Posts tagged Mac
Shame on Apple!!
Sep 25th
Shame on Apple. As a huge Apple supporter, I am shocked and dismayed by today’s news that Apple will be “bricking” – or fatally breaking – iPhones that are either unlocked or contain third party applications with their next update.
Even more shocking is the comment section of this article on tuaw, where Apple fans are actually supporting Apple on this matter!
I can understand entirely Apple’s decision to break unlocked iPhones. Apple probably gets a nice cut of at&t iPhone plans, for one, and they cannot be expected to support your iPhone as you move it to another carrier by changing the very nature of the hardware.
However, by voiding the warranty of those who have installed “Installer.app” and third party applications, they are making a very silly move. For one, Apple is biting the hand that has fed them so many users and in all actuality, market viability. OS X is only truly useful because freeware and shareware development has really ramped up and brought us an amazing array of Mac apps, enough to complement OS X and provide that elusive “Google it and you’ll find an app that does that” level of prevalence. In the meantime, they taut the iPhone as running OS X. So when developers – often the most loyal of fans – extend the functionality of the iPhone the same way they’ve done the desktop version of OS X, they have added value to the iPhone.
Steve Jobs, who runs Apple with an iron fist, is understandably mad about third party apps, but it’s fruitless to spend his tears. Developers have rapidly put many things on the iPhone that should have been there to begin with! Where the heck is iChat? Even Verizon includes AIM compatible apps now! How about a dictionary or games or themes or GPS… all now doable in a few finger taps via Installer? An Apple product ought to provide for users, not work against them. Apple – learn from Google – “don’t be evil!”
Apple missed the boat on the iPhone went Jobs decided to exclude an SDK from the plans. When he told us that “AJAX” was the SDK, I threw up a little in my mouth. Notice my comment from back in January… even then we knew that the lack of an SDK was bullshit.
If Apple decides to truly brick iPhones with third party apps, they are doing a tremendous disservice to all iPhone owners. They are removing capabilities from a device that really ought to have extendable capabilities; well, that or admitting that Windows Mobile or Java platforms are superior. I suspect Jobs is locking it down so he can resell it to us in iPhone generation 2, which is so Microsoft-ian is scares me that maybe Apple is becoming just as evil as Redmond.
An unintended side-effect is that Jobs will birth a new hacking community, one that will certainly rival Apple in what they provide. It may be that all 1st gen iPhone owners decide to stick with 1.0.2 firmware and let hackers extend the functionality, which I glibly believe today will offer more than Apple foolishly will ever allow. To their own peril, I guess. I suspect that Apple’s limp effort to contain iPhone hacking is going to backfire as the people who make a difference forsake them in favor of a community firmware, or maybe just community added functionality.
Frankly, I think the solution is to quickly organize a massive “Do Not Buy Apple Products” day before the new firmware comes out. Maybe October 1. Send a message to Apple that they enjoy success at our pleasure, and that a second rate iPhone experience is not acceptable and not what we’ve come to expect from Apple.
So on October 1, do not run Software Update. Do not buy an iPhone. Do not buy Mac apps at all, including shareware or third party OS X stuff. Let’s piss off Apple, let’s piss off small developers who will have no one to complain to but Apple. Let’s make them open up the iPhone, which has the potential to be great, but may perhaps be, at the very wish of Jobs, destined to remain just a fancy phone.
Update: A few things for those who emailed me —
1) I am a very loyal Apple user, all of the computers in our house are Macs. I do not hate Apple, I do not hate Steve Jobs, I’m just pissed that they are condemning my iPhone to death if I want to actually use the “OS X” on it. Their over-eager rules actually prevent me from doing things I can do on a comparably priced Windows Mobile phone.
2) About the “boycott just shifts the spending to another day” argument – no one is trying to hurt Apple financially, just send them a message: that we won’t stand for the half-assed “SDK” they have provided when hackers have already demo’ed better capabilities the phone inherently possesses, but can’t access due solely to …a EULA?!
3) I am still in love with my iPhone, I just will love it much less if Apple decides to make me restore it, and I’ll love it A LOT less if they destroy it. Oh, and I will NOT replace it. They will simply lose me as a customer on the iPhone. There are some awfully nice Nokia sets out there that allow me to download Java applications like Gmail that really extend the phone as a platform rather than cripple it on purpose, which sounds a lot like Vista and its ridiculous “editions.”
Confirmed: iPhone is Awesome
Sep 10th
My cell phone saga stretches back for several weeks or even months. I decided to leave Verizon for AT&T GSM, then decided to stay with Verizon, and ultimately, bit the bullet after a month and a half of waffling.
I had no intention of getting an iPhone, mostly because they were more money that I wanted to spend and because I expect rev 2 to come out by spring at the latest (or sooner?) But the fact is, at $299, I was probably going to get an iPod Touch, and the iPhone was just too compelling. So last Thursday, I went for it. Ported my number and just took the dive.
Let me assure you: the iPhone is worth all of the hype. Yes, it doesn’t record video, it doesn’t have GPS, it doesn’t have a flash, it doesn’t do cut and paste, there is no SDK, and EDGE is no Verizon EV-DO. And yet, despite all of that, the iPhone is likely the coolest “gadget” I’ve ever owned. It’s incredible; it’s got technology never before seen (multi-touch) and it just… it makes people giddy to see it. It’s tons of fun and it’s easy to use. It was seemeless to sync it and watch it receive my Gmail, import my contacts, bookmarks, appointments, and music from my iMac. It’s worth every penny of the $299 I paid for it.
Maybe they will release new iPhones soon, and almost assuredly I will want one, but it doesn’t mean this thing isn’t still every bit as incredible.
Mac Freeware RSS via Yahoo Pipes
Sep 7th
Ever wanted to view all of the MacUpdate universal binary apps, but limit it only to freeware? MacUpdate doesn’t offer such a feed, but thanks to the incredible Yahoo Pipes, I was able to make the feed myself. I love that site, it’s really amazing.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6tbRfrJd3BG887G96UjTQA&_render=rss
Enjoy.
I Switched to Safari 3
Aug 26th
I really did not expect to ever post something like this, but it’s true: I switched to Safari 3.
I love Camino, really I do. But recently, its limitations have been bothering me. I prefer my tabs in a very specific order and often I have several tabs open. If ever I close a tab by mistake, I cannot get that same order without doing tons of work or re-launching. Safari 3 draggable tabs.
One of the things that used to bother me about Safari was that there was no “New Tab” button available for the toolbar. There is now. It’s also got great keychain integration, private browing, the original embedded RSS, true Aqua widgets, resizable text boxes, easy PDF integration, and it’s super-fast.
Camino doesn’t support Ad-Block, but rather, stylesheet-based filtering. Safari does that too, by default, and it’s even easier to use than it is in Camino. Safari doesn’t have any Flash problems and once you add “Safari Stand” and enable the debug menu, you have a perfect drop in replacement.
My biggest complaint about Camino was the lack of development tools. It doesn’t have a Javascript debugger (ChimericalConsole never worked me for), doesn’t have a decent source viewer, doesn’t have many third party hacks to add functionality – it’s a browser for users, not developers. Without XUL, it’s tough to add features easily. And that made it tough to use for me. When I did any serious work, I’d always switch to Opera or, more recently, Safari 3. Safari 3’s Inspector is just awesome.
So… for now, I am Opera on Windows and Safari on Mac. My browser requirements are more demanding than most. I have felt for some time that Opera and Firefox on Mac just “feel” wrong, they don’t fit. So we’ll see how the Safari experiment goes.
iLife ‘08 First Impressions
Aug 10th
Yesterday, being a loyal Mac user, I rushed out and got iLife ‘08. iLife ‘08 was billed as a huge update. I was very excited. I got a chance to play with some of the apps, and here is my first impression.
iPhoto: Features Galore
iPhoto and iTunes have always been the two core apps for me on the Mac, since I use both loyally. iTunes is no longer billed as part of iLife, but iPhoto received a huge makeover for version 7, so I was especially excited for this application.
Lo and behold, iPhoto ‘08 is worth the price of admission. This version includes some really neat features, some advanced photo editing I was pleased to use. The addition of “events” was a very welcome feature. iPhoto attempts to “autosplit” events when it first loads and the auto-split mostly sucks. So my advice is add your entire library into one “misc” event (which can take several seconds) and then pull out the ones you want elsewhere. Moving from one event to another is painful. You can join and split very easily, but moving a nonsequential photo into a previous event is still a multi-step process (split, split, “all”, merge).
The “skimming” feature is one of the coolest, most unique things I’ve seen in some time. It’s surprisingly easy to use, very impressive to onlookers, and actually pretty useful. iPhoto 08 is a great step forward and I am very happy with it thus far. Just one warning: it will warn you every time you move photos from one event to another. Leave the warning. After 2 hours of work, I accidentally remerged ALL photos into one event, and had to repeat the entire process. Yuck!
iWeb ‘08: Incremental at Best
iWeb ‘08 is a garbage upgrade. I really thought that based on Steve Jobs’ keynote we were going to see something special. Unfortunately, it’s mostly the same iWeb with a few weird features. Adding HTML snippets is great, but adding a Google Map or Google Adsense is too specialized and most people don’t put Adsense on their personal sites anyway (snicker!). The export to a “personal domain” took me to mac.com and told me that my .Mac trial had ended. I haven’t done too much research, but does this mean your domain must be hosted at mac.com? I don’t know why I can’t export to an FTP server. The other “features” added are nonsense. There are still major problems: no way to style the navigation, no CSS, no “apply style to all pages” and no “convert to web friendly fonts.” iWeb templates can be VERY image heavy, and that would be a nice touch.
Rounding it Out
I haven’t had a chance to play with iMovie or iDVD yet, but I’ll be visiting them shortly. Garageband Magic looks kinda cool; I only played with it for a few minutes, but it’s a nice front to an otherwise intimidating application.
Some Suggestions for iLife
I am very upset that the “web galleries” cannot be exported to a folder the way iWeb can. I just paid $79 for a photo manager, and one of its coolest features is unavailable without buying your “still a ripoff” .Mac plan for $99 annually. By the way, Google charges me $20 a year, and I use their web apps about 100 times as much as i would use .Mac.
We really need “iVideo.” I recognize that both iPhoto and iTunes can manage video clips, but I prefer to keep my videos away from my massive music collection and out of my photos.
iWeb needs a major overhaul to include some basic features. The ability to manipulate the navigation menu is critical, without it, it’s just for silly personal sites and not much more. While it’s very easy, the two year old and now free “SiteStudio” makes it easier to create websites even faster, writes with stylesheets, and can FTP to my personal site. Here’s my equasion: Adobe Pagemaker is to iWeb as Microsoft Word is to X. That’s what you’re missing – X, a simple tool for simple lightweight website creation.
Overall
If you’re using iPhoto heavily, I think iLife is worth it. It’s really great to get small-step upgrades to your other apps too, even if they are minor like iWeb’s. If you are only a casual iLife user, definitely wait until you get a new Mac. There is nothing so groundbreaking that it’s a must have, and the old apps are still perfectly capable of getting the job done properly. I suppose we’ll have to wait until Leopard and the inevitable round of ‘08 .1 updates to see how well they can make this thing work, but for now, at only $79, it’s a solid upgrade well worth the comparably low price for people who use iLife with regularity.
Safari 3 Nightlies Are Awesome
Jun 23rd
Safari is not now, nor has it ever been, my browser of choice. Aside from the fact that KHTML is generally the least compatible of browser engines these days, Safari is pretty barren from a feature standpoint. I rarely use it on my mac. I also find the lack of the “button” widget in Aqua annoying, because it makes Gmail ugly.
When I started using Safari 3.0.1 beta at work, I was impressed, but not impressed enough to ditch Opera. At home, however, I am using Camino, which I love, which is based on Gecko, the underlying Mozilla engine that also forms the core of Firefox. The problem is, as much as I love Camino, it’s tough to use for development: it doesn’t support extensions, it doesn’t have a javascript debugger that works, it doesn’t have draggable tabs, or tab restore, and it’s not very easy to extend functionality. There are lots of tricks at PimpMyCamino, but even today, the most useful add-on, “CamiScript,” is billed as unstable on Camino version above 1.0. Camino 1.0 was released in the first half of 2006. We’re over a year later.
This is not a post to bitch about Camino though. I love 1.5 and it’s serving me well. The thing is, I downloaded a nightly build of Webkit recently. Webkit is to Safari what Gecko is to Camino, and Webkit comes easily packaged in a disk image that requires no installation.
Webkit nightlies are awesome. First, there’s the page inspector. From a development standpoint, this is awesome.
click image to view at full size
The inspector shows you each detail of the page load. You’ve got the entire page transfer size, as well as the page transfer time. You can break it down by element or by element type. You can view the headers sent and received. This is tremendously useful. It’s been very interesting to see what parts of requests are properly cached and compare original load to subsequent page loads.
Then we have “Drosera,” the Javascript debugger.
click image to view at full size
I haven’t quite figured out how to use this tool, but I’m excited that it exists. It’s something I’ve needed for some time on a Mac. This is all very promising.
Safari may be mostly bare, but by the time 3.0 final is released with Leopard, plus the fact that Safari exists on Windows, it, or its featureful offshoot based on Webkit, Shiira, just may be my main Mac browser.
You can get Webkit nightlies at nightly.webkit.org.
Safari Windows Updated, Brings Welcome Changes
Jun 14th
If you browser around the internet, particularly on tech sites, you’ll find person after person praising Apple for releasing Safari 3.0.1 a mere 3 days after releasing the first public beta on Monday. At first, I thought – here we go! First off, it’s a BETA release, and I *expect* it to be updated. Secondly, people are going crazy about Apple’s fast reaction time, but I wondered if it were Microsoft, would the reaction be the same, or would it be “They release a product and it takes less than 24 hours to find a major vulnerability!?”
But alas, I ran Software Update and updated my Safari/Win install at work to 3.0.1. Whereas 3.0 was a major disappointment at work – fonts were a mess, pages had major problems with rendering, and the browser would crash randomly – a few minutes after install I can tell you that 3.0.1, on my computer at least, is a HUGE leap forward. The browser hasn’t crashed on me outside of one bug that existed before (maximizing on the slave screen of a dual-monitor setup), the thing is SO much better!
Safari is far from usable as my main browser. The thing is feature-barren, is far less customizable than Firefox and Opera and even Camino, and on Windows, it sticks out like a sore thumb. That said, I just love having the rendering engine on my windows machine, I love that it’s available for iPhone and Mac-friendly web development.
Kudos to Apple for porting this great app to Windows fairly successfully. Microsoft has been very slow to move to OS X and Intel; they have let RDP stagnate, they have let Office go 5 years with no update, they have no management tools that work on Mac, no IE, no WMP, not even a fully compatbile Outlook Web Access (OWA)… yet.
I am usually wary of excessive praise on Apple, but after seeing the Leopard previews pushing the evolution of the desktop and the accessibility of backups, the iPhone pushing the mobile experience, and Safari pushing web standards, I’m really feeling good about what they are doing.
Safari on Windows a Reality After All
Jun 13th
Several months ago, I posted an article suggesting that Apple should port Safari to Windows. Many disagreed with me, and I was lambasted on OSNews for the same. A few months later, here are are, and lo and behold, we are using Safari on Windows. I was partly right, my logic was mostly sound.
I suggested that Safari should exist for two reasons: firstly, that web developers could test their apps in Safari, and secondly, to lure more users into comfort with the Mac UI and Mac apps. So, score me 50%. There is one reason and one reason only for Safari on Windows – so developers can test their stuff in Safari. Now, it turns out it’s less for web sites and web apps than it is for iPhone development, but nonetheless, iPhone apps are, in fact, Safari apps. Thus, web developers can now test their sites in Safari, whether for iPhone or not.
The interesting thing here is that Apple is in a very unique position, and I hope they don’t pull a Microsoft. Apple can now introduce new proprietary hooks into their iPhone. Let’s say they “extend” javascript or CSS or even HTML itself. What if they invent tags like <iphone:dial> or <iphone:toAddressBook> or something that has unique function ignored by normal browsers but defined on the iPhone. I dread this, and yet, it would allow for rich, powerful applications without an SDK.
Assuming, or even ignoring that possibility, Safari on Windows does all Windows-based web developers to test their sites in Safari. I just installed Safari 3 on my Mac, and found it to be fantastic; it’s faster, it’s more compatible, and thus far, it’s a far better browsing experience. That said, on Windows is was a nightmare. It doesn’t play nice with dual-monitors, it doesn’t handle fonts well on my work computer (defaulting most fonts to “Metal Lord” font, odd choice) and crashing randomly. But then… it’s a beta and a first shot, and I bet most of these bugs are fixed.
Either way, I think this was a great move by Apple to establish themselves as serious about making the Mac a first class citizen for web browsing. Currently, it’s just not. There are several notable sites, like say, the MLS, which require IE. And there’s simply no IE for current Mac users. So this is great news all around, even for the Opera-ers, Firefoxers, and Camino-ers who use Macs.
I’m not feeling especially vindicated by this announcement, because I don’t think I spotted something so far fetched – I always felt Safari/Win was a good idea. But I am thrilled to see the seeds being planted for the Mac to be considered a legitimate, affordable, enjoyable contender as a computing platform for the general public.
Camino 1.5 Released!
Jun 5th
Many of you know that my browser of choice on OS X is Camino. Camino is the Gecko rendering engine (the same base as Firefox, Seamonkey, and others) aqua-fied to run as a antive Mac app. While Firefox runs well on Mac, it still uses XUL to draw its widgets, so it doesn’t really fit in with the look and feel of real Mac apps.
Enter Camino, which not only looks and feels like Mac, but tastes like it too by behaving like a real Mac app. Aqua widgets, proper alert boxes, a prefs panel that fits the theme. Camino is a fantastic browser and runs extremely well and is very stable. And today they release 1.5 – a pretty major milestone – and reveal their new website.
Congrats to the Camino team.
A Cursory Glance at Apple’s New Airport
Jan 11th
I was just glancing at Apple’s new 801.11n capable Airport Extreme base station. Having just purchased an Airport Extreme Base Station within the last month, I’m trying very hard to get my MacMall contact to allow me to exchange and upgrade to the new one.
Of course, the big feature is 802.11n capabilities. No Mac has this yet, but recent models, including my 20″ iMac, have capable hardware, so a nice firmware update via Software Update ought to remedy its max speed limitation.
The new base station has something called “Airdisk” built in. Apparently, you can plug in an external hard drive and share it over the network. How cool! This feature is a fantastic killer feature I haven’t seen elsewhere yet.
I am very excited about this. I can’t believe Steve Jobs didn’t mention this AT ALL during Tuesday’s keynote!