing Classic and XCode, and downloading Camino, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

With my 6.0 megabit internet connection, I was able to download ALL of the software updates and get them installed in under 5 minutes.

Now I just to find a way to remove the lick marks from my 17-inch LCD…

Two and a half weeks?! Ryan, that’s just no good. What’s your deal, man? Why are you being suck a slacker?

This is the obligatory “Sorry, I’ve been busy” post as made famous by Dan Rubin, Todd Dominey, and Adam Polselli.

Every time that I’ve come across something cool lately, my boss has handed me another 5 hours of work that is due in three. Everytime, I’ve gone to work on Feed Parser, or Blocker, or Blogroller, my wife says “Time for dinner!” Everytime I’ve gone to sit down and experiment with unexplored features of CSS (for my upcoming redesign with the Longhorn-esque timeline), I realize that if I don’t leave right away, I’ll miss my train and be late for work.

Weekends haven’t been that much better either since I’ve either been out of town or watching my friend’s kids for a few hours while they’re at work, or I’ve been trying to get through disc 1 of 3 in Final Fantasy VII.

I’ve got to figure out how to re-work my schedule so I’ve got a little more room. Spending over 3 hours a day either on or waiting for the train as been a huge loss of time. Of course my iPod and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for GBA-SP have helped the boredom issue, but I’ll be able to do more once I can finally afford to get my laptop.

I’ve read about, as well as seen images of Apple’s extraordinarily close attention to detail when it comes to a person’s experience of opening up one of their products.

No wonder I’ve always been an avid Mac fanatic.

I opened up the box, and meticulously examined every piece that came in the box. I couldn’t believe how small it was. I remember seeing the original 5GB iPod at the Apple Store in Valley Fair Mall in San Jose a few years back, and it was twice the size as this one. It suddenly occurred to me how small the iPod Mini must really be. Whoa.

I connected it to my FireWire slot, and fired up iTunes (which I had already installed). Apparently I never knew how smart iTunes was either. I’ve got an MP3 folder, and all of my songs are organized by first letter of the group/artist. I took my (grand)parent MP3 folder and dropped it into my iTunes playlist. iTunes read through, and added all 2249 songs to my playlist, which I promptly synced with my new iPod. After about 10 minutes, my entire collection in one, single, ready-to-go spot.

Amazing. Simply amazing.

I then decided to read more about it at some of the Mac News sites. I must admit that I was suprised to hear something like this, but I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair when I read this over at As the Apple Turns:

And when we say “stunned the world,” believe it: faithful viewer Mike referred us to a New York Times article which describes Microsoft as the proverbial deer in the headlights yesterday: “Thursday the company appeared unprepared for the Apple-Hewlett agreement, which clearly stung Microsoft executives.”

How unprepared, you ask? So unprepared that the company actually said the deal would “limit choice and harm consumers” because it didn’t have time to realize just how butt-stupid that sounds coming from freakin’ Microsoft. (“Justice Department? What Justice Department?”)

Whether or not you even care about Macs, As the Apple Turns is a great, entertaining read. Here’s another recent “article” related to the Apple+HP deal…

Carly (HP’s CEO): Yeah, we thought so. Also, we don’t want them to be white.

Steve Jobs: No white?

Carly: Right. In order to match our other products, we need them to be HP Blue.

[She hands him a color swatch which matches the prototype shown at MacMinute as pointed out by faithful viewer The Professor.]

Steve: I once saw a dead body this color.

Carly: Hey, who hasn’t? That’s why it tests so well among our target market. Lastly, we want to take the Apple logo off the back and replace it with the HP logo, just so any customers not tipped off by the delicate corpse-like hue and the catchy name will be sure to understand that this is an HP product, even though all we’re doing is changing the name and the color of the plastic.

Hat tip: Taylor McKnight.

I whisked through the iTunes Store… I wasn’t planning on buying anything just yet. Mainly, I just did some searches for bands and record labels that I wasn’t too sure would be there. Some were, some weren’t. That’s alright… that’s what KaZaA’s for anyways, right? Bands who would rather have people steal a single track from their album, rather than to make it possible for people to pay for that same single track (not naming any names, Metallica, Linkin Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers…)

I looked through the preferences as I began listening to some of my legitimately purchased CD’s that I’ve ripped to MP3 for archival purposes. I went back to my MP3 folder and noticed something different… iTunes reorganized my music according to the ID3 tags built into the MP3′s. I almost put my fist through my monitor.

Look, it’s bad enough when Windows XP forgets that my MP3 folder (alphabetized by artist) is set to list view and switches back to “Tiles” view. But when iTunes took my MP3′s from their folder and placed them into newly created folders without my explicit permission (which I wouldn’t give anyways), it made me want to hurt something. I went back into the preferences and deselected the option to “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” (see below) and saved my choice. I listened to more music, and had no more reorganizing issues.

Other than that, I’d say that Apple did a darn good job. The player is infinitely faster and more responsive than Winamp 3 (Winamp 2.8 is definitely faster). I’m still not sure if I’ll set it to be my default player yet, as it’s still between iTunes, Winamp 2.8, or doing nothing (continuing to use Winamp 3). As far as downloading music, I’m all for supporting the artists. I despise supporting the record companies, but that’s just the way of it.

I think I’ll plan on downloading as many MP3′s as I can legally through iTunes, and only use alternative methods for obtaining MP3′s when a song isn’t available through legitimate means. If I want to get a song, I will get it. Whether or not the bands and their labels want to accept my money for songs or not is up to them.

« Update » I just came across this comment over at C|Net’s News.com:

Among other gripes were complaints that iTunes recategorized Windows users’ music into new folders, although Apple said if the default settings are used, iTunes is not supposed to rename or move any music files.

That’s not entirely true, as this is exactly what happened to me using the default settings, but hopefully Apple will realize that these are the default settings, and will fix those defaults in future releases.

On the other hand, do you honestly think that Apple hasn’t prepared for that doomsday scenario? Well, it’s easy enough to find out; frankly, we lack the attention span to get through more than six words of Apple’s quarterly 10-Q without downing a couple of bottles of Focusyn first, but even we get a kick out of the “What If?” drama in the section called “Factors That May Affect Future Results and Financial Condition”– and the most current one lists such hazards as terrorist attacks, SARS, earthquakes, fires, labor disputes, price wars, higher R&D costs, screwed-up product intros, inventory write-downs, supply shortages, quality control problems, a cratering of the retail initiative, plunging pro product sales, getting smacked down in education, patent litigation, rising insurance costs, deadbeat debtors, tax rate hikes, and third-party software developers being abducted by an evil cult of mutant cannibals. There’s nary a mention of the single greatest hazard facing the company, namely Steve kicking the bucket or otherwise vacating his role as Omnipotent Apple Overlord.

It’s a rather entertaining article to read, whether or not you even like Apple.

Apparently, the thing that was in the box was a sharply discounted PowerMac G4. As expected, Steve Jobs’ “Steve-note” announced the August availability of the PowerMac G5 based on IBM’s 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip (a derivative of the IBM POWER4 chip with native 32-bit support and the AltiVec™ multimedia instruction set), officially ditching Motorola and all their stagnant PowerPC 8500 development efforts for the PowerMac.

The Upside: With Dual 2.0 GHz 64-bit PowerPC 970 RISC processors, up to 8 GB PC3200 memory, 500 GB hard drive space, and an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 MB DDR-SDRAM, it’s enough to make any hard-core computer geek jerk-off.

The Downside: I haven’t seen an uglier enclosure since the days of the Beige G3′s. I actually like the beige better than this. Whereas the G3 and G4 models had a very nice looking, natural, organic feel to them, the PowerMac G5 looks like a piece of military-style steel flooring folded around a set of technological components. If Jonathan Ive is the one who designed this, then the man needs to be institutionalized. And if Steve Jobs actually signed-off on the design, then he’s doing no better.

I was going to buy one of the upcoming G5′s for my college graduation in February, but if this is the case, I’ll just upgrade my existing PC. It is my hope and prayer that Apple is just pulling our legs, and will release a much more beautiful enclosure when the system debuts in August.

Here’s what they had to say:

Speaking of Apple retail stores, more and more sources are climbing on board with reports that Apple’s own outlets and third party resellers alike have received Big, Mysterious Boxes labeled “Do Not Open Until Monday Or We’ll Wear Your Entrails As A Grisly Feather Boa-Like Thingy (Only Without The Feathers).” And we admit that we here at AtAT were mildly concerned about the fact that, with all these Big, Mysterious Boxes all over the place, as far as we could tell, absolutely zero photos of said boxes had materialized– but that was before an AtAT source in the reseller business informed us that the boxes also bear a label which reads, “Distribute Photos Of These Big, Mysterious Boxes And We’ll Still Do The Entrail Thing, Plus We’ll Also Lick Our Fingers And Stick Them In Your Ears, Which Is A Very Unpleasant Experience.” Immediately under those labels are other labels which read, “Someone Just Told Us It’s Called A ‘Wet Willie.’ The Ear Thing, We Mean, Not The Entrails Thing. We Don’t Think The Entrails Thing Has A Name.”

Considering Apple’s WWDC is right around the corner, we may all be jumping for ["The 970's been announced, the 970's been announced"] joy!

« Update » Apparently someone at Apple is now fired.

Check out “As The Apple Turns…” for more of this fantastic Mac info… Wondering what is the PowerPC 970?

Apparently, further updates of IE/Mac will only occur within the MSN for Mac OS X software. Supposedly this decision was made so that Apple could push Safari, Apple’s lightning-fast browser for Mac OS X 10.2 or later, without having fight with Microsoft on the desktop.

Everyone seems to be wondering what in the world Microsoft is doing cutting off IE at the knees. About a year ago, I was reading an article discussing how Microsoft would probably phase out Internet Explorer in favor of MSN Explorer internet software. Now that AOL has signed a seven year deal with Microsoft to continue using IE in it’s own AOL software (despite the fact that AOL owns Netscape), Microsoft may be getting lazy. Either that, or they’ve got something evil in mind…