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Ambassadorial Slogs
0015 (03.25.09): In the Spirit of Spring I give you a small bouquet of bookmarks that I hope will brighten these unusually cold spring days around here:
To keep my 98 year old Nana up to date with the latest weather I have found these radar loops to be invaluable:
http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/index_loop.php
http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/northeast_loop.php
For those folks who can't get enough Apple, Macintosh, or Tech News, check out these sites:
MacDailyNews http://macdailynews.com
MacRumors.com http://www.macrumors.com
Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com
Tom's Hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/us
I am not mentioning this site as a place to buy anything from. I bring it to your attention as perhaps the easiest way to figure out what memory you need for your computer, period. This comes in very handy when folks call me about PCs, but you can get all you need to know about your Mac's memory requirements and limits here: 18004MEMORY http://www.18004memory.com
Now this one takes a bit of thought-wrapping to understand. It doesn't help that the site is apparently in Dutch (it is in English, too), but it really won't prevent you from using it. Simply get hold of the serial number of any Macintosh computer and enter it in the approriate place and hit return. You'll get some very important info about the computer that may or may not be of interest/use/relevance.
http://www.chipmunk.nl/klantenservice/applemodel.html
MacTracker is also an excellent, FREE, tool you can download if you really want to know what you have: http://mactracker.dreamhosters.com
0014 (03.18.09): In response to numerous requests for what I consider to be the BEST backup solution for folks' ever burgeoning backup needs I am happy to bring the following to your attention. Our friends, and they really are our friends, at Other World Computing (OWC) have a little thing called the Voyager Q. I first came across this delightful product at this past Macworld San Francisco and came away with that elusive "gee whiz" feeling that very few computer products evoke in your ever-faithful ambassadore. The true beauty of the Voayger Q is that it gives you limitless expansion options in terms of storage. It is the easiest removable hard drive solution out there, and is as simple to use as a slot-loading toaster—in fact my friends on the left coast who introduced this marvel to me refer to it as "the toaster". Why? Because as you'll see from the picture below the hard drive slips into it just like a piece of toast. Now that you can purchase a "bare", i.e., not enclosed, 1 terabyte hard drive for about $100, you can pop SATA hard drives in and out of this baby as easy as plopping toast in and out of your toaster. You can use 3.5" standard SATA hard drives as well as the 2.5" SATA hard drives that are used in notebook computers. The Voyager Q comes in two flavors, a USB/eSATA version and the outrageously robust "Quad" version that gives you USB, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA connections. I heartily recommend the latter as it gives you the most options. Oh, and this works with both Macs and PCs for those of you straddling the two worlds. You can purchase the Voyager with or without a hard drive, and for my $$$ there is simply no better solution out there, and believe me, I have tried just about every type of hard drive enclosure imaginable.
1. 2.5" & 3.5" SATA I/II drive connector
2. Hinged flap for 3.5" drive access
#3. Hard drive eject lever for safe removal of 3.5" drives
4. Blue Status LED for power on
5. Power receptacle
6. USB 2.0/1.1 Mini-B port
7. eSATA port
8. Two FireWire 800 (1394b) ports
9. FireWire 400 (1394a) port
0013 (01.29.09): I have been frustrated beyond belief with my business web host, Network Solutions. I simply am not able to edit my business website on my Macs, no matter which browser I try to use. In order to edit my website I have to fire up my PC (yes, I have a nice mid-range Compaq tower thank you very much) in order to use a browser "acceptable" to Network "Yes, We Have No" Solutions. No more. I have installed on my lovely MacBook Air an application called Crossover. Crossover, from CodeWeavers, lets me run (on an Intel processor equipped Macintosh computer) Windows software packages, such as Internet Exploder 6, all the while booted in MacOS X, with a couple clicks of my mouse. I don't have to have an entire Windows install on my Mac to do so, it is fast as can be, and I am now able to edit my website with IE 6 as if I am running it just as I would on my PC. It really works, and I know many of you who might benefit significantly if able to use it in your everyday life. I can't wait to see what else will work with it.
Screenshot Proof:
Editing my website on my MacBook Air running Internet Explorer 6 for Windows via Crossover:
0012 (01.21.09): Speaking of floppy disks, I have recently been sadly reminded of the old rule of thumb when it comes to backing up your data. I have received quite a few phone calls from folks who had entrusted all their data, in some instances 20 years worth of files, to a single hard drive. The calls came because said external hard drive had malfunctioned or otherwise bit the dust and said folks were, to say the least, freaking out. Years ago, 15-25 years in some instances, when we were all backing up to floppy disks, I wrote that you needed to back up to at least THREE different floppy disks (the same rule applied to Zip disks, SyQuest cartridges, or any other removable disks). Why three? Let’s say you inadvertently trashed something from your hard drive. You know it is on your backup disk so you stick it in the computer but you get an error message. Okay, no problem, stick in disk number two. Another error message. At this point you stop before sticking in disk number three because at this point it is probably not the disks that are bad but the disk drive that is chewing up the disks. If you still have number three and access to another computer you can then test whether the disk is good or not without destroying it. The same rule applies to backing up to hard drives, CDs/DVDs, and especially flash drives. I have been telling clients who have backup issues that we need to buy two hard drives, so that including the primary copy of their files on their main hard drive, they have two additional copies for a grand total of three copies of their data. If they are burning CD/DVD backups they need to make at least two copies as they go along.
Even relatively new computer users are accumulating data that should be backed up at a rate that would have astounded those of us who go back to the days of 40 megabyte hard drives (or even 400k floppies). Your email, digital photos, scanned items, documents, digital movie files, your iTunes Music Library, all of this should be backed up periodically. Yes, you can burn to CDs/DVDs, but you are going to quickly find that even with the fastest of burners that this process can be very time consuming. If, like me, you accumulate a terabyte of data in a relatively short time span, what do you back that much data up to? Disks? Forget it. The only solution is to back it up to a hard drive. My personal backup, i.e., documents, photos, and movies, is well over 300 gigabytes of data. That would mean burning over 75 standard DVDs a month, which would entail starting to burn them on the first of the month and perhaps ending sometime by the middle of the month. Not gonna happen. Instead, I have at least two hard drives that I copy all my data to every week or two. It goes much faster, and I can rest easy knowing that should my internal boot drive go bad I can rebuild things without too much trouble. This in fact happened to me recently over this past Thanksgiving. I knew from the feel of things that my boot drive was failing, so I had backed up my personal files to my backup hard drives and was able to plop a new hard drive in my G5 Tower and start with a fresh install of OS X 10.5 (Leopard), all my basic applications, and then restore my personal files. While it took me a day to get up and running, I didn’t lose a single kilobyte of my personal files as a result of my taking the proper precautions.
So what to back up if you have a Mac? My advice is to back up your entire Users folder, located on your hard drive:
Why the entire Users folder? Because everything you need to rebuild your personal computer life is located there. The Users folder not only contains your Documents folder, Photos folder, Music folder, and Movies folder, it also contains everything on your Desktop, your Preferences, your Safari/FireFox bookmarks, and your Apple Mail/Microsoft Entourage email databases. If you have your Users folder backed up and your internal boot hard drive goes kablooyey we can put Humpty back together again a lot easier than if we have to try to recover all this data from a crashed or malfunctioning drive in the first place. Please trust me on this, data recovery can be very time consuming and very costly if you have to resort to sending the drive to a commercial data recovery specialist (thankfully for my clients in such dire straits I am very good in these desperate scenarios and have a success rate of 99 out of a 100 drives and do not charge the arm and a leg that the commercial recovery services charge).
If you want to make your computer life even easier to put back together when the inevitable disaster strikes then I suggest you pick up a couple of hard drives that are as big or bigger than your internal boot drive (if unsure what to get give me a call when in front of your computer with it on) and clone your entire hard drive to them. This is actually very simple to do and instead of having to rebuild everything from scratch (OS X System, applications, and your files), your cloned backup can be cloned back to your new hard drive and you won’t have to do a whole heckuva lot in terms of reinstallation. Depending on what kind of hard drives you use for these cloned backups you can even boot off of one of them to be up and running in minutes until you can take the time to put all the pieces together again. My favorite (free) utility to do this is Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7032/carbon-copy-cloner), and if necessary I can walk you through it over the phone or even get you going remotely via Leopard’s screen sharing ability.
0011 (01.20.09): If you are wondering why I am up at 3:00 AM writing this it is because unlike last year when I received a whopping load of bugs on the flight out to Macworld SF, I have to thank the young Japanese woman sitting behind me on the airport van on the way to my flight back for not covering her mouth as she coughed all over me. While not as sick as last year, I can't breath and can't sleep no matter what medicines I ingest. Yummy!
As a new day dawns in America and we prepare to inaugurate our new "Prez" (hey, we gots to get jiggy with the happening nomenclature associated with this administration-if you don't believe me check out page 8 of the January 20, 2009 NY Daily News), I have to say as a fellow Phillips Academy Andover Alum, "Hasta La Vista George", and please, let the door clobber you on the way out. What a mess he's left us with. Reminds me of the fiasco Steve came back to at Apple the second time around. At that point in time Apple was getting its collective clock cleaned by the Mac Clone makers, our beige boxes were in danger of becoming even more superfluous in the face of the relentless PC/Windows onslaught, and Apple was in serious peril of becoming a footnote in the history of the personal computer. And then along came the Bondi Blue iMac and out the window went the floppy drive. What a game changer! It was not easy to swallow this drastic metamorphosis overnight, but somehow we managed to muddle through, and in the final analysis we were better off moving forward than we would have been clinging to our floppies for dear life (funny, last week my surrogate Jewish mother here in Westchester had me over to figure out why her external USB floppy drive wasn't working with her ultra-modern Mac Pro Tower just so she could access her 15 year old floppies-Oy Vey!). A look back would not be complete without giving pause to the advent of OS X, which forever changed how we get down to work with our Macs. While I miss many of the tools that I had come to rely on in my everyday work in OS 9 and earlier versions that bit the dust under OS X, or for one reason or another have not survived the transition (Connectix's CopyDoubler being the most notable-I Want My SmartReplace!), I do not miss the daily crashes and restarts that pre-OS X Mac OSes engendered (thank Jobs for protected memory), and I certainly do not miss watching four rows of inits and control panels loading across the bottom of a 20" screen at startup (though I do get nostalgic about them when I fire up my old pre-OS X Macs).
Which brings us to the next great thing about to hit our Macs: Snow Leopard, of which I have spoken a bit about in the slogs below. I got my hands on the latest beta copy and have been toying with the idea of installing it to see what all the hoopla is about, but have decided to wait until it ships, and as this appears to be rather imminent I can afford some patience. And this is what I have been trying to get around to in my inimicable roundabout way: You gots to get yourself a new Intel-based Mac if you want to play the Snow Leopard game, because it won't run on your older PowerPC based Mac (and this leaves my G5 Tower out of it so I am in the same boat). If you are still tapping away in front of a four year or older PPC based Mac and are starting to get a bit worried well you have good reason to be (see Slog above) for many reasons, and you should begin to give some serious consideration to an upgrade. If $$$ is an issue take heart-the new Mac Mini is just over the horizon and given the rumored specs of the new Mini you may just have the solution that is going to work and not break the proverbial bank. If you have upgraded in the last couple of years you are Snow Leopard ready, and given the performance boost you'll experience this is one OS upgrade that should be worth every penny.
0010 (01.16.09): Well Macworld SF 2009 is over and quite frankly this was as disappointing a Macworld as I’ve ever seen outside of the New York shows. Really, they should have called it “Everything That Can Possibly Encase Your iPhone and iPod World”, as there was very little anywhere in Moscone North and South that had anything to do with the Apple Macintosh Computer. I was astonished to see that everyone outside of me had an iPhone. While I am totally enamored with the iPhone, it is impossible for my whole family spread over three states to give up our very cheap Sprint Family Plan to switch us all over to iPhones (AT&T offers nothing that comes close to the cost of Sprint’s plan). The floor space occupied by Apple was a complete waste, and they had a grand total of four of the new 17” MacBook Pros for people to lay hands on. The new 17” model doesn't even look much bigger than the 15” model, most likely due to Apple not putting a lot of extra space around the screen, but at 5x the cost of a similarly configured 17" PC notebook you have got to be kidding me. I was surprised to see that many of my buddies, who are always the first to upgrade their Apple notebooks, had opted to stick with older models. Why? Because they were not ready to give up on FireWire 400 connectivity (the newest Macbooks and MacBook Pros have all dropped FireWire 400 ports) among other things. I am sure there'll be some folks who'll buy them, but most likely Apple will have to reduce prices across the board given that no one is buying computers these days unless they are obscenely rich or have no choice because their current computer has bit the dust. Yesterday (01.15.09) Intel announced earnings of approximately $240 million dollars as opposed to over $2 BILLION dollars a year ago. That is Scary (yes, with a capital "S"). Apple has cut its margins on computers from 40% to around 20%, mostly by reducing the price they charge folks for RAM upgrades, but Macs are still the priciest computers going. I have always been happy to pay the premium for my Macs because of the better Operating System (OS), the infinitely better bundled software (iPhoto, etc.), the absence of viruses, and the user interface which still makes Windows in any of its iterations look like the piece of crapola that it is (pardon my French).
One thing that completely baffles me is why Apple is not playing up the fact that the Mac turns 25 this year. There should be celebrations at every Apple Store, along with ads playing up the fact that the Mac has "survived" the trials and tribulations that have seen so many computer companies go belly up. I can't figure this and if something eventually occurs to me or others to explain this rest assured o'faithful readers that I'll share it with you as soon as I know the answer(s). Maybe Apple is waiting for the Super Bowl to roll out a one-time ad touting this a la the original Big Brother ad that appeared during the 1984 Super Bowl. Who knows? Probably not even The Shadow.
0009 (01.06.09): Another year has come to a close which means that Macworld San Francisco is upon us. This may very well be the last Macworld I attend as I can’t imagine a Macworld without Apple exhibiting. If you have been following things, Apple, i.e., Steve Jobs, has decided not to exhibit at Macworld beyond this one. Part of this stems from a long-standing and long-running feud between Apple and IDG (specifically, a guy named Paul Kent), the folks who organize these lovefests, along with what I suspect is a desire on Señor Jobs’ part to distance Apple from being “just” a computer company. If I had to make a bet I would say Apple is most likely to exhibit next year at the CES Show (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, this being in keeping with the idea of Apple as a brand. We’ll see.
As far as Steve not giving the Keynote at this Macworld we were all somewhat relieved to hear definitively that it is due to health considerations as opposed to something else. It is disappointing, given that the Mac turns 25 this year, not have Steve standing up there getting all the accolades he deserves from the adoring throngs, but something tells me that even as I write this on the plane out there that he’ll manage to somehow interject himself into the Keynote, be it via tape or some sort of live hookup. I’ll see if I am right once I land and get to the hotel where I stay with a large group of friends. Unlike last year, no one has thrown up on the plane and no one is walking up and down the aisle coughing all over everybody, so maybe I’ll land healthy this time and can actually enjoy my one vacation of the year. Again, we’ll see.
So what is there to look forward to from this Macworld? There appear to be some hardware announcements that have been a long-time coming, namely a big update of the Mac Mini, the introduction of the unibody MacBook Pro 17” model, and perhaps an iMac update. Again, I’ll see what the deal is once I get there and get settled. Of less interest to me is the possible $99 iPhone Nano, but this too will go over big with the masses, especially given the current uncertainties of our economy.
What I am most interested in outside of the hardware announcements is what Apple’s plans are with regard to Snow Leopard, the next iteration of the Mac OS (operating system), 10.6. Everything is pointing to an earlier release rather than a later one, and it could even appear this month if things are on as firm a track as I have been hearing. This is very important for all of us. First, we need to put Leopard and Tiger behind us as quickly as possible. These two OSes have been the equivalent of Jekyll & Hyde since their respective debuts, given that they had to be written for two very different processor “brains”, the CPU chip(s) in our beloved Macs, PowerPC (G5s, G4s, and earlier), and the Intel versions that are now what come in every Mac and have done so for the last three years or so. As long as Apple had to write two versions of the System Software, as well as having to take into account the gazillion hardware differences across an over-extended product line, well there was bound to be the inevitable glitch or three or four. I have felt like a very over-wrought guinea pig for the last few years when it came to the Mac OS, with Panther (10.3) the last Mac OS that I really had any confidence in. Every 10.4.x or 10.5.x update has been one step forward in the bug squashing department and at least two steps back in introducing new bugs and inconsistencies. Features have been added and dropped willy-nilly, only to reappear and disappear with frustrating regularity (I am still trying to figure out what happened to the “floating clock” feature that one of my clients lost when we updated her from 10.4 to 10.5. Why would this silly little harmless feature suddenly vanish? I wish I knew.)
Snow Leopard starts with the promise that it is written solely for Macs that have an Intel processor for a brain(s). As such it should be extremely solid right out of the gate, and unlike Tiger or Leopard it should “feel” different right off the bat, faster, tighter, and possessing the ability to address those multiple “cores” that reside in almost all Macs. Outside of the earliest Macs with Intel chips, if you have a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo chip(s) in your Mac you have a processor that is really two brains in one. If you have a Mac Pro Tower with multiple processors you have up to 4 to 8 cores running things. Since Snow Leopard is designed from the ground up to take advantage of these multiple cores we should see some phenomenal performance boosts, as we’ll finally have an OS that can delegate a process to one core and another disparate process to another core. Now for most of us we’ll just appreciate the speed boost that Snow Leopard gives us right out of the box, but for those in the graphics/photo/video fields who need every iota of power they can muster from their computer they will feel like they’ve died and gone to heaven (or whatever makes them feel supremely happy).
0008 (10.31.08): Ah Halloween, when a young man's fancy turns to throwing eggs, toilet paper, and spraying shaving cream. Given that we are in a perpetual Halloweenish nightmare economics-wise it makes sense to try and keep this particular slog more in the tradition of Thanksgiving than All Hallows Eve. What do we, the Applelytes, have to be thankful for? That we use the Mac OS (operating system) rather than Windows Vista (whoops, Billygoat Gates says we're not supposed to use the word Vista any more). While not perfect (see slogs below), our Mac OS, current iteration code-named Leopard, is less likely to cause blindness, insanity, and varicose veins than its PC counterpart Vista. There is simply no comparison between the elegance of Leopard, at least visually, when you look at it side by side with Vista. I know this from experience: out of my last ten clients running Vista, 8 (eight!) of them went out and bought a Mac when they saw my Macs running Leopard side-by-side with their computer running Vista. The other two are just waiting to get the $$$ together to dump their Vista machines and get a Mac. For these ten people, all professionals struggling to keep their heads above water in their businesses, the fact that they feel they tinkled their money away on a Vista PC (I coulda had a V-Mac!) is very telling. Perhaps as little as a few years ago they never ever would have given the Mac any kind of serious consideration. That today they are all headed "our way" is a very encouraging sign that Apple has finally broken through the Karl Rovian-haze of dis- and misinformation about the Mac.
Fact: Microsoft can't "fix" Vista. The Apple Ad making this point is correct.
Even with whatever issues Leopard presents us we need to be thankful we aren't running Vista. It is a Vista fact o'life that at some point it is going to go completely kablooyey, usually following an update from Microsoft that is supposed to "fix" things. I have spent more time putting Vista machines back to an earlier "restore point" than I ever thought possible after one of these "updates". Vista is a nightmare, plagued with bugs and incompatibilities and all kinds of glitches that make it virtually impossible to use it efficiently and effectively. While there is no comparing the initial cost of a PC versus a Mac (the PC is always much cheaper; for instance I can get you an HP 17" Vista laptop with a 320GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, built-in webcam etc., for about $700.00--a comparable 17" MacBook Pro is going to run you between $2500-$3500 or more), the ultimate cost of a computer is measured by the ability of the user to get down to work and do the things that we all do: word process, surf the web, send and receive email, download some photos out of a camera, etc. Fire up a Mac for the first time out of the box, spend 3 minutes personalizing it, and you are basically ready to get going (outside of a few Apple updates that will need to be downloaded and installed along with any additional software you may want to install). This unfortunately is NOT so with a Vista PC. In fact the first Vista PC I set up out of the box took three hours to simply get to the Desktop after turning it on for the first time (it has gotten a bit better as time has passed, but it still takes way too long to set up a PC out of the box as opposed to a Mac). Firing up your Vista PC for the first time you had better take a moment to update the virus definitions related to whatever anti-virus program your PC came with because the minute it is hooked up to a live internet connection the attempts to infect your PC are going to commence with a vengeance. Even if your Vista PC is wrapped in a giant industrial strength condom of virus protection you are still not safe--the next web site you visit off the beaten path of the WWW will probably sneak some malware or a virus or a rogue application past your defenses and render your computer almost useless until it gets the equivalent of a computer enema (and if you think the Geek Squad or the FireDog folks are going to come to your rescue think again-these guys for the most part are set up to keep you on the hook forever). I have found good anti-virus solutions for folks running Vista, but if they are not eternally vigilant they can still experience that uniquely Windows "gotcha" that users experience when their computer lives are turned into Donald Pleasance's life in the Halloween movie series. Or is it lives? Didn't he die in one movie only to be resurrected in some later ones? I'll check IMDb, The Internet Movie Database, an essential bookmark in anyone's collection.
Not that I am inviting attack, but all the things that can screw up Windows, Vista, XP, whatever flavor, well all these bounce off our Macs like bullets off Superman. Let's say you inadvertently visit a rogue web site that is known for "phishing" for your info. In Windows you're cooked--the hackers are always out in front of the protection schemes. Without any virus protection installed both Apple's Safari and Mozilla FireFox under the Mac OS will identify these same sites and allow us to avoid them in the first place, which for the average user is a huge boon, especially if they found themselves inadvertently diverted to one of these web sites (can you say "Google"?). Why don't rogue web sites get by folks running the Mac OS? Because their "hacks" can't get by the basic fundamental UNIX security schemes upon which the Mac OS is built. So these scurrilous scumbags go after the OS that is vulnerable: Windows. My favorite recent scheme, which is still in operation as I write, has the XP/Vista user convinced that the "anti-virus" software they are being offered is actually from Microsoft. After all, it has a Windows shield-like icon on it, has "Windows" in its name, it looks official, you'd guess it's "ok". Well the minute these folks install it they discover their computer has been completely hijacked. This can be "cleaned", but it can take a few hours and is infuriating, frightening, and frustrating. That is not what anyone of us bargained for when we first set up our computers.
The Mac OS Is Turning 25 in 2009
Those of us on a Mac take for granted the fact that most of the menus and commands we point and click on are really pretty basic and easily recognizable in an English-language sort of way, and that once we learn something in one program it is often readily applicable in the next application we launch. Menu items and commands, and their keyboard equivalents, are thankfully (and this is where I give thanks Woz & Jobs that Apple got there first) sensible when compared to the same on a Vista/XP PC. I know that since DAY 1 of the Mac OS back in 1984 there has been an underlying set of principles guiding developers (Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines) as they write their applications. That is why it is so easy for a Mac user to go from one program to another without ever having to open or refer to a manual--learn something in one app and the next one is going to feel very familiar even if it does something totally different than the first app. That is because of this underlying Apple human interface philosophy that has been there since 1984 (that English-language thing I referred to earlier). If you look for the same in any version of Windows you are going to be sorely disappointed--it is a virtual free-for-all when it comes to writing for Windows, and one can be hard pressed to find anything resembling the English language therein. Half the people I work with on Vista PCs could not figure out how to access the main commands in Microsoft Office Word 2007 because Microsoft had changed the menus so dramatically from the previous version. No sense and no sensibility.
None of this is to say that there is not room for improvement in the Mac OS and the applications that Apple is responsible for writing. In fact Apple has developed the nasty habit of adding and dropping features in their applications from version to version, and then often bringing them back or dropping other features in the next version. This has led to many in the community to throw up their hands in surrender and resulted in folks looking for other solutions because they can't trust Apple to leave well enough alone (a good example is iPhoto and iMovie--they have become almost Jekyll & Hyde as they evolve from one iteration to the next; I still use them, still love them warts and all, but even I have called "enough is enough" with all the changes--just get them to work as is). For the most part we are blessed with a computer and an operating system that makes it a snap to get things done even after Apple fiddles and diddles with the hardware and the software, and for this I am very thankful. If I was tied to a Vista/XP machine I fear a life of perpetual Halloween nightmares. As things stand I generally fall asleep happy and secure that when I awake and sit down in front of my Macs that all will be well, that day in and day out I am going to get things done without the OS getting in my way, and that I am going to be pleased as punch with my computers. Think about it: How many times have you heard a person say, "I love my Mac"? Ever heard a person say, "I love my Vista PC"? I didn't think so. Not unless they are getting paid to say so (see Apple ad above or check out the new MS ads with "real" Windows lovers--I'd love to see what any one of them has to say 6 months later after their Vistas have turned upside down).
0007 (10.18.08): In case you missed it in the midst of our economic meltdown/reckoning this past week, the Mothership, aka Apple, Inc., launched a new line-up of MacBooks. Sporting a new look, a new manufacturing process that carves the case out of a block of aluminum, and dedicated graphics processing chips, these babies are sure to restore a good deal of Apple's past notebook computer glories. [MacBook Pro specs][MacBook specs]. Of course what would new computers be from Fortress Cupertino without some controversy, namely the dropping of FireWire ports from the MacBook (a FW 800 port is still on the MacBook Pro). At first glance this is tantamount to Apple dropping the floppy drive on the original Bondi Blue iMac (to say nothing of SCSI). A lot of Apple aficionados are causing Apple's message boards to wilt under their atomic blasts of derision for abandoning FireWire 400 in the MacBook line because this has rendered their digital camcorders (and external hard drives and other FW peripherals) with FireWire output useless with the new MacBooks. The other bone o'contention is how are you supposed to migrate gigabytes of data from your old Mac to a new MacBook? In the past you'd simply boot up the old computer in FireWire target disk mode and attach it to the new computer via the FW 400 (or 800) port, boom, bang, you are happily transferring your old account, files, applications, settings, etc., to the new computer. How to do so today if you have a new MacBook? USB? Ethernet? Bluetooth? You have got to be kidding me O Faithful Ambassadore, for any of the aforementioned methods of connecting two Macs to transfer anything over one gigabyte of data will result in more folks jumping out their windows than the crash of '29. Fortunately saner heads have pointed out that like the cheap PC makers found out long ago, Apple has discovered that it is best to make one of the few actual moving parts of a portable computer outside of the keyboard and trackpad more accessible. No longer do we have to take the whole bloody laptop apart to get at the hard drive. In the new MacBooks the hard drive is accessible by removing a single screw. Once out of the computer it is possible to plop the drive in an external case/adapter and transfer whatever data needs to be moved. While not the most elegant solution to the lack of a FireWire port, it will keep people like me quite busy down the road as folks migrate to the new models. Not quite resolved is what we are going to if folks choose the SSD Hard drive option (SSD=solid state drive)? I have not seen one yet but I suspect it has a totally different set of connections than ATA or SATA hard drives which will necessitate a whole new set of hard drive adapters. Still, the lack of a FireWire 400 port is troubling, in particular because Apple invented FireWire!!!!! You spend all that time and $$$$$ developing a technology only to abandon it. Huh? Somebody pinch me. I'll have more to report as I get my hands on them, but for now I am just happy to see new models that look poised to be Snow Leopard ready.
What was that? Snow Leopard? What you talkin' bout Evan? Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard. The next great thing from Apple: Snow Leopard. Macintosh Operating System 10.6. I guess we're running out of big cats--I speculate that 10.7 will be Black Leopard. I know many of you are feeling a bit hopeless when it comes to understanding exactly what happens when you hit the power button on your computer so I'll try to be as simplistic yet informative as I can about all this. When you turn on your PC, Mac or Windows, it is the Operating System that is read from the hard drive into RAM as the computer boots up. The OS is what gives you the framework within which to get to work. It provides you with your Desktop, along with a hierarchy of folders, containing documents (files, photos, music, movies), applications, and system files. The OS defines how things appear on your screen, how you navigate the information on your computer, and how things get processed when you start to click away and open applications, specify commands from menus, or manipulate data such as in a photograph. If you purchase a new Mac or PC today it will have a processor(s) from Intel that is more than meets the eye. In the "dark ages" of computer CPU chips a single chip had a single "brain". Today, a single CPU chip found in any new Mac has at least two "cores", or brains. I for one cannot argue that two heads are not better than one, but the problem has been to date that neither the Mac OS nor the Windows OS has been able to fully take advantage of these multiple cores/processors. This is where Snow Leopard comes in and why many of us are going to have to get hold of an Intel-based Mac going forward. First of all, SL (add an "N" in the middle and we have the Saturday Night Live OS) will only run on Intel based Macs. Secondly, Snow Leopard is being prepared from the ground up to take advantage of these multiple cores/processors. The potential performance boosts have me lusting after snowy leopards in my dreams, and I am not alone. We'll have to wait and see how Steve manages to pull this rabbit out his mock turtleneck, but I hear whispers through the apple blossoms that Apple shipped the first copies of SL to developers this past week to start playing with. The good news for the denizens writing the code for Snow Leopard in the forgotten basement levels in Castle Cupertino is that they no longer have to write code for two disparate audiences (Power PC vs. Intel). This should make their miserable lives more bearable until Steve comes a'stalkin' with a wish list featuring a slew of new features (please, someone be there to talk him out of whatever the heck he has on his mind). Por favor Steverino, just let the boys and girls write a rock solid, holy-grail like OS. The Mac turns 25 in January. Let Snow Leopard be the best birthday present for the Mac ever.
Now counting myself as the 1% I wrote about awhile back, I am writing this on a MacBook Air. It is a long story, but suffice it to say that I did not actually purchase this myself in the first place but rather acquired it through the bailing out of one of my clients. I can safely say that my "love" of the Mac is back in force not felt since my original SE/30. It is not the fastest thing in the wonderful world of computers, it has its drawbacks, and it is already "old" in comparison with the recently updated Airs, but it is still so sweet and sassy and surprising that even a grizzled pessimist when it comes these things cannot help but smile when it is fired up each and every time. (more to follow....)
0006 (06.29.08): I want to take a moment to remind everyone that HEAT IS DEADLY TO COMPUTERS. Already twice this summer I have been called on to retrieve data from computers that had troubles directly related to them being operated in extreme heat. Computers themselves generate enough heat to boil water or cook food, they do not need any additional help to do so by you not running them in an air-conditioned environment. In fact I am using a nifty little bit of software called iStat Menus that is giving me a temperature reading of 149°F in my Dual G5 Tower. That is pretty hot. Fortunately for the folks who "fried" their computers, one a Mac and one a PC, they didn't really lose the computer as a whole. What they did lose was a day or two of work while I diligently backed up their data, reformatted their hard drives, and reinstalled everything. If the computers were fine you may ask, what happened? Your hard drive is formatted into sectors, think of the grooves on a record album. Excessive heat can cause these tracks to expand. If data is written into these expanded tracks, say you save that letter or proposal you've been working on, then you shut the computer down for awhile and start it up again, you might find that the letter you saved is unopenable. What happened is the track the data was written to contracted as things cooled down and the data became corrupted, unreadable. This used to be a much bigger problem ten years ago, and to their credit the hard drive industry has made their products less susceptible to this issue, but it still occurs. While we are all feeling the pinch (some might say sledge-hammer blow) of our faltering economy, if you need your computer to make a living it would be penny-wise and pound foolish to skimp on AC. One last point: If you have a laptop and think that is ok to be outside with it this summer please think again. Laptops are even more sensitive to heat than Desktops and you will shorten its life span considerably if you use it outside. DO NOT work with your laptop on a pillow or blanket--they act as insulators and will cause heat problems. One of the most effective things you can use that you may have lying around the house to put your laptop on is a plastic cutting board, but commercial cooling pads or stands are a better bet (the Podium Pad from Targus is one of my favorites).
0005 (06.27.08): Well apparently the brain trust at Apple couldn't wait to see what I had to say next so they hacked my computer to get at these "slogs" before they were made available to you dear readers. What is my evidence? Read Slog 4. Steve J. recently was quoted as saying that Apple intends to "slow things down", get what they have in working order, stop introducing new features and get the features they already have on rock-solid footing. I wish I had copied or bookmarked the page where I read this, as I immediately thought I was hallucinating and rushed myself to the Emergency Room. By the time I returned his quotes were lost in cyberspace (I keep searching for them).
Let's see, I called on Apple to do something akin to GarageBand 8 months ahead of time--and for this I received a t-shirt that said, "I Helped Apple & All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt". I answered desperate calls from beleaguered Mac Users who Apple couldn't/wouldn't help for 10 years as your ever-faithful Ambassadore del Grupo Macintosh de Hastings-on-Hudson, mostly from folks with thick Bronx, Brooklyn, or Eastern European accents, who at 80+ years of age had been screwed around by Apple for so long that many of them would have died before their problems were solved had they kept calling Cupertino, CA. Again, all I got was a lousy t-shirt from Apple that said, "I Am An Apple Tool". Then there has been my incessant call since Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) that Apple has got to stop kidding around and nail the code dead, no excuses, no delays, no more features until you get the ones you have to work with all the freaking hardware iterations you keep introducing (uh the switcherooney to Intel processors in the dead of night right after all those folks bought PPCs at Christmas was about as classy as the Mets firing Willie Randolph at 3:14 AM Eastern Time). Steve: We're gonna have four product line-ups-Consumer Desktop, Consumer Mobile, Pro Desktop, Pro Mobile. Sounds simple, good plan. But then the fragmentation syndrome started creeping in and you had iMacs and Minis and Towers, and now MacBooks, MB Pros, and the Air. On top of everything the product line was still incomplete, so we have iPods and Apple TV, AirPorts, iPhones, all leading me of all people to say iwanttogetoffthistechnologicalmerrygoround. In the end I'd say hardware fragmentation, shmardwarefragmentation, it wouldn't matter how scattered things got as long as the stupid software that ties it all together wasn't hopeless. In my estimation it is absolutely ridiculous for there ever to exist even the slightest breaks, glitches, hiccups, whatever, between Apple Software and Apple Hardware, period. APPLE, YOU DESIGN AND BUILD THE HARDWARE, YOU CONTROL EVERYTHING FROM TOP TO BOTTOM, GET THE SOFTWARE UP TO SNUFF!!! I sound like a broken MP3 or rather the gazillion iPods people think I can magically restore after the latest iteration of iTunes blew their playlists to smithereens. The good news is that Apple "gets" it now rather than ten years from now after we've all turned into the audience in Apple's 1984 commercial. I for one will be on the case and will report to you my findings. This time Steve, I want a 24" 3.06GHz iMac/1TB/4GB AND (I won't be too greedy) a Dual 2.8GHz Tower/1TB/4GB/BT/AirPort/8800GT/30" Cinema Display (all with AppleCare). If you send anything less, or one more t-shirt, I swear I'll lead a physical assault on Fortress Cupertino. You owe me big guy. (11/01/08--no computers) 031/25/09--no computers; ok, I'll take a new Mini)
0004: Now that our Steverino has been lulled into thinking that item 0003 indicates a perpetual lovefest for all things Apple, it is, to borrow a phrase, "clobbering time". Can Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) actually make me long for the instability of Tiger (Mac OS 10.4)? Do the drones writing Mac OS code in the bowels of Fortress Cupertino have as their mantra: "It is okay to fix things only so far. Loose code is good code. Hardware? We don't need no stinking hardware!" This is alas what I think they are thinking, because what we have as of this Mother's Day 2008, 10.5.2 and all the other updates and bug fixes and EFI Firmware Updates and Security Updates is completely hopeless. Again I call on the Gods of Silicon Valley to pull the plug and get Steve off his Segway*** and onto Dr. Jung Jr.'s couch (or preferably into his sensory-deprivation tank) until Steve comes to his senses and sees the trees and the forest just aren't meshing up.
+++http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,00.html
0003: I believe there will be a HUGE grassroots effort in the coming year on the part of PC users to get Microsoft to reconsider dropping support for WindowsXP in 2009. Given Vista's failure to win converts, as well as Microsoft's own private admission to big corporate users to "wait" for the next version of Windows (7), the last thing Stevie Ballmer and Billygoat Gates want to see may happen, i.e., prodigious growth in Apple's overall marketshare. Anyone with an Intel-based Mac has all that Apple has to offer at their fingertips along with the ability to run Windows and Windows based apps on the same machine if necessary. Corporate America has had its thinking turned on end by their collective Apple experiences, not surprisingly mostly in their own homes rather than at work. The iPod "halo effect" has translated into more of these executives buying a Mac for their kids to go along with their iPods and discovering that the Mac is a lot more bang for the buck than the Dells and HPs of this world, which while still cheaper do not in any way shape or form equal the experience of the Mac hardware and software environment. These guys are starting to ask the question: Why can't I have a Mac in the office? Why can't we all use Macs? Stevie B. and Billy G. are watching the equivalent of a coup d'etat happening and there is not a thing they can do about it (apparently).
0002: The Apple Wireless Keyboard is insanely great and must be played with to fully appreciate how wonderful it is, especially if you want to do some writing of any kind but don't want to sit on top of your computer to do so. Works with any Mac with built-in Bluetooth or you can add an inexpensive USB-based transceiver to plug in and give you Bluetooth capability (this is what I have on my G5 Tower).
0001: It bears sharing-there are three things I NEVER thought I'd live to see:
1. I never thought I'd live to see the National Debt Clock running backwards to zero (this happened under Clinton I).
2. I never thought my beloved Red Sox would ever win a World Series in my lifetime, let alone two. I can now die happy no matter what.
3. I never thought I'd live to see the Canadian Dollar worth more than the US Dollar (thank you Mr. Bush).
03.13.08 Apple Picking Dept.
Have Leopard installed? Not yet updated to 10.5.2? Good. Don't. Wait until 10.5.3 rolls around. Once again the braintrust responsible for OS X software development has decided that the one step forward/three steps back approach to quashing the bugs in our fav OS is the way to go. The last release, OS X 10.5.1, was great, really tightened things up, made every machine it was installed on feel a lot faster. OS X 10.5.2 feels like someone put two shotgun blasts in my radiator and my Ferrari is driving like a Stanley Steamer. This is truly painful as PC Magazine, of all the folks in the known Universe, just rated Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard as the best Operating System (OS) known to Planet Earth, with Windows XP second and Windows Vista finishing third [OS Wars: The Battle for Your Desktop http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2273486,00.asp]. This is astounding stuff and makes certain friends drool over the idea of one day installing Mac OS X on their PC boxes, the caveat being that our current OS X woes will compound a millionfold if that ever happens. Apple has a hard enough task at hand getting their OS to work on their own hardware, let alone attempting to account for the billion PC configurations out there. Perhaps a better bet would be for Apple to bite the bullet and allow PCs to run Mac OS X "virtually" so PC users can gain access to what Apple is really still all about: SOFTWARE. Imagine how fast a PC User would gravitate to iPhoto or iMovie in comparison with what is on their PC today? Regardless of this pie in the sky speculation, the fact remains that Apple needs to ramp up its efforts to get Leopard squared away and get the whole product line humming in sync with one another (computers, iPods, iPhones, AirPort Base Stations, Time Capsules, AppleTV, etc, etc, etc.) AND the OS. Right now it ain't a pretty picture.
Macworld San Francisco 2008 Report
Evan M. London
01.31.08
Well I am literally back from the dead, having survived the flight from hell (sick woman on plane getting sick in one of the two coach bathrooms and then spending the flight coughing all over us) and then two weeks of hacking and hocking and well you get the idea probably more graphically than you bargained for. That about sums up the show as well. This was probably the smallest Macworld I've seen in 20 years, and that includes the NYC shows which could have been held in a broom closet nevermind the Javits Center. I went out to SF for the first time since 2003 for "da show" but more to see all my left-coast buddies who hadn't seen my endearing scowl for far too long (according to them). San Francisco is still beautiful, still the coldest 60°F you've ever experienced, and still one of the coolest places on Earth. Outside of everything imaginable to house your iPod and iPhone, or to plug into your iPod or iPhone, the main event was of course the new MacBook Air. It is remarkable, you can't help but find it impressive, you might even get a longing to go home with one, but in the end you are left wondering if Steverino didn't whip this out more to drive the industry crazy than to drive sales. Frankly, it is sort of like the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, a beautiful design, not so much oomph under the hood as to be absolutely compelling, more a candidate for a display in MOMA than a candidate for your lap. With the introduction (unprecedented I might add) of the new Mac Pro tower lineup the week before the show, this was all about the Air. Quite a few of us diehard Apple enthusiasts were disappointed to see no new MacBook Pro (it is coming soon), or a replacement for the Mac Mini (our vision is a half-tower sized tower). These would have been just as big a showstopper as the Air, but alas, no. No, no, no, no, no. Nothing to bring back to the folks back home except word of a computer that 99% of the rest of us will never buy.
The MacBook Air is innovative, there are lots of new features that will eventually trickle down and make their way into the rest of the Apple portable lineup, but for the most part I was left wanting. If anyone buys one of these and doesn't purchase AppleCare on it then they should have their heads examined and I should be appointed their guardian because they are clearly too deranged to handle their own money. I just see too many broken Airs in my dreams and that is not a good thing to say about a portable computer. I guess time will tell how durable they are.
On a more practical note, Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) is here and it is a compelling upgrade from Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) with a couple of major caveats. Like Tiger, Leopard has started life with a split personality, part PowerPC and part Intel. As long as Apple keeps trying to write an Operating System (OS) for two very different brains whatever Apple shrinkwraps out the doors of Fortress Cupertino is going to be a problem child. Note to Steve: STOP and nail things down once and for all. Be honest: Leopard is for INTEL machines, we're sorry, but we cannot continue to write these two-headed behemoths so that both sides of the equation end up suffering. This is the legacy of the decision to move from the venerable PPC chips to the Intel platform. So unless you have a very late-model G5 PPC machine forget about Leopard--it is INTEL ONLY!!! But that is not what they are doing on the Cupertino Campus, and as a result everyone is suffering the slings and arrows of this outrageous fortune. Both Tiger and Leopard are plagued with bugs, and so is just about every other piece of Apple software these days. I call on Apple to make the call, cast the die, and be honest about what the ultimate solution is going to be (and it is not OS X 10.6). If you have an Intel brained Mac and have 2GB or more of RAM then I'd give Leopard a shot--the new features shine best on these machines and there is less chance of major headaches developing over the course of things. If you have an older machine I'd say be happy with Tiger and start saving (like me) for a new Intel-based Mac. On the Apple side of things, please slow down the breakneck speed of software development, take a deeeeeep breath, and quash the bugs now across the board, in every nook and cranny. The list of bedeviled Apple software reads like the FBI Ten Most Wanted List--Tiger, Leopard, QuickTime, iTunes, iWork, iLife, Aperture, Final Cut, all of them might as well be beta versions rather than the polished versions they should be. I am tired of reading the endless horror stories on MacFixIt about the latest "update" gone wrong (I've actually turned off Apple Automatic Software Update on computers I regularly service as I cannot vouch for what is coming down the pike from Apple these days), I am tired of having to do complete System reinstalls in order to downgrade people from the latest greatest version of something that has gone hideously wrong via Software Update (things that should never go wrong in the first place-QuickTime, iTunes). (taking a break 01.31.08 4:08PM)....
Ambassadorial Asides June 2007
Evan M. London
iPhone, Schmiphone Dept.
Unless you are absolutely insanely rich and stupid a la America's favorite celebrity felons and substance abusers you will not want to be the first in line for one of these. I don't see what all the hoopla is about, and in this case being an "early adopter" will probably be less thrilling than than being the first in line to test a new dental drill (no offense to dentists or all those masochists out there). Will this new technology eventually mature? Sure, and then when it is opened up to other carriers outside of AT&T/Cingular then maybe the rest of us will be bitten by the desire to jump on the bandwagon. Until then I'd stay on the sidelines before introducing yet another headache in what is becoming a full-blown technology overload pandemic. http://www.apple.com/iphone/
Google Kills The Internet Dept.
Yes, you read right and perhaps read it here first: Google is killing the internet (along with eBay, Microsoft, and Madison Avenue). What started out as a sane and reasonable means of putting your finger on the link(s) that would actually answer the question you were asking or the specific product/service/website you were looking for has become a marketing behemoth that has rendered itself almost as useless as garters for men. Have you "googled" something lately? Noticed that the first 10 million things Google lists for your search are all selling you something rather than providing a simple answer or basic link? That's because retailers of all sorts, be they online or even brick and mortar stores are paying Google to list them at the top of every search that is relevant. Or even worse you get a page of "Sponsored Links" which again are all trying to sell you something. While Google is leading the charge, there are others out there doing as much as possible to kill things for the average internet explorer, and it is much worse on the PC/Windows side of things. Install the "new and improved" Internet Exploder 7 in Windows and try typing in a company's website address in the address bar. Think you are going to anycompany.com? Most likely you are going to end up at anycompany.com.com. Huh? And this anycompany.com.com page is simply a bunch of "sponsored advertisers" trying to sell you whatever anycompany.com produces. It is maddening and unbelievable that something as simple as trying to get to a company's website could be hijacked in such a manner. Does Bill Gates think people won't sit up and take notice that Microsoft has sold them out for the pennies they take in from "redirecting" us? And how long do you think it is before Apple does the same, if they aren't doing it already? It is becoming very difficult to get away from the fact that commercialization of the web is in fact killing what was once a truly joyous experience, akin to driving down the highway with the top down and a big smile on your face. Now it is hunker down, hope they don't trap you, and for goodness' sake put the top up before the vultures circling above let loose with a pile of doo-doo on our heads. Thanks Google & Gang.
On A Bright Note Dept.
I must say that the recently redesigned MacBooks are quite delightful. My siblings and I sprang for one for our mother's 65th birthday and after setting it up for her I drove home with that uniquely Apple Macintosh wistful feeling. It felt solid, loaded with enough RAM it was almost blazingly fast, and I liked the contours and lines of this unit a whole lot. Granted it would be nice to have a better video processor in it, but if all you are looking for is a truly portable Apple laptop with enough oomph to run Office, do some stuff on the internet, and even run iPhoto and iMovie reasonably well then this is the baby for you. Purchase a simple video adapter and you can turn the MacBook into a pseudo-Desktop with a mouse and a keyboard and a nice big screen. The only other thing is to seriously consider putting the max of 2 gigabytes of RAM in it (you'll thank me later) and without a doubt getting AppleCare. All in all a very nice package, and barring a Lotto hit on my part most likely my next laptop to replace my ancient G3 iBook.
Ambassadorial Asides April 2007
Evan M. London
After quite a lengthy hiatus from writing about all things
Macintosh, I was convinced to return to my keyboard by a number of long-time
HoHMUG members and good friends who missed my oftentimes acerbic take on things.
Much of my frustration with the whole Apple MUG (Macintosh User Group) thing
over the last five or six years stemmed from Apple's, i.e., Steve Jobs', abject
derision for MUGs and the role they serve in filling the gaps left by Apple
in terms of supporting Mac Users. Steve likes to think that the sun shines
out of Apple's many windows (I am trying not to be too crude here), and that
nary a problem arises for "the rest of us" because Apple is so perfect. It
ain't so. Steve wants you to believe that the Apple Store is a kind of Xanadu,
a place where if you have a problem you'll get the best answer, the best
advice, the best of everything, so why look anywhere else? I will concede
that there are many enthusiastic Apple Store employees, and that the stores
are packed with Apple-specific goodies that you may not find in CompUSA or
Best Buy, but enthusiasm and selection does not necessarily equate with honest
advice, does not equate with real-world experience, and does not always equate
with what is in the user's best interests. I have overheard too many conversations
between eager users and Apple Store employees that border on the absurd that
I get hives thinking about them. Hence my return as the fly in da ointment,
the much needed reality check, the PITA (Pain in the Apple), the voice that
Steve would rather not hear (unless he is stealing one of my ideas, GarageBand
being only one). So on with the show....
Mac OS 10.4 Tiger Dept.
I hate to say it, but Tiger has been one long Beta Test
of an OS (operating system), not a rock solid OS by any stretch of the imagination.
Tiger is no Panther (Mac OS 10.3), the latter OS being the last dependable
version of Mac OS X to come out of the hallowed halls of Cupertino. Tiger
came out of the gate with a lot of promise, but that promise was quickly derailed
by Steverino's decision to pull the plug on PowerPC (PPC) Macs and switch
to Intel chips in January 2006. Tiger has had a bit of split-personality problem
ever since, and each iteration (10.4.1, 10.4.2, etc.) has introduced more
problems for users to deal with as opposed to fixing existing issues. Tiger
has also resulted in more data loss than all other Mac OSes combined, and
that is not a good thing. PPC users have been getting the short shrift of
things for over a year now, and I do not see it getting any better. Apple
wants all of us to run out and buy an Intel Mac NOW so as to make it easier
for Apple to write for one chip as opposed to writing software that works
on two very different chips. Tiger has had a plethora of annoying little bugs
that at no point has Apple fixed, many of them Finder related. Given that
the Finder is what every Mac User is confronted with the second their computer
boots up you would think that by 10.4.2 that these issues would have been
quashed. The reality is they have been ignored. These issues are generally
cosmetic but are nonetheless annoying and aesthetically very unpleasant. A
good example of what I am referring to occurs when you have a lot of information
to copy. Look at the following screenshots:
Here I've lined up a bunch of my personal folders to copy to an external hard drive in order to back them up. Notice that things start to get cut off in the right side of the window. Notice too that there are two buttons available along the top of the window, the yellow to collapse the window to the Dock and the green to expand the window to its full size. There is also the tab in the bottom right corner of the window to allow you to resize the window (but only vertically, not horizontally). Look what happens in the next screenshot:
I've expanded the window by clicking the green button so I can see all that
is happening in it but in the process have lost the green button, there is
no way to "shrink" the window, and stuff is still cut off on the right side
of the window. Most folks would never notice this and if they did they would
not be troubled by it, but I am telling you it is not right, looks terrible,
and is evidence of the kind of loose programming that was only seen in Windows
before the advent of Tiger. This has existed since Tiger debuted, and at no
point has Apple done anything about it even though we are now up to Mac OS
X Update 10.4.9. What gives? Am I being too nit-picking about this? The answer
is no. This is inexcusable. If I want this kind of nonsense I'll mosey over
to my PC and work in Windows where stuff like this assaults my senses at
every turn.
Putting Tiger's cosmetic issues aside, and there are a
lot more I could refer to, how about giving us what we've had from Day 1
with OS X (with the glaring exception of Tiger): A crash-proof Finder. The
Finder in Tiger routinely crashes on all three of my Macs, the Desktop
"blinks", disappears, and then reappears. Or the Finder just stalls, the
spinning beachball whirring incessantly, until one goes to the Dock and sees
"Finder Not Responding", necessitating a Force Quit to get it working again.
I have not seen such crashes in a long time in any other version of OS X,
but in Tiger I see them 5-10 times a week, and we're talking about scrupulously
well-maintained machines.
The Finder is the "face" of the Mac OS and it is seriously in need of major
reconstructive surgery. Long-suffering OS X users know that Steve never wanted
an Apple Menu in OS X, and it was only because users rebelled that it ever
saw the light of day in OS X. How about giving us a truly robust and functional
Apple Menu? Would it kill the Lord of Cupertino to give the System Preferences
in the Apple Menu a pop-out, hierarchical architecture a la our old multicolored
Apple Menu Control Panels? Apparently so.
Another disastrous Tiger element, one that should work a lot better than
it does, is Spotlight. That is the little blue magnifying icon in the upper
right corner of the Menubar. The idea behind Spotlight is the ability to
search all of your documents, images, emails and applications and view the
results literally as fast as you can type in search words (I'm quoting Apple
on this). This is great if you saved a document and can't remember its name
but do recall that the word "chocolate" was in it. Simply type "chocolate"
in the Spotlight window and every single document on your hard drive with
the word chocolate is revealed. What Apple leaves out is that first Tiger
has to index all of this information, a process that can make your machine
grind along for hours, even days, depending on how much info you've packed
on your hard drive(s). Spotlight is supposed to do this only when the machine
is idling, but the fact is that it often overtakes everything and can prove
impossible to stop. Most folks relatively new to the Mac or to OS X will
never notice these issues due to the fact that they don't have gazillions
of files, but folks who are toting around twenty years worth of documents,
archives, photos, and all sorts of other stuff can find themselves going
mad when this issue crops up.
I could go on and on about how Tiger hasn't lived up to its promise (see
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html). What it boils down
to is that Tiger has not been all that great an improvement over Panther
(10.3), and Apple really needs to hit a home run with the forthcoming (and
now further delayed) Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). My gut tells me that the delay,
and it is a significant delay, in the ship date for Leopard (from April/May
2007 to October/November 2007) means that the billion new features of Leopard,
some of them so "secret" that no one outside of a handful of illuminati
at Apple even know what they are, are not ready for Prime Time, and that
owners of older Macs, i.e., PPC based Macs (G5s, G4s), are going to be left
even further out in the cold when Leopard eventually ships. Apple is getting
what it wishes for in the short term: millions of Mac Users who have been
holding off on purchasing a new Intel-based Mac until they could buy one
running Leopard (this Spring supposedly) are now going to cave and end up
purchasing one running Tiger because they simply have no choice (older machines,
dead/dying machines, software issues, etc.). The thing is, if folks do cave
and buy one of the current crop of Macs and eventually end up running Leopard
on their new Macintels, this is where Apple has to be very careful or they'll
have another IIvx debacle on their hands: Apple and Leopard better deliver,
Leopard better work flawlessly, and there better not be any caveats about
what you need to run ALL of the latest and greatest features of Mac
OS Leopard. Imagine laying out $2,000-$5,000 for a new Mac system today and
then finding out that not all of Leopard's goodies are written for your new
baby, nope, you'll need the latest and greatest in the ever-evolving Mac
lineup.
If you want to see the complete list of all the new features that Apple introduced
in Tiger check out: http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html.
More on the way....
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Thanks for coming! Site last modified 04/27/09.
