Jim Barraud web designer

Lego iMac

Love this. The best part is the designer is offering up the Lego Studio Builder file so you can order the bricks to build it yourself. Very tempted, but with a trip to the Lego store a couple weeks away I'm holding off… for now.

Safari 4 Beta – Initial Impressions

Yesterday Apple released the public beta for Safari 4, their latest and greatest web browser. I’ve always been a Safari fan. It’s always seemed faster then the other browsers and has lead the way in implementing new standards and experimental features. And Safari 4 builds on that, while taking a couple missteps. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons.

Pros

  • Speed. Safari 4 is significantly faster than any currently shipping browser and it’s very noticeable upon use. I say shipping because the current nightly builds of Firefox appear to be on par in terms of performance.
  • Coverflow History. I’ve usually found browser history to pretty much useless unless you know the exact time your were looking at a particular site. Being able to scan through your history as a series screenshots is awesome and makes using the browser history much more usable.
  • Topsites. While not particularly ground breaking (this was introduced with Google Chrome, topsites is a nice to have feature that will display your most visited sites as your homepage and notify you if they’ve changed.
  • New Web Developer Tools. I haven’t had the time to fully try out the new web developer tools, but from my quick poking around I can tell they’re vastly improved over the previous version. Time will tell if they give Firebug any kind of run for it’s money.
  • New Web Technology Support. I’m itching to try out some of the new standards (non-standards) support for upcoming web technologies they’ve added.

Cons

  • Tabs at the top. Placing the tabs at the top of the window is an interesting choice, but I feel it’s done purely because google did it with Chrome. I don’t have so much an issue with the tabs at the top as much as I do with how they’re implemented. Now that the tabs are at the top in the window title bar, you can’t just drag anywhere on the tab to move it around. Doing that moves the window. You need to click and drag on the designated area on the far right of the tab to move it. You can also no longer double click anywhere on the tab bar to create a new tab, you need to click the designated button to do so. And visually having the tabs break up the title bar is a little jarring, especially when you have other windows layered on top of them as in the following image.

Finder Tabs

Overall I’m pretty impressed with the new Safari beta. And it is just that, a beta. I have noticed a couple bugs here and there, but no show stoppers. Like I said, my only real complaint is the new tabs, I’m just not digging them. Luckily there are a couple of hidden Safari preferences, one of which that allows you to revert back to the old tab style.

On twitter (my new favorite gauge of public opinion) I’ve noticed that the general reaction to the tabs has either been met with absolute dislike or the “going to try and get used to it” attitude. Along with a smattering of people who really like it. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds in further betas or in the final product.

WWDC 2008 Thoughts

iPhone 3G
Very nice. I really dig the white variant. 3G speeds are obviously a good thing. The suits will love the Enterprise Exchange integration and will probably prove to be the killer app of this iPhone. The addition of GPS is huge. This will fuel a slew of awesome location based services. The price drop is very welcome, but still won’t get me to by one since it’s still chained to AT&T.

iPhone 2.0 Software
This is what I was really waiting for since I’m an iPod Touch owner. I was expecting more in the way of new features, but I’m sure the addition of the SDK and App Store will more than make up for it. I’ll be plunking down my $9.95 nominal payment come early July. Oh, and three words. SUPER MONKEY BALL.

MobileMe
.Mac rebranded. The angle this time is “Exchange for everyone”. Which is odd because if by “everyone” they mean people not in an office environment who don’t use exchange, that may be an issue. Because office workers are the only ones who would really know what “Exchange” is. Sure, there’s small business and non-microsoft shops. But they more than likely have their own solutions (Google Apps?). Essentially MobileMe is a glorified way to sync your Address Book, Email & Calendar with your PC, Mac, and iTouch device. I’d call this a minor improvement over the current .Mac and that it falls short of it’s potential.

Macworld 2008 Thoughts

I have to admit this years Macworld keynote was pretty lackluster. There wasn’t that sense of “Apple’s done it again!”. It was more “Oh, that’s nice”. Anyway, here’s may take on what was announced.

Apple TV Take 2
The new Apple TV looks pretty sweet. With the ability to download content directly to it, sync it with my mac and rent feature films this could easily replace countless stacks of DVD’s in my house as well as move out some media equipment. That is if it would work on my TV. I’m not in the High Def age yet so that leaves me out in the cold. But when the time comes to buy that new TV, an Apple TV will also be in the shopping cart. Out of all the announcements Apple made today, I believe this to be the most significant and exciting.

Time Capsule
This is a fabulous idea and I totally want one. But oh wait, I purchased an Airport Extreme that has the ability to hook up and share a USB hard drive. And before Apple released Leopard, the ability to sync time machine with this connected hard drive was a touted feature. Then when Leopard was released to the wild, the feature was dropped. Awesome, 50% of the reason I purchased the Airport Extreme was dropped. Thanks Apple. The optimistic side of me is hoping that a 10.5.2 update will resurrect this feature and that it wasn’t dropped in order to make selling this product more viable.

iPhone & iPod Touch updates
I don’t have either of these so I really don’t have much of an opinion. But I think charging iPod Touch owners $20 for a software update that provides additional apps that already exist on the iPhone while providing a software update that offers significant new features to iPhone users for free isn’t right. And the fact that all new iPod Touch owners get this update for free doubles that. If I was an iPod Touch owner I’d be pretty pissed.

Macbook Air
It’s a gorgeous machine. Beautifully designed and I love the simplicity of it. But it’s not a sub-notebook. It’s a notebook, just a lot thinner with less features. I think having it as thin as it is with the footprint of the 12” Powerbook would have made this a killer product.

10.5.2 Update
It wasn’t announced or released and it’s the only thing I really wanted. There are a slew of stupid annoying bugs in Leopard and I’m praying it will fix most of them. The most significant of which would be fixing iCal.

iCal Reminder Fix

While the upgrade to Leopard has overall been a great thing, as with any OS upgrade, there have been some issues. Many of these I listed in my Leopard Observations post. But the most annoying and persistent has been that of iCal not firing off any reminder alarms. I rely heavily on these to remind me of meetings and conference calls and not having the reminders has been a huge pain in the ass. And I’m not the only one with this issue.

I was hoping that the first Leopard point release 10.5.1 would solve this (and other) issues, but it hasn’t. After a couple of quick tests, alarms still aren’t firing… then rage ensues. After taking a deep breath and doing a little digging into the iCal library support files, I discovered two glimmers of hope. alarmsCache.plist and notifications.plist. These two files are located in the /Library/Application Support/iCal directory. After removing these files and restarting iCal, my reminder alarms have miraculously sprung back to life. Hallelujah! I don’t think these files are anything more that cache and preference files, but you never know. So remove at your own risk.

I post this for anyone else suffering from this bug in hopes that it will save you some sanity.

Update: Nevermind. After fixing this several times, after a few days it just reverts back to not working. If anyone has a definitive fix, please let me know.

Leopard Observations

I’ve been working with Apple’s new operating system for a couple weeks now and figured I’d post up some of my observations.

  • The overall level of visual polish is higher then any previous OSX release. The entire system feels more cohesive.
  • The new dock is an atrocity. But I rock mine on the left of the screen so I get the much more pleasing alternate dock.
  • I thought the new transparent menu bar would bug me, but so far it hasn’t.
  • Spotlight is actually usable. Fast enough to make a great app launcher and search results appear faster and seem more relevant.
  • The new ToDo’s and notes features in Mail are a great addition and I can see myself using them regularly. But currently they’re almost unusable if your making ToDo’s within Notes. There seems to be a bug that decides to randomly make items you’ve designated as ToDo’s in your notes… to not be ToDo’s but just sentences of text.
  • It’s nice having a system wide ToDo’s system. But it would be helpful if they were color coded in mail in accordance to the color of the calendar they’re associated with.
  • The new Mail.app is much improved in terms of performance and features. But also suffers from a bug that randomly decides to not show your message in the bottom preview pane unless you select it twice.
  • I’m finding Spaces to be super handy. Other’s are finding issues with how it’s been implemented. I understand the issues being argued, but my personal workflow hasn’t really hit it (yet).
  • You can now double click an image embedded in an iChat window and it’ll open in preview. This was previously only doable if you’ve installed the Chax plugin.
  • iCal is much better at handling Exchange based calendar invites (and changes). Not perfect mind you, but much improved. They also seem to have done away with the asinine requirement of having your email being defined in the invite in order for you to accept it. Which was a tremendous pain in the ass for invites sent to mailing list groups.
  • As great as the iCal improvements are, it seems riddled with as many bugs as Mail. My alerts no longer work, which is torture for someone who relies on them. And there are times where it will not allow me to pick the calendar I would like a meeting invite to be placed in.
  • When you take a selective screenshot, you now get X&Y coordinates next to your cursor. And when you start creating your screenshot selecting, it displays the height and width of your selection. This is super cool. (And it’s small touches like this throughout the OS that make it awesome.)

There are many other cool new features and a few more minor annoyances, but these are the items I come across and affect me on a day-to-day level.

Leopardized

I finally got the new Mac OSX (10.5) Leopard up and running. I had attempted to do a regular upgrade, but that ended in a blank blue screen staring back at me after restart. I attribute that to either the fact that the image size of Leopard is 6.66 GB (the number of the beast!) or more than likely, months ago I installed some third party system level app that I completely forgot about. A quick “Archive and Install” resolved the issue.

First impression, it’s pretty nice. Seems faster (spotlight seems usable!) and there’s some gratuitous visuals that bug me. I’ll post a full observation after putting this cat threw it’s paces over the next couple days.

Update: Turns out my installation issues stemmed from my Logitech trackball driver. Apparently Logitech doesn’t know how to properly write Mac OSX drivers for it’s mice and relies on hackie third-party solutions. Providing users of it’s software hours of fun when trying to upgrade to Apple’s latest and greatest operating system.

WWDC 2007 Predictions

I’m not one for posting my predications of Apple announcements. They’re usually reserved for the “I think Apple will…” conversations with friends. Which usually stems from my time of working as an Apple Retail employee. Trust me, they have no inside info and speculate just as much as everyone else. But for fun, I thought I’d post my thoughts for the upcoming WWDC.

Just to note, I have absolutely no inside knowledge or “sources”. These predictions are based entirely on my observations of trends, gut feelings, and pulling things out of my ass. So without further ado.

Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard

It’s already been announced that we’ll get a preview of the feature complete version of 10.5 Leopard, but what will those still unannounced features be?

New User Interface

We’ll see a revamped user interface. Less glossy with a more matte gradient finish. I believe the latest version of iTunes and the new iPhone commercials are hints to that.

iPhone Widget

Touch Screen Support

Leopard will incorporate touch screen support similar to what’s used in the iPhone. The technology is there. Why not use it? And as an added bonus, it’ll tie into the already existing inkwell technology for onscreen writing.

Lots of Google Integration

Google and Apple have been close bed fellows recently. With Google CEO Eric Schmidt being on Apple’s board of directors, the integration of Google Maps on the iPhone and now YouTube becoming available on Apple TV. I believe we’re going to see a lot of Google Integration in 10.5. Spotlight will not online search your hard drive, but it will provide the most relevant web results via Google. You’ll be able to get directions from within Address Book via Google Maps. And we’ll probably see a bunch of new Google Dashboard widgets.

Dashboard Improvements

They’ll be lots of improvements with the Dashboard and the related widgets. There’s already been rumors of having multiple dashboard workspaces. Widgets will be allowed to live on the desktop (without a hack).

New iMac

Sure, this is a “Developer” conference. But you’re going to need something to demonstrate that new touch screen functionality in Leopard. And since the iMac hasn’t been updated in ages, it’s about due.

Touch Screen Support

There will be a new iMac introduced with touch screen support. Allowing you to move windows, resize objects and page through documents like you can on the iPhone. You’ll also be able to write onscreen using inkwell technology.

Updated Look

The new iMacs will have a slightly updated look. Probably thinner and available in black.

New Model

This is really going out on a limb, but there will be a new iMac model. A smaller one, that can detach from the base and be used as a tablet. Of course utilizing all the new touch screen and inkwell goodness.

New iLife & iWork

This is a given. But the reason this has been in the holding pattern for so long is all the Leopard integration both suites will incorporate. The new iLife will see modest improvements to all apps, but the biggest will be to iWeb. iWork will include a new spreadsheet application. That’s about it.

New .Mac

Long overdue for a complete overhaul if Apple’s struggling .Mac service. I say struggling because it’s struggling to keep up with all the superior FREE online services it competes with. The only thing it has going for it is the Syncing feature and the tight integration with the operating system and iLife apps. But what good is that tight integration if the online experience sucks?

Free version

They will introduce a free version of .Mac to compete with all the free competition. This will be similar to what exists now, but will include vastly improved online experience.

Pro Version

There will also be a Pro version introduced. Apple has tried to position .Mac as small business solution (website, online backup, email), especially in the retail stores. This Pro version will introduce features that make it worthwhile. Increased disk space, customer support, ability to host your own domain and perhaps some online apps.

Vastly upgraded services

All the services will see a major overhaul, making .Mac something you would want to use.

Google Integration

I think it’s possible you’ll see some Google integration with the new .Mac. Apple is big on partnering with companies who specialize in specific services. And Google excels at online services. Update: Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks this. So does Wired and BusinessWeek.

iPhone

They’ll obviously be some talk of the iPhone. But I don’t think it’ll be anything more then a rehash of what we already now and possibly a preorder date.

Those are my predictions.

Music To My Ears

Yesterday EMI announced the ground-breaking decision to release it’s entire music catalog DRM-free. And at a greatly improved sound quality to boot. Apple’s iTunes will be the first distributer of the new files starting in May. iTunes will be selling the new and improved tracks as a premium at 30 cents extra per song. Going from $.99 to $1.29. While no one ever likes a price increase, I’d happily pay the extra 30 cents for the superior sound quality and freedom to play the song on whichever device I wish. Two really nice features are that album purchases will remain the same price as the current DRM versions. And you will also be able to upgrade your currently purchased tracks to the new DRM-free higher quality super-hotness for 30 cents. Which brings up two questions I haven’t seen asked.

  1. If you previously purchased an album, will you still need to pay 30 cents per track to upgrade that album since the album prices aren’t rising for the new format?
  2. If you acquired tracks through iTunes free weekly downloads, will you need to pay the 30 cents to upgrade those? (I understand we got them for free in the first place, but it’s still worth asking.)

Regardless though, this is a tremendous advancement in digital music downloads and I’ll certainly be purchasing more music online because of it. At least from EMI artists.

More info on this can be found from EMI and Apple.

Airport Extreme(n)

It’s been about a week, and I’ve been surfing along nicely on my new Airport Extreme(n). There are some significant improvements when compared to my original Airport Extreme.

The most notable new feature for me is the ability share USB Hard drives. Before the new Airport arrived, I purchased a two new usb Hard Drive enclosures for some drives I had lying around and a 7 port USB hub specifically for the new router. With the hub I’m able to plug in multiple drives as well as my printer and have them all accessible wirelessly. This has allowed me to move my entire iTunes music library off my MacBook Pro and onto the external Hard Drive that is shared wirelessly. And with the 802.11n speeds, music & videos stream beautifully (as I had hoped).

But I may have set hopes too high. I also attempted place my entire iPhoto library on the shared drive, and while it technically worked, it was far too slow to be usable. Just scrolling through the library would introduce the never ending beachball. I’m hoping that Apple plans to leverage this new wireless sharing ability with iLife 07. You can now share from computer to computer with the iLife 06 apps, but it would be nice if they were built to recognize a centrally shared library and had the smarts to handle multiple users using the same library.

A future benefit of the shared drives will be once Leopard comes out. With it’s time machine backup feature, you should be able to have your computer automatically backed up without the need to physically plug-in an external drive.

I should also mention that it seems to share any type of storage media that will plug into the USB port, such as the little USB keys that are all the rage. It even seems to mount media cards that are plugged into an external media card reader. My printer that is shared has a built in media card reader and any media cards that are plugged into it also mount, which was a nice surprise

Some other things I like:

  • Increased range. (I now get full signal bars anywhere in my house)
  • More reliable printer sharing. (The previous Airport was always a bit flaky for me)
  • Nicer Admin Utility.
  • Shared drives automatically mount when your on the network.
  • 3 Ethernet ports. (as opposed to 1 on the previous airport)

So far the only real issue I’ve come across is getting my Nintendo DS lite to connect to the network. It seems to be because of the Airport’s new “Transitional Security” that combines WEP and WAP. Even though I enter the WEP key, the DS still won’t connect. This seems to be a common issue with gaming consoles in general. And since I’m in no way turning off wireless security, my solution has been to plug in my old Airport Extreme into the new one and create a separate network which the DS can connect. I’m hoping that a firmware update will resolve this issue.

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